SquillagusNiggle
New Member
Hi, I'm a bit new here.
I'd like to share a few personal insights into the temptation, that inexplicable force that draws people deeper and deeper into the well of pseudoscientific/conspiracy theory belief and cultism.
I'll start by saying that I am a physics graduate, I work in cybersecurity and I am an amateur astrophotographer; I tend to think of myself as deeply grounded in reason, but I also write creatively and thoroughly enjoy fantastical (and profoundly illogical) concepts and ideas.
I'd like to talk about why apparently 'normal', rationally-equipped humans suddenly go off-course and end up so thoroughly twisted-up that they can barely discuss any topic without reference to their badly skewed internal factsheet.
The deep
When I was very young, 10 or 12 years of age, I 'believed' in UFOs. Not aliens; UFOs.
I had books on the subject, I would lie awake watching the night sky with my binoculars, I would avidly absorb any source that cast light on these mysterious objects. It was exciting, it was a 'science' of a sort that I couldn't learn from any teacher or school text, and had no tests or anxieties accompanying it.
Of course, I never told anyone but a few close friends; I was socially aware enough to know that proclaiming an interest in moving lights in the sky was a bad idea.
I look back at that interest and the emotional landscape associated with it whenever I encounter avid (and particularly, emotionally-dependent) proponents of pseudoscience and deep conspiracy. It is easy to filter out the hyper-religious and the mentally damaged, they each have highly characteristic signatures and are driven by different impulses.
What I remember most, was that wondrous feeling of 'frontiersmanship'; the feeling that I was at the forefront, the verge of unique and profound knowledge. Not just knowledge, but information, data, stuff that could be brought to others and shown and expanded upon, investigated.
In essence, I had become scientifically enamoured with a pseudoscientific concept; the prospect of these things in the sky excited me, because anything I can see, I can photograph, chart, plot, verify. When I saw videos that were clearly faked, that were just flying hubcaps or bad hoaxes.... it actually made me feel bad. It ate into the satisfaction, diminished the experience, it actually genuinely saddened me as I found more and more photos, more and more videos, which were so obviously unreal.
The heartbreak
I finally had a sit down with myself and acknowledged that there were a lot more people wanting to believe in UFOs and aliens than there were people who had any real evidence, or who had even seen any real evidence, that they were real. The few sightings that were multiply confirmed still interested me, and still do in fact, but the overwhelming bulk of fakery was too much for my rational mind to accommodate.
I was an enthusiast more than a believer... but the contradictions and the lies destroyed my enthusiasm. I could no longer reconcile the beliefs of the 'ufologists' with what I was seeing, and learning.
I had a similar experience when I was 15 and read about 'Scalar Electromagnetics' on a text-only BBS-a-like web page (yep, seriously). I consumed anything and everything, I browsed sites bursting with complex electromagnetic coil configurations and 'totally non-linear' oscilloscope plots and I felt that same rush of discovery and excitement. This was an amazing idea, that 'beams' of EM potential could be tuned to intersect at some great distance and effect change... the possibilities!
As time went on, I read more and more, and again felt those pangs of sadness as the evidence just failed to line up, even to my teenage self. Another bunch of 'adults', apparently completely sure of themselves, loudly proclaiming a conclusion that simply didn't add up. Sad again.
The thrill of the chase
I have since learned to recognise that thrill; it drives me to investigate any new CT/pseudoscience topic that isn't immediately insane (Reptiloids/Galactic Plane/Andromedans...) and I have to admit I still really, really enjoy that process.... I love reading conspiracy theories, that initial honeymoon period before it inevitably defeats itself and becomes another notch on my staff of sincere inquiry.
Recently, even tonight, I felt it once more when looking into (and you'll hate this) WeatherWar/dutchsinse and his 'weather control' videos... but what I have learned to do in adulthood is to skirt the edge of the rabbit hole much more deftly and swiftly, shaving a few parsecs off the Kessel Run... it took me about two hours to come to the conclusion his evidence was completely insane.
But the journey.... I still loved the journey. I was excitedly explaining to my girlfriend what I was watching, what he was claiming, and she (a geneticist) joined me in exploring the possibilities and ramifications...
Ultimately, the signs were there; a clear persecution complex, clear self-obsession and self-delusion, and ultimately... interpretations of the weather data that simply didn't make any sense.
Another let-down, but an expected one and with much less time and effort expended.
The hole-dwellers
This is how I approach every new theory I come across, and I might gently encourage some of you to try it too. Do not approach them with grim, iron-jawed skepticism. Allow yourself to be drawn in, to be enticed but not convinced... the result is typically the same when ultimately it doesn't hold up, but it is so much more compelling and informative to do this from a position of engagement rather than distant criticism.
By following this emotional curve, by personally exploring that interface between emotion and reason, it may help to advance understanding of how a few humans out of every thousand seem to slip through that gap. When I meet one of these emotionally-charged and clearly thoroughly institutionalised individuals I feel genuine sympathy and sorrow for them, something I tend not to feel for the ultrareligious and the incapable.
These people are trapped inside themselves with a sense of reason that almost works, but they have accepted that North on their compass is actually East, and everything they now encounter they must somehow reconcile with that translation. Flat Earthers will denounce anything, anything at all, that threatens their assertions. All of physics, cartography, everything... a lie. Anti-vaxxers will get searingly, furiously angry as the lunacy of their position is exposed and generally depart the floor rather than endure the contradictions and what they might mean.
They have become dependent on their beliefs. They have had to remember 'North is actually East' so very many times, with so very many people in their lives telling them they are not just wrong but a bit strange for saying this... their self-identity becomes intertwined with the necessity that they were, and remain, right about this one thing.
It is not that they love being in the rabbit hole... they've gone through the rush of falling in. It is that they have expended so much energy in staying in it, that every glimpse of the surface brings them not enlightenment and relief but abject, internalised horror.
What am I, without my surety? What am I, without my uniqueness?
What have I been all this time.... if all this time I have been wrong, like everyone said.
This is the emotional reality they cannot face. I have 'turned' a decent number of embryonic (usually juvenile) Flat Earth posters back to reason by exposing the lies they have been fed... but it seems every time someone slaps away the truth, the harder it becomes to accept it the next time.
Eventually, they get lost down the hole, in the dark with a compass that will never point North.
I suspect a decent number of them do struggle back out... but would never, ever tell anyone how long they spent down there.
I've never really revealed all of what I have written above, and I'm not particularly ashamed of any of it... I suspect a lot of former hole-dwellers are, and there might be many more of them out there than we might think, quietly never mentioning it ever again.
~Sq
I'd like to share a few personal insights into the temptation, that inexplicable force that draws people deeper and deeper into the well of pseudoscientific/conspiracy theory belief and cultism.
I'll start by saying that I am a physics graduate, I work in cybersecurity and I am an amateur astrophotographer; I tend to think of myself as deeply grounded in reason, but I also write creatively and thoroughly enjoy fantastical (and profoundly illogical) concepts and ideas.
I'd like to talk about why apparently 'normal', rationally-equipped humans suddenly go off-course and end up so thoroughly twisted-up that they can barely discuss any topic without reference to their badly skewed internal factsheet.
The deep
When I was very young, 10 or 12 years of age, I 'believed' in UFOs. Not aliens; UFOs.
I had books on the subject, I would lie awake watching the night sky with my binoculars, I would avidly absorb any source that cast light on these mysterious objects. It was exciting, it was a 'science' of a sort that I couldn't learn from any teacher or school text, and had no tests or anxieties accompanying it.
Of course, I never told anyone but a few close friends; I was socially aware enough to know that proclaiming an interest in moving lights in the sky was a bad idea.
I look back at that interest and the emotional landscape associated with it whenever I encounter avid (and particularly, emotionally-dependent) proponents of pseudoscience and deep conspiracy. It is easy to filter out the hyper-religious and the mentally damaged, they each have highly characteristic signatures and are driven by different impulses.
What I remember most, was that wondrous feeling of 'frontiersmanship'; the feeling that I was at the forefront, the verge of unique and profound knowledge. Not just knowledge, but information, data, stuff that could be brought to others and shown and expanded upon, investigated.
In essence, I had become scientifically enamoured with a pseudoscientific concept; the prospect of these things in the sky excited me, because anything I can see, I can photograph, chart, plot, verify. When I saw videos that were clearly faked, that were just flying hubcaps or bad hoaxes.... it actually made me feel bad. It ate into the satisfaction, diminished the experience, it actually genuinely saddened me as I found more and more photos, more and more videos, which were so obviously unreal.
The heartbreak
I finally had a sit down with myself and acknowledged that there were a lot more people wanting to believe in UFOs and aliens than there were people who had any real evidence, or who had even seen any real evidence, that they were real. The few sightings that were multiply confirmed still interested me, and still do in fact, but the overwhelming bulk of fakery was too much for my rational mind to accommodate.
I was an enthusiast more than a believer... but the contradictions and the lies destroyed my enthusiasm. I could no longer reconcile the beliefs of the 'ufologists' with what I was seeing, and learning.
I had a similar experience when I was 15 and read about 'Scalar Electromagnetics' on a text-only BBS-a-like web page (yep, seriously). I consumed anything and everything, I browsed sites bursting with complex electromagnetic coil configurations and 'totally non-linear' oscilloscope plots and I felt that same rush of discovery and excitement. This was an amazing idea, that 'beams' of EM potential could be tuned to intersect at some great distance and effect change... the possibilities!
As time went on, I read more and more, and again felt those pangs of sadness as the evidence just failed to line up, even to my teenage self. Another bunch of 'adults', apparently completely sure of themselves, loudly proclaiming a conclusion that simply didn't add up. Sad again.
The thrill of the chase
I have since learned to recognise that thrill; it drives me to investigate any new CT/pseudoscience topic that isn't immediately insane (Reptiloids/Galactic Plane/Andromedans...) and I have to admit I still really, really enjoy that process.... I love reading conspiracy theories, that initial honeymoon period before it inevitably defeats itself and becomes another notch on my staff of sincere inquiry.
Recently, even tonight, I felt it once more when looking into (and you'll hate this) WeatherWar/dutchsinse and his 'weather control' videos... but what I have learned to do in adulthood is to skirt the edge of the rabbit hole much more deftly and swiftly, shaving a few parsecs off the Kessel Run... it took me about two hours to come to the conclusion his evidence was completely insane.
But the journey.... I still loved the journey. I was excitedly explaining to my girlfriend what I was watching, what he was claiming, and she (a geneticist) joined me in exploring the possibilities and ramifications...
Ultimately, the signs were there; a clear persecution complex, clear self-obsession and self-delusion, and ultimately... interpretations of the weather data that simply didn't make any sense.
Another let-down, but an expected one and with much less time and effort expended.
The hole-dwellers
This is how I approach every new theory I come across, and I might gently encourage some of you to try it too. Do not approach them with grim, iron-jawed skepticism. Allow yourself to be drawn in, to be enticed but not convinced... the result is typically the same when ultimately it doesn't hold up, but it is so much more compelling and informative to do this from a position of engagement rather than distant criticism.
By following this emotional curve, by personally exploring that interface between emotion and reason, it may help to advance understanding of how a few humans out of every thousand seem to slip through that gap. When I meet one of these emotionally-charged and clearly thoroughly institutionalised individuals I feel genuine sympathy and sorrow for them, something I tend not to feel for the ultrareligious and the incapable.
These people are trapped inside themselves with a sense of reason that almost works, but they have accepted that North on their compass is actually East, and everything they now encounter they must somehow reconcile with that translation. Flat Earthers will denounce anything, anything at all, that threatens their assertions. All of physics, cartography, everything... a lie. Anti-vaxxers will get searingly, furiously angry as the lunacy of their position is exposed and generally depart the floor rather than endure the contradictions and what they might mean.
They have become dependent on their beliefs. They have had to remember 'North is actually East' so very many times, with so very many people in their lives telling them they are not just wrong but a bit strange for saying this... their self-identity becomes intertwined with the necessity that they were, and remain, right about this one thing.
It is not that they love being in the rabbit hole... they've gone through the rush of falling in. It is that they have expended so much energy in staying in it, that every glimpse of the surface brings them not enlightenment and relief but abject, internalised horror.
What am I, without my surety? What am I, without my uniqueness?
What have I been all this time.... if all this time I have been wrong, like everyone said.
This is the emotional reality they cannot face. I have 'turned' a decent number of embryonic (usually juvenile) Flat Earth posters back to reason by exposing the lies they have been fed... but it seems every time someone slaps away the truth, the harder it becomes to accept it the next time.
Eventually, they get lost down the hole, in the dark with a compass that will never point North.
I suspect a decent number of them do struggle back out... but would never, ever tell anyone how long they spent down there.
I've never really revealed all of what I have written above, and I'm not particularly ashamed of any of it... I suspect a lot of former hole-dwellers are, and there might be many more of them out there than we might think, quietly never mentioning it ever again.
~Sq
