If you want to understand how the world works—how history unfolds—you must examine power: the relations that determine it, the institutions that embody it, the motivations driving the wealthy and powerful to pursue their goals, the decisions they make, and the structures that allow them to seek power and wealth exclusively.
We see this kind of power analysis all the time in science fiction and fantasy. Authors engage in world-building precisely because they know a plot must unfold within a framework of possibilities and constraints. Those possibilities and constraints are given by the larger structure of the imagined world. Without them, nothing makes sense. The reader accepts the built world as necessary and obvious.
Given this, it’s worth asking why so many people deny that the real world has a structure. From the standpoint of power, it isn’t surprising: the powerful benefit from denying the structures that grant them immense possibilities while keeping ordinary people from achieving the good life. And they spend a great deal of time ensuring that the ordinary man doesn’t accept theories critical of elite power.
Nobody watching FX’s Alien: Earth thinks “conspiracy theory” when told that five corporations rule the Earth a century from now. Nobody reading The Lord of the Rings dismisses Tolkien’s carefully built world as implausible, given assumptions about the supernatural. In both cases, structure is essential to understanding the unfolding plot, the characters’ motivations, and the constraints and challenges they face—and overcome.
Yet in the real world, many people leap to “conspiracy theory” when confronted with the realities of corporate power, greed, and elite machinations to gain and preserve wealth and influence at the expense of ordinary people.
By accepting that references to such structures are mere conspiracy, the ordinary man resigns himself to seeing events as accidental or as the work of charismatic personalities. He imagines his own struggles are simply the product of personal inadequacy. Too many blame men blame themselves for their circumstances instead of challenging power and pursuing the good life for themselves, their families, and their communities. They believe what they are told instead of questioning those who tell them what to believe.
freedom and reason 