Conspiracy is as natural
as breathing itself. It’s so common that even apes do it.
It's as universal as feelings. It is in our very nature to plot
and conspire together, to make connections and disseminate information
through secure channels.
Caesar’s Empire gave the world an early
means of spreading knowledge from country to country in the form
of Latin, a language that could be understood from the Netherlands
to north Africa and beyond. Secret sects and occult societies fulfilled
a similar function. In their day, groups like the Rosicrucians,
the Illuminati and the Freemasons helped to form a loosely connected
international underground through which revolutionary ideas, both
scientific and political, could be safely channelled.
Between them they could boast a membership that
included mathematicians John Dee and Robert Fludd, scientists Robert
Boyle and Sir Isaac Newton, philosophers Voltaire, Diderot and Montesquieu,
painter William Hogarth, novelist Laurence Sterne and founding fathers
of the US Benjamin Franklin and George Washington. John Hancock
was, in fact, just the first of many Freemasons to put his name
to the Declaration of Independence – a major work of conspiracy
if ever there was one.
So why do secret societies have such a bad reputation?
Why does the proposition that conspiracies rule the world seem inherently
malicious? A growing public cynicism regarding the level of transparency
shown in both scientific and political circles over the previous
century hasn’t helped; nor has a sneaking awareness that Big
Science and Big Government can both be easily co-opted by the demands
of Big Business. After all, deals made in smoke-filled rooms don’t
tend to involve the common people all that much.
It shouldn’t therefore come as any big surprise
to discover that a significant number of US presidents, including
Madison, Monroe, Jackson, Garfield, McKinley, both Roosevelts, Taft,
Harding, Truman, Johnson, Ford and Reagan, were all Freemasons.
Ironically, neither of the two presidents most closely associated
with darkest political intrigue were ever members of that clandestine
fraternity. Without John F Kennedy and Richard M Nixon, however,
modern conspiracy theories would be deprived of two of their two
biggest names.
Read on …
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