Johnny One Note and His Digital Hobby Horse
Once you get into any movement, especially a fringe movement, you come across the person we all know and want to avoid: Johnny One Note.
Johnny has only one theme. He may know several choruses, but it is still the same theme. The world, he believes, circles around a single theme. Whatever is wrong with the world emanates from one source. The restoration of the Golden Age will come about by overcoming the bad guys who are running the world from conspiracy central.
This outlook is an extension of a legitimate social development: the division of intellectual labor. We are all different. We have different skills. We have different interests. So, we have a tendency to believe that whatever interests us, or whatever makes us money, or whatever threatens us, is the central problem of society. That which we perceive is our individual central problem is also what we think is everybody's central problem. But it isn't.
CONSPIRACY THEORIES
Conspiracy theorists who trace everything to one conspiracy are typical of this mentality. They are convinced that if this single conspiracy could be exposed, and if everybody knew about this conspiracy, there would be universal outrage. The masses would rise up to thwart this conspiracy. Then the millennium would begin.
People who believe this are obsessed. They are also obsessive. They are also a gigantic pain in the tush. They just can't stop talking about the one universal conspiracy. They also have an enormous faith in salvation by knowledge. They believe that if they could just persuade everybody about the evil machinations of this one group, the masses would respond. I contend that the masses would not respond. The masses don't give a rip. The masses want to watch TV, have a beer, and avoid thinking about big problems. Their idea of a big problem is running out of money before the end of the month. For them, this really is a big problem. That's why they are part of the masses.
I have written about a classic example of a Johnny One Note in my life, although I have not seen the guy for 35 years. He was a great believer in the fully informed jury, and his recommended tactic was jury nullification. I am in favor of both, but my life did not then, nor does it now, focus on these two issues. He could not stop talking about jury nullification. I would see him at hard-money conference after hard-money conference, and he would always approach me, telling me how much he liked my speech, no matter what I had spoken about. But he always came back to jury nullification. I'm sure he did this with everybody else. The moment anybody saw him, the person's thought was this: "Please, please, let him collar somebody else."
Then there are the people who declare: "All is lost." All is lost because of some particular defect in the political order. They have identified the central defect, and they have also made a career out of exposing it. But hardly anybody pays any attention to them. A few people send them some money to help fight the evil, despite the fact that things are always getting worse. This individual becomes dependent on the money sent in by these people, so he returns to the theme, over and over and over. The theme is this: "All is lost! Therefore, send me money."
ROTHBARD ON CONSPIRACIES
I much preferred Murray Rothbard's approach to such matters. He was perfectly willing to admit that there was another conspiracy that he had neglected, or another evil trend that he had missed. He would analyze the conspiracy or the trend in terms of the expansion of the state, which it usually was associated with. He would study its origins. He would trace its connections. He would find five books no one ever heard about, and he would discuss them. He would enthusiastically proclaim it as one more example of a statist inroad into our sphere of liberty. But he would not obsess over it. He would soon go on to the next one. He had one word for all of them: monstrous. And so they were.
For him, the whole world was a grab bag of evil trends. On the outside of the bag was this label: the state.
He did not think there was a single source of all of these conspiracies, all of these statist pretensions, all of these bureaucratic nightmares. He did think there was an overarching source of the funding: the state. He did not believe that the millennium will arrive by eliminating the state. He just thought the elimination of the state would make it cheaper for the millennium to arrive: "more millennium for the gold-backed buck." It would free up human creativity.
He did not believe in the universal goodness of man. He just believed that a lot of bad men gravitate towards the state to gain leverage for whatever evil and power-enhancing strategy they have adopted to feather their own nests. He believed that the best way to stop them is to eliminate the state. He believed, as Hayek believed, that there is a tendency for the worst to get on top by means of the state.
I don't think we can eliminate the state. I believe that there are gang leaders out there who would like to become warlords. They specialize in the thing they are best at: violence. Step by step, we would wind up with another state unless we organized politically. In short, if it ain't one state, it's another.
The mark of a crackpot is his single-source theory of evil. Religions can blame it all on the devil. Those of us who remember Flip Wilson's character Geraldine remember Geraldine's universal explanation for everything questionable that she did: "The devil made me do it." Maybe the devil did make her do it, but it was her enthusiastic cooperation that was the problem. It's everybody's problem.
CONCLUSION
I recommend that you do not obsess over any particular trend in society. There are numerous trends, and people join numerous special-interest groups and action groups either to extend the trends or to try to reverse them.
The division of labor is a good thing. No one has enough time, money, energy, and emotional commitment to fight all of the evil trends, nor support all of the righteous trends. We have to specialize. The danger is that we conclude that the thing we are specializing in is the central problem or central solution to the evils of the day.
For both good and evil, never forget this truth: "There's more where that came from." This reinforces a conclusion: "There is plenty left to do." There is even this possibility: maybe you can set up an organization to fight something, and somebody will send you some money.
Specialize, but don't become obsessed.