Certainty in an UNcertain World

Thinking about why people entertain questionable conspiracy theories yet ignore actual documented and quite bad conspiracies throughout history. And thinking ther is a connection to some leaping from believing unproven (to my mind) conspiracies to wanting to take up arms to the point of violence to others. Below is some of me talking to myself

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Conspiracies with ambiguous or tenuous evidence can prompt different paths of thought in response… but if you go “all in” and double down on the belief, it gives a “believers high”. AND the bigger the leap, the more complex the conspiracy, the more tenuous the claim, the better the emotional “high”

To believe in conspiracies there is a psychological Alchemy formula that is different for each person, but to end up with this “believer’s high” a key ingredient in the mental potion is the LACK of absolute proof. Perhaps it is the very act of “connecting the dots” that gives off some endorphin or hormone, but whatever…it requires a physiological response that allows emotions and reasoning to combine and produce the “sacred belief”. Once in place it allows someone to achieve a blissful state and exalt in self righteous confidence.

And once something becomes a “sacred belief” then contrary evidence, or illustrations of illogic actually harden the conspiracy in the mind.

It is this self righteous confidence that pushes away the ever present fact that to live,is to live with uncertainty, to live with ambiguity.

To be sure, there ARE conspiracies. Some with big government, or big corporations, or even biases of cultural worldviews. BUT conspiracies with clear, documented, evidence, don’t give the same “high”. So Iran/Contra, tobacco companies and cancer, oil companies and climate change, may be noted, then ignored. Those conspiracies are in a sense accepted and relegated to the mundane while JFK conspiracies,ludicrous voting claims, all with dots just waiting to be connected IF you only take off your blinders…THAT requires making a commitment, declaration of sorts, and this commitment gives back many times over with the emotional alchemy of turning ambiguity into certainty.

Interestingly it is the act of committing oneself to a belief in a vague theory wholeheartedly that makes the belief “real”. To believe you simply have to believe, THAT is where the fun is. Proof is not fun, connecting the dots IS.

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On the violence of it all…to return to the psychological, once you have the confidence in the conspiracy THEN the next level of commitment is to hate some other. So once the leap to connecting questionable dots is done, then comes the audacity of HATE, and the more audacious, the more hate, the better the "high". To fuse self righteous certainty of a disovered injustice and blame it on somebody else takes another audacious commitment. To be self righteously confident of the injustice, AND to have that "other" as the cause of the injustice… Then all that is left is action. Sweet, sweet, self righteous action

Final thoughts.

I suggest that we live in an uncertain world, most knowledge is an illusion*, life is complicated, ambiguous, even contradictory. And almost everybody seems to have a different opinion on what the rules should be. And no one wants to submit to somebody else’s view.

So, how then do we live in a world with people who don’t believe what we believe and may actively hate us for some imagined injustice.

What then is to be done?

For me the starting point is Compassion for all things, including people. And that takes recognition from the start, I, like the world, am flawed…I want to be compassionate but fail so often.

But you have to start somewhere so I start with that.

* the illusion of knowledge is a post for another day