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The conspiraitist world view—the belief that a unified cabal of elitists is manipulating world events, mind controlling the population, that the main stream media is nothing but lies and that we already live in a police state and a New World Order, etc. has become ubiquitous in global culture. It is the premise of so many Facebook posts, viral memes, websites, radio shows and movies. It transcends red and blue and is as likely to be heard amongst the far right and the far left. It is a perspective widely held in Europe, Central and South America, the Arab world, Australia, New Zealand and almost any place you can think of. Typically, the purveyors of this point of view think they are daring revolutionaries waking up the sheeple, etc. and don’t seem to notice that they are actually just one more of a vast and growing multitude who hold this perspective. Many of these people are close friends of mine. My challenge to them is to listen to this talk and consider whether this worldview actually represents an awakening rather than a distorted perspective riddled with problematic assumptions and reality testing issues.
Correction: The way I mentioned a colleague of Alex Jone’s appearing on Coast makes it sound like it was John Wells, who was the host of the show, not the guest.
Although conspiratists usually claim that the mainstream media serves only to brainwash “the sheeple” etc. they never seem to notice that mainstream corporate movie studios/ television networks, etc. are always making popular high-budget movies and TV series that cater to their all-too-common worldview. There are so many movies that portray a ruling elite as a demonic force that people need to defeat. Another really obvious example is The Hunger Games. Lesser known, but with an intriguing premise is In Time with Justin Timberlake—read the first paragraph of the Wiki to see how it mythologizes the same theme. Outside of fantasy and sci-fi there are even more movies where corporatist elites are the evil ones that a group or individual protagonist must bring down. Michael Clayton with George Clooney is an excellent example. All these shows, the X Files, Mr. Robot, etc. are made because these corporate entities are not part of an Illumanati conspiracy they are part of a vast nonconspiracy—-the desire to make money. They do what will sell and bring in quarterly profits. If they wanted to make sheeple, the wouldn’t make The Hunger Games but only movies that depicted heroic young people who were loyal soldiers of the government, etc. When I point this out to conspiratists I get classic circular, delusion-conserving, responses: “They make those so you won’t think they are brainwashing you.” etc. Nazi propaganda minster Joseph Goebbels and other purveyors of Nazi culture, who really were masters of brain washing people did not make anti-Nazi films to convince people they weren’t being brainwashed. Everything they made was on-message and pulled in the same direction. You don’t brainwash people by spending hundreds of millions of dollars making Hunger Games movies that portray good-looking, charismatic young people taking down the 1% who are portrayed as corrupt, decadent, cruel, sadistic and as using their mainstream media to brainwash people!
The conspiratist world view is part of a larger problem of scorn for reality testing which is also quite common in the New Age, amongst religious fundamentalists and also militant atheists and debunker types as well as many other subcultures: See Reality Testing is Politically Incorrect
Conspiratism typically involves many of the blind spots and pitfalls of other types of esoteric study: See:
Much of what seems like a vast conspiracy are actually different permutations of the culture of psychopathy that characterizes many spheres of power. See:
Foxes and Reptiles—Psychopathy and the Financial Meltdown
Focusing on an Evil “They” can actually empower evil. See: How to Empower Evil: Keep Talking about They
Are there unseen forces manipulating the human domain to promote strife and negative emotions? The idea of a parasitic species manipulating mankind goes back (at least) to the ancient gnostics if not earlier. 2,000 year old Gnostic texts were the major inspiration for the movie, The Matrix. Although this perspective is considerably stranger than the conspiratist world view, and although I regard it as speculative, I actually think it has more merit than the idea of a unified cabal of human egos puppet mastering the world. See the Mind Parasite Category of this site where you will find a number of documents, You Tubes and podcasts on this subject. Mind Parasites, Energy Parasites and Vampires is the introductory work.
Great video on problems with the Truther view of the collapse of the Twin Towers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=mmIjDfpTeMc
My friend Jordan Lejuwaan just sent me this. He is the creator of High Existence a beautifully done website full of great insights and suggestions for living a better life. The following post, which could relates chaos theory to the conspiracy view could have been entitled “You are the Illumanati (and a snowflake)” It is brief, beautifully done, deep, wise, and cooler in the sense of less heated as my rhetoric tends to be, and snowflakes are less divisive then dissing Alex Jones, etc. http://www.highexistence.com/snowflakes-and-the-illumanati-how-chaos-theory-debunks-the-new-world-order/
And for people who say that steel buildings don’t fall down due to fire—-how many are hit by jumbo jets with full fuel tanks? Jet fuel causes steel to bend like wet noodles. National Geographic demonstrated that and in this article/video a black smith demonstrates it in his forge: http://www.addictinginfo.org/2015/12/16/sorry-911-truthers-this-new-video-totally-destroys-your-stupid-jet-fuel-conspiracy-theory-video/
Facebook post from three weeks before the 2024 election:
See:
Over a few decades, every single person I’ve heard tell me, or others, that they need to “wake up “or that they are living in a “fantasy world.” EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM, has been someone fully asleep in a world of paranoid fantasies.
For example, when I pointed out that crime is not an out-of-control carnage sweeping the country as Trump claims and that there is no out-of-control inflation, etc. said I was living in a “fantasy world.” Here’s my response:
Right, and you live in the real world of online conspiracies. Let me tell you about the fantasy world I’ve lived in. When I was 11, on a Bronx street corner, I was mauled by a German Shepard, hundreds of stitches, my head was actually in the dog’s mouth. All the muscles in my left arm were severed. I was zoned into a junior high school in the South Bronx, where I took beatings for two years. In my early twenties, I was the building security coordinator of an all-boy public high school in the South Bronx during the crack epidemic. Patroling hallways and breaking up fights all day, and we managed to keep kids relatively save in an area surrounded by block after block of burnt-out buildings. Ronald Reagan was president, and there were 2000 murders a year in NYC as compared to 3-400 today. I’ve survived numerous attempts on my life. A South Bronx kid was sent to Rikker’s for attempted manslaughter of me. My dad had severe PTSD from D-Day into his 90s, and I grew up with holocaust survivors. That’s the fantasy world I’m from. So, in my numerous recent trips to NYC and Portland this summer, I observed carefully to see the “carnage” Trump keeps raving about. I can feel the potential for violence in a situation in my whole body, and I can tell you that it was 20% of what I felt during the 70s and 80s. People like you who aren’t old enough to remember real inflation keep raving about it when we have some of the lowest inflation rates post-pandemic of any major country. You want to know what inflation is? When I was growing up, a slice of pizza cost fifteen cents. A full-size candy bar was a nickel. The inflation we’ve had in recent years is nothing compared to what we used to have. So, I’ll let you go back to your real world of online conspiracies but don’t tell me I’m living in a fantasy world.
From Zap Oracle card #582:
A sleepwalker is someone who assumes they are awake. Anyone telling you to “wake up” in a political context is almost certainly a dangerous sleepwalker trying to suck you into their nightmare. An awake person is one who realizes they are partially asleep and is actively working to expand their awareness. Someone who tells others to wake up rather than themselves is the definition of a dangerous sleepwalker.
But let me be clear, the world is full of conspiracies and always has been and we need to expose those. Nothing could be more valuable than conspiracy theories that actually did that. My dad was a super well-informed conspiracy theorist who predicted the Kennedy assassination almost to the day. Unlike the average conspiracy theorist who excels at predicting things after they happen. The problem is that most conspiracy theorists, like the one who just said I’m living in a fantasy world, massively suck at conspiracy theorizing. They “do their own research” by listening to people as horrendously bad at reality testing and evaluating sources of information as they are.
Some comments on Facebook about this:
Richard H: I was reminded we don’t live in a police state when I experienced living in the country of Jordan for six months, where the mukhbiraat (secret police) can be professors, taxi drivers, etc in order to report and arrest (esp. on the topic of speaking pub…See More
22 minutes ago · Unlike · 2
Jonathan Zap Right, as Dr. Bruce Damer pointed out in a recent dialogue we had, Americans who believe they live in a police state are usually people who have not traveled extensively. They don’t know what it’s actually like to live in a police state. This doesn’t mean that we live in a state of total freedom and we do have police that look more and more like storm troopers, unconstitutional surveillance and a corporate prison system that incarcerates way too many people, but we are still very far from living in a police state. When you live in a police state you won’t need people on the radio or Facebook to tell you because it won’t be subtle. You won’t need to be particularly “awake.” You will personally know at least 20 people who have been taken away in the middle of the night never to be seen again.
And people who don’t want to travel to any of the numerous police states in the world can watch the brilliant German film, The Lives of Others, about life in East German under the Stasi
Dear Mr. Zap,
This was very interesting, thank you.
I think you must be around some really crazy people, though!
I’m mostly around fairly sane people, I think, and I haven’t been exposed to much of the crazy thinking you describe, like saying that there’s some grand plan on the planet being coordinated by shape-shifting lizards. I once looked through the book The Biggest Secret and was aghast that anyone could take it seriously.
I’ve mostly been exposed only to the “greed” interpretation you describe, the idea that there are sociopathic competitors with an overabundance of power who are screwing things up for the rest of us as much as they can– not because they desire to screw things up for us but because they desire some other thing and have inadequate moral guidelines for their protocols.
So, I’m not personally aware of this crazy “conspiratist” world view, which sounds like exactly what you describe– a way to soothe the fear that nobody is in control as well as a way to deflect attention from one’s own failings. I can see why you might want to speak out about it.
I was really enjoying your lecture until you got into implying that the ubiquitous presence of people who don’t know how to observe themselves or check their logic indicates that conspiracy theories around 9/11 aren’t true. Huh? (You didn’t say directly that you think all 9/11 conspiracy theories are incorrect. You did say that you’re open to being proven “wrong” about 9/11 by finding out that it was, in fact, a false-flag drama, so I guess your point of view is that it wasn’t a false-flag drama.)
To make a couple of opposing arguments: Although you may be meeting and hearing from people who claim they know the “truth” about 9/11, my understanding of “The 9/11 Truth Movement” has always been that it is people SEEKING truth. All I’ve ever heard from 9/11 conspiracy theorists (and, granted, I don’t listen to Coast-to-Coast) is that 1) there is disturbing evidence that what we’ve been told happened is not what happened, 2) official investigation has been suppressed, and 3) getting the word out in a meaningful way is difficult because of the flooding of our mental culture with greed-controlled propaganda. People have a lot of ideas of what the array of motives behind a theatrical 9/11 operation could have been, but I’ve never heard anybody who’s open to a conspiracy interpretation say they know for certain what the heck was going on that day. The only people I’ve heard say they know exactly what happened are the people who say it was a terrorist attack orchestrated by Al-Quaeda and implemented by hijackers with box-cutters.
So, when you say, “Why didn’t the Bush administration just plant a WMD in Iraq?” I and the folks I find myself around would respond, “Yes, WHY?” One of the hypotheses I’ve heard about this is that the World Trade Center was becoming a liability to the buildings’ owners because of asbestos. In other words, greedy reasons could be why somebody thought a disaster was good idea. The model of greedy, overly powerful, sociopathic competitors is a perfectly reasonable place to look for an explanation of what happened that day.
I know there is a culture of people in this country who have been trained all their lives to look for big solutions that solve many problems at once, without feeling responsible for the casualties. Some successful ones of them make money as oil tycoons, military manufacturers, war profiteers, media moguls, bank executives, food engineers, and lots of other positions I’m sure I can’t even envision. For these people, orchestrating such a mess in autumn of 2001 would feel like being wise and brilliant, not evil.
Nobody needs to claim knowledge of motives to point out inconsistencies of evidence. In the same way, dismissing evidence because you can’t think of a suitable motive doesn’t make sense, either. One of the virtues of conspiracy thinking can be recognizing that there are people who think differently from you, as in, “I cannot conceive of wanting to do such a thing, but it appears that somebody powerful in this country wanted either to cause or to facilitate the destruction that happened on 9/11. I don’t understand why they might have wanted to do this, but it looks like they did. As a citizen, I feel entitled to some answers, and I’m noticing that my access to the answers I want is being blocked.” This is reasonable thinking.
I guess I ended up disappointed by how it appears that you’ve let such an abundance of people saying “Wake up!” in the spheres you frequent distract you from the people who are quietly saying, “Well, things just aren’t lining up.” There are a lot of things that don’t line up. I don’t want this to be true, but it is. I hope you’re not shortening your own investigation because you keep meeting bozos.
Thank you for your video,
Kenna J.
Hi Mr Zap,
I enjoyed your talk a lot. Thank you.
I have some concerns in regards to a few aspects of your presentation. Granted, many people who hold the conspiratist world view are extreme, often things are exaggerated and points are made out of context, connecting dots that don’t connect etc… It is a big movement and not everyone involved approaches their research with integrity and honesty. I guess in a way it is an industry in and of itself, it attracts vulnerable people, they get exploited and preyed upon by people looking to profit from the movement. It is dicey territory and often individuals who approach trying to unravel some of these mysteries are unable to hold it all together. I think that there is a growing movement towards understanding events and discovering truth is overall a positive thing, obviously, we are all making mistakes, making assumptions without realising it etc… There are annoying people in every culture/sub culture… I think your presentation focuses too heavily on this.
I agree, that there are competing forces striving for power within the world… but, at the same time, there is also a well documented plan for an economic system of world control, that is undeniable. If you would like me to reference this claim I’m happy to.
the main mode of administering this planned system of world control is through the monetary system. Most conspiratist come from this point of view… Why do you not deal with this very credible, well researched aspect of the story? Money creation & Debt slavery… Who is the ‘World’ bank? Who is the ‘International’ monetary fund? Who the private share holders are of reserve bank stock is not information known to the public. I think it is fair to say that whoever these money creators are, are the ones holding the cards. They can direct traffic and sway political events. The pay the governments. They are in a sense their employer. They decide where the money goes. That is their means of seeking control over the physical reality. It has been very successful. For many people, their lives are dominated by money, usually not having enough. It is almost essential to have to coexist with the environment. There is a small group of individuals who not only have the majority of this money but actually create the money. This is evident. This is factual.
Some people feel the need to fill the gaps in from this point, I’d prefer not to speculate about who “they” are. When something is in shadow it appears in a more dark/grotesque form, we collectively sense the embedded evil lurking in the shadows, we cant identify it, it pains us because we are supposed to be smart, not deluded, in control, have the answers. There is a sense that this physical reality is ruled over by an evil and powerful force that we cannot identify. giving it a name, giving it a face is a stage in the process of its revealing. Greys, Lizards, whatever… the picture will become clearer the closer it moves to the light. What we can know at this point is that the same people who create the money, steer political events and they have a plan, the plan is a structured global economic system.
There are globalists that have a globalist agenda. It is a substantial threat to humanity and the ecology of the planet. Frustrating things conspiratists say in bars doesn’t discredit this.
I simply have to comment on the point you made about the ‘movies’. the answer to your question is poised within it. Weight to certain ideas is instantly discredited if there is already a hollywood film about it. It destabilises the ideas represented.” Isnt that a movie with Matt Damon? hahahaha You’re dumb!” etc… surely you can see the strategy in this. Also, these ideas are gaining momentum in collective consciousness, hollywood is forced to comment.
I hope that the mechanics behind how things work and who pulls the strings becomes clearer to us collectively. I’m not sure how nit picking over annoying things that conspiracy theorists say or think is really helping develop the certain consciousness needed for people to become more aware and empowered. Taking down and deconstructing is just so too easy.
I find architects and engineers for 9/11 truth a pretty reliable source of information on the controlled demolition theory as far as I’m concerned that has not been unanimously dismissed.
Hope you’re having a good day and journeying well
Cheers
Matt Leopard
Conspiracies not only exist, they are rampant. Wherever you find organized sociopaths (banking, government, military commanders, etc.), you will find lots of conspiracies. It’s what sociopaths do. Life is a game of deception and manipulation to them. They have no remorse for their crimes and no empathy for their victims. And they are very good at what they do.
It’s easy to discredit individual truthers, but that’s just attacking the low-level messengers. Try discrediting the message instead. The official 9/11 story is bogus, and the preponderance of evidence confirms it. Trying to figure out what really happened is much more difficult, and that is by design. Plausible deniability is always built into the con-game. You don’t expose the con by showing how every little thing was orchestrated. Instead, you look for the subtle errors, the holes in the story that indicate that something doesn’t add up. And finding the holes in the official 9/11 story is not difficult. You ignore them at your own peril, just like in any con-game.
There is a valid point to be made that people fighting for the truth can display many of the same behaviors as the people trying to hide the truth. That is, of course, one of the reasons why conspiracies, or you can call them con-games, are so successful. Many people are easy to fool, and some people are masters of deception.
Hi Jonathan,
I found your podcast to be vital in the reality testing of the “truth movement” or whatever it’s called, but I find some faults in it as well as faults in the common perspective of this “movement” (which you share in, but articulate more clearly).
I know this might seem like spam and you’re free to delete this comment or edit the link out of it, but I want to initiate dialogue or at least get you to read what I think is a lovingly crafted response to your concerns and criticisms.
http://nagualgrove.com/the-daily-llama/re-problems-with-the-conspiratist-world-view/
Something that REALLY threw me off about 9/11 is the Larry Silverstein guy, “Lucky Larry”, What do you think about that?