Holiday - Conspiracy

This is the story of a conspiracy, the story of a billionaire who set out to make an example of a millionaire, to destroy the mans lifes work in response to a cruel transgression made as thoughtlessly as it was quickly forgotten. It is a story of poetic justice on a grand scale, plotted silently for nearly a decade. It is also a book about that controversial word and methodconspiracywhich has long terrified and intrigued.

There is an unpleasantness in talking about conspiracies, Ill grant that. Yet conspiracy is a neutral word. It depends on what one does with it. Our tendency to shy away from this truth creates a profound ignorance of how things really work, and what it means to be strategic, to be powerful, and to try to shape events rather than simply be shaped by them.

So what then do we mean when we talk about this word? Certainly not imaginative guesses about what goes on in the shadows, or silly theories. Conspiracy entails determined, coordinated action, done in secretalways in secretthat aims to disrupt the status quo or accomplish some aim.

There is a moment in The Great Gatsby when Jay Gatsby introduces Nick Carraway to Meyer Wolfsheim, mentioning offhandedly that he is the man who fixed the 1919 World Series. The idea staggers Gatsbys idealistic young friend. Of course, Carraway knew the series had been thrown. But if I had thought of it at all, he says, I would have thought of it as a thing that merely happened, the end of some inevitable chain. It was unbelievable to him then, as it is to us now, that a single person could have been responsible for changing the outcome of an event watched by some fifty million people.

In real life, the 1919 World Series was fixed not by Wolfsheim, but with great skill and audacity by Arnold Rothstein, a Jewish gangster. A young lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army named Dwight Eisenhower eagerly followed the game as the scores came in via telegram, and like everyone else, never suspected a thing. He would remark years later that the revelation of the conspiracy that had thrown the series produced a profound change in his perspective about the world; it taught him never to trust in first appearances.

Nearly a century has passed, and too many of us have not yet lost that Jazz Age navet. One longtime Washington columnist wrote recently that years of covering politics taught him one lesson: the legend of Washington as a ceaseless, ruthless, scheming place is simply that, a legend. The truth, he says, is that No one can carry out complicated plans. All parties and groups are fractious and bumbling. We nod our heads in agreement. We shake our heads in disappointment.

This is a book for a world that has come to think like Nick Carraway, riding in disbelief through life on the wake of conspiracies we wont believe until we see, unable to comprehend why they happen and who makes them happen. This ignorance of how things really work is depressing to me. Because it opens us up to manipulation. It closes us off from opportunities to produce fruitful change and advance our own goals. It is time to grow up.

Nick Denton, whom you will come to know in these pages, is a kind of freethinker who has always held that the things other people are afraid to say are precisely the ones that need saying most. Peter Thiel, whom you will also come to know, has famously become associated with one question, which he uses in interviews and over long dinners: What important truth do very few people agree with you on?

Ill give you mine to close this short preface: Perhaps we have too few conspiracies, not too many. Too little scheming, rather than too much. What would happen if more people took up plotting, coordinating how to eliminate what they believe are negative forces and obstacles, and tried to wield power in an attempt to change the world? We could almost always use more boldness, and less complacency. We could use less telegraphing of our intentions or ambitions and see what secrecy, patience, and planning might accomplish. We could use a little more craziness and disruption, even from the people we disagree with.

This book is my homage to that complicated idea, told in part through the complicated story of one almost unbelievable conspiratorial act.

Please use it wisely.