Episode 15
TRANSCRIPT
Good afternoon, good evening, good morning, everybody. This is Peter Joseph, and welcome to Revolution Now! January 9th, 2020 (Error: 2021), episode 15. Sorry for the delay in this episode's upload. I've had to rerecord it multiple times, especially given the events that have happened this week. And it's also just been one of those weeks with a whole lot of random things coming up. I try to make sure I compose these with a good deal of consciousness, just not a lot of rambling, as I typically hate in podcasts.
So each of these episodes I try to make as concise and thoughtful as I can, and I'm willing to delay their releases if I have to. I hope that's okay. The subject for today is non-evidence-based belief and the rise of conspiracy culture. Something I've touched upon in prior episodes, but we'll explore now more so, especially given the January 6th circus insurrection that occurred at the U.S. Capitol building, which I suspect everyone is aware of, causing a handful of deaths, sadly. Some of the footage of that event is truly horrifying.
And the event is a case study in many ways not only of the power of disinformation and propaganda, often in the form of unfounded conspiracy theories, in the idiosyncratic pejorative sense of that term, but also a study of human behavior and our social nature. Something that I've been interested in for a long time, how group think or crowd psychology, what Charles Mackay calls the madness of crowds, unfolds.
He states in his book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, as I've quoted before, "Men, it has been said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one." And in the world of social media, which I believe can create crowd madness without the need for physical gathering, we are faced with an even more complex argument, that of censorship and free speech.
In a stunning move by social media, the President of the United States Donald J. Trump has been banned from Facebook and his favorite mouthpiece, Twitter. I did a whole episode, by the way, on free speech a while back. It was the November 3rd episode, if anyone wishes to review it. But I wish to say right now that all of those out there saying it is totalitarian censorship for social media to ban Donald Trump, you are partially right, but it is not that simple.
And for all those that say these private corporate dictatorships, as I called them, as all businesses are undemocratic by their very structure, have the ability to create their own rules and banning of Donald Trump or anyone is their own prerogative, and they can do what they do, you are also correct in the framework of the legal and structural reality we have day, but incorrect from a principled ethical and democratic standard. In other words, like most everything in our polarized society, people jump from one side to the other.
You're either for total free speech or you must be against all free speech. People have no sense of in-between. They have no sense of the intersecting sociological forces that relate to culture, that relate to human biology and psychology, or that relate to the relevance of a system science perspective, which I promote, a system science perspective, meaning you have to take into account other intersecting factors and not get lost in the absolutist assumption.
The greatest philosophical and moral delusion we have as a species, as complicated as it is, is the idea there can be a singular propositional declaration to address given phenomenon, as if such a singular worldview could be applicable to every possible variation of that phenomenon. In other words, there will always be exceptions to a perceived rule. It is a human construct that some kind of singular moral philosophy or social philosophy will have a universal application and that's that. It's all very convenient.
It's simplistic thinking. The real world and how society manages itself specifically to reduce harm cannot be reduced to singular declarations. Do I think Donald Trump should be banned at this particular time? I absolutely do, if you take into account the climate of violence that is happening and may continue to happen over the coming weeks as the United States leads up to the inauguration of the new president.
And by the way, I'm politically apathetic here. I think Donald Trump is a lunatic that shouldn't be involved in any kind of social management on any level. That doesn't mean I support Biden and the traditional establishment.
So now we have people on message boards talking about violence once again, with armed militias publicly stating they are planning even more interference and attacks with the clear and obvious link between years of Donald Trump's pathological self-serving rhetoric about not believing anything but him and the wars against him, effectively creating a cult of personality and a subculture of millions of people that literally believe only what he says, rejecting virtually everything else on the grounds that society and its institutions are now too corrupted to be trusted without any critical thought whatsoever.
I do not believe Donald Trump should be banned forever. The climate has to dissipate first and that is, once again, the sociological intersection that needs to be taken into account. And yes, on the other side of this, I obviously recognize the slippery slope of banning anyone's speech from any network, as I've talked about in the past. Private power corporate dictatorships, such as Twitter and Facebook, make their own rules.
When the truth is, due to the vast reliance modern society now has and these networks, they really should be deemed public utilities at this time and, frankly, completely nationalized and be regulated in a democratic way. For example, the decision to ban Donald Trump should have been started as an executive action on the part of Twitter management, but immediately followed up with a publicly sanctioned body of officials that are supported by public interests, developed by the public and make a detailed case about the issue to make a larger order decision.
Easier said than done. Because the sad fact is, due to the nature of our economy, both government and private enterprise are unified in a basic self-preserving bias. But at least government on paper is supposed to represent the will of the civil constituency. Corporations in stark contrast are structured dictatorships once again and do not represent democracy whatsoever. Now, I could say a great deal more about larger order sociological changes that could help create less need for any kind of social management.
And as Jacque Fresco once stated, an educated population needs no controls. What that means is that an educated population will generally share the same value system and the same worldview. And without a similar shared value system or worldview, society does not have cohesion and makes it more prone to conflict. Since the Enlightenment Era, the hope has been that the world would awaken the function of reason, moving away from superstitions and arcane traditions that have no evidence-based support, coalescing the human family into a common rational direction.
Nothing's perfect, but that is the human ideal. Sadly, we are very far from any kind of shared value system or shared social goals in the current state of social evolution we find ourselves as a civilization. And the United States, of course, is a case study in deep ideological polarization, fueled fundamentally by a hyper individualistic capitalist society based on artificial scarcity and competition, generating an enormous amount of caustic socioeconomic inequality, which is the most fundamental precondition for human division on all levels.
As far as free speech itself, I want to reiterate that advocates of absolute free speech, those who declare that under no circumstance, legal or otherwise, should any entity be censored on any level, what they're doing if they know it or not is making the assumption of intellectual self-regulation. Intellectual self-regulation. In other words, if everyone spoke their mind in an open discourse by natural force of debate, the truth would rise to the surface and people would reach general consensus through evidence and reason in a shared unified way.
Well, that is not something we are going to see anytime soon. Political pluralism does have a dynamic function to progress society. Obviously we don't know everything and differences of opinion are critically important. And these debates, they help move society forward. Free speech is a vehicle for fundamental progress. And yet unfortunately, it also has the potential to paralyze society when certain ideas that have absolutely no merit, no evidence-based foundation are embraced by a majority.
And suddenly, one day, you wake up and the majority of people believe say the earth is flat once again. For example, we now have people entering into the United States Congress that literally believe in the QAnon conspiracy. Another example, of course, are the religious theocracies of the world, completely unfounded that there is a God looking down upon us. But the cohesion of those societies is based on everyone accepting that mythology.
And it's an interesting case study. There's actually more stability in some of these societies, believe it or not, that believe in completely unfounded things, which goes to show the social nature of it all. And it's all very frightening when you really start to think about it.
So anyway, not to belabor this, free speech is critically important for social development, especially today because institutions by nature of the kind of social system we live in once again in terms of economic and the consequential power structure created from that economy are always going to fight anything that interferes with the premises that support those establishments and their preservation. Our society does not welcome change. It fights it.
It fights it not only through dogmatic comfort zones that unfortunately appear to be part of our nature, people don't like change, it's scary, but also by the very architecture of society itself, which gravitates towards institutionalized establishment preservation for the sake of maintaining group, economic, and social power. But I hope it's at least very clear to everyone that neo-Nazis, people that promote hate, exclusion and violence against individuals or groups explicitly, have no place in a society trying to be sustainable and stable.
I certainly understand the debate of the slippery slope of any form of censorship, but unfortunately, history is replete with empirical examples of cult of personality figures and organizations that literally operate in a kind of hypnotic mass delusional state. They create it. Mass psychosis is a phenomenon. The people of Nazi Germany were not just looking the other way when Hitler did all the horrible things that he did. They had been absorbed into this kind of mass psychosis value system simultaneously.
Anyone that's ever studied crowd behavior can see the power and extreme danger of the speech of a singular human being when embraced wholeheartedly by a mass of people in mass delusion. And that is the context that Donald Trump exists and why at least at this particular time especially he is an extremely dangerous force. All that out of the way, let's get back to the actual subject of the show, even though it's related to what I've just talked about. I have a number of things I want to touch on in relation to non-evidence-based belief and conspiracy culture.
I want to talk about the kind of mental schema or model of thought that appears common in paranoid and delusional thinking. I want to touch upon the cultural and socioeconomic foundations of how these models and beliefs and feelings arise.
I will touch upon some psychological and behavioral biology understandings as related to metamagical thinking, and I will talk about the dangers of broad categorization when it comes to this umbrella concept of conspiracy theory, how it also serves as an establishment preserving factor in many contexts, creating false limits of debate, limiting the expansion of knowledge through stigma and ridicule.
I also want to talk about the gross representation of this phenomenon in the general media and some of the bogus psychological analysis and assumptions, that carry little scientific weight, and serve no function to help resolve the issue. Now, as most may know, my focus of the past 13 years as a kind of public figure has been on dynamics related to the outcomes of socioeconomic inequality and ecological decline through the lens of systems science, reaching the conclusion that we cannot have the kind of economy we do if we expect to see social stability in the future.
My most definitive treatment is The New Human Rights Movement published in 2007 (Error: Actually 2017). However, what brought me into the public light years ago was a spectacle film I made in 2007 called Zeitgeist: The Movie. This film, which I still very much enjoy from an artistic standpoint, was unfortunately condemned as a conspiracy movie, as opposed to a critical thought movie and treatment on social mythology. At the time of its release, it had a very sharp impact on the internet, considered by some as the most watched internet movie of all time, at least then.
And I was very surprised over the years to be contacted by universities and even high schools that were showing the movie in media study courses, critical thought courses, and even philosophy courses. And that was good because that was the true context and purpose of the film, critical thought. The first part dealt with comparative religion, which is very straightforward. The second part explored the events of September 11th, 2001 through the use of footage taken from about 30 other documentary productions in a kind of montage.
And the third part of the film dealt with the nature of war, the financial system, and the problem of power itself. What makes the movie unique is it has a very strong narrative, a narrative that is actually quite gestural for the sake of artistic impression. Some may be surprised to hear this, but just because something is in the movie doesn't mean I actually believe it, rather it is a challenge to critical thought once again, with a goal of people walking away from the production with a renewed interest to question what they've learned in society and think for themselves critically.
It was never supposed to be released to the public. I threw it up on Google Video randomly, because it was originally a live performance piece I executed with a large percussion dual screen array in Downtown New York city in a free open to the public six night run. A fascinating experience. And once it hit Google Video for reasons I'm not quite sure in terms of how it sparked attention, it went hyper viral. I was still working at an advertising agency and trading the financial markets at this time. I had no intention of being a filmmaker or an activist.
And to finish my little anecdote here before I explain why I'm telling you this story, there was a three to four month period, I'll never forget it, where I got an email a minute when I had the website up. Unbelievable response. Tens of thousands of emails. I still have some of them archived somewhere. So why did I bring this up? Because I am the Zeitgeist guy. And even though I turned quickly to make Zeitgeist: Addendum, about economics and Zeitgeist moving forward, about public health, Zeitgeist: The Movie continued to have a very strong, powerful effect.
And I have met some super fucked up people in my life, insane, paranoid, conspiratorial people that read into that movie in a way that I had never intended. The crème de la crème of paranoia. I have met thousands of folks and talked to them, and the phenomenon of conspiracy culture and this delusional conspiratorial worldview has only grown over the years. I have a very unique knowledge of the mentalities through tons and tons of conversations with conspiracy culture. Let's now begin to break some of this stuff down.
First, it's critical to make a distinction between the conspiratorial worldview and true crime based analysis of an academic type, such as investigations regarding the death of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., historical war pretexts, even the events of September 11, 2001. Events that are approached by a range of multidisciplinary academically-minded, intellectually focused people, not making sweeping judgements or grand conclusions, but doing their best to look for facts as they exist.
It is one thing to argue that John F. Kennedy was not killed by a lone gunman and present the range of evidence that supports that argument. It's another thing to speculate as to the reasons why he might've been killed. Was it a result of the CIA? Did Lyndon Johnson want to take him out? Was Kennedy having an affair with somebody else's wife and that guy was the one that did it, as other people have said? It's the deviation from the analytical work, starting to invent contexts that are too distant to be proven, that pollutes the analysis.
True crime considerations are just that, police style considerations as opposed to grand overarching paranoid and utterly unfounded assumptions of the conspiracy camp, such as reptiles ruling the earth in secret, covert secret societies meeting to decide the fate of the world at Bohemian Grove, sacrificing children to Moloch because the rulers of the earth are Satanists, to people that believe the earth is flat and NASA is projecting an image into the ether of space.
Bill Gates is preparing to microchip everybody through the COVID-19 vaccine, Pizza Gate pedophilia clans of the government, nonsensical conclusions that the massacre at Sandy Hook was staged and all the people interviewed and were crisis actors, or QAnon, which thinks Donald Trump is some sort of savior who's going to stop a pedophile ring, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This is where the insanity rests, probably most notably propagated by people like Alex Jones and David Icke.
So that separation is critical, academic true crime separation and truly ridiculous speculation. And I'm going to get to the dangers of this as well from a categorical standpoint in terms of stigma in a second. Conspiracy culture has certain characteristics. There is a schema or a mental model of thinking in how information is filtered by somebody polluted by this kind of framework. The first characteristic is the uncritical rejection of any kind of mainstream narrative. Information isn't even considered, rejected entirely on the basis of the source.
For example, in my general social media activity recently discussing the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, a large swath of people have just decided that Antifa was the ones behind the break-in and violence and that the Trump people were just doing their peaceful thing all along. And then you go about saying, well, look at this article that actually addresses some of the people, the photos and videos of the people that broke into the Capitol, showing that they are actually long-standing Trump supporters.
And the conspiracy culture mindset shoots back and says, "Oh, we're not going to believe that because the source of that information is mainstream." Then you have irrational associations, where the truth of any given circumstance is overshadowed by some kind of nefarious association that is given greater weight than the circumstanced itself. This is extremely common. For example, many people have decided that Black Lives Matter is not a true activist organization because George Soros has been donating to it.
And because of these donations, the whole of the Black Lives Matter community and all of its diversity is really just a puppet organization of this nefarious figure, George Soros. I even had firsthand experience with this kind of irrational association with Alex Jones himself years ago, probably the strongest propaganda tool in his toolkit. For when I made Zeitgeist: Addendum in 2008, I featured for one minute a man named Jiddu Krishnamurti, a philosopher who was born into a rather esoteric group called The Theosophical Society, which he left.
He rejected the organization and went on to do deep think philosophy, which is quite enlightening and I encourage people to listen to his work or read his work. But this had no relevance to someone like Alex Jones or the conspiracy cult followers because of irrational associations. Rather, he chose to associate Krishnamurti to The Theosophical Society irrespective of the true relationship, and then associate The Theosophical Society to New World Order Satanism. Yes, he said that.
He then encapsulated my entire film project by this association and then associated me to New World Order Satanism, whatever the hell that means. You can go punch this up if you ever want to hear him talking about it. It doesn't matter the substance of my use of Krishnamurti. It doesn't matter Krishnamurti's actual life history. It doesn't even matter the true nature of The Theosophical Society as distantly related. Suddenly, my film Zeitgeist: Addendum was simply about New World Order Satanism.
This is a key associative disorder found in conspiracy culture, and it is extremely prevalent when you start to look at it. Moving on, a third mental characteristic has to do with irrational categorical associations. Categorical thinking, of course, is common to all of us. It's built into the way we comprehend the world. Inferentially, from a reductionist standpoint, using deductive thought processes to break things down to inductive processes to build up context logically, we're constantly categorizing information in our minds and reasoning around these categories.
Conspiracy culture tends to assume that any significant event must have some kind of ulterior element. That is the category, a significant event. Alex Jones is, once again, a case study. Over the past few decades, any kind of notable event, something that people hear about in the news, such as a school shooting or a bombing or a social crisis, a public health crisis, is deemed immediately to have some kind of ulterior element used for social control.
I've had no shortage of people contacting me thinking that COVID-19 is some kind of staged event, even though there's no evidence for it. And of course, even the January 6th insurrection of the Capitol building, it must be a staged event. What kind of policies or legislations are they going to try and put forward now because of Antifa? As an aside, there's an old psychological disposition that says large scale events make people feel like they can't possibly have simple explanations, often referring to the John F. Kennedy assassination once again.
You read about this all the time. Armchair psychologists will say something like, "People just can't believe that a simple lone gunman working at a book suppository could kill the most powerful man in the world, so they invent all of these other stories to make it more meaningful." This is nonsensical, and I have no idea where this is rooted. I have never met anyone that actually thinks that way. Rather, the gravitation is that the bigger the event in this worldview, the more social impact that event may have, and therefore there must be a secret group behind it somehow pulling the strings.
Obviously it's possible for that to happen, but there has to be evidence for it. And the fourth characteristic worth discussing is the assumption of institutional character. So say you have a criminal that has a history of shoplifting. The criminal was caught yet again being accused of shoplifting. Is it intellectually sound simply to assume that the shoplifter did it again without evaluating any evidence just because of the prior history? The character assessment? No, it's not.
Everything has to be taken on a per case basis, even though the character establishment of that shoplifter probably would be taken to account probabilistically as well depending on needs. And then conspiracy culture, once again, loves to do just that. The logic is "we have been lied to by institutions, therefore everything the institutions tell us in the future is going to be a lie," which, of course, is a false logical conclusion.
Those four characteristics understood, you now have the manner by which the stuff unfolds, the social and biopsychological mechanisms. Two are group think and bias confirmation. Group think is defined as a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational and dysfunctional decision-making outcome. They come together and believe the same thing by force of the group.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for and interpret and favor and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values. Both of these psychological tendencies coalesce to a dangerous phenomenon on social media. People tend to mold their bubbles in groups subconsciously, remaining in their bubbles, constantly having their views reinforced dynamically, by the way, by active mass participation.
Add in the fact that social media is designed to be addictive and to create a dopamine reaction, you start to see how group think and bias confirmation become reinforced even more through this dopamine reaction. It's like a drug that accentuates the belief system. By the way, I'm not opposed to social media as an idea, but I am very much opposed to the way it's currently designed. Social media is not an impartial environment. It is an amplifier of what people want to be amplified and a kind of addiction in its current form.
In this and complimentary to the group think phenomenon, it's critically important to recognize that we as human beings have evolved to seek group inclusion, as Dr. Robert Sapolsky in his work on us versus them group psychology and others have talked about. We have some old biological wiring where if we feel rejected by our identified group, we are very prone to conform. It's built into our limbic system, some kind of distant evolutionary function that arguably is not very helpful right now.
We feel pain when we are rejected by our identified group, a kind of nervous system reflex. And I have said this quote before in a prior podcast, but I'm going to repeat it here in context by neurobiologist and researcher Vasily Klucharev. He writes that "the deviation of individual opinion from the group behavior is interpreted by the nervous system as behavioral error or reward prediction error, which starts the process of behavioral change based on the dopaminergic mechanism of reinforcement learning."
In other words, our very brains are somewhat trapped between rational thinking and impulsive counter reactions that seek to prefer in-group conclusions. These lower brain reactions make us vulnerable to numerous thoughtless behaviors triggered by brain chemistry, and in addition make us susceptible to external manipulation. And it certainly applies to mass narratives as well, such as the perpetuation of irrational conspiracy theories.
Now, as I touched upon before, when I compare true crime issues such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy as a historical criminal conspiracy theory authentically in contrast to absurdist theories like QAnon, it's important to see what has happened in terms of what is publicly acceptable to talk about and what is not. All too often, especially in current articles I've read recently on conspiracy culture, they write along these articles and eventually you see them start lumping in anything and everything that sort of sounds like a conspiracy.
Suddenly in the same paragraph, they're talking about JFK's assassination and QAnon as if they're equivalent. What does this do? It creates a stigmatized association. Suddenly people will become fearful to talk about true crime events that are not in line with the mainstream narratives, not because they're simply not in line, but because they don't want to be called a conspiracy theorist and lumped in with QAnon and flat earthers and the cult of Alex Jones and beyond. In addition, this has also been weaponized.
If you go to the Wikipedia article, The Zeitgeist Movement, last I checked, a movement based explicitly on seeking socioeconomic change and human sustainability, regardless of the name, some troll went in and added that my first film was the first project I did, even though the movement is based on Addendum or at least it was started by Addendum. My films are not the basis of anything.
And there's an audio clip in Zeitgeist of Alex Jones speaking, which is one of many speakers, and I do not necessarily agree with a lot of the speakers in my own film because that's not the point, but they have Alex Jones' name in the article as a kind of black eye, as if he has any context of The Zeitgeist Movement whatsoever. So someone reading that article will hit that name and it'll be like, "What? This doesn't sound like a very reputable organization. They have associations with Alex Jones."
And this is how propaganda works when it comes to the dogmatic anti-conspiracy culture, a kind of intellectual bigotry, if you will. All this is to say that if you create this blanket broad categorical box and you throw everything into the box that kind of sounds like a conspiracy, you are going to discredit everything by association. And that is a terrible intellectual place to be, creating limits of debate by stigma. Moving on, it's also important to consider the nature of metamagical thinking and schizotypal personality disorder.
Schizotypal personality disorder is a characteristic set that includes people being antisocial and not forming social bonds on one side, but often, and more to the point, they hold very strange, often magical beliefs, hence, metamagical thinking. Metamagical thinking is not just believing in things that are non-evidence-based, but the ideas are consistent with a kind of magical mystical quality.
Astrology, unproven energy fields that can move things, or believing in angels and gods, hence, theistic religion, all well-argued as different degrees of metamagical thinking. And it is an important general recognition, relatively, that while we see lots of public condemnation and dismissal of extreme claims and beliefs such as QAnon, we still see a general acceptance of more traditional metamagical forms, such as people piling into a building on Sunday to worship an unseen, unproven God.
Billions of people engage this metamagical schizotypal traditional stuff without question and we just accept it as a form of tradition. It's interesting as an aside to view conspiracy culture as an extension of that. In fact, it goes beyond that, if you really want to start pushing the envelope. Think about Adam Smith's invisible hand and the idea of free market self-regulation. It has been modeled that the market system left to its own devices is completely unstable and will just push wealth into the pockets of people without any kind of equilibrium.
There is no equilibrium to be found in market dynamics whatsoever, which is why state intervention is constant as a mechanism of regulation and control. And yet, there are tons of free market proponents that to this day still assume in the laissez-faire tradition that state regulation actually is the problem. State regulation in an inhibiting force and the reason why people are super rich and some are super poor.
And hence, it's not the natural dynamics of competitive market behavior, which, of course, it is. I consider this to also be a form of religious thinking, of magical thinking, even though I think ignorance is also relevant too. People just are not educated enough.
But the very idea that you have a society where everyone exists in a state of abstracted scarcity, forced to compete for their own self-interest and encouraged to gain as much as possible in the game, and then assume that somehow everything is going to work out in some kind of egalitarian way to some degree, and everyone will be fed and housed and so on, as proponents of the free market seem to believe in many, many writings, historically is very, very magical thinking.
This is why my film Interreflections I talk about the money god or the market god, because that is basically what free market self-regulation implies. Now, finally, to conclude this episode, let's now think about broader cultural and socioeconomic causality when it comes to conspiracy culture. What does it take to produce a mindset of deep distress, paranoia, and potential delusion, typically focused around secret operations in the shadows; behind the scenes? What does it really describe in its framework first of all?
It describes group antagonism once again. Just like we have political antagonism between political parties, the conspiratorial worldview sees the individual and their localized constituents as suffering at the hands of another group in some form somewhere. It's not a system science concept. It is a group versus group concept. It's not about the structure and the outcomes of that structure. It's about the individual behavior of some secret nefarious group. And what is the root cause of group antagonism in society in general?
One can argue ethnicity, racism, and other common separatists distinctions as being the root of something. But that's not actually the case as we've talked about before. Everything comes from something. Really what we're dealing with is people that feel disadvantaged, oppressed, and exploited by something, so they invent a group to define that.
As I stated before but would like to state again, this Frederick Douglas quote, "Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe." The key sentence here is "where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them." This is the central root of the phenomenon of delusional paranoid thinking culturally.
If you were taught to believe, particularly in America, that you can make it, the American Dream, that it's all up to you and there's nothing that's going to stop or inhibit you in the free market... When you don't make that, when you struggle and you don't know why because you believe the mythology, you're then going to search for reasons why. And if you're not educated enough or you're in the wrong group of people that snowballed this kind of group antagonism in prior generations, if you don't know the answers to these problems, you will start inventing reasons.
And the most intuitive and simplistic answer people can come up with is some group doing something negative to them. Such invented reasons still framed in a group versus group way will grow and mutate and snowball as more people embrace them in their own confusion generation after generation, while falling victim to the ideas of Alex Jones and David Icke and other people. At the same time, it's easy to understand the general distrust of major institutions in the world.
It is a skeptically healthy thing to do, of course, to question the major institutions and not take anything at face value. Business is the rule of law. Money is the god. So when people turn on the news and they begin to see bias, they begin to see things that seem to fit an agenda that don't really fit their interests, they lose trust in the system. They lose trust in institutions because of the slantedness, as, for example, companies seek to satisfy their advertisers in corporate media and government relations are preserved.
It's pro-establishment. You see the general distrust of all institutions and the business climate we have created as a general outcome of that climate. And it makes perfect sense to have a general distrust because we live once again in a competitive society that is based on artificial scarcity, forcing people to compete with each other for basic survival in what is nothing more than a game. There is no real reinforcement for humans to trust anything, because of the constant game that is occurring based on narrow self-interest.
Everyone is angling at all times. How we have any social trust in society actually bewilders me, frankly. All this is to say is that the greatest condition of group antagonistic thought, including the rise of conspiracy culture itself, is capitalism. That does it for me today, and I will continue expanding on this subject a little bit more most likely as I had other notes, but I will talk to everyone very soon. Be safe out there.