samadhisoft.com

I’m back, as they say, in the saddle this morning. I’ve got a half a dozen or so articles I’ve culled from the web to put up. As usual, these bear, mostly, on the Perfect Storm theme which is the central point of the website/blog.

Before I jump into all of that, however, I want to discuss some thoughts and experiences I’ve had recently.

Information permeability – in my opinion, people are either open to new information, indifferent to it or resistant to it.

Those who are open to new information by intention realize that new information is what allows them to grow and shed earlier points of view for newer ones with more to recommend them.  Intentional openness is a form of self-creativity.

I consider myself intentionally open to new information and, of late, I’ve gotten a fair bit which I’m integrating and processing.

Seeing something you’ve been looking at for a long time from a new POV, can expand your horizons.   I consider myself a liberal and, as such, I’ve been inundated with theories about what the Neocons, the Religious Right, the Conservatives and everyone of an even vaguely Republican flavor are doing as they try to take over our hearts and our minds, take away our freedoms and generally drag the world into a new dark ages.  Most of my friends share my views and stories like this pass among us as common currency.

Recently, I was corresponding with a good friend of mine, C., about a conspiracy theory and he related the following to me:

Reading this article immediately reminded me of over-hearing a phone conversation of my right-wing brother, N., the other night with one of his like-minded friends. He completely attributed the Democratic take-over of House and Senate, and the exit of Rumsfeld as manifestations of the vast, surreptitious, media-driven conspiracy by the Left to “take America back down the road to Socialism”. As in this article, my brother considers Bush a dupe (though well-intentioned), being out-maneuvered by sinister, determined, behind-the-scene forces who thwart the American people’s desire for a traditional, family-oriented government through their control of the media, and their manipulation of “weak-minded and weak-willed” “so-called moderate Republicans”. He ENTIRELY blames the Mark Foley incident on House Democrats and mainstream media that held off publishing the scandal until just before the November election (when, actually, Democratic Party operatives had been trying for most of the year to get the press to cover the story, yet it is known that 13 Republican Members or staffers knew about Foley’s e-mails to pages — while no Dem Members or staffers are alleged to have known: the Dem operatives found out from investigating media and/or from Republicans). Since the President, Executive Administration (i.e. the West Wing), Supreme Court, and both Houses of Congress are still (until 2007) under Republican control, and talk-show radio is dominated by the Far Right, my brother and his buddies attribute leadership of the Leftist Conspiracy to “the liberal media”, and believe that it is not at all loose, but tightly coordinated, massively funded, and utterly morally bankrupt.

Sound familiar?

Sorry, I just don’t buy any of these conspiracy
theories (which is not to say that I don’t believe
there are wanna-be conspirators out there). As J.notes, the theories are more convoluted than the
conspiracies they postulate, and all of them are
incompatible with Occam’s razor.

C. makes his living in the political world and has insights into what goes on out in the Beltway that most of us can only read about from a distance so I value his insights greatly.   He is a Democrat and he is quite liberal in his orientation but he is definitely not persuaded by most conspiracy theories and his comments here have given me a lot of food for thought.

I think conspiracy theories ‘work’ for many of us mentally, because they give us what we believe to be a plausible explanation for what we see going on around us.  And it is human nature to prefer understanding over confusion, to prefer apparent clarity over cognitive dissonance.   But, it’s a road too easily taken in most cases because the world is seldom so simple.

Years ago, I read a lot of material, and saw even more on TV, about the Roswell Incident.  It was all fascinating stuff but later, after I mulled it over, I asked myself what was the probability that the hundreds of military people who supposedly participated in the clean up and the cover up would have not spoken out over the following 60 years?  Imagine someone is in his 80’s now and near the end of his time.   If he didn’t agree with the imposed code of silence, what would keep him from speaking now?  What are they going to do to him at this point – kill him?   And imagine the hundreds of folks who would have been out there picking up every scrap of alien debris – that not one of them would have been able to squirrel away a memento, a piece of something so unique and amazing?   And that now, after 60 years, not one such verifiable piece of alien technologyhas come forward?

Conspiracy theorists would have us believe that the governmental spooks do have such incredible control but I’m strongly doubting it.   This is, after all, the same organization that tried to keep the bombing of Cambodia secret and failed, the same people who bungled Watergate and brought a government down and the same folks who throught they could get away with ContraGate only to find it splashed across the world’s newspapers.  No, when they try to do large scale clandestine stuff, very often, someone lets the curtain fall by accident and then we are looking at what appears to be the Keystone Cops.

So, conspiracy theories may make us feel good and give us a nice explanation of who’s good and who’s bad but I think they are usually vast oversimplifications and as such their adoption blocks us from further and deeper insights into what’s really happening.

I’m going to discuss one more interesting insight I’ve had lately and then we’ll begin to post some of today’s news.

A correspondent of mine, Kevin, who publishes the Cryptogon blog,  hails from Irvine in Southern California. He used to work in the financial industry there but he moved about a year ago to a remote area in New Zealand to create a new life for himself as a permaculture farmer.  I had to laugh some months ago when I read a scathing piece he’d written about why he left Irvine.  He said that the ‘plasticness’ of the place was getting to him and he related how he’d seen a sign posted over a small plot of grass amid all of the concrete and the sign said, “Grass under renovation”.

A few weeks ago, on my way here to New Zealand, I spent a week with my son and his family who live in Aliso Viejo which isn’t far from Irvine and I found myself remembering Kevin’s comment.   All of this area is intimately familiar to me as I lived there myself for many years.  If anything, Aliso Viejo is Irvine in spades.  It is a brand new city built over what was, 15 years ago, just empty rolling hills.   Today, it is a complete city – fully filled in with shopping centers,  housing developments, businesses, and roads.   Everything is new and I dare say that virtually ever bit of greenery one sees there, outside of a few nature preserves, was placed there intentionally by the builders of the city.

I left Orange County and Southern California 16 years ago myself and moved to a semi-rural area about 40 miles northwest of the City of Seattle in Washington State in the US.   My opinions about Orange County are nowhere as strong as Kevin’s are.  I enjoy it and its weather and beauty when I’m there but I also easily acknowledge that I’m glad I don’t live there anymore.  It is just too big, too crowded, too fast paced and too artificial for me as well.

All of this came together for me in the form of a small revelation one night over a beer with my son, Dan, while I was visiting.  We were talking about our family history, the amount of luck we’ve both had in our lives and the major events that have shaped them and he said that in his life one of the things that he was most grateful for was that in spite of the fact that he came from a broken home and that both of his parents (myself and my first wife, Rose) had ended up living outside of California, that we’d been kind enough to drop him in the middle of the best and most affluent place on the face of the earth.  I knew that he liked where he lived but now I got that he really loves it passionately and fully intends to live there all of his life – he’s deeply bonded to it.

So, here we have one place and several different views of it.  It all reminds me deeply of the idea that for any given set of facts, there can be many possible explanations that all seem to explain those facts equally well. Each of us makes sense of things in different ways and each of us typically thinks that our way of making sense is the right way.

And beneath it all, the situations we’re all trying to make sense of don’t really give a hang about any of what we think.

Well, that’s enough time up on the soapbox today.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 27th, 2006 at 13:05 and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.