Conspiracy

In periods of expansion you have this simultaneous flourishing of new economic structures and the political frameworks to support them, but if a society collectively fails to understand the nature of energy cycles - an economic cycle is one of them: boom, bust, that sort of thing - then the resulting economic contraction will have more adverse consequences.

Alan Watts noted that guilt has something to do with it, a residue taken from overhanging Christian thought. Just as our human, temporal brain is built over our mammalian brain, which is in turn built over a more ancient lizard brain, our collective ideology and social structures are built as layers of interrelated functions taken from distinct periods of time.

Now in this case, the way our society is structured, and the way in which our mass psychology operates, this period of economic contraction is taking a specific course. To borrow car terminology, the structure is crumpling in the direction of least resistance. Points of reinforcement - or that is, whomever wields the most power - are holding shape while the lower classes are buckling around them. 

All of those economic structures that formed to facilitate creative economic expansion still stand, as well as the political structures that support them, and they are all seeking to sustain themselves at once. So you get all sorts of effects from this. 

You get an almost universal deterioration of product and service quality, yet prices tick steadily up. Planned obsolescence makes its appearance in greater force, with things breaking down quicker and with less use. Quantities of foodstuffs are steadily lowered within packaging while prices remain the same or increase. Ingredients are adulterated with low quality substitutes , or even unsafe substances. Financial fraud, dull creative works, a general perception of decreasing competence, you name it, coupled with increasing political violence performed on those who object or resist, or lord help them, attempt to take some power back. 

It is understandable that someone would attempt to theorize this complex state of affairs with some simplistic or even cartoonish conspiracy theory. Most conspiracy theories are false on their face, as they are merely compressions that seek to concentrate various related facts in a digestible narrative. But even the most absurd conspiracy theories point to something that exists. They combine subconscious symbols and archetypes into a portrait that - though may be wildly distorted - communicates some sort of truth. There is still conspiring going on among the most powerful, but I'm not sure that there is any well-formed, unified conspiracy. 

One of the most insidious and destructive conspiracy theory traditions, the variety of conspiracies generated from antisemitic sensibilities (the Rothschild conspiracy theory was one of the most famous) took its shape from various weakly related facts, such as the prominent presence of Jewish families in international banking and facilitator relationships with the various nation states that were increasingly hated by the masses, a tradition that was eventually weaponized by the Nazis to acquire power, with the horrifying results unfolding from an attempt of the scapegoating and liquidation of an entire race for a state of affairs whose causes were far more complex and historic, so you have to be very careful with these things naturally.

You can even see this happen on the family level. In a dysfunctional family, a narrative will coalesce with favored members acting as the victim of some injustice or insult, and the least favored scapegoated as the cause of it all, which provides a story to carry out practical individual actions with, but which obscures the reality that what is happening to the family is happening to the family as a body, a body situated within a greater social body.

Another part of what makes reality so difficult to understand - well, it is easy for some, especially if you practice certain spiritual techniques - is this relentless generation of ideological and mythological artifacts which are supposed to carry this support function of a deeper understanding. Some are better than others though. You just have to learn how to sort through all the junk on top of everything else.