Tag Archives: conspiracy theories

conspiracies, Archbishop Viganò

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We’re getting to the point where Alex Jonesian conspiracy theories have gone from being an entertaining intellectual diversion to a sound predictive model. In a sense, they were always a reasonably good guide to the future (more surveillance, less freedom), but the correlation was not so exact, and the final destination still seemed improbably distant & surreal. Before 2015, studying conspiracy theories was like watching a horror movie when you’re safe & snug at home, with a warming drink: the titillation of letting yourself get scared, knowing that you yourself are fine. Since the so-called migrant crisis, and especially now with the organised panic of Covid-19, it’s maybe more like reading about wolf pack attacks & tactics as you hear the howling in the distance, and your cat won’t go outside anymore, and Eastern European strangers turn up at your door reeking of garlic and offering cryptic remarks about that which cannot die, and your phone signal just cut out, and your massive TV keeps playing the monolith scene from 2001, and when you look for reassuring naughty teacher porn your browser redirects you to Hunter Biden dick pics, and the milk soured in the fridge, and the ravens have all departed.

When I was younger, I liked Neil Gaiman’s line from his Sandman comics: “any view of things that is not strange is false”. As a wide-eyed youth I just liked the idea that maybe the surrounding banality & mediocrity was not final; years later, I had enough “supernatural” experiences, that I accepted our reality as indeed stranger than we normally suppose. And yet I still find it hard to accept just how evil our rulers are – not so much the apparent rulers, the bumbling Boris, for example, as his masters. Increasingly, the evidence I accrue leads to dark theories. I know that there are malevolent non-physical intelligences, demons if you will, but I always found it hard to imagine they could interact with us in a more than haphazard, opportunistic fashion, serial killer style. And yet, it seems they can.

A letter from Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop of Ulpiana, to Donald Trump:

the Intelligence Con

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They say that con men win the victim’s confidence partly by flattery. I have noticed this with an acquaintance who is both highly gullible and highly paranoid, the paranoia most likely a result of his frequently falling victim to con men; all of his cons involved flattery, the quite primitive con men/women telling him how wise and intelligent and simply great he is – and because he sees himself as a Great Man, he laps it all up.

You could divide today’s official propaganda into two broad sections:

i) The Daily Mail demographic. Here the appeal is to the the no-nonsense white van man mentality.

ii) The Guardian demographic. Here the appeal is to the “educated” and intelligent, the mostly white liberal elite.

I would prefer to read The Daily Mail, in all honesty. The DM has a scatter-shot crudity to it, a simplifying of human motivation and complexity which I take for granted and so find hard to really even notice; the propaganda isn’t aimed at my IQ/education level, so has (I guess) no effect. The Guardian, by contrast, is infuriatingly smug & prissy, and irritates every fibre of my sentience, from which I judge it is targeted at precisely my IQ/education level.

The second sector of propaganda often makes appeal to the self-perceived intellect of the victim. Here’s a good example from The Z Man, though he’s not (I judge) a propagandist, merely one of these “you can’t fool me! everything is in reality very mundane and boring” types:

Stupid people are more prone to believe fantastical explanations for events than smart people. The QAnon stuff, for example, is a clever mocking of the sorts of people inclined to believe such things. It’s a very clever person with too much time on his hands having fun at the expense of those who are not so clever. Dumb people tend to fall for conspiracy theories.

Since people naturally conspire, in every workplace & social group, it doesn’t seem far-fetched to suppose that politicians and the financial elites would do likewise, on a far grander & weirder level than Janice and Sandra bitching about Debra’s skirt at the coffee machine. A reading of Suetonius should prepare one for the possibility that, for example, Bill Clinton visited Jeffrey Epstein’s island on multiple occasions.

The Intelligence Con is to say, “only a dumb person would believe that. It really is incredible what dumb people will believe. You know, a dumb person will believe that goat-riding Satanists decide our interest rates. It really is incredible. Now, a smart person understands that there is no order to anything, that things just happen for no reason. A dumb person doesn’t want to understand this, because he can’t. You’re not dumb, are you?”

Most people don’t care if someone critiques their upper body musculature, but they take it as a personal affront if you suggest their IQ is below, say, 100. Hence, a great deal of propaganda is an Intelligence Con; which may be why I would rather take out a year’s subscription to The Daily Mail than The Guardian.