Conspiracy 101: The Mother of All Conspiracy
In the ancient world some folks speculated that all life proceeded from a single dyad. Study of life forms leads the investigator to notice distinct similarities from one form to another. The pattern leads to the idea that all life is related. A similar process an lead us to the idea that all conspiracies can be traced to a common parent. Which conspiracy seems to be the mother of them all?
As a child growing up in a totalitarian society, I was struck by the casual attitude that people had toward vicious brutality. When adults frothed at the mouth with rabid anger, they were not treated as suffering from dementia. Instead, they were upheld as examples of civic virtue for emulation by the next generation. They were feted as great advocates of the common weal. People who knew better had to keep their thoughts to themselves for fear of becoming the victims of brutality.
Later in life, I put the whole process under a microscope to look for a pattern. What makes these brutes the way they are? What separates them from people who know better? What is the yeast that infests their mental space?
One of the clear distinctions I noticed was a truncation in intellectual development. These brutes had become convinced that their intellectual development was complete. They embodied an arrested development that isolated them from the path toward knowledge. It was as if their minds resided in cages and could neither grow out of it nor escape its confinement. They had become trapped in a prison of primitive precepts.
I recently encountered a corollary of this type of mindset in a discussion about Jewish literature. When I pointed out that a deity mentioned in one text was not the same deity as in other texts, the other person was incredulous. How could there be multiple deities in Jewish tradition? It did not make sense. Isn't it simpler to see only one deity? Certainly, it is simpler to see the Earth as stationary when that is all that you know, but a moving Earth explains phenomena more simply than a static paradigm. Multiple deities simplifies some of the contradictions in the Jewish tradition.
What word can we apply to this mother of all conspiracy?
As a child growing up in a totalitarian society, I was struck by the casual attitude that people had toward vicious brutality. When adults frothed at the mouth with rabid anger, they were not treated as suffering from dementia. Instead, they were upheld as examples of civic virtue for emulation by the next generation. They were feted as great advocates of the common weal. People who knew better had to keep their thoughts to themselves for fear of becoming the victims of brutality.
Later in life, I put the whole process under a microscope to look for a pattern. What makes these brutes the way they are? What separates them from people who know better? What is the yeast that infests their mental space?
One of the clear distinctions I noticed was a truncation in intellectual development. These brutes had become convinced that their intellectual development was complete. They embodied an arrested development that isolated them from the path toward knowledge. It was as if their minds resided in cages and could neither grow out of it nor escape its confinement. They had become trapped in a prison of primitive precepts.
I recently encountered a corollary of this type of mindset in a discussion about Jewish literature. When I pointed out that a deity mentioned in one text was not the same deity as in other texts, the other person was incredulous. How could there be multiple deities in Jewish tradition? It did not make sense. Isn't it simpler to see only one deity? Certainly, it is simpler to see the Earth as stationary when that is all that you know, but a moving Earth explains phenomena more simply than a static paradigm. Multiple deities simplifies some of the contradictions in the Jewish tradition.
What word can we apply to this mother of all conspiracy?