Secrecy is a central issue

I had to explain again in response to a comment on my “Decline of Conspiracy” post that, no, the Cathedral is not a conspiracy. It makes more sense to say that the Cathedral is the opposite of a conspiracy. It is what you get when there are no conspiracies 1.

The word “conspiracy” is basically clickbait, but I’m going to stick with it anyway. Be aware, though, that I don’t mean anything really weird by it. The management of any company is a conspiracy, in that the members discuss plans in private and only publicise them if it is advantageous for them to do so 2. @drethlin pointed out on twitter that HBO were able to keep the secret of the ending of Game of Thrones for months, despite hundreds of people needing to know it to make the episode.

In this sense, conspiracies are normal and common, though not quite as common as they used to be. That was my argument in the earlier piece: that as recently as a decade or so ago, a political party (or at least a faction within it) could agree an agenda in private and make confidential plans to pursue that agenda. That capability seems, since then, to have been lost. The key debates between leading politicians of the same party over what goals should be pursued and what means should be employed to pursue them are carried out in public.

I stand by that point. But on reflection I think it’s a much bigger deal. This is a recent development in a much longer trend. As I wrote yesterday in a comment, the Cathedral is defined by its lack of secrecy. The distinctive role of the universities and the press is to inform the public, and to do so with authoritative status. It is not defined by its ideology. However, its ideological direction is a predictable consequence of its transparency. A public competition for admiration causes a movement to the extreme: the most attractive position is the one just slightly more extreme than the others 3. This is the “holiness spiral”

The breakdown of conspiracy, then, is not just a phenomenon of the last decade that has given us Trump and so on. It is the root cause of the political direction of the last few centuries.

What is the cause of the breakdown of conspiracy? If I had to guess and point at one thing it would be protestantism. That, after all, was largely a move to remove the secrecy from religion 4. Once democracy got going, that removed much more secrecy. But it’s still an ongoing process: democracy until recently was mediated by non-public formal and informal institutions. The opening of the guilds can be seen as part of the same trend. Many of the things I have written about in the past may be related — the decline in personal loyalty, for example.

That produces a feedback loop — a belief in equality and openness brings more decision-making into the public sphere, which leads to holiness spirals, which leads to ever increasing belief in equality and openness. But it seems to me that the openness comes first, and the ideology results from it. The Cathedral is a sociological construct, not an ideological one.

Openness has benefits, of course. The advance of knowledge, and of commerce, were made possible or accelerated by the decline of secrecy. But it’s still useful to keep secrets.

Restating the “decline of conspiracy” argument in this context: until recently, the Cathedral, being fundamentally transparent, was subject to the peacock’s-tail type holiness spiral5 as defined above. Through democracy it caused politics to follow. However, the actual powers of the state were immediately in the hands of the civil service and political parties, who were not transparent, and exerted a moderating influence. There were self-perpetuating groups of powerful people — conspiracies — who could limit the choices open to the electorate and therefore slow the long-term political trends driven by the Cathedral. Today, as a result of internal democracy in political parties (particularly in the UK, a very recent development), and of unmediated channels of communication, those conspiracies have been broken open. A politician today is fundamentally in the same business as a journalist or a professor — he is competing for status by means of public statements. The internal debates of political parties are now public debates. In the past, in order to become a politician, other politicians had to accept you. Now you can be a TV star or a newspaper columnist today, and be a politician tomorrow. The incumbents can’t quietly agree to stop you, any more than they could quietly agree to have pizza for lunch.

  1. The term “prospiracy” has been used, going back to Eric Raymond long before Moldbug, but his description fits perfectly.
  2. And where required by securities law
  3. At a given moment, moderation might win. But the choice is between the moderate and the extreme, and whenever the extreme wins, the idea of what is moderate moves to follow it. So in the long run, there is a move to the extreme. Extremely what? Extremely good.
  4. I’m open to the idea that protestantism itself was just part of a broader trend. That’s a question for people more expert in early modern history than I am.
  5. Or “Signalling arms race” as Spandrell puts it — probably a better term

2 thoughts on “Secrecy is a central issue”

  1. Well that’s alright then. In the Monty Python sketch, the gangster Dinsdale Piranha was convinced that he was being followed by a 3o foot high hedgehog called Spiny Norman who (appropriately enough) slept in a hangar at Luton Airport, making Dinsdale so worried that he attacked the building with a tactical nuclear weapon. This is the sort of behaviour that, in my opinion, should attract a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. But what if Dinsdale believed that his imaginary companion Norman was not at all threatening, a mere hedgehog sized hedgehog, a happy little chappy who followed hippety hoppity after Dinsdale wherever he went, offering him encouragement and advice and causing him no concern whatsoever? In such a case I think we can retract the paranoid part of the diagnosis. He might be suffering from something called childhood schizophrenia, the familiar ‘Binker’ syndrome of Imaginary Childhood Companions, which a doctor might dismiss with “He’ll grow out of it, just let me know if it gets any worse.”

    Nevertheless, it is my belief that non-consensual entities should be omitted from your public discourse, even if they are non-conspiratorial and non-threatening. To be fully accepted as a rational human being, it would be better for Dinsdale not to bolster his arguments with statements like “Spiny Norman is in favour of it”, and equally you would do better not to mention “The Cathedral” at all, seeing as neither Spiny N or the Cathedral actually exist in the world of consensual reality.

    There appears to be a certain degree of misunderstanding caused by the fact that I was not trying to refute or endorse your central proposition on the decline of conspiracy. The only phrase I was taking issue with was “The failed coup against Trump”. I objected to this because ‘failed coup’ implies that it was a time bound action which is now over, whereas in reality it is destined to last as the Trump Presidency, and has seen major developments since you entered your post. This was the subject I chose to discuss.

    Equally in your reply I take particular issue with one particular sentence:

    McCarthy was of course right in a great deal of his specific allegations……. He thought he was dealing with a secret conspiracy of opponents of the United States Government.

    But I shall deal with this in a separate post.

  2. The McCarthy movement was essentially derivative, being a rerun not only of Cicero’s attack on the Cataline cabale, but also of the campaigning of a 1st World War British Imperialist mountebank called Noel Billing.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noel_Pemberton_Billing

    Like McCarthy, Billing was involved in Military Aviation during the war and invented heroic exploits for himself. When the British Empire found itself with its back to the wall three to four years into the war, he either invented or adopted as his own a conspiracy theory about an organisation called the Unseen Hand. The relative success of the Central Powers was not due to the incompetence of the British Administrative Class or their unrealistic war aims, it was caused by traitors within (The Unseen Hand):-

    There exists in the Cabinet Noir of a certain German Prince a book compiled by the Secret Service from reports of German agents who have infested this country for the past twenty years, agents so vile and spreading such debauchery and such lasciviousness as only German minds can conceive and only German bodies execute.

    This was the Black Book, a list of 47,000 British perverts who were being blackmailed by the Germans:-

    https://spartacus-educational.com/FWWblackbook.htm

    It was their treachery, and not any defect of the Military or its war aims which was responsible for the straits in which the British Empire found itself. Sued by someone he had defamed, Billing fielded a carefully coached perjurer who alleged she had seen the book in Berlin, that the plaintiff’s name was in it and even that the presiding judge’s name was in it. As this was a civil process rather than a criminal trial, there was no-one to enquire whether she could really read German and how she managed to remember 47,000 names. This approach was spectacularly successful, the jury found for Billing, crowds strewed flowers before him as he left the court and he was returned to Parliament as MP. (The insanity of the British public during the 1st World War was unbelievable.)

    So the method created by Billing is as follows: you allege the existence of a list of traitors, without revealing the contents. If anyone thereafter hinders you in your endeavours, you say that his name is on the list. Billing set his sights high, in an attempt to make the whole country cower before him: he even alleged that the list mentioned Alice Keppel, mistress of the then king (and great-grandmother of the current Duchess of Cornwall.)

    McCarthy adopted this method in its entirety. Of course he had the spurious history of war-heroism, and when he started brandishing his list it began with 57 names, but soon went up to 206.

    The method of bolstering one’s outrageous assertions by reference to an uncheckable source proved popular: in the Alger Hiss case (not one of McCarthy’s triumphs, Richard Nixon was the prime mover in this one) there were the Pumpkin papers, a recovered stash once buried in a pumpkin patch, too secret to be produced in court. (When finally revealed, it was found to be banal.) And of course in the instant case, we have the Soviet archives which you say prove the integrity of McCarthy, without bothering to cite any particular instance.

    I myself have a list, of the more famous people who were blacklisted or suffered some other persecution during McCarthyism. It was not created by me: I culled it from the internet:-

    • Elmer Bernstein, composer and conductor
    • Charlie Chaplin, actor (probably placed on the list for his affair with Randolph Hearst’s mistress.)
    • Aaron Copland, composer
    • Bartley Crum, attorney (suicide)
    • Jules Dassin, director (blacklisted, fled to France)
    • W.E.B. DuBois, civil rights activist and author
    • Howard Fast, author (jailed)
    • Lee Grant, actress (refused to testify against her husband)
    • Dashiell Hammett, author (jailed)
    • Lillian Hellman, playwright
    • John Hubley, animator (blacklisted; survived by making commercials, anonymously)
    • Langston Hughes, author (named names)
    • Sam Jaffe, actor (blacklisted)
    • Gypsy Rose Lee, actress
    • Philip Loeb, actor (suicide)
    • Joseph Losey, director (blacklisted, moved to Europe)
    • Burgess Meredith, actor (blacklisted)
    • Arthur Miller, playwright and essayist
    • Zero Mostel, actor (blacklisted)
    • Clifford Odets, author
    • J. Robert Oppenheimer, physicist, “father of the atomic bomb”
    • Linus Pauling, chemist, winner of two Nobel prizes (Peacenik who warned of the dangers of radioactive fallout)
    • Paul Robeson, actor, athlete, singer, author, political and civil rights activist (conclusively proven to be a Black Man)
    • Edward G. Robinson, actor (Friend of the Negro, named names, career suffered)
    • Waldo Salt, author (wrote Robin Hood, Midnight Cowboy)
    • Pete Seeger, folk singer (freed on appeal)
    • Artie Shaw, clarinetist
    • Howard Da Silva, actor (cleared of all charges)
    • Paul Sweezy, economist and founder-editor of Monthly Review (imprisoned, freed on appeal)
    • Tsien Hsue-shen, physicist (found not guilty)
    • Orson Welles, actor, author and director (left for Europe)

    I have tried in the main to check each entry against their Wikipedia biography. McCarthy set his sights on people who could not possibly have any connection to any information that would be of interest to Soviet espionage. As one of those named here (Zero Mostel) later commented: “What did they think I was going to do – sell acting secrets to the Russians?” There are a couple of scientists here who might have had some knowledge worth communicating, but careful inspection of their biography shows this never actually happened.

    There are a lot of Jews among the accused. The reason for this was possibly that in the 20s, 30s and 40s World Politics was extremely polarised. You were either on the left with the Communists or the Right with the Nazis. For obvious reasons Jews could not be on the same side as Nazis, so they had to be on the left. More recently they have found a niche in the Republican Party which is more attuned to their income.

    Where there were genuine agents of the Soviet Union arrested and convicted during the Cold War period, the name of McCarthy is suspiciously absent from their accusers. They were arrested and investigated by the FBI, whose job it was to do these things. However irresponsible the American polity that allowed McCarthy was, it was not so stupid as to allow him to compromise the investigation of real traitors.

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