The default image of a conspiracy is a theory that envisions a small minority of very powerful people acting in unison to abuse and enslave a majority of people. I am not totally against this form of thinking, because after all some individuals are incredibly powerful and have enough time and opportunities to link up with other incredibly powerful people. But plausible doesn't mean real, and real doesn't mean that it is the main driver in our society, which is one reason why I tend to not think along those lines. Another reason is that, just like mainstream ideas, the conspiracy theories which become very popular are not the most truthful ones, but the ones best at spreading, which usually involves some form of hijacking, not just of the mind but also of emotions, but this is another can of worms.
The main conspiracy I'm interested in these days is something like the conspiracy of hatred, or anything hugely negative along those lines: fear, apathy, cynicism, disempowerment. Not that the exact opposite of naive optimism and faked "happiness" are virtues of course, but that by and large, it is very fashionable to not take responsibility for your own life and find people to blame.
Hatred of women or men, of immigrants, of this or that religion, of your parents, of the system, of your genes, of your boss, all done so that people may avoid looking at themselves and do something about it, similar to the constant need to be right. Not only does that happen individually, but it then spreads collectively, sometimes very very well as can be seen in some online communities, because maintaining a delusion is difficult by yourself, especially if you have to take care of your own needs in the wild, but within a complex society that shields you from most of Reality, and within which you can find people who think like you, delusions become very appealing to the ego.
Ego, as tautological as it might sound, is concerned with its own survival, which is why it can be said to be "made" of narrow awareness. By filling you mind with how women specifically make it impossible for you to be fulfilled, you find more and more evidence for it, and you become increasingly angry in a way that makes you even more blind, and thus unable to see the whole pattern for what it is.
Hatred is self-obscuring: by focusing all your attention on the wrongs of this person or group of people, you stop seeing the hatred for what it is, usually a response to being harmed, a sense of feeling powerless, and a way to avoid taking responsibility, and you only focus on its supposed "cause".
Social media is incredibly good at taking advantage of those patterns of narrow awareness. The fact that all information is taken out of context and can be shown to the people most susceptible to react to it, thanks to algorithms that feed on your data, means that it is essentially an outrage machine to keep people glued to their screens.
Darren Allen uses the term "unhappy supermind" 1 to describe the collective mood, and even genius, which keeps a large number of people unhappy. It is genuinely fascinating how intelligent people are when it comes to justifying their own misery and hatred, constantly looking for reasons to feel this or that way, and sometimes able to come up with those in an instant, tapping into the ego's prodigious ability at bullshitting itself.
But it doesn't have to be that way. To see the pattern for what it is and see in what ways it does not serve you is not a herculean task, though it requires honesty and some amount of mindfulness.
From what I can tell, nothing of lasting value has been built out of hatred for people. Even if you identify as someone who is fairly reactionary and localist, then surely your duty in life is to find and be of service to a community, not spend your time spreading hate.
If the concern is that the internet is used to propagate deeply ignorant views which harm a large amount of people, then I also do not see how hate can create a better situation. People love to be contrarians and push against resistance, it is very well known that by and large, conflict is a common source of meaning in people's lives. By adding hatred to the whole mix, the only outcome I can see is to fuel the ongoing narrative war, which is not going to be solved by more antagonism and separation.
I think the conspiracy of hatred is ultimately an echo of two of the biggest voids left by the modern world: a sense of purpose and a sense of belonging. Crude tribalism 2 is a very easy way to solve both of these, 3 by having a clear enemy to "defeat", or at least oppose, which then, hopefully, creates a sense of belonging around those who oppose it. I say "hopefully" because in a lot of cases, that ingroup bonding does not even arise, because it's just a lot easier to fight an (imaginary) enemy and spew hate at it than it is to build relationships.
Thus the only way to let go of the dynamic of hatred is to address those voids. I do think that "purpose" has a way of being easily misinterpreted by our modern minds, as to mean something like "creating a plan with my mind which I will impose onto Reality no matter what", which is why I usually find it more helpful to connect with specific aspects of your life, such as people, activities and the things around you, and allow a sense of purpose to arise from those. I think that purpose without love risks running into the Schopenhauer trap of seeing the Universe as being endowed with a meaningless will, which seeks to impose its reality and perpetuate itself without any bigger context to it, 4 and which we can see recapitulated in the people obsessed with agency, usually working in tech, who have lost all context about what that agency is supposed to bring into the world, such as flourishing, love, connection, all the inherently valuable aspects we live for.
This deep loving connection to Reality is always available to us, because we are part of Reality after all, but the problem is that describing it in any set of literal descriptions and instructions risks turning it into another set of methods, an instruction manual so to speak, for the ego. This does not mean it is complicated, after all children are fascinated by the world around them even before they learn to think and use language, but it usually requires a sense of softening which isn't rewarded by our world. Softly listening to the birds in the morning, softly letting the qualities of the clouds as they gently drift across the sky, softly feeling the wind on a September afternoon, all reminders of the incredible, almost mad, miracle of what it is to be alive.
There is always a choice to walk away from the conspiracy of hatred. Even the mere decision to stay silent and not engage in it goes a long way when repeated over a lifetime.
1 From 33 Myths of the System and The Apocalypedia (second edition), which I believe is a term he got from Barry Long, one of his main references, but I haven't read from him.
2 There is nothing fundamentally wrong with having an ingroup and an outgroup in my opinion. Our capacity for care is limited and it's better to work with that rather than pretend we are beings of infinite compassion. But there is a massive difference between: "my priorities lie with my community, I cannot help everyone sorry" and "my community is the best and I will do everything I can to slay or convert the outsiders".
3 Another crude way to solve it is to join a cult. You feel special for joining those who "get" it, you often have a clear set of steps to "ascend" within the cult, and you have nice like-minded people who make you feel at home.
4 A view which interestingly enough even Schopenhauer did not completely agree with, because of his exposure to Eastern philosophy and his recognition that there is bliss in an existence "beyond" that selfish will. Darren Allen would say that Schopenhauer's confusion of the will as being a hodgepodge of very different things led to one side of his writing into the bleak cynicism he is most well known for, but that other parts of his writing could see and express the beauty of life, conscious life that is.
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Narrowawareness Cynicism Wholesome Responsibility Mimetics Groupunhappiness
2025-09-02