Conspiracy Theories - Part 1

Focus on trees and miss the forest; if you seek a trap under every paving stone you will miss the road

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I decided on this topic while listening to Joe Rogan's interview with Marc Andreessen. This is a difficult subject and it's not going to fit in one post. In the interview, Andreessen referred to David McGowan's book Weird Scenes in Laurel Canyon. This book was published in 2013. I bought the Kindle edition and still reading it.

This week I want to write in general on conspiracy theories. I'll get into the Laurel Canyon and the Hippies 'conspiracy' after I am finished reading McGowan’s book.

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Conspiracy Theories

‘As the world gets more complex, it gets harder to understand it; conspiracy theories are put forward to provide simple answers’. That's how I started this article, but I later decided that searching answers to the complexity is not a sufficient reason for believing in conspiracy theories, it may not even be the most important reason because it's based on the assumption that the majority of people are curious. Curious people wonder about the order in the mess, and when they can't find it, they seek fake explanations.

I think most people believe in conspiracy theories, not because they are curious, but on the contrary, because they are indifferent. Because they don't care enough about what's going on around them, they don't care to examine. Then they get bored. When they get bored, they ask, 'Is this what life is all about? How boring' and they look for discourses that will make life appear more mysterious and generate some excitement. In Facebook, WhatsApp and other social media groups, where people think that they are being informed by titillating each other, you tend to believe the most ridiculous things, even your own fabrications, when the fiction you make up today come back to you from others as apparent fact.

In the old days, our misfortunes could be explained by witches or naughty fairies. Today we know better and we blame secret societies and conspiracies.

Conspiracy theory essentially is an evil superman story. According to the theory, the conspirators are cabals of ingenious omnipotent supermen. The turmoil of the world, which we cannot understand, is actually a series of connivances created and managed by those cabals.

At the same time, understanding a conspiracy feels like being part of that conspiracy, so the more frivolous the fabrication we believe in, the more excited it makes us.

It is necessary to have understanding (noös) in order to be able to interpret the evidence of eyes and ears. … Heraclitus ... in Fragment 56 says that men, in regard to knowledge of perceptible things, “are the victims of illusion much as Homer was.” To reach the truth from the appearances, it is necessary to interpret, to guess the riddle ... but though this seems to be within the capacity of men, it is something most men never do. Heraclitus is very vehement in his attacks on the foolishness of ordinary men, and of what passes for knowledge among them. They are compared to sleepers in private worlds of their own.

(from Valis by P K Dick, who is quoting E Hussey, The Presocratics, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1972, pages 37-38.)

If you haven't heard of P K Dick before, or if you only know of his books (The Man in the High Castle, Blade Runner, Total Recall) made to movies, I recommend you to correct this deficit. Dick is not only a master science fiction writer but also one of the most original thinkers of the second half of the twentieth century. The books he wrote allegedly while high on drugs are products of exceptional brainstorming.

In ancient Greece, the gods descending from Mount Olympus were the mischief makers. In today's secular religions, where the god is kept at a distance away from the people, the conspirators had to take place of the intervening gods of the ancients.

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Conspiracy Types

Conspiracy theories are usually classified according to the identity of the conspirator: foreign powers, government, wealthy classes, deep state, extraterrestrials, imperialists, communists, etc.

I prefer to group them first with respect to their scope under two broad headings: tactical comspiracies; and strategic conspiracies. For readers who know chess, these are akin to combination (Alekhin) and position (Capablanca) plays. I propose that the two separate chess styles of the two early 20th century masters Alekhin and Capablanca can also be used as a classification scheme for modern players in conspiracy games.

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Examples of Tactical Conspiracies

The following are the narratives from some of the popular conspiracy theories of today:

The 9/11 conspiracy — It is not Al Qaeda that carried out the 9/11 attacks, but elements trying to create a justification for the US invasion of Iraq.

The Sandy Hoak conspiracy — The 2012 Sandy Hoak Elementary massacre in which 26 people reportedly died, actually did not happen, the Obama government looking for excuses to disarm the American people made it up and the pro-government media made the fiction look like it actually happened.

QAnon conspiracy theory — There is a global pedophile network involving Democratic party dignitaries based in the basement of a pizza shop in Washington. Donald Trump is fighting them, therefore the whole establishment is against him.

The secret articles of the Lausanne Agreement — Some people in Turkey believed that the secret articles in the Lausanne Agreement blocked Turkey's growth. They were waiting for the 100th anniversary of the Agreement, when this secrecy would be lifted. This happened this July. I do not know what they say now.

It is hard for a sane person to blindly believe any of the above nonsense because they are things that could be verified or refuted by research. Even if you do not have the time to do the research, you would expect that someone would have the time and resources and provide evidence for or against it. And if evidence is found supporting the theory, it becomes a police matter, not a conspiracy theory. On the other hand, if there is a lot of talk on a topic but no evidence is offered, this may be because there is no evidence and the whole thing is the product of someone’s imagination.

The insane conspiracy theories above should not be confused with some discourse on the internet, which are dismissed as conspiracy theories by some, but for which there are reasonable arguments and evidence for their authenticity. I will not give examples because if I give an example, I will have to go into more detail and we will be thrown off topic. I only mention it here because it has become standard operating procedure for people trying to hide their faults and liabilities by calling the truth sayers as conspiracy theorists.

Tactical conspiracies, if true, are often exposed over time, if not immediately, through investigations by the media, independent agencies, and sometimes the police. There are certainly some that never see the light of the day, but they also may be conspiracies that were relevant for only a short time, that is, they were not that important or effective in the long term.

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Strategic Conspiracies

These are the ones that I am most interested in. They have wide scopes and target multiple layers of the society over significant periods of time. Because they have such ambitious aims, they also are the ones that can easily go astray. The complex systems like modern societies are impossible to control. Therefore, a conspirator can give a nudge to the society in a certain direction but cannot rigorously control and direct the outcomes of this nudge over time. It's like digging a side channel to divert a river into a neighboring valley. Its direction changes, but the river makes its new bed on its own.

Moving uncontrollably like a rogue projectile, such conspiracies can come back and strike their creators. CIA operatives arming islamist mujahedeen as freedom fighters against the Soviets in Afghanistan in 1980s could not contemplate what the same fighters would turn into in twenty years.

The Ottomans also loved conspiracies and some of theirs also must have backfired. Many things changed in the Republic of Turkey but not this. For example, Aliza Marcus writes that “in the summer of 1980, just a few months before the military coup, Ocalan sent word to the militants that they should try to get out of Turkey and join him in Syria”. This advance notice made it possible for Ocalan and his men (today’s PKK) to survive the 12 September 1980 military coup. The coup tramped over all unsuspecting Turkish and Kurdish democrats like a sledgehammer. Öcalan and PKK cadres returned a few years later to a region cleared by military of all rival political movements.

David McGowan wrote about a highly ambitious strategic conspiracy in his book. I will continue next week with that.

References

Marcus, Aliza. Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence (p. 49). NYU Press short. Kindle Edition.

McGowan, David. Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & The Dark Heart Of The Hippie Dream. Headpress. Kindle Edition.

Short Takes

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Pink Floyd music recreated from Brain EEG wave recordings

Scientific American, 15 August 2023 (I first saw it in Nature Briefing e-mail)

Scholars from the University of California - Berkeley, University of Florida, and Albany Medical College have done research that is interesting and has great potential for the future. They had epilepsy patients who had electrodes implanted in their brains. With the permission of the patients, the researchers made them listen to Pink Floyd's song Another Brick on the Wall, while the electrodes were recording the EEG waves emitted by the patient’s brain.

The research team later tried to recreate the music by processing the EEG recordings. The result is astonishing. It is hard to believe. Since it obviously passed through the filter of Nature Briefing, it cannot be total hogwash. Five recording files can be downloaded and listened to from the article web page: S1, S2, S3, S4, and S5. The differences between them are due to the differences in the computation method. Individual WAV files can be downloaded from this page. I recommend you download and listen to the individual WAV files. They are short and won't take your time.

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You Tube

You must have watched the Rich Men North of Richmond video. A previously unknown young man named Oliver Anthony, plays his guitar and sings the song, which became an internet phenomenon overnight. The video was uploaded 11 days ago. When I looked at it Sunday morning, August 20, it was watched 26 million times; received 1.1 million times 👍; and most surprisingly, it attracted 110 thousand comments.

Here it is:

Richmond is the capital city of the state of Virginia and 150 km on its north is Washington DC, the US capitol. Presumably, Washington politicians are meant by 'Rich Men in Richmond's North'. This song is adopted by the US right. When we were young, the left owned such protest songs. Now, at least in USA, the protest space is occupied by the Right.

The American leftist intellectuals, who are drowning in the seas of trans rights and cancellation rush, fail to focuss on jobs, bread and freedom, and are becoming more isolated from the public every day.

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Before I decided on including the Oliver Anthony link, I had a video link from ABC (Australian Bropadcasting Corporation) on magpies. So there are two You Tube links this week:

When Pascal was one year old (and before running away from home), a magpie chick would come to our garden and share in what Pascal ate. He was not afraid of us, and sometimes he would enter the house. Despite being a baby, it was twice as big as Pascal. Despite this, Pascal bullied him. Once he even bit its leg and made him fly away in haste.

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Diary

Last Thursday I went to a funeral. I should say a Memorial Ceremony.

It was held in the West End Sails Rugby Club building shown above.

Let me start at the beginning. In 1983, I was hired as a post-doc at The University of Queensland Solar Energy Research Center, where I met Peter. I was interested in methods of converting solar energy into electricity, his topic was solar drying of agricultural produce and minerals. Meliz and I were renting in Highgate Hill, Torbreck, which I wrote about earlier; and Peter and his wife had a house down near the river. Meliz and I were newly married; they had been for four years. Their first daughter was four years old when we met and the second was born soon. We would see each other as a family.

Then I left the university. I started for a manufacturing company, which in a year moved to Melbourne and we moved with it. Peter also left the university and started working as research manager at an international HVAC equipment manufacturer, first in Singapore and then in China. I think it was as late as 2010 when I saw Peter again. In Brisbane, where we both had returned.

While watching the photos screened during the ceremony, those early days came to mind. I shared two memories of Pete on the microphone:

• It was 1984. Peter had begun a new project to develop an industrial dryer using microwave-assisted solar heat. Microwave ovens were new. Peter had bought a domestic unit and was exploring how to take it apart and use the transformer and magnetron inside. He was a good engineer and he did a good job at the end. I remember our conversations when he was worrying about the correct construction of the wave guide etc. Back then, the microwave was an unknown, somewhat magical phenomenon.

• In 1983, a few people went to an international meeting on Solar Energy in Perth, Western Australia. One evening in Perth, Peter, me and a Dutch friend (I think Frank) decided to have dinner somewhere different. Frank said there were Dutch/Indonesian restaurants in Perth that weren't in Brisbane at the time, and he suggested we had Risjtafen in one of them. Risjtafen is like the meals we now call degustation, but the product given on each plate was much smaller. I think we tasted 50 different flavors that evening. We were very hungry because it took us two hours to find a restaurant. This was before smartphones and Google. Peter and I patiently waited for Frank to find a restaurant. I think it is a good virtue to be a patient and helpful in such situations. Being impatient and blaming the lead does not bring any benefit anyway. I had approved of Peter's attitude, whom I had met only a few months ago.

Returning from China, Peter settled back in the West End, the same suburb where he lived forty years ago. He loved that neighborhood. Maybe that's why their daughters chose the West End rugby club for the memorial service.

West End is a neighborhood close to the city center. You can even walk to the CBD if necessary. In the 1980s, the West End was a place occupied by mostly Greek, Italian and Turkish immigrants and some bohemians and retired low-income single old men. Except for Torbrek on the hill, the remaining residences were detached houses with gardens. It has changed a lot now. Here's the new West End:

The place you see below was a run-down concrete building forty years ago. It housed a branch of a chain supermarket called 'Jack the Slasher'. Everything was on shelves in boxes, customers would pick things themselves and pack them themselves too. I went to Jack the Slasher a few times but I preferred Woolworth or Coles, which offered more choice and better quality goods, even if you had to pay a little more. Today, Jack The Slasher is no more. Its place in West End is occupied by Coles: