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Chris Bateman's avatar

Hi Mike,

Thanks for inviting me to read this piece. I have a lot of sympathy with what you present here, most especially in the way that the topics you've chosen to reflect on have been polarised and thus distorted. However, it is the nature of my engagement with thoughts such as these that I will tend to single out points of disagreement or areas where there is greater ambiguity than you might be suggesting. This does not mean I disagree with your overall themes; on the whole, we are quite well aligned here (especially on the utter mess that was COVID-19, but also on many of your other chosen topics).

You choose to call these situations a 'psyop', and although I'm not against the idea being flagged here (the distortion implied does occur, and there is a motive behind the acts taken to create and sustain the distortion) I personally resist this terminology. I prefer to talk about these as 'rifts', although even this term is not entirely helpful. I dislike 'psyop' largely because it reinforces the idea of a shadowy cabal controlling events from behind the scenes. I personally suspect this risks overstating the actuality, and in so doing reinforces the idea that we have less power than in fact we do. If there is a shadowy cabal manipulating events behind the scenes they are doing it very badly. There are certainly wealthy individuals doing stupid things with vast funding, but I don't think this equates to these lunatics being in control. Most likely, nobody is in control in the way this phrase is usually used. So on the whole I find it more plausible that other, more basic aspects of human nature suffice to explain the entire horrendous situation.

You are clearly writing from a US perspective, so from this neck of the woods (where I currently live, incidentally, although it's not where I'm from) the situation falls out into the blue team and the red team. I find it helpful to do away with the names of the parties, which are extremely misleading (now more than ever). Because of the cost of running elections in the US (owing to its size as much as anything), those who own the majority of the wealth have aligned with one or another team, and the two teams have ended up, slowly but inexorably, aligned with commercial interests. The red team, for instance, is aligned with oil companies and weapon manufacturers (among other things), while the blue team has become - albeit only quite recently - with pharmaceutical companies, tech companies, and, even more recently, with weapon manufacturers, who have apparently decided to hedge their bets. (The blue team resolutely opposes weapons 'at home' but seems extremely dedicated to sending them abroad and asking everyone to foot the bill).

Every polarisation begats demonisation, and so too this has happened in the US. Cognitive dissonance (which in a political or ethical context I like to call 'moral horror') drives this split, and the split is, I suspect, sufficient to explain much of the nonsense that occurs downstream, possibly all of it. When we encounter what seems to us unthinkable, we will recover from the shock by either dismissing the relevance of what we've encountered (if we can) or making out the other people as monsters (if we can't), this is moral horror in a nutshell. The desire for censorship, for instance, comes about because moral horror so successfully allows for the demonisation of the other side of the rift that all manner of despicable things suddenly sound reasonable.

When you say 'we are being divided for a reason', I feel this plays into the shadowy cabal interpretation - which is not to dispute that we are witnessing great exploitation of divisions to 'divide and conquer'. However, there's another side to this. It is a remarkable quality of the way that legacy news media has operated that it requires sensational stories in order to drive eyeballs, and the divisiveness is therefore available both as a cause ('divided for a reason') and as a symptom (divisive stories 'sell'). I rather suspect it's a bit of both, but even this is a step beyond the shadowy cabal interpretation, which as noted above risks demotivates people in terms of breaking out of this cycle of nonsense.

Again, it's not that the divisiveness doesn't happen, and it's not that there isn't motivation behind the divisions - it's rather that there are many layers of these motivations that happen to align in the divisions. To put this another way, nobody is in control, but some people have more influence than others. I feel it is important to appreciate that nobody is truly in control, least of all the President of the United States. One thing about the current administration is that it has made it far clearer how irrelevant the figurehead is to what is being pushed forward, since Biden, unlike most of the terrible presidents before him, is clearly not capable of being in charge. Honestly, I rather suspect nobody is.

I hope I have made clear why I resist framing these issues in the way that you do, even though I don't disagree with your concerns (I don't have time to go through all the rifts you choose here one by one, although I'm sure we could have an interesting discussion about every one of them).

One more thing. You say:

"Facts are indisputable and in the end of a logical discussion everyone will agree what is true. Opinions are beliefs that are arrived at based on values that each of us give different things."

This is something that has picked up the name 'the fact-value distinction', and it grew out of certain early twentieth century philosophical trends, including and most notably something called 'the Vienna circle' i.e. a group of nerds who met in Vienna and ended up having an astonishing degree of influence on thoughts about facts and values later in the century. But the fact-value distinction is powerfully and dangerously misguided, and indeed has caused enormous mischief over the years. The intuition you are drawing upon here consists (as is so often the case) of both a true and a misleading element. The true aspect is that there is such a thing as a true description (or, perhaps better, descriptions that lean towards the truth) - but the truth is not equivalent to facts, as such.

If I may give an analogy, the facts in a criminal case are statements that capture partial elements of events (and these facts may contradict one another, at least in the way they are presented). A true account of what happened is always possible, but it is not inevitable, and neither is it indisputable. The collection of available facts sets a limit to what is achievable. The court case is, in its ideal case at least, an attempt to assemble the truth from the facts. The facts are not truth, they are more akin to signposts to the truth. Or, to put this another way, facts are not the bearers of truth, but rather knowledge produces facts as a side effect, and we can therefore attempt to retrofit facts into a partial version of the truth.

But beyond this, the facts are not indisputable - or rather, the indisputable facts are the boring or irrelevant facts. The boiling point of water at a certain gravity and atmospheric pressure is an example of an indisputable fact in the sense you want here. But this is radically less than what is required to determine truth on a topic such as climate, the environment, gender metaphysics, disease etc. For more on this idea, see this piece, "After Universities", from September:

https://strangerworlds.substack.com/p/after-universities

You say there are two worlds, by which you mean the world of the red team and the world of the blue team. Aye, but there are not solely these two worlds, and the greatest deception is perhaps the one you don't mention here - that these two worlds are the only available worlds, an illusion that the parties trying to ride the favour of their associated teams have a joint vested interest in maintaining. There are many more than two worlds, but the great danger, as you suggest, is in coming to think that the world we inhabit is the only true world and everyone else has it wrong.

The truth is more fragile and elusive than this; it takes effort to assemble it. We can inch closer to the truth only by being able to speak to one another, in order to build bridges between these worlds. This is the project I am attempting at Stranger Worlds. Of course, I can only do this on a small scale... it will take much more than this to effect change, but I hope to be part of that change if and when we can form alliances with common principles. At the moment, even this feels far, far away, but I maintain my faith that the wretched state of affairs we are currently living through can be ended through the cooperative actions of people such as ourselves.

Many thanks for the invitation to read this essay. As I say, I have great sympathy for your perspective here. But I feel, as I so often do, that the truth retreats from us, and seeing through various sets of deceptions, illusions, psyops, political commitments or whatever, isn't enough to get us to truth. Perhaps, though, it is the start of that journey.

With unlimited love,

Chris.

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Larry Cox's avatar

How do you think human life on Earth started? How far back do you think our history extends?

Figuring it out: We depend on intellectuals and academics to do this. Most of us don't have the bandwidth in our lives or minds to do this work. We are more or less forced to rely on "experts" or "God" for a fair number of our beliefs. I haven't even bothered to go out into space and see for myself if the Earth is globe-shaped. I know of some people who have. And there WERE people in the ancient past who knew this and could even go out and make sure if they really wanted to.

Psychopathy: I have never heard of the Machs test. I have heard of the Dark Triad, though see this as a psychology insider term. Have you heard of Łobaczewski and his Political Ponerology? Hubbard and his work on "Suppressive Persons?" Desmet and his work on Mass Formation?

Propaganda: This became a "thing" during the rise of mass marketing and Public Relations, which was the specialty of Freud's cousin Edward Bernays. However, psychological operations go way back, before the time of Earth.

Who is shaking the jar? That is what Hubbard refers to as the Third Party. These are psychopathic people.

Here are some other psyops I can think of:

1) The evolution of biology on Earth / humans are the only intelligent life form in the universe.

2) You only live once / reincarnation cannot be proven.

3) The death and resurrection of Jesus as depicted in the New Testament.

4) 9/11 as depicted in the relevant government reports, as well as many other major political disasters.

5) Your mind is in your brain, and you can't leave your body, or ever be really free.

6) An asteroid impact destroyed all the dinosaurs 70 million years ago.

That's enough for now.

You're right. Much of what we think we know is true is not actually true. And that's been the situation for a long long time. A REALLY long time!

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