A friend of mine, who I have known now for almost 20 years, was telling me the other day about a video series on Flat Earthism she found fascinating. I thought she was joking, but she was completely serious. Here is the link: https://www.bitchute.com/video/RrVePATwfBzT/
I told her I would give it a listen, and I did make it 15-20 minutes or so before giving up.
There are a few points I wanted to make on this, both specific and general. Specifically, to me, loyalty is a core element of true friendship, and loyal friends value and respect their friends opinions, no matter how crazy they may sound. I myself am nuts sometimes, and she knows it, and she puts up with me too. And she knows that no matter what particular rabbit hole she wants to go down–and the current landscape is littered with them, since the only obvious Truth is that important Truths are being concealed–I won’t judge her and that I will hear her out. She is perfectly safe with me in that regard. I don’t have to agree or disagree. I just listen, and do my best to hear.
As a more general point, I was thinking about Conspiracy Theories generally, which I might even broaden to Epistemological Diversity.
If you drive through any large cities, or for that matter most small cities, you will see many kinds of churches. In this country most are Christian, but within Christianity all sorts of MAJOR divisions exist, such that bloody wars have been fought over fine points of doctrine, like how to interpret the Trinity. Is it literal, or figurative? Thousands, probably more, people died in the old days–their throats slit, knives stuck in their hearts, their heads cut off–over how to resolve this question.
So there is violence in Diversity. This is the argument made by those who seek a Uninarrative, the One Narrative to Rule Them All. But of course when you suppress ideational diversity you necessarily suppress real KNOWLEDGE. God does not stop existing even if God is worshipped in many contradictory ways, and understood in many ways. You do not rid humanity of the religious impulse by removing God. On the contrary, you make things worse, by blinding people to their own dogmatism.
No, humanity needs many, many narratives. Just as we need biological diversity for planetary health, we need ideational diversity for social health. We need many views, many ideas, many perspectives.
And as with this Flat Earth stuff, you can find wisdom even in error. I would recommend you watch that video for 5-10 minutes. What you need to understand is YOU DON’T NEED TO AGREE WITH ANY OF IT. Feel your feelings. Feel the thoughts that come up in response to all that. Ask yourself what it would take to trick the world into some enormous delusion.
Ask yourself, in fact, how the response to COVID happened. How so many people who knew and KNOW better allowed themselves to be herded together and put into an ideological and behavioral monorail.
As I keep saying, we have Fauci saying masks offer no protection from airborne viruses, AND him saying that no pandemic has ever been driven by asymptomatic people. Logically, then, we just needed to ask sick people to stay home. The rationale for masks on adults, much less on children at no risk for anything but trauma FROM the masks, disappears. Snip, snip, gone.
The danger of error from too much information is infinitely smaller than the risk of error from too little information. That is why the 1st Amendment exists. This point has been obvious to the intelligent for as long as intelligence has existed.
And I will sneak another COVID comment in here (Sorry, but this shit is still going on): at the same time criticisms and even QUESTIONS about these “vaccines” are being suppressed, the DATA of what we DO KNOW is ALSO being suppressed. A Swiss Olympian who recently got Pericarditis following a jab–and whose days competing may well be permanently over–pointed out that nobody is talking about risk and side effects.
Free speech and science are raw data, shared freely. That is how we, as a collective organism, become smarter and avoid sustained stupidity. Stupidity is a virus that only flourishes in the darkness of constrained information flow.
Returning to religious and theological wars: all of this is abstract. There is no way to bring evidence gathering to bear. There is no way to bring SCIENCE to bear.
But in effect, scientifically, all the churches practice Conspiracy Theories. The Muslims, the Jews, the Hindus: all of them.
But before those of a Scientistic bent allow their vanity and rigidity to get the better of them, I will point out, as I do from time to time, that philosophy always logically precedes science.
As Bertrand Russell, I think it was, noted a century or so ago, there is no way to know for sure we were not created five minutes ago with artificial memories. Something like this is in fact the premise of the intellectually very interesting movie “The Dark City”, which is a perennial favorite with conspiracy hobbyists, along with, of course, “They Live!!!”.
Do you get this? Do you get that it is philosophically POSSIBLE that everything you think you know is a lie? It’s in the realm of the possibilities. You cannot deny it a priori on a philosophical basis. You can merely make the common sense observation that it makes sense to you–it feels right–to suppose that your life is your life, that you lived it the way you remember it, and that the world is approximately the way you suppose it is.
But many Eastern schools teach that reality IS made up. That everything we suppose we know is a lie. That reality itself does not exist, but that we create it with our minds.
This is kind of the ultimate Conspiracy Theory, isn’t it? Not only are things not as we supposed, but even the supposed conspiracists don’t exist either. You’ve taken it the next level.
Now, I feel well the weight of such contemplations. It makes you a bit dizzy. PARTICULARLY in our affluent worlds, which became so through the systematic use of the scientific method, which assumes that what we see is real, and does very intelligent and very measurable things with this assumption–it is hard to suppose there exists some radical alternative.
And as should be obvious, I try and take a middle position on most things. The world is not, physically or spiritually, precisely what most of us take it to be. I do think there are obviously conspiracists of some sort, without being able to feel confident in determining who they are exactly and what they want, other than assuming that they must be the wealthiest people in the world, making the Rothschilds and Rockefellers and those sorts obviously involved in some way.
And the evidence for alien presence is good enough for most purposes. I will again mention Edgar Mitchell. He says he has heard many first hand accounts. To use C.S. Lewis’ argument, if he was neither crazy nor lying, then he was telling the truth. And we can assume an Apollo astronaut with a Ph.D from MIT is not stupid. Ergo: substance to the rumors.
And spiritually, what seems to make the most sense is that there are levels of “reality” which interpenetrate our own. Nothing in physics precludes this, and once you truly step back and consider seriously the necessity, mathematically, of a Quantum Vacuum, that idea becomes plausible quickly. Our bodies were sculpted by our consciousness, which preceded and will outlast our physical machines.
This makes “reality” relative, and this reality a relative lie, in that it is vastly, vastly incomplete.
And given this, given birth and death, is it not a strange delusion to ignore all this, to waste our time in frivolities and distractions? Maybe the truest conspiracy theory is that most of what most of us do every day matters in any final way. It doesn’t. But we cling to it, treat it as sacred, inviolable. We mutate invisibly into sub human creatures when we forget our divinity.
The creators of the movie “The Wisdom of Trauma” recently recommended a book called “Let the Moon be Free”. Functionally, it counsels non-action: doing less, thinking less. It is a sort of deconstructive narrative that at this point in my life seems to be useful.
As I have said before, it may well be that the core teaching at the top of true spiritual traditions is that “there are no real rules”. But this is only appropriate for people who have learned how to be emotionally and spiritually healthy. If it is possible to kill someone and not be punished in another world, why would you want to? Anger and violence are crimes to ME. They hurt ME. So much spirituality consists in teaching people not to be stupid.
Teaching people rules teaches them to climb the mountain high enough to see for themselves how much better it is up there. When you reach a certain height, you then tell people “You can go back down there, now, if you like.”
And “Satanism”–what might be broadly terms the Doctrine and Practice of Becoming Smaller Spiritually–would of course consist in the claim that “you don’t have to climb at all”, which itself amounts to the claim that you can be small, ugly and stupid. This is among the options, just not among the good options.
I would put it this way: all karma is instant and continuous. To be guilty of cruelty is to be guilty of being a person CAPABLE of cruelty, and being such a person is already to have lost nearly everything truly desirable in this life or any other.
And another conspiracy theory is that, as Ricky Gervais put it, God created heaven because he loves us; and hell just in case we don’t love Him enough back.”. Would it not be better not to have been created than to spend an eternity in Hell? Of course. Of course.
And a lot of people, particularly those raised in religious homes, have a tendency, realizing something like this, to mutate to radical atheism. I have one particular individual in mind, who I think was also molested by a member of this Church (he told me it felt good, so he was not sure it was a crime, although in his case, he is far, far, far from processing it–obviously to me–and likely never will; I will add that the feeling of pleasure is what makes sexual abuse seemingly particularly hard to process), who transitioned from Bible thumping Christianity to what he terms Positive Nihilism. Basically, in his little mind, his Life Commandment is be an asshole because he can. That is in my view more or less literally true. He seems to leave wreckage everywhere he goes.
Nuance is hard, and only possible once you turn the emotional temperature down, and start to FEEL. Can you feel the tip of your left pinky finger right now? Good. Now do that slowly with your whole body. That process is where honest listening–a word used often in the book referenced–begins. And listening leads to spontaneous goodness, most of the time.
As I have tried to articulate on my Goodness Movement website, morality to me needs to take into account the Complexity–seen formally as in Complex Systems–of the human experience. We are Complex as individuals, and as social systems. Everything moves in waves and circles and figure eights. Everything goes and then comes back. We are not the same in the morning as we are in the evening (as Sun Tzu pointed out over 2,000 years ago). Your resolution is not the same, which in some respect means YOU are not the same.
To my mind, perfect consistency–a perfect, straight line–is neither possible nor desirable. What we are looking for is relative consistency, regular peaks of the waves at about the same times and places and situations. The best of us do this instinctively.
The alternative, normally, is strenuous, tense effort, papered over here and there, admittedly for short periods of time, with lies. If you want to be a monolithic block, the holes are filled in with self deception. And that, in turn, creates a reactive rigidity, since you will find, unconsciously, that you need to protect those lies. The lies create your self image, and if you want a stable self image, you have to attack those who question your lies.
I am speaking in a highly abstract way there. It is what I am feeling, and it is likely I am speaking not least of myself. What I feel is there is a rhythmicity to life that, when acknowledged, makes everything easier, lighter and more honest.