One day, the Lyndon LaRouche Youth Movement visited the Mass Media offices. I just missed them. Drat. The next day, my classmate whipped out a Lyndon LaRouche magazine when she grew tired of listening to the rest of us in her group yakking. I started yelling.

For those of you who are unaware of the Lyndon LaRouche Youth Movement, I will provide a quick synopsis of their thought: quack, quack, quack. They, or rather Mr. LaRouche, (there seems a paucity of writings by others in his movement) expand voluminously on this initial precept. He has the ability to shed 10,000 droning words on the least pressing topics at the drop of a dime solicited by his misguided henchmen. Nowadays he is using his hatred of Dick Cheney as a Trojan horse for his thought. “Hey, we both hate Dick Cheney, right?” is how it’s supposed to go. “Man, let me tell you about all the other things that are wrong with America…”

LaRouche and his followers are political Scientologists. Any disagreement with them renders you a fascist, as they conveniently ignore LaRouche’s own flirtations with the iron fist. Just the same way Scientologists label anyone who doesn’t buy into their claptrap as “in bed with the pharmaceutical complex” or some such. But still, encounters with conspiracists, people who see everything as part of the bigger picture that you’re just not getting, man-they make me think, despite themselves.

The conspiracist sees shadows of interests antithetical to his ideals in every corner, never sees a white van parked outside overnight or a hovering black helicopter but when the shadow government has planted a surveillance device. Lines are traced from the store down the street to (breathe in) a corporate chain in Cleveland to a parent company in London to a holding company in Zurich to a family of Alpine yodelers who have a last name containing seven umlauts and have run the world from their snow capped mountain since 1356. (Breathe out.) It’s an intimidating road to traverse.

I walk part of the way. However, The Conspiracy isn’t always such a conspiracy. There certainly is a small, somewhat shadowy group of people who indeed run the world. Some, like the Council on Foreign Relations, have magazines available at Borders. Or they meet at Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum. Or Bilderberg. If you balk at defining them as “shadowy,” try getting into Davos. They do unquestionably rule the world: read “Foreign Affairs” and keep track of how often suggestions in that magazine become policy. You can trace the founding of the EU through back issues. Right now, primary concerns for them are how to navigate the mess in the Middle East and immigration policy (think of that, the power elite having much the same concerns as anyone else).

I bring this up just to say that things aren’t always a vast whirlwind swirling irremediably beyond our control (or detection!) so that it is necessary only to give up or fight armed rebellion. It is to state that an elite does run the world, and we can be fairly sure of identifying it. The question becomes whether the intention of these groups is necessarily to enslave mankind, and not just to have wealth and the power to keep it. And either way, America, when you think about it, could be a lot worse. (Sheesh.)

The magnifico after all must live in this world with anyone, and it is in his interests much as anyone’s to have happy, well-ordered societies. If slavery produces unhappiness and social instability slavery should be abolished, if for no other reason then that it causes destabilization. We have to find ways of living together, and if people aren’t given freedom, they take it. Those most possessed of evil genius, the Hitlers, the Stalins, have been unable to attain their ends of world domination and any evil genius of the future will fail in time. So conspiracists needn’t worry that much- despotic regimes can and do arise, but they’re not going to be ultimately successful. Liberalism, or at least opposition to slavery, becomes a sort of self-interested noblesse oblige writ large. Having us happy, dull, and complacent works just as well anyway.

I hold that there are two reasons no one group can ever enslave mankind. First, the man on the street is just too ornery and nonmalleable and second, even the most calculating human intelligence can’t outwit the fact of chance. These patterns can’t have escaped the notice of those who presently constitute “the people who run the world,” who are different from the people who ran Vercingetorix’ world, different from those who ran Touissant L’ouverture’s world, and from those who ran Gandhi’s. And all the other rebels who have risen against oppression-where would they be today? We’ve had them; we called one King. They come when Man needs them.

I have faith that if, or when, things get so intolerable that a free people must revolt, Americans will do so. Until then, what people are thinking and how they think it differ, and at any rate people differ in competence, interests and agendas from each other. This is difficult to organize against even by the cleverest or strictest. I don’t mean to say that a plutocratic, oppressive tendency can’t take root and do damage, even in our much touted Democracy (which seems to get most lip service when most imperiled, and by the most malignant to it). But this doesn’t mean the assumed goals of the bad guys-to permanently enslave mankind, say-have been met, and that the only reasonable response to this condition is to join your political cult.

The elite, if they are to be considered so, have to know that slavery inevitably leads to rebellion. When the time comes, the people will rebel. Even if they do not, excitable lunatics with boring-ass LaRouche speech booklets need to hone their pitch before I sign up for any new model army.