The WordPress/JetPack writing prompt for today is:
What’s a conspiracy theory you actually believe?

I’d thought I might skip this one, as I don’t think of myself as a conspiracy theory type of person. But honestly the last few years have broadened my acceptance that some conspiracies may be real.

I grew up with a father who was obsessed with the JFK assassination. He lived and breathed the Warren Commission. I never thought much of it, it was just one of his hobbies.

Then, in the 1980s, I went to university. One of my professors was quite interesting. he had served in an intelligence unit in West Berlin when the Soviets built the Berlin Wall.

He had stories and as he got more comfortable with us, he shared some of them. Near the end of one of his courses, he opened the floor to questions. One of his grad students asked, “Who killed Kennedy?”

He didn’t reply ‘Lee Harvey Oswald,’ which would’ve been the easiest answer, as that’s what the Warren Commission concluded.

Instead he gave a cryptic, “I don’t want to know the answer to that, because if there was a conspiracy, then knowing puts you in danger.” (This was either 1987 or 1988, so I’m paraphrasing)

The answer revealed an interesting mindset. How much are you willing to risk to know a truth that’s been kept hidden?

But the thing is that conspiracies themselves aren’t uncommon, especially during the cold war era of my childhood. Keeping them secret for long periods of time is uncommon. Once acted upon, they tend to become public. Think about the various conspiracies and attempts to assassinate Hitler during the Second World War.

So are there any conspiracies that I believe to be true? Well, let’s start with defining a conspiracy. For my purpose, it’s an agreement by a group of people to act in a secret manner to get an outcome that they want. I’m not talking about planning a surprise birthday party, although that could be called a conspiracy. No, I’m thinking of a national scope or transnational scope.

So are there any that I would believe?

Well, I’ve been thinking about the idea that “the system is broken, plan accordingly” and all the ways that the phrase is possibly true today. How is the system broken?

The first thing that pops to my mind, mainly because of my background, is a concerted, planned attack on education, intelligence, and critical thinking. I think in most developed countries, there is a consensus that the education system is broken. Public schools are almost universally under-funded, teachers are wildly under-paid. Vouchers and charter schools are used to enforce a class-based tier-ing of education, whereby the upper middle class (those deemed to have the potential to be rich) are given a chance to escape the rest of us. Curricula are being standardized in ways that make it harder for students to learn and teachers to adapt to student needs (“Teach the test”). Other elements that would make learning easier or more enjoyable are being eliminated (art, music, recess, and in some school systems, sports in general). And in the US, there’s the added anxiety of ‘shooter drills.’ School is not a refuge for the creative or the curious anymore. it’s a place that teaches and reinforces anxiety.

Parents can see that the education system is broken or breaking. But most people have not traveled enough to know how universal this is. It’s not just your country. So why is something that we spent a century building and improving now getting eaten? Why are IQs going down, students losing not just the passion for learning, but the skills to do so themselves?

It sounds like a conspiracy. It sounds like a strategy to create a new kind of serfdom (which is only slightly better than slavery, and may be a gateway to its return.). And we all know how the tech elite keep feeding our kids and even our adults a dulling of the senses through addictive social media and shallow stimulus responses.

So now we’re isolating, losing a sense of community too, the ability to organize and share experiences and counter-strategies.

I used to think that home-schoolers were quacks and religious zealots who were doing more harm to their children than good. I mean, how would their kids ever have friends or a community if they didn’t go to school with their peers?

Now? The schools no longer offer those advantages, and home schooling, if done correctly, could be an answer. But home schooling, like charter schools, can only be done by those with certain economic advantages (or, if you would, “privilege’).

But is this an actual conspiracy or just the natural evolution of late-stages capitalism? I don’t know. I do know we live in a “K-shaped economy” whereby the wealthy are getting exponentially richer by draining the poor of every opportunity not only to advance, but to sustain our quality of life. So why is this happening to education? If we can all see it, why aren’t we fixing it? And most importantly, who gains from ruining a quality education for the masses?

So do I believe in a conspiracy? As Monty Python would say, “Say no more, say no more. A nudge is as good as a wink to a blind man.”