Have We "Gone Off the Deep End"?

More on conspiracy theories. And how weaponized language tricks prevent people from believing what their eyes are plainly telling them.

Someone told me a few days ago that I had “gone off the deep end”.

This was in response to this post, where I summarized some key takeaways from Mike Yeadon’s Trafalgar Square speech.

Honestly, I probably went off the “deep end” a lot longer ago than this. I’m thinking somewhere around 1994 as a bewildered philosophy undergrad.😂

But this “deep end” stuff is just another way of expressing the same denial (and shutdown-ism) that lies behind the use of the term “conspiracy theorist”.

It really means: I don’t want to think about the things you’re bringing to my attention.

Or: I want to suppress them.

We talked about the use of the term “conspiracy theory” and other such language tricks here:

Others have called these “thought-terminating cliches”, and though I agree with the “thought-terminating” part, the worst part is not that they are hackneyed—which they are—but that they are weaponized.

Thought-terminating grenades or flashbangs might be more to the point.

Their intended effect is exactly that of the Men in Black neuralyzer.

Cognition, if you think about it, is really just pattern recognition. We make observations. We order those observations into coherent patterns.

If we didn’t do this our experience of the world would be sensory soup. We would be incapable of forming concepts, or principles, or judgments, or understanding. Certainly nothing like language, or reading, or memory, or plans, or goal-directed behavior, or ethics.

We would be as amoeba, reacting to stimuli from one moment to the next, utterly unaware. And we would not even be aware that we were unaware, since that awareness too, would require pattern recognition.

To be aware, we need to observe patterns.

If we were a logic-only species, like Vulcans, we could do so in an environment of intellectual curiosity. We could observe a pattern, project that pattern into the future, and make a statement about it, AKA a prediction, and other members of our species would consider it... without having the knee jerk reaction to annihilate the prediction, and call into question the sanity of the predictor.

Communicating patterns to one another, after all, is called learning. It’s how we recognize and mobilize against threats. And acting on shared predictions is how we build a society.

Seems kind of important.

But alas, we are what we are—the mostly lizard-brained.

And the mostly lizard-brained come up with other patterns, destructive patterns—let’s call them “language tricks”.

By employing language tricks in a certain way, one person can cause another person to abandon their own capacity for pattern recognition. A convenient weapon if you don’t want somebody to be aware of a pattern. Or if that somebody observes a pattern that you find uncomfortable to consider.

The term “conspiracy theorist” of course, is exactly such a language trick.

(I’ve heard the term originated with the CIA to prevent any pattern recognition involved with the JFK assassination. I’m pretty sure the term is older than that—I think Karl Popper used it in the forties—but the CIA may very well have popularized it. In any case, it doesn’t matter. Even if the CIA never got into the businesses of propaganda mindfuckery, someone else would have. We’re living in a culture which, instead of engaging thought, has become obsessed with stamping it out. For this project, weaponized language tricks and slogans are an extremely easy and effective tool in the toolkit, and probably would have been invented and popularized even without the CIA’s help.)

“Conspiracy theorist” is a pattern-annihilating term. Anyone who uses the term, essentially means: awareness is bad. Be unaware of the thing you are trying to be aware of. To be aware of that thing is to invoke my ridicule. You don’t want to be ridiculed, do you? Instead, be as an amoeba. No patterns for you to observe here. Nothing whatever to see here, at all. Here is some pain stimuli for you, amoeba. Move away, move away.

If you’re like me, you’re thinking: Hmm, a pattern that someone does not want me to be aware of. Interesting.

If you’re like me, this makes you look harder.

“Gone off the deep end” is a variation on the same theme. It means: I will imply your lack of sanity if you express awareness of the thing you are trying to be aware of. Negative social cue! Haha, take that! Cease and desist!

At this point, these tactics just make me chuckle.

I mean how much more needs to happen before you stop dismissing the Cassandras and start paying attention?

So, let’s say I observe a pattern: corporate media lies.

This is not a profound observation. Your eyes tell you this. It is what I would call readily observable.

If someone then responds with: “What? That’s ludicrous! Crazy talk! Why would the media lie? They are the part of our society devoted to presenting the truth!”

Not true, I can respond. At all. I can point out exactly why they lie:

Oh, and here’s the owners of the media (via Blackrock et al.) telling us that they INTEND to instruct the media to lie, in order to “shift social norms”:

“There is now a compelling body of evidence to support the idea that, with the right research and theoretical grounding, story-based media can shift social norms, values and beliefs more effectively than traditional, fact-based messaging. (from WEF website)

I know, right? Darn, stupid, pesky facts. They really get in the way of people believing what we want them to believe.

(I agree, WEF. I agree.)

With that evidence, plainly available to your observation, I think there is no other conclusion than corporate media is NOT the bastion of truth you think it is. They are agents, delivering the propagandistic messages that their financial masters want delivered.

It’s not just that they “tend” to lie, or are guilty of a few whoppers. They HAVE TO lie, as necessitated by the terms of their existence.

Everything they say must be interpreted in this light.

To me this requires that I turn off their propaganda and do my own research.

If, in spite of all of this, you still believe corporate media is a bastion of truth and pillar of honesty, and that people who do their own research are nothing but dirty “conspiracy theorists”, I’m sorry, but you have fallen for a language trick.

Your capacity to see a plainly observable pattern has been annihilated, with a slogan.

So how about those predictions by Mike Yeadon, eg., CBDCs, digital IDs, etc?

Here again, we don’t have to try too hard: these are observable realities. Already in motion.

National Digital ID System: It is Already Here

Digital Slavery: IMF Announces Single Global Digital Currency in Push To Eliminate Cash – SLAY

What you’re calling “going off the deep end” I’m calling seeing clearly observable patterns and calling them out.

And what you would call “sanity” presumably would consist of something like…

• believing that media has no hidden motives and exists only to tell you the truth;

• believing that government has your best interests at heart and is trying to protect you;

• believing that corporations exist only to serve the people by bringing them products and services they want at the lowest affordable price.

😂😂😂

So, you tell me. Which one of us believes in wild, hare-brained, unsubstantiated theories?

Which one of us has “gone off the deep end”?

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The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists. The American mind simply has not come to a realization of the evil which has been introduced into our midst. It rejects even the assumption that human creatures could espouse a philosophy which must ultimately destroy all that is good and decent.

—J. Edgar Hoover

James has had too much coffee. Definitely don’t buy him one here.

Or here.

(Unless you really want to.)