Chapter 11: The Conspiracy

This chapter is a first draft written entirely by Claude from Aditya's notes and key points, and he has not yet rewritten it in his own voice. If you only want his prose, skip to the section marked "Original material."

We have met the enemy and he is us. —Walt Kelly

Nobody in the locker room planned anything, and yet the room behaved as though it had. Hold on to that, because it’s about to get bigger.

Take the men out of the locker room and put a thousand of them in a building with a name on it. Now the turning away doesn’t need a look, or a joke, or a wife who might walk in. It has procedures. It has a form for the thing nobody wants to decide, and a committee for the thing nobody wants to see, and a line in the budget for the harm that’s cheaper than preventing it. The executive who signs off on the part he knows will fail isn’t in a shadow space. He’s at his desk, and there’s a reason on file. Nobody in the building has to feel a thing, and that’s the point of the building.

Now ask where the pattern lives. Not in any one person; each of them will tell you, sincerely, that they were following the process. Not in the process; it was written by people who’d already stopped looking. It lives in the ways the pieces are kept from meeting. Everyone knows a piece. Nobody has to hold the whole. And the whole behaves as if it wanted something: to keep going, to keep everybody’s eyes on the problem somewhere else, to make the next person’s not-looking a little cheaper than the last.

You can check this against rooms you’ve been in, because each of the following is what you’d expect from something with intentions, and from nothing else. It defends itself: try naming it out loud while it’s happening, say in the meeting that this has stopped being about the problem, and watch what comes back. Not a rebuttal. A look, and do you not see what we’re up against? The one who hesitated is now the suspect. It recruits: every person who joins makes it cheaper for the next one; the first cruel line in a thread costs something to write, and the fortieth costs nothing. And it adapts: bring attention to it and it doesn’t stop, it intensifies, in exactly the way needed to stay hidden. Ordinary bad behavior doesn’t do that. Ordinary bad behavior gets embarrassed.

We already talk about it this way. The system protects itself. The mob took over. Everybody knew, but nobody said it. We think we’re speaking loosely. We aren’t. A pattern can have memory in habits, perception in what people report, intelligence in what they calculate, and hands in what they do. It has no equipment of its own. It borrows ours, as the devil in the cartoon did, and for the same reason: because we lent it.

That’s what’s sane in the feeling that there’s an evil conspiracy running the world. Not a council in a room. Something more ordinary and much harder to fight: each of us responding locally to a pattern our response helps create. My darkness convinces yours that the world is hostile. Yours gives mine the evidence that you’re beyond reach. Ten of us make a culture. A thousand make an institution. The institution hands the pattern back to us as reality: this is just how the world works. And the result wants what almost nobody wants. Is the devil behind one hatred a different devil from the one behind another? There’s a test. Watch what happens when two of them go to war. Both grow. Every side comes out more certain that the problem lives in the other. That isn’t a fight. That’s a partnership. It doesn’t care who you hate, as long as you hate, and it never fights itself, because it’s only ever on its own team. King said darkness cannot drive out darkness. The reason is that it was never trying to.

Real conspiracies exist. People meet in rooms and plan harm and hide it. What I’m describing is the one underneath, the one that supplies those rooms with people willing to sit in them, and supplies the rest of us with the certainty that we’d never be among them. It has no headquarters. It needs no central conspirators. And here is its recruiting office: the feeling of being the noble one, standing outside it, fighting it. That feeling is how it gets you to hate, and it doesn’t care whom.

Two mistakes are waiting, and both hand it the win. Decide there’s nothing there, just people being people, and you’ll do nothing while it eats and call your nothing compassion. Decide there’s a real cabal and you’ll go looking for them, with contempt, which is the recruitment working as designed. What’s true is stranger than either. It’s a nothing that has to be fought like a something, and every tradition that looked at it hard ended up giving it a face. The Christians called it the Devil. The Buddhists called it Mara. I don’t think they were describing a monster under the world. I think they were describing this, seen whole. Whether it’s a creature, I’ll come to. It behaves identically either way.