America's Fractured Reality:
A Look A Conspiracy Theories, and what they have done to our nation.

This is a re-write of an article I posted 2 ½ years ago, but revisited and reinterpreted from a much wider context.

For better or worse, conspiracy theory, or conspiricsm, has become an inextricable force within the fabric of American politics. To a certain extent, this is healthy. I've always been of the opinion that people should be watching their governments like hawks, because of the old axiom of absolute power corrupting absolutely, etc. But looking at the way things have been going lately, one wonders if the very idea of conspirism – that one should remain vigilant in case someone or a group of someones should attempt to obscure the truth – hasn't been turned against itself by certain fringe elements on both the left and the right. When we start trying to cherry pick information to fit what we think the facts should be, instead of employing due diligence to make sure the information we've found fits the facts, we officially have a problem.

Part of the problem, as this Rolling Stone article points out, is that we don't even agree on what the facts are anymore – or what reality is, for that matter.

We have become a nation of “reality editors.” Not in the cool, Matrixy “I know Kung Fu” kind of way, but the way which involves heavy use of cognitive dissonance and the willful refusal to accept facts that may not mesh with our current worldview. Which is definitely not cool.

The reason why scientific theory holds as much water as it does is because of experimentation and peer review – a theory is tested to ensure the results come out the same or within a certain percentage of being the same every single time, and then other folks in the scientific community test it to make sure they're seeing the same results as the first guy who tried it. When people fudge results or make mistakes, it's the job of those within the scientific community to call them out on it.

Obviously, not everything I believe is based in currently verifiable scientific fact, and there is a lot that we still don't know as a species. But when we find things that can be verified, it makes sense that our opinions should change to fit this new information. This does not seem to be what is happening now in America today, and it scares me. Robert Anton Wilson referred to this as being in a “Reality Tunnel” and it's still my favorite description, because people caught in their own reality tunnels do seem to experience a kind of “tunnel vision” that prevents them from assimilating new information.

One would think that the internet would make it easier to find out exactly what is going on, but it's actually made things a little bit more difficult, because people are just finding echo chambers filled with other people who confirm their current worldview instead of trying to independently verify new information.

Take the dispute over the concept of global warming. This is one that never fails to send the right wing into a hissyfit when it's mentioned, and has inspired one of the largest right-wing efforts to discredit science that is rapidly becoming more and more irrefutable with the more information we get on the subject. And even if it is overhyped, even if global warming isn't manmade – do you guys seriously want to live in the polluted shithole you are helping to create? Why are you guys so down on the environment, and so against protecting the air you are breathing and the water you're drinking? Do you like ingesting mercury and lead? Is this perhaps part of the problem? Seriously, right wingers, what the hell?

The Truthers - those who believe that the Bush Administration had advance knowledge of the attack on 9/11/2001, did nothing to prevent it, or were perhaps even truly responsible - are more difficult for me to address, because I held Truther sympathies for a long time. I am still one those folks who believe that the Bush Administration maybe had an idea that something was going to happen, and didn't do enough to stop it. Not that 9/11 was a false flag operation as some have suggested, and not that they knew an Al Qaeda cell was specifically going to fly planes into the World Trade Center on 9/11 - just that Bush and Co either underestimated the threat or just didn't care. There is a great line for this, called Hanlon's Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

Then there is the recent Birther agenda. It was obvious to most of America from the beginning that this was an obnoxious hoax launched by those who were unhappy that Barack Obama was elected president – but for those who latched onto it, it was something that fit into their reality tunnel that suggested that Obama was unfit to serve. But instead of framing their displeasure with a reasoned discussion of their disagreement with the man's politics, they came out of left field with a conspiracy theory that was easily shot down once the true facts emerged. And once this happened, there were still those who loudly expressed suspicion that Obama had waited too long and it was still part of a conspiracy.

The thing was, they were right – but not in the way they thought. People were so busy talking about Birther nonsense that any discussion of actual policy – like jobs, the economy, things that are actually affecting us - fell by the wayside. And that was exactly how the perpetrators of the Birther conspiracy wanted it.

What I'm trying to get at here, is – what purpose, exactly, does conspiracy theory serve? If it exposes a Watergate and outs a Nixon, it seems to be doing its job (Baudrillard has a lot to say about this, which I'll go into at another time.) When it is being used to obscure the truth and to hide what is actually going on, it is just another smokescreen and defeats the purpose of vigilance altogether.

I feel that the best metaphor ever might have been in a dream I had recently. In this dream, my mother and I were at a restaurant where a very controversial person who was said to practice satanism was eating. Everyone was so preoccupied with the presence of the satantist (I think it was Boyd Rice. Crap, did I have a Boyd Rice dream?) who was just there enjoying his meal and not bothering anyone, that they failed to notice the thief in the parking lot who was breaking into people's cars. It's very, very easy to frighten people with a boogeyman in order to get them to react the way you want them to, so that they will ignore cases of mundane all-too-human evil which are happening right in their midst. I think this is an excellent metaphor for how those who may not have the best interests of 99% of the American populace at heart are using conspiracy theory for their own ends. And if this makes me into a conspiracy theorist too, oh well.