Popper, K
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</div><div>=</div><div><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">For decades prior to that conflict, <a href="http://www.unz.org/Author/BeardCharlesA/" style="color: rgb(241, 96, 44); text-decoration: none;"><strong>one of our most prominent scholars and public intellectuals</strong></a> had been historian <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_A._Beard" style="color: rgb(241, 96, 44); text-decoration: none;"><strong>Charles Beard</strong></a>, whose influential writings had heavily focused on the harmful role of various elite conspiracies in shaping American policy for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many, with his examples ranging from the earliest history of the United States down to the nation’s entry into WWI. Obviously, researchers never claimed that all major historical events had hidden causes, but it was widely accepted that some of them did, and attempting to investigate those possibilities was deemed a perfectly acceptable academic enterprise.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">However, Beard was a strong opponent of American entry into the Second World War, and he was marginalized in the years that followed, even prior to his death in 1948. Many younger public intellectuals of a similar bent also suffered the same fate, or were even purged from respectability and denied any access to the mainstream media. At the same time, the totally contrary perspectives of two European political philosophers, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper" style="color: rgb(241, 96, 44); text-decoration: none;"><strong>Karl Popper</strong></a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Strauss" style="color: rgb(241, 96, 44); text-decoration: none;"><strong>Leo Strauss</strong></a>, gradually gained ascendancy in American intellectual circles, and their ideas became dominant in public life.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Popper, the more widely influential, presented broad, largely theoretical objections to the very possibility of important conspiracies ever existing, suggesting that these would be implausibly difficult to implement given the fallibility of human agents; what might appear a conspiracy actually amounted to individual actors pursuing their narrow aims. Even more importantly, he regarded “conspiratorial beliefs” as an extremely dangerous social malady, a major contributing factor to the rise of Nazism and other deadly totalitarian ideologies. His own background as an individual of Jewish ancestry who had fled Austria in 1937 surely contributed to the depth of his feelings on these philosophical matters.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Meanwhile, Strauss, a founding figure in modern neo-conservative thought, was equally harsh in his attacks upon conspiracy analysis, but for polar-opposite reasons. In his mind, elite conspiracies were absolutely necessary and beneficial, a crucial social defense against anarchy or totalitarianism, but their effectiveness obviously depended upon keeping them hidden from the prying eyes of the ignorant masses. His main problem with “conspiracy theories” was not that they were always false, but they might often be true, and therefore their spread was potentially disruptive to the smooth functioning of society. So as a matter of self-defense, elites needed to actively suppress or otherwise undercut the unauthorized investigation of suspected conspiracies.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Even for most educated Americans, theorists such as Beard, Popper, and Strauss are probably no more than vague names mentioned in textbooks, and that was certainly true in my own case. But while the influence of Beard seems to have largely disappeared in elite circles, the same is hardly true of his rivals. Popper probably ranks as one of the founders of modern liberal thought, with an individual as politically influential as left-liberal financier <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_society#Criticism" style="color: rgb(241, 96, 44); text-decoration: none;"><strong>George Soros claiming to be his intellectual disciple</strong></a>. Meanwhile, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism#Leo_Strauss_and_his_students" style="color: rgb(241, 96, 44); text-decoration: none;"><strong>neo-conservative thinkers</strong></a> who have totally dominated the Republican Party and the Conservative Movement for the last couple of decades often proudly trace their ideas back to Strauss.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">So, through a mixture of Popperian and Straussian thinking, the traditional American tendency to regard elite conspiracies as a real but harmful aspect of our society was gradually stigmatized as either paranoid or politically dangerous, laying the conditions for its exclusion from respectable discourse.</p></div><div>===</div>