Quantum Non-Linearity: The Compulsion of Conspiracy Theorism

Monday, October 03, 2022

The Compulsion of Conspiracy Theorism

(This post also appeared on my Views, News and Pews blog, but to complete the collection on Quantum Non-Linearity I add it here as well)

I have recently compiled this analysis of an article by end-times pundit Wilfred Hahn. Below I've copied in the introduction to my analysis.

1. Introduction

This document is best read in conjunction with my document here where I explore some of the pratfalls of conspiracy theorism.

Conspiracy theorism is a pernicious evil that wracks democratic society; it undermines confidence and plays into the hands of tricksters and would-be-dictators who are looking for the disillusioned, the angry, the disaffected, the traumatised and the paranoid as an easy-sell for their concocted rumours of conspiracy & blame in order to justify a power grab. The cut & thrust and the open contensions natural to an accountable democracy exacerbates the insecurity of those targeted by would-be-despots who perceive democratic debate and its rancour as a sign of weakness and failure.

Of course, in societies where dictatorship has been successfully installed (e.g. Putin’s Russia) there is sufficient autocratic media control to block all conspiracies theories but the one put out by the protection racketeers in charge. In totalitarian and authoritarian states government may be headed by a demagogue figure who is portrayed as the only truth teller.

In this document I look at a web article by Christian end-times pundit Wilfred Hahn. He consciously avoids fanciful conspiracy theories peddled by web enabled theorists. These theorists join the dots of social history into ramifying plots hatched by hidden nefarious operators who are said to be the evil geniuses behind current affairs. Hahn’s overall thesis is that an integrated economic system facilitated by enhanced technology, social integration and a world market makes the idea of international centralized social control by an anti-Christ an all too plausible scenario. I would not disagree with this conclusion.

But as we shall see, although Hahn identifies no specific baroque conspiracy behind current affairs he nevertheless informs us that the history of progress is a product of a conspiracy intended to bring about an anti-Christ power grab. He therefore inadvertently plays into the hand of conspiracy theorists by leaving the edges of the map blank and making statements to the effect that “Here be Monsters”. Therefore the active imaginations of the disillusioned, the angry, the disaffected, the traumatised and the paranoid are encouraged to fill in those spaces with fanciful entities which explain and make sense of their fears and anger: Such will take their eyes off up & coming world-dictators and instead they will focus on the fanciful intrigue imagined to be going on behind the scenes. All this will play into the hands of an antichrist.

It’s with reluctance that I relate my anticipation that many Christians are well set up to be duped by up-and-coming dictators who use conspiracy theories to exploit Christian diffidence about the democratic West where freedom of expression & choice is a prime moral value. It is ironic that reformation Christianity opened the way to a sequence of events that ultimately gave Western populations the choice to accept or reject the core message of Christianity. This very freedom of choice was built into Christianity along with many other aspects of the democratic West where the concept that community serves the individual (and vice versa) along with the freedom to dissent still has a very strong hold on Western minds. The irony was that Christ’s take-it-or-leave-it presentation of Himself turned out to contain the seeds of the possible demise of core Christianity in the West.

As a reaction against the marginalisation and decay of core Christianity in the West it seems that some Christians consequently find common ground with potential dictators and will support a dictators cause as the price for the restoration of their traditional authoritarian view of society. (e.g Hitler, Trump and Putin). In any case many of those Christians come from sects with a culture that has a high view of demagogic leadership and may even seek to bring about a Christian social authoritarianism bordering on dominionism. My guess is that Christianity will become debatable ground during the end times; by that I mean demagogues will claim to be working for Christianity.

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THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION

“Ideas Versus Experience!" is a slogan expressing the uneasy relation between what we think the world to be and what our actual experience suggests it is. Experience makes or breaks ideas. But the reverse is also true: Well established ideas can influence the recognition, acceptance and even the perception of experience. In short there is a two way dialogue between ideas and experience. Sometimes that dialogue can turn into an argument, even a row.

The success of Science is based on a formalisation of this potentially contentious relationship as it seeks to support or refute theoretical notions by systematically comparing them with experience. In the far less formalized contexts of daily living we probably are using a similar heuristic when we display a tendency to drop ideas that lose the confrontation with experience, and retain those that win. Winning ideas, like the gladiators of the Roman arenas, live to fight another day. This Darwinian slant on the struggle for ideological survival is itself ideology that must, for consistency sake, submit itself to the very process it purports to describe. For example, it should be able to give account of the resilience of traditional theories in the face of contra indicators. And in the extreme, explanation also needs to be given of how conspiracy theorists continue to hold on to a ramifying structure of untested elaborations.

Human theoretical visions are often grand and sweeping, confidently affirming states of affairs that are far beyond immediate sensation. The vast unseen domains covered by our best theories contrasts with the limitations on human perceptual resources, resources that only allow a very sparse experimental sampling of our most ambitious ideas. Even a professional scientist only ever tests a small portion of any theoretical structure. Moreover, our theoretical concepts are ambitious enough to cover unreachable areas like the center of distant stars, sub-atomic dimensions, events long past into history, and very complex inscrutable objects like the human mind and its societies. Thus, science is metaphysical in as much as it has to admit that it covers vast domains inaccessible to testing in practice if not in principle. For the intelligent layman even the keyhole view of the experimental scientist may not be available. So whence comes the authority to affirm ideas that are often so grandiose in their sweep that they make claim to impinge upon the very meaning of life the universe and everything?

The fact is that for most of us the really big ideas diffuse through to us from our societal context, and at most these big ideas are only illuminated here and there, at a very few places, with actual direct experience of the phenomenon they conceptualise. These big ideas float around in the ether-like-media of society in the form of books, lectures, programmes, and the Internet etc, objects that the postmodernist philosophers call "texts".

For someone such as myself the battle to make sense of life was joined as soon as I was aware of mystery. But looking back it is clear to me that I haven't done an honest scientific experiment in the whole of my life. For me the effort to bring sense and integration to the complexity of life boils down to grappling with the many texts of society; These texts carry both big theoretical ideas and raw data from which ideas crystallize. These texts are compared with other texts in the search for coherence and consistency. These texts take the place and role of experiments as one tests theories using texts. These texts are in effect the experience of life. My own modest attempt at grandiose theorising has already been presented to the world. (See this blog "Physics and the Wild Web") and my excuse is that I have simply inherited the theoretical hubris of the human race.

The postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida said, "There is nothing outside the text". I think he was at least right about the primary role texts play in the life of those like myself whose instinct has been to grapple relentlessly with the riddles of life, and to seek out meaning and go where no man has gone before. But one could equally claim, "There is nothing outside the experience". For one might read the "text" of the clouds in the sky as a predictor of impending weather just as one reads socially generated symbolic configurations as the predictor of certain kinds of thought or potential experience. For the text is just as much an experience as more primeval phenomenon like thunder and lightning. Texts are part of our cosmic experience and they imperceptibly grade into the more conventional notion of experience. Where the crossover point is, is difficult to say.

Postmodernism may have got it right about the primary role of the text, but it has made one very serious mistake. Where I would radically differ from the postmodern view is that I believe the mass of social texts, if we allow them, naturally converge upon grand consistent narratives and those narratives are here to stay. And that is because these texts, I submit, are part of a world with an underlying rational integratedness and that integratedness is being revealed to us bit by bit. For revelation it is: Revelation is what we cannot discover unless God chooses that we discover it. My perceptions and reason, limited though they may be, were not self-made, they had to be discovered as gifts. These gifts are given to all of us; one can but trust and use them. Reason is a grace of Revelation. For this reason the hubris of theory making is justified.

Quantum Non-Linearity

Monday, October 03, 2022

The Compulsion of Conspiracy Theorism

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THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION