Between propaganda and consipration theory
This is the main division in the social media. You either believe what propaganda and mass media are telling you, or you turn into the dark side of conspiration theories. Both options are presented to you, and the options that lie between are hidden.
The internet is polarizing. This is visible in the most spectacular way in the probably most toxic place in the internet: the reddit. Most groups about politics are lead by fanboys of one political options. They might admire Lord Trump, or worship the Blessed Ursula. It doesn’t matter. They are convinced they know the way, they are the enlightened way, and their beloved leader of their choice is leading mankind to the golden age. Yes, they disagree if the American Freedom or the German Collectivism is the correct way, but there’s one, and it’s the one of their country of choice. They fight against each other, but they join forces agaist the foil hat guys, which represent ignorance and backwardness.
On the other side, on the other platforms, there is another faction. They know what every reasonable adult knows: politicians are liars, they are corrupt, they misuse power for their own good. This should be a common sense, but it’s almost fully absent in the mass media and in the places like reddit. Someone who speaks the obvious in internet becomes suddenly a mix of genius and prophet, and people fall for it. They lower their guard, and start to believe everything those guys are selling. And they are selling a lot. Because someone is responsible for the lack of common sense in public debate, and this someone has an agenda. The world is controlled by people, who brainwash and stupefy the masses, to use them for their goals. Their name is Legion: Sionists, World Economic Forum, Masons, Hydra or whatever. Their methods are also incredible: from hacking our brains with hypnosis, hidden agendas in school programs and music, to chemtrails and 5G radiation. As on the reddit side of the internet, if you don’t believe everything, you believe nothing, you’re on the side of Legion.
Both are the easy ways. Propaganda creates a fairy world, where enlightened leaders build a paradise on Earth, and everything you need to do is to trust them and follow their orders. It’s the thinking of child - the parents are God-like creatures, and they offer housing and food for exchange for absolute trust, which is a great deal from evolutionary point of view - we’ve survived 2 millions of years with that mechanism.
Conspiracy theory also creates a fairy world, but it’s a world of Grimm’s fairies. It’s a dark place where everyone and everything is agaist you. You need to actively fight for system, but for your luck, there’s a group of likely minded, who will find until the death. It’s the thinking of rebelious teenager - a necessary phase in life, where an adolescent questions all the rules, to find themselves. Without that phase, you’ll be stuck in childish thinking, and never become an adult.
But stop, what about being an adult? What is the option for you? This option seems to be missing, the internet and the media presents only those first options to you: either remain a child or become a rebelious adolescent. Being an adult means learning from the failures of full trust and full rejection and find a third way, a balance between those ones. Being adult means gaining control about your life, and not be steered by adults - because both children and teenagers can be easily steered, only in different ways. But the system, the ones in power doesn’t want you to grow up, because you’re a better client, a better employee if you don’t grow up.
Wait, you’ve said, system, so the foil hat guys are right? No, because when conspiration theories speak about system, they speak about a group of individuals, that create a secred organization, the system, with the goal of controlling the world. The system I speak about, is the system the cybernetics is learning about, the entity that is more than a sum of individuals, and distinct for them. The brain is made from neurons, but it’s more than just neurons. It’s the neurons and their connections, and it builds an entity, that is based on the work of each single neuron, but no subgroup of neurons control the brain, the brain is the result of the work of all of them. Just the same, the social system is the result of the actions of all human beings within that society, and the actions of the system are the result of higher level of organization.
The cybernetics, formally created by Norman Wiener in 1948, is still an esoteric knowledge for most of the people. It’s associated with building autonomous machines, therefore a kind of rocket science, but in its core, it describes all systems. Machines, yes, but also living beings, and organized structures. Like bee hive, but also like human society.
Wiener was not a prophet, and cybernetics are build upon the previous concepts, mostly of German philosophy. The concept of system being more than the sum of its parts have roots in Hegel’s triad, where every statement about reality - thesis has its own antithesis, and together they create synthesis. Therefore the reality enriches itself in the natural way. Synthesis is build from thesis and antitheis, but it’s more than the sum of them.
Then we have Marks and his most famous quotation:
It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness
This is the main point that conspiracy theoretics are missing. The system is rigged in many aspects. The people in power shape the system in the way that profits them and forces others to adapt. But it’s not because they consciously created the system in the way that benefits them. It’s the self-organization capability of the system. The society, like living organizm, is organising itself in the way that protects its survival. It means, it needs to protects its structure. The rich and the powerful are the benefactors of the system, but for the system, they are the tools of protecting the existence of the system. Rewarding them for it is a way, how systems survive in the long term.
Understanding how systems work gives us the framework to navigate within the system. It’s a topic to broad to cover in a single post, so I will point it with an analogy:
Three group of people play in water on the seashore. All of them see warning about the currents. But they react in the different way.
- children - they watch fairy tales (TV news) that tell them, that currents doesn’t exist, it’s a propaganda of the enemies of the state. But if currents exist, our wise man (politicials) will take care of them.
- adolescents - conspiration theoretics - they know that currents exist, and they know, that bad people are responsible for them. They are determined to challenge them, find responsible for creating currents, and if they get caught, they will find to the last breath.
- adults - they know, that currents are the natural phenomenon, and fighting against them is the nonsense. The best way to deal with current is to look for indices and avoid them, and once you’re caught in current, don’t fight against it, but swim paralell to the shore, because every current has limited width.