Conspiracy is as real as price fixing, point shaving, and gerrymandering. Worse, most things are not what they appear to be, at least on the surface. Dig deeper and always there is more complexity. History is lies agreed upon; this interpretation means that the best story wins. Do things just happen randomly? When’s the last time coffee magically appeared before you without the need for someone to grow, pick, roast, grind, package, ship, sell, buy, open, measure, infuse, cup, and serve it to you? No, things do not happen randomly unless, as the insurance companies put it, it is an act of nature. Lightning striking, however, can be both predicted to a good degree — what is the highest thing around? — and channeled, with rods. Floods and storms are guaranteed on a long-enough calendar scale, so building houses on the shore, for example, is going to get you flooded and hurricane-battered sooner or later. So that, too, mixes elements of the random with the predictable. Human events do not just happen randomly. People cause them, by doing them. By choosing to do them. The indigenous people of the North American continent did not end up on reservations by accident. Europeans did not invade by accident. We do not “stumble into war” by accident. There is no Oopsie clause in our history of atrocity, horror, death, and destruction. The Mai Lai massacre did not just happen by accident, nor did it occur in a vacuum or without context.
Context is the key to all this. When right wing loons howl that the Sandy Hook School Shooting was a hoax, and never happened, tell that to the grieving parents whose little children were slaughtered. When they ascribe their delusions to a dire plot by “Obama” to “take our guns” in order to “stop the armed insurrection” he knows is coming in order to “save our freedom”, the right wing loons are howling bigotry, fear, hate, and they are pretending that what happens to other people is just theater, only a movie, nothing but a TV melodrama to manipulate us.
This is quite literally schizophrenic breaking from reality, and not only delusional, but psychotic.
Yes, false flag operations do exist. Yes, people really die in them. Yes, events are spun, manipulated, even conjured for hidden agenda purposes, for political reasons, for gain. Of course all this is true. Now apply context and ask yourself what your sense of reality is rooted in. Are you a solipsistic delusionist who lives in your own dream world of fear, hate, and categorical thinking? Or do you reach beyond yourself to empirical reality, where physical things can be independently tested?
We have hit the Enlightenment speed bump.
Do you, in other words, base your sense of reality upon what you choose to believe (pretend) without solid evidence? Or do you base your sense of reality upon what can be observed and tested independently by science, technology, logic, and reason?
Are you trapped in a nightmare, or are you awake and mapping the world around you?
The question is not whether to sneer at all conspiracy; that would be folly. The question is whether this or that event came about for hidden reasons by hidden machination. Is it what it seems? Look deeper; is it still what it seems? If not, where is the physical evidence leading us from a simple, straightforward interpretation?
Yes, physical evidence can be hidden, destroyed, and ignored. Sure that happens, ask any trial attorney or police detective. Yes, emotional stories can over-ride obvious evidence. People can be carried away and end up lynching or convicting innocent people simply because they don’t like them. Or letting rich, famous, powerful, popular people get away with practically anything, and do it with a smile. Glamour counts.
What scholars know is generally much more, and much different from, what the general public knows. This is because, unless it is your specialty, you will glom onto only the basics, only a vague shape, the gist, a notion of a given topic or thing because you don’t have the time or impetus. You’re interested only to a certain level, and you look into things only to a certain degree.
This is why such vast ignorance of, for example, the xtian Bible is spread so widely, while alone in their carrels and cubicals, genuine scholars know better, and can confirm it six ways from Sunday.
Common knowledge is so often mistaken that there are still those who refuse to “lose time” by setting back their clocks in Autumn. There are still flat earthers. There are still those who think in ways so primitive a Neanderthal would scoff. Being informed is all the harder today, when science and knowledge has become so huge a range of endeavors. No one can, any more, know everything, and all of us must decide what we can live without knowing, or what approximations suffice to get us along.
We’ve reduced it all to epistemology. How do we know what we know, what can we know, and how small a fragment of reality is it?
No one knows, so it’s all the more important to go with what others can check and validate in an impartial, physics-based manner. That way we won’t be deluding ourselves, or buying into someone else’s scheme of things designed to place them in a position of power.
Questions, not answers, are the keys to freedom from dogma and deception. Doubt is a good thing when tempered by fact. Next time you hear someone shouting conspiracy, start asking physics-based questions, apply logic and reason, and remain awake.
/// /// ///
