“Social psychologists believe that feelings of frailty and uncertainty associate an individual with a tendency to believe in conspiracies”, said Karen M Douglas, Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom. Conceivably, it is true, to have something to lean on is an instinct to regain a sense of control, even if the conspiracy is unrelated to what caused the lack of control in an individual’s life. But what if this is just another conspiracy theory to dwarf all the other conspiracy theories?

If you remember watching The Matrix, you would probably remember Mr Anderson (Keanu Reaves), an otherwise rational person making the leap from prudent paranoia to a not so illogical conspiracy, which led him to the dilemma of choosing between the red and the blue pill. There exists a gnawing feeling of not having control over your life - the dissatisfaction which hinders you from living your life to the fullest. And that is what happened with Adam Weishaupt, founder of The Illuminati.

Born in 1748 in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, Weishaupt was a descendant of Jewish converts to Christianity. Orphaned at a young age, his uncle took care of his education. After completing his studies, Weishaupt became a Professor of canon law at the University of Ingolstadt, got married and started a family. He seemed to have a conventional career until 1784 when the Bavarian state learned about his distinct and provocative ideas. Since childhood, being an avid reader, Weishaupt was convinced that religious ideas were no longer an adequate belief system and hence, he decided to find another form of illumination.

May 1, 1776 saw the first Illuminati meet in a forest near Ingolstadt to find the order and there, they established the rules that were to govern the order. The order was a set of scientific ideas and practices that could be applied to radically change the way European states were run. By the end of 1784, Weishaupt’s secret order grew considerably to 3,000 members and by the mid 1780’s, theIlluminati caught the Bavarian government’s attention, which put an end to the secret society. Weishaupt fled and gave up the secret shenanigans.

What does the Illuminati want?

Conspiracy theorists obsessively analyse public events for evidence of Illuminati infiltration in the modern-day world. There have been many events which are said to be proof of the fact that the Illuminati has infiltrated the ranks of prominent leaders, celebrities, clergymen, business tycoons and pharmaceutical companies around the globe, who are affiliated with it and are collectively working to secure their main objective. Back in 2013, when Beyonce performed at superbowl and flashed a pyramid (believed to be the Illuminati’s symbol) with her hands, the internet was lit up with conjectures that she was a member of the secret society. While this might be a baseless conspiracy theory on the grounds of impracticality, it is logical for many who believe they have seen things. Moreover, there exists a condition called Pareidolia, which causes humans to see objective patterns in random stimuli, often attaching humane characteristics to non-living objects, for instance, seeing the face of Jesus in a cream cracker or the date of Apocalypse in Trump’s social security number. Though rationality makes conditions like Pareidolia seem utter nonsense, one can argue that wild-imagination has always fuelled pragmatic creativity.

Conspiracy theorists have been warning about a New World Order for decades, going all the way back to the isolationist critics of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The New World Order or NWO is claimed to be a totalitarian world government led by a secretive power elite conspiring to rule the planet. Though it holds little significance whether any secret society wants to instigate a new world order or a group of power-hungry humans who want to control the world, it nonetheless merits some investigation.

What is the New World Order?

The New World Order is a supposedly autocratic world government (or a Cosmocratic government), which signifies the idea of having ONE central government for every country, institution and state in the world. A Cosmocratic style of government can come to power either through violent world domination or voluntary supranational union. Cosmocracy is a polity made up with recombinant structures that are themselves products of constantly changing, yet permanently unfolding processes. It is a moving target that produces unexpected and highly unstable targets. Though that is one way to look at it, there are numerous ways to perceive this form of world order. Having a single government for everybody will result in absolute harmony among different nations implying that most likely there will be no trade and nuclear wars, rather homogeneity will breed bonhomie between countries.

A single government at the world stage may also ensure that after people become unbound from nature, they will create more anthropocentric forms of organizations, and one among them is democracy. Cosmocracy brings this cycle to a close and leads us back to the essential unity of all things - nature.

Is something like the NWO feasible?

The likeliness of a Cosmocratic government’s rise to power is undoubtedly negligible, given the severe political and socio-economic turmoil it may bring. Any leader who is at the top of the world’s power structure and wields enormous power has a good chance of indulging in malpractices and corruption. The world surely cannot afford to give such power to a small group of individuals, because at the end of the day, they are just humans and have a good chance of becoming corrupt because of the unlimited power the position entails. Also, in the status quo, we live in a world in which people are inherently very proud of their cultural practices, which naturally results in any of their actions (at a macro level) aimed towards making their ‘nation’ great. In such a scenario, if we elect people from a particular country or even if we ensure that the Cosmocratic government is such which consists of equal representation from all parts of the world, there is no way we can eradicate personal bias towards their nations. This is a factor which defeats the purpose of having one government at a global level because if the leaders do not work to cater to the interests of all people across the world, the implementation of this new order will be futile. Moreover, setting up such a government is not pragmatic at all. We have around 200 countries in the world, albeit we cannot have 200 leaders at the world centre, so there has to be some type of filtration system to see from where the leaders are to be elected, which will naturally give the leaders from the first world nations an upper-hand.

However, such a type of government may surely be beneficial in a post-apocalyptic scenario.

Throughout the course of history, the most powerful advocates of change have emerged out of destructive circumstances. Citing some examples from history - the nation-state to geopolitics emerged from the Peace of Westphalia, which marked the end of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48) in Central Europe. The political concept of balance of power gained greater importance with the Congress of Vienna, which emerged in the aftermath of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars (1792-1815). Besides, The League of Nations, a noble, yet short-lived experiment in circumscribing power competition, emerged from the First World War.

The transformation of the world order into a new world order may result from extremely farsighted diplomacy, for which diplomats and policymakers around the world will have to do more than push for incremental improvements within an inadequate system. A possibility entails that if not from diplomacy, the NWO may arise from an apocalypse, though it is terrifying to consider what might have to occur for a new order to emerge in this way, isn’t it?