A number of Trump and RFK Jr. critics are attacking them for being believers and purveyors of conspiracy theories. Let us stipulate that most elaborate conspiracies that require large numbers of people to be complicit (like faking the moon landing) are implausible. I have my own thumbnail equation, which is that the probability of a conspiracy actually happening is the inverse of the number of people that would be required to pull it off and maintain silence for decades.
However, what is the effectual difference between what people call a “conspiracy” and the enforced groupthink of a bureaucracy along with the compliant media that backstops the groupthink?
The point is, it is not necessary for a group of the powerful get in a room and hatch a conspiracy when everyone thinks the same thing and knows instinctively what position to take and what to do.
We have previously quoted the great analogy to the bee hive that Joe Sobran and Tom Bethell offered way back when, but it is worth recalling again. Here’s Bethell from 1981:
Left-wing individuals and organizations have disguised their agenda by adopting a new system of communication, one in which the crude old formulas such as “state ownership of the means of production” never appear. Joe Sobran, the National Review editor and columnist, has likened the contemporary system of socialist communication to a beehive. Bees in a hive don’t “talk” to one another, but they do have an effective system of communication, and they all work toward a common goal, different bees performing different functions. “There is no need to posit an overarching conspiracy,” Sobran wrote recently. “The world collectivist movement goes forward. None of its constituent parts — Communist, socialist, liberal — runs the whole thing; they don’t even consciously cooperate, for the most part.” But they manage never to sting one another.
In 1999, Sobran returned to the point, with this paragraph in particular having an ironic (because understated” relevance for today:
The Hive is so powerful in controlling public opinion that it has transmuted its ideology into etiquette. “Politically correct” language, extending even to pronouns, is largely Hive-imposed. “Everyone” is no longer “he,” but “he or she”; homosexuals are “gays”; unborn children are antiseptic “fetuses,” and those who kill them are no longer abortionists, but “abortion providers.” Old words like fornicate, promiscuous, and unchaste are replaced by the bland sexually active. [Emphasis added.]
