Problems with the Conspiratist World View

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:

Carnival 2012—A Psychological Study of the 2012 Phenomenon and the Twenty-Two Pitfalls and Blindspots of Esoteric Research

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.