Comment by danaris | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danaris | Hacker News Reader

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It's tempting to believe in that kind of a conspiracy—the kind where there's a single person or group pulling the strings, a single entity to blame, and possibly to eliminate, in order to solve many of the world's woes—but the truth is, it's unlikely to actually be something like that.

A conspiracy isn't necessary when the incentives align such that a group of similar people have reason to work toward such a goal independently. And because the problem is those incentives, not the individuals involved, even if you were to somehow change the mind of, imprison, or assassinate everyone pushing for these things today, more would spring up soon after.

The only way to stop this from happening is to remove the power base that those entities use to make these pushes, and remove the mechanisms that allow them to do so legally. Make it impossible to amass that much wealth. Make the worst kinds of lobbying illegal. Ruthlessly enforce antitrust laws, preventing hyperconsolidation like we see today. Make the very idea of a multibillionaire impossible.

I'm not into conspiracy usually, but regarding everything that was exposed in recent years, I would easily see a conspiracy there.

I'm not necessarily say that it is just a single person or company, but that it is likely that a group of entities is working together on this for a hidden interest.

Just look what happened with the "vote" of the council, each time it became too public that a vote was coming and that some countries would publicly be against due to public pressure, they preferred to "withdraw" the proposal instead of going to the public vote that could have been a strong "no". And they did that multiple times. And it was obvious that the reason to not go to the vote is to be able to try to pass it again. Then, at least the representatives of the countries involved "plotted" against us in a conspiracy, to have the discussion and the decision voted in secret in order to be sure that it will pass. And eventually that no country like Germany could be pointed as individually have voted "yes" despite its population will.

I think it's more comforting for people to believe that there are a handful of evil, mustache-twirling villains, sitting in a smokey room, plotting and directing their henchmen to carry out a conspiracy. "There are only a few bad guys, and the rest of us are just doing what we can," they can say to feel good about the world.

It's a lot more scary to admit that there is no evil puppet master running things, and it's simply that the vast majority of people in leadership positions are just awful people, acting independently, but aligned with the rest of the awful people, intent on doing whatever it takes to make line go up and to the right.

Honestly, I wouldn't even couch it as the majority of leaders being evil: it's that the systems they lead, and that we all operate within, are poorly constructed, broken, or outright corrupt, and need a concerted effort on all our parts to fix them so that they actually work for everyone, rather than funneling wealth and power to the already-wealthy and already-powerful by default.

And that's genuinely hard! Just by the nature of things, it is much, much easier to create a system that reinforces existing power structures than a system that works to subvert them and give more power to those who have little.

Why not take the simple result from economics? The bigger the economic union, the bigger the inequality. Transforming small European countries, without even harmonizing minimum pay laws and social rules, into the EU, was always going to concentrate wealth to an enormous extent.

One might even say that given the EU's history as an organization, this has always been the intent of creating it in the first place, not an accident.

The mature perspective is that there isn't one big conspiracy. There are many small conspiracies.

It sounds like what you're talking about is fairly ordinary political maneuvering of an already-extant official group?

Like, the fact that it's a "council" means that they're already meeting regularly and talking to each other, about these specific things.

When a group like that decides not to advance a proposal because they think it will be voted down, that's not a conspiracy; it may be a highly undesirable behavior, and something we should try to prevent with changes in the structure or rules, but "conspiracy" isn't just a word for every group of people who does things we don't like.

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