Intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.

— opening paragraph of War of the World, 1897, by H. G. Wells, author of The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution (1928) and The New World Order (1940)

Above is the opening of War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells. The words, understood properly, have more meaning than they first appeared to unsuspecting readers in 1897. While shrouded in science fiction, it was a metaphor for something happening, that Wells was fully aware of from Fabian Society meetings he attended, right here on Earth. Plans being made by men who really did have "intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic." And Wells is right and quite serious, but concealed in a Ludibrium when he says, "No one would Believe."

The same warning is found in The Coming Race written by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, also a secret society member, in 1871.

In this story a man descends into a mine where he discovers a secret race of reptilian descent, with cold loveless intelligence, planning to one day rise to the surface and destroy humanity. The novel ends with these words that precisely parallel the words of Wells:

Only, the more I think of a people calmly developing, in regions excluded from our sight and deemed uninhabitable by our sages, powers surpassing our most disciplined modes of force, and virtues to which our life, social and political, becomes antagonistic in proportion as our civilisation advances,—the more devoutly I pray that ages may yet elapse before there emerge into sunlight our inevitable destroyers. Being, however, frankly told by my physician that I am afflicted by a complaint which, though it gives little pain and no perceptible notice of its encroachments, may at any moment be fatal, I have thought it my duty to my fellow-men to place on record these forewarnings of The Coming Race.

This is not a conspiracy theory. These are the people involved in malfeasance who cannot resist telling the world what is happening in backhanded and veiled ways.

Brave New World (1938) was another example, of a world kept in willing slavery by drugs and sex.

What was common to all these authors was their distrust of democracy, of the people. The Coming Race, for instance, is full of expressions of Lytton's detestation for American democracy, though he himself was British, that are easy to locate in the text.

Such disguised hints at real ongoing 'plots' are not new. The first known is the original 1616 Rosicrucian Manifestos, written by Johann Valentin Andreae (1587–1654). They too warn of an ongoing conspiracy, conducted in secret by a concealed group, in this case the fictitious Rosicrucian order of monks. See this site for explanation of Andreae's sense of what he called "the ludibrium of the fictitious Rosicrucian Fraternity." In these works, again a group is claiming to be planning to covertly bring about a new order against the will of man, especially directly at toppling the Roman Catholic Church.

What still needs explaining, and I will try to do so in time, is less what these people had in mind for the world, but what anxieties motivated them, and the cause of these anxieties. That I will try to come to in time here, or in a book. It is not that hard to understand.