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Get Rich Quick With Conspiracy Theory!!
The weird thing about conspiracy theory is that more people aren’t into it. I know what you’re thinking: “No, the weird thing is the conspiracies themselves.” But in many cases, conspiracy theory explanations of events are much more compelling than mundane explanations. Oftentimes so-called conspiracy theories provide a better more accurate model to understand and predict behavior and outcomes. And yet, “conspiracy theory” is still considered a pejorative label. Why?
I found an interesting quote by Timothy Leary which I think sheds much light on the psychology of it all:
[People] do not like to receive information unless the facts fit into their 3rd Circuit reality net [their established semantic system of meaning] and immediately reward their emotional status. Democrats were delighted to hear the facts about Nixon, but Republicans were irritated and resistant.
[People] submit themselves to learn new symbols only under special motivational circumstances where the new connections build on and confirm established systems or give promise of future emotional rewards of which the teacher is model.
[Note: I modified Leary’s original wording which used the word “Larval” instead of “People” because it’s just cheesy and unnecessarily belittling.]
This is exactly why I think telling people to “wake up!” is a complete waste of time. Same goes for trying to battle somebody head on and tell them they are just “wrong” and that it’s “obvious”. The fact is, it’s not obvious for them. What Leary is highlighting here is critical: there is an intimate connection between a person’s emotional/security status and their system of meaning, their knowledge.
We tend to think of people as being rational beings, who can carefully analyze inforation and logically decide if it is correct or incorrect. But in reality, knowledge - for the most part - is a socially-conditioned construct. From an early age, people receive emotional rewards for gaining new skills and knowledge. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s just how we treat each other. Think of a parent who is trying to teach a child a word or to put together a puzzle. When the new task is accomplished, there is an excitement communicated from the parent to the child. This is codified into an organized system in school when we receive meaningless arbitrary alpha-numerical “grades” for mastering new information. Later we translate these grades into “salaries” and so on. Even in the world of hobbies or skills/information that you work on for “fun” - you do it because it makes you happy; you receive an emotional reward for doing so.
Leary’s concept above is also used explicitly by New Age groups. The teacher/guru/cult-leader acts as a model for future emotional rewards for the student. Rewards such as “enlightenment” or “bliss” or psychic/mystical powers are offered if you commit yourself to a new semantic system or reality tunnel. The same thing happens at college with the promise of a good job. Emotional and security needs are played upon with the promise of future rewards.
This then is the obstacle keeping conspiracy theory from gaining widespread acceptance, and overturning the complacent worldview of the majority. Conspiracy theory doesn’t offer an emotional reward. Instead it seems to offer an emotional punishment. You may become “paranoid.” And as a result, your security/social status beings to decline: people see you as a “lunatic” and don’t take you seriously.
For whatever reason, people like you and me seem to get off on that. Maybe the idea of accessing some deeper level of “truth” provides some people with enough emotional payoff to make re-wiring your semantic system worthwhile (probably correlated to people who have a strong 3rd circuit imprint in Leary’s model).
So how do we go about getting other types of people actively involved in conspiracy theory? According to Leary, the trick would seem to be appeal to the other instinct centers (circuits) such as: bio-survival, emotional, sexual and social. The title of this post: “Get Rich Quick With Conspiracy Theory” is an incentive to both the bio-survival and social circuits (money = survival + status). Just one of many possible examples.
There is a problem to this approach though, I think. Once you’ve hooked somebody with an appeal to one of these instinctual centers, you’ve got to be careful then not to flagrantly violate their 3rd circuit semantic system of knowledge. Otherwise, they will just dismiss you out of hand, or they will tune out once they are unable to easily locate the emotional reward promised to them. As Leary says later in that quote:
[People] fervently resist new symbols which require a change in their network of associations. This resistance to learning is not psychological; it is neurological and biochemical. New ideas require a change in the wiring of associations and literally cause a “headache.”
Communicating with a [person] involves building onto the net of associations. You must literally wire each new idea to an existing neural connection. [People] learn almost no new symbol systems after childhood. They simply add on or translate into symbols closely connected to the imprint. This accounts for the fact that it takes at least one generation for a new idea to be understood.
This seems to explain why the “Everything You Know Is Wrong” approach to conspiracy theory fails miserably on the vast majority of people. Remember: what they (think they) know is closely connected to their emotional and social status. To challenge one is to threaten the other, and nobody likes to be threatened - even if it’s not done overtly. A more clever approach seems to be consistently reward people as you introduce them to new ideas. You could preface things by saying, “Oh, you’re going to LOVE this new idea I came across…” Or: “When I found out about this, I was so HAPPY!” Or you can consistently reward the knowledge they bring to the subject, even if you don’t exactly agree with it. Another approach is the bad news/good news approach. Whenever you deliver information which may be disturbing or unpleasant, you always provide them with a positive follow-up or an alternative behavior or idea with which to replace what you’ve just revealed as a negative. You get the idea; it fits that old saying about how you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
This approach is pretty challenging, I find - and I don’t always successfully use it. It takes an almost zen-like concentration, and it’s often easier to revert to screaming or trashing other people’s beliefs. While it may be satisfying at times and may help reach a certain type of person, it leaves the vast majority out in the cold. Anyway, this seems like a topic we could develop at great length. Does anybody have other ideas about how to increase the legitimacy or popularity of conspiracy theory?
- A Definition of Conspiracy Theory
- More Conspiracy Polls
- Origin of the New World Order Conspiracy?
- Conspiracy Theory, Parapolitics, Whining
- The Cowardice of Conspiracy
- Prev: The Four Horsemen & The Tarot
- Next: Apocalyptic Dreams
June 5th, 2005 at 4:22 pm
Take down the Illuminati. lol. I prefer Maslow’s model for personal growth. A person must have their food/shelter, love, and self-esteem needs taken care of before they can truly begin to become self-actualization. Thus, by attacking someone’s core beliefs, you usually lower their self-esteem (and perhaps sources of love), thus creating conflict and preventing them from thinking about or reaching self-actualization. For me, I guess the best way is just to slowly tear away at the curtains, letting in small bits of light at a time, until their eyes can handle the full sunshine.
June 5th, 2005 at 6:54 pm
You seem to be saying, “To get the sheep to follow you, learn the tricks of the shepherd.” Or, “To sell Conspiracy Cola, put some cocaine in it.” I would rather totally fail to change people’s thinking, than succeed by pushing their pleasure buttons — and thereby strengthen their habit of being led around by their pleasure buttons.
The important thing is not whether people agree with me but whether their minds are free. So I’d like to work on a deeper level, by somehow leading people to directly appreciate violating their 3rd circuit semantic system, changing their network of associations, getting a headache. I don’t know how!
June 5th, 2005 at 7:28 pm
i agree, but i dont know how either. thats what im saying… i suspect the trick is teaching people to - like you said - reconfigure semantic systems. i think what im saying is that certain people already do it… why? because they enjoy it. i know thats why i do it. if i didnt enjoy it and get such a thrill from it, i wouldnt do it. it must be possible to “teach” that on some level
June 5th, 2005 at 7:28 pm
Humbly: the first question I’d ask is why do you advocate increasing the legitimacy and popularity of “conspiracy theory” as a whole? I mean, I can easily understand an adherent’s motivation to popularize one particular conspiracy theory, but why the whole genre? The advantage isn’t immediately apparent to me.
To answer the question, though: a conspiracy theory-themed dating/matchmaking or networking site (like friendster, match.com, et al). Instead of entering your “personality profile” you enter your feelings or intuitions about particular conspiracy theories, and these are used to pair you up with like-minded people. For instance,
More than one gunman was involved in the assassination of JFK.
(Strongly Disagree / Disagree / Agree / Strongly Agree)
I actually think that would be a pretty strong way to match people up with potential friends and companions. If you agree with someone’s conspiracy theories, you’ll immediately and perpetually have something to talk about with that person, especially if one of you knows more about the background of that particular theory than the other. Who doesn’t love to enlighten others about that stuff?
The incentive to join up is the lure of love/sex or money (in the form of business contacts) and upon joining the new user is forced to consider and make judgements about theories that defy conventional wisdom and perhaps even undermine their original motivation for joining (especially re: money), so the site has a kind of hidden, thought-virus agenda. An inherently conspiratorial nature.
June 5th, 2005 at 7:32 pm
man, thats a brilliant idea alec… i love it
June 5th, 2005 at 9:45 pm
i was also thinking about how with infomercials, they always intersplice semantic product information with appeals to the emotional value of it. you have all these testimonials about the success or the fantastic results that “ordinary” people (actors) had with the product. it might be sort of cool to put together a “conspiracy theory infomercial” done in the same style as this - where there are interviews with people about how conspiracy theory made their lives better
June 5th, 2005 at 10:40 pm
tim, thats sort of where i’m going with this stuff, about how our personal experiences are hijacked and “brokered” by various interests… but it makes me realize that there is no “easy” symbolism with conspiracy theory. Everything’s been taken — i mean, what symbols do we have that haven’t already been charged opposite to what we are preaching? UFO’s…9/11…Jesus? Christ! There’s no easy way to sell gray to black and white people. that came out all wrong…
June 5th, 2005 at 11:36 pm
The only problem with an idea like Alec’s is that when you bring people together like that, what you inevitably find are some subtle, but meaningful, distinctions. You know, I think LBJ conspired with the Texas oilmen, but you think it was the CIA. Or, you think Roswell was a real government cover-up, but I think the stuff about aliens is just silly and a distraction. Tensions would soon arise, and before you know it, we’d be at each other’s throats, because the needs of the Ego to be right and recognized and secure in it’s beliefs doesn’t go away just because you find yourself consigned to a subculture or an alternative community of the damned. So, to make conspiracy-oriented analysis more popular, it would certainly help if it’s would-be popularizers weren’t always yelling and screaming and accusing each other of being disinformation artists or intelligence agents. This kind of in-fighting has always been a problem for those who would work outside the mainstream with hopes of changing or challenging the status quo, the tendency to tear each other to shreds in the neverending struggle for status and influence ends up taking precedence over everything else, and the kind of united front that might make more effective action possible becomes little more than a pipe dream.
June 6th, 2005 at 12:31 am
Conspiracy theory doesn’t offer an emotional reward. Instead it seems to offer an emotional punishment.
That’s interesting because anti-conspiricists will often pooh-pooh conspiricists with pretty much the exact opposite of your analysis, i.e. that “it’s comforting to believe in an untrue theory which explains such-and-such complex and inscrutable thing.” No matter how many times I hear that I always boggle because it’s exactly as you say - this shit isn’t comforting, it’s extremely disturbing! Ah, but how magically comforting to imagine that our country is run according to a set of constitutionally-mandated principles…
I’m not optimistic; I think the polarization and walls dividing people are too strong to be breached very soon - hell, it’s tough for Americans to believe that markets aren’t free, let alone begin to speculate seriously on the nature of UFO’s.
I think conspiracy theory will continue to “trickle up” into the traditional media from the internet, and that process seems to be accelerating recently with more intelligent “conspiracy” analysis, especially on the blogs. So, how to popularize conspiracy theory? I think you’re doing it.
June 6th, 2005 at 7:37 am
I think there’s a lot in here to do with the labelling of “conspiracy theorists”. Some people may be willing to learn cool shit and find out they were wrong/misguided on certain issues but due to the mass media labelling, do not want to be called a conspiracy theorists. I found this a few years ago. I used to get annoyed when people even mentioned conspiracy theories in relation to something cool I was telling them because it seemed like an easy way for them to completely destroy my argument and make me look like some nerd loser. I still have a slight bias against the terms conspiracy theories/ists now because it’s usually used along with words like “anarchy” and “patriotic” to label ideas and turn most people against/for them. I like what Jeff suggested about us “debugging” instead of “debunking”.
Also, I find the best way to lead people on to learning cool stuff they dont’ know is to give them a few tidbits and try and encourage them to read the rest themselves. This way, you navigate them away from nasty labels and they get a sense that they’re finding something out for themselves which I’ve found is what a great majority of us prefer (mainly due to what Leary was saying I think). You are the only one who can teach yourself something, because you are the only one who can internalise ideas and symbols.
But it is pretty hard, and as you all mentioned, it’s always tempting just to grab eachothers throats Homer Simpson style and scream sense into someone heh.
June 6th, 2005 at 7:20 pm
I may explore this more in-depth later, but while I have the thought in my mind I want to remind that “to label something is to negate it,” which I think was purported by Søren Kierkegaard. As a journey through many different cliques, social stratums in Western Canada, different industries, et cetera, I have to say that I’ve come to notice many similarities. These are offset by the simple points Leary put forth, as noticed by Tim here.
No shit of a lie, everyone seems to act the same. I wish I’d travelled Asia just to makek sure of this, but from what I know of friends’ accounts, the internet, literature, and good ol’ tv is that a good majority of South America and Europe are similar in nature. All the way from rioting in the streets over hockey in Edmonton, Calgary, and Vancouver, to the rioting in the streets over soccer (football) in Europe. I see tales such as City of God and can’t help see traces of Mafia-ruled Ukraine and other Eastern European countries, mixed with a good dose of what goes on all over Africa (tribal fuckhead idiots they seem to be).
The point I want to put forth is that in my socially immediate journeys, I’ve found that as I claim less and less — I am not a punk, skater, goth, yuppie, whatever (yet, in all fairness, I may “be” a punk skater goth yuppie, all of which I’ve been termed in my years — as I claim less and less, people have a more difficult time pigeon-holing me. I am either forgotten from the memories of people that meet me but aren’t on a friendly or directly business social relation. This is interesting because I am a fairly aggressive, assertive, impudent person much of the time. Though, if people come to get to know me, I can tend to reduce those around me to tears, inspire change and growth and insight, push them to confront aspects of their lives, and ultimately offer them a glimpse of the occult through me.
I have become a brand unto myself. I don’t call myself an occultist, unless it makes sense to in a social context. I don’t consider myself a patriot, or a son, or a good friend, or a teacher, or a student, or a good employee, or a bad employee, yet I am all of these things.
But without context, people either seem to dismiss me or as my disposition pays off and I win acquaintances over with my wit, charisma, and huge penis (well, maybe I have one?), I become entrenched in their paradigms as this anomoly that Tim is trying to break open for others.
In marketing and storytelling, all myths need a hero that can be related to.
I guess the short of it is, we must lead lives that explore our own myths, and in doing so return to our social circles, our jobs, our families, and present them with that so-called elixir. Bring back what we have from the underworld of trial, tribulation, with perceptions and symbolic systems cast anew, and infect those around us. We can’t change them directly, we can cause ripples however. Be the Hero. Get out and fuck shit up, meet as many people as possible, experiment, heed no rights or wrongs. Those that I know are mostly, yes, black and white towards me. It’s either love or hate. I maintain who I am, the hurts and joys I cause, without apology. By sticking to my guns I develop the Brand of Me™, a Cult of the Self, and as I put together new symbols and references, those directly around me will share in it as they come to those points in their life.
“Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.”
—Joseph Campbell
June 7th, 2005 at 2:11 am
Alec’s idea is like the little brother of that David Fincher movie The Game. Or, I can’t seem to place exactly how to hunt it down, but there was this company some years ago that was selling an online conspiracy game that included phone calls in the middle of the night and other spooky simulations.
If you started a match making service for conspiracy theorists, I think it would quickly mutate into something nobody would want to be a part of. There is so much opportunity for mindcontrol abuse in such an idea (I love the idea! Dystopian. Yum.) that new conspiracies would be invented daily. Much of it, I am sure, to throw intuitive dreamers off the scent.
Which is also I might add, why the existence of such a concept is probably a done deal and something like it is already in the works. There is no end to paranoid thinking. One must park himself in only its possibility, not its likelihood.
Likely story, coming from me. . .
June 7th, 2005 at 2:24 am
Oh yeah, what Fell said. Jesus Christ brother, you just described me!
A question for Fell and anybody else:
Do you feel people avoid you because of how imaginatively intense you are?
Cos that, mixed in with my cynicism makes for some uncomfortable people sometimes. I come off as negative. Except I’m not! I swear. I just see things and make connections no matter how uncomfortable.
June 7th, 2005 at 8:00 am
Yeah a lot of my friends tend to go silent when I express opinions ha. And yeah I’m constantly called over cynical or too reserved because I rarely explain my views on certain things. Mainly because my friends talk about boring shit like elections.
June 7th, 2005 at 12:08 pm
crasspastor, I find that I’ve been very fortunate in attracting like-minded and good, driven, and creative people around me. When I meet people that were perhaps a bit more sheltered, or from smaller towns or the suburban areas of the city, they generally seem fairly adament about what is right and what is deemed wrong. Yes, most people claim that what I “mess with” is evil, that I shouldn’t dabble with what I don’t know, that God looks down upon it, et cetera. It’s been one of my biggest goals to try to find a bridge in metaphor to allow those conservatives around me a glimpse of what it is I see, but it’s been admittedly difficult thus far.
What I have noticed, though, is that by just developing my own esteem and self-worth, and becoming existentially aware, that I’ve created a “name for myself” which has spread through circles of people. I use the term branding because essentially I believe that I’m becoming that which I admire, from both my own experiences and the occult.
Tim’s idea about bringing conspiracy theory to a wider public is good, but in my years I’ve met many a theorists and other so-called occultists and I’d rather sit at home and clean my aquarium than listen to them, their fears, their paranoias, their hates. All I wanna say is, Hey, fuck, the Rothschilds are winning, maybe! And good for them! I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t have the drive to devote my life to playing that Game, albeit a cool one, they’ve been playing it for like over 140 years.
So I play my own, in their arena. The Invisibles. Ramsey Dukes. Finite and Infinite Games. Chuck Palahniuk. We have our heroes so I say we take what we have and further disseminate.
Sure I come off as extreme to some, but to others I’m quiet, reserved, and sane. There are far more eccentric in my circle than I, trust me on that. I try to keep a balance between the paradigms I play with and the acknowledgement of social orders, because I belong to both.
June 7th, 2005 at 8:57 pm
Seems like you’d want to use people’s accepted realities to introduce conspiracy theory. Surely you can find some well-established conspiracy to start with, like Operation Northwoods. One of RA Wilson’s books mentions Roman Catholic “miracles” as a conspiracy that had succeeded for hundreds of years.
June 7th, 2005 at 9:39 pm
do you know which book of wilson’s that happens to be?
June 8th, 2005 at 12:11 am
The first of the Historical Illuminatus books — The Earth Will Shake, apparently.
June 8th, 2005 at 12:22 pm
[…] ink) on the topic of the sort of “brand name” that the occult has nowadays. In one comment, he says: Tim’s idea about bring […]