Conspiracy Intuition is Right

To my dear friends who see conspiracies as reality, I think your intuition is right.

I’m glad you are playing the role you are. It’s healthy for our society to have people like you questioning everything. What drives you to do it? Is it an instinct or energy surging through you? Whatever it is, it is natural and healthy for society to have people like you shaking things up.

I think your intuition is right: our society is suffering from deception, corruption, systemic inequality and abuse of power. My intuition is telling me the same thing, but I’m interpreting it slightly differently based on my view of history and human nature. I know that when we are scared our brains go into fight or flight mode and we are more likely to label people enemies, imagine that they are evil, and blame them for all of our problems. We are more likely to think that destroying those evil people will make everything better.

I think this is a great time for us to awaken to the problems we may not have noticed before and address them. But getting rid of individuals we think are evil isn’t likely to do the trick. Before you gather the lynching mob, please consider an alternative interpretation of the facts and your intuition.

We feel deceived, betrayed, controlled… and we may be. But what is the most insidious device of control and deception? Is it a misinformation campaign by the news media controlled by powerful politicians and the “deep state”? That would require thousands of journalists whose careers are based on telling the truth and getting it right, people whose careers could be ended if they were found to be lying, to cover up the massive conspiracy they dream of uncovering. That seems unlikely, doesn’t it? Politicians have rivals they would love to destroy publicly; why wouldn’t they publish the facts on their enemies if they had any? It is statistically improbable that thousands of people could keep a big secret for more than a few years, as research on historical conspiracies shows. If there were a big conspiracy, the most efficient way to keep it hidden wouldn’t be through powerful people using force to cover things up; it would be woven into our culture itself.

Culture is a scaffolding for our minds, and we know little else. Try to describe water to a fish who's never been taken out of it. We don’t know what we don’t know, and we fight to maintain the reality we’ve been conditioned to believe, instinctively, just to prevent the anxiety of doubt. Only the rare fish will poke its head out above the surface and notice that water is a unique condition with its own set of principles. And so only a few have poked their heads outside of our culture — anthropologists, philosophers, physicists perhaps. Certain experts in their fields have drilled down through the knowledge handed to them by others to observe reality themselves, establishing first-hand experience. But even they rely on others to understand every other field of knowledge. We are part of a hive-mind that shares knowledge, and that is simultaneously our strength and our weakness.

Accompanying first-hand knowledge we have assumptions — conceptual beliefs that frame and spin our knowledge to make meaning of it — ideas like “might makes right,” “greed is good,” “more is better,” “technology solves everything,” “rags to riches,” “The American Dream,” “hard work pays off,” and “you reap what you sow.” Those of us born into these cultural assumptions develop a worldview that is blind to anything that might be contrary to them. Another culture might bring assumptions like “power corrupts,” “greed is sin,” “less is more,” “the meek shall inherit the Earth,” “go with the flow,” “together we thrive or fail.” These ideologies control our thinking more than any powerful despot ever could. And waking up to question those assumptions could dramatically transform society today.

We are all drawn to believe in the grand conspiracy led by evil people at the top of the power pyramid, who if we only stopped them, all our problems would be solved. This is our body-budget trying to minimize our stress from thinking about all the problems we have to solve. If we could only tie them all together into one evil cabal, one story, one concept, we could say, “that’s who to blame for everything!” and stop thinking. Overstimulated by computers, cell phones, and an increasingly busy and rapidly changing world, we crave that certainty more than anything. Our minds are very flexible, as any study of cognitive biases will show, and we filter reality into the story templates we choose, consciously or unconsciously. The story we are all too often craving is that of the savior, the messiah — one hero of divine origin who comes down to cleanse us of all our sins, contamination, disease, and to punish and destroy the evil-doers responsible for all the darkness in the world. This is the story of Jesus, and many others before and since, recurring myths that embody this deep psychological desire for someone else to do the work for us. These archetypal stories flow in through our intuition and we emotionally settle on the story we want to prove — then we spend all of our research time filtering in evidence that supports and filtering out all that doesn’t. Again, this is human nature.

We love to hate because to project all of the evil upon a few other humans means we don’t have to take responsibility for any of our own darkness. And as they are swept away to be destroyed, we can claim to be free of sin without changing anything ourselves. This mythology is insidious. Carl Jung pointed out the rising messiah myth in Germany as it led to the rise of Hitler, the Nazis, and World War II.

So your intuition is correct — there is corruption, deceit, betrayal, and many of us are blind to it because it’s all we know. But before you call for lynchings and gas chambers, steady your mind and check your zealous sense of certainty. The desire to label people as evil is our human unwillingness to confront our own part in the evil perpetrated by our culture. Our desire to connect all the dots to tie all the evil together is our human reluctance to confront the overwhelming multitude of problems we actually have. And our certainty that we are right and everyone else is blind is our projection upon others of our own blindness.

Is there evil going on and corruption in top places of power? Absolutely! And if evidence shows them to be guilty of crimes, we will prosecute them. But that won’t eliminate all of our problems. Jailing a few bad apples won’t stop systemic racism, sexism, xenophobia, or homophobia. Punishing a few politicians for their corruption won’t undo an entire culture of greed, graft, and exploitation. And snapping out of one debunked conspiracy theory won’t give you the mental strength necessary to resist the next one. We have to commit to a higher sense of truth that we can only come to collectively, by using the hive-mind together, pushing each other to think through our problems and reshape the culture. And the hive mind needs all of us, the conservatives, the liberals, the centrists, and the conspiracy theorists, to undercut the lies in the current paradigm so we can erect a better one.

If your research consists of browsing the internet for dots to connect, consider stepping up your game to vet the credibility of sources, guess their human agendas, and seek out credible rebuttals to their claims. Don’t forget that many of your would-be sources are filtering their data based on the same story template that you are drawn to. Question the story template. If you are looking for dots to connect, upgrade your standards to the analogy of puzzle pieces that have many sides and shapes that have to fit their neighbors. Look at history in detail to see what patterns actually match and which ones are merely oversimplified legend. Read up on cognitive biases so you can catch your mind before it slides into these traps that use your logic against the search for truth. And accept your limitations. You aren’t built to know everything. It is difficult to drill down deep enough know something first hand, to become a credible expert in a field of knowledge, someone whom others will rely on to represent true understanding. But that would be a great service to humanity if you took it on. Someone has to ground us to reality so that our collective paradigm doesn’t float off into fairy tales and superstition.

Your intuition is right. Reality is shifting like great big tectonic plates producing tremors and earthquakes. Our foundational assumptions are being questioned, and that can lead us to great change. Let’s get emotionally ready for reality to crumble, welcome the paradigm shift. Capitalism, socialism, equality, meritocracy, authority, liberty, race, sex, gender, power, our conception of how interconnected we all are and how we should treat each other is up for debate. If it turns out that Donald Trump is supporting King John III in taking his rightful crown from the British Royal family, shutting down the private banking organizations controlled by the Rothschilds and the Catholic Church, putting the Clintons, Obama, George Soros, Trudeau, Fauci, Bill Gates, Harvey Weinstein, and all the other villains in the “Deep State” behind bars for their crimes against humanity, including the Satanic blood-drinking, sex-trafficking, and pedophile rings, and all of that magically rids us of inequality, poverty, racism, sexism and most every evil in the world… I’ll admit that you were right and I was wrong. But if that theory turns out to be untrue, I won’t shame you for believing that. It’s your role within the societal organism to question these things, and I applaud you for that. Just don’t call for violent action until you have actual proof. We don’t want another Holocaust.