Surpassing All Kings: Proofs of a Conspiracy...wrap up

Well, we did it. It took us nine months, but we have closed the back cover on the first book to warn us of the dangers of a private club of 18th-century skeptics. So what did we learn?

Well, we learned that conspiracy theory books are pretty much the same throughout time. Remember this is the first book to call the Illuminati out and it reads like a slightly better-written version of the books that get popped out today. This is an interesting difference because Robison doesn't have access to the vocabulary or the concepts that we do. Otherwise, there isn't a substantial difference other than the historical references that peppered Gary Allen's book. Yet they are still arguing against the same thing, the encroachment of "liberalism." The funny thing about that is Allen would be Robison's enemy, I don't think that Allen would understand Robison's complaints.

As much as I dislike Gary Allen's book and the ideas of the John Birch Society, I don't think that they were against women being educated or having their own ideas. I want to call them ingrained misogynists but I have no evidence (at least no evidence in "None Dare Call it Conspiracy") to make that kind of claim. Allen would probably not think it to be a big deal that women attended the opera unescorted with bare arms. Yet Allen and the JBS; had a huge problem with the civil rights movement in the 1960s so who knows. 

Another interesting facet, that I brought up a few times in the last 9 months, is that Robison could have known these people. This absolutely blows my mind and it is a glaring lack that a Mason would not have just inquired to another Mason about the people in his book. Weishaupt and Robison are both alive at the same time. Robison is a famous natural philosopher, there is no doubt in my mind, that someone like Adam Weishaupt would have come if invited, "I'm sorry, one of the major Scottish intellectuals wants an audience. I'll accept directly." 

In the introduction to the book, I mentioned that someone provided Thomas Jefferson a copy of the book and he called it the ravings of a "bedlamite." Again, Jefferson is alive at this point. These people could have shared a table with Benjamin Franklin and Adam Smith. Why not put that team together and have that discussion in a book? 

That Adam Smith doesn't get a mention is very strange to me because his "Wealth of Nations" did more to overturn the status quo than anything else as his book wrecked the economic principle of mercantilism and ushered in a system where anyone, even the non-blue blooded peasant class could become wealthy. In fact, it's this idea that contributes to the French Revolution as their merchant class was the only group producing anything of value. Because they were being shunned from the decision-making process created discontent and they saw the value of the Enlightenment. 

Finally, there is the chain of inspiration. As I have said, concurrent to this book, was Augustin Barruel's work on the history of the French Revolution titled "Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism." These works occurred about the same time, and according to Robison, he was unaware of the Barruel book. At first, they both seem to agree with each other but later Barruel will claim that Robison is wrong. Conspiracy theories create schism even within the same belief, this is because it's all emotional and at the core, the individuals become quite possessive of their belief systems. In either case, these two books are so highly influential that without them there may very likely have been no Illuminati conspiracy. Not to say that David Icke would never have happened, but that we would have a different name for them.

We will begin our next conspiracy book "Behold a Pale Horse" by Bill Cooper. Digital copies exist on the internet archive. I'll be using a PDF version of the book and going by those page numbers. Just looking at it now, the PDF page numbers are about 6 ahead of the numbers on the page (my version isn't a scanned version either). 

I would recommend the book "Pale Horse Rider" by Mark Jacobson as a biography of Cooper, or you can check out the two episodes of "Behind the Bastards" podcast where they cover him. The host basically summarizes the book leaving out some of the cultural contexts and the impact of the book. I'm going to skim through the 35-page introduction that Cooper writes for the book. Most of it is just family history stuff that I'm going to give Cooper the benefit of the doubt on. There are a couple of remarks that he's made in the intro that is worth delving into, but if you are reading along and you just want to get into it. Just start at the first chapter and we will get to that in two weeks.