Conspiracy: A Taxonomy

Establishment Theorists - A Taxonomy - A Case Study

Conspiracy is not a black and white issue.  Conspiracies deserve careful analytical attention.  Below is an attempted nomenclature and taxonomy.
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conspiracy

a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful.
        google.com (emphasis added)

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At face value, conspiracies are neither unusual nor hard to understand although some conspiracy remain more complex and difficult for people to believe exist.  Like many complex questions, conspiracies sit on continuums - in this case I propose at least the following three continuums: conventional to the highly strange, weak to strong, and local to systemic (if not global).  

Conspiracies are sometimes also underdetermined; conspiracies can include competitive arrangements where factions vie for supremacy but also remain satisfied with long-term detentes or impasses that remain advantageous in a larger sense - such as controlling the masses.  Conspiracies also sit within hierarchies - one or even many within another - like Russian nesting dolls.  Indeed all conspiracies may fall into one single enormous struggle for power on this planet where the dominant conspiracy may yield the greatest power.  I suspect, in a certain sense, we live in such a world.  I will later call this managing the maelstrom.  In any case, before I get ahead of myself, here is the introductory taxonomy...

A conventional (i.e. face value or vanilla) conspiracy exhibits conventional-rational state authentication or other forensic verification that, for instance, a lawyer, academic, journalist, researcher, or other practitioner might evaluate.   The The Business Plot and Mena Coverup are vanilla conspiracies.  You can find more.  Highly strange* or Ickian conspiracies - named after David Icke - involves higher, lower, and unseen dimensions in the universe as well as new and unusual beings that conventional research and reporting fails to imagine or evidence.  Most people do not have the imagination to suspect that the world we live in could be so complex, deep, and even problematic.  The world described in The Matrix films is an example of an Ickian conspiracy.  Another example is the very one Icke often discusses regarding inter-dimensional reptilian extraterrestrials who have utilized various direct and indirect methods to control the outcomes of collective and individual human decisions.**

A weak (or soft) conspiracy lacks a well-delineated group or plan and exhibits greater flexibility in its operation and interpretation.  A weak conspiracy may simply involve a common understanding and signaling*** within a loosely organized group.  A weak conspiracy exhibits less forensic specificity.  (Here weak does not mean their impact is weak.)  (A subset of teh weak conspiracy is the complex conspiracy, which may not reach a systemic wide conspiracy but still exhibits a good deal of complexity.)  A strong (i.e hard or verifiable) conspiracy is a 'smoke-filled room' conspiracy.  They have a well-delineated, secretive group and a specific harmful or illegal plan often exhibiting specificity in terms of forensics and authentication in relation to accomplices, objectives, schedules, and other components.  Watergate and Iran-Contra Affair are examples of strong conspiracies.

The American mafia is an illustrative example of both strong and weak conspiracies.  If we look at the entire American mafia - as a whole - its members are bound more by common understanding and common values and less by an explicit plan.  In such as an environ, signaling is very much possible and people can realize common goals with explicit coordination.  In this sense, the American mafia is a weak conspiracy.  For instance, in terms of RICO laws, the American mafia as a whole obviously remains to this day un-prosecuted and in operation (albeit perhaps weakened).  However, prosecutors have been successful at targeting sub-components of the mafia.  If we look at individual families or subcomponents such as crews within a family, those subcomponents are more likely to have the qualities of a strong conspiracy; and, unsurprisingly, law enforcement officials prosecuted such subcomponents using RICO laws.****

A local conspiracy is a small scale, (often) geographically close conspiracy.    A local conspiracy is often a conventional conspiracy such as a point shaving in college basketball or municipal contract bid rigging.  Such examples do not stretch the imagination.  A systemic conspiracy involves interdependent parts, often geographically spread that form a complex and interacting whole.  If I was to adventure a candidate example, I could point to voter irregularities outlined in the documentaries Kill Chain and Hacking Democracy.  

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*  The idea of high strangeness explicitly comes from in the work of Linda Moulton Howe - another researcher on extraterrestrial matters.  

**  I want to share two observations regarding the question of high strangeness.  One, evidently I didn't offer evidence for the last conspiracy mentioned.  I have no hyperlink, no book title, and  no documentary name.  You will have to do your own research.  Or don't.  Two, these ideas - whether we wrap them in terms of inter-dimensional reptilian extraterrestrials or some other strange beings - are not fundamentally unreasonable questions that lie outside of religious cosmology.  Archons, to which Icke often refers, are a legitimate research matter in contemporary religious studies.

I have a new blog entry that touches on the subject extraterrestrials.  For some, first-person testimony from various sources is convincing.  For others, psychedelic experience will reveal answers to these questions.  For others, they want to see bodies and crafts.  I get that.  Personally, I believe in intuitive sensing, Indigenous folklore/knowledge, and rational/scientific thought.  For me to reach personal consensus, I want to check all the boxes.  Until then I make the best possible conjecture in the face on conflicting evidence or lack of evidence.  The prevalence of first-person testimonies that discuss, reptilians, so-called Pleiadians, Ebens, and various greys suggest to me that they all likely exists.  The same applies to extraterrestrial crafts, crashes, and even possibly meetings between US government officials and extraterrestrials at least during the Eisenhower administration. 

*** Signaling allows people to communicate a great deal about their intentions without direct communication.  I also was going to add a subcategory called signaled conspiracy but a signaled conspiracy seems like a sub-category of non-strong conspiracy.

**** For instance, to borrow from the language of RICO cases, 'enterprise' revolves around whether prosecutors can establish a common purpose among a group of individuals.  Establishing 'enterprise' is easier among a smaller group of conspirators.  With a hard conspiracy, a prosecutor can more easily establish 'enterprise' when the conspiracy involves fewer people.