I am going to make what may sound like an uncharacteristic claim: all human beings are rational, most of the time. They are consistent, most of the time.
But much of the time they are either unaware of their real motives, or LYING, to you or to themselves or both.
If someone says their greatest hope is to win the lottery, but they don’t buy lottery tickets, there is a back story.
If someone says nothing excites them more than getting married, but they look miserable every time they are with their future spouse, there is a back story.
Any long term problem which does not get fixed, does not fail to get fixed because of incompetence, but rather competing rationalities.
I would articulate this general principle: All long term problems continue to exist because they benefit someone. Someone rational has appropriated some aspect of the problem to serve them.
Wars serve military careers. They serve arms dealers. They serve politicians. Some people–and I have met them–just LIKE war. “It gets in your blood”, as one Army officer confided in me.
Poverty serves many agendas. Most proximately, it provides the raw ingredients of racially divisive rhetoric, and the following ability to build group cohesion off of shared hate.
And ignorant people are easier to manipulate. And they are less likely organize politically against you if they can be made to believe you are on their side.
Rationality often means literal money in literal bank accounts. It means perks when you travel. It means being showered with attention and respect and sex.
So whenever there is a disconnect between claimed intent and following action, I don’t think we should assume incompetence. I think we should assume competing rationalities are interfering with the resolution of problems that benefit them.
COVID (and obviously, when I say COVID I am nearly always referring to the RESPONSE to COVID, and not to the disease that could as easily have been made to disappear, had the media chosen to do so) is a great case in point.
If we had given Vitamins D to everyone at the outset, almost no one would have been hospitalized. The data is pretty good on that. The cytokine storms only happen when the body gets to a certain stage of its immune response, and the floor drops out because of the lack of a needed tool; and a tool, I will emphasize, that is readily available and CHEAP.
Ivermectin and HCQ, along with Zinc and Vitamin C, also seem to make a huge difference in early to middle stage cases; and very, very few cases, treated early, should ever progress past that. Based on what I read, the deaths from COVID should literally have been on par with a bad flu years, which is to say 100,000 or less of mainly old and sickly people.
So what gives? Why push unproven and potentially very dangerous spike protein injections before recommending general supplementation of a Vitamin that is in any event essential to health, and really hard to overdose on (although it is possible)?
Competing rationalities. When I say “some conspiracy theory is needed to explain all this”, “competing rationalities” could be used as a synonym. Other agendas. Conflicting agendas. Competing greed. We are greedy for a return to normal and for our loved ones not to suffer with idiotic restrictions, and die sometimes from a not dangerous disease; others are hungry for power and money, and all that money will buy, which does also include power.
And I commented elsewhere, and will share here, that the denigration of “Conspiracy Theories” is itself the result of a conspiracy to silence people telling unwanted truths, or at least partial truths.
Most of history is conspiracy theories. It is psychopaths plotting in secret with one another to off one person or group so they can get their stuff and start telling everyone one else what to do.
To take a long ago example, from about 2,500 years ago, Babylon seems to have fallen to Cyrus “without a battle”. The existing king was unpopular, so traitors invited in a replacement. That is a conspiracy. Those who suspected that was about to happen would have been “conspiracy theorists”.
To denigrate “conspiracy theories” as a class of ideas is to claim that psychopaths do NOT plot in secret, that they DO telegraph their intentions, and that there do not exist many people in the world who are capable of literally anything to get what they want. This is obviously a counterfactual claims. Conspiracies do happen.
It is simply the case that some conspiracies are more plausible than others.
I was thinking this morning that one intellectual task any honest person confronted with the many competing secret rationalities of this world must undertake, is to overlay each on the facts, like templates, to see what matches, what doesn’t match, and to identify the many gray areas where there just isn’t enough information, either about what IS happening, or who might be driving it.
For example, I listened to this talk (https://www.thriveon.com/911/) yesterday with David Icke and Foster Gamble (descendant of the Gamble of Proctor and Gamble, who seemingly grew up pretty comfortably). What to do with it?
Icke makes a lot of points that seem well documented. He explains in some detail who brought down the towers, and how they covered it up. The culprits, on his account, are an elite cult which controls most of the world’s intelligence agencies, the Vatican, most think tanks, and certainly Israel. They are nominally Jewish, but secretly highly anti-Jewish (Anti-Semitic, as he points out, would functionally mean, if the term were used properly, anti-Arab in nearly all cases, which is something I knew, but had not thought much about), to the point of having played a role in the Holocaust.
[ Holocaust, by the way–as he points out elsewhere– is itself a somewhat blasphemous term, in that a holocaust is an offering to God. It is an offering that is burnt to smoke in the fire. It is fully consumed, to ash. Is that an appropriate term for the murder of 6 million people? An offering to God? I knew that was what a holocaust was, but never thought about it in those terms.]
Is he right? I don’t know.
And this morning, I was thinking about Stephen Greer. He is all about the aliens, and the coming alien false flag. In his world, the dominant reality is that our government knows about UFO’s, BUILDS them using technology most of us don’t suspect exists, and is in contact with a number of alien races. As I have said Edgar Mitchell backed this up, as did Paul Hellyer.
Is he most right? Can elements of both theories not be true? Along with something else?
As I was discussing with someone in a bar a few weeks ago, it’s really important, in my view, to have a large gray area marked “Unknown”.
To me, the NEED for a conspiracy theory to explain the world’s willingness to march into Fascism over an easily managed disease is absolute. That is not in the gray for me. That is an obvious and indisputable fact. Incompetence and stupidity just won’t cut it. Not by a long shot. It is willful.
But why? For whom? Those are questions that cannot be answered with confidence. They go into the gray area.
But I will say that all of us should ALWAYS look at the congruence between what someone says they want, and what they actually do. Anthony Fauci does not want to save lives. That is obvious. What his real rationality is, his real calculations are, I cannot answer from evidence; but if what I might term primary rationality is not present–and it clearly is not–then you have to move into the darkness, into the conspiratorial, and most of what lives there is guns, drugs, sex, money and a power elite.