I've designated him high priest, so Jeremy Lent can do no wrong in my book.
Still, some of his work requires interpretation, elaboration, and integration into a the larger Alt Q-Anon conspiracy theory that I am espousing here.
For example, he has a great piece on Five Conspiracies that everyone should know about, and he talks about them in some detail in several places, for example here. And he even leads off exactly as I would, comparing these theories to Q-Anon, Plandemic, et al -- all the false conspiracy theories that are easily disproved, but also easily researched and thus "supported." But if it had been up to me, I would have made it super-clear that these are all part of the same basic conspiracy, and that new "evidence" of that conspiracy is produced by the ton every day -- the conspiracy of Alt-QAnon (still haven't settled on where the hyphen goes).
Here are the five conspiracies he has in mind, and yes, you should know about them:
1. Conspiracy to turn the world into a giant marketplace for the benefit of the wealthy elite
The Mont Pelerin Society, formed in 1947 with the goal of spreading the ideology of neoliberalism -- basically the idea that free market capitalism based on "individual liberty" is the solution to every problem -- throughout the world. They've seized chance after chance -- from the elections of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s to the Great Recession of 2008 -- to implement their agenda, with the result that the rich have gotten richer, and the middle class and poor have suffered.
(I am aware that Steven Pinker thinks otherwise, and Jeremy Lent deals with that here. My own view is that while technological advances have probably improved the lives of everybody in the aggregate, they could have improved the lives of the lower and middle classes much more, and then we wouldn't have the disaffected classes that vote for people like Donald Trump.)
As Lent puts it:
they initiated a campaign to systematically transform virtually all aspects of life into an unrestrained marketplace, where everything could be bought and sold to the highest bidder, subject to no moral scruple. They crippled trade unions, tore up social safety nets, reduced tax rates for the wealthy, eliminated regulations, and instituted a massive transfer of wealth from society at large to the uber-elite. Every time a new crisis occurred of their own making, such as the Great Recession of 2008, they took advantage of the mayhem they caused to double down on their power, and extend their reach even further, bringing the ideology of the marketplace into domains, such as education, law enforcement, or wilderness preserves, that had previously been considered sacrosanct.
By the way, George Monbiot has a decent TED Talk about neoliberalism, and explains that the reason that it has taken hold, and even survived the 2008 recession that it caused. His replacement story is based on altruism, which is very sweet, but probably hopeless. Read these pages and you will understand the better replacement story is, in fact, Alt-QAnon and the theory of WRAITHS.
2. Conspiracy by transnational corporations to turn billions of people into addicts
This is just the creation of today's consumer society, and he blames the 1920s advertising gurus Edward Bernays (a nephew of Sigmund Freud) and his partner Paul Mazur, whose goal was to appeal to people's deeply buried desires to get them to by stuff that they didn't need and that wasn't good for them:
Their goal was to turn normal working Americans into manic consumers, training them to desire an ever-increasing amount of goods, and thereby converting their life’s energy into profit for American corporations. “We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture,” declared Bernays’ partner, Paul Mazur. “People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.”
And of course, corporations have now perfected this technique. Lent is particularly concerned with the way they target kids:
Corporate predators have learned that the most valuable population to ensnare are children. In the sinister words of chief executive Wayne Chilicki, “When it comes to targeting kid consumers, we at General Mills . . . believe in getting them early and having them for life.” Children in the Global South are turned into junk food addicts with the same callous contempt that factory farms turn their animals into chicken nuggets. Half of the children in south Asia are now either undernourished or overweight, conditioned by pervasive advertising to spend what little money they have on the empty calories of junk food.
He then goes on to say that new mind controllers are using "sophisticated data mining technologies to inject their power even deeper into our minds, and he cites Stanford's B. J. Fogg as a modern Bernays who "has taught budding entrepreneurs how to use 'hot triggers' such as thumbs-up signs and 'Like' statistics to activate short hits of dopamine in our brains that literally get us addicted to our screens."
Actually I kind of like BJ Fogg -- I have seen his Ted Talk, and his TexX Talk and I particularly like his work on microhabits (not sure whether he or James Clear came first on this, but it's a good idea -- just make yourself floss one tooth and eventually you'll be a daily flosser. And each day, when you get out of bed and your feet hit the ground, say "it's gonna be a great day.").
But it wouldn't surprise me if Fogg's work is used for that kind of nefarious commercial purposes -- as Lent says, Fogg leads the "ominously named" "Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab."
Although this is good to know, I don't necessarily approve of the idea of "blaming" it on individuals like Bernays, Mazur, and Fogg. Sooner or later, the corporations would have figured it all out for themselves -- that's how artificial intelligence works. And we would have been in exactly the same place.
I also find it odd that he talks about this conspiracy and then uses cereal boxes with prizes inside as the prime example. I get it -- they are targeting kids with the idea of making people customers for life, so I guess that needs to be said. But for me the prime example here has been the opioid crisis. The drug company (notice I don't bother to name Purdue Pharma -- any for-profit drug company would have behaved the same way if they had a patent on the drug in question) got doctors in on the scheme, convinced patients that the opioids were good for them, and soon enough we had tens of thousands of preventable opioid related deaths on our hands.
3. Conspiracy to plunder the Global South for the benefit of the Global North
This started with the Treaty of Saragossa in 1529, when Spain and Portugal carved up the non-European continents, and continued through and after the Industrial Revolution, as all the European powers sought to gain a foothold in Africa, and (among other acts of imperialism) directly or indirectly sent tens of millions of Africans across the sea and into slavery. And when the civilized world abolished the slave trade, they simply replaced it with indentured servitude, where desperate workers from the India, China, and the Pacific Islands essentially sold themselves into slavery by "volunteering" for lengthy terms of servitude in exchange for passage out of the intolerable conditions that imperialism had created for them in their home countries.
Lent includes a great quote from Cecil Rhodes (of Rhodes scholarship fame):
We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labour that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories.
Although I like the quote and am edified by it -- and it fits the theme like a glove -- I caution once again against focusing on "individuals" in laying the blame. Here, it is clearly the WRAITHS known as Nation States, at first presumably at the behest of the sovereigns who happened to be born to control the state machinery, but later, it became clearly the merchant class, the industrialists -- the corporations.
Lent sums up:
In more recent times, the plot continues in different guises. During the decades after the Second World War, Global South leaders who demanded a fair role in the economic system were systematically deposed in coups arranged by U.S., British, and French militaries. In a vast loan sharking scheme, countries impoverished by colonialism then racked up unsustainable debts forced on them by Global North banks. When they couldn’t pay them back without bankrupting their nations, they were coerced into so-called “structural adjustment programs” which opened their labor markets and natural resources to further plunder by the North’s transnational corporations. The World Bank, IMF, and World Trade Organization are all controlled by a few wealthy nations that set the terms for international trade, with the result that through a combination of illicit financial flows, debt interest payments, and profit repatriation, wealth continues to flow from the South to the North at the rate of about $3 trillion per year.
4. Conspiracy to hide the effects of climate breakdown for corporate profit
For over fifty years, fossil fuel executives have known about the reality of human-induced climate change, yet they spent most of that time deliberately concealing their knowledge and obfuscating public discussion on the topic so they could rake in trillions of dollars in profit. In 1968, the Stanford Research Institute alerted the American Petroleum Institute—the national trade association that represents America’s oil and natural gas industry—to the fact that CO2 emissions were accumulating in the atmosphere, and could reach 400 parts per million by 2000. Their report warned that rising CO2 levels would result in melting ice caps, rising seas, and serious environmental damage worldwide. Exxon scientists studied the issue further, reporting to management in 1977 that there was “overwhelming” consensus that fossil fuels were responsible for CO2 increases. In an internal Exxon memo in 1981, scientists raised the alarm that the company’s 50-year plan “will later produce effects which will indeed be catastrophic (at least for a substantial fraction of the Earth’s population).”
Exxon—and the other fossil fuel companies—knew their actions would lead to climate breakdown, and instead of trying to solve the problem, they lied to the public to hide their misdeeds. Following the example of the tobacco industry, which had already condemned millions to early deaths through cynical deception, they embarked on a concerted strategy to dupe the public by paying fake experts to publish papers; cherry picking selective data to support false conclusions; and sow their own wild conspiracy theories to deflect attention from their crimes.
As a result of their immoral plot, the world is now facing a dire climate emergency. If the fossil fuel companies had confronted the issue honestly from the outset, there could have been a managed transition to renewable energy over decades, causing little disruption and saving millions of lives through reduced pollution. Instead, it will now take an immediate global mobilization to avoid a 2° C rise in temperature over preindustrial levels. The world is currently on track for more than a 3° C rise this century, with the high likelihood of stumbling into a tipping point cascade that quickly leads to a three- and four-degree world—one that becomes rapidly unrecognizable, with the Amazon rainforest turning into searing desert; coastal cities inundated by flooding; super-hurricanes tearing the windows out of skyscrapers; persistent massive droughts and famine across the world; and hundreds of millions of desperate climate refugees.
Meanwhile, by putting billions of human lives in jeopardy, the four biggest fossil fuel companies—ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, and BP—have made $2 trillion in profits since they began their campaign of lies in 1990.
5. Conspiracy to grow the global economy indefinitely, while killing most of life on Earth and risking the collapse of civilization.
In a barely noticed footnote to the daily news, the World Wildlife Fund recently released a shocking report revealing a devastating 68% worldwide decline in animal populations in the past fifty years. Even this dismal news hides more gut-wrenching statistics, such as the 84% decline in amphibians, reptiles, and fishes, or the 94% decline in animal populations in South America.
This is just the latest bulletin marking the demise of nature as it succumbs to the relentless growth of human economic activity across the world. Three-quarters of all land has been appropriated for human purposes, either turned into farmland, covered by concrete, or flooded by reservoirs. Three-quarters of rivers and lakes are used for crop or livestock cultivation, with many of the world’s greatest rivers, such as the Ganges, Yangtze, or Nile, no longer reaching the sea. Half of the world’s forests and wetlands have disappeared—the Amazon rainforest alone is vanishing at the rate of an acre every second.
Meanwhile, the world’s Gross Domestic Product is forecast to nearly triple by the middle of this century, by which time it’s estimated that 5 billion people will be facing water shortages, 95% of the Earth’s arable land will be degraded—and there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean. It’s been estimated by leading experts that, by the end of this century, half of the world’s estimated 8 million species will be extinct or at the brink of extinction unless humanity changes its ways. These depredations, combined with climate breakdown, are believed by an increasing number of analysts to spell the likely collapse of modern civilization.
The underlying cause of this headlong rush to catastrophe is our society’s obsession with economic growth as the sole criterion for measuring success. A dangerous myth of “green growth” propagated by techno-optimists argues that through technological innovation, GDP can become “decoupled” from resource use and carbon emissions, permitting limitless growth on a finite planet. This has been shown to be nothing but a fantasy: it hasn’t happened so far, and even the most wildly aggressive assumptions for greater efficiency lead to unsustainable consumption of global resources.
So who, in this case, are the conspirators? If you’re living a normal life in an affluent country, you don’t need to look further than the mirror. The wealthy OECD nations, with only 18% of the global population, account for 74% of global GDP, and the richest 10% of people are responsible for more than half the world’s carbon emissions.
Those of us who continue to benefit from the inequities dealt us by the global system, and aren’t actively engaged in curbing it, are like a few shipwrecked survivors on a gilded lifeboat kicking others desperately scrambling for life into the ocean to protect their own safety and comfort. We may not be actively kicking their knuckles, but by allowing this reckless system of unsustainable growth to continue, we’re implicitly making the same choice.
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