Essay - Negative Conspiracy Patterns
By Niles Heckman
We've had a background creating personal work in primarily the area of self-development which is really spiritual self-development because we are absolutely spiritual beings having a human experience. That's the trunk that leads up the tree of the branches of the health of the natural world (environmental health), as well as mental and physical health on both an individual and then global societal level. Which we desperately need to improve because it's "evolve or perish", "grow up or die" time for humanity. This has led us into interests and experience with entheogens (especially their usage within indigenous traditions), as well as areas such as esotericism which means the little known inside. Searching into some of these alternate areas inevitably touches on other areas that could be related to "conspiracy" or what's sometimes called "conspirituality" which is sometimes a catch-all term for people who are in alternative medicine communities. Becoming more open to conspiracy is an early stage in spiritual growth. Which is essentially due to a distrust in cultural institutions and realization that they have not been fully or sometimes even partially honest with the public. Spending over a decade in this and its adjacent orbiting material, and in the early days of it thinking most conspiracies had validity, we matured into realizing certain things were very wrong with it. Primarily because of many folks within this areas support for the election of a deplorable excuse for a human being to the United States Presidency in 2016 and then how it dealt with the global Covid-19 situation, mainly having a strong one sided anti-vax / anti-science thread, we came to notice two patterns running in many "alternate media'' circles, especially those related to conspiracy and sometimes even conspirituality which has caused us to be much less supportive of said subjects. The philosopher Terrence McKenna who had mushroom gnosis would sometimes say, I'm not very supportive of conspiracy theory, and we've now come to see more and more why, because at the time of this recording, we're now 50/50 at best regarding it. Some conspiracies are valid, while others breed irrational or baseless thinking. So it's crucial to recognize that this term can be politically charged and might be used to dismiss legitimate concerns by painting them as mere conspiracies. As with any conspiracy theory, the validity of the claims associated with it should be evaluated based on evidence and critical analysis.
The first negative pattern we started to notice within conspiracy circles is the accurate identification of problems but then proposing batshit crazy solutions. Specifically related to what is public and what is private and a heavy asymmetry towards giving the private a pass. Being very 50/50 on the subject, the other main pattern is we've honestly come to think that 50% + of conspiracy or conspirituality, the half we don't buy, is really just extremist right wing politics in disguise. Nothing more. Since everything is all about the money, in the United States, liberal leaning politics is typically associated with progressivism, social equality of opportunity, and government uses in the economy to achieve social goals on behalf of the middle class - which is generally more compassionate. Modern heavy handed conservatism wants you to think it's somehow for individual freedoms and gives false binaries such as freedom or government control when a more accurate juxtaposition would be public democratic governance over private corporate greed. Conservative politics in the US, while claiming and historically many decades ago having some semblance of being for individual liberty, free market principles, and limited government intervention in economic and personal matters, doesn't actually do those things now and has basically been replaced with this neo-fascism which protects the wealth and power of godzillionares and mega corpses. Which hurts the individual, rigs the market to be corporate crony markets, uses government to only give tax cuts to the top 1%, privatizes everything for corporate profit, amplifies corporate greed through deregulation, gets in quagmire holy wars in the middle East for Israel, and then because those shit policies have been screwing over the middle class and the poor for nearly half a century, because it’s compassionless, tells people immigrants are to blame for their middle class ills - is a form of neo-fascism.
Most conspiracy accurately identifies that the way the world really works is that a small number of extremely wealthy people, probably a few thousand, on a planet (or as the flat Earthers would say, on a plane, lose the T) of 7 some billion people, have a massively disproportionate influence on governments throughout the world. Controlling industry and public policy. Authoritarian governments are awful. Democratic governments, while messy, are the most representative of all people and have the most freedom. A lot of folks in conspiracy, not even when speaking of authoritarianism but instead within democracies tend to say phrases like "governments lie" or "all politics is corrupt" or "it doesn't matter who you vote for" or "both parties one puppet string puller"... the problem with all of that is first off is not what they're saying, it's what their not saying. Which is that corporations lie even more and the reason governments lie is because they're corporatized - meaning they're captured only by private corporate interests. This is evident by the fact that newspapers 50 years ago had both a labor section (meaning speaking for the majority of working people) and a business section (meaning speaking for a small number of private business owners), and now usually only have a business section.
The next problem with the "all governments lie and are totally corrupt" mindset, is that it throws all governments into the trashcan for working class people. Which is a very right wing misdirection trick. We were listening to the podcast of someone who we are generally fond of, who we've had as a past guest on earlier iterations of our own podcast, and now hosts their own podcast. Everyones got a podcast, Yeah... They had a guest on who was doing a really amazing deconstructing and analyzing of the problems with various cultural institutions such as corporatized universities and the corporate media. It was one of those things where the first hour was free to listen to and the second hour was for members only, with the first hour being tracking the problems with the second hour being some solutions proposed, and since we're not yet members of their podcast we honestly couldn't tell from the first half of the conversation if it was doing what we've seen far too many related discussions doing, such as many conversations on The Higherside Chats podcast, which is one of the world's foremost conspiracy podcasts, that we have been a past guest on, and now were 50/50 on, because like it and this other podcast, it seems many conspiracy guests are just sending people down into something more conservative and regressive politically by giving a complete pass to private corporate corruption and oligarchic corruption and only talking about public university corruption and government corruption which have only happened because they’ve become so for profit privatized by corporate interests.
Another problem with the “governments lie" oversimplified talking point is that the problems between left and right are not symmetrical within US politics. While both parties in the US absolutely have problems, mainly that they are both heavily captured by the conservative leaning Israel lobby, and we are going to do an upcoming series of insights on the problems of the extremes of the left, the difference between issues stemming from left wing policies are 15% of the problem and issues stemming from right wing policies are 85% of the problem. So why not work to continually be involved in fixing the better and more truthful of two dysfunctional options? So throwing one side, which has some corruption - meaning it mainly works on behalf of the middle class but sometimes only helps the morbidly rich, into the same pot as the side that does nothing for the middle class and exclusively and only helps the morbid rich in their policies, means "conservative conspiracy" solutions are an oxymoron. If anything, we'd buy a conspiracy if it leads to having more liberal ideals so that the government more works on behalf of the wide range of people instead of the micro narrow spectrum of special corporate oligarchic interests. In terms of accurately identifying problems and then proposing bat shit crazy solutions, the extremist right wing Q-Anon cult’s pitch is "Hey, there's a global network of sex traffickers and sex abusers, many of which hurt children, so let's try and put one in the white house while we give the others tax breaks''. While in the US what is considered more left-leaning conspiracy, sometimes labeled "Blue Anon", alleges that various right-wing groups are systematically engaging in widespread voter suppression efforts to disenfranchise Democratic voters, particularly minority groups. Which is much more factually accurate.
We used to keep an eye on the work of an individual who dove heavily into the conspiratorial as one of their main pillars. Even though they claimed they’re work had little to do with politics, every time they touched on the political, everything they were saying became the same things the dark imperial agents of the Christian Right (really Christian Wrong) were saying, who want to turn liberal democracy into a fascist nightmare with the incredibly unpopular anti-American Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 proposed theocratic hellscape. This individual even started getting into the world of Natzi esotericist Julius Evola and alternate WWII history which basically = Natzi's were really good guys. Which is not only batshit but is an all good green lite for heading towards fascism, fuck that and "no way Jose". So after the realization of "oh my gosh, their work is just about politics, nothing more" light bulb moment going off... After deciphering the pattern that they were just leading people towards fascism, but doing it in overt ways, we figured we might as well include forward thinking, more balanced politics into our work in order to counter that awfulness. This is why we've gotten more political with what we call "pro-democratic political philosophy" mixed into our work over the last few years". And why much of it has been so up front and center in our material, because democracy is hanging by a thread in the US and it's us that need to keep fighting to save it for future generations.
Extremely rich captains of industry, via their tentacles such as their political organizations, lobbyists, etc... are very interested and involved in politics and want to turn democracies throughout the world into authoritarianism which is an ongoing fight cause it helps them and not you. Representative liberal democracy, while sloppy and slow, and direct democracy would be better, and the seven liberal arts, all have the ability to help you over helping them, but it also requires an educated and informed voting electorate to be the arbiters of who gets into the halls of power and who can sift through the massive signal to noise of corporate media propaganda. Which is not easy and requires knowledge of the logical fallacies to see through all the lies.
But being practical about sharing public resources, communal respectability, and the lower and middle classes and thus democracy shouldn't even be a partisan issue. The whole con is to get the middle class and poor people fighting against one another which only helps morbid wealth. The oligarch controllers want people to be more conservative (meaning more protective of private wealth hierarchy) and they certainly want you to be less liberal (meaning openness and freedom of heart) and less social (being more publicly communal minded). We are fiercely independent but we also personally recognize shared public communal resources are crucial for any healthy community. Liberal democracy requires a strong, activist, public minded, progressive (meaning wanting to evolve) middle class and fascists have been trying to destroy that our whole life. If anything, being more progressive, meaning wanting to help the middle class and electing those who enact policies which do so, in your politics should be like step 3 of 10 in your spiritual development. And since “conservative” policies protect wealth hierarchy while extreme right wing fascist policies that claim their “conservative” protect extreme wealth hierarchy while also empowering power hungry villains like Viktor Orbán, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, it boggles our mind that so many conspiracy folks then end up falling down right wing rabbit holes. If anything they should end up moving less conservative and more progressive in their politics to more support the middle class. Instead of being down for intolerant extreme ideologies that breed wanna be fascist dictators.
So our confession on this one is that all of our spiritual self-development themed work is not only intended to help you in your personal development, but the road to that is paved in helping make you into a more compassionate and open hearted and open minded person. More compassion for the environment, more compassion for the lives of all people, regardless of their economic class, more compassion for all animal life, more liberal (in the classical sense of the word) and especially more compassionate to the plight of the indigenous people - such as femicide of indigenous women. But you must go more outside of the empire to do that. That majority of our readers or listeners will read this or hear this and be like “OMG! right on! so true! thumbs up!” But those who have stopped reading or listening to these essays because they think what we’re saying is “bleeding heart lib woke”, are not only more compassionless, but deeper in the empire.