Amerika

Conspiracy theories exist to make sense out of the human tendency toward collective delusion that ends up pointing civilizations toward failure and making individuals go insane. We want to believe that there is some malevolent force controlling the whole mess for some comprehensible purpose.

Instead the reality seems to be that when put in groups, humans decide on inversion of our thinking. We reject what is real and insist on the exact opposite because doing so makes us feel powerful inside, and in groups, it makes us stand out and be popular when we reject the reality with which we all struggle for a Utopian or contrarian vision.

This might be called the ultimate conspiracy theory, the knowledge that instead of a master plan there is only a dreary human pathology of egoism that drives us toward symbolic acts of defiance against nature, logic, culture, and whatever divinity exists on this sad little planet.

While the media rant in unison about “disinformation” and “misinformation” — fancy words for stuff that does not support their narrative, some of which is gibberish and some of which is more accurate than the official story — actual conspiracy theories are more mundane and involve humans giving in to their baser instincts.

We can review a few common beliefs that in fact are conspiracy theories, consisting of a moral evil scapegoat and a moral pure talisman each, which are leading us into self-destruction:

• The Rich: we are told again about how evil rich people manipulate us, and in some cases like the delusional George Soros and Bill Gates, this is true, but generally, rich people have no need to manipulate us. We buy their products and make them rich. We desire alcohol, entertainment, desktop operating systems, smartphones, luxury products, and other items that create massively rich people. They do not need to manipulate us; we do it to ourselves. They do not keep us in poverty; we keep ourselves poor mainly by buying unnecessary products. If someone is rich, they have no need for manipulation unless they are ideological zombies like Gates and Soros, mainly because they already have the power they need. They do, however, have to contend with the popularity of taking their wealth to “redistribute” it, which is why they are politically active as lobbyists among the other industries, special interests, religions, and foreign nations lobbying our democratic leaders.
• Taxes: it is said, widely, that taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society that is compassionate and just, but every time taxes are raised, prices go up and the value of the currency goes down. Taxation creates a distortion in the market by redistributing income away from where it is productive toward unproductive sectors. It also enriches a bureaucracy which spends money on idealistic projects removed from what creates value. As a result, the currency becomes more attractive to speculators, as do properties in that society, but this short-term energy means that each individual unit of currency is worth less. Over time, those who own the properties that are appreciating get richer and everyone else gets poorer, to which the response is more wealth redistribution, eventually ending up at a third world level of dysfunction.
• Diversity: politicians used to open every speech with a homily about how diversity is our strength. From a logical perspective, however, diversity brings nothing but internal division because as soon as a society is not homogeneous, it cannot have culture; culture sets up rules and goals that benefit a certain group but not others, and in order to make the society diverse, it has to abandon culture and fall back on the bureaucracy and money as its guiding principles. People from groups other than the founding group have to either reject their ancestral cultures and embrace the new host society as a better option, or reject the host culture by rationalizing that it is somehow an oppressor that in fact deprived their superior cultures of success. The different groups fight it out much as they do in international politics, but within one society, leading to instability. The lack of culture makes social interactions both risky and prone to be endless discussions of basic values, which makes people withdraw from them and become atomized or limited in social interaction and concerns beyond their immediate physical needs.
• Morality: ethical thinking involves choosing our actions so that the best possible results are achieved; morality, on the other hand, comes from the contrarians as a form of denying what functions because it does not include everyone, and therefore starts rewarding unrealistic behavior instead of promoting realistic behavior. Moralism allows people to sit in judgment on the actions of others based on a human standard of emotions, symbols, and pacifism instead of looking toward what actually works and improves the civilization as a whole, thereby benefiting all of its members. Wherever morality goes, reality is rejected in favor of what is popular so the moralists can get wealth, power, and status for themselves.

These are some of the many illusions we live by. These are the real conspiracy theories, and in each case, we are told that what is real is not real, and what is not real is real; by this process, society gradually becomes hostile to realism, sanity, goodness, clarity, and focus on productivity.

Since at this point our civilization is deep down the rabbit hole of reality denial, actual realistic statements seem like nonsense and manipulation to us, so in order to rationalize what we have as functional, we invent conspiracy theories that explain how everything is going well except for one evil group of oppressors manipulating us.

During the early days of a civilization, clear thinking triumphs, but as it enters the “dark” half of its life cycle, people embrace illusions in order to get ahead in the linear path that bureaucracy, meritocracy, and popularity define. At that point nothing makes sense and people turn to superstition instead.

Conspiracy theories of the mundane sort reinforce this superstition instead of admitting that we did this to ourselves with unrealistic thinking, and defend our unrealistic illusions by pointing the finger at bogeymen instead. To get out of this, we have to look at the conspiracy theories we live by and undo that unrealistic thinking.

Tags: crowdism, diversity, moralism, taxation