I'm putting together a little conspiracy school - it's sort of designed to properly extract someone from The Matrix and educate them to how to look at the world in a truthful way.
I've just posted about one of the sections, but I wanted to separate discussion of the whole thing.
In some sections I've mentioned specific docs or creators.
- The Two Obvious, Really Big Conspiracy Theories.
- JFK - "The Men Who Killed Kennedy"
- 9/11 - What are the best 9/11 docs?
- Conspiracy Thinking, Connection to Mysticism, Best Overall Education
- David Icke - His bio doc and epic 8-hour presentations
- Fake History - and how (real) Science can unravel it.
- "History: Science or Fiction". (I think this is vital for understanding how to think and analyse data)
- Power - Who Controls it in the world
- Power Itself - "Zeitgeist"
- Money and the Fed - "The Money Masters"
- Mind Control - "The Minds of Men"
- Ideology - "Shock Doctrine", others
- Politics/Economics - Adam Curtis
- Mysticism - Maybe Chris Everard's collection, perhaps some others
- Schooling
- How Schools are designed to make obedient citizens, How Schools Kill Creativity - Ken Robinson, etc
- How Western Academia is infiltrated by Marxism (Yuri Bezmenov)
- How Academia is corrupted by industry
- How Peer Review itself is a corrupt, broken system
- The Rockefellers, Carnegies etc
- Who is controlling information, and our idea of what is true?
- Murdoch
- Social Media Companies
- Russian Troll Farms
- Censorship/Wikileaks
- The FDA
- CIA
- Possible Solutions:
- Conscious Capitalism, Co-operatives
- Sustainable Agriculture
- Da Vinci Project
- Bitcoin
Any thoughts? What have I missed out.
I've deliberately ignored UFOs, Qanon, unverifiable stuff.
Cool list. I will think more about this and get back to you.
PS - Your thoughts above very well organized. Well done!
It's not intended as categories for Concen or any other site, more of an introductory, on-boarding process. An executive summary, maybe. "You liked David Icke on London Real, now try this", kind of thing.
Hi there, as mentioned above I think you started a great list of important points. I would like to add four thoughts for now.
1. Information vs Communications
Your point about #6, "Who is controlling information" is true, in part, but it might be better to refer to this as "Who controls communication technology" more generally. That would cover the printing press in the past, telegraph and telephone in the recent past (as well as vinyl-record and celluloid-film in the arts) but most importantly today: the Internet itself which is not just "information" but a communications *technology*, a medium through which something gets processed (in this case, the "something" is bits and bytes, what you refer to as information).
I was just reading Rushkoff and he writes this: "Instead of marveling at a person or group who have gained the ability to communicate in a new way, we tend to marvel at the tools through which all this is happening. We don’t celebrate the human stars of this medium, the way we marveled at the stars of radio, film, or television; we are mesmerized instead by the screens and touchpads themselves. Likewise, we aspire less to the connectivity enjoyed by our peers than to the simple possession of the shiny new touchpad devices in their laps. Instead of pursuing new abilities, we fetishize new toys."
2. Pattern recognition
I did not see mention of how our brains and minds work. We are pattern-forming, pattern-recognizing, and frankly pattern-addicted creatures. We love stories (and, yes, a conspiracy is nothing if not a "story").
3. Types of conspiracies
Conspiracies themselves do not all take the same shape. Jesse Walker has identified five kinds of conspiracy theories:
-The "Enemy Outside" refers to theories based on figures alleged to be scheming against a community from without.
-The "Enemy Within" finds the conspirators lurking inside the nation, indistinguishable from ordinary citizens.
-The "Enemy Above" involves powerful people manipulating events for their own gain.
-The "Enemy Below" features the lower classes working to overturn the social order.
-The "Benevolent Conspiracies" are angelic forces that work behind the scenes to improve the world and help people.
It seems to me that a good conspiracy school would need to address those broad groupings/
4. Paranoia-style politics
Lastly (for now) is that conspiracies need tyrannical archons to attack: the search for archons leads to what the historian Richard Hofstadter famously named the “paranoid style” of American politics: a conspiracy-minded tendency to intensify ordinary power struggles into Manichean battles between good and evil.
As Erik Davis put it: "Tuning in to the rebel yells that choke AM radio and shortwave frequencies across the land, one hears the paranoia of crude neo-gnostic myth: loud and clear tales of free, God-fearing individuals who wage guerrilla warfare against creepy conspiracies whose various tentacles are stamped with federal insignia."