Unfollow the Science
Conspiracy Consciousness, Semiosis Psychosis, & a Void of Increasing Doubt
(Audio version at end of article)
Courting Uncertainty
In school, we had a list of “statements” we had to copy as a punishment. One of them was (roughly) “Socrates was sentenced to death by poison for corrupting the youth of Athens.”
I never asked—though perhaps I wondered—what he did to corrupt the youth of Athens. (I guess the answer would have been too complex to include in a single statement.)
It may seem contradictory, but there’s a direct correlation between being firmly grounded in reality and the ability to be uncertain about what is or isn’t true. An extreme case of this idea was expressed by Socrates, when he said (roughly), “The only thing I know for certain is that I know nothing.”
Maybe that’s why he had to drink the Hemlock?
Being a cognitive dissident means courting uncertainty. To avoid doublethink, one must become a liminal thinker. Not this, not that, but somewhere in between.
The Socratic principle of not-knowing is addressed, more obliquely, cryptically, in the book of Job: Job is certain of one thing only, his own innocence. This gives him the cojones to challenge God, and rightly, since God just turned Job into Satan’s plaything to win a bet.
And yet, at the climax, God’s whirlwind asserts that Job essentially knows nothing. Job is not God. By implication, however, since Job is not God, all Job needs to know is what he is personally responsible (and accountable) for.
On the flip side of the paradox of the wisdom of knowing nothing is this: the less sure people become of what they know, the more fiercely they believe in it. This is “logical,” as well as irrational: if you don’t know something for sure, but are unable to admit it, then—you’ve got to believe it.
Not only that, you have to forget it’s only a belief and convince yourself you know it for a fact.
Belief is something we think we know for sure.
Why is it so difficult to be in a state of uncertainty when life is nothing but a state of uncertainty? If life is nothing but uncertainty, whither cometh this powerful “need” for certainty? Surely not from life itself?1
Three Big Lies?
Last week, on a recommendation, I listened to John Hamer talking to Bill Ramsey about “the falsification of science.” Hamer claims there are three tenets of modern science, all of which he considers false.
1. The Big Bang.
2. Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.
3. The Globe-Earth.
Hamer doesn’t offer much evidence about why these things are false, but he did get me thinking, and inspired the focus for last week’s Children of Job discussion group. What follows are some of my observations from that meeting, the full recording of which I have included at the end of this piece (for paid subscribers).
I would say that these three tenets increase in relevance, as well as credibility, as they proceed. The Big Bang theory is little more than a modern-day creation myth, obviously unknowable and who-really-cares-to-know? It’s an obvious case of the use of scientistic myths to shape and then impose a worldview.
Evolution is more essential as a concept to the modern or postmodern worldview. Like Gnosticism, there are parts I find useful and parts I don’t, and since my twenties, I have doubted the basic premise that humans were descended from apes, and preferred the notion that apes were degenerated humans.
This makes it no great challenge for me to throw Darwin, along with Alexander Friedmann and Stephen Hawking, to the wolves.
The shape of the Earth comes much closer to a fundamental belief-assumption that I have held for as long as I can remember. I have even had sleeping visions of flying above the Earth, visions I used to believe were bona fide experiences of “astral projection.” And yes, it was round.
In Prisoner of Infinity I wrote at some length about “the overview effect”: the claim put forward by the (alleged) astronaut Edgar Mitchell that seeing the Earth from space was akin of a kind of enlightenment experience. I also wrote about NASA’s involvement in sociocultural engineering, and I am pretty much convinced that nothing that comes out of “Not a Space Agency” (and Never A Straight Answer) is to be believed.
However, the globeEearth “theory” predates NASA by thousands of years, and I have until lately assumed that “flat-Earth” theories were part of a psyop to confuse and discredit conspiracy theorists.2
It would be difficult to say how much my previous conviction regarding the shape of the Earth was cemented by early NASA photographs, and then by internet programs like Google Earth, but I think it is fair to say, “Quite a bit.” Did our ancestors 300, or even 100, years ago have anything like the same sort of certainty—or interest—regarding the shape of the Earth? I doubt it.
Hamer remarks how, when he says he doesn’t believe in the theory of evolution, people frequently assume he’s a Christian fundie who believes in the literal truth of the Old Testament. Hamer says that this is just laziness. Similarly, a person can doubt the official claims—and imagery—regarding a spherical Earth, without necessarily believing in a “flat Earth.”
The mere fact that “flat-Earther” has more or less replaced “tin-foil-hatter” and become short-hand for “all-conspiracy-theorists-are-morons” is reason enough for me to want to remain open to it, if only not to fall into the schismogenetic trap.
That, and the fact that “some of my best friends” do appear to take it seriously—though as far as I know this wasn’t the case a few years ago.
Matrix 1 or Matrix 2?
After listening to the Ramsey podcast, I posted this on X:
if we realize that a whole paradigm might be invented (globe earth, evolution, big bang = 1st matrix) with that shd surely come the awareness that the notion of its being invented could also be an invention (= 2nd matrix) TL;DR: How much are we being lied to abt being lied to?
The main aim of psyop, as I see it, is to get us to believe things that are untrue as a way to uncouple us from reality and compromise our capacity for discernment.
But is there a psyop to get people believing the Earth is not a globe, because in fact the Earth is a globe? Or is there a much older psyop that got us to, not only believe but be flat-out convinced, that the Earth is a globe, when in fact it isn’t?
The next question I want to ask is: does it actually matter?
Neither the theory of evolution or of a globular Earth is particularly essential to my personal “worldview” or to how I live my life. And yet, I can hardly be unaware that these ideas are linchpins of a collective worldview. What is most challenging about the idea of a non-globular Earth is the thought of how complex, elaborate, sophisticated, and far-reaching such a deception would be, if true.
We may then start to wonder if it wouldn’t be less of a deception to create a whole set of counter-data, convincing people that the Earth isn’t a globe. Which “psyop” seems more likely?
In conspiracy circles, the more “serious” and hard-headed researchers and commentators have, like myself—at least until recently—considered flat Earth theory a psyop, designed to make conspiracy research look like it is a field full of undiscerning idiots who will believe anything.
And yet, at Wednesday’s meeting, I was surprised to find four out of six attendants (if I include myself) had doubts about globe-Earth, with one person pretty much convinced it isn’t, and two with serious doubts (I remain agnostic).
I would guess that this is at least indirectly related to the “covid years,” in which “conspiracy consciousness” went all the way to 11. If “They” can lie about this, what else have they lied about?
In the 2020s, Mulder’s “I Want to Believe” has been eclipsed by “Trust No One.”
Which is another way of saying, believe nothing.
Whether this is a Socratic or a psychotic frame of mind depends on who it belongs to.
The Religion of Science
“The Enlightenment” was when Science replaced Religion as the primary reference point for consensus reality (the thing that most people agree on). But was this a natural, organic “succession” of one worldview by another, or was it intentionally and systematically engineered (or a bit of both)?
If there was a growing realization—among the cryptocratic social engineering factions, however many, and however unified or fragmented—that religion was losing its hold over the collective psyche, and that science was its inevitable replacement, might this “natural” development have been coopted?
I don’t see why not, or even how not.
Suppose the awareness of an “evolution” within human society and consciousness led to a collective decision, by the same secret societies that had already co-opted religion, to cement their control and do roughly the same thing with science?
That is, to take some fundamental truths, rearrange them into a form that is more mystifying than illuminating, and then set themselves up as the indispensable intermediary—the “priestcraft”—to convey, verify, and interpret these truths.
Truth is thereby co-opted to maintain worldly power, and to keep everyone else under it.3
Today, science functions just like religion once did: We are given ideas, concepts, and facts that there is no way to verify—we are even told that we can’t verify them, and then we are reassured that it’s OK, we can trust “experts” to verify them for us.
“Follow the science” means “follow our mandates.” Our commandments.
Can you go to Mars and check it is there? Can you go into space and see what shape the Earth is? Can you measure how far away the Sun and the Moon are? Can you look into DNA evidence to make sure it is accurate? Can you measure subatomic particles or observe their behavior to verify quantum mechanics? Can you carbon-date things to confirm the historical timeline we are given?
No.
It’s self-evident that most of Science is unverifiable by us, that we have to trust in the professionals, exactly as previously we were told to trust in priests and bishops and popes, and in religious hierarchies.
Without these experts and their “occult” methods, we can know almost nothing about such questions. And yet, not only have we been persuaded that the experts of science can and do know these things, we have been made to believe that we do, in fact, need to know them.
Hence we need the experts to tell us.4
Semiosis Psychosis (Using a nail to drive out a nail)
In the introduction to Jacques Ellul’s Propaganda, Konrad Kellen writes that “education is largely identical with what Ellul calls ‘pre-propaganda’—the conditioning of minds with vast amounts of incoherent information, already dispensed for ulterior purposes and posing as ‘facts’ and as ‘education’” (p. vi).
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