Discussion Do you Believe in Conspiracies?

[GGWP]

I am tempted to delve into rabbit holes about Gnosticism and Secret Societies but a part of me thinks that these are deliberate demoralization campaigns.

In reality I don't think there is anything fantastical about this world or any grander narrative beyond opportunist exploitation and tribal game theory; we are intelligent animals shuffling ideologies like a deck and refining evolutionary strategies. Maybe Dawkins was right after all. People want their struggles to hold cosmic significance, so you get people under social stress that try and turn their trauma into a spiritual odyssey.

Whenever I read around History I see a bunch of people out of their wits trying random things for survival. I don't see anything extraneous. If anything conspiracies are more likely to be time-wastes engineered to make people go schizo. Coincidences can just be passed off as human idiosyncracies exaggerated for dramatic effect.

I've watched Graham Hancock's series and maybe I could entertain that there was a relatively advanced (tribal) civilization before the Younger Dryas with an outsize effect on human culture. I can entertain the idea that old pagan mythologies retell tribal clashes of Upper Palaeolithic (which might relate to the circumstances of the Upper Palaeolithic Revolution), or that they allude to important astrological events with some esoteric significance. I can't entertain Icke, or Flat Earth, or Thulean Hyperborea, or Fomenko, or whatever because I don't see any evidence for it.

I think secret societies obviously exist but apart from actual criminal syndicates they seem like LARPing mythology nerds or insane sexual deviants like Crowley. Nothing esoteric or magical.

There's just no evidence for anything other than humans exploiting each other forever.

 

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In reality I don't think there is anything fantastical about this world or any grander narrative beyond opportunist exploitation and tribal game theory; we are intelligent animals shuffling ideologies like a deck and refining evolutionary strategies. Maybe Dawkins was right after all. People want their struggles to hold cosmic significance, so you get people under social stress that try and turn their trauma into a spiritual odyssey.

I could never find the words to articulate this.

It probably does just involve people wanting to give mythological substance to their own "vanguard" groups, affecting manifest destiny and so forth. I wouldn't be surprised if it was mostly just LARP from people sculpting out clique identity without committing fully in order to "own da libs", though I could be wrong.