I’ve constantly been gob-smacked by all the nutty conspiracy theories. Ten years ago, I was teaching part-time in a private high school, when all the well-dressed, BMW-driving students informed me that the 9/11 attacks on Manhattan’s World Trade Centre was really a conspiracy by the United States government; and their gruesome conviction suggested that their parents may have transmitted the theory. Years earlier, in the midst of the sub-prime market melt-down, a well-educated entrepreneur told me that nothing bad was going to happen to the global economy, because the Bilderbergers were in control of everything. And just last year, in a nostalgic moment, a mathematician insisted that the 1969 moon landing was mathematically impossible and must have been faked. Staged in an aircraft hangar. In northern Florida. With invisible wires and counterweights to simulate low gravity. Government did it all.

Such theories generally suffer from a weakness in explaining the government’s precise motive – a motive sufficiently crucial to justify that enormous effort. Did the government really need to destroy the World Trade Centre, just to justify the invasion of, where? Afghanistan? The gateway to Kirghizstan? So, whenever I’m pestered by a conspiracy theorist, I try to suggest that, “Government’s not that smart.” If they were dumb enough to launch such a conspiracy, they’d be much too dumb to keep it secret. QED.
I believe it a near-universal experience, however, that people, once hooked by a conspiracy theory, cannot be talked out of it. Which suggests: they want to believe it. Which suggests: they would prefer to believe that a disaster is a conspiracy, rather than believe that complex natural events will always b unpredictable. They would prefer to believe in a malicious, universal bureaucracy, rather than a natural, isolated chance.
Now, imagine the homesteading Ingals family, back in the 1880s, overwhelmed by an early autumn blizzard, destroying their crops and threatening a hungry winter. You cannot imagine them staring up into the roiling storm clouds and wondering, who’s responsible for all this? Or who’s responsible for fixing it for us? They knew, as many of us today do not, that most of human life lies beyond the control of human planning, and if you’ve lost, recover yourself. The most iron-clad natural laws – like the laws of thermodynamics and atmospheric fluidics – can produce the most spasmodic results, like a once-in-a-century blizzard.
Today, we think that, because they (the authorities) understand the fundamental physical laws, they can prevent perfectly natural catastrophes. What’s more, the Administration is already in place to control it. The Mississippi drowns New Orleans, and it’s the government’s fault – which ironically it was – sort of – because individual Public Servants failed to plan for the rare but inevitable catastrophe.
This is the Universal in the Homogenous, Universal and Managerial Administration. It seems like the government is everywhere and doing everything. People often prefer to believe that, because they prefer a predictable tyranny to unpredictable nature. Fortunately, that’s not the real meaning of Universal in the HUMA. Universal really means, not that the government is everywhere, but that the government can be anywhere. For the Universal Administration, however, Sioux Falls is just as remote as Damascus.
An example: 50 or 60 little boys and girls are shot down every week in Chicago alone. Now, improved emergency care has brought the number of child fatalities down to just 10 per cent of the shootings, to one per week – in Chicago alone. When it comes to stopping the carnage, the police (in Chicago, New Orleans, St. Louis, Detroit, Baltimore, etc.) are helpless. They issue press releases, detailing who was killed, where and with what, but they cannot stop it. Even if the National Guard was mobilized to sweep the Projects, they’d never find the guns.
Meanwhile, every second month, a psychotic teen shoots up some distant suburban high school, and the Administration sends in a Task Force to prove that it’s Doing Something.
Conclusion: The Universal Administration cannot be everywhere, but it can be anywhere, at least anywhere there’s a TV news team.
Some will object: Universal means everywhere, so the HUMA is not really Universal. And realistically, that’s true. Neither is the HUMA really Homogenous or Managerial (especially not Managerial). But the HUMA is a cultural fact, like Chivalry was a cultural fact amid the anarchy, murder and mayhem of the 10th Century. It’s not “real,” but it shapes our expectations and behavior. A 10th century knight shrugged fatalistically about the ambushes of wilderness outlaw bands, but shook with rage at any insult to his ancestors. Today, we shrug fatalistically at daily gunfire on east-end streets everywhere, but shake in rage at monthly gunfire in a school anywhere – or at a cop shooting anyone.
Why is the Universal Administration so convincing? Universal communications. From time immemorial, population has grown, cities have concentrated, and technology has accumulated. In the depopulated 10th century, communication was expensive. To find out what was happening in the next town, you had to risk a horse and rider in the trackless forest. Today, nothing is cheaper than wireless communications, not even bottled water. So Africa skips over expensive copper wires, and goes directly to low-cost cell-phone banking. We know more about Jeff Bezos than we do about our own city councilor. Universal communications convey the illusion of the Small World, Universally Administrable.
Meanwhile, police departments everywhere issue press releases of this week’s child shootings and fatalities, to prove they’ Doing Something. The Media bluster convincingly that More Needs To Be Done – pretending to have an adversarial relationship with the HUMA. The Administration voices its Profound Regret and promises to Do More in the Future. Doing More rarely means practical measures like more cops. It means Task Forces, communications specialists and community animators, because, in the feel-good spirit of Neo-Modernism, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.”
In reality, we have far too much communication. Yes, communications are good, but so are calories. Just because something is good, we really can have too much of it. So… no cell phones or videos at the dinner table. What you have to say to each other is far more important than what you’ll see from the Far Side of the Country.

-30-