conspiracies or opportunism or does stuff just happen?

Human beings have a natural inclination to see patterns in the events of history, including (or perhaps especially) in the case of recent history. We like things to make sense and we dislike the idea of randomness.

When major social or political changes occur we therefore like to assume that they could not possibly have just happened. Someone must have planned them.

This way of looking at social change seems to be very popular on the far right. Since most of the social changes that have occurred since 1945 are changes that the far right does not approve of (and I must admit that they have valid reasons for disapproving of many of those changes) they must have a sinister explanation. Somewhere there were men in smoke-filled rooms plotting these changes.

In reality what appear to be vast organised conspiracies are often simply the result of individuals acting out of what they perceive to be their own self-interest. In many cases even these individuals are not behaving in any kind of planned way but simply behaving opportunistically.

Take immigration. Why is it so difficult for immigration restrictionists to make any real headway? Surely the answer must be that immigration is part of an organised conspiracy to destroy the West, or to genocide white people, or to usher in an international Communist dictatorship? In fact to a large extent the explanation is that a large number of individuals and corporations and small businesses (and particularly in the US farmers) have all concluded that immigration is in their interests. They are all pulling in the same direction on this issue because they all think they will personally benefit, not because they are part of a sinister organised plot.

Or take the current COVID-19 crisis. There’s a popular view on the far right that there’s an organised globalist conspiracy to use the crisis as an excuse to further the globalist agenda (there are even some who think the crisis was entirely cooked up by evil globalists). In fact this seems very unlikely. What seems more likely is that some large corporations have seen the opportunity to advance their own interests by supporting lockdowns in order to destroy unwanted competition. Other have seen it as a chance to collect handouts from government. It’s mostly been pure opportunism. It’s difficult to see how the lockdowns are good for globalists in general. Quite the reverse. It seems likely to be a setback for globalism. But if a particular corporation sees an opportunity to benefit from the overall economic carnage they will of course take advantage of it.

There are even conspiracy theories to explain declining white birth rates. Apparently it’s all part of an evil plot for white genocide. The problem with these conspiracy theories is that they don’t explain why birth rates for many non-white populations have declined even more sharply than white birth rates. In reality it’s likely that declining birth rates are the result of a number of long-term social, technological and economic changes which were in themselves ideologically and morally neutral – urbanisation and improvements in contraceptive technology being quite possibly the biggest single factors (although quite a few other factors have doubtless contributed). The conspiracy theories are not just unnecessary, they don’t fit with the facts on the ground.

In most cases self-interest and opportunism are better explanations than conspiracies. But they don’t appeal to people who want ideological explanations.