The Steve Sailer Rule of Conspiracies

Over the past couple years, Steve Sailer's writings on conspiracy theories (see below) have intrigued me. Like most educated Westerners I don't think much of conspiracy theorizing, but the examples Steve has given got me thinking. Some of the stuff he cites is pretty banal, if it even counts as a conspiracy at all, like the USSR spreading stories about aliens in New Mexico to cover up their reconaissance missions. Gossip doesn't really require any actual group cohesion. If your story is interesting enough (aliens and sex acts are always popular), all you really need is one person to get the ball rolling.

More interesting though are some of Steve's other examples: the Mafia, the 90s Russian oligarchs, the Donmeh, the diamond business, not to mention conspiratorial groups like the Druze or the Assasins. What these all have in common is that they all involve small, closely knit ethnic groups or people with close family ties. To be precise, actual conspiracies tend to be found only among family members or, what amounts to the same thing, closely knit endogamous ethnic groups. Therefore, in honour of Steve's abiding interest in family, I give your the Steve Sailer Rule of Conspiracies. So far as I know, Steve hasn't spelled this out explicitly, but I'll do it for him:

The more closely related the alleged conspirators are, the more likely that there is an actual conspiracy.

We in the West, with our loosely knit families and anti-nepotistic traditions (the Catholic Church ruthlessly suppressed cousin marriage), don't think much of conspiracies, and for good reason. Without family ties, there are just too many incentives to defect and therefore somebody almost always does.

What surprises me in all this is how few actual conspiracies Jews in the West have been involved in, despite their otherwise fitting the profile quite well. I just don't see a lot of evidence for Jewish conspiracies, except in a very few, limited cases. The much simpler explanation for their disproportionate success is that of Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending. I suspect that when you you have such high natural intelligence, the tendency is to start fighting amongst yourselves for the true top dog position. In fact, of the relatively few Jews who have been involved in conspiracy type behavior, like those in the diamond business, many seem to be the presumably less intelligent ultra-Orthodox types. Why conspire when you can kick everybody's ass on a level playing field?

So, if we in the West have little time for conspiracy theories, why are they so popular in the rest of the world? The reason is that family is that much more important there. Therefore, in places where this is so, conspiracy is entirely plausible fact of daily life. Is it any co-incidence that the current hotbed of conspiracy theories is the Middle East, with its high incidence of cousin marriage? In most places in the world, a good and decent person, as a matter of course tries to benefit his family first, at the expense of everyone eles, so, by the lights of their experience, why wouldn't America and the West work the same way. Therefore, it is that much easier, and happily much more self-flattering, to think that the West's technological and economic superiority must be a result of devilish scheming, not of any deficiencies on your own part. (The U.S. tendency to elect people named Bush and Clinton does nothing to relieve this suspicion, I'm afraid.) Even in the West, it is the Italians, with their tradition of family-centred corruption, that tend to be the most open to conspiracy theorizing. (They also traditionally have have the reputation for being, well, the most Machiavellian.)

On another topic, more plausible explanations for many alleged conspiracies in the West are groupthink and inertia. For example, some would cite the exclusion of conservatives from certain professions as proof of conspiracy. But in fact, there is no such conspiracy to keep conservatives out of Hollywood, the universities, the teaching profession or the media. People on university tenure committees or in Hollywood casting agencies don't sit around planning how to keep conservatives out; these types of jobs just naturally attract rootless, less family oriented individuals, and once a critical mass is reached, well by God the opinions of my group are correct and don't let me hear otherwise. There is no central direction or planning, just the natural tendency to ostracize people with different views.

LINKS:
Steve reviews Antitrust here. He follows up here. Steve's thoughts on Lee Harvey Oswald and the plot to assassinate JFK are here. He writes on the Donmeh here, here, here. and here. He writes about conspiracy hotbed Salonika here. He writes on post WWII Italy here. His thoughts on the great Italian conspiracy novelist Umberto Eco are here.

PLEASE NOTE:
Comment moderation has been enabled. I have no interest in letting the comment section becoming a place for people to rail against the Jews or other groups. While some Jews have been involved in some conspiracies, the idea of a some secret worldwide Jewish cabal is to me self-evidently absurd. Furthermore, whatever Jewish involvment there has been in specific conspiracies clearly seems due to historical circumstance, not some unique awfulness of Jewish character.