Welcome to "Meet the Conspiracies", a devlog series in which I'll be introducing the six playable factions of Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars. I'll be discussing the history of the real-world conspiracy theory, how they'll be depicted in the game itself, and how reasonable I personally think it is to believe in the underlying conspiracy theory.

Meet the Conspiracies, Part 2:

The Freemasons

The Freemasons have turned out to be one of the places where I have to exercise my own creativity the most in inventing the lore of the game, and that's for a simple reason: the Freemasons are the original conspiracy theory. 

The Real Freemasons

In reality the Freemasons are a social club for upper middle class white dudes. I could go into the historical roots of Freemasonry, but the reality is that there's a near total absence of direct evidence of their existence predating the 18th century. It is widely held that their claims of a lineage tracing back to medieval stonemason trade guilds are true, but hard evidence is lacking, and there is no widely agreed-upon explanation for where the elaborate rites and rituals of Freemasonry came from, as they are generally held to not be authentic medieval rites. 

Discussing the reality of Freemasonry is fraught, because unlike Jews, Jesuits, and Communists, Freemasons don't need conspiracy theorists to make up wild myths about them, doing that themselves is basically the whole point of Freemasonry. My personal theory is that the rituals were an artificial attempt to create a Western Christian esoteric tradition, after the Reformation and Counter-Reformation led to a society where religion was more approachable and less mystical. I don't think it's a coincidence that the Freemasons, a supposedly medieval institution, emerge onto the scene of history in the middle of the Enlightenment - of course, other people didn't think that was a coincidence either, but for very different reasons.

The Freemasons were the subject of what might be the first conspiracy theory ever, and what is certainly the first modern conspiracy theory. Before I even get into the details, I think I should probably establish exactly what a conspiracy theory is. While the Blood Libel could arguably be called a conspiracy theory, and that absolutely goes back to the middle ages; a conspiracy theory, in the modern sense, is a belief that a historical event was not caused by its apparent instigators, but as the result of a deliberate, coordinated campaign by a group of individuals, working in secret, to affect an outcome which primarily or exclusively benefits them. That's a wordy description, but the first part is the most important, the idea that the simple or generally-accepted explanation for an event is false. A conspiracy theory is a kind of historical revisionism. That's a mode of historiography, a way of thinking about history itself, which is very modern. I would be way out of my depth talking about why, but that's basically why conspiracy theories only come into existence when they do: it requires the tools of historical criticism, and in the West that's a direct product of the Enlightenment.

So then, if conspiracy theories can only really come about in a modern era, then it makes sense that the first conspiracy theory revolves around one of the first great events of the modern era: the French Revolution. The theory, mostly promulgated by English academics, was that the Freemasons engineered the French Revolution to advance their own interests. and the basis for this theory is that many of the men in the Revolutionary government were Freemasons. There are two serious flaws with this theory, one merely suggestive, the other fatal. First, while many of the revolutionaries were Freemasons, they weren't in the majority. More importantly, though, many, many French aristocrats, who met their ends on the guillotine, were themselves Freemasons. That's because, unlike in Great Britain, French Freemasonry was much more open - to people in general (including women), and to the aristocracy; whereas everywhere but France, Freemasonry was a distinctly bourgeois subculture.

The uniqueness of French Freemasonry (which survives to this day as Continental Freemasonry) provides a reasonable explanation for why people might believe in the conspiracy theory - they would have had little knowledge of Freemasonry in their own country, let alone regional differences. However, the general notion of a secret conspiracy being responsible for the French Revolution would wind up having more legs than the specific anti-masonic theory, and it would directly, and I mean directly, mutate into the most consequential conspiracy theory in history.

To make a long story very short, Napoleon was uncommonly tolerant of Jews for a European ruler of his day. He abolished many forms of  institutional discrimination against Jews, both in France and in the lands he conquered. How much of this was out of genuine liberalism vs a cynical play to win the support of a significant minority is wildly out of the scope of this blog post, and I don't want to whitewash the ways in which Napoleon still persecuted Jews, albeit to a lesser degree than was normal for the era; but the fact remains that Napoleon was tolerant of Jews and his enemies did not like this. You can probably see where this is going.

The "Freemasons did the French Revolution" conspiracy theory was directly recycled into what might be called the first true antisemitic conspiracy theory, if not for the fact that is the antisemitic conspiracy theory; there has only ever been the one, stuff just keeps getting added to it. And if the idea of "The Freemasons overthrew a country they were already substantially influential in, in order to implement an unstable government they were slightly more influential in" was a goofy notion, then "a hated minority convinced their persecutors to kill the king so that, eleven years later, a military strongman would come to power who would instruct his government to treat them slightly worse than Christians, instead of much much worse" is an absolute joke, one that would be very funny if it weren't for the millions of murders it would be used to justify. Writings which blamed "The Jews" for the French Revolution would later be plagiarized to create the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. You know the rest of the story.

The Freemasons in SILENT WEAPONS FOR QUIET WARS

Because the Freemasons are effectively the template for all other conspiracy theories, there's not a lot of "lore" that's truly specific to them, other than the iconography (and even a lot of that has been associated with the Illuminati) so trying to turn them into a faction with as many unique features as Majestic 12 is challenging.  My solution is to mostly take reference not from genuine conspiracy theories, but from other portrayals of the Freemasons, and from fiction which draws on the Freemasons for inspiration.

I'm just going to lay it out, there's no use dancing around it: one of the biggest influences on the Freemasons in Silent Weapons is the Greendale Air Conditioning Repair School from the TV series Community. Specifically, the way that it's an institution with unbroken continuity back to Ancient Egypt. My original concept for the Freemasons would have had them be worshippers of the literal Egyptian pantheon, since that would be more creative than their Old Gods being generically Lovecraftian (the option I went with), but that level of strange specificity would not fit well with the other factions which are deliberately quite generic interpretations. 

The fact is that the Freemasons are very much still a work in progress. When the game launches, probably at least one thing I've said here will be totally wrong. Broadly speaking, they will definitely engage directly with the Occult Artifact mechanics in order to achieve their particular victory. Their rites and degrees of initiation will make it harder to sway characters away from them, and maybe even grant some arcane abilities. I'm literally brainstorming game design ideas right now as I write this, that's how far from being done I am here. Currently their victory is to awaken their Old Gods, but just now I realized it should be building some kind of Bronze Age wonder. That would be sweet. Sorry, this should not have been instalment number 2.

Plausibility Rating: 3/10

On the one hand, Freemasons are usually pretty influential dudes in their community. On the other hand, country clubs already exist. I give the Freemasons conspiracy theory a plausibility rating of 3/10 because it's not totally preposterous, and it is an organization that literally exists, but the notion of Freemasons coordinating for the purpose of advancing Freemasonry is about as dumb as a conspiracy theory can get without crossing the line into total nonsense.

Who do you want to learn about next?

Post a comment and let me know which conspiracy should be highlighted next:

• The Illuminati
• The Communist International
• The Jesuits
• The Church of Satan