Conspiracy

con·spire Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French conspirer, from Latin conspirare to be in harmony, conspire, from com- + spirare to breathetransitive senses : PLOT, CONTRIVE
PLOT, INTRIGUE, MACHINATION, CONSPIRACY, CABAL mean a plan secretly devised to accomplish an evil or treacherous end.

Let me begin by assuring my reader that I do believe that many conspiracies have been devised throughout history.  However, what strikes me as very odd is how willing we are to believe that complex, decades or even centuries long conspiracies account for much of the evil we see in this world.  The latest conspiracy to gain such credence forms the basic premise of the DaVinci Code.  The idea that relatively small groups of power hungry men have deceived all of Christendom for more than 16 centuries is ludicrous.

The government of the Soviet Union did its best to suppress religious belief altogether.  But a decades long effort seems to have yielded little more than a pent up desire on the part of the former Soviet citizens to know more about things spiritual.  Once the Soviet Union collapsed, there was a sort of stampede by the citizens toward embracing various religions.  One suspects that a great deal had been going on all along and was simply not publicized.

It is my experience in a large multinational corporation that human leaders are completely incapable of concocting and sustaining the sorts of elaborate plans that a world shaking conspiracy would require.  The best corporate leaders can generally hope for is to set a direction and hope that employees stumble a bit more in that direction than they formerly did.  The idea of a precisely executed ballet involving tens of thousands of people is laughable.

Stories like the DaVinci code suppose that hundreds or thousands of people will remain faithful to a conspiracy for hundreds and hundreds of years.  That is exactly the kind of unity and commitment that God asked of the Jews in the Old Testament.  It is a miracle of God that they managed to maintain a written history over a two thousand year period.  And that very history shows that time and time again they failed to stay on course.  They could not maintain discipline for even a few decades before falling into all sorts of degradation and foolishness.  Despite miraculous interventions by God, they failed repeatedly.

We are flawed. We are greedy and power hungry. We plot, conspire, and collude.  The very flaws that cause us to take such actions, also doom those actions to failure.

We have met the enemy, said Pogo, and he is us.