Page 50 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

Cabalocracy and the Hall of Mirrors

intellectual terrain. His enemies, real or imaginary, couldn’t stop them
all: but did it matter?
The hall of mirrors extended metaphor was just a preamble to
Curtis Capra’s actual theory, a preliminary effort to demolish his
readers’ cherished preconceptions. Then he launched into his own
correctly-informed analysis of history. First Capra distinguished his
ideas from those of his predecessors by calling the latter “closed,”
and therefore untenable. The notion that a secret association could
perpetuate itself through the centuries, maintaining its obscurity all
the while operating as the power behind the throne for its own
iniquitous purposes, is patently absurd. But the idea of a persistent
cabal grips the public imagination owing to its simplicity and its fuzzy
description of an impossible unchanging omnipotence syncretic with
theology. Further, such a conspiracy theory (abbreviated to CT by
Capra) effectively forecloses any objective search for its
underpinnings; like Manichaean religion, the absolute power of evil
needs no material antecedents or motivation other than selfish greed.
The devil might be a fallen angel, but he is not going to change again.
The possibility of human fallibility is invoked by such beliefs only to
show the inevitable failure of opposition to the cabal. Somehow the
conspirators reproduce and persist through centuries of political and
technological change, all of which they must—of necessity—be seen
to co-opt and exploit, if not instigate, for their own profit and
perpetuation. Ultimately, wrote Capra, “closed” CTs collapse under
the weight of tortured coincidence and exhaust the theorist with
circular reasoning.
The more likely scenario, he concludes, is that conspiracies are
both highly probable through time and utterly non-repeatable in
protagonists and manifestation. This he refers to as an “open”
theory. The near-certainty of recurrence derives from human nature,
as a product of evolution; its uniqueness from history’s ever-changing
sociocultural conditions. Man the actor emerged from a gene pool
more or less constant over tens of thousands of years. At some point
after that establishment of a fixed range of psychophysical traits, the
conditions of Homo sapiens’ hunter-gatherer tribal life altered
progressively and irreversibly into larger-scale societies with
authoritarian hierarchies, division of labor, organized warfare and
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