I want to confess having a bia towards the cospiral world. I’m not too invested in any one pet cospirisy, I’m assuming almost all of them are wrong in ways I can’t even imagine them being wrong. Rather I revel in uncertainty, which is always the by product of opening myself to cospirisy. I try never to trust my brain to where I completely eliminate doubt. There is always some sliver of a planck length that my neurochemistry misinterpreted the infinite amount of data points it processes every microsecond, and produced a mutant meme not fit for this world. There are many ideas that sound true enough to bet my life on it. I’ll get on a plane because I trust the mechanical and social infrastructure of air travel. I can’t however say my plane will absolutely land safety with no chance of mishap. I would never board a plane if I had any substantial doubt of a plane safety, but I always have a few viral thoughts of some in air borne fiery calamity. In these moments I’m bonded with my fellow passengers as I pick up on all the collective anxiety around me as we take off.
Nurturing this doubt, I hope, allows me to be free from ideology. Every culture and subculture has rules and customs. These rules and customs can benefit or harm people in these cultures. I understand how many things such as geography, climate, environment, and other physical variations will contributes to how a culture will act. Belief as to what reality is and what are its rules seem to have a prominent role in shaping the rules and customs of a society, in a metaphysical way. It's perhaps the biggest variable we have control over. If your an Inuit chilling in the arctic you have to build a shelter a certain way with regards to the cold temperature and available resources. Whether you believe in globalization though is your choice. Whether your area becomes part of the meta human hive or lives in a more traditional way, will certainly have an effect on your life. Which would be a better life for you is too big a question to be answered by bumper sticker. It is my bias that thinks neither side should be 100 percent embraced. Place your bet for sure, do some heavy thinking, but be aware there are flaws in your answer and there are alway a better answers.
There Seems to be a perennial pattern where a thought is divided in half. There a god and a devil, or sacred and secular, liberal , conservative. Of course we all have all of these idea swirling around in our heads. Again we all have our preferences but no one gets away without contradiction, despite what our propaganda cartoon in pharmaceutical sponsored media model for us. The religious have moments of doubt, while atheist have moments of faith. Once a ideology is divided it seems we humans are prone to identify with one side and denounce the other. We choose to become liberals or conservatives, scientist or mystics, sunni or shiite, christians or muslims, catholic or protestant, crip or blood. Whatever it seems it doesn't matter, as long as its us and the other. Ideological purity can easily becomes a virtue, and only the virtuatist will be allowed to ascend within the hierarchy of this culture.
I don’t think there anything wrong with the us and them game as long as we can acknowledge all the contradictions within us and not mistake our perception of reality for reality. If we are willing to be honest about how messy reality is and be clear that our philosophical models of reality are always going to be simpler than reality, then these models can be useful tools to communicate. And this is my affinity for conspiracy. In a word where political violence seems to be intensifying and in a world where we (from nation state down to people ) have more tool for destruction, whether like it or not, I believe we all need to work on creating cultural myths that both allow for full expression of ourselves but don’t create monster which we need to slay. Again I want to point out I could be wrong about all this, I just want to express an opinion. If all people on team x think the problem is lack of turntables and all the people on team 0 think the problem is too many turntables, then eventually they may kill each other if they don't come up with a new story. The problem may in fact have little to do with amount of turntables but the distribution of turntables, or where the turntable are located. Perhaps many people on team X and 0 could help each other solve these problems instead of arguing over the amount of turntables.
I feel this is the true purpose of conspiracy theories. Who was responsible for 911 . I am in no way qualified to really know. I don’t even know all the ways I’m unqualified to know. I Know what corporate news told me to believe. I know the differences between fox and msnbc. I know what NPR told me. I know wht Alex Jones thinks happened. They all make a certain amount of sense if I’m in the right mindset. They all could be true or untrue and I have no way of knowing absolutely. I can however tell if these theories, onced believed by people, help or hurt. Does this idea make people paranoid, and helpless, or do they create engagement, and community.
The conspiracy world seems to have many causality. Many people who want to believe just to believe. Conspiracist can be hostile to ideas only because they are mainstream. I think conspiracy thinking should not be about embracing far out beliefs, but generating possibilities. Beliefs are ideas that got stuck. Ideas like water grow foul with stagnation. Fixating on whether an idea is true distracts us to whether a idea is useful. How long before our most grounded notions about how reality works are upended. What will people thousands of years in the future think of our civilization if they think about us at all. A conspiracy theory whether right or wrong can only be useful if it lead to a perspective that empowers people to a healthier state.
To illustrate this idea I submit “operation long leash” I found this little diddy of a yarn on some little known fringe bait site called the BBC. The gist is, in the forties after the war a CIA funded group called the Congress for Cultural Freedoms (CCF) played a significant role in promoting of all things abstract expressionism. Good ole god denying anarchist and communist such as Pollock and Rothko being patronized by uncle sam. There is a cat by the handle Julius Fleischmann who funded an exhibition in London bringing this supposingly subversive American art to Europe. Julius was president of the Fairfield Foundation which was bankrolled by the CIA
So why would the CIA in the 40s, a time in which one can assume the international tension was palpable, would the CIA concern itselves with some drunken misfits painter. Maybe after all the carnage of WW2 staring at paint spit on to a canvas with little concern for intention made as much sense as anything. Or perhaps as the theory goes it was a reaction against the jingoist type of art our evil communist friendmies were cranking out in the USSR. Soviet art at this time feels earnest and wholesome but quite repressed. It doesn’t depict people so much as it displays citizens, performing for the benefit of a centrally controlled state. What better way to undermine all the well intention art of communism than by promoting something that wasn’t punk only because punk wasn’t anything yet. What could sell western values more than some drunks pouring paint on a canvas and being hailed a genus. Come to America, forget all responsibilities as a citizen., be an artist, be free.
So do I think this is true. Maybe. Some facts lineup , but people are complicated. Who knows how art will affect a culture, especially experimental art. Who would be able to think this through all the way. But again maybe someone such a position of power doesn’t need to think everything through. Maybe at this echelon, power is maintain by hundreds of these type plans. Maybe only a fraction ever pan out, but that is enough to maintain control over a culture. To argue over the validity of this to me misses the point. What to me is fascinating is if this is true, something that I can’t rule out, so many people were duped into promoting government propaganda thinking it was high art. Government propaganda that probably went against the very values of many within this art culture who were promoting this.
Whether this one story is true or not misses the bigger picture, of how common is this archetype. How often are we duped without knowing we are duped. How often are we being complacent when we imagine ourselves subversive. Are we fighting against a system in such a predictable way that the system has found a way to harness our energies without our awareness. What utterly mundane boardroom of Don Drapers started selling Che shirts to people who wanted to protest capitalism. And If you bought one please don’t be offended. It is my tin foil hat opinion this is happening all the time. We are all fools at some point. It is the constant practice, I believe, of entertaining, not necessarily believing, as many possibilities as we can, that allows us to cultivates an immune system for these opportunistic memes.