Culture War Therapy or: “Conspiracy Theories” as a Collective Rite of Passage?
Tomorrow’s event:
Stoa Provocations: Is Consilience the Key To Understand Everything? w/ Tom Beakbane. January 12th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
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January 11th, 2021
Premise: No one narrative of reality is completely right.
Inverse premise: No one narrative of reality is completely wrong, or as Ken Wilber says: Nobody is smart enough to be 100% wrong.
Reality: There exist multiple narratives of reality in reality, aka “reality tunnels,” that are being replicated by memetic tribes, all of which are trying to be replicated through your mind, without care about what is really best for you. Some have more power than others, e.g. the ones backed by Big Tech or an apex narcissist.
Question: How do you protect yourself against memes that are not in your best interest?
Answer: I do not know, nor pretend to know, what is the best approach for you. Here is a method I have adopted, I trust your discernment to consider if it is the right approach for you ...
Method …
With the principle of charity in hand, have the capacity to pass every ideological Turing test you can, this is to say, be able to articulate their views in a way that would allow you to fit in with them unnoticed. Of course, “philosophical allergies” will emerge that engender intense emotional triggers, and these should be viewed as an opportunity to get into the right relationship with whatever emotional constellation you are avoiding. You can probably view this as “culture war therapy,” as the culture war can be an excuse to become individuated.
I find Stoicism as a good enough anchor for all of this. In its modern manifestation, it is a lean enough philosophy, or a “minimum viable philosophy,” that consciously promotes the gift of dissociation, in the right way, which is to say the way that sets up embodiment. It affords a method acting of reality tunnels to occur, in such a way that does not make you fall prey to becoming seduced or gaslighted by them.
If you can articulate most of the views that are in play in our collective mind, in a way that will not get you wildly triggered by them, you can become a sacred clown, or perhaps a sacred troll. You feel what they feel, when they believe what they believe. You develop a protean embodiment, jumping from one reality tunnel to the next.
By doing this, you might get closer to what is true, as taking on all of these perspectives helps you find what is at the intersection of them. You still will not know the full truth of course, as reality is not designed for us to know the full truth, but you will now be emotionally capable enough to explore the truth, and more importantly, to speak in the spirit of truth.
One reality tunnel is particularly dangerous to explore, and that is the so-called reality tunnel of conspiracy theories. Nathan Allebach argued when he came to The Stoa: America has become a “land of conspiracy theories,” capturing half the country with unfalsifiable narratives of what is happening.
As I explained to my friend Lubomir, creator of In-Shadow: A Modern Odyssey, while sensemaking the parapolitical, which is to say conspiracies that might be real, one’s sensemaking capacities rapidly break down and radical paranoia fills the body, as I wrote about in a Letter exchange to him:
When I fire up my Tor browser and switch on DuckDuckGo, in order to start exploring parapolitical theories, the felt-sense of paranoia immediately enters and begins to spread through my body—despite the propositional distance I maintain as a performative agnostic. Everyone starts to look like an agent of misinformation, part of a controlled opposition, wittingly or unwittingly denying me access to reality. If you spend too long in the parapolitical space, your sensemaking capacities quickly break down.
I went on to write how this may serve as an opportunity, as getting into the right relationship with radical paranoia encourages you to stop outsourcing your sensemaking, and begin to start to think for yourself, from very humble foundations:
Despite these risks, I still think sensemaking the parapolitical is important—it provides an opportunity. At this point, I think the content of our bespoke narrative is less critical than the process of how we construct it. Maybe the radical paranoia and distrust that the parapolitical can invoke can lead us to an epistemic ground zero, cleansing us of the simulated thinking that authorized narratives impose.
Suggestion: It is dangerous to rest in conspiracy theories, and believe them to be true, but they need not be the dead-end of the noosphere, or a sensemaking graveyard that needs to be censored. Instead, maybe riding with them, and taking them to their logical conclusion—burning all the dead scripts in the process—could be the way.
They may be used as a portal, a collective rite of passage even, for us to become liberated from the undue influence of all memetic tribes.
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