Conspiracy Theory
The term ‘conspiracy theory’ entered common parlance in the wake of the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy in 1963. Suspicion had spread that the Warren Commission tasked with examining the many dubious, sometimes sinister irregularities of the official story was unfortunately yet another whitewash. Whoever first dismissed these doubts as ‘conspiracy theory’ was attempting to make the doubters appear foolish. Shooting the messenger may inadvertently promote his message; but if you can convince people he’s a crank, filing cabinets of supporting evidence may fade into obscurity with him.
Secret connivance causing harm to others is a staple of the tales we tell as history. And there must be many more which once left a legacy of sorrow but will never see the light of day again. By the third decade of the Twenty first Century, so much fresh skullduggery had been unearthed that expectations of governance across much of the West were abysmal. And as the public mood darkened, self-serving populists could pose as heroes fighting ‘corrupt elites’ while trading favours with them.
Prominent historical examples, like the Cataline Conspiracy in ancient Rome, or the Pazzi Conspiracy in Renaissance Florence, feature powerful people conspiring against powerful others. But throughout history another kind of conspiracy has been practiced more or less constantly, this one taking place behind a theatre of imposing sets, charismatic actors and the ceremonial art of mass deception. In this kind of conspiracy, powerful people set aside their rivalries and find common cause exploiting the rest of us.
We’ve been trained to associate maladministration with autocracies and banana republics, but it’s actually rife among liberal democracies. Conspiracy, it turns out, can remain bloodless, cordial, and largely undetected provided its victims prefer to do precisely what the rigged system demands of them; but harm still spreads; suffering goes unattended; trust and confidence erode; and once enthusiastic voluntary participation wanes, the masks and gloves come off; authoritarianism returns with a new look, pretending to bring deliverance, but quickly resorting to police and prisons; this is happening again.
One common ‘conspiracy theory’ proposes that the network of interlocking institutions that form the Western establishment is the visible dimension of a conspiracy operating across continents and centuries. The internet businesses which turn human anxieties into clickbait love this kind of story. It explains to some of us a feeling we carry in our central nervous systems. Avoidant fascination makes the story more compelling. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. It also explains quite a lot of evidence. Perhaps it deserves reappraisal after all. A good place to start might be the early Twentieth Century, the era when the modern world was taking shape.
A Prototypical Conspiracy
In 1924, representatives of the world’s major lightbulb manufacturers formed the first cartel with global reach[1].
One of the cartel’s temporary achievements was to stop competition from eroding profits; a more enduring legacy was a shorter life span for the incandescent lightbulb. Long lasting lightbulbs, like one famous example in California still shining after more than a century[2], did not augur well for future business.
By reversing decades of progress, the cartel established the principle of planned obsolescence which sends us back to the shops on a timetable determined not by engineering but by consumer psychology. Smartphones which slow down after software updates, electronics with non-replaceable batteries, fast fashion which dates immediately, and appliances and toys which fall apart just out of warranty are the results of design decisions, not accidents or manufacturing defects[3].
It's unscrupulous, but its harm is limited. When dishonesty conceals real danger, the consequences can be much more serious.
Conspiracies Which Harm
In the same year the lightbulb cartel formed, a British textile worker, Nellie Kershaw, became the first published medical case of asbestosis[4]. By this time, the dangers of asbestos were widely known. Yet its use wasn’t banned until much later, nearly a century later in Australia.
Michelle Whitmer discovered court documents proving that dozens of US and UK companies leveraged collective influence to hide the hazards of asbestos from their workers and the public, even putting a whistleblowing pathologist on the payroll to shut him up[5]. With its menace cloaked, asbestos snuck into homes and everyday use. Even baby powder contained it, a fact Johnson & Johnson hid while marketing the product as a sacrament of the inviolable bond between mother and infant, continuing to do so as illness in women and their children spread[6].
In Australia, James Hardie Industries concealed the hazards of its asbestos products and then moved offshore, leaving thousands of workers and others accidentally exposed to face a lingering death[7]. As of 2024, around four thousand Australians still died each year from asbestos-related illness[8].
Through decades of court battles, aspiring corporate defenders proved their worth by exploring loopholes.[9] Not that laws were broken necessarily; but perhaps this shows the law itself is broken, an imperfect instrument of justice at the best of times, and when one’s client is a corporation, limited liability, disparate jurisdictions, obscure precedents, and big coffers can lean heavily on the scales. I doubt corporate lawyers see themselves as co-conspirators in the evasion of consequences; nevertheless that’s what earns them the big bucks.
Legal combat also equips one for the growling pit where laws are made. A successful lawyer may become Prime Minister, as did John Howard, or a deputy leader and government minister, as did Julie Bishop, after earlier helping to build CSR's legal fortification against liability for its deadly Wittenoom asbestos mine. Coincidentally, Wittenoom had been opened by the late Lang Hancock, father of major party donor Gina Reinhart.
It would be nice if we had put all this behind us, assured that lessons were learned and probity restored. Unfortunately that isn’t the case. What should have been the exception became the rule.
The Normalising of Risk
When lead was added to petrol in the 1920s it had been a known poison for centuries[10]. The oil and auto companies were aware of it; and they recognised ethanol was a better way to improve combustion efficiency; but ethanol was an oil competitor and couldn’t be patented.
Company executives convinced themselves leaded petrol wouldn’t cause harm. Their reasoning was the legacy of a Sixteenth Century physician called Paracelsus who claimed ingesting any substance can be ‘safe’ if the dose is small enough[11]. This is the principle behind dosage warnings on pharmaceutical products.
Industrial chemicals are a different matter. Most have never been tested for precise toxicity, since consumption is not intentional, and accurate testing is challenging when exposure is environmental. Sensitivity may vary considerably with age, health, and genetic predisposition. Determining a generally ‘safe’ level of exposure is therefore extremely difficult. But in this case, the decision was made with scant empirical data. Even after some refinery workers died of lead poisoning, a cursory public health assessment was sufficient to quell alarm and the truth remained buried for another half a century.
Because their brains and bodies are still forming, children are highly susceptible to injury from environmental lead. Research has shown links to reduced IQ, hyperactivity, social problems and learning disabilities. Lead exposure in children correlates strongly with statistics for violent behaviour[12].
The places where I grew up were indeed violent. Kids beat up on one another in the schoolyard every day. Parents and teachers administered beatings, often with implements such as canes, straps and blackboard rulers. Husbands beat their wives. Fistfights erupted outside pubs, nightclubs, and sporting events.
We’ll probably never know how much environmental lead contributed to this. But some of the many casualties of violence in the Twentieth Century may have been, at least in part, secondary victims of lead poisoning; wherever leaded petrol was withdrawn, crime statistics fell[13].
This pattern would be repeated for a large number of other substances across many industries and countries. Manufacturers would assume that concentrations of vagrant chemicals were low enough to be ‘safe’, often without direct evidence, extrapolating a threshold from tests on animals or from the known effects of higher levels on humans[14], sometimes simply by applying the ‘no news is good news’ principle to a lack of studies. To convince lawmakers, the device they would employ wasn’t science but another recent innovation.
Lobbying
In the early part of the 20th century, the job of governing was complexifying. As more people got the vote, and more of them could read a newspaper, expectations of government expanded and diversified; voting blocs formed, often with competing interests; and the speed and scale of technological change called for expert consultation. Both the electoral and practical implications of the legislative process became bound to the influence of special interest groups[15].
Corporate lobbyists would help legislators look at risk from the perspective of shareholders. Living with risk was necessary, they would come to understand, for the sake of ‘the economy’. “You can’t stand in the way of progress”, my businessman uncle Cec would say, echoing this idea, until a rare blood disease cut short his life. In this way, conspiring for private gain at public expense would be liberated from the backrooms and given a company car and a calling card.
Many modern ailments would later be linked to environmental poisoning[16]. Multiple toxins, including many never seen on Earth before, would surround and infuse our bodies. In addition to lead, other elements known to cause cancers or damage to organs including arsenic, mercury, chromium, cadmium, copper, zinc, aluminium and manganese would spread from mining and industrial effluent, ore smelting, municipal waste, pesticides and herbicides[17]. Plastic products and wrappers would shed phthalates which upset foetal and childhood development[18]. Our livers, kidneys and brains would be found to harbour microplastics[19].
In the cut and thrust of politics, public health would be merely one factor among many, some with a much more immediate effect on political careers. Pitted against party donors and public megaphones it would often come off second best. This asymmetry of advocacy would eventually poison the people of Flint, Michigan where Nestle had hijacked local drinking water[20], and the pristine coastal waters of Tasmania, where foreign-owned salmon farms were endangering native species to supply inferior product to Australia’s foreign-owned supermarkets[21].
Even so, the money to be made in this way is limited. A more expansive business model than destroying lives for profit would be to monetise the survival of entire populations. And it was in exactly this way, and during this same formative period, that conspiracy in commerce expanded from opportunism to strategic, sectoral and long term reorganisation.
The Medicine Business
Everyone knows the story of modern medicine: scientific advances saved us from the short, horrible lives of our ancestors, condemned by primitive superstition to grovel among parasites and pathogens. It’s a compelling tale, which inspires gratitude for being born in an ‘enlightened’ age. If only it was true.
Undoubtedly many of those who came before us lived in dreadful conditions, as do many today, in some cases not very far away. What we learn from the archaeology of our ancestors, the anthropology of unmodernised peoples[22], and Indigenous voices past and present is that these conditions are not ‘natural’. They are, however, typical under certain circumstances, such as alienation from land, livelihood and community courtesy of foreign invaders, repressive rulers, exploitative corporations, and agencies like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
Modern medicine’s glossy brochure also overlooks the extraordinary prevalence of depression, anxiety, insomnia, infertility, erectile dysfunction, heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's disease, dementia, cancer and many other ailments marring enjoyment of the Western ‘lifestyle’ which don’t seem to be common among unmodernised peoples[23]. It’s clear the accumulation of environmental toxins has contributed[24]. And surely a task for medicine ought to be to arrest this and repair the damage. When you examine its history, however, the development of modern medicine, like the business practices which poison us, seems to have been largely determined neither by science nor by altruism, but rather by its potential for profit.
As far back as the Middle Ages, we can find evidence of this. The transition from traditional healing modalities to new ‘scientific’ methods was assisted by the elimination of much of the competition who were mostly women and often among those ‘tried’ and murdered[25] in events we persist in mislabelling ‘witch hunts’.
Although historical data is scant, some early harms from the professionalising of medicine are starkly apparent. Until the widespread adoption of antiseptics, puerperal infection and maternal mortality increased dramatically in the absence of traditional skilled midwifery, even more when deliveries were performed by physicians, and especially in hospitals [26]. Long after the witchfinders had stopped killing women, patriarchal medicine continued to do so. But it’s in the age of carbon capitalism when the commercialisation of care and its disturbing consequences become conspicuous. And one name which stands out is John D. Rockefeller.
Monopoly
At the cusp of the Twentieth Century, Ida Tarbell[27] exposed how Rockefeller’s Standard Oil had used dishonourable and sometimes illegal practices, including collusion with railroad companies, to monopolise American oil production, making him one of the richest men in the world[28]. And the differing responses to these revelations were emblematic of a longstanding contest of ideologies. It would manifest again between the private sector purists of neoliberalism and the government interventionists of Bretton Woods. And each subsequent technological revolution would revitalise it, first in the Information Age, and yet again as AI and robotics proliferated.
The argument of Rockefeller’s defenders could be summarised as: “So what?”; he did what capitalism is supposed to do; he outwitted and outpaced his competitors to deliver cheaper, more abundant energy[29]. Tarbell said he simply put them out of business using dirty tactics; she had experienced firsthand the immiseration which followed; and it was Rockefeller and his stakeholders she saw reaping most of the benefits.
Techno optimists often argue that disruption and hardship are the necessary and temporary price of ‘progress’. I heard one senior Microsoft strategist minimise fears of loss of livelihood from AI by referring to his hometown of Manchester, where prosperity had emerged again from squalor and misery after mechanisation wrecked the weaving industry. I don’t think he realised how much this revival depended on exports of misery to the colonies. And such ideological bullishness is perhaps what persuaded Rockefeller’s VP Henry H. Rogers to divulge the company’s ruthless strategy to Tarbell. The tech bro catchphrase ‘move fast and break things’ is an old idea which each new wave of capitalists seems to think is daringly original. It’s an ‘end justifies the means’ rationale. The problem is the end and the means tend to be experienced by different people.
At the time, the public and the US Supreme Court mostly agreed with Tarbell and Standard Oil was broken up. Her efforts added momentum to America’s anti-trust laws and the movement for female suffrage. Rockefeller turned his attention elsewhere. Far from relinquishing the strategy of monopolisation, however, he dramatically expanded it. And this led to a further demonstration of conflict of interest between commerce and the common good[30].
Education
America’s oligarchs, among them Rockefeller and the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, shared a vision for education. The task they foresaw was to produce reliable, docile, methodical workers who would welcome the drudgery in their offices and factories[31]. Rockefeller poured large sums of money into redesigning the school system accordingly.
In 1910, assisted by the Carnegie Foundation and the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, activist educator Abraham Flexner produced a report which proposed to standardise and regulate American medical research and education. It explicitly stripped legitimacy from holistic and nutritional modalities, some of which had been practiced for thousands of years, and redefined authentic medicine as surgery and pharmacology.
Like its wealthy sponsors, the report was influential. Congress subsequently passed a number of bills which resulted in the closure of many schools of medicine. Textbooks were rewritten and dissenting doctors were ostracised, often at the cost of their careers; a few were prosecuted and jailed. Most of the remaining schools no longer accepted women or African Americans[32].
Over a century later this standard and the consequences for non-compliance would still apply[33]. We would witness the effects during the Covid-19 pandemic in lives damaged, both medically and professionally, and in profits reaped by the pharmaceutical industry, the industry which Rockefeller had founded using momentum afforded by the Flexner Report, turning some of the byproducts of oil into patentable and often highly addictive chemical ‘medicines’[34]. And his influence didn’t stop there.
Public Opinion
In 1913 Rockefeller faced a crisis of public opinion for his involvement in the deaths of striking workers’ families whose homes had been set on fire[35]. To help repair his image, he hired Ivy Lee, an early public relations expert, who staged events and press releases which rebirthed his client as a great philanthropist.
Much of Rockefeller’s philanthropy was conveniently in his own interest. He became a major donor to institutions which promoted pharmacology, including Johns Hopkins Medical School and the University of Chicago. When evidence appeared linking oil-based products to cancer, he founded the American Cancer Society to look for other causes.
Rockefeller and Carnegie coined a catchphrase for oil-based ‘medicines’: ‘a pill for every ill’. And they popularised derisive labels such as ‘quackery’ for time-honoured healing techniques, a stigma which attached so successfully that a majority in rich countries would come to depend entirely on allopathic treatments, whether they worked well or not.
For all the contention around funding modern medicine, especially as the cost of it escalated, few would question its indispensability. Hans Rosling would one day use big data to demonstrate a strong correlation around the world between investment in health and greater national prosperity. But it would be jumping to conclusions to give modern medicine the credit.
The New Normal
Many measurable improvements in ‘developing’ countries in the postwar era would be achieved with the same technological breakthroughs which had improved health in the West before the era of chemical medicines. Gains from vaccination, anaesthesia, antibiotics and antiseptics had been helped by improved refrigeration, sanitation and water supply. Rather than some naturally abject condition of humankind in general, new methods and infrastructure fixed specific problems amplified by the transition first to agrarian settlement and then to urban, industrial society. For the first time average life expectancy in cities exceeded that of hunter-gatherers. Much of the remedial effort had been publicly funded.
Those born into these transformed societies would enjoy better prospects of health and longevity. And yet, by 2022 life expectancy in the US would be falling again[36]. A study at Johns Hopkins Medicine would find medical error the third leading cause of death in the US[37], and publicly available data would show that even correctly prescribed pharmaceuticals, vaccines and chemotherapy produce a significant ratio of unintended consequences, sometimes fatal. When aggregated, the sheer proliferation of chemical treatments in the data would reveal a troubling correlation between modern medicine and premature death. Other research would find that when doctors go on strike mortality typically decreases[38].
Meanwhile deaths for want of common, effective treatments such as insulin would increase[39], as would the per capita cost of providing them[40], while medical expenses would become a leading cause of bankruptcy, even for those who were insured[41]. Although worst in the US, many countries would experience these ill effects. The result for public health would be the paradoxical simultaneity of a very large and lucrative medical industry with a high incidence of chronic illness throughout its host nations. And it should take only a moment’s reflection to see why this might be so: healthy people are bad for the medicine business. Although it employs many capable, caring and sometimes brilliant practitioners, and can at times perform extraordinary feats of rescue and rehabilitation, as a system, commercial medicine is primarily intended to produce rich people, not healthy people.
Rockefeller may have been a pioneer, but not of medicine. Rockefeller’s real innovation was the use of influence to focus the combined power of government, education and public communication on a response to a fundamental human need which favoured his personal business ventures. This has become standard practice for big business. Ivy Lee’s techniques of image management worked so well on the public they are now routinely employed by billionaires such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.
Of all the practices we might broadly assess as conspiratorial, these are the most damaging, because they undermine the very institutions on which complex societies depend. And medicine is only one sector. What happens when the model becomes multi-sectoral?
Systemic Conspiracy
Unmodernised cultures are very like modern ones in some ways – we are, after all, the same species – and yet strikingly different in other ways, one of which is the values we uphold. In a Blackfoot Native American community, I'm told wealth is measured not in possessions but in gifts to others. Recognition follows contribution rather than position in a hierarchy. Honesty, kindness, and humility are prized above ambition and hard work[42].
As I reflect on my own culture, these seem like stark differences, until I remember that the ordinary Westerners I know also cherish integrity, compassion and generosity. What’s different in the West is an economic system which incentivises other attitudes and behaviours. The qualities which inspire reverence among the Blackfeet, as in many Western communities, are ignored in the allocation of resources and rewards at the scale of enterprise which now dominates our lived experience, where competitive self-interest is the paramount virtue. Our system, unlike the Blackfoot system, is misaligned with the values most people hold dear.
This incongruity is revealed in the contrast between popular surveys and government programs. If most ordinary Australian voters got their way, governments would be hard at work lowering the cost of living, making housing affordable, and improving public health[43]. Expensive foreign military equipment, new gas wells and clamping down on protests wouldn’t be priorities.
Mainstream media is similarly unrepresentative. Australia rates highly on the Global Peace Index[44]. And most Australians want extra government assistance for the least advantaged[45]. But TV, radio, newspapers and sponsored social media relentlessly gaslight their audiences with confected menace from ‘crime waves’, ‘foreign military threats’, and ‘welfare cheats’.
This can't be an accident, even in a vacuum of competence and professional standards. Something other than ‘the will of the people’ is directing Australian public affairs. Suspects aren’t hard to find; some people are doing very well from these arrangements; but unfortunately for the aspiring detective their fingerprints won’t be on anything because ‘the economy’ is now doing the dirty work. Enrichment of the few at cost to the many has been systematised and normalised to the extent that harms no longer attract remedies but instead become business opportunities. Consider, for example, the potential windfall gains for investors in commercial medicine if sickness was to become a general precondition. It sounds farfetched, until we consider where our food is coming from.
The Agriculture Paradox
The accepted story of agriculture is like the story of modern medicine, a demonstration of the art and science of marketing. It tells us everything good started with farming; without it there would have been no cities; without them no civilisation; and by extension we now owe almost everything to the giant multinational corporations who control the sector.
This triumphalism apparently irritated Jared Diamond[46], who drew our attention to some discarded chapters of evidence. While it may be true that technological development and skill specialisation flourished among early agrarian settlements, the unabridged version also features despots, slavery and terrible bloodshed. And any given day might have added hunger, poor nutrition, parasites or infectious disease. Life expectancy fell, people learned to live with bad teeth and unpleasant odours, and none of that improved much until the century of transformation. In this way, agriculture had long ago created conditions favourable to the ambitions of John D. Rockefeller.
The shift to commodity production amplified the perils of subsistence farming. Farmers were no longer feeding themselves and their communities but creating a store of value which was owned and controlled by someone else on whom they depended for survival.
Risks compounded again when farming was financed by debt. Tens of thousands of American farming families learned this when the Dust Bowl forced them into poverty and exile. The experience of colonised populations was even worse. Britain alone presided over the Irish Potato Famine and a series of great famines in India in which many millions starved while producing crops for export.
While the accepted story of agriculture is another glossy brochure, something very real now stands between us and starvation, which is modern industrial farming. And its expansion parallels the increase in both degenerative illness and modern medicine. But since most of us have never had the skills to feed ourselves, and even local commercial food production has been displaced by extended, oil-fuelled supply chains, we are utterly dependent on it, hardly a recipe for vibrant local culture and cuisine, and certainly not for security and peace of mind, which is why even a rumour can trigger panic buying at the supermarket.
Like modern medicine, modern nutrition seems to be about something other than human wellbeing. And one commodity is particularly illustrative.
Sugar
Sugar had long supported a modest trade for elite consumption, but the settlement of the island of Madeira by the Portuguese in the 15th Century brought something new[47]. There we first see capitalism’s ‘three pillars’ described by Karl Polanyi[48] assembled into a radical engine of exploitation: commodified labour in the form of kidnapped slaves, commodified land in the form of appropriated arable soils and forests used for fuel, and commodified money in the form of investment seeking a return. And it’s also on Madeira we witness the cycle of destruction which results when this engine is run full throttle, as the living world and human lives are devoured until ecological collapse necessitates abandonment.
Despite its violence, the venture attracted approbation through the enrichment of its investors. And so, in 1492, Christopher Columbus took sugar cane to the New World. Soon Spanish and Portuguese fortune hunters were spreading it through the Caribbean and along the coast of Brazil, murdering and displacing native populations and converting ecosystems, enslaved workforces and new habits of consumption in Europe into profit. Other nations followed suit, employing the model in colonies around the world, producing food and fibre crops like wheat, wool, and cotton, along with intoxicants like tobacco, opium, tea and coffee.
Sugar has the curious distinction of belonging to both commodity groups. It’s really a drug masquerading as food. We’re wired to like the taste of it. In the places our ancestors lived it was found in scarce sources like honey which also contributed powerful nutrients[49]. But adaptations to scarcity are easily fooled.
In its most common refined white form, sugar contains almost nothing except calories, which nutritionists call ‘empty’, so devoid is it of micronutrients. It can disrupt memory function, increase inflammation, and in young adults lower appetite-suppressing hormones[50], increasing vulnerability to obesity and its harmful consequences. Consumption has been linked globally with diabetes mellitus[51].
Sugar activates the brain’s dopamine reward system[52]. Repeated activation builds tolerance leading to craving, so consumption tends to increase, especially when sugar is ‘hidden’ in foods. It’s one of the easiest ways for producers of edible products to harness human hedonic motivation. As a result, in 2023 the world consumed over 170 million metric tonnes of a substance with no nutritional value and many of the attributes of a poison, with Australia very close to the top of the per capita list[53]. It’s the perfect edible product for capitalism.
Closing the Loop
Sugar arrived in Australia with the British Navy, along with Polanyi’s pillars – land theft, slave labour and salivating investors. But other opportunities kept the colonies busy, and cultivation at scale only began in Queensland in the 1860s, on what Jason W. Moore calls a “frontier of appropriation”, employing Pacific Islanders to work stolen Aboriginal land, sometimes willingly, sometimes not, in thinly disguised slavery[54], even as its undisguised manifestation was being outlawed. As ‘blackbirding’ too became less acceptable, the arduous task of farming cane devolved to the common working poor like my mother’s family of Irish and Scottish descent, until carbon energy and mechanisation changed the rules again, and they and other small producers left the land.
By then, this system of appropriation, exploitation, production, consumption and ownership concentration in an ever-rising spiral had metastasised in the West, replacing many time-honoured, smaller, local forms of enterprise across many sectors. This was the system Bretton Woods sought to perpetuate and expand. And that much of its legacy remains. But this was only the departure point for the system we have today.
In the 1960s, medical manufacturers noticed that the birth control pill had persuaded women to become habitual long-term consumers. In 1963, the dopamine modulator diazepam was released to market, transforming its host company Roche into a pharmaceutical giant. A few years later, when Arthur Sackler applied his dark arts, it would become Valium, to which 30% of American women would become dependent, while in Australia’s burgeoning suburban isolation it would be ‘mother’s little helper’. By this time, most medical research would be funded by the same big companies, and commercial treatments for chronic conditions, many with roots in diet, trauma, and societal dysfunction, would contribute most of the industry’s profits.
In 1967, an article appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine refuting growing concerns about sugar's possible role in heart disease. No mention was made of funding by a sugar industry body[55]. Subsequent reviews have found the study to be sound and its conclusions valid. But this is the moment when the line between science and marketing starts to blur.
The article fed an emerging consensus across the food and medicine industries, that fat, especially saturated fat, was the enemy, drawing on some hasty conclusions made by pioneering diet researcher Ancel Keys and some even weaker data science which followed[56]. The evidence has since been reinterpreted[57]. At the time, however, this fuzzy science suited industry purposes very well, capturing regulatory and popular attention for another generation, and fuelling the rise of ‘healthy’ alternatives, including seed oils and margarine[58], the products of chemically intensive broadacre monoculture farming and factory processing. It also distracted from other dangerous developments.
In 1971, US President Nixon appointed Earl Butz secretary for Agriculture, a man whose vision was to industrialise the entire food system. Butz would champion the conversion of surpluses from chemically intensive grain production[59] into a new industrial sweetener called High Fructose Corn Syrup, which would quickly find its way into every corner of the American diet[60].
By the 1980s, the tobacco giants, facing increasing opposition since the US Surgeon General had two decades earlier pointed his official finger of doom at them, had gone shopping for other revenue sources. The ones they had chosen were food companies. R J Reynolds merged with Nabisco. Kraft and General Foods were picked up by Philip Morris. Applying the skills they had learned as purveyors of deadly pleasure, they infiltrated the agencies charged with protecting consumers to advocate for ultra processed foods and hired food technicians to make them more addictive. Half of the substances consumed as food in the US during the following decade would come out of this system.
Today’s supermarket aisles reveal how the system evolved. And today’s public health statistics catalogue its effects.
The Perfect Crime
As if by some natural process like mould growing in a petri dish, an expanding network of corporations and their enablers in government, science, education and communication transfigured modern life.
Saturation advertising targeting children habituated millions to a lifetime of edible substances laden with sugar and chemical additives to make them addictive. Thousands of dangerous chemicals, some of them used in industrial farming, and others in products and packaging, permeated the environment, entering bodies, triggering allergies and illnesses. The incidence of degenerative diseases rose rapidly, along with the cost of treating them, while onset age steadily decreased. A plethora of chemical medicines, themselves often highly addictive, many with their own damaging side effects, flooded the market for treatments. And the profits of the companies involved ballooned, devouring household budgets and GDP.
A system of allocating resources and rewards structured to favour one group of people above others will unavoidably produce injustice. A national economy structured that way will produce injustice at national scale; and globalisation will spread it across the globe. Once government and civil society are aligned throughout its reach, it simply follows that large tracts of Earth and people in great numbers will be bound in service to what is, in effect, a far-reaching conspiracy. We may call it something else like 'empire' or 'progress', but what drives it are the private interests of an elite cohort. We won't all suffer it equally; some service will be highly prized; and with money to spend our appetites may also be well received; but so many mundane, everyday acts will first and foremost serve the purposes of its architects.
Capitalism is such a system. When you look behind the smiling spokesmodels and soothing euphemisms of its branding and marketing, the modern corporation is in essence a conspiracy of shareholders. It emerged from colonialism, expert in extraction of unearned wealth from the land, labour and desires of others. It will admit conflicting demands only when the alternative is worse; and will explore every means to avoid it — legal loopholes, lobbying, monopolisation, capture of institutions — and the kind of public relations which turns criticism into ‘conspiracy theory’. It will form alliances, open or secretive, with any other entity or interest group which helps it do this; and it will keep doing this until arrested by superior force or the collapse of the human and Earth systems which sustain it.
I find moral argument is only marginally effective with people; with capitalism it's utterly useless, because, rather like a common domestic abuser, capitalism lacks any motive or means to accommodate ethical obligation beyond seductive artifice. In each case, our interlocutor's real intent is domination. To save ourselves we must quit the relationship. I concede this is no small matter; it will be daunting and difficult; hesitancy is understandable; but delay only exacerbates the inevitable crisis; and that's precisely where we have arrived. The surrender of local self-sufficiency has inured us to domestication as livestock of the corporation – investors, employees, suppliers and consumers – increasingly reliant for safety and fulfilment on a soulless shell of legal personhood programmed to harvest value from us. That is not a formula for health and happiness.
We have barely scratched the surface. These examples are a tiny fraction of only the documented cases. And although the food and medicine industries are large and global, behind them are bigger industries jockeying with truly existential threats and risking ever more drastic means to secure their dominance. If we have felt the precarity of our time, perhaps a question follows, the one abuse survivors sometimes sense behind an otherwise compassionate gaze: why did we let it go on so long?
The existential malaise in the West has very deep roots. And it’s been inflamed by a sophisticated, copiously funded, and lengthy campaign to universalise a dangerously psychotic reimagining of the nature and purpose of human existence. Even intelligent people of goodwill can be misled. That will be the subject of the next essay.
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[3] Richardson, J. (2022), “14 Planned Obsolescence Examples”, Very Informed, Jul 18.
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