I have been getting frustrated with people in my extended and close circle moving towards conspiracy theories and science denial.
I also had loads of troubles discussing anything with them without fearing that this would rip our friendship apart.
This piece puts many of my thoughts into words. He uses too many complex words for my taste but I think the message gets through.
Best of all. Its not only a rant. It ends with a wish.
- Twenty years after the Matrix, and about twelve after The Secret, I still think the antidote lies in integrating a more emotionally honest psychological understanding of trauma and painful emotions, a better-informed and humble understanding of how science works, and a more intellectually unpacked philosophical conversation about reality, reason, consciousness, causality, and the human condition.
I would say the most mind fucked I've ever been in science was when I took my first class in quantum (upper-lever undergrad), and learned that QM isn't mystical but basically boils down to boundary conditions. It's so fucking ordinary, even if the implications are extraordinary. I'm not plugged into the New Age community, but I think that fact would not resonate....a better-informed and humble understanding of how science works, and a more intellectually unpacked philosophical conversation about reality...
I spend quite some time around people interested in psychedelics, covering the whole spectrum from academics to psytrance festival hippies. There are too many people referencing quantum mechanics. I am always tempted to ask them to explain QM to me but stop myself because I remember that I am there (a burn or festival) to enjoy. And just leave.
As the son of a teacher at alternative medicine clinics in and around Santa Fe and Taos since the late fucking '70s who then married a goddamn naturopathic doctor, allow me to say with no quaver in your voice that this guy is overthinking it. Spiritual beliefs of any kind are nothing more and nothing less than the manifestation of a need for purpose. Full stop. The end. It needs to mean something. That's all. That need for purpose serves as the foundation for a ridiculous amount of human endeavor but it doesn't need to. Conspiracy theorists are basically apostates. They still have a need for purpose but they think that purpose has been subverted. They've decided the universe is imbalanced because the gods are angry. So they look for angry gods. Fundamentally, every conspiracy theorist is saying the same thing: "the world is praying to the wrong deity." They don't have to be advocates of that deity either; David Icke doesn't want the world run by lizard people, it's just that lizard people running the world makes the most sense to his need for purpose. Obviously things are fucked up because the lizard people aren't taking care of us the way actual humans would. Obviously things are fucked up because the people running the world drink the blood of tortured children. Obviously things are fucked up because Bill Gates is bathing us in 5G to excite the chips in our bloodstream from the vaccines. They take these arguments on faith; they won't assent to this assessment when you press them on it but their resistance to argument will go up just as fast as if you said "jesus wasn't actually the son of God, you know". Hippies? Hippies have known the wrong gods were worshipped since the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Before that. Before the hippies it was was the Beats, before the Beats it was the jazz crew. I mean, the Bavarian Illuminati were a group of businessmen and aesthetes who figured the world could be run better than the officials running it so they had a couple meetings and here we are, three hundred years later, freaking out about pyramids with eyes. Fundamentally, you're going to have more apostates when the New World Order is fucked up. And when central knowledge becomes diffuse, the apostates will pick and choose. It's not rocket science.As a yoga teacher, teacher trainer, bodyworker, ecstatic dance DJ, and writer, I have been in and around this subculture for almost 30 years,
“ I have been getting frustrated with people in my extended and close circle moving towards conspiracy theories and science denial.” I guess I have trouble with the term “science”, I read this more as, people around me don’t accept or conform to my “religious” views and I’m mad at them for picking a different religion. In the age of covid the science is crap, the study’s often are using bad or incomplete data and the additional filter and spin put on top of that when it is processed to be consumed by the masses makes It only marginally more factually accurate than something someone wrote on a stone tablet 2000 years ago. Unless you are actively reading the source materials (which I am not probably more due to lack of access than interest) I dont feel like you should be making any claims of having an opinion based on science. And if you are then you should do your best to establish to your peers where your data comes from and let them make up their own mind. In the US at least I don’t feel like there are any official science sources that are trustworthy. The CDC and google are tainted, Bill gates you couldn’t trust with education but you trust him with covid?, state sources are for the most part cooking the books trying to justify the discussions already made so who is left except primary sources? Sure there is real science going on in the background somewhere but what most people are consuming is some sort of religion based loosely on some science, so don’t be so high and mighty about your science because it’s probably just science based bullshit
Except, I live in Germany and work for the university hospital. We get the internal numbers from the hospital and the other hospitals and I can see, to everybody surprise, they match the official numbers in the media. If I look at the states, yeah, that's some clown fiesta where no one really knows where up or down is. But that doesn't interest me. What messes me up that people in Germany are adopting weird QAnon conspiracies even though the ground is barren. It is really hard to argue against the policies and the data here. This is what frustrates me. The data is clear and it is very easy to show what is happening. But at the end of the discussion the argument ends with "in my truth" (wtf does that even mean) or "the pharmaceutical industry" or "everything you learn at university is wrong". So yeah, I get frustrated.