CONSPIRACY & CONSCIOUSNESS - under permanent construction
How the current path of de(con)struction leads to the birth of a new Consciousness
Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse
Sophocles -
Quoted from the Netflix Documentary, The Social Dilemma
For me, this quest for a deeper understanding started with being a long term
meditator, somehow identifying myself as belonging to a more rationally thinking
niche within the New
Age community. To my surprise, the New Age communities, almost within
months, had become deeply affected by mistrust
and paranoia. How could
Burning Man creative
freedom people end up as ultra-right-wing conspiracy believers? And
why did many ordinary meditating people who so far had believed in calmness, spirit, and
free creativity suddenly freak so much out in in fear of 5G and the like?
Suddenly I realized that I, for the first time in my life, did not understand
the time I live in.
Here I present a screenshot of the ongoing process of understanding the crazy
and fascinating time we live in. I will try to show how phenomenons, from Woke,
Identity politics,
Outrage,and
Cancel-culture to sinister conspiracy theories,
are related and that the only solution to the current de(con)struction of the
world as we know it lies within ourselves.
Most probably, you dear reader, will wonder why I often stray away from the
subject in the form of all kinds of thoughts from high to low, from lofty
abstractions to concrete exemplifications within subjects that, at first glance,
are difficult to associate. Please have patience with me here. I have chosen
unorthodox ways to extract analytical sense out of a world that seems to rotate
faster and faster. New ways of seeing and understanding require new ways of
structural thinking and writing. If you should ever read to the end of this
text, I hope that you will be able to see that every brick, no matter how
strange it seems placed, contributes to the whole architecture.
THE EGO OVERPOPULATION The 'ego-operative system', has, together with capitalistic liberalism, come
to an end. These Siamese twins have served us well in the past, but at present,
this world order of ego and money is piling up contradictions that cannot find a
Hegeliansynthesis within its own
reality-dimension.
What is the biggest challenge here? It is us!
There are, at present, simply too many selfish and noisy egos on this planet.
At current, we process as much information in one day as the lifetime sum of
information for a person in the Medieval period. Our success in society depends
on the amount of data we can digest. However, our stone-age brains have
difficulties filtering the increasing amount of information we need to process
to survive. The receptive human bandwidth is simply too narrow as
compared to the vastness of data that potentially can shake, confuse, or define
our identity. This overload is a threat to the ego seen as an operating system, and it reacts
protectively with a narcissistic hyper-sensibility where social exchange other
humans are more and more in danger for being perceived as emotional violations.
The next challenge is that this information overload is presented on a platform
without time and space.
The singular omnipresent space The internet has, in this sense, placed all of our loud voices on
the tip of a needle.
Here on this needle-point, we are not Medieval Angels. The lack of space makes
us devils, when the myriad of 'My'-spaces collide in the location-less location
of social media.
A cartoon drawing of the prophet Muhamad is published in a narrow-minded
provincial newspaper in Denmark. The next day they create outrage among Muslims, even
in the furthest mountains of Pakistan. Free speech requires at a minimum of two
spaces: a space from where one part can speak and a space from where the
opponent can speak. In the global village-like interconnectedness, there seems
only to be one omnipresent space as it presents itself on a screen. That
phenomenon in itself seems to create polarization. It is like the magic digital
mirror only allows a reflection of one surviving truth. In the early days of
Facebook, I discovered this strange phenomenon on my own body. A quite close
friend and I started arguing about some insignificant nonsense on my public
Facebook-wall and it suddenly spiraled out of control, and in anger, I unfriended
him. It took more than a year before we could burry the ax. In a way we are
getting mentally suffocated by the lack of space in the digital space. We are in
our hyperconnectedness present like voices in each other's brains, and from that
position as a claustrophobic caveman I roared to my friend: Get out of my
cave!
The annihilation of historical time One can imagine the huge confusion when
simple, honest living people with archaic, 500 year old mindsets looks into the
magic mirror of their newly acquired smartphones and computers.
Tribal woman from the Himalayan range with her
mobilephone.
I took the picture 15 years back!
Social media places cultures hundred of years apart, with
inconsistent values in the same room.
How could we ever expect simple, straight forward people from cultures who have
not (yet) developed the modern, often also decadent ability to navigate in
irony to understand a danish newspapers satirical take on Islam?
The medialized presence of archaic identity-interfaces with little or no capacity for understanding the modern
flatscreen-presented world presents for sure a huge challenge.
The biggest challenge, however, is not the confusion made in and by Medieval minds
suddenly beamed into a casino in Las Vegas.
The biggest challenge is the narcissistic consumer-ego of the West.
This new, vulnerable drama-ego crave huge safe spaces around its particular and
highly complex crystal-like identity. When this ego at the same time unite with
kindred souls in the media bottleneck as gender, race,
Trump, and
conspiracy-movements, there is no mental space
left that is not a potential zone of conflict.
Hence we have ended up in an impossible situation, where we are getting deeply offended by
the presence of each other.
we are so to speak sitting as voices in each others heads - paranoia
that also explains the need for unisone echochamber voices - it
is less unbeable with a choir of unisone voices in he head -
when we all , here and now are intimate precenses in the same my-space we tend
to percieve the world through the amygdala - the amygdala knows of no time and
always reacts when the threat is intimate close sense - we tend not to be able
to store memory on a time line in the hippocampus
What can we now do?
A new common ground We need to go deeper in ourselves to find new common ground.
This is what Meditation is all about:
We need to upgrade from ego-consciousness to a unity-consciousness where we all
are color, gender & identity-blind. In the current meltdown of the hysteric
ego-interface, I see a new world order rising.
Here I see the words of my favorite Mystic come true. You do not need to be
religious to realize the depth of his statement:
All
creatures contain one reflection:
one, that is the denial of its being
the other;
the highest of the angels denies he is the lowest.
For many, it might be difficult to grasp Meister Eckharts double
negation play. However, Prince EA
essentially says the same:
COVID19 - The trigger We live indeed in pandemic times. Here I am not only thinking
about COVID 19 but also of the rise of all sorts of infodemic conspiracy
theories ranging from the plausible to the outright bizarre.
As
M.D., Ph.D. D.S. Jones has
pointed out, pandemics, seen from a historical perspective, have always been
following an archetypical gameplay. The first act in the social drama of an
outbreak starts with various forms of denial. Driven by our self-interests and
the need for reassurance, we ignore the signs. The second act is launched by
reluctant recognition of the severity of the outbreak and the following
attempts to explain the situation. These explanations have often taken the form
of irrational blame-gaming where paranoia and persecution walked
hand in hand in search of scapegoats. Often the fake conspiracy theories are
centered in the outbreak of disease itself. Hence COVID19 has in the believer's
minds, become a deliberate biochemical weapon directed towards the common man.
In other scenarios, COVID19 does not even exist but is by hidden power people
planted as a collective fear in order to control the population.
COVID 19 has once again shown a pandemics' potential for being the ideal
breeding ground for weird conspiracy theories. However, we must not forget to
take in the last years' rising
inequality as a part of the equation. The conspiracy-tales of
Count Dracula arose at a time
with great social injustice. Wampire tales are on the rise again and beyond the
madness in believing in a blood drinking aristocracy there might be a true story
about rising inequality in our contemporary world.
Conspiracy theories built on sound skepticism Let me state my position. I do believe in Conspiracy and Conspiracy theories.
The claim that Saddam Hussein's Irak was having weapons of mass destruction was
a conscious lie organized by the American government. Edward
Snowden's exposures have shown how nations are not only spying against other
countries but also have secret surveillance programs directed towards their own
citizens to such an extent that the term Conspiracy is justified.
Wikileaks is yet another great source for
exploring what is going on behind the curtains and even beyond governmental
control.
The world is and was full of real Conspiracy events, and we can still speculate on
how Alexander the Great died. There will always be a new
Watergate, and
there will always be sound Conspiracy theories founded on factual driven
detective work. A healthy skeptic and investigating mind can not rule out the
phenomenon of Conspiracy, at least when we widen the definition a little. Fake
news are when weaponized through social media in political battles as we have
observed the last years in the US, definitely not conspiracy made by tin foil hat
people. Hence it gives meaning to view even traditional, but now extremely
polarized legacy media such as CNN and Fox-News as Conspiracy laundering agencies. The
level of real Conspiracy production through fake news from Russian and Chinese
trolls to Alex Jones and David Icke to warring political groups has now reached
a level where it poses a threat to civilization as we know it.
In my understanding, social Conspiracy is an unavoidable phenomenon rooted in
genes and
tribally conditioned social interaction.
It occurs as a result of a group's conscious but also unconscious efforts to distort, lie, or hold back information in order to promote its own
viewpoints and agendas.
Not to confuse what I define as sound Conspiracy theories based on detective
work and evidence with false paranoic conspiracy ideas, I, in the text to
come, will spell the natural social Conspiracy and the factual detective work
to uncover these Conspiracies with a capital 'C' and the unsound conspiracy
theories with a small 'c'.
To sum it up:
There is and was always social Conspiracy events.
There are basically two kinds of conspiracy theories
* Conspiracy theories based on sound reason, facts, and detective work
* False, even paranoic conspiracy theories without factual evidence
Identifying harmful conspiracy theories I do, however, not approve of the irrational and sinister conspiracy concepts
that are thriving in especially religious and spiritual communities and now even
seem to spread to mainstream segments of society. As a general pattern, the
paranoia conspiracy groups are worried about 'smaller' threats like 5G or
outright crazy beliefs in blood-drinking secret societies while ignoring
much larger systemic ones hidden in plain sight. I consider the most extreme of
these conspiracy beliefs to reflect a kind of epidemic collective paranoia that
we have seen quite a few times in history. The rich people drinking the blood
of children type of conspiracy madness took momentum in Medieval Europe,
where Jews were persecuted and killed due to widespread rumors that
they were drinking the blood
of children in secret rituals. These persecutions have always followed the
script of the second act in the 'pandemian' play.
However, it seems that the belief in outrageous conspiracy theories recently has
been on the rise to such an extent that it could be justified to see it as a
kind of collective mass psychosis. Paranoia conspiracy theories have
expanded in the slipstream of fear created by its more physical twin, the COVID
19. Like in the case of the corona, there seems to be no effective vaccine at hand.
The highly infectious mental conspiracy-virus rejects any falsification anti-dote. The
irony is that the same segment of believers really would believe such a
vaccine to be a real threat to them if it by some bullshit blogger-head was
claimed to be the work of Bill Gates.
One of the most important breeding grounds for this strange phenomenon has been pointed out in the
outstanding Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma.
The social media has silently, and step by step
created major changes inour ways of thinking and understanding of what reality is. Humans are
pattern-seeking machines. So are the various social media like Google, Youtube,
Facebook, and Twitter. The symbiosis of these two pattern-seeking systems has
created fundamental and explosive changes in the world without hardly anyone
taking notice. As we shall see later, all kinds of ghost-like collective
Frankenstein cyborgs with their own conspiratorial paranoia agendas have been
born as almost conscious living net-entities. These from their bottles freed new
life-forms are driven by social media's algorithms common denominator, which
always seems to point downwards towards the most primitive. Suddenly the good
old notion of a computer virus has got entirely new implications in the
sense that social media has been able to infect us with all sorts of
infodemic paranoia and mistrust.
The blind spot of anti-conspiracy 'believers'
As Soeren Kierkegaard has pointed out, the anti-fanatic and the fanatic are
identical as far as they are each other's opposite. There is a large segment of
people opposed to conspiracy theories that denies all kind of conspiracy
theories. For these people all phenomenons of conspiracy are beliefs made inside
a tin foil hat. This is, in my perspective, of course not as harmful as the wacky
conspiracy making, but even though an absurd position to take in a time where
fake news through social media now have become the most powerful conflict-making
tool on the planet. In fact, this position is quite similar to Trump's when he
ridicules the traditional media as being fake news. This position of ridiculing
all Conspiracy theories is all too easy to misuse by the people who are actually
using fake news as a political or economic weapon. They can disrupt any critic
position and discussion by referring to the tinfoil hat.
Inside the Black Hole of fake news However, there is no doubt that the rise in insane and undocumentable
conspiracy theories poses the greatest threat. I have at close hand observed
what falling down these wrong rabbit hole does to people.
It is quite worrisome. The social media-driven ghost can, with its algorithmic-based
persuasion, and collectively created echo-chamber momentum, easily swallow a
fragile human soul as a black
hole does to a star. In this black hole, negative feelings of anxiety and
depression are amplified in a constant unison news feed, all with the same
headlines. It is obvious that when you here get bombarded with the
algorithmic prioritized more extreme conspiracy theories like a Bill Gates on a
grand scale genocide mission and the Dalai Lama drinking blood from small
children together with the Pope, it becomes more difficult to sleep. Various
degrees of paranoia is sometimes the end station.
The mental consequences of haboring sinister conspiracy theories are
grim. However, most probably the darknes was there all along - in the person who
felt attracted to open exactly that door.
Therefore before we have to go on a little prolonged philosophical journey to India
before continuing with the subject. I call it the atronaut view. Here you do not
need to be religious to 'inner-harvest' lessons from the Gods.
To be continued...
a
•
The thoughts presented are, of course, based
on my subjective reflections, and I do not claim to be in possession of
any absolute truth. I might even be wrong. I only write to present
fragile viewpoints that might inspire you to find your own, hopefully,
fleeting truth about the matter.
•
Unfortunately,
big internet cooperations like Facebook Twitter and Youtube have
censored their information feed. They try to eliminate the availability
of conspiracy voices on the net.
To block free speech in this way is nothing less than a disaster and
will do nothing else than make the paranoia conspiracy theorists
stronger in their beliefs.
It also makes it more difficult for me to substantiate with links when I
quote from conspiracy theorists.
However, my aim is not here to refute each and every paranoic conspiracy
argument, but the present a larger frame in which to observe the
phenomenon.
•
In this information overload we get vulnerable when we try to
sort out what is fake and what are facts.