Popular delusions and our duty to dispel them

there's a student in one of the classes i work in who seems to be deeply into the whole Illuminati thing. i'm vaguely aware that this is some Web 2.0 retooling of the time-honoured conspiracy party that now seems to, hilariously, revolve around major pop stars, but i don't care to know much about this cobblers.

this student tho, is really really into it and seems to swallow every bit of "WOW LOOK AT THIS SINISTER EVIDENCE" crap they come across. now i don't teach them and don't have any direct role in their education, but the last few weeks i've been wondering if i ought to gently suggest that maybe they shdn't believe everything they read on the internet. i haven't done that yet because maybe it's none of my business to be the smug adult who tries to spoil your exciting inner world of evil Jay-Z or whatever.

but i dunno? in this kind of situation where one is at least tangentially a mentoring-type figure is there any kind of duty to gently and respectfully try to guide the student away from Idiotville? or shd one just roll ones eyes because it's Chinatown and tbh all the web-boggled teens out there now will be lolling underwater in 50 years time anyway.

I'd leave well enough alone tbh. Then again I've never even tangentially been a mentoring-type figure.

There's a load of Illuminati themed graffiti at my workplace for some reason, alongside "Bolon Yokte is coming" and "TTT Asianbird is 100% fit."

my instinct is to leave it but then i think if everybody leaves it where do we end up?

chinatown, chonatown always.

also YOU DONT GET TO TELL HIM WHAT TO THINK iirc

sure i wdn't go in with "THIS IS HORSESHIT YOU BUFFOON" but maybe some gentle questioning

i feel like a bystander at the murder of human intelligence tbh

i mean obvs i wd never get into one of the fights online but person to person in an educational setting i dunno

Since when, exactly? Not starting with yerman, surely? xp

When I was at an impressionable age, my Mum left lying around an interesting book called "Love's Executioner" (which I picked up and read, thinking it would be excitingly kinky; it wasn't at all. It was a collection of tales of psychotherapy which turned out to be interesting in a different way.)

But, one of the (repeated) dilemmas posed in this book was the idea that, should you disillusion people of delusions which are comforting them if you don't have anything better to replace said delusions with.

Which is one thing when it is the delusion that one has been deeply loved, another when the delusion that one is secretly Napoleon, yet something else that the Illuminati control Beyonce's career?

I think if you are someone's teacher, part of the job is actually to challenge them and say "why do you believe that?" because this is how you teach people to think, and "maybe you could question the idea of believing everything you read on the internet" is part of that. But on the other hand, believing in conspiracy theories can be fun and entertaining and a way of believing that there is *some* control over a world that is very scary to an adolescent, even if it's a big, scary evil controlling thing.

Maybe mentoring isn't the thing, but if you are in a role where you can push them more towards questioning/thinking, that's better than going "conspiracy theories are bunk!" to say "why do you believe this, what about it appeals to you?" rather than engaging it directly.

(well aware that conspiracy theories also appeal to mental adolescents who may be much older than physical adolescence, but still cling to that adolescent belief that *something* is in control of life, even if it is a Big, Bad Parent, rather than accepting the unpredictability of adult life.)

Since when, exactly? Not starting with yerman, surely?

i meant fights with people in the grip of obvious and severe delusions. you can make of that what you will.

tbh i think in this case the tutor shd raise the questions if anything, as an illuminatu stooge i'm happy for the clouds of ignorance to thicken

I meant re bystander feeling tbh

amirite in observing a slightly skeezy queasy racial element to this shit now, pics of Obama with his eyes scrubbed out and apparently rappers and r'n'b singers secretly running the world?

I first heard of it in connection with 2Pac.

Branwell Bell otm.

darragh oic your point yeah it's fair enough it's not a new thing i think it's just jarring at work in an institute theoretically dedicated to "education"

Thing is if you engage this student he's gonna know a hell of a lot more about it than you so could be difficult.

tbh i think 5 minutes on the Web and i "know" more about it than "him"

i think on the whole i agree that this is none of my business.

i still also think that this has kinda disturbing implications about ideas or worldviews or our relationship to others tho.

i see somebody starving, i shd feed them. i see somebody freezing, i shd shelter them. i see somebody rolling around in a bog of stupid, i shd keep me head down and walk quicker.

When someone has dedicated themselves to a delusion and researched argument and counterargument and read experts in the delusion and quotes verbatim on the delusion and accepts only argument on the level of that with the associated jargon as pantomime script before they even deign to engage with you then its tough to motivate yourself to give enough of a fuck about where it leads them as long as you can ignore them.

I mean, if ilx has taught me anything, like

The thing is, 1) we as humans have pattern-spotting brains and 2) there *are* actually large, over-arching systems that do exercise undo control over the world which are called things like Class and Race and Gender and there are probably ways in which you can shape people to use 1 to notice and/or address 2 rather than go off on these adolescent fantasies of The Big Evil Controller.

But somehow those explanations and patterns are neither as simple nor as easy (and also entertaining) as the ~OMG the Illuminati/Rosicrucians/Trilateral Commission/Bilderberg/Invisible College control everything, maaaaan." And also involve looking at and examining one's own role in the world, rather than just presenting oneself as the passive pawn of parent-controllers.

I think in this case, it might be worth, if you are on good terms with the actual tutor, to get the tutor to teach independent thinking/challenging but who knows if they think that's above their paygrade or whatever.

xp

i don't think we're at that level of dedication to research tbh, it's only stuff to look at on the internet inbetween listening to tattooed white dudes rapping over acoustic guitars.

i guess your depressing point is right, tho.

and another xp

well BB i think the tutor probably isn't seeing it as an issue like i do - and tbf i see it as a niggle at the back of my head rather than a consuming issue, based on the oddity of sort of professionally turning a blind-eye to rongness

I still think it's worth raising it with the tutor if it's bothering you enough to start a thread about it - and if they say it's NBD, well, then it's their call. At least you tried.

TBH, a lot of Anti-Capitalism reads superficially like the same conspiracy theory stuff I used to read in college, except more grounded in reality and a slightly more sophisticated understanding of the world and one's place in it.

(Just like the rabid proselytising fringe of Capital-A Skeptical Atheism reads a lot like the UFO "the truth is out there!" cults that proceeded it, and incidentally contains a lot of the very same people.)

It's almost like conspiracy theory thinking is an early way of *grasping* at the idea that the world is bigger and more complicated than you've been told, but really isn't quite there yet as to what to *do* with the knowledge.

Reminds me of a guy I used to work with, a young black guy who voted Tory and said that the UK was the only country in Europe that had a welfare state and that's why we had so many immigrants... but that's by the by... I came in once in the middle of a conversation he was having with a fellow worker where he was saying that there was a giant pyramid floating a hundred metres above the Kremlin, I (in time-honoured NOTW fashion) made my excuses and left.

(in time-honoured NWO fashion)

Yes, indeed, I have no patience with conspiracy nuts I must admit

Probably best not to delve too deeply into the utter shite that apparently sensible people are prepared to believe in

yeah i might bring this up with the tutor. this "research" is happening in the context of other students working on actual fictional material so there's a degree of irony here and a lack of it being meaningful to the educational context.

i think the broader issue is "when do we 'step in' and try to guide people away from intellectual paths that might be harmful to them in some vague way"? i don't think obsessing over internet conspiracy memes is especially harmful except that if your thought comes to revolve around this stuff, if you view the world around you thru this distorting lens, who knows where it might lead? there's something maybe dehumanizing about aspects of the big conspiracy theories - illuminati become lizard people/coded Jews become "not one of us"

obv there are "rationalist" world views that can go into this territory but then i'd shy clear of the conspiracy end of Marxism or Atheism too. they do attract a similar crowd - smartarses and peeps who wanna know more than you - but they aren't the only people. the kid that set me thinking about this seems like a sweet kid with enough issues of their own to be getting on with

Given that it is easier to leak actual conspiracies and secret service shit than it has been at any point in history and none of what we've been presented with so far is anywhere near as elaborate as any of this shit. It's like how none of the conspiracies on Wikileaks are as elaborate as the one allegedly perpetrated on Julian Assange.

I mean "the US government are monitoring everything you do online" is elaborate as well but in a different way and I'd always basically assumed it was happening anyway.

atheism, illuminati, marxism, privcru, its all a bit dark round the edges imo

when ppl i have known have come out w/ semi-crazed shit i have v gently had fun w/ them, nothing direct, but e.g. advocating a more extreme/ridiculous position, generally trying to deflate their own seriousness. if i get on well enough w/ someone that i can share lols then i would try something like that.

Maybe the answer is just to lend them a copy of Karl Marx / No Logo / bell hooks or whatevs with a wink and a wary nod and say "here's the shit that They are *really* trying to keep away from you..."

Haha no.

I mean Assange is kind of case in point of a former conspiracy nut who made his own fantasies come true but um, no, not going to go down that avenue today.

yeah i think this was the wrong thread to start today but thanks for all your thoughts which i am broadly in agreement with

The thing that always gets me about 9/11 conspiracy theorists is that their explanations (or *implied* explanations since they're usually "just asking questions") are always far more illogical and full of holes than they claim the "official" explanation is. Once you realize that, you realize that they possess an indomitable will to believe, and a knee-jerk mistrust of anything "official," that you can never overcome with facts.

how does the 77 Board fit into all of this? THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE

77 = SS

= SECRET SANTA

= CRETE'S SATAN

the obvious question "how do you trust the people telling you 'the truth'?" is too painful to contemplate

so 77 caused the greek crisis and is going to replace their government with a nazi one, you see?

makes sense, thx. (sorry NV for facetious derailing)

I did actually once have someone, who knew I was Jewish, perfectly innocently ask me about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and I explained it to her, and I think she actually believed me. But she wasn't really a "conspiracy theorist" type, it was just something she heard about somewhere and wanted to know what the deal was.

Coincidence or not, but every conspiracy theorist nut I've ever known smokes copious amounts of weed, which I guess makes them a bit paranoid.

yeah a friend who had serious drug problems and problems with depression started coming up with this kind of nonsense. I don't want to generalise about a link between conspiracy theories and mental health problems, but in his case one seemed to go with the other. Who knows what causal relationship (if any) there was though.

A teenage friend started telling me about some illuminati/Jay-Z stuff I dunno, a few months ago? First I'd heard of it. I think I left it at a sort of distant-sounding, "Oh, really? Hm. Let's move on." She's smart. She'll figure it out.

Did all this stuff start before or after Magna Carta Holy Grail came out?

As we all know it's the Magic Flute of rap.

Yeah that's pretty much the theme of the thread innit: when someone's whole deal is based around an antipathy to stuff like "facts" and "thinking", at what point do you just get the fuck outta Chinatown

Maybe the most popular delusion that needs dispelling is that it's our 'duty' to dispel them.

But... we do have such a duty? And I think it does largely work even if not on an immediate personal level. Like if climate change denial was demoted to flat earth science in popular culture, over time such views move to the fringe, away from determining policy.

Like maybe you can't change your kooky anti-vaccine pro-misogyny coal-burning uncle, but you can keep him from becoming mayor

I feel like, in light of the Isla Vista rampage, we *absolutely* have a duty to try to dispel false and unhealthy ideas.

It's like, yeah, you can keep said kooky uncle from becoming mayor, but you can't, in a free society, keep him from joining a community of likeminded kooks who will feed off one another's hatred and eventually possibly hurt/kill someone. Even as someone who supports gun control (it really is obviously way too easy in this country for someone like Elliot Rodger to get their hands on firearms), I can't help but feel like the core of this issue, as it always is in these situations, is the influence of toxic ideas on susceptible minds, and the two best things we can possibly do are 1) improve support for those with mental health issues and 2) promote non-harmful ways of thinking and living in the world. We need to do these things *in addition to* keeping guns out of the hands of the violent, but they can't take a backseat.

I'm not naive enough to think that you can accomplish no. 2 just by arguing with people. Branwell and others in this thread have pointed out that this is a matter of trust and if the people you're trying to sway have already decided not to trust you, you will at best have zero effect on them and at worst just make them more stubborn and entrenched.

tl;dr changing minds is a really hard problem but not one to be abandoned, imo.

I don't think the key is to argue people out of their insane bullshit, whether it's anti-vaccine or belief in religion. I think the key is to keep the infection from spreading. So when you see/hear someone talking insane bullshit, don't argue with them in an attempt to get them to change their minds—debunk what they're saying in a calm and rational manner so that the casual observer, who could go either way, winds up on your side instead of the lunatic's.

I think not enough credit is given to all the people with the old, bad, unshakeable ideas just dying out and a younger group less hidebound in that area ascends control.

There's this disturbing unshakable aspect in Western thought left over from the Enlightenment and other Greek traditions that you can just change someone from a tightly held belief just by debunking it. I remember reading in _The Ghost Map_ about how the scientific and medical establishment up thru the early Victorian era believed that disease traveled thru bad smell and bad air, and there was nothing that these few guys who were investigating a certain water pump in London could sway their views, so they just had to wait them out.

I think that might be right with outdated scientific paradigms, like if you're talking about "diseases are borne by bad smells" or "Newtonian physics doesn't need Einsteinian physics" then sure, it requires the old guard retiring or dying off for the new theorems to take root and grow.

But there are other old, bad, unshakeable ideas (like racism, like misogyny) that just spring up like little seedlings and grow afresh in every generation. So a different kind of approach is required, rather than e.g. "wait for all the old racists to die" because racism finds new and more insidious forms to express itself anew.

And on that one, yeah, you are not going to dislodge those ideas from the minds of old people. But the idea that you can practice weed control, and model better forms of behaviour not for the people who are hopeless, but for the undecided onlookers (especially of another generation) to stop it taking root anew, I think that's a better practice.

Sorry, though, I don't think "religion" is anything that one really can or even should stamp out of humans as if it were just like anti-vac. What one can do, if one is religiously inclined, is push for a more loving, tolerant, progressive kind of religion. That's a duty I leave to the religiously minded, and I've a lot of respect for those that do.

The ways in which science changes is a fascinating topic, I would recommend "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn for anyone interested in this. His basic idea is that scientific theories are sociologically constructed paradigms which require a critical mass of expert dissent before they can be shifted. The classic example is the evidence gathered by Copernicus that the earth revolves around the sun, which was to begin with resisted by "conventional" astronomers of the Ptolemaic persuasion. There are numerous other examples. However Kuhn's theories aren't uncontroversial, c.f. Paul Feyerabend.

Religion isn't something that can be stamped out, or should it. Religion is interwoven with culture, and culture changes.

Sorry, though, I don't think "religion" is anything that one really can or even should stamp out of humans as if it were just like anti-vac.

Religion isn't something that can be stamped out, or should it.

I'm fascinated by this POV, because to me it's the most abject surrender. Religious belief—belief in imaginary things, let us remember—is every bit as poisonous as any other kind of belief in bullshit, and in fact is far worse, because it's frequently the umbrella under which people's other bullshit beliefs hide, whether it's racism or sexism or anti-scientism or whatever else. Tear it away and destroy it, and who knows how many other fucked-up aspects of human culture may disappear too? Sunlight as disinfectant, etc. But if you're unwilling to tackle religion, you're allowing the structure that shelters all the oppressions you're against to remain and even thrive. You're effectively saying, "Well, you've been wrong for so long, it's impossible to correct you now, so we'll just let it go." Good luck changing anything else you think needs changing with that approach. Personally, I think anyone who brings religious belief into a discussion of real life should be punched in the face until they learn to debate like a grown-up. (N.B.: The last sentence—but only that sentence—is intended as humorous hyperbole.)

I thought the pump mystery was solved by graphing people who were ill and you saw that there was this huge cluster centered round the pump?

No, sorry, horse, this is not something I'm prepared to discuss on the internet. Religion is part of human culture, spirituality is part of the set of human emotions. If evils (misogyny, racism, etc) infect religion, it is because they are part the problems of *humans* which infect every other aspect of human culture, not just religion. It's really next level bullshit to blame "religion" for these ills, rather than "humans" for these ills. And the moment someone starts coming out with that kind of magical "get rid of religion and we instantly get rid of all the human problems" reasoning, it's a big warning to me that they don't really understand how culture, or religion, or indeed humans work. So sorry, but... nope. I'm out.

i've been around this on many other threads, so it probably isn't worth getting into here, but i disagree strongly with the horse. the blithe reduction of religious faith to "belief in imaginary things" is rank arrogance, imo, and simplistic to boot. the temptation to dismiss beliefs & experiences that don't square with our own is just as pernicious as anything else discussed in this thread.

moreover, i don't believe that the rational/scientific has any special claim to the good. from a purely scientific standpoint, any obligation to morality, decency, justice, equality and/or compassion must also be seen as "imaginary". such matters instead become the intersection of pragmatism, social theory & taste. i hardly think that scrubbing the world of all thinking that isn't wholly objective/logical/scientific would reliably lead to a reduction in human fucked-uppedness.

More listening and less talking would lead to a reduction in human fucked-uppedness!

also: cake

"Get rid of religion, and we will somehow get rid of all the human problems which infest every other aspect of human existence" is just another kind of ~magical thinking~.

(I am talking way too much for someone who doesn't want to talk about this stuff.)

I can still never discuss this properly because I don't know how to identify a 'religious belief' as opposed to any other kind of belief.

Branwell's probably right that it's a chicken-egg thing: people give their god(s) all the same fucked-up prejudices they've got already, and then argue that their fucked-up prejudices come from their god(s). Still not sure how that's an argument for holding onto the god(s), though. I mean, if you're gonna try to get rid of fucked-up beliefs and the behaviors they inspire (which is the Progressive Project, supported by All Right-Thinking People and everyone we follow on Twitter, after all), where do you start if not with the 100% imaginary ones? You can always work on the ones that have a toehold in reality afterwards, right?

Leaving to run errands, back later.

Believe in something ineffable that's bigger than yourself as reminder of both insignificance and specialness of life: fine, go right ahead, might even be helpful in a crisis.

Believe in higher power that's gonna smite your enemy because they're dirty/don't believe/you're having a bad day: magical thinking.

There is a tribe that due to some weird linguistic properties, have never developed beliefs in the supernatural, but they've also never developed counting.
This missionary who went to convert them basically lost his faith, and they also are really problematic for Noam Chomsky in terms of linguistic theory.
Also despite being in abject conditions, they don't experience depression.
Who would switch places with them, though?

if you want to oppose what you consider poisonous beliefs & behaviors, then do that. trying to stamp out "imaginary" beliefs (irony alert) is a completely different enterprise, and there's no clear relation between the two that i can see.

that kind of aggressive arrogance is far too narrow- and closed-minded to have any place in what i consider "the progressive project".

What would you need to draw that relation? The godless tribe seems to be free of many ills we assume are baked in more deeply than religion.

"the godless tribe" is an anecdotal point. would want to see some kind of verifiable large-scale correlation. otherwise, it's just wishful thinking, belief in an imaginary reality preferable to what we can actually observe.

Well I'm gonna assume the piraha are actual observable people and not imaginary.
There are only 400 left though

was speaking of the correlation being imaginary, not the tribe

idea that eradicating other people's belief in supposedly imaginary things would result in a reduction in man's humanity to man seems like a fantasy on the level of "when i die i get to go to heaven"

Piraha believe in spirits but only ones they can see.

coming from a white southern american family dominated by baptist grandparents, I personally find it very hard to separate certain old-fashioned reactionary delusions from certain protestant religious beliefs. I know most people don't share my experiences though.

i feel like this gets brought up all the time, but religion has been a force for violence + bigotry in the world, and also a force for liberalism, justice and progress. the issue isn't that someone believes something you think is silly but what they use that belief to justify.

Yes, the problem isn't belief as such, its drawing moral imperatives from metaphysical assumptions. Jesus rose from the dead therefore don't use birth control. This goes for secular belief systems too.

But the force itself is coercive -- the real trade off to me is that civilized comforts might not be possible without coercion
The piraha apparently live in a society without such coercion but is that sustainable when they are only 400?

I'll put it this way - I wouldn't be anywhere near as reactionary as P-Free, but some of the prejudices that are inherent in religion didn't merely come from man taking something pure and sullying it up. These things are ingrained in many religions, especially Judeo-Christianity, because religion is manmade and was a product of its time.

There are definitely latent anti-Semetic sentiments buried throughout the Gospel According to John, for one. When comparitively reading it alongside the other synoptic Gospels, one sees that more blame is attributed to the Jewish people for the death of Jesus, whereas Pilate, who was much more complicit in the other depictions, was seen as more reluctant. Bart Ehrman and other New Testament scholars largely believe the author of the Gospel According to John was one of the earliest new Christians to break from the old school Judaism faith, and he and others of his followers were ostracized and forced out of the faith for their 'heretic' beliefs. In retaliation, he and the Johannine community began assessing blame to the Jews for Christ's death. So right there, we have prejudice ingrained in canonical New Testament text, and being that Christianity did not exist until after Jesus was dead, one can hardly say "well it was a pure religion until men came and tainted it", cuz men invented it to begin with!

With all that being said, I am still tolerant towards religious folks, but not like I once was. That doesn't mean I go looking for fights with believers or refuse to associate with them by any means. But it does mean I'm less likely to be laissez-faire with them if I happen to get in an argument or won't criticize their beliefs. Context also matters: cliffs notes is I grew up in a church that explicitly told me that the word "dogs" in Revelation referred to homosexuals, who would sit outside the Kingdom of Heaven, and other completely bigoted horseshit. And many of the folks in that church grew up in it from childhood, indoctrinated into it, meaning by the time they were an adult, they didn't know anything else. the only reason I escaped it and actually sought other 'truths' was because someone had the gumption to challenge my beliefs in a series of discussions when I was 16...and I found, upon closer examination, that I hadn't really thought through it much and that it didn't make sense to me after all.

Some folk will remain steadfast after being challenged and that's fine. But sometimes I feel like 'respecting' people's beliefs is conflated with 'ehh don't bother engaging with them on the topic', which is BS IMO

No, sorry, horse, this is not something I'm prepared to discuss on the internet.

followed by 3 more sentences on the topic and a follow-up post

Well, religion is coercive!

i do not believe for any reason though that our ills would be gone by eradicating religion. there are plenty of evil sons of bitches out there that have little to no influence of spirituality or religion making them tha tway.

Actually do you guys think of coercion as having a neutral property or is it intrinsically bad?

coercion is the wrong way to put it. nothing is ever "completely free". context is constraint. and there's nothing wrong with context.

my own bit of magical thinking is that a reduction in certainty (fundamentalism, absolutism, etc) would "naturally" lead to a reduction in human poison. this applies to religious certainties as well as those of whatever other sort: libertarian, antireligious, progressive, whatever.

Isn't it a classic defense of religion argument to claim that without it, certain classes would have nothing to restrain them from going completely id?

Well if you're trying to dispel a delusion, I think some coercion is implied in the sense that there is an unwilling party to win over and likewise they have stakes in winning you over

my own bit of magical thinking is that a reduction in certainty... I tend to agree provided that we're generally talking about unsubstantiated or unverifiable certainties.

and sorry for nonsensically dodging the "coercion" question. straight answer: coercion is not intrinsically bad. social coercion (laws, standards, taboos, regulations, etc & their enforcement) is okay w/ me.

I tend to agree provided that we're generally talking about unsubstantiated or unverifiable certainties.

i just go with opposing all of 'em. cleaner that way. allows for the erosion of supposed verities, which seems inevitable.

Then why isn't religion counted among the "good" coercion toolbelt? Because of deceit?

Coercion is the monopoly of the State, blah, blah, blah. It tends to be less effective on interpersonal levels and especially if you're trying to get someone to empathise enough to think like you do. My biggest problem with conspiracists is they're missing the forest for the imaginary trees. Most of the shit that impacts us is out in the open and it's rarely that well camouflaged. Pppl are relatively predictable and rarely smart enough to carry out secret schemes like the Illuminati and why would they? Most of the ways that the system is rigged are pretty obvious and straightforward.

i just go with opposing all of 'em. I hate to tell you this, contenderizer, but we're all going to die.

seems likely

Well the conspiracists impulse to see patterns that aren't there and convince others of it is essentially a religious impulse but isn't this also the mechanism for invention and technological/capitalist progress?

Like what's the difference between a conspiracy theorist and someone making an IM app?

I hate to tell you this, Michael White, but all of our consciousness is going to be uploaded to the cloud.

not me.. i keep all of my thoughts to myself and never post them on the internet