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Gatto on Conspiracy



John Taylor Gatto is warning here about the danger in attributing everything to conspiracy. He’s talking about his “underground” history of education, but his words ring true on a much bigger level:

If you obsess about conspiracy, what you’ll fail to see is that we are held fast by a form of highly abstract thinking fully concretized in human institutions which has grown beyond the power of the managers of these institutions to control. If there is a way out of the trap we’re in, it won’t be by removing some bad guys and replacing them with good guys.

Here’s the full text.







2 Reader Responses

  1. bill Says:
    July 26th, 2005 at 10:44 am

    Tim,
    This is fascinating. Just the little bit Gatto laid out in the essay you linked to, seems intuitively obvious. The experience that my wife and I had with the local schools, left us with both an admiration for the effort put forth by the teachers and a disgust for the system. We now home school our two kids—and they almost teach themselves the same material that some regular and even Special Ed teachers could not teach them within the system. It’s as if their system is driven at a certain frequency so that any change, even change for the better, creates a Charlie Chaplin assembly line crash. Perhaps Chaplin was smarter than Henry Ford whose assembly lines Chaplin spoofed. (I’m an engineer BTW, not a liberal naysayer) But Gatto’s thesis applies to most if not all institutions.

    It’s this very phenomenon that leaves me intrigued with the Gnostic mythology. It’s the systems in Orwell’s “1984” and “The Matrix” running on their own. The leader (Demiurge) IS both arrogant and ignorant! The same sort of phenomenon was present in all three of the multi billion dollar, global companies that I’ve worked for in my life. It seems that they just can’t help doing stupid things.

    Thanks for the link. I’m going to read more of Gatto’s stuff.

    bill

  2. hebrides Says:
    July 26th, 2005 at 1:42 pm

    Gatto’s quote reminds me of a moment in the conspiracy movie The Cube where the headstrong male (the archetypal American?) is speculating upon the sick and twisted bastards who were behind the deadly cube in which they were imprisoned. One of the other characters, who worked for the company, has to explain to him how it was worse than that–no one was in charge; everything was so compartmentalized no one knew what anyone else was doing, much less how to stop the cube. I hope things aren’t as dire as all that, but there is a sense in which the systems of control have taken on a life of their own, how we’re all trapped, the Demiurge included, in the Black Iron Prison.



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