Conspiratorial Thinking and "Multiple Outs"
How to do magic tricks...
Magicians have this concept called "Multiple Outs." It's actually how you can do
simple magic tricks. Suppose you have a person pick a card and say you will
guess the suit of their card.
They pick a diamond card and announce it, and you tell them to check underneath
their chair to reveal a slip of paper that says, "You will pick a diamond card."
That might sound like a nice trick, but if they had picked a spade, you have
another piece of paper under the fruitbowl that says, "You will pick a spade."
If they pick a club, you unbutton your shirt to reveal a giant club written on
your undershirt, etc.
In essence, for any possible outcomes, you have a response planned that seems
natural and predictive. This is one of the ways that magicians do what they do,
often with more complicated mechanisms.
Applications
Multiple outs are actually real magic.
You've heard the expression "hope for the best and plan for the worst," but the
concept of multiple outs is that one should be planning for all possible
outcomes, including those that you yourself might not even anticipate now.
Every business plan should have multiple outs. Your major life decisions should
be planned with multiple outs. You should even tacitly plan dates with multiple
outs, so that unexpected events can be met with a confident, perhaps even better
replacements.
Multiple outs in political power
Any longstanding group in political power is by the mere fact of their survival
sure to have mastered the sleight of hand of "multiple outs."
This serves not only to continue in political power, but to cement their power
further by the appearance of inevitability. A ruler or ruling class puts
themselves in a position to benefit from any possible occurrence: be ready even
to use disaster to your benefit, as Obama's chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel put it
succinctly: "You never let a serious crisis go to waste."
Conspiracy?
People skeptical of the state sometimes devolve into thinking that every major
political event is in one way or another is planned in advance. This is because
they don't understand and apply the concept of multiple outs. They see that
their rulers are good at benefiting from any chaos or unforeseen events, so
assume these events must've been engineered.
Look at the corona virus: it's a great example of an event that has hugely
benefited a small elite: it has bankrupted small businesses in favor of Amazon,
destroyed churches and mom and pop stores in favor of passively consooming
digital infotainment from curated social media sites and more. It is a
rationalization of state location and contact monitoring and things far beyond
what anyone dreamed of. It was a rationalization for sending out unsolicited
ballots to unverified voter rolls which had very obvious beneficiaries. It has
produced a cult of doomsday believers crying for the state to lock them in their
houses and make them wear fetishistic masks.
Seeing all this and asking who benefits, "Cui bono?" might lead you to think
that the whole thing was planned: perhaps the disease itself is fake, or maybe
it was real, but spread on purpose, or perhaps it was engineered. You've
probably seen stuff like this, and while I won't dismiss this kind of thinking
out of hand, it's unnecessary.
In reality, the ruling classes of the West have openly prepared to benefit from
a pandemic scenario. COVID19 was deemed "closed enough" to a pandemic, and the
momentum of the system took over. It's not even that they wanted it to
happen, but they were prepped to benefit from it as a contingency plan if it
might occur.
The Conspiracy Rabbit Hole and the Omnipotent Cathedral
There are some people who see how the ruling class is in a position to benefit
from every school-shooting, police encounter, foreign entanglement, dissident
politician and everything else and thus assume that everything they see must be
arranged in advance. There is a logic behind believing this: it does seem
way to convenient for all of this to happen at what retroactively seems to
the best time, but this leads people to the much more uneconomical idea that the
System is so omnipotent that it controls every event and every reaction to
every event.
In reality, our rulers just know how to use multiple outs. When you know how to
do that, it seems like you are always in control, and by nature, people
attribute a kind of magical power to you. All you have to do is stay cool and
play it off like you predicted it all.
This is why "the System" always seem to win.
The system knows how to play with multiple outs.
There is a canned response, or at least a reasonably ad-libbed response, for
every event and every possible event. They are in a position of antifragility
and can gain from nearly any possible event. When they can't, the media can at
least throw enough mud on public perception to inspire apathy or confusion.
There are certainly portions of the System which are "conspiratorial." Major
news organizations usually coordinate on what editorial line to publish, but in
general, their entrenched power comes from a detached ability to be flexible in
new events.
The omnipotence and permanence of the Soystem is illusory. It comes from that
flexibility.
Multiple outs in your life
Even aside from politics, it's important to behave yourself in a way that allow
yourself to have multiple outs. Business, social life, major decisions and in
everything else. Never tether yourself to one option; that's when you lose. Have
a smart response to co-opt anything that can happen, no matter how good or bad.