This may be a tough pill to swallow but your main adversary is not Bush, Obama, or Federal Reserve bankers. It is your neighbors, friends, and family who would turn you in if you got out of line with the state. You see, the slaves keep the other slaves down. It is not Timmy Geithner who will come to your house in a costume and point a gun in your face if you refuse to give up half your income to corrupt politicians (taxation) but your neighbor down the street in a costume (police officer). How many of your friends and family work for the mafia (the government). We need to end our addiction to violence. Talk with those close to you about how the initiation of the use of force is unethical (statism). The only way out of this is through peaceful voluntarism and real social contracts that people actually sign to. The mafia will collapse eventually due to financial mismanagement and freedom will be the only reasonable option left for individuals.

Reminds me of the following scene in the matrix:

The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. When you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of people we're trying to save, but until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand that most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inert, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it. Were you listening to me, Neo? Or were you looking at the woman in the red dress?

Look again. Freeze it.

No. It's another training program designed to teach you one thing. If you are not one of us, you are one of them.

Sentient programs. They can move in and out of any software still hardwired to their system. That means that anyone we haven't unplugged is potentially an agent.

The only way out of this is the rejection of greed.

The result of Capitalism gone wild is greed gone wild. Greed causes all of the crime and all of the wars. It is greed that is our problem and its reduction would do more for us than you can imagine.

That's really good weed you are smoking.

Be courageous and accept the truth.

The truth is if the "mafia" - as you eloquently put it - were put down, then it would be just another group of brain dead thugs would winding up in control.

Humans are inherently self serving and evil, this is why all large organizations need to be limited in their influence since power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Just because a few neighbors drink wine with you outside of their hybrid cars and smell their own farts with glee doesn't mean you figured out the answer to how to run things.

Try to tell that to Plato. You are inherently wrong when you try to say all men are equal.

Yeah it's rarely coherent to object to an entire power elite though.

ie elites tend to be made up of a complex alignment of (sometimes competing... think evolutionary equilibrium) different interests with differing incentives, goals, histories etc. Although some of their interests or incentives will sometimes broadly align.

But even given that general alignment on some points (the most obvious alignment being a shared interest in maintaining some loosely defined status quo, since it is largely working for them, by definition...) there doesn't tend to be many things you can say about them as a group that aren't either false, banal, or sort of tautologies.

That's often what people mean when they dismiss those sort of overly broad sociological / pol science social criticisms as conspiracy theories.

(in much the same way that the so called conspiracy theories themselves are often shorthand for more complicated actual stories of what's going on).

Broad brush explanations of bad things tend to either not have a ring of authenticity, or they are just really weak explanations:

why do so many houses burn down? because people are stupid.

That's sort of true... in the same way that "why do we have so many wars?" "because wars serve the interests of the global power elites" is true.

But:

1. it's not very useful, because it's super abstract and vague. (What about being stupid causes fires? Oh right, so being stupid fails to prevent fires... how is that?...)

2. It doesn't have the ring of truth, because there will be non-stupid participants in fires. So while in broad abstract terms it might be sort of true, you will personally know a lot of obvious exceptions.

3. It also relies on a whole lot of dubious counterfactuals to classify the agents involved - ie people are stupid because they don't invest more in fire prevention, which would be smart, because it prevents fires... So they should... fireproof everything, and have moats around their houses... that's why they're stupid... etc etc etc...

You can see how you could redo examples 1 2 and 3 with semantically equivalent statements about "wars being because of the global power elite", and how it's just not a very good explanation, while sort of true...

TL;DR

Often people call things out as conspiracy theories because they're vague, untrue-feeling, not-very-useful explanations.

So, your saying that blaming the elite for war is too vague, too general, and not practical at all to fixing the problem. I agree.

As an example...

I think you need to go study the CFR and the Bilderberg group. Check out the Carlyle group while you are at it.

This is how Chomsky responds to charges that he is a conspiracy theorist --- why attribute to active conspiracy what can be attributed to passive shared interest? Application of Occam's Razor shows that positing of conspiracy is not necessary.

yes the simplest answer is always correct, except in the case of war, the simplest answer is a grab for resources as they always have been the case, and then there is the case of 911 where 19 men subverted our air defense system and injected false targets into norads radars, that was just some boxcutter tactics right there learned from the back of a fruit loops box, simple explanations:simple minds

occams razor is a big piece of reductionist garbage

"If coincidences are just coincidences, why do they seem so contrived?"

• Mulder

I don't see the official story being all that simple what with all the loose ends. They wrote an entire book on it after all.

injected false targets into norads radars

what?

You're obsessed about 9/11, I understand that, since it is natural reaction to there being unanswered questions about a matter as important at that.

But I wasn't talking about 9/11, I was responding to the OP, who said:

When you philosophically oppose and entire power elite...

I was speaking on the level of ideas, not the discussions about facts in a particular instance.

occams razor is a big piece of reductionist garbage

That's just foolish, since it's your biggest ally in proving to people that there actually are unanswered questions about 9/11.

Just what I was about to say. The world will miss him when he dies.

Sorry to break this to you kiddo - William of Ockham is dead already.

so the question should be: does wars serve the interests of the global power elites?

correct me if im wrong...

Well you're not much of an elite if you can't find a way to profit from a war or two.

I was meaning though that you don't use terms that abstract.

That, and my rambling post somewhere else on this page, both assume that you're interested in understanding how things happen, for some purpose other than getting mad at vague enemies, or selling books to undergrads.

Which doesn't mean that you should restrict yourself to being super granular either - that would become absurd too. There's no magic grain. But if you're telling a story and the characters are so big and vague that you can't really define their boundaries, or even their key characteristics (without just being circular - ie 'elites are powerful') then something is going wrong.

I meant Chomsky.

When the sociial power elite are trying to subordinate the United States to a new world government, which they would lead and control against the interests of our own people, they must be opposed with as much energy as can be mustered.Social power may be a conspiracy but that conspiracy is currently against the best interests of America.