I Am Not a Conspiracy Theorist

I am a fence-sitter. I always see both sides of an issue. And I will say this: I am not a conspiracy theorist. I do not believe twelve men in a panelled room run the planet with a shared calendar and a preferred font for the New World Order letterhead.

And yet.

The same networks keep turning up like bad pennies. The Trilateral Commission still gathers people who treat national sovereignty as a slightly embarrassing teenage phase the adults will eventually outgrow. The Federal Reserve manages the value of money with the calm of an institution that has never personally bounced a check. Old fraternal orders with their secret handshakes and suspiciously good catering continue to produce an impressive number of men who somehow end up on the interesting boards. Former presidents and the permanent institutional class discover sudden, passionate unity the moment anyone threatens the current operating system. Corporations larger than most countries talk endlessly about stakeholder capitalism while quietly preferring employees who can’t vote them out of a job. Informal alliances form, fall apart, and reassemble without ever sending a memo, yet the results keep pointing in roughly the same direction.

None of this requires a secret genius. It only requires enough powerful people sharing the same blind spots, the same incentives, and the same mild irritation that the rest of us still get a vote.

It does make you wonder how long we’re supposed to keep calling all of this coincidence and good intentions.

The dramatic conspiracy versions usually collapse under their own weight. There is no finished global takeover. If there were, someone would have lost the binder by now. Control is still incomplete, contested, and frequently incompetent. That is the part the full-time conspiracy people prefer not to mention. What remains after you throw out the theatrical claims is still unattractive enough.

Very large corporate and financial structures now operate at a scale that makes most governments look like regional branch offices. Their internal logic is refreshingly simple: expand. More market share, more flexible labor, more distance from voters who might object. They do not need to own every department. Influence over the commanding heights works just fine. Their primary loyalty is not to any flag. It is to the continuation of the system that keeps the lights on and the bonuses coming.

Alongside this institutional appetite sits the older human one. Some people simply want power. Not money exactly, not ideology exactly — just the ability to shape outcomes and enjoy the feeling of mattering more than other people. When those who already control vast amounts of capital meet those who cannot stand the idea of ordinary limits applying to them, you get a working arrangement. No secret handshake required. Parallel interests will do the job.

One of the largest private funding networks on the planet has spent years underwriting the organizations, legal campaigns, and activist machinery that treat national borders as a moral failure and permanent protest as a form of civic virtue. It doesn’t need to give orders. It only has to keep the oxygen flowing to people who already agree with it. In Europe, a certain class of political and bureaucratic actors has decided that the war in Ukraine is less a tragic regional conflict than the final exam the entire post-national project must pass with flying colors. Their enthusiasm for pulling the Western alliance into ever-deeper commitments has the convenient side effect of keeping the high-end weapons industry running at a very comfortable capacity. Prolonged high-intensity conflict is not, for everyone involved, a regrettable necessity. For some it is simply good weather for business.

Radical groups have been treated as useful tools on more than one occasion — armed, funded, or at least politely ignored when they were aimed at the right temporary enemy. The problem is that useful idiots have a stubborn habit of remaining idiots long after their usefulness has ended. Entire Christian communities across parts of the Middle East paid a heavy price for these calculations. The pattern is not subtle. It is simply rarely discussed in the better living rooms.

None of this requires an Evil Wizard behind the curtain. Distributed incentives and informal alignments produce results that look coordinated because, inconveniently, they are. The people involved do not even need to like one another. They only need to share a preference for a world in which the rest of us have less room to refuse.

The deepest problem is not institutional. It is moral, and rather ordinary. Tyranny almost never begins with a man announcing his plan to become history’s greatest monster. It begins when ambitious people decide that the usual restraints — law, tradition, national loyalty, the annoying interests of citizens who weren’t invited to the meeting — no longer apply to them. Once that internal permission slip is signed, the rest is mostly paperwork. The restraint that keeps ordinary ambition from turning into something much darker is thinner than most comfortable societies prefer to admit.

This is why the present moment feels larger than ordinary politics. One side is still trying to keep a country where faith, productive work, national stability, and personal liberty can exist in the same zip code. The other is shaped by forces that regard those things as not merely negotiable, outdated, or mildly inconvenient, but something to be eradicated. And if the values themselves are to be destroyed, what exactly is supposed to happen to the people who still hold them?

The danger is not that a perfect secret plan has already succeeded. The danger is that the barriers which once limited this kind of ambition have been allowed to wear thin, and that a surprising number of people who should have defended them have found the thinning rather convenient.

I still remain a skeptic of the grand narrative, that it is all a giant conspiracy that will happen tomorrow. But. I simply refuse to keep pretending the patterns are invisible — or that the restraint we once took for granted is still doing its job particularly well.

Maybe that is why the old spy thrillers always reached for the bald man in the chair with the cat. The image is ridiculous. The hunger it tries to picture is not.

— Julian B. Horrow