Conspiracy theory is one of the coolest ventures human beings ever undertake. To imagine a structure for the world that involves putting total control in the hands of a small, organized group of people... Well, that kind of venture of the imagination takes great skill for distorting the facts to fit your conceptions, or better yet, for constructing elegant and twisty flights of logic that make even the most damning counter-evidence into coherent proof of your theory. This is not only difficult, but totally useless as well, and is therefore a great medium for Art. But since Life imitates Art, shortly after Art imitates Life, any additions we make to the world of Art are prone to sneak back into Life by inspiring people to act in a certain way.
As a result of this, there may very well be conspiracies of one kind or another floating around in the ocean of humanity, but it's not likely that any of them have the kind of absolute control over anything that conspiracy theorists love to ascribe to them. And, as much as they might like to, most of them have probably never made a secret pact with the devil, UFO aliens, or Ascended Masters in Tibet. Some of them, however, may control one or more governments. Not so much because they've taken control of them, but because they arose inside the organizational bodies the governments formed to get stuff done.
Now some people, when they get involved in conspiracy theory, get very paranoid. They consider people like me second only to The Enemy when it comes to furthering Their Sinister Ends. That's because I see Conspiracy Theory as a great medium for Art, so I like to invent strange conspiracies, plausible conspiracies, and even small privately-owned conspiracies, all for my own amusement. This, they say, undermines the rational conspiracy theorists, or even the institutional analysis of people like Noam Chomsky. By making conspiracy theory into a joke, I undermine their plausibility, and so prevent anyone from doing anything about these horrible problems. Well, I happen to think that Chomsky's analysis is clear, logical, rational, and points out the Truth. More than half the Mass Media is owned by only 23 corporations, which are 60% owned by 15 rich American families. But if you're going to take this as a sign that They're Out To Get You, you're deliberately choosing to believe in a world in which you have no control over your life.
Now the International MOOist Conspiracy is a patent fraud. There's no such thing. But it's because there's no such thing that nobody can ever close it down. No amount of effort, no matter how concerted, can ever find the MOOist Military Council's Headquarters, hidden somewhere in the city of Ottawa, because they're purely fictional. But, as I say, Life Imitates Art. The concept of these conspiracies is intriguing to some people. They deliberately take part in Operation Pencilcase - the MOOist Intelligence Council's effort to disrupt normal behaviour patterns, government structures, and religions worldwide. Somehow, without actually being REAL, the Council manages to get people in cities all over the world to hand out weird leaflets, preach on street corners, infiltrate governments, and blow up buildings. Or something.
Part of Operation Pencilcase is the development of a network of media for exchanging information - unlike most Conspiracies, the International MOOist Conspiracy uses Information Overdose instead of secrecy to protect itself. In an era of instantaneous communication and information overload, this is the appropriate means of protecting your secrets: publish them openly in the midst of a sea of DISinformation. Nobody will be able to tell what secret messages you're communicating to your agents worldwide, because the true messages are hidden inside nonsense. As the global information medium becomes thicker and thicker with new technology, your enemies simply won't have time to figure out what you're talking about REALLY: it's better than Their allegedly secure cryptography. Instead of encoding your secrets using algorithms developed by Them for Their Sinister Purposes, bury it with so much disinformation that even if they DO read your messages, they won't be able to figure out what the heck you're talking about ANYWAY! It's the same method They use: the intelligence community is based on disinformation hiding the Truth. They don't have to bump off people who figure out what's REALLY going on, because they're indistinguishable from the stark raving paranoids who only THINK they've figured it out.
The future of the International MOOist Conspiracy depends on the sticky nature of MOO. As an ArtForm: art is always in the mind of the observer, but MOO-Art IS the mind of the observer. Anyone who learns about it and responds to it is a part of the thing. They become an operative of the International MOOist Conspiracy by the expedient of being programmed... by knowing about it. As a Game: the central players win by getting other people to play. The opponents of MOO win by having as few people as possible play: but if they try to accomplish this goal, they're playing the game themselves, furthering MY goals. As a Religion: the earliest grades in the MOO heirarchy are for those people who actively recognize MOO, or who've heard of it but don't do anything about it, those who haven't even heard of it yet, and even a rank for those who don't exist. MOO has no clearly defined boundaries... just like Reality.
All around the world, there are hundreds of thousands people who've heard of MOO over the Net, over the Web, over the various amateur computer networks, pirate TV broadcasts, street-preachers, incomprehensible leaflets, co-opted DJ's on local community radio stations, through public-access television, through ranters who visit local churches on Baptismal Missions... In a world of massive information flow, something like this couldn't be contained, even if we wanted to try. Ideas move through the Internet, reach people in dozens of countries, who pass it on through MOO-Fests, propaganda literature, and micropower pirate radio. It cross-pollenates with other ideas, and filters back by the same channels, in a never-ending flow of thoughts, creating the shape of the Church Ov MOO, and the International MOOist Conspiracy is created whenever any human mind is touched by this purely fictional creation.
Like UFO's, this nebulous Thing called the Conspiracy moves back and forth between the format of "fact" and the format of "fiction", sometimes forcing us to ask whether there really as clear a difference as we once believed there was. Can we really trust our senses, or do we smother what we actually SEE with what we expect, what we imagine, and what we assume to be true? Can we trust our judgements, or are they simply part of a pattern of socially learned ideas, shaky logic we've grown to accept unquestioningly, and invisible alien brain control? Lots of our so-called "real" experience is peiced together after the fact by our brain. Do you really see a squirrel run past you, or do you see a blur, then part of a tail, arcing along a path that darts up a tree, and then interpret what you saw as a squirrel? Those "illusion" signs that say Keep Off The The Grass are perfect examples of our tendency to briefly scan the world, and fill in parts of it with our own expectations. This is normal, and in fact it helps us get on with life without wasting all of our time confirming that things are, in fact, exactly how they seem. It's also a useful feature of the human mind for the Mind Jammer to use. Most people don't stop to critically analyze everything they read. There's a tendency, if the style is plausible and reasonable enough, and the content not TOO outrageous, to accept what we read as truth, until it disagrees violently with what we believe. It's quite easy to hide a subversive or MOOist message inside something that seems reasonable at first:
"What forest? I can't see anything with all those damn trees in the way!"
Of course, once the idea has wormed its way into the unsuspecting brain, there'll always be little parts of the brain that remember believing them. Even if the victim realizes that they're reading something they don't believe, they've been, however briefly, sucked in. No matter how many "I don't believe this garbage" signals the ego-mind sends out after the rogues, the brain is too vague and diverse to eradicate the idea completely. In order to perserve its attachments to its beliefs, the self-mind will constantly return to the offending idea that once snuck past its barriers. By constantly returning to it, even to knock it down, the brain gives those little bits of itself that still believe that much more encouragement. So, just by reading a pamphlet, or happening to turn on the radio at just the right time, even the most average, unsuspecting, ordinary citizen can be turned into a puppet of the International MOOist Conspiracy.
MOOist messages can be worked into the real world in subtle ways: using the tendency of the human mind to fill in the parts of the world it doesn't look at with plausible fictions, MOOist propaganda can be made to look like advertising, concert ads, street signs, or billboards. By replacing "legitimate" parts of the world with substituted messages, those messages get accepted as the real thing.
That's the technique for turning the imaginary MOO Conspiracy into a real thing: for the human mind, or brain, or whatever, is incapable of distinguishing between a real experience and an imagined one, and in the world of human beings, the brain is a powerful tool for turning an imagined thing into a real thing.
That concludes this brainwashing. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.