In Defense of “Conspiracy Theories”

Let’s imagine living in Soviet Russia during the 1960’s – the height of the Cold War – and let’s imagine that the KGB used the Russian phrase teoriya zagorova to signal to the Soviet public that certain ideas, beliefs and sources of information were to be marginalized, even shunned – how would you, as a literate adult in the 21st Century look upon those ideas and information? I think the rational response would be to take a closer look at them, for the simple reason that the Soviet-era KGB (or, for that matter, the SVR, the contemporary Russian intelligence agency) is not, by any reasonable measure, to be regarded as a reliable source of public information.

Now, let’s flashback to November 22, 1963 – the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, commonly believed to have been perpetrated by a lone, crazed assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, from the Texas School Book Depository. This was the official version of events propagated by the mainstream press of the time. However, since then, a small group of out-of-the-box thinkers, based upon significant evidence – as publicized, most famously, in the Oliver Stone film JFK – began to suggest that the Kennedy assassination was not as it had been made out to be in the mainstream press. There may have been other shooters involved, most notably a shooter from behind the so-called “grassy knoll”, while Lee Harvey Oswald may, in fact, have been a CIA operative, and the assassination itself may have been orchestrated by former CIA chief and notorious Nazi sympathizer, Allen Dulles. Well, FSU professor Lance deHaven-Smith, in his 2013 book Conspiracy Theory in America (as cited on Wikipedia), alleges that the CIA “deployed” the usage of the phrase conspiracy theory in the 1960’s in order to discredit such alternative speculation about the Kennedy assassination, and this became the first widespread usage of the term as we understand it today.

What does this historical background about the origin of the modern colloquial usage of the phrase conspiracy theory suggest to the rational adult living in the 21st century? I guess it depends on how much credence one gives to the CIA, as a reliable source of public information – the CIA, one of whose stated objectives is the perpetuation of disinformation, especially with respect to the perceived enemies of the United States! One would have to be gullible indeed, if not utterly deluded, to take the CIA’s word at face value! For the same reason that no rational adult living in the modern world would take the KGB’s or SVR’s word at face value – because these are state-run intelligence agencies for whom deception and disinformation is standard operating procedure!

And yet, somehow, against all sense and reason, the term conspiracy theory has entered common usage as a label with which to discredit and marginalize any information or idea that happens to conflict with or challenge the widely accepted mainstream, institutional interpretation of reality. No doubt, if Galileo or Kepler had introduced their theories about heliocentrism and elliptical planetary orbits in this day and age, the CIA would label them as conspiracy theories, even as the Catholic Church of the 16th century declared them as heretical ideas at the time! The phrase “conspiracy theory” is, in effect, the modern equivalent of the Medieval “heresy” – both are basically ways of flagging certain ideas or information as unacceptable, even threatening, to the establishment. It is the establishment’s way of marginalizing and discrediting any form of knowledge that may threaten its hold over the public imagination.

This is not to suggest that every idea in the realm of the conspiracy theory must, at once, be taken seriously. No doubt, there are many ideas in that domain that have no rational basis or justification, and must, therefore, be considered to be irrational, pending the disclosure of additional supporting evidence! However, it does imply that any idea, however far-fetched or outrageous it may seem to be at first glance, should be assessed on its own merits and on the evidence supporting the claims made. Not because some mainstream institution happens to dismissively label it as a “conspiracy theory” without any serious consideration of the case to be made in support of the claims. Anything less than this essentially amounts to surrendering one’s rational faculties to the self-appointed wardens of taste in our society, many of whom have no more than a grade-school understanding of the facts in question, and certainly are lacking in the specialized knowledge necessary to make sense of them.

An excellent example is the theory, posited by the well-known “conspiracy theorist” David Icke, that the universe is constituted of wave-form energy and that our perception of the solidity of matter is, in fact, a trick of the senses. The immediate, reflexive response of most of us in mainstream society, conditioned as we are by mass media and a simplistic grade-school understanding of Newtonian Physics, would be to roll our eyes and murmur the words “conspiracy theory.” And yet, this idea is substantiated by modern experimental quantum mechanics – wave-particle duality as demonstrated in the well-established “double-slit experiment” – that clearly points to the possibility that all matter is, at its core, wave-form energy, and that electromagnetic energy waves double as material particles upon the intervention of a conscious observer. Similar themes have been expressed by such brilliant minds as Einstein and Planck. Unless one is aware of this background into theoretical and experimental Physics, one would not be in a position to adequately form an informed opinion on what the mass of uninformed humanity might dismiss as a “conspiracy theory.”

As such, the least one can do is to give such ideas a fair hearing, because, who knows? It may not be so far-fetched after all to suggest, for example, that the Bushes and Clintons are involved in narcotics and human trafficking and child abuse, or that the Rockefellers conspired with the Nazis to suppress the healing Solfeggio frequencies. Without a clear knowledge and understanding of the evidence and the case to be made, are we in a position to adjudicate on the credibility of these ideas?

David Icke and the Limits of Human Perception

Recently, I have been delving into the ideas of the reputed conspiracy theorist turned metaphysical philosopher, David Icke. I now own several of his books and have watched and listened to hours of video and audio footage of his talks and interviews, so I think I have some basic understanding of some of his more esoteric and mind-bending ideas.

One of his ideas that really speaks to me is what he says about the very nature of human perception of the universe. Complementing the ideas of such brilliant minds as Tesla and Einstein, Icke delineates his concept of the universe as a giant field of wave-form energy that we human beings inhabit as conscious, sentient entities. We interpret this field energy through our five senses and brain to construct the experience of living in a universe of three-dimensional space and time – physical reality, as it were. But this construct really only exists in our minds – it represents how we human individuals interpret the field of wave-form energy in which we are immersed. In its raw form, the universe is nothing like how we perceive it. Icke likens our perception of the universe to the video programming one might watch on a television screen. The TV interprets the electromagnetic waves that it intercepts via its antenna or cable to construct a recognizable experience of the world. However, in its raw form, the TV signal is simply electromagnetic wave energy.

The really fascinating insight that David Icke provides is that the human sensory apparatus is tuned to an extremely limited bandwidth of frequencies. We can perceive visible light and infra-red (heat) radiation through our senses of sight and touch, we can hear a limited range of sounds through our sense of hearing, we can detect a limited range of odors through our olfactory system, and so forth. But the senses we are capable of constitute an extremely limited range – other members of the animal kingdom, in fact, have their senses tuned to different ranges, so that cats can see in the dark, dogs have highly sensitive senses of smell and hearing, and bats have a highly developed sense of hearing that it uses as a form of acoustic radar to navigate through a world in which it is, essentially blind. Furthermore, while our senses are bombarded with signals at all times, our brain filters these signals so that only a fraction of what our senses perceive actually reaches our awareness.

The bottom line is that what we human beings know and experience as reality is only a tiny fraction of what is really around us – our interpretation of the vast field of wave-form energy that surrounds us is extremely limited. There is much that we cannot perceive simply because of the limitations of our senses and the capacities of our brains to process the information our senses receive. Even with the benefit of peripheral devices and technology, our perception of reality can only be slightly extended.

And this brings David Icke to the startling hypothesis that, potentially, explains much of what we conceive – and dismiss – as the workings of the supernatural. If our perceptions are so limited, how can we reasonably infer that what we see or hear or otherwise sense is all there is to the universe around us? If we are tuned to a specific channel on our TV sets, then we are limited to viewing only the specific programming to which we have access. But that doesn’t mean that all of the other channels don’t exist, simply because we are tuned to one specific channel. They do exist, and if we flipped the channel we would be able to access that programming.

But what if we lived in a backward totalitarian state, where the only programming we could receive on our cheap black-and-white TV sets was the government channel of 24/7 state propaganda? Because we would not have the capacity to flip the channel on our cheap one-channel TV sets, we would never be aware that any of the other channels or programming even existed. We would not be aware that there was such a thing as color TV or multiple TV channels!

Becoming aware of color television and multiple channels of TV programming and, in fact, the ability to flip channels on a whim, would be something like experiencing an expansion of personal consciousness. One becomes aware of other dimensions of reality, beyond what one had previously been exposed to in one's very limited sphere of awareness.

That, in effect, is the profound metaphor that David Icke uses to explain his understanding of what we deem to be the “supernatural” – in other words, phenomena that we dismiss as incredible simply becauase they occur beyond our capacity to perceive them! When you really think about it, it seems perfectly logical, but the implications of this feat of reasoning are profound – and, indeed, terrifying! What, in fact, lurks out there in the universe, behind our very shoulders, perhaps – beyond the reaches of our ability to perceive it? David Icke makes some terrifying suggestions – he claims the existence of parasitic reptilian creatures who feed on human life-force energy. Apparently far-fetched, but is it really?

Having previously written about human perception on my blog, this subject is particularly interesting to me and worth thinking and reading about in greater depth!


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Sunnyvale, CA, USA