And yet... still not the best choice of president in this handshake.
From your own experience, ask yourself this honestly: how successful are surprise parties?
How about this one: how long does it typically take for a workplace-based extramarital affair to become common knowledge? Even ones that ruin marriages and (more importantly) careers seemingly have the inevitably of avalanches.
We are shit at secrets.
Gossip is an evolutionary advantage. Endless, pointless nattering solidifies social bonds in primate groups. (Yes, I just gave you an evolutionary explanation for the Kardashians. Nobel Prize, please.)
Most of the time we understand this. Most of the time, Peter J Carroll’s observations in Psybermagick ring true:
Any conspiracy lacking internal conspiracies will rule its world… In practice the power of any conspiracy rises and falls in inverse proportion to the power of its internal conspiracies. Mutual guilt and bribery mainly hold together conspiracies whose ideologies command insufficient loyalty, but this makes them vulnerable.
Never join a conspiracy that you could possibly betray, because if you could, someone else will.
The trouble is… when you look at the Fortean world for long enough you inevitably, erroneously -and hopefully temporarily- reach the conclusion that a vast conspiracy of the powerful and hegemonic is allied against you… against the truth.
Because how else could it be possible that the Egyptian authorities have steadfastly refused all global attempts to explore the chamber under the left paw of the sphinx that is unequivocally there as proven by independent ground penetrating radar?
How else could it be possible that the potentially unavoidable proof of ancient structures on the moon -which you can see in publicly published photos- hasn’t reached the mainstream without generations of sustained, complex and active suppression? What happens when people who have actually been into space tell you there are structures on Mars?
It’s kinda a big deal.
And so you start to think unhelpful thoughts. You start to think like a character in the last few pages of a Lovecraft story.
You start genuinely entertaining the notions that astronauts have had their memories erased and rogue academics have been offed in suspicious plane crashes. You start to believe in -paraphrasing PJC- a conspiracy devoid of internal conspiracies.
That being said… there is only so much instant dismissal, mockery and shrill counter propaganda -rather than the eminently reasonable and scientific examination- of these oddities before you start feeling a little disturbed… a little bit moved around the board. Something is evidently going on because, clearly, the lady doth protect too much.
If you’ve ever worked in a large company or government organisation you will instantly recognise the absurdity of the very idea of a vast conspiracy maneuvering in concert to keep mankind ignorant of what’s really going on. My old company couldn’t manage to keep a few layoffs (including my own) secret. Everyone knew about it six months in advance.
My comments about conspiracy do not apply to the Norwegian government who is clearly keeping the existence of trolls secret from us as this doucmentary proves.
This is basic Organisational Theory.
Large organisations -especially bureaucracies- can barely do the job they are supposed to be doing let alone a whole extra one, executed flawlessly, that nobody knows about.
Our helicopters crash into each other in broad daylight, we are declared dead by the tax man in a phone call on our way to work, human resources overpays us for a year without noticing and then wants it all back, diabetics are injected with methadone rather than insulin in hospital.
If you don’t believe me then just look at the person in the cubicle next to yours. The one talking about last night’s [insert talent/singing show here]. Do you think they are keeping the secrets of an alien civilisation from you?
The seeming coordination of factors contributing to the “suppression” of unorthodox facts and ideas can be more elegantly explained as the summary of competing mutual agendas. After the fact -thanks to the narrative fallacy- it looks like an alliance of the powerful working together to keep us ignorant.
Market-wide coordination, however, is extremely rare which is why price fixing is also such a rarity. It’s really only OPEC countries, utilities like gas and electricity and government contractors that manage to do it. And they do it boldly, in broad daylight, right in front of everyone’s nose. A conspiracy it is not.
Other examples like Big Tobacco’s patchy and unsuccessful attempts to suppress the health effects of smoking only look like coordinated activity. They are instead dozens of smaller suppressing actions taken for localised reasons. It might look like a ship but it is a ship without a captain.
Sidebar: This dovetails neatly into my nascent Demiurge-as-Egregore theory. It’s a narrative fallacy… it’s a mental shortcut -convenient on the spiritual path- that implies intentionality and complexity when the reality is much more likely to be banal. There is no great Sauronesque being seeking to keep you chained to the earth… there is just the bureaucrat having a bad day and the business development director at a weapons manufacturer trying to make his quarterly target. Multiply by six billion and you have a potent enemy.
Thus true gnosis is escaping the inevitable false narrative of dominant power structures. The narratives would have been different in the second to tenth century when the notion of the Demiurge crystallised but the ‘inevitability of the banal explanation’ would have been the same. It would have been the untalented, ambitious priest, the shrill, petty king and the local burgomeister who insists on a bribe but… just like in the modern era… if you add together all these horrible little factors you inadvertently build an implacable, continent-spanning egregore of darkness, a high emperor of the radioactive wasteland, an astral Simon Cowell, who whispers in your ear that you should buy The Sun and keep that job in the call centre and watch reality television all night because your world is devoid of magic and your starlit sky is devoid of teachers and companions.
Except that’s not the case. That’s an observational error.
Conspiracies don’t have to be the suppression of knowledge. Conspiracies are simply those moments when the currently inexplicable meets the unwillingness to change. They don’t trickle down from the Bildebergers conference… they are the side effect of encountering that unhelpful employee at the DMV.
Where we are going in this series it’s important that we bring this up first. We will be swimming at dusk in some very murky waters and the bull sharks of ignorance are always hungry.
Intentionality is not always necessary for suppression. Sometimes it’s just another day in the cubicle for the Demiurge.
Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes by Alan Moore:
“The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory is that conspiracy theorists actually believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is chaotic. The truth is, that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy or the grey aliens or the 12 foot reptiloids from another dimension that are in control. The truth is more frightening, nobody is in control. The world is rudderless.”
Posted by Dver | January 25, 2012, 10:36 pm@Dver Ha. Love it. Once again the grumpy luddite from Northampton drops a truth bomb.
He’s so awesome.
Posted by Gordon | January 25, 2012, 10:40 pmConspiracy theorists wear me out. Which is why I avoid Ron Paul supporters like the plague.
Posted by Ron | January 25, 2012, 11:28 pmGood post, Gordon
Where there is fire there is smoke. Unless the “smoke” is really a dust storm.
Alan Moore rocks
Regarding the “monolith” (aka mono=one, lith=stone, which does not mean it is anthropogenic… there are monoliths, aka boulders (glacial erratics), spires, etc. all over national parks here):
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1204254/Has-mystery-Mars-Monolith-solved.html
Posted by Lance Foster | January 26, 2012, 1:35 am“If you’ve ever worked in a large company or government organisation you will instantly recognise the absurdity of the very idea of a vast conspiracy maneuvering in concert to keep mankind ignorant of what’s really going on.”
This is so true. I’d normally laugh at how inept some organizations are, but I’ve been working in such organizations for far too long.
Managing communication is difficult for simple things like every day work. For conspiracies – I think that the complexity of communications management would astronomical. Hey, perhaps it takes an alien intelligence to make it work
Posted by Simon Tomasi | January 26, 2012, 12:14 pmOn the other hand…
The Ruse of The Fourth Estate
January 24, 2012 By Jaffer Ali
We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.
—John Swinton, 19th Century NY Times journalist**
The recent SOPA legislation had another purpose other than protecting intellectual property. It really was a thinly veiled attempt to control our information ecosystem. Our MSM is relatively easy to control. You see, contrary to what most of us grew up believing, mainstream media exists largely to promote the prevailing power elite.
Everyone knew that the old Soviet Union’s largest newspaper, Pravda (the Russian word for ‘truth’), existed to promote the Communist’s party’s central committee wishes. Everybody knew this in the Soviet Union as well as the West. There was no illusion of a free press.
If I may, a personal anecdote will illustrate the point even more clearly. I was born and raised in Chicago most of my life. When I was ten, my folks figured I should learn more about the language, religion and Palestinian culture so they sent me to live with my grandparents on the West Bank. It was 1966 and the West Bank was administered by the King of Jordan.
I was not thrilled to go because among many reasons I was going to miss watching Gale Sayers run through NFL defenses. But I remember a talk my father gave to me that would not make sense for many months. My father, knowing even at ten that I was a bit precocious and loose-lipped, sat me down and said something to the effect, “Son, you have to watch what you say when you get to Jordan. It is against the law to say bad things about the king.”
My aunt was the number one radio news broadcaster for all of Jordan. She read the news in English and it was broadcast all over Jordan and Israel. She lived with us too. More on this in a bit.
One day my grandfather took me to the doctor in Jerusalem. As fate would have it, a huge demonstration against the King was taking place. Arab Spring reminded me of this event in my life. In between Jerusalem and the village where we lived, there was a huge park festooned with the King’s crowns everywhere.
Trying to get home was a nightmare. The King had called up tanks and the entire army was mobilized as he was worried that a revolution was about to take place. All movement from village to village was restricted, but my grandfather asked the taxi driver to continue until we got to the park where the main concentration of tanks were.
All of the King’s crowns were torn down and crowds were chanting anti-King Hussein epithets. The army was not supposed to let anyone through the road block, but my grandfather was an American citizen and showed his passport. They finally, after four hours let us through.
We listened to my aunt’s broadcast later that evening. Not a single word of the massive protests was uttered on air.
Fast forward to 1967 and the “Six-Day War” ensued. My aunt was given scripts to read how the Arab armies were marching on Tel Aviv. She was in Jerusalem, gun shots could be heard everywhere. But she kept broadcasting how Israel was soon to be but a memory. A soldier came into the station who looked worried.
She yelled, ‘what’s the matter with you’ in Arabic. She was puzzled that he did not seem to understand her. So she tried English. This he understood. He pointed the gun at her and told her to leave. Yep, he was an Israeli soldier. She had been reading how swimmingly the war was going and here was an Israeli soldier capturing the station.
My aunt laughs about it now as she lives a retired life in suburban Chicago. But the two events at an early point in my life made me more skeptical about the role of the press in a society. If you lived in the Soviet Union or the Middle East, it is no tin-foil hat conspiracy to recognize the verity of John Swinton’s quote. At times, the elite tell us the truth, but it is buried in a sea of trivial information. Here is a precious quote:
“The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media.”
—William Colby, former CIA Director, quoted by Dave Mcgowan, Derailing Democracy
Was Colby lying or posturing? Was he donning a tin foil hat? One of America’s great novelists/journalists was Upton Sinclair. He wrote a little known book that he made available for free called The Brass Check. It was an early 20thCentury expose on how US journalism worked. If you are a journalist and have not read this, shame on you. He wrote:
“The methods by which the “Empire of Business” maintains its control over journalism are four: First, ownership of the papers; second, ownership of the owners; third, advertising subsidies; and fourth, direct bribery. By these methods there exists in America a control of news and of current comment more absolute than any monopoly in any other industry.” – Upton Sinclair, The Brass Check***
No doubt defenders of “the fourth estate” will point to great muckrakers to prove the point of a vibrant press. But the exceptions do not prove the rule. If you are a Ron Paul supporter, much of the above already rings true as he is often odd man out of discussions…unless you follow the most trusted man in news, comedian Jon Stewart.
This brings us back to SOPA. It is my contention that the Internet’s expansion caught the elite flat-footed. As more and more people got their information from the Internet, the stranglehold of the MSM was loosened. The “empire of business” lost control of how mythologies could be maintained and promoted. So how could the elite grab control of the Internet? See SOPA and other similar campaigns down the road.
**Labor’s Untold Story, by Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais, published by United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America, NY, 1955/1979.)
*** The Brass Check was a slang term referring to a way in which prostitutes were paid. Upton Sinclair wrote the book of the same title that was self-published and made available to copy free from royalties.
Filed Under: Featured Writers
About Jaffer Ali
Jaffer Ali is CEO of Vidsense, a video content network. With thousands of advertiser-friendly video clips licensed from major film and TV studios, the Vidsense content network can deliver millions of qualified visitors directly to advertiser websites to view the content on a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) basis. By bundling content and audience and delivering both to advertisers, Vidsense creates an engaging and compelling environment for consumers and advertisers alike. He can be reached at j (dot) ali (at) Vidsense (dotcom).
Posted by Lance Foster | January 26, 2012, 3:56 pmActually, Lance’s remarks remind me of when I worked as a copy editor for the English-language section of the Hungarian Press Agency (read: “Ministry of Propaganda”). I recall editing a piece about George Soros offering to buy a major Hungarian bank in the mid nineties (which the anti-Semitic, paranoid government would not stand for). The Editor-in-Chief (read: “chief censor”) hovered around behind me and “suggested” changes that I resisted making. Later that day I saw the article that eventually went out on the wire. The “official” version of events did not look like the article that originally crossed my desk, nor like the version that went out after I’d edited it. I was pissed off and bitter at the same time. And this in a so-called democracy. Only a handful of people every saw the original story. And they ain’t talkin’. And I was too scared to tell anyone about it (I figure it’s OK now after almost twenty years). I’ve seen the truth get smothered in its crib. That incident made a deep impression on me.
Scribbler´s last [type] ..Contribute to the Arbatel Link Digest!
Posted by Scribbler | January 26, 2012, 4:26 pmAnd here I was ready to jump in with a “but…” until I read this:
“Conspiracies are simply those moments when the currently inexplicable meets the unwillingness to change.”
Excellent explanation for the point I was ready to argue. Looking forward to your next installment!
Rose Weaver´s last [type] ..Continued Manifestation
Posted by Rose Weaver | January 26, 2012, 4:58 pm