There’s a part of me beginning to wonder whether the extreme and obvious inability of the mainstream media to have even the briefest passing acquaintance with the truth, or objectivity, is actually deliberate.
You make it almost impossible to trust any source of “news” and you have a recipe for a population that just doesn’t know what’s up or down, right or left, or man or woman.
But maybe the target isn’t anyone, but that growing proportion of the population who are, since covid, questioning things much more closely. The tactic would be something like this
(a) present your obvious BS as the ‘truth’
(b) wait for the inevitable fringe suspicions to emerge
(c) identify the entirety of the questioning “group” with the fringe elements
I’ve rather a lot of sympathy for heretics - even when I think what they’re saying has too many bonks to be described merely as bonkers.
One of the most famous ‘heretics’ is Galileo. He is often seen as the hero battling the ‘establishment’, and there’s some truth in that, but the actual story is more nuanced. But he serves as the archetype, particularly where science is involved.
Some people like to (sort of) compare themselves to Galileo - they present themselves as a heroic figure battling against the prevailing dogma. The problem is that in order to lay a legitimate claim to be a new Galileo one must satisfy two requirements
you must be a heretic
you must be right
The second of these requirements is much more important (and hugely more difficult to achieve).
But the “heretical process” - the willingness to reject ‘authority’ and stand against the prevailing wisdom, even if you’re several spikes short of a virus, is a precious and valuable thing.
When it comes to science then, sure, you’re going to be wrong 99.99% of the time - but it’s all worth it for the 0.01%
Science progresses not by orthodoxy, but by heresy.
With the gender debate, for example, I’m very much on the side of “orthodoxy”, and against what could be seen as the new heresy of Genderish. With the climate “debate” I’m getting more and more firmly convinced of my heresy - there is no climate ‘crisis’.
One could argue, perhaps, that the new ‘orthodoxy’ regarding gender is, in fact, that there are a squillion genders with several squillion more new and exciting ones yet to be discovered, and that being a man or a woman is entirely governed by what one feels about the issue when applied to your own sense of identity. So by rejecting Genderish one is being heretical - but I think that’s an illusion generated by the media presentation (and institutional capture) that “most people” are in tune with the Gender crap.
In a world where we have no way of properly getting at the truth of the matter, is this picture “genuine”, or a stunt dreamed up by some “anti-trans” group?
I’m talking about the picture here - the words are mine and (obviously) meant in jest.
If you convince people that there are all these “wacky” ideas being propagated, that it’s really difficult to know what’s true and what isn’t, that wrong ideas are dangerous (and they certainly can be, but how many simply wrong ideas can be truly labelled as such?) then you’re priming the pump for totalitarianism.
In such a world wouldn’t the average bod in the street just crave for some “authoritative” source of information, some official place they could get to the “truth”? Wouldn’t they be cheering any government effort to limit the spread of “misinformation”?
Uncertainty and doubt are, I think, uncomfortable for many. I rather like this state, though, because it means I’ve not quite understood something properly, that I have something to learn.
We do need to be better, as a society, at embracing doubt, at embracing heresy.
The neat trick that has been played, and gone largely unnoticed, is that you start by labelling clearly1 wacky ideas as some ‘heresy’ - the modern terminology here might be “conspiracy theory”. Once you’ve set the stage, and directed your audience’s attention where it needs to be, you can now apply the misdirection of labelling anything that veers from the “official” narrative as some kind of conspiracy theory, some kind of loony heresy. It’s a vicious one-way ratchet.
We had the covid lab leak hypothesis dismissed as some crazy conspiracy theory when, in fact, even at the time, it was extremely plausible - even if it had later turned out to have been false and that covid had zoonotic origins (which of course it didn’t - the lab leak explanation looks even more firmly founded and massively more plausible than it did back then).
I mean, covid is said to have originated in the very same place where they had a research facility investigating bat coronaviruses with gain of function techniques. It couldn’t possibly have leaked from there, could it? You’re just seeing conspiratorial coinky-dinks everywhere. It must have come from some improbable chain of animal infections involving, bats, pangolins and raccoon dogs. Obviously.
In the recent debate in the UK parliament on the WHO proposals to become the single source of truth and authority2 on all things health emergencified3 those who were concerned by this were dismissed as “conspiracy theorists”.
It’s very easy in science (and academia in general) to create the illusion of consensus. It’s really easy to manufacture it. You just need to ensure that the journals and funding sources will only deal with things within the “acceptable” narrative and, hey presto, you now have 97% of scientists agreeing with stuff that allows them to publish and get research funding.
It’s a neat feedback loop. The only things that get published and funded are those things that are narrative-friendly which then creates an even bigger “consensus” making claims outside of the consensus appear to be even more heretical. The Twitterati will then be able to claim, in their perpetual cry for “sources”, that all of the scientific “sources” agree with their particular cause of the day.
Because the majority of people still have some residual respect for scientists and have no idea just how crap most of us are, it’s easy to steer a population along some path that has been verified by The Experts™.
I’m being too harsh on scientists, in general. It’s true that the vast majority of us are not pedestal-worthy, but we do rate a place on the bottom step at least - but really only when it comes to our own specialities.
Instead of entirely rejecting the label of “conspiracy theory”, I think we should be seeding the idea that conspiracy theories are good things.
We should place “conspiracy theories” within their rightful place as being part of the necessary process of questioning - of maintaining our scepticism - and we should be supporting the right of people to be heretics. Without heretics we’d still be back in the Stone Age (which is where the KKK, the Klimate Krisis Kooks, seem to want us to be).
Heretics are a kind of mutation in the environment of ideas - and without mutations we never would have developed intelligence in the first place.
And by ‘clearly’ I really mean with high probability - because some of those “clearly” wacky notions turn out to have been true
And not just an “authority” in the sense of knowledge, but in the actual authority to implement their ‘solutions’ to some ‘emergency’
I like this new word - the emergencification of health. It doesn’t work well for crisis - crisissification sounds like a crisis wearing a dress
There should have been more heresy on gay marriage: https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/25/from-tolerance-to-tyranny-feeding-the-gender-beast/
Good piece! What do you think of the philosophical concept, Occam’s Razor? People are accused of being a conspiracy theorist all the time by MSM and the power elite but often it’s they who conjure up the most elaborate conspiracy theories (dressed up in narrative) and present it as truth! For example, the lab leak hypothesis seemed to be the most simplest explanation for covid at the time, in fact even Fauci and Farrar believed this too. But the power elite said we were conspiracy theorists for thinking this and came up with all sorts of nonsense involving pangolins. Has it now been proven that it wasn’t a lab leak? It’s not clear from your post. There’s a really good book just published about media narratives, ie they don’t bother with truth anymore, just narratives. It’s called “Truthaphobia” by Graham Majin. He’s done a few interviews on YT to promote it. Worth a listen or a read in my humble opinion. He does blame the baby boomers for the fine mess we’re in though. But since I’m not a boomer that’s ok with me!