There is an increasing prevalence of obsession with conspiracy in political discourse. It worries me, that many of the most defining political debates of our time get heated up in mostly unsubstantiated charges of conspiracy: 9-11 "truthers", the Tea Party, islamophobes, and so on. This is not to say that conspiracies criminal and murderous are nonexistent. The trouble is, unsubstantiated conspiracy theories are permitted to clog the limited bandwidth promoting the advancement of political awareness and engagement. As a result, there is a nihilistic trend that is stunting (especially among younger people) motivation to discover what is happening to our societies, and dulling incentive to become informed and involved. If everything, nearly every major event of our times is considered conspiracy, there is very little purchase left for individuals on the perceived "outside" taking part in history. If at any scale of human interaction we resign ourselves to unassailable elites, then there isn't much hope for a better world. Pondering this sort of defeatism often leads me to my own pet "conspiracy theory" if you will: Superorganism. That our species often competes in directing our destiny with a separate (but not superior) life-form or super-meme, sometimes referred to as "the system", "the Man", or "the Institution"; maybe "the Matrix" in strictly collective-consciousness sense. This superorganism is not (in my perception of it) more intelligent than we, as a species or as individuals, or superior in any way. But it pushes back noticeably, often emphatically when challenged. Societies seem to operate like rudimentary programs in virtual machines, existing in the software of collective human consciousness, and there are sometimes curious operations and routines. We are the hardware, but we typically think and act (as individuals and peers) as if the superorganism (if we perceive it at all) is beyond our control- or, that the major political events of our times are mostly (if not all) part of conspiracies. This is not only unfortunate but crippling, because if unsubstantiated conspiracy theories sufficiently clog the bandwidth of the most defining political debates of our times, then in the broadest sense we may become dumbed-down and nihilistic to the point that it will not require a fast-evolving hyperintelligent superorganism to seize our destiny. The irony to me is that habitual conspiracy-theorists who cry wolf about most stories of our time may be conspiring in contributing to the undoing of our species our troubles.
Where there's smoke, there is usually fire. I find it just as shocking that people seem to naturally assume that people in power DO NOT conspire...ever? Since when, like this kind of thing after 1000s of years history from tyrants to royalty to economic factions has proven true, true, true...do we suddenly assume the "great game" is not still played? Because the U.S has a constitution? Because WWII eliminated all the evil people? Bullshit.
Are you alledging that these latter parties are unsubstantiated in their charges of conspiracy, or that there are charges of conspiracy against them, or that the charge of existence of same is conspiratorial? I suppose it's the former: in which case the question is what those charges specifically happen to be. It goes without saying that conspiracies do exist; it is the question as to which are reasonably likely and which are implausible. I would also ask that in making such charges of false conspiracy, it should be carefully asked what their actual statements are. It may be easy to mistake social commentary for an accusation of conspiracy, when the subject matter is disagreeable to the recipient. In regards to your "superorganism": this is conceivable. Neural connections are not random; the imposition of societal networks of thinking are not designed to produce chaos; personality is malleable. That such generalized patterns of thinking - common to nearly every social, religious or political description - are real is very believable and, I would argue, self-evident. How shall such be combatted? I argue that a return to classical education would be best: the trivium, the quadrivium. Give students real tools to discern reality, not pap. It takes only will. And probably a benevolent dictatorship, and several generations. But such damage as our society has accrued is not easily fixed.
^ Agreed upon... :bravo: By the way "conspiracy theory" is normally taken out of context and ironically, in my opinion, the manafactured association of "conspiracy theory" with things like lets say crazies,etc. is a conspiracy theory on its own.
I think sometimes it's a mechanism to explain concepts and actions too large to be detailed in a given thought or conversation. What I would contest is that many of these so called " Conspiracy theories" are secret or less than factual. More often they are over simplifications of a broader topics used to illustrate the narrators point of view. As for the three examples of destructive "CT"s. What on earth about the Tea party or islamophobia is considered conspiracy or theory? (Or perhaps you're referring to the lefts description of the tea party as blood thirsty, racist paramilitary force prepared to shoot their way to power.) Anyway, for many people it's just tradition and survival/food on the table kind of thing. However,I think there is a point when it becomes potentially dangerous. Alex Jones and David Icke come to mind. I have to wonder how many people buy into the giant lizard shtick.
I find it incredibly ironic that someone who routinely questions basic facts about Al Qaeda -- and even at one point questioned whether the hijackers could actually have flied the planes without govt. training (or something) -- is the person who begins this thread.
The dialectical contrast between the average man on the street with the fringe elements of society serves only the legitimization of normalcy. This is ironically the thing that keeps us most locked into the matrix. So long as there are "crazies", the proof of our sanity is assured by default. Normalcy is then seen as an honorable measuring stick from which to distinguish us and them. However, the tipping point of credulity was reached for me once I realized that most people are only living an imitation of life. What passes for normal in contemporary society is a glassy-eyed provisional existence caught between a mindless celebrity worshiping cultural milieu and tortuously boring familial relations. It's understandable that the world of secret societies, alien implants, and global hegemonic agendas provides such a strong enticement out of the mundane. And I certainly believe that many people sense there is something fundamentally wrong with the world. Conspiracy theories offer easy answers. And that's not a commentary on their veracity, I have no doubt that there are shadowy figures operating in pockets of power against the better interests of humanity. But too me its only symptomatic of deeper issues. Also, of strong consideration to me is the narrative that we are taught growing about history as the story of charismatic statesman molding society into their vision of a better tomorrow. Who can blame conspiracy theorists for taking the lesson that the individual is only a pawn for the agenda of powerful people at face value? The narrative of history never empowers the individual to think of his or her life as the sacrosanct and inviolate pillar of civilization. No, the individual is always expendable. If you don't rise to a position of prominence in the political or corporate system, your life simply has no meaning. It is the property of those figures perched higher up on the food chain and you can expect to be answerable to them whenever it is convenient to their purposes. Most children grasp pretty early on that they are never going to be Abraham Lincoln or John Lennon. And it's pretty difficult to develop a strong conviction in oneself when you are made to constantly scramble to fulfill the expectations of your superiors. It's empowering to join up with one of these ready made conspiracy movements. As with religion, it allows you to become immersed in something larger than yourself, as a distraction from the meaninglessness of your life as it is actually lived. I really like this observation. Although these days I would substantially distance myself from his considerably muddled philosophy as a whole, the person who introduced me to this concept was Terence Mckenna. He talked about culture as an operating system downloaded into human consciousness soley through the inertia of history and geography. Consequently, we exist in such a way that the abstractions of the very language we use have a terrible, invisible stranglehold over the operations of consciousness as a whole. Language has been evolving for just as long as we have, and it is not a stretch to suggest that it has it's own self-perpetuating style of engagement. One can read every day in the newspaper about how ideas, especially mistaken ideas once they are firmly entrenched in the human mind, are like parasites that have no trouble violently opposing the advancement of anything that threatens it's existence.
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I'm inviting discussion here about the possibility that conspiracy theories are interfering with definitive political debates, and that this phenomenon could be an organic mechanism (not really a conspiracy of conspiracies) but a function of a less-than-sentient "conspiracy" of one: A dysfunction that seems at the surface set of critiques or questions to authority, but that in effect dilute and distract from more reality-based criticisms and analysis- and so, it becomes a mechanism for protecting the status quo. I think the "status quo" exhibits more than mere inertia, and less than sentience: That is, it may be evolving (by natural selection if you will) fairly sophisticated defense-mechanisms, without actually amounting to a "conspiracy" as we apply the term in human relations. I was trying (clumsily) to use the word "conspiracy" in an ironic way above. I'll look into "Ghost in the Shell" (I'm completely ignorant of what that is). Thanks!
Then here is an opportunity to discover what you may have misunderstood about me: I think that the "truther" movement has obscured many valid questions of the mainstream narrative, questions for instance about the skill levels and backgrounds of the 9-11 attack pilots. Obscuring those identities would not have required nearly so elaborate a conspiracy as the secret controlled demolitions of buildings, substitution of airliners, etc. which are part of the "loose change" school of 9-11 retrospective. Or as another example, that most of the training, preparation, funding, and recruitment for the 9-11 attacks did not in fact happen in Afghanistan or Iraq is an aspect of the al-Qaeda story that is also obscured within more elaborate conspiracy theories. We don't need to digress far into any conspiracy theories here to establish that some conspiracy theories are considerably more extraordinary than others. In many of the most heated political debates of our times, highly improbable conspiracy theories often drown out simpler ones. This is the piracy of confidence that I am hoping to learn your opinion about here. In the exponentially-expanding age of information, we're experiencing a pervasive degeneration of reason throughout our broadening channels of discourse- it's affecting our examination of politics and events even in the most academic, journalistic, and major-media contexts. We might just attribute it to a human weakness for sensationalism and superficiality- but I am proposing that if systems of collective thought are evolving on a macro scale, the first "life forms" we discover there may be quite simple ones, with simple defense mechanisms that we may develop methods of observing and describing. Because what I am postulating here is a non-sentient "being" (at least at this point of evolution) I expect that with some effort we can either rule it out or begin to better describe what we find, and use any discovery that may arise for the benefit (dare I say it in a conspiratorial tone "defense") of our species.
Well put. But if in an accelerating pace of events the bandwidth of collective perception experiences something of a DoS attack involving fringe distractions, then I wonder about the implications. If the incoherence off humanity can reach a point of serving a higher-order (even if non-sentient) system, then there may be an event horizon out there, more fearsome than the sea-dragons and edge-of-the-world memes of old. When "normalcy" becomes collective insanity (as in rogue states) the correction we see in history is the collapse of such political structures. I'm concerned that that if at the same time as a global superculture is evolving and gaining a capacity for profoundly asserting itself, that we are proceeding without developing collective skills pertaining to the defense of reason from emotional collective impulses. Our future challenges may be worse than human error and entropy- we may be creating the conditions for enslaving our species to a super-meme with powerful stimulus-response behavior. Of course we don't have to look for this as some sort of organism, but there may be a case for approaching it that way, if only to frame the examination more scientifically. I commiserate- but at middle age I'm not ready to give into it. And maybe what I'm offering for discussion is nothing more; Maybe I'm just lamely trying to inject some code of my own, in competition with the superorganism/supermeme of my imagination. We might test the theory at least, and see what may be learned along the way. That's a good point, and no easy answers should be left unchallenged if we're serious about saving humanity from collapsing in stupidity. Yes. Thank you. Exactly: History is rarely taught from a wider perspective of collective psychology, and it's obviously "missing the forest for the trees". Hence nihilism, and fertile ground for authoritarianism, and (maybe) mutation into an irreversible state of surrender in our species to "higher" forces. Politics and religion as refuge of repressed nihilists. I see that. I also see the potential, in the ramping-up of existential crisis, an opportunity for a challenge to that order, and of development of a resistance to even higher mutations of that order. Maybe this is mere idealism, but I like to think that all science is rooted in idealism about the distant and unknown horizons of human perception: That reason can prevail, and that we are (so far as we have managed to look into existence thus far) reason's only hope.
Yes, in my view these movements all involve unsubstantiated conspiracy theory. It was tongue-in-cheek that I suggested that all wild conspiracies are a conspiracy- Instead, I would like for us to consider if there is a super-organism at work, exploiting human characteristics in a comparatively mindless self-defense. Please eliminate any that offend you personally: If one of the above gets your dander up, then let's please set it aside. I think we can agree that there are many highly-implausible conspiracy theories clogging the essential bandwidth in nearly all channels of political discourse and evolution. No, I would like to offer as my premise here that there are unsubstantiated conspiracy theories operating decisively on human collective consciousness. If any example is controversial here, then let's remove it from discussion here. I'm hoping that we'll find an example or two to use here if need be, that will not detonate here (as I contend that they may be designed to do under close examination, provided a proximate critical mass of supporters). If you really can't abide the way I've framed this discussion, then please start your own, separately. That said, you are most welcome here, and I value your perspective. Well put. I too think that there is enough "soup" of life in the accelerating and expanding flow of human-origin thought, that something new, and not strictly human may evolve within that pool. I don't agree with the dictatorship part: I think that's entirely in the wrong direction- a complete capitulation before even taking up the cause.
There is no wild improbability in the notion that an immediately available and easily comprehended, as well as implemented, propaganda technique like that has been part of the toolkit of the media handlers in this society for a few decades now. The creation of wild conspiracy theories first promotes fear among initial believers, with the desired immediate recourse to authority figures for comfort, and thereafter provides a handy tarpot for smearing enemies by association, once its ludicrous nature has become familiar. A particularly clear example might be the manipulation of the press coverage of Dennis Kucinich in recent years. A muddier one might be the handling of the "black helicopter" meme, with its use of the demographic ghettoization of information delivery. The point being that the level invoked here the level at which some kind of larger system more or less mechanically (insentient as it is) incorporates these media and marketing agencies as components in its evolved homeostatic circuitry and defensive reactions is higher or larger or more inclusive than most of our concerns. What happened to Kucinich probably was deliberately done, by sentient people engaged in conscious efforts. The constant conflation of whackjob 9/11 "theories" involving easily debunked claims, with the more sober observations of the implications of the actual events of that day, to the dismissal and discredit of all together, is not all happening in that high and large and distant arena. The US media manipulation industry is really sophisticated - they're pros. The assumption that they don't know what they are doing is not safe.
That's not what I'm postulating here. I am trying to draw a distinction between conspiracies that are/have been empirically revealed and those that are alleged on the basis of unsubstantiated conjecture. For instance- The inception of present wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was revealed to be a conspiracy: Nations were manipulated into the mobilization using deliberately deceptive propaganda, that has since been exposed as false. I would not rule this example out as evidence of higher-order control, or a defense-mechanism that may operate externally to the will of any human or conspiracy of humans. What I am most interested in exploring here is the potential for the signal-to-noise ratio of politics to come under the control of an inhuman pirate, or parasite, super-organism, super-meme (I'm not satisfied with any of these terms, but I'm doing what I can with what I have so far). TI would like to examine the problem with the notion of a super-organism with a Darwinian approach to parasites: That collective human thought may be experiencing the influence of an organism that is not interested in (and not evolved enough to have any such interest) us, but in that most primitive aspect of life force which is self-preservation. With regards to the self-preservation of our species, if there is a perceptible phenomenon of the degeneration of reason in the human political sphere, I think that it is in that interest to explore that process of degeneration. I don't have much to go on at this point, so call it just another conspiracy if you will- but it seems to me that something is happening to us that may be more than spontaneous entropy of collective thought. We should be evolving a capacity to think more coherently together in this age- but for some reason, it's as if something we haven't quite recognized is jamming our networks.
Don't we all? It's fine for you to say my opinion puts you off, countezero. I'm OK with that, and I'm interested in why, if you have critique that is not highly emotional or personal- I would welcome that from you here without malice.
So to extend the observation: this kind of stuff, the separation of discourse from physical reality altogether and the banishment of political discussion or analysis from any role in actual policy or decision, is not necessarily in origin unconscious. That's not a defensive reaction from an insentient system - that's a deliberately fostered tactic designed to free the powerful from the bonds of accountability or responsibility, so they can pillage and rule. IMHO you are in that case engaged with a defined, deliberately conceived, and consciously employed media effort to prevent that distinction from being drawn.
Maybe so- But the intention is this: If all media is hijacked, then by whom? If it isn't a conspiracy we can nail down, could it be understood as a virus within the software of our collective consciousness: Is there an originating impulse or mechanism that we can isolate? It seems to me that there's more to it than intellectual apathy, because cons'piracy is invading every channel: Academic, political, major media, social media, etc. The proposition of a les-than-sentient superorganism seems more plausible to me than vast human conspiracies. I have not made an advanced exploration of this notion personally thus far, but I'm interested in what others may make of this.
