-Caveat Lector- an excerpt from: The Higher Circles G. William Domhoff�1970 Vintage Books Edition(1971) orginally Random House(1970) LCCN 79-102332 367pps�out-of-print ----- <<"Talks on World Affairs Are Closed in Williamsburg" (The New York Times, March 23, 1964), P. 36. An earlier dispatch (March 15, 1964, P. 49) told of the arrival of Prince Bernhard to chair the "thirteenth session in a series of informal meetings on international affairs.">> Om K ----- Conspiracy. A conspiracy, says my college edition of Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language, is a "planning and acting together secretly, especially for an unlawful or harmful purpose, such as murder or treason." Well said, and that ultra-conservatives believe America is run in such a conspiratorial way fills the pluralists with dismay. It is just too manipulative, they say and it assumes a unity of purpose and plan that couldn't possibly exist. In fact, to believe such is to be a nut, and if you can succeed in getting the label "conspiratorial thinker" attached to a person, you have ended all possibility that he will be taken seriously in the academic community. Before comparing my position on conspiracies with that of the ultra-conservatives, let me state the pluralist view. While there is no one place to quote from, it seems to add up to something like this: History is made by and large by impersonal physical and social forces that are beyond the control of any one group of men, however conscious and manipulative. As to the role of businessmen, they have a certain general common interest, and a certain rough ideology, but they also have a great many differences. Furthermore, they do not meet and plan together in secret little gatherings, and even if they did, there are other groups which can checkmate business power. In many ways this view is the antithesis of the ultraconservative view, which sees a small group of men meeting and carefully planning as to how to manipulate society toward certain agreed-upon goals. As for myself, I am a moderate on this question. That is, I take a position between the two sets of extremes, the ultra-conservative and pluralist views. On the one hand, I believe that the power elite are more aware of their interests, and do more planning and talking about them than any pluralist ever dreamed of daring to consider. However, I do not believe- that history is one big conspiracy, or even a lot of little ones. I agree with the pluralists that it is mostly millions of people doing their thing alone and in groups, within the context of interacting, impersonal variables which no one fully understands, let alone controls. However, if it was not conspiracy that led to the medical, scientific, technological, communication, and transportation advances that have shaped the twentieth century, it was nonetheless a. relatively small number of very rich people and their academic advisers who met together in various interlocking social and policy-forming groups to decide how best to make money from and take advantage of these developments for their own narrow ends. If the power elite cannot make history just the way they want, there is still reason to assert that they are successful in realizing their wishes far beyond the modest limits claimed by pluralists. If it is true, as I believe, that the power elite consist of many thousands of people rather than several dozen; that they do not meet as a committee of the whole; that there are differences of opinion among them; that their motives are not well known to us beyond such obvious inferences as stability and profits; and that they are not nearly so clever or powerful as the ultraconservatives think�it is nonetheless also true, I believe, that the power elite are more unified, more conscious, and more manipulative than the pluralists would have us believe, and certainly more so than any social group with the potential to contradict them. If pluralists ask just how unified, how conscious, and how manipulative, I reply that they have asked a tough empirical question to which they have contributed virtually no data�at the same time pointing to findings such as I have presented throughout this book. What are the main attributes of the conspiratorial view when it is applied to the structure of power? How can we recognize it in ourselves or others? First, it tends to project omnipotence onto the ruling group. They are seen as so powerful that they can do anything they want to, and are thus blamed for anything that goes wrong. The claim, "Dean Acheson lost China," is an example of this imputation of omnipotence. It implies that Dean Acheson alone could have prevented the Chinese Communists from taking over that vast land Of 500 million people if he had wanted to do so. The facts are that Dean Acheson represented the predominant view among leading members of the power elite at that time; after pouring millions of dollars into China and sending many task forces and investigating teams there to assess and advise, they concluded that Chiang Kai-shek and his regime were so weak and discredited that America could not save China without a tremendous infusion of troops and money. They felt they did not have the power to make this fight, given their problems in Europe at that time, and they were probably right. But even if they weren't, the point is that there are limits to the powers of any ruling group, and to overextend yourself is to invite defeat. The problem of respecting these limitations is not acknowledged by those who project omnipotence onto the "villain." In short, the smug Dean Acheson, whose British mannerisms so annoy many ultra-conservatives, no more lost China (the ultra-conservative delusion) than the boorish Lyndon B. Johnson, so distasteful to cultured types, personally decided to escalate the Vietnam War (a common .liberal delusion). Acheson's decision represented considered opinion within the moderate wing of the powerful, just as Johnson's decisions to escalate and then to de-escalate were made with the advice of very important members of the higher circles.[21] A second attribute of the conspiratorial view is that it attributes omniscience to the leaders. They know everything and never make mistakes. "Mistakes" are clever and deeply-motivated plans. This is seen, for example, in those few ultra-conservatives who argue that the power elite planned the invasion of Cuba so that the American people would think they were doing something about communism, but purposely made it fail because they are really communists who welcome Castro in Cuba. It is seen in those postwar liberals who saw every foreign demonstration or disturbance as evidence for the cleverness and world-wide intelligence of the Russians. In short, the ultra-conservatives make our power elite more clever and manipulative than they really are, just as the liberals make the Kremlin and Peking more clever than they are. In my view, our power elite are more sensible and manipulative than pluralists would have us believe, but they are also human, ruled by their impulses and subject to errors of judgment and execution. Furthermore, while they plan further ahead and understand the system better than most of us, thanks in part to their academic advisers, they do have their limits, their ideological blinders. Once again, a reading of the reports and histories of the organizations Smoot pinpoints would make clear that they are more clever than most people think.[22] But they are not that clever. A third characteristic of the conspiratorial view is that it makes the whole thing more secretive and organized than it is in reality. Secrecy is not the reason why they rule. Nor are they really very secret. Dan Smoot got his information from articles in Harper's Magazine and from the annual reports of the organizations themselves. And if CFR reports do not reveal what everyone said at the meetings, they do record every group that met. They also give a distillation of the groups' wisdom in articles in Foreign Affairs and in books published by CFR. An example of this attempt to make something secret out of something that isn't can be seen in Mrs. Schlafly's dramatic chapter called "Who Are the Secret Kingmakers?" Here she-tells us how she "stumbled on clear evidence that very powerful men actually do meet to make plans which are kept secret from American citizens."[23] She found this conspiracy while visiting Sea Island Georgia, an upperclass resort area where rich people such as Mrs. Schlafly often vacation. At any rate, she tells of the elaborate security precautions she encountered, and then names the rich and well-born from the United States and Europe who were at the meeting. She next tells us "Yet, there was not a word in our press."'[24] Unfortunately, she did not check very far. We found the meeting reported in The New York Times (February 16l. 1957). Furthermore, attentive ultra-conservative readers may recall that they read a lengthy report on the matter, mostly based on The New York Times article, in the July, 1957, issue of the American Mercury which, characteristically, put Felix Frankfurter and Arthur Hays Sulzberger (both Jews) at the top of the list of plotters and tried to tie the meeting to international monetary difficulties.[25] What did Mrs. Schlafly actually discover? According to The New York Times, the informal discussion group called the Bilderberg (after the hotel in which it first met) was called together by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands to talk about how "mutual understanding for each other's [Europe and the USA] viewpoint [can] be promoted. . . "[26] This 1954 report noted that former government leaders from European nations, as well as David Rockefeller and former Eisenhower adviser C. D. Jackson, would be among those present. The result of the meeting was general agreement that the West must stand together in fighting Communism, and that political and economic action had to accompany military resistance." The 1957 article which Mrs. Schlafly overlooks gives a more general picture: An unpublicized backdoor approach to better relations among nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is getting its first tryout on United States soil. . . . The meeting is the fifth by an informal association called the Bilderberg group and organized by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, who is presiding.... Bilderberg group members include selected public officials, economists, professors, publishers, industrialists, and some labor leaders.... Most of the ninety-one members are from abroad.[28] The 1964 meeting of this discussion group was duly noted as follows in the American Establishment's major means of communication: Ninety-five representatives from the United States, Canada, and Western Europe ended the thirteenth annual Bilderberg Conference on international affairs here yesterday. A statement issued at the closing said the topics discussed in the three day meeting included new developments in the Soviet Union, Communist China, and other Communist countries; East-West trade and political, military and economic relationships within the Atlantic community. The chairman was Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, who has served as chairman since the first parley ten years ago at the Bilderberg Hotel in Oosterbeek, the Netherlands.[29] Clearly, then, the Bilderberg group is not quite the secret Mrs. Schlafly thinks it is. It is merely one of many, many get-togethers by business leaders and government officials. While such informal gatherings are important in cementing the group and ironing out differences, they are not summit conferences, and the fact that they occur should surprise only those among the pluralists who do not believe that big businessmen maintain a variety of intimate, off-the-record contacts with each other and public officials. Mrs. Schlafly does us a service in pointing out these informal links between the corporations and the government that are all but ignored by the pluralists, but she makes too much out of them. Conspiratorial theorizing such as is found in the work of Smoot and Schlafly is the essence of what Richard Hofstadter has called "the paranoid style" in American politics.[30] While Hofstadter notes that "it is admittedly impossible to settle the merits of an argument because we think we hear in its presentation the characteristic paranoid accents," he immediately adds in a footnote that "while any system of beliefs can be espoused in the paranoid style, there are certain beliefs which seem to be espoused almost entirely in this way."[31] Then too: ". . . the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good"[32] I would like to register a dissent to Hofstadter's style in talking about a paranoid style. First, I think it tends to turn people away from the merits of the argument despite Hofstadter's mild warnings against such an eventuality. Second, such articles are seldom written with the humility of giving one's own style a clinical label. I am often left with the feeling that the style that is not paranoid is somehow more healthy or more objective, and therefore not needful of clinical examination. Such is not the case, in my opinion, and to redress this imbalance, I would like to consider briefly a clinical characterization of much academic thinking. The title of my comments could well be "The Compulsive Style in American Social Science." The compulsive style is narrow, restrictive, highly phobic about flights of fancy, and usually partial to the status quo.[33] Ritual is highly important, as rules make everything just routine.[34] There is a need to categorize, weigh, and label phenomena in order to bring them under mental control. This style tends to see everything in shades of gray, perhaps under-emphasizing where the paranoid style over-emphasizes. In general, this style has a strong tendency toward the insignificant, a "displacement" on to small details.[35] Despite its love of system, its use of the defense mechanism of isolation keeps it from seeing events as connected: Isolation frequently separates constituents of a whole from one another, where the noncompulsive person would only be aware of the whole and not the constituents. Compulsion neurotics, therefore, frequently experience sums instead of unities, and many compulsive character traits are best designated as "inhibition in the experiencing of gestalten [wholes]. [36] The point I have tried to make in using Hofstadter's method of distilling a clinical style from the similarities of one clinical group to one intellectual approach is that there are styles and there are styles, and that one group is as justifiably psychologized as any other. To delineate a paranoid style while neglecting others is to be one-sided, inviting ad hominem thinking about one group but not another. Furthermore, the paranoid style may sometimes occasion discoveries or emphases that are not open to other clinical. styles. Maybe this style brings to awareness things that are little known because another style does not consider them important or encourage research on them. As Freud suggested, even "persecutory paranoics" do not "Project it into the blue, so to speak, where there is nothing of the sort already. They let themselves be guided by their knowledge of the unconscious, and displace to the unconscious minds of others the attention which they have withdrawn from their own."[37] In other words, such people are often blind to their own motives, but they are not bad at searching out those of others. On the other hand, there are good things about the compulsive style too. Since words and thoughts are important in it (as a substitute for action), intellectual abilities are highly developed. Thus, it is not surprising that people with such a style would find academic pursuits congenial. Since reaction formations against impulses are frequent, control, logic, caution and orderliness are often prominent features of this style, while its tendency to doubt leads it to check and re-check its claims. Then too, coldness and lack of emotional feeling lend this style to highly abstract and impersonal thinking: The retreat from feeling to thinking succeeds, as a rule, in one respect: compulsive thinking is abstract thinking, isolated from the real world of concrete things. Compulsive thinking is not only abstract, it is also general, directed toward systematization and categorization; it is theoretical instead of real.[38] Having shown, as Freud warned, that the use of psychoanalytical findings in arguments cuts both ways, I now return to the core concept of ultra-conservative thinking about the power structure, "the international Communist-Jewish conspiracy," and compare it with my view. For "internationalist" I would substitute "interested in overseas sales and investments." For "Communist" I would substitute "big businessmen with needs that lead corporate America to some similarities with the Russian state." For "Jewish" I would substitute "urbane," "liberally educated," "secularized," and "accepting of the welfare state to provide stability and consumer demand." For "conspiracy" I would substitute "aware of their interests," "far-seeing," "willing to meet and plan with other rich men and corporate leaders," and "willing to use scholars as consultants." In my view, then, there is nothing like an international Communist-Jewish conspiracy, although I do not dismiss the notion out of hand because it is supposedly an emanation of a particular style which is said to be more associated with some ideas than others and with more bad causes than good ones. In my view, the country is run by a group of very rich, cosmopolitan big businessmen with international business interests. They are part of, or employees of, a social class making up about a few tenths of a percent of the population. Many of them meet together in a variety of groups and try to figure out how to react to and capitalize upon the problems and opportunities that the forces-tides-driftwinds-exigencies of history (pick your own favorite impersonal term) bring to them. They are a group of relatively pragmatic multimillionaries and their employees, with at least some sense of the limits of their power. They are rational, reasonable, and forward-looking within the context of their big-business, upper-class mentality. In short, the American rulers are not secret communists conspiring with Russian Communists, but wealthy men trying to reach a limited accommodation and detente with a rival power group that they cannot militarily destroy except at great risk and cost. They are not driven by internationalist or collectivist ideological principles, but are seeking to solve their problems and enhance their fortunes through overseas sales and investments. They are not liberal or socialist ideologues wanting to give a break to the poor and elderly, but corporate leaders who accept the welfare state as a potential solution to the problems of stability and consumer demand at very little cost to themselves. They are not treacherous traitors to the ideals of individualism, self-reliance, and laissez-faire, but the operative heads of a technologically-based urban society Of 200 million people who have different problems from the small businessmen, small farmers, and pioneers who espoused those ideals in an earlier epoch. To conclude, I hope ultra-conservatives will consider seriously this effort which takes them seriously, and that pluralists will not avoid coming to grips with my views by calling them conspiratorial and paranoid. Moreover, I hope I have shown that my views, to say the least, have several major divergencies from those of the ultra-conservatives as well as the pluralists, and that ad hominem arguments, even when wrapped in clinical discussions of style, are as useless to serious discourse about social and political issues as they were when Aristotle ruled them out of logical order 2,200 years ago. pps. 298-308 --[notes]-- 21. Johnson's secret advisers at the time of the de-escalation, known as the "Senior Informal Advisory Group," were corporate lawyers Arthur Dean (Sullivan and Cromwell), Dean Acheson (Covington and Burling), Cyrus Vance (Simpson, Thatcher, and Bartlett), and George Ball (now with Lehman Brothers investment firm); investment banker C. Douglas Dillon of Dillon, Read; Ford Foundation president McGeorge Bundy (Boston Social Registerite); and former generals Matthew Ridgway, Maxwell Taylor, and Omar Bradley. Stuart H. Loory, "Secret Session: How Advisers Changed LBJs Mind on War" (San Francisco Chronicle, May 31, 1968), p. 1. 22. Eakins, op. cit.; Schriftgiesser, op. cit.; and the essays in Part Two of this book. 23. Schlafly, op. cit., p. 103. 24. Ibid., P. 105. 25. Paul Stevens, "Money Made Mysterious; Part IX, Planned Bankruptcy" (American Mercury, July, 1957), P. 135. 26. "Prince Bernhard Invites West Leaders to Parley" (The New York Times, May 18, 1954), p. 6. 27. "Bernhard Parley in Accord on Reds; Leaders Agree All of West Shares Peril-Rifts Laid to Lag in Conferring" (The New York Times, June 2, 1954), P. 4. This follow-up article adds that publisher Barry Bingham, investment banker Paul Nitze, and industrialist J. D. Zellerbach (head of CED from 1955 to 1957) were among those present. 28. "Views Exchanged on NATO Policies: Informal Session in Georgia, First in U.S., Is Forum for Leaders of Nations" (The New York Times, February 16, 1957), P. 10. 29. "Talks on World Affairs Are Closed in Williamsburg" (The New York Times, March 23, 1964), P. 36. An earlier dispatch (March 15, 1964, P. 49) told of the arrival of Prince Bernhard to chair the "thirteenth session in a series of informal meetings on international affairs." 30. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York: Knopf, 1965). 31. Ibid., P. 5. 32. Ibid. 33. Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1945), pp. 284-6, 297-8, for a discussion of compulsive characteristics. 34. Ibid., P. 285. 35. Ibid., pp. 285, 290. 36. Ibid., P. 288. 37. Sigmund Freud, "Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality (1922)," The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955), Vol. 18, p. 226. In one of his final works, "Constructions in Analysis" (1938), Freud speaks of the "kernel of truth" and "fragment of historic truth" in delusions. Sigmund Freud, Therapy and Technique, Collected Papers (New York: Collier Books, 1963), pp. 284-6. 38. Fenichel, op. cit., p. 297. ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! 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