Conspiracy Thinking vs. Critical Thinking
Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis in Human Evolution
Book Contents
Introduction
The Natural Order (Thesis)
The Early Natural Order
The Pleasure Function
The Destruction of the Natural Order (Antithesis)
Reductionism and Moralism
Repression and Perversion
Love vs. Split-Love
The Disintegration of Sexual Paraphilias
Parent-Child Codependence and Emotional Child Abuse
The Oedipal Mold and Oedipal Culture
Mysticism and Atheism
Narcissism
Denial of Complexity
The Plague of Sadism
Conspiracy Thinking vs. Critical Thinking
Youth Fascism
The New Natural Order (Synthesis)
The Eight Dynamic Patterns of Living
The Twelve Branches of the Tree of Knowledge
The True Religio
Toward a Science of Life
Primary Power and Permissive Education
Research Bibliography
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Page Contents
Generalities
Dangers of Conspiracy Thinking
The Biggest Secret
—Pedophiles, Pedophilia
—The Reptile Theory
—The World is Being Dominated by Five Families
—Blaming People or Institutions
—Anti-Semitism
—Secret Societies
Generalities
Conspiracy Theory is a hypothesis that alleges a coordinated group is, or was, secretly working to commit illegal or wrongful actions, including the attempt to hide the existence of the group and its activities. This is the dictionary definition.
What I am saying is that the natural order knows the self-thinker, while the destruction of the natural order brought us the uncritical nerd who is halfway paranoid, and lives in isolation and despair, avidly out for conspiracies to happen, so that he or she can feel involved in the political discourse.
Needless to add that this kind of involvement is false, as it is based largely on myths, on hearsay information, if not on lies and slander.
One of the main targets of conspiracy thinking are secret societies, especially international Free Masonry. Before discussing the hairy topic of conspiracy thinking, let me say I do agree that secret societies are a queer element in a democratic society. However let’s look at the roots first.
Secret societies came up a few hundred years ago as a philosophical movement in times where there was not much democracy around, but rather, a certain danger for philosophers to say certain things about the rulers of nations. Mozart was a free mason, Goethe was one, Emerson was one, and many other people we would judge as benefactors of humanity. I have had a very good friend in Switzerland, a Scottish who was a freemason and who taught me much about it. He was the most caring human I have seen in my life, was doing much social work and had very balanced opinions, the contrary of a fanatic, unbalanced, chaotic or secret person.
Theosophy was also a kind of secret society. Why? It was very dangerous at that time to attack organized religion, not as today where those religions are fading off into nothingness and are but a joke for our young people. Not so in the 1920s. Somebody interested in an overarching spiritual truth, studying comparative religion was being judged a pagan or heretic, worse a dangerous element in society, almost a terrorist as we would say today. Hence, the need to find support and discussion in secret societies.
The other aspect was the old Hermetic Tradition that was hermetic, as the name says, in ancient times, and for good reasons. Not all truth is for all people. And that tradition that I studied extensively, has really benefited humanity, and much wisdom is contained in it.
Dangers of Conspiracy Thinking
While American society professes to be transparent and liberal, there is nothing farther from the truth. So what the heck have these people to rumble about secret societies? I do not see their concern.
A democracy also sets in place a certain freedom for groupings, only that today you would call it a Yahoo Group and formerly, because of historical reasons, it was called a secret society.
I see a certain danger in conspiracy thinking. Adolf Hitler was a conspiracy thinker, nothing but that, he couldn’t see reality, not only because he had an IQ of 80, thus bordering debility, as we know today, but because he was through and through a mythic thinker, seeing secret societies virtually everywhere.
To replace a critical mind with a conspiracy mind is exactly what Hitler did, taking the Swastika, a Hindu religious symbol and turning it around, thereby making a devilish confession out of it. That is perversion grand style and so is, in my view, conspiracy thinking.
People, young or old, who lead a balanced and happy love life won’t get on those paths. It all shows that the sex repression of the youth, as it’s ruthlessly practiced in today’s postmodern consumer culture, is and will be the cradle to a plethora of future perversions to come.
The Biggest Secret
I am going to critically review a book by David Icke, The Biggest Secret: The Book that will Change the World.
Pedophiles, Pedophilia
Icke uses the standard label pedophiles, without defining what he understands under this notion, and accuses certain politicians to be pedophiles. Apart from the fact that this is simply non-scientific as a person is not a label but may engage in activities that bear the label (confusion between activity and actor, an old trick in demagogic journalism), he perhaps voluntarily confuses child rape with pedophilia, while research on sexual paraphilias shows that child rape and pedophilia are characterized by two different etiologies, and are two entirely different sorts of sexual behavior. He is explicit enough to charge certain well-known politicians and leaders with a number of violent attacks upon a child or children, in the way that such behavior must be judged, from the explicit description, as blunt child rape. But he labels such behavior as ‘pedophilia’ and the men in question as pedophiles. This is simply unscientific and he uses here the technique of defamation, which is under-the-belt journalism.
The Reptile Theory
David Icke has probably never heard of mythology and of the basics of psychoanalysis. He simply takes metaphorical content as real, which is really man-in-the-street-thinking par excellence. Icke seems to have no idea of the imaginal realm which is the very basis for mythology, and also the basis for religious thinking. It goes without saying that there is in all native cultures reference being taken to snakes and reptiles as metaphors for divine powers, as divinities, which is not to be taken as pertaining to outer reality or real-life animals. Hence the psychological notion of the mythic animal, that probably escapes Icke completely.
This is all I can say, because when you see that his point of departure is actually based upon ignorance of psychological facts, and thus flawed, his whole rhetoric and ‘proof’ of the existence of human reptiles is pure nonsense. But to reach the mass mind, this was probably the strongest element in his rhetoric because it may be what most accesses the primitive mind of the masses, who are living in the same world of ignorance of psychological realities as the author.
Psychiatrist Robert M. Stein calls for this reason Christian thinking primitive because it denies the existence of the imaginal realm, or while admitting its existence, claims to control this realm by dogma and supervision of the believer.
Creative psychological development, individuation, is dependent on spiritual freedom. When we say, for example, a man has a free spirit, do we mean that he freely or necessarily transgresses the imposed manners, mores and taboos of his culture? I think not. But it does mean the freedom to do anything or go any place he desires in the imaginal realm. He is a man who has clearly distinguished the sacral, timeless world from the secular, historical world. He knows he can move with unashamed dignity among the gods and demons which belong to the mundane world. Such freedom cannot occur with a primitive form of consciousness in which inner and outer reality are governed by the same laws and values. In this sense, our Judeo-Christian tradition is primitive in that our thoughts and desires are subject to the same dogma, the same regulation, as our deeds. Spiritual freedom requires a break with biblical tradition and the development of a new form of consciousness — a consciousness which promotes the cultivation of imaginal freedom.
—Robert M. Stein, Redeeming The Inner Child In Marriage and Therapy, in: Reclaiming the Inner Child, ed. by Jeremiah Abrams (1990), 261, 265.
I know this from many personal examples, especially from Germany, people I have known and whose thinking is rather right-wing and fascist. They reject psychoanalysis, they reject psychology and they argue like Icke. In their worldview, great scientists and discoverers like Freud or Reich simply are swines. Needless to add that they hate Jews, and are arrogant enough to voice that even in public. And in Germany such thing is possible, which is one of the reasons I left that country forever.
The World is Being Dominated by Five Families
It is of no importance who dominates the world, if that should be true; it is only of importance, supposed it is true, that the overwhelming majority of humans develop some kind of critical sense, not allowing those who dominate to do their business unhampered.
I’d say if it is true, we should first of all applaud them because they must really be smart if they have got there. Then, after applauding them, we can think about a future world where this can’t happen again. By just shouting Revolution, Revolution, nothing will be changed, nothing will be achieved, except blood shed. If it is true, then something must be wrong with our perception of reality, or let’s say with how we were taught to perceive the world, and to fit in this world. We might namely think of establishing a quite unpopular and different form of child protection, namely a lifestyle paradigm that smoothly guides our children back to nature, to inner silence, so that they’re not eaten by our manipulatory media, video games, and the hidden polemics and lies that are written in our school books.
Thus the true concern, as I show it with my publications, is education or a new form of education, or self-education, not polemics against those in power. Those in power will die and new ones will be in power. It’s of no importance who they are as long as the majority of humans allows this to happen, focusing on large-scale entertainment and on body building instead of mind building, running for the newest junk and the latest gimmick, without giving importance to living intelligent and meaningful lives, and become conscious of their soul values.
Blaming People or Institutions
The forth issue I would like to mention is that Icke blames certain people, or certain institutions, instead of seeing the psychological root causes of why certain things go wrong in the world. Humans are not perfect but when they live in something like a natural order, they more or less can reach excellence, and human imperfection will not have outright destructive consequences. When one reads Icke carefully, one finds about the same morality scheme as in Westerns and crime movies, the good guy (first of all himself … ) and the bad guys, corrupt government officials, free masons, bankers and so on. It’s nice for the movie world to stick to this scheme, it makes cinema easy, it makes it easy to sell films to the masses of people who wouldn’t like to learn about the complexity of life, and of human beings.
But when a man like Icke, who comes over, after all, as an intelligent and aware human, comes up with this scheme, then I can’t help but think he may think business. What is his purpose? Is it perhaps just to make more money with ‘selling more conspiracy to more people, at higher prices,’ to paraphrase Coca Cola’s Sergio Zyman?
Would it not be more honest to make readers understand the psychological root causes of our violent patriarchal setup and the consequences and the karmic boomerang connected to it?
Putting blame on people is not only lacking smart but it’s misleading, because the power in the world is not really going out from people but from concepts and ideas that human beings create and that are taken by the masses as eternal truth. So the culprit of all evil is in fact language, that is the misuse of language, the use of language that is conditioned along the lines of ideologies, strategies, and political stratagems. People can be replaced, but a system of concepts, created by language, has a self-perpetuating force!
Icke is not only a demagogue, but he’s simply not on track when he looks for the roots of evil. And he uses a simplistic vocabulary just as those he attacks, and that is why he is ultimately successful.
The masses do not understand the complex language of life, but the idiotic language of humans who are following idiotic concepts that they themselves don’t understand. If a certain politician, for example, wanted to euthanize all people who love children sexually, and he does not use the hanger term pedophilia or define it for his cause, he will achieve strictly nothing. Truly, the evil or destructive effect on the mass psyche is effected by the concept of pedophilia, not by the fact that a certain politician, parliamentary or policeman dislikes childlovers.
Anti-Semitism
The fifth issue is that Icke’s teaching is, honestly speaking, outspokenly anti-Semitic. In this respect he can shake hands with Adolf Hitler. And I am pretty sure that much of his popularity is due to this very anti-Semitism because the masses today in all consumer societies are fascist, most of the time in a hidden way, but they are.
Secret Societies
The sixth and last issue is that Icke has misunderstood the intention of secret societies. He blames secret societies to be the breeding lot of global fascism or the organizing network that brings together all the evildoers in the world. He doesn’t mention that originally secret societies were founded as the very opposition to tyranny, the tyranny of patriarchy, namely, even before the Middle-Ages, but then they gained importance with the raising power of the Church at the time of the Inquisition.
When alchemy was considered a crime, secret societies were a necessity because otherwise those early scientists—and that’s what alchemists were— could not have been in state to communicate across the borders of their village or clan, and their scientific knowledge would have been insulated.
Even in our days, the intention of most free masons is to do good, not evil, and even to oppose evil by a way of living that is in accordance with spiritual laws.
To follow Icke, Goethe, Emerson and Mozart would have been evildoers as they were free masons. His reasoning is not only childish, it’s manipulatory because he uses the simplification scheme of homo normalis to reject all that the ’peasant doesn’t understand.’ He uses, just like Hitler and many other tyrants, the strategy of denying complexity, that is based upon the ignorance of the masses for the sake of getting power over the masses, the power in this case, to buy his books, and to get many people subscribe to his conspiracy theories.
The secret societies were a considerable force of resistance during the Nazi regime and similar regimes in Europe in 1940 to 1945. I happen to have studied, during my 3rd cycle program, European Integration, the resistance movements against Hitler in Europe, and it is notorious that secret societies were a forum for their communication, which shows they are actually against totalitarian forms of government and the suppression of basic human rights.
I hereby do not deny that factually it may well be true that five single clans reign the world, but to repeat it, to counter this state of affairs, we have to wake up to another reality as the one described by the myths of David Icke. We have to awaken to nature, and nature in us, in our bodies. I mean we have to a do away with moralism, with judgmentalism, with all activism targeting to judge and expose others, to blame certain folks, and to declare other folks as heroes. We have to wake up to being authentic and defend the values of emotional and sexual freedom, and children having the right to go through childhood without being emotionally, physically or sexually abused, and thereby being able to building a soul identity, and their unique soul power.
Then, as a growing group of mature and spiritually awake soul beings and individuals, we can prepare another course of destiny for humanity. But it’s not possible by attacking those in power, for this is not only not effective, but truly destructive. The wise and virtuous know that their wisdom, and their integrity, will influence even the most evil leaders and tyrants, such as Petronius influenced Nero during most of his lifetime.
And Nero clearly murdered less when under the spell of Petronius’ poems!
