While millions of people are spellbound by false conspiracy theories, the real conspiracies that are wrecking our world go about their business unheeded. Here are five genuine threats that everyone should know about—and take action on.

The world is awash in a deluge of dangerous conspiracy theories. Most notoriously, the bizarre QAnon fantasy postulates that a global child sex-trafficking ring is being run by liberal, Satan-worshiping pedophiles whose plot will be uncovered by President Donald Trump on a “day of reckoning” involving mass arrests. This surreal mass delusion is not the only one infecting millions of people around the world. Earlier this year, the Plandemic conspiracy video went viral on social media, instilling disinformation into millions of minds about Covid-19, falsely alleging that it was a hoax perpetrated by big business for the sake of profiteering by selling mass vaccinations.

One of the most harmful results of these bogus conspiracy theories is that they help deflect people’s attention from the real conspiracies that are systematically damaging billions of people around the world, destroying the living Earth, and—if left unchecked—may drive our entire civilization to collapse. These are the conspiracies everyone needs to know about. Unlike the QAnon and Plandemic nonsense, they are real. The facts about them are in the open, yet these lethal conspiracies hide in plain sight, flagrantly going about their destructive activities while millions of people have their attention diverted toward pernicious fictions.

Let’s take a look at five of the most damaging conspiracies out there. As you consider them, I invite you to ponder how it is that, while our mass media focuses attention on imaginary conspiracies, the real ones that threaten every one of us are barely even discussed.

1. Conspiracy to turn the world into a giant marketplace for the benefit of the wealthy elite

Back in 1947, as the world was rebuilding from the destruction of the Second World War, a few dozen free-market ideologues met in a luxury Swiss resort to form the Mont Pelerin Society—an organization devoted to spreading the ideology of neoliberalism throughout the world. Their ideas—that the free market should dominate virtually all aspects of society, that regulations should be dismantled, and that individual liberty should eclipse all other considerations of fairness, equity, or community welfare—were considered fanatical at the time. Over three decades, though, financed by wealthy donors, they assiduously expanded their plot for global domination, establishing networks of academics, businessmen, economists, journalists, and politicians, in global centers of power.

When the stagflation crisis of the 1970s threw classic Keynesian economics into disrepute, their moment of opportunity arrived. By 1985, with free market disciples Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher entrenched in power, they initiated a campaign to systematically transform virtually all aspects of life into an unrestrained marketplace, where everything could be bought and sold to the highest bidder, subject to no moral scruple. They crippled trade unions, tore up social safety nets, reduced tax rates for the wealthy, eliminated regulations, and instituted a massive transfer of wealth from society at large to the uber-elite. Every time a new crisis occurred of their own making, such as the Great Recession of 2008, they took advantage of the mayhem they caused to double down on their power, and extend their reach even further, bringing the ideology of the marketplace into domains, such as education, law enforcement, or wilderness preserves, that had previously been considered sacrosanct.

With the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic, this conspiracy has found yet another opportunity to squeeze wealth from the bulk of society into the hands of the few. In the United States, since the pandemic began, while 200,000 Americans have died from coronavirus and more than 50 million have lost their jobs, the collective wealth of this country’s billionaires has soared 29% to $3.8 trillion. Jeff Bezos alone could give every Amazon employee $105,000 and still be as wealthy as he was before coronavirus hit.

2. Conspiracy by transnational corporations to turn billions of people into addicts

In the 1920s, two ruthless men laid out a sinister scheme to gain control of the minds of Americans. Their plan? To identify people’s deeply buried needs and use subtle messaging to manipulate them into doing whatever they wanted without realizing it—even at the cost of their health and well-being. One of them, Edward Bernays, was Sigmund Freud’s nephew and used his uncle’s insights into the subconscious to develop his new methods. Their goal was to turn normal working Americans into manic consumers, training them to desire an ever-increasing amount of goods, and thereby converting their life’s energy into profit for American corporations. “We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture,” declared Bernays’ partner, Paul Mazur. “People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.”

In 1928, Bernays proudly described how his techniques for mental manipulation had already permitted a small elite to control the minds of the American population:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government that is the true ruling power of this country.
​We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. . . . In almost every act of our daily lives. . . we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons . . . who pull the wires which control the public mind.

Since then, this conspiracy has succeeded beyond its instigators’ wildest dreams. Corporations have perfected the technique of mind control by tweaking core human instincts that originally evolved to support our ancestors’ flourishing in hunter-gatherer bands—such as the desire for status or fear of exclusion—for their nefarious purposes.

Corporate predators have learned that the most valuable population to ensnare are children. In the sinister words of chief executive Wayne Chilicki, “When it comes to targeting kid consumers, we at General Mills . . . believe in getting them early and having them for life.” Children in the Global South are turned into junk food addicts with the same callous contempt that factory farms turn their animals into chicken nuggets. Half of the children in south Asia are now either undernourished or overweight, conditioned by pervasive advertising to spend what little money they have on the empty calories of junk food.

A new generation of mind controllers are now using sophisticated data mining technologies to inject their power even deeper into our minds. At the ominously named Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, a modern-day Bernays named B. J. Fogg has taught budding entrepreneurs how to use “hot triggers” such as thumbs-up signs and “Like” statistics to activate short hits of dopamine in our brains that literally get us addicted to our screens. With social media now infiltrating every aspect of many teenagers’ lives, the power of predatory corporate advertising to control their minds for profit has become even more formidable. In 2017, a leaked document revealed Facebook boasting to advertisers how they can identify in real time when teenagers feel “insecure” and “worthless,” and would be most susceptible to a “confidence boost.”

3. Conspiracy to plunder the Global South for the benefit of the Global North

Ever since Portuguese and Spanish explorers set sail in the fifteenth century on a quest for wealth and power, a small population of white Europeans have conspired to use their technological advantage to despoil, plunder, and exploit the rest of the world’s wealth for their own benefit. With the Treaty of Saragossa in 1529, Spain and Portugal carved up the non-European continents between them for conquest and booty. After the Industrial Revolution, the countries of northern Europe took over the plot for global supremacy, devastating the lives of tens of millions of Africans mercilessly chained and shipped as slaves to the colonies.

After the abolition of the slave trade, the brutal exploitation continued through an international system of indentured labor. Having destroyed their livelihood in their native countries, European potentates transported more than 60 million desperate workers from India, China, and the Pacific islands to territories where they were needed, in what was frequently referred to as the “new form of slavery.” This vast global scheme of human trafficking was promoted by colonial magnates such as Cecil Rhodes who declared: “We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labour that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories.”

In more recent times, the plot continues in different guises. During the decades after the Second World War, Global South leaders who demanded a fair role in the economic system were systematically deposed in coups arranged by U.S., British, and French militaries. In a vast loan sharking scheme, countries impoverished by colonialism then racked up unsustainable debts forced on them by Global North banks. When they couldn’t pay them back without bankrupting their nations, they were coerced into so-called “structural adjustment programs” which opened their labor markets and natural resources to further plunder by the North’s transnational corporations. The World Bank, IMF, and World Trade Organization are all controlled by a few wealthy nations that set the terms for international trade, with the result that through a combination of illicit financial flows, debt interest payments, and profit repatriation, wealth continues to flow from the South to the North at the rate of about $3 trillion per year.

4. Conspiracy to hide the effects of climate breakdown for corporate profit

For over fifty years, fossil fuel executives have known about the reality of human-induced climate change, yet they spent most of that time deliberately concealing their knowledge and obfuscating public discussion on the topic so they could rake in trillions of dollars in profit. In 1968, the Stanford Research Institute alerted the American Petroleum Institute—the national trade association that represents America’s oil and natural gas industry—to the fact that CO2 emissions were accumulating in the atmosphere, and could reach 400 parts per million by 2000. Their report warned that rising CO2 levels would result in melting ice caps, rising seas, and serious environmental damage worldwide. Exxon scientists studied the issue further, reporting to management in 1977 that there was “overwhelming” consensus that fossil fuels were responsible for CO2 increases. In an internal Exxon memo in 1981, scientists raised the alarm that the company’s 50-year plan “will later produce effects which will indeed be catastrophic (at least for a substantial fraction of the Earth’s population).”

Exxon—and the other fossil fuel companies—knew their actions would lead to climate breakdown, and instead of trying to solve the problem, they lied to the public to hide their misdeeds. Following the example of the tobacco industry, which had already condemned millions to early deaths through cynical deception, they embarked on a concerted strategy to dupe the public by paying fake experts to publish papers; cherry picking selective data to support false conclusions; and sow their own wild conspiracy theories to deflect attention from their crimes.

As a result of their immoral plot, the world is now facing a dire climate emergency. If the fossil fuel companies had confronted the issue honestly from the outset, there could have been a managed transition to renewable energy over decades, causing little disruption and saving millions of lives through reduced pollution. Instead, it will now take an immediate global mobilization to avoid a 2° C rise in temperature over preindustrial levels. The world is currently on track for more than a 3° C rise this century, with the high likelihood of stumbling into a tipping point cascade that quickly leads to a three- and four-degree world—one that becomes rapidly unrecognizable, with the Amazon rainforest turning into searing desert; coastal cities inundated by flooding; super-hurricanes tearing the windows out of skyscrapers; persistent massive droughts and famine across the world; and hundreds of millions of desperate climate refugees.

Meanwhile, by putting billions of human lives in jeopardy, the four biggest fossil fuel companies—ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, and BP—have made $2 trillion in profits since they began their campaign of lies in 1990.

5. Conspiracy to grow the global economy indefinitely, while killing most of life on Earth and risking the collapse of civilization.

In a barely noticed footnote to the daily news, the World Wildlife Fund recently released a shocking report revealing a devastating 68% worldwide decline in animal populations in the past fifty years. Even this dismal news hides more gut-wrenching statistics, such as the 84% decline in amphibians, reptiles, and fishes, or the 94% decline in animal populations in South America.

This is just the latest bulletin marking the demise of nature as it succumbs to the relentless growth of human economic activity across the world. Three-quarters of all land has been appropriated for human purposes, either turned into farmland, covered by concrete, or flooded by reservoirs. Three-quarters of rivers and lakes are used for crop or livestock cultivation, with many of the world’s greatest rivers, such as the Ganges, Yangtze, or Nile, no longer reaching the sea. Half of the world’s forests and wetlands have disappeared—the Amazon rainforest alone is vanishing at the rate of an acre every second.

Meanwhile, the world’s Gross Domestic Product is forecast to nearly triple by the middle of this century, by which time it’s estimated that 5 billion people will be facing water shortages, 95% of the Earth’s arable land will be degraded—and there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean. It’s been estimated by leading experts that, by the end of this century, half of the world’s estimated 8 million species will be extinct or at the brink of extinction unless humanity changes its ways. These depredations, combined with climate breakdown, are believed by an increasing number of analysts to spell the likely collapse of modern civilization.

The underlying cause of this headlong rush to catastrophe is our society’s obsession with economic growth as the sole criterion for measuring success. A dangerous myth of “green growth” propagated by techno-optimists argues that through technological innovation, GDP can become “decoupled” from resource use and carbon emissions, permitting limitless growth on a finite planet. This has been shown to be nothing but a fantasy: it hasn’t happened so far, and even the most wildly aggressive assumptions for greater efficiency lead to unsustainable consumption of global resources.

So who, in this case, are the conspirators? If you’re living a normal life in an affluent country, you don’t need to look further than the mirror. The wealthy OECD nations, with only 18% of the global population, account for 74% of global GDP, and the richest 10% of people are responsible for more than half the world’s carbon emissions.

Those of us who continue to benefit from the inequities dealt us by the global system, and aren’t actively engaged in curbing it, are like a few shipwrecked survivors on a gilded lifeboat kicking others desperately scrambling for life into the ocean to protect their own safety and comfort. We may not be actively kicking their knuckles, but by allowing this reckless system of unsustainable growth to continue, we’re implicitly making the same choice.

So, the next time someone tells you to “do your research” on their new conspiracy theory, please point them to the real conspiracies that are threatening life on this beautiful but troubled planet. The good news is that, since they’re real conspiracies, there is something we can do about them. We can vote in politicians that promise to peel back the neoliberal nightmare; advocate for curbs on predatory corporate activities; support the Global South in changing the terms of international trade; declare a Climate Emergency in our community to turn around carbon emissions; and become active in the movement to transform our global society to an Ecological Civilization—one that is based on life-affirming principles rather than accumulating wealth.

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Jeremy Lent is author of The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning, which investigates how different cultures have made sense of the universe and how their underlying values have changed the course of history. His upcoming book, The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe, will be published in Spring 2021 (New Society Publishers: US/Canada | Profile Books: UK/Commonwealth). For more information visit jeremylent.com.