In A Cauldron of Conspiracies, posted here on 11th November, I set out the disciplines that help us separate evidence from fable, facts from fiction. Today I apply them to a seductive case: a conspiracy narrative whose appeal is obvious and entertaining in an odd kind of way, but whose plausibility dissolves under closer scrutiny.
In The Predators versus The People, Meeuwis T. Baaijen invites us to believe that a clandestine fraternity—a global mafia or his “Glafia”—has choreographed the world’s upheavals over the past five centuries. The proposition is tidy and consoling. It exchanges ambiguity for certainty and complexity for intention. But the neatness is counterfeit. We don’t live in a machine with one master switch. We live in a turbulent world-system of systems—economic, cultural, technological, social, political, ecological—where causes braid, feedback delays confound designers, and outcomes routinely surprise their authors. To trade that unruliness for a single story about an invisible world government is not a daring insight. It’s a laughable abdication of inquiry.
A claim of such range must clear a very high evidentiary bar. If an invisible command had truly directed revolutions, depressions, empires, wars, vaccines, and the rise and fall of hegemons over centuries, the proof cannot be impressionistic. It demands contemporaneous orders, minutes, directives and financial instructions—documents cross‑validated across archives and languages—demonstrating control and compliance. Good history accepts that where the archive is silent, ambiguity remains. If the archive becomes too quiet, then it’s probable we’re dealing with unadulterated fiction. It does not paper over uncertainty with omniscience. The Glafia thesis offers interpretations stitched after the fact and the perennial tautology of conspiratorial reasoning: that the absence of direct proof is itself proof of some cunning concealment.
If such a command structure existed, the residue would be unavoidable. Real power leaves debris: instructions, minutes, accounts, quarrels that spill into letters and diaries, defections that become testimony. When states and corporations collude, the seams show. The record is explicit on this point. LuxLeaks and the Paradise, Panama and Pandora Papers exposed tax rulings and offshore structures across Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas. The Credit Suisse leaks and HSBC “Swiss Leaks” pulled back the veil on private banking. The FinCEN Files mapped suspicious flows through the world’s clearing houses. Vatileaks pierced the Vatican. Brazil’s Lava Jato investigations and South Africa’s Gupta emails detailed state capture. The Pegasus Project revealed transnational surveillance for hire. The China Cables and Xinjiang Papers surfaced internal directives from Beijing. Even the Snowden disclosures laid bare the Five Eyes, not just Washington. Secrecy at that scale frays under the pressures of time, numbers and errors; a simple quantitative model underlines the point: as conspiracies span institutions and generations, the chance of silent survival collapses. Were one cabal truly steering “all major events”, the documentary flood would be proportionate to the claim. It is not.
A recurring move in The Predators versus The People is to borrow the aura of serious systems scholarship to underwrite a myth. Fernand Braudel’s longue durée and Giovanni Arrighi’s systemic cycles of accumulation trace the interplay between finance, commerce and state power, showing how leading centres of wealth shifted from Genoa–Spain to the Dutch Republic, to Britain, and then to the United States. Their work maps emergent order in markets and geopolitics—an ecology of rivalry where elites jostle, adapt, fragment and sometimes fail. This rhetorical borrowing is central to Baaijen’s presentation, but inverts their conclusions. Nothing in Braudel or Arrighi implies a timeless board issuing edicts; everything in their analyses points to competition, churn and contingency.
On contact with particulars, the grand design frays further. The Bank of England began life in 1694 as a joint‑stock venture. Since 1946 it has been owned by the UK government. In 1997 it gained operational independence over interest rates. Ownership did not revert to private hands; the arrangements are on the public record. Likewise, the notion that Oliver Cromwell was bribed to readmit Jews to England distorts the history. The 1650s were a muddled, often public debate about commerce, toleration and religion, with no formal statute of readmission. Historiography does not support the idea of a covert purchase of policy. It takes no imagination to see how that insinuation slides into a much older, uglier trope that financial puppeteers lurk behind every civic pivot. Responsible argument resists that gravity.
The Glafia thesis, as framed in The Predators versus The People, must also contort itself to absorb episodes that testify to drift, error and rivalry rather than discipline. In 1914 Europe slid into catastrophe through misperception, mobilisation timetables, alliance commitments, nationalist fervour and domestic pressures converging into a conflict that shattered empires. Sir Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 shows as much; it does not read like a script. It reads like a pile‑up. Hitler’s ascent followed a different path: Weimar’s structural fragility, the trauma of the Great Depression, the Nazi party’s organisational acuity, and a politics of grievance that proved catastrophically effective. Britain and the United States did not “set him up.” They fought to obliterate his regime, at colossal cost. If this was orchestration, it was a plot addicted to self‑destruction.
The Bolshevik seizure of power likewise shows the limits of a monocausal frame. German facilitation of Lenin’s return is well documented—an opportunistic wartime gambit to hasten Russia’s exit from the conflict. The decades that followed brought a grinding ideological and geopolitical struggle, at huge cost to both sides, hardly a harmonious programme curated from above. Decolonisation after 1945 doubled down on messiness: insurgencies, nationalist movements and superpower competition unwound empires in ways frequently hostile to Western interests—Algeria, Vietnam, Iran in 1979 among them. This is what a system of competing agents looks like. It’s not what we would expect were a single cartel husbanding colonial rents and smoothing transitions.
Even where the present is concerned, Baaijen’s story is maladapted to the facts. China’s economic rise unfolded in plain view through contested policy choices—rapprochement in the 1970s, normalisation, WTO accession in 2001—combined with corporate strategies that sought lower costs and larger markets. These moves were argued over in public. Unions objected; some industries resisted; techno‑nationalists warned; optimists insisted that integration would liberalise. Today’s export controls, investment screening, sanctions, industrial policy and alliance‑building tell a simple tale: open strategic competition. If a hidden sovereign is writing this script, it has written two that aim to thwart each other.
Even where Baaijen extends his argument into contemporary public health, The Predators versus The People substitutes suspicion for method and rhetoric for data. Decades of groundwork on mRNA platforms preceded their emergency deployment. Large randomised trials and extensive real‑world surveillance, audited by independent regulators in multiple jurisdictions, show substantial reductions in severe disease and death. Adverse events exist and are monitored; benefits and risks are scrutinised in journals and public datasets. Critique the inequities and missteps of the pandemic response by all means; there’s ample material to examine. But to conclude from those failures a deliberate extermination programme is to abandon both evidence and common sense.
A deeper methodological error runs through the book. It begins with an indisputable observation—elites and interest groups exert influence—but then smuggles in an extravagant conclusion: those elites resolve into a single, omnipotent hierarchy with perfect discipline, memory and reach. Evidence for the smaller claim is offered as proof of the larger. The shift is a sleight of hand. Real networks of influence are plural, contested and leaky. Within a single government, Treasury will prize different objectives from Defence, Health or Environment; regulators, courts, media, unions and industry tug in divergent directions. Across countries the divergence multiplies. Even cartels with clear incentives, such as OPEC, struggle to enforce coherence. The European Union can wrangle for years over marginal provisions. The United Nations produces declarations that unravel in implementation. Once you listen closely, the orchestra is tuning to different keys which, of course, is the real problem.
Secrecy itself refuses to behave as a totalising thesis requires. The more nodes added to a covert scheme, the more brittle it becomes. People move, fall out, grow a conscience, call a journalist, blow a whistle, write a book. Tools for exposure have grown formidable: freedom‑of‑information statutes in dozens of jurisdictions; transnational investigative collaborations; open‑source intelligence; forensic accounting; satellite imagery; whistle‑blower protections. This infrastructure exists because open societies learned, often painfully, that power requires scrutiny. The reflex that reinterprets every exposure as theatre and every contradiction as camouflage empties that civic achievement of meaning. It is resignation masquerading as insight.
Viewed through an organisational lens, the Glafia narrative asks us to believe in something that does not exist: seamless, century‑spanning co‑ordination among thousands of actors with divergent incentives. Reality is more prosaic. Knowledge is dispersed; attention is scarce; agency chains multiply misreadings; Goodhart’s law and the Peter principle do their quiet work; factions form; success breeds complacency. Even disciplined intelligence services and religious orders split, leak and err. The real Illuminati in Bavaria, so often reimagined as omnipotent, was small, fissile and swiftly dismantled once discovered. Myth grants them immortality; history records their fragility.
None of this exonerates the powerful. Corporations game regulations. Lobbyists write paragraphs that find their way into statute. Intelligence agencies do run covert programmes; indeed some might assert that’s the CIA’s main mission. These things happen, and we should be unsparing in our criticism when they do. But they don’t add up to a single puppeteer or Wizard of Oz controlling things from behind a curtain. They describe a noisy marketplace of influence and inertia where incentives collide, jurisdictional boundaries get in the way, and outcomes are shaped as much by design flaws as by intention. The work that matters—accountability, reform, renewal—starts with that recognition.
The corrective is not a new grand theory but a steadier ethic. Be exacting with claims, prefer primary sources, ask what would falsify a hypothesis, and name wrongdoing precisely. When we find corruption or cruelty, the response is not theatre but remedy: enforcement when laws are broken; institutional redesign when incentives misfire; public investment and transparency where markets cannot or will not serve the common good. Precision in accusation and humility about what we do not know are not niceties. They are the minimum conditions for truth to surface.
Conspiracism often dresses itself as courage, but it flattens accountability. If everyone is compromised, no one must answer for anything; if everything is scripted, effort is irrelevant. The work that changes outcomes is slower and more demanding: gathering facts, testing claims, repairing trust, improving the architecture so it fails less often. That is how complex systems shift—incrementally, contentiously, and sometimes decisively—without recourse to a hidden sovereign.
The single‑villain story at the heart of The Predators versus The People seduces because it simplifies grief and anger. It gives our frustrations a face. Yet the cost is immense. It blinds us to the ordinary disciplines that keep societies viable: due process, evidence, accountability, compassion. It erodes our capacity for shared sense‑making at the very moment we must navigate planetary boundaries we’re already breaching.
If we care about intellectual integrity and the dignity it aims to secure, we should refuse the anaesthetic of total explanation. Keep faith with the archive. Attend to structures and incentives. Cherish the civic tools that let truth surface. Direct suspicion into questions that can be tested. And keep our efforts focused on the acupuncture points that shift systems, however unglamorous they may be. Sorry Meeuwis, there’s no backroom sovereign coming to save or doom us. There’s only the work we choose to do, the integrity we bring to it, and the futures—plural—we are still capable of making.