As much as it’s human nature to contemplate about conspiracies, it’s human nature to attempt to form them. Look at reality shows like Survivor for evidence of this tendency at the simplest level.

The higher the stakes, the more complicated conspiracies become. The more people involved, the harder to control. People ultimately operate in self interest if they find it’s not 100% aligned with the group interest. Secrecy is notoriously difficult to sustain as well. And internal power struggles to be or influence the hand that guides a conspiracy can easily drown a conspiracy with drama or cause it to literally blow up.

An effective world-level power conspiracy would have to be based on historical results, thereby proving to those involved that its in their self-interest to perpetuate and protect it, as well as providing the clearest clues about proper methods and systems. It’s probably just about impossible to create such a conspiracy by intelligent design. Most likely then, if there are any mass-global power conspiracies in the world, they EVOLVED.

But humans conspire without even realizing it every day. It’s hard to identify such natural conspiracies because we take them for granted and are blind to them, but they are there and it’s what leads to fashions, general consensus, mass-behaviors and tics, cliques, and peer pressure. Much of natural conspiracies are naked and in the open if you just take the time to look, but much of it is also latent and repressed. Racial and sexual bias and prejudices are examples.

So my theory is that natural conspiracies also exist between the classes. The unimaginably wealthy vs the rest of the world, the poorest of any society vs the rest of that society, the rulers vs the ruled, the intellectual vs the anti-intellectual, the religious vs the scientific, those who have the ear of the most powerful vs. the entire world, those who can control money vs those who depend on it, those who supply the scarcest resources in the world vs those who depend on it.

People who may believe they have the most benign, or ‘necessary’ of intentions unwittingly conspiring nonetheless.

A natural conspiracy may evolve unintentionally as players protect their self interests over the years, and as old players are replaced by new ones stepping into the exact same roles. Suddenly, the rules of a conspiracy become tradition. They become cronyism. Loyalty. Hierarchy. Rules. Eventually, information managing the system effectively becomes stratified. Not all the payers will know everything. And very likely, even no single player will know everything. But more politically sensitive ‘secrets’ will certainly be stratified at the top level, while ‘secrets’ that cannot make good evidence and are very latently serving the conspiracy are more widespread.

Perhaps one natural conspiracy meets another at the global level and they make deals or operate symbiotically, leading to yet another, new natural conspiracy. Sounds like what you’re describing.

We find conspiracies exciting because the moment we can successfully identify one, we can expose its players as traitors, people who are not operating in some Hippocratic ‘general public interest’ way. It’s akin to finding out there are people in your company who are running another company off the resources of yours. So we’ve evolved to be highly attuned to rooting out conspiracies if we see evidence of behaviors that go against our own interests. Once you’re part of a natural conspiracy, you become more or less blind to its existence until the whole conspiracy comes of age and actually breaks off into it’s own social entity (a new tribe, a new nation, a new company, etc).

So we see conspiracies everywhere. And indeed, they are–more than we even realize. The hard part is finding out which ones matter enough to do something about and what can you do about it.