not everything bad that happens in the world is because of an oppressive conspiracy actually
“the 40 hour work-week is deliberately designed to keep workers exhausted and downtrodden –” no the forty hour workweek was negotiated by labor power to block the eighty hour workweek. “american food is full of corn syrup in order to make people obese and sick and weak and unable to revolt against the government –” there are a lot of reasons why Corn is the way it is in the US and this is not any of them. “the concept of ‘coming out’ is a straight conspiracy designed to murder queer people –” please stop
stop assuming that every bad thing that exists is the result of active malice. there is so much in the world that’s bad just by accident, or as an unintended consequence of something else – maybe even something with good intentions. please don’t turn yourself into a conspiracy thinker just with shinier woker labels
also it doesn’t NEED to be a conspiracy for you to make your point. you can still say the 40 hour work week keeps people exhausted and makes political participation harder, and that corporate interests like it that way!
there doesn’t need to be a conspiracy of the evil 100 richest people on the planet (I see that idea way too much btw) to make this happen. In fact if you are a communist you SHOULD believe that the current conditions are the consequences of the historical forces shaped by material interest. believing in an evil conspiracy is the precise opposite of Marxism and actually what fascists love to do. so maybe consider stopping
Yeah, like, the whole point or historical materialism is to show that these things happen without needing conscious decision making. That’s why it’s materialism.
Sometime back in the middle of the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, I was picking the brains of a friend of mine, the activist scholar Cindy Patton, about the probable natural history of HIV. This was at a time when speculation was ubiquitous about whether the virus had been deliberately engineered, or spread; whether HIV represented a plot or experiment by the U. S. military that had gotten out of control, or perhaps that was behaving exactly as it was meant to. After hearing a lot from her about the geography and economics of the global traffic in blood products, I finally, with some eagerness, asked Patton what she thought of these sinister rumors about the virus’s origin. “Any of the early steps in its spread could have been either accidental or deliberate,” she said. “But I just have trouble getting interested in that. I mean, even suppose we were sure of every element of a conspiracy: that the lives of Africans and African Americans are worthless in the eyes ofthe United States; that gay men and drug users are held cheap where they aren’t actively hated; that the military deliberately researches ways to kill noncombatants whom it sees as enemies; that people in power look calmly on the likelihood of catastrophic environmental and population changes. Supposing we were ever so sure of all those things—what would we know then that we don’t already know?”
Eve Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re so Paranoid You Probably Think This Introduction Is about You” (1997)
