A Warning Regarding Conspiracy Theories
Careful with the conspiracy theories, ladies and gentlemen. Careful that you don’t miss the forest for the trees. Or worse, lose the plot entirely.
I’m all for healthy investigation. And I agree that much of what gets labeled “conspiracy theory” isn’t conspiracy theory at all. But I’m also deeply familiar with the territory, having spent years wearing the tinfoil hat.
There’s a place in conspiracy land that Robert Anton Wilson called Chapel Perilous. And trust me when I say it’s a place you do not want to end up if you can help it.
I know because I lost my sanity in Chapel Perilous.
As High Weirdness author Erik Davis points out, “It’s a place where you’ve been following these strange lines of implication, going down rabbit holes in the internet or your own psychedelic experience or your own dream life and synchronicities and everything’s starting to connect and then you find yourself in this place where you can’t go back. The door’s shut behind [you]. [You] can’t just go, ‘This is all a bit much! I’m just going to return to my ordinary life’ because the implications are too much. The narrative has swallowed you up.”
According to Wilson, when you’re in Chapel Perilous, there are only two ways out. You either come out 1) a stone-cold paranoid or 2) a radical agnostic.
Now, I don’t consider myself agnostic regarding God, but I do consider myself radically agnostic regarding many of the conspiracy theories swirling around right now. Why? Because I’m aware of the different layers of “radical skepticism.”
You see, most people in internet subculture conspiracy theory echo chambers have only learned the first stage of radical skepticism, which they apply toward the narratives they’ve inherited, the media, consensus reality, etc. But they have yet to apply the same skepticism to the subculture narratives they now inhabit, which are equally, if not more, prone to corruption.
They’ve only escaped the first layer and are now stuck in the second.
True freedom comes when you understand how chaotic and contradictory and multi-dimensional our world is and you decide it’s not possible to ever really know what’s going on. I don’t care if you’re Joe Shmoe or Nathaniel Rothschild. You’re never going to fully crack the code.
Should we still build models of the world based on the available evidence? Of course.
Is child sex trafficking a far worse problem than any of us can begin to fathom? Absolutely.
Did Epstein kill himself? Probably not.
Will I be injected with a mandatory vaccine? Not without a fight.
But sorry, you lost me at flat Earth Santa and Pizzagate and Bill Gates being literal Satan.
Sometimes the red pill isn’t as exciting as The Matrix made it out to be. Sometimes it’s just holding everything more lightly.
