Lies, damn lies and 'counterknowledge'

[sangraal]

I figured this would be a nice one to throw in the lot of conspiracy theory proponents. I've been thinking a lot lately, at how *some* CTs are such utter bullshit that they themselves are the harbingers of "disinformation" as much as the governments, Illuminatum and secret societies in which they blame. This came to my mind, not through fluorescent light fixtures or micro mind-control chips, but by watching some movie I downloaded a couple of months ago and finally watched. I think it was called something like "The Antichrist Conspiracy" or something of that ilk, I remember the back of it said something like "I'd like to be a fly on the wall when President Bush watches this movie" (Wow! He gives himself a lot of credit, huh?) but as I was watching it, this "deep and dark" voice that narrated it suddenly began to make himself look like some occult expert.

I've been involved in the study (and then some) of the occult for 13 years as of next month. While I don't consider myself an "expert" (I think they only come in two flavors: Catholic and Protestant), I do know quite a bit. Never was any part of it wasted; I've rather immersed myself into it on various levels. As I watched the movie, the narrator was making all sorts of bullshit claims about historical figures that I knew to be utter lies, all the while doing some cheesy computer generated effects designed in a VERY SIMILAR fashion as to how advertisers get peoples attention and drill things into their head- repeated phrases, repeated graphics with each line, very similar to a form of hypnosis so the watcher will buy the bullshit he was preaching...

So who is really worse? Whose the greater enemy? When so-called conspiracy theorists are they, themselves, liars and spread their own "disinformation" about government disinformation and such? Its hypocrisy and I don't think a single one of these people in the spotlight should be given any more credibility than the organizations that they condemn. They're using the same techniques to instill mass-hysteria as their invisible opponents who keep it at bay.

Lies, damn lies and 'counterknowledge'

By Damian Thompson 12/01/2008

George Bush planned the September 11 attacks. The MMR injection triggers autism in children. The ancient Greeks stole their ideas from Africa. "Creation science" disproves evolution. Homeopathy can defeat the Aids virus.

Do any of these theories sound familiar? Has someone bored you rigid at a dinner party by unveiling one of these "secrets"? If so, it is hardly surprising. In recent years, thousands of bizarre conjectures have been endorsed by leading publishers, taught in universities, plugged in newspapers, quoted by politicians and circulated in cyberspace.

This is counterknowledge: misinformation packaged to look like fact. We are facing a pandemic of credulous thinking. Ideas that once flourished only on the fringes are now taken seriously by educated people in the West, and are wreaking havoc in the developing world.

We live in an age in which the techniques for evaluating the truth of claims about science and history are more reliable than ever before. One of the legacies of the Enlightenment is a methodology based on painstaking measurement of the material world.

That legacy is now threatened. And one of the reasons for this, paradoxically, is that science has given us almost unlimited access to fake information.

Most of us have friends who are susceptible to conspiracy theories. You may know someone who thinks the Churches are suppressing the truth that Jesus and Mary Magdalene sired a dynasty of Merovingian kings; someone else who thinks Aids was cooked up in a CIA laboratory; someone else again who thinks MI5 killed Diana, Princess of Wales. Perhaps you know one person who believes all three.

Or do you half-believe one of these ideas yourself? We may assume that we are immune to conspiracy theories. In reality, we are more vulnerable than at any time for decades.

I recently met a Lib Dem-voting schoolteacher who voiced his "doubts" about September 11. First, he grabbed our attention with a plausible-sounding observation: "Look at the way the towers collapsed vertically. Jet fuel wouldn't generate enough to heat to melt steel. Only controlled explosions can do that." The rest of the party, not being structural engineers (for whom there is nothing mysterious about the collapse of the towers) pricked up their ears. "You're right," they said. "It did seem strange…"

Admittedly, no major newspaper or TV station has endorsed a September 11 conspiracy theory. But more than 100 million people have watched a 90-minute documentary, Loose Change, directed by three young New Yorkers who assembled the first cut on a laptop. The result is super-slick: computer-generated planes glide menacingly towards their targets, to the accompaniment of a funky soundtrack; buildings collapse in a comic theatrical sequence. This is one cool movie – and a masterpiece of counterknowledge.

The makers suggest that a missile, not an airliner, hit the Pentagon; that the occupants of Flight 93 were safely evacuated at Cleveland Hopkins airport; that the panicked calls made by the passengers were faked using voice-morphing technology.

The directors make basic errors and play outrageous tricks: quotes from experts and official documents are cherry-picked and truncated. Airline parts are misidentified and pictures cropped in a way that leaves out inconvenient rubble and wreckage. "Expert testimony" is lifted from the American Free Press, a hysterical news service with strong links to the far Right.

Yet the makers of Loose Change are pushing at an open door. More than a third of Americans suspect that federal officials assisted in the September 11 attacks or took no action to stop them. September 11 conspiracy theories have gained such a following in France that even a member of President Sarkozy's government has suggested that President Bush might have planned the attacks. Christine Boutin, the housing minister, when asked in an interview whether she thought Bush might have been behind the attacks, said: "I think it is possible."

Another who believes this is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, who reckons that September 11 could not have been executed "without co-ordination with [US] intelligence and security services". Ahmadinejad is also a well-known Holocaust denier, having referred publicly to "the myth of the Jews' massacre".

In the world of counterknowledge, wild theories are constantly mating and mutating. As the editor of Skeptic magazine, Michael Shermer, puts it: "The mistaken belief that a handful of unexplained anomalies can undermine a well-established theory lies at the heart of all conspiratorial thinking, as well as creationism, Holocaust denial and the various crank theories of physics."

We do not normally think of creationism and maverick physics as conspiracy theories; but what they have in common with Loose Change is a methodology that marks them as counterknowledge. People who share a muddled, careless or deceitful attitude towards gathering evidence often find themselves drawn to each other's fantasies. If you believe one wrong or strange thing, you are more likely to believe another. Although this has been true for centuries, the invention of the internet has had a galvanising effect. A rumour about the Antichrist can leap from Goths in Sweden to Australian fascists in seconds. Minority groups are becoming more tolerant of each other's eccentric doctrines. Contacts between white and black racists are now flourishing; in particular, the growing anti-Semitism of black American Muslims has been a great ice-breaker on the neo-Nazi circuit.

In June 2007, the home page of The Truth Seeker, a conspiracy website, included claims that Aids is a "man-made Pentagon genocide", that Pope Paul VI "was impersonated by an actor from 1975 to 1978", that new evidence about the Loch Ness monster had emerged – plus a link to Loose Change.

Yet, as we saw earlier, more than 100 million people have seen that film. In the 21st century, bogus knowledge is no longer confined to self-selecting minority groups. It is seeping into the mainstream, cleverly repackaged for a mass market. This crisis goes beyond traditional political ideology. Yes, the Left has helped to spread counterknowledge by insisting on the rights of minorities to believe falsehoods that make them feel better about themselves. Afro-centric history aims to raise the self-esteem of black youngsters by feeding them the fantasy that the origins of Western civilisation lie in black Africa. Last year, a British government report revealed that some teachers are dropping the Holocaust from lessons rather than confront the Holocaust-denial of Muslim pupils.

But Left-wing multiculturalists are not the only guilty ones: entrepreneurs are turning counterknowledge into an industry. Publishing houses pay self-taught archaeologists and pseudo-historians large amounts to turn fragments of fact into saleable stories. Titles are placed in the history sections of bookshops whose claims have been thoroughly demolished – yet the publishers carry on bringing out new editions.

The dividing line between fiction and non-fiction is becoming increasingly hard to draw. These days, public opinion is so malleable that a product does not even have to pretend to be fact in order to affect perceptions of truth: the success of The Da Vinci Code has persuaded 40 per cent of Americans that the Churches are concealing information about Jesus.

Meanwhile, publishers, television channels and newspapers are making huge profits from another branch of counterknowledge: alternative medicine. Unqualified nutritionists make claims for vitamin supplements and "superfoods" that are unsupported by scientific literature; conveniently, these people often have a commercial interest in selling the supplements in question.

Fashionable advocates of alternative medicine, and the executives who profit from them, are as reliant on counterknowledge as any bedsit conspiracy theorist. Their miracle diets and health scares undermine science by distorting the public understanding of cause and effect, and therefore of risk.

The fingerprints of the alternative medicine lobby are all over the worst British health scare of recent years, in which thousands of parents denied their children the MMR triple vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella following the dissemination of flawed data linking it to autism. In that case, distrust of orthodox medicine increased the danger of a measles epidemic.

But that is nothing compared to the impact of medical counterknowledge in underdeveloped countries. In northern Nigeria, Islamic leaders have issued a fatwa declaring the polio vaccine to be a US conspiracy to sterilise Muslims: polio has returned to the area, and pilgrims have carried it to Mecca and Yemen. In January 2007, the parents of 24,000 children in Pakistan refused to let health workers vaccinate their children because radical mullahs had told them the same idiotic story.

These incidents cannot be dismissed as examples of medieval superstition: these people are not rejecting life-saving vaccines because they reject modern medicine, but because their leaders are spouting Islamic takes on Western conspiracy theories. Counterknowledge, with its ingrained hostility towards a political, intellectual and scientific elite, appeals to anti-American, anti-Western sentiment in the developing world.

Islamic countries, in particular, have embraced counterknowledge to a remarkable degree. In 2006, the Pew Research Centre asked Muslims in Indonesia, Egypt, Turkey, Jordan and Pakistan whether Arabs carried out the September 11 attacks. The majority of respondents in each country said no. Indeed, most British Muslims – 56 per cent – also thought that Arabs were innocent. A quarter of British Muslims believe that "the British Government was involved in some way" with the London terrorist bombings of July 7, 2005.

The battle between knowledge and counterknowledge is not just a struggle to protect the public domain from bogus facts. It has profound implications for the safety of the West. And, make no mistake about it: this is a battle we are losing.

Summarised from:'Counterknowledge: How We Surrendered to Conspiracy Theories, Quack Medicine, Bogus Science and False History' by Damian Thompson (Atlantic)

[bbd2]

very true
this has always been the struggle
especially in religious circles
between the certainty of those who have true knowledge and those who are equally certain of false knowledge
now its become so easy to build up a body of false knowledge that in the future there will be people who are completely dependent on others for access to the 'real" world

i think of what Americans know about foreign countries and cultures actually live to be one area where the "disinformation" is almost completely comprehensive. even when we visit other countries we are looking to confirm false ideas, we focus on their food, their children, their illnesses, rarely seeing them as ordinary people with regular lives

its an information war
and the other side is co-opting the usual sources of information
you cant even trust wikipedia nowadays

[catdaddy]

What if every once in a while, some truth leaked out, despite best efforts to keep it hidden....

Wouldn't the best way to dismiss it be to add enough totally outrageous bullshit and then label it as conspiracy theory?

There's another one for ya.

[johnnydigital]

Nice post. Really, all you have to do is think logically about the 9-11 attacks to know that George Bush had nothing to do with them. Remember, when he got into office, his administration was trying to 'downplay' the threat of terrorism in order to get support for his Missile Defense system. They were trying to focus attention on rogue regimes and their possibility of obtaining nuclear missiles, not even mentioning Bin Laden or Al-Qaida in any serious sense until we were hit on 9-11... then, it could no longer be ignored and they saw their opportunity and ran with it.

No President, not even Bush is that stupid to orchestrate an attack on our country. I've seen "Loose Change" and it was very slick indeed and did bring up some points that are hard to explain, but, not 'everything' has a convenient explanation. One thing is for certain though, Al Qaida has some very smart people in their organization... they may be batshit crazy, but they do have some smarts.

[sangraal]

Originally Posted by bbd2

very true
this has always been the struggle
especially in religious circles
between the certainty of those who have true knowledge and those who are equally certain of false knowledge

I completely agree. When religion comes into play, there will always be some sort of bias. Christian fundamentalism fervently idealizes that anything non-Christian, especially the occult, is purely Satanic. And of what origins is the concept of the "New World Order"? The Book of Revelation.

I even have a bit of a bias in that, although I consider myself a free-thinker who can believe or disbelieve anything that I damn well please, I'm also not Christian. Thus I will automatically have a bias against any allegations of the Anti-Christ and, less directly, the idea of a NWO, although I believe that -if- one were to exist, it wouldn't have to follow prey to religious idealizations.

I'm reminded of the mass hysteria of Satanic Ritual Abuse most prominent in the 1980s. Despite there was NEVER a federal case that proved it ever occurred, people within and without religious circles feared that some "Satanist" would come and kidnap their daughter, rape and subject her to blasphemous ritual. SRA was just another manifestation of the earlier witch hunts that were led by the same hate-mongering mindset, that all things different are somehow of Satan.

And I see the same, though far more subtle, allegations in the so-called "occult experts" whose expertise floods the conspiracy theory culture, adding fire to the beliefs in the NWO, Illuminati, et all. Hunt 'em down and burn 'em to the stake before they make our milk spoil, crops go bad, or stocks go down and enslave us all! Bah humbug!

No President, not even Bush is that stupid to orchestrate an attack on our country.

I'm reminded of a song by hiphop artist "Immortal Technique" called "The Cause of Death", ansong that's conspiracy theory from beginning to end, in which one verse states in terms of 9/11: "And just so conservatives don't take it to heart, I don't think Bush did it because he isn't that smart..."

[ShinobiFeather]

I have come to view my own and many other ct's as simple distractions from being.

Ultimately, there is nothing that can control or repress a liberated mind.. but of course, the mind.

At the grandest level, each and every one of us is the being. The highest, grandest most powerful consciousness of the universe. In the light of this kind of experience or belief, I choose to deny all convoluted abstractions.

[catdaddy]

Me, too.

Until I get hungry or cold.

And sometimes, well, other things.

Then my ass tells my mind to get it in gear, feed the animal, put another log on the fire.

I guess my mind isn't quite that liberated, yet.

[~Hippie3]

nice to see someone hitting back at all the bullshit artists and sloppy thinkers

[tenjin]

I always thought something wasn't 'right' with 9/11 way before I saw any documentaries on it. I already had questions coming to mind after watching the news and when I found some documentaries about it I knew I wasn't alone in this thinking. But the more documentaries I found on these subjects, the more bullshit I saw being projected in them, some more so than others, especially the ant-christ one you speak about in the first post. And I think most of these cash cow documentaries and fickle CT do more harm (spreading misinformation, hypocrisy, etc) than good (open your mind to different ideas and debates, etc) IMHO.

[orgonebox]

Originally Posted by johnnydigital

Nice post. Really, all you have to do is think logically about the 9-11 attacks to know that George Bush had nothing to do with them....

No President, not even Bush is that stupid to orchestrate an attack on our country. I've seen "Loose Change" and it was very slick indeed and did bring up some points that are hard to explain, but, not 'everything' has a convenient explanation. One thing is for certain though, Al Qaida has some very smart people in their organization... they may be batshit crazy, but they do have some smarts.

I have trouble believing Dubya could plan his way through a taco.

It's really weird how Conspiracy Theory (purposefully capitalized) has become its own genre of reality narrative. But all debunking of the big CT's aside, there are actual conspiracies that occur, but I think the theory behind them is sound. The longest-running reason for conspiration derives from a select group who gain and control resources and then collude with like individuals to gain control of more resources. I don't think the plans go far beyond greed; however, if you look at something like Rumsfeld's war briefings, with their crazy Bible quotes coupled with invasion photos, as well as statements by public figures such as Bush and Blair claiming that they felt god wanted them to go to war, then the motivation of pure greed either seems a bit suspect, or that the material/nationalist/racist motives behind authorized slaughter are covered in a patina of holiness.

On the local city/state level, if you have citizens voting for public ownership of something, like say a water company, and the private entity which owns the water company has been bought by a much larger transnational corporation, then you may directly consider the massive funding campaign against public ownership, including influence of city councils/state representatives, a conspiracy. Unlike CT's, though, this kind of collusion is fairly transparent. The disinformation that stems from this sort of campaign distracts people from looking at the benefits of the resource and shifts focus toward principals of ownership, creating a bullshit moral issue out of the rain from the sky.

Or as Jarvis Cocker said, "Cunts are still running the world."

[catdaddy]

#1 lie.

"We're from the government, and we're here to help you".

[~Hippie3]

not always.
millions of americans over the years have been very relieved and grateful
when much needed help arrived in the form of a federal government check.
glossing over the good done over-simplifies the situation,
and only serves the interests of extremists.

[catdaddy]

Again, I was making light of conspiracy theory, I am fully aware of the help the government provides many people-

I just wish they'd do it more efficiently.

It's the LEGISLATORS I don't trust as far as I can spit.

[tenjin]

Originally Posted by orgonebox

I have trouble believing Dubya could plan his way through a taco.

I think Bush is alot smarter than people actually believe. The media has made him into some bumbling idiot. You will find more ridicule, jokes and parodies about him being stupid than of his academic accomplishments. He did graduate from Yale and went to Harvard where he earned a MBA. Which he is the only us president to have a MBA. Now I hate Bush as much as the next guy but all the talk of him lacking in the intelligence department I think is false and has largely been perpetuated through the media. And also the way he presented himself and his policies didnt help much either.

[~Hippie3]

agreed, no idiot could navigate himself into the white house.
if you think one could,
by all means,
give it a try...

[seedlessstinky1]

I'd bump a line and drink a beer with George W.

He's just a man.

[mycpooper]

A lot of conspiracy's are perpetuated by "repeaters" people that hear something and repeat it to other people. When a lot of people you know or talk to start telling you these things you start to think it's true when it actually Isn't. it's just that that particular info was spread to a lot of people and it's bogus. It also could be true but now days it takes undeniable facts and a lot of higher up or qualified persons in that area to convince people it is true to the mass public or persons involved but because of that you still have to be careful because you don't know what their agenda actually is. The same thing as bad business gets spread by word of mouth. you start screwing over people those people talk and tell other people but the people that haven't got screwed over yet don't believe the other people Unless some day they get screwed over themselves and then start believing what they were told. I'm just glad we don't live in a world that still kill people or get locked up by spreading info that others believe Isn't true because one day it might come true. Remember when the earth was flat? But to me it does not matter if it is or not I would still be the same person on a flat world and everybody should be able to believe what they want. That's why wisdom is wisdom you can't earn it you have to learn it and decide what's what but also not try to convince or argue with other people what you believe in because you might not be right.

[orgonebox]

Originally Posted by Hippie3

agreed, no idiot could navigate himself into the white house.

Or a stadium seat.