My brother and I have been arguing about that all of our lives. He believes everything is intentional and it's just a matter of discovering who benefits. I see chaos that nobody intends or controls. His political landscape is a tapestry of conspiracy theories and mine is a fog of war. I think his is more comforting, since it admits a possibility of a rational, predictable world.

I'd synthesize those as: "There is a lot of chaos with no central plan, but every small piece happens because someone believes they will benefit."

In other words, a lot of this depends on what scale/scope is being inspected. On the high level, the world is chaos rather than a meticulous and inscrutable plan of the Illuinati Shadow Cabal. On the low level, people do things for reasons, even if they're dumb ones.

With respect to the "current political climate", I'd like to suggest that a lot of dumb or seemingly "against their own interests" stuff is due to people prioritizing costly in-group loyalty signals. Their interest in staying good with the tribe is just higher than their interest against a dumb national policy.

It’s intentional in the sense that actors are acting intentionally for their own benefit (or at least what they believe is beneficial) and following incentives. Not that there is a master planner who manipulates everything

the thing is, that fog might've been true decades ago, but for 100 billionaires to sit in a virtual smokey room and do the shit they want to do, that's not really a conspiracy.

It's just peter theil's texting groups.

The ability to conspiracy both willing and unwilling is such a low threshold now, it's virtually indistinguishable.

You watch one billionaire do something and you're like, I'm a billionaire, I should do that too.

The fact that there's so few billionaires, the probability that they conspire together both direct and indirect approaches 1.

The inverse of course is rediciously hard to conceive: the working class bands together to get something like universal healthcare.