The Deep State Is the “God of the Gaps” for Conspiracy Theorists
The paranoid world of the conspiracy theorists is set under pressure when their predictions turn out to be false. As the Deep State fails to deliver according to the prophecy, the narrative must change in order to maintain the structure of the story.
The term Deep State is said to have been coined by Eisenhower, who warned of the military-industrial complex. Seventy years later, the Deep State gets a boost under President Trump. But with a new meaning. It is not only the military and industry that becomes the Deep State, but also the media, research and democracy.
Today’s conspiracy thinkers are standing on the shoulders of their predecessors. They recycle ideas from a tradition with centuries on its neck. Alternative facts and factual resistance is a basic chord.
One of the first thing that comes to mind is how the Deep State conspiracy theorists look for patterns and often go back centuries in time when they refer to people and events that supposedly laid the foundations to everything we have today, the geopolitical system, the banks and financial system, the wars, the establishment, the major corporate groups and so on.
The conspiracy theorists are blind to generally accepted basic facts such as statistics, democracy, journalism, science, climate change and major events in history. These things are all fake and lies, imposed by the omnipotent Deep State (supposedly a very small number of ”Rockefellers”, i.e. shady billionaires and oligarchs representing the elites from Big Pharma and the Tech-, War- & Bank industry).
This sound very much like fundamentalistic religious views to me, but with a slightly different message. In this case the message is not about the return of the Messiah or God’s new Kingdom, it is about a new world order that will rise after the old system has broken down.
Just like in the holy scriptures, Big Things is about to happen and they will happen soon and the evidence is all around you and only the righteous are welcome into the new Kingdom — the ones that can see the light of the new reality. Hallelujah!
Looking for patterns in the rear mirror of history is easy, especially if you are willing to accept different kinds of patterns and allow the patterns to change. The challenge starts when you are to predict the future. The conspiracy theorists masters the skill of looking backwards but not forward.
This is the main reason that the doomsday predictions are often vague, blurry and unreliable. Big things will happen. Soon. And the next thing that actually happens is always self-fulfilling. It was supposed to happen because the Deep State wanted it to happen.
But when the predictions become more specific they always fail, and when they fail the narrative changes to suit what actually happened. This is like the God of the Gaps theory.
The God of the Gaps is about filling out the blanks. Every field of science has unanswered questions and hence gaps in our understanding. Scientists typically view these as open research questions.
Others sometimes argue that if science can’t explain how something happened, then God must be the explanation. Such religious arguments are called “god-of-the-gaps” arguments and was originally postulated by Richard Dawkins.
The problem with these arguments is that science is always developing. If gaps in scientific knowledge are the basis for belief in God, then as scientists fill in the gaps, the evidence for God gradually disappears.
I have a friend that I have known for more than 25 years. Over the last 10–15 years he has gradually (and unfortunately) turned into an architype of a Tinfoil Hat and today he is the definition of a classic conspiracy theorist.
He essentially lives in a parallel world and as he talks and writes about this world he describes another reality, a society permeated by corruption, lies, disinformation, victimization, cartel formation and geopolitical and financial fraud. Do I have to say that we have drifted apart?
The upside with this is that I have direct access to another world, a paranoid world where the Deep State is the global sinister network that controls everything in daily life and where “free will” does no longer exist.
The resistance groups are the enlightened ones fighting to shed light on the true state of the world. When I first reflected upon this it was just like being caught in George Orwell’s dystopia 1984.
I have decided to share some of the content, sent via text messages over the last years. My friend is anonymized and the content is translated, rearranged and censured (he has a taste for dirty words :-) ). The examples below are statements from his debauched world view.
The reason I list them is that the content represents a very similar twisted reality to what I have read on other sites over the last years (and yes they are here on Medium as well). Here we go…
A very limited number of elites control the whole world through corruption and a geopolitical board game. All presidents, politicians and official people with power are merely puppets in a greater game with an ultimate purpose to control the world.
We live in a fake world where nothing is what it seems to be, but in the light of truth everything will soon be revealed.
People are brainwashed trough centuries of corruption. They all live under a material philosophical dogma and in the shadow of a fake political scenery where every individual is a slave to money.
The official statistics is corrupt and cannot be trusted, just look at the US lection results in 2020.
The Deep State is about private profit maximization. The money controls the society through systematic cartel formation and corruption. It’s all a geopolitical game. We have now reached debt saturation and the country is lost.
The money that is lost through corruption could be spent on citizen salaries.
WW2 and Hitler was a project initiated and funded by the Deep State.
The Moon landing was fake. They never managed to get off the surface of the Moon or even reach the Lagrange Point.
The globalists and the bank system are the real demons. Money consists of interest based debts such as mortgage deeds, promissory notes, credits and different loans.
Cash is King, no credits or digital transactions should be allowed.
The Bilderberg Group, I.G. Farben, Krupp Industries and the Rockefellers are some of the faces of the Deep State demons.
The European Union (EU) is a corrupt supernational organ created with the sole purpose to promote profit maximization.
The climate movement is a fraud and the science behind global warming has been invented or distorted for ideological or financial reasons.
Covid and the pandemic of 2020–2021 was created by Big Pharma and other large corporations to ensure control over each individual through mass vaccination.
The vaccines are stuffed with ingredients that will be used to take control over your life. That stuff is probably in the air and in the drinking water as well.
The establishment and lobbyists are corrupt to the bone and cannot be trusted in any situation.
The problem is that there is often an ounce of truth in some of these claims. The tricky part is to sift the chaff from the wheat. One method is to challenge the prophecies, i.e. challenge the conspiracy claims before they are supposed to happen. This is exactly what I did during the dawning pandemic period early in 2020 when my friend saw yet another clear pattern.
The first claim that I challenged was the one that postulated that COVID-19 did not exist at all - that the pandemic was invented by the Deep State to control individuals and hence increase the grip of the world. As the reality came knocking at the door at the homes of even the most radical and ignorant Tinfoil Hats, the narrative gradually changed.
The new claim was that the Virus did indeed exist, but it was created by the Deep State to allow Big Pharma to pack the vaccines with shady substances that will never be found in any table of contents. COVID-19 turned out to be a global misinformation pandemic where conspiracy theories in various forms, such as that 5G technology, causes infection and the Deep State masterminded the pandemics.
As it (again) became obvious that the whole world was negatively affected but stood united in their fight against COVID and that, from an economic perspective, there must be very little to gain from an invented pandemic, the doomsday rhetoric slowly faded away.
The second claim that I challenged was the alleged election fraud in the 2020 US election process. My friend was willing to take a bet (corresponding to the symbolic value of 50 USD) that Donald Trump would be re-elected as a result of the claims for election fraud. This was directly after the first official results in December 2020.
As Joe Biden took the office in January 2021 the narrative changed again. Rudy Giuliani, Trumps personal lawyer, will soon provide the final evidence for election fraud and Trump will be back in office within months. As time went on nothing happened.
In summer 2021 a New York court suspended Rudy Giuliani from practicing law in the state due to his “false and misleading statements” about Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss. I never claimed my money.
The third claim is about the WW2 and the Nazi regime. My friend proposed that this is just another project initiated by the Deep State and funded by large companies such as I.G. Farben and Krupps Industries. Nothing is more documented than WW2 and the claim that Hitler is just a project must be like missing the lessons learned session by a light year.
Hitler did most certainly receive funding from these companies but Who started the war and Who controlled what? The responsibility falls on the Nazi regime and most certainly on Hitler himself. The huge amount of material from WW2 is perhaps a problem in itself since it allows for extensive pattern seeking.
Just like the Moon landing it is almost impossible to debate all conspiracy theories due to the massive amount of material to conspire about.
The fourth claim that I challenged was the true power of the Deep State (supposedly a very small number of corporate elites, billionaires and oligarchs). Think of “Spectre” in James Bond and you will be pretty close.
Hypothetical organizations such as the Deep State may have influence through their money and lobbyism, but can they really come together and dictate the world order with it’s contradicting and messy belief systems, historical differences and diverse economic and political systems? Not very likely!
One recent indication that the supposed “Spectre” does not have as much power as claimed, came when Putin made a political decision to invade Ukraine and consequently 141 UN members replied with an unprecedented joint condemnation of the Russian aggression.
In parallel with this the whole western world (with US, UK and EU in the frontline) teamed up and imposed a mile-long list of sanctions including the bank system and some of Russia’s most powerful and well-known oligarchs.
The oligarchs are the persons supposed to rule the world and now they have to watch their yachts being tugged away! Again, when the war started this was a self-fulfilled prophecy (it was supposed to happen) but as the consequences unfolded the narrative had to change.
So, what can we learn from the paranoid word poop? Well, the Tinfoils come in all shapes and rage against everything. There seems to be a cross-section of the population that is fairly receptive to this.
It can be both about a psychological disposition and about group psychology, where a person you trust markets these messages and the group accepts it. Conspiracies have always existed but right now they seem to experience a tailwind that makes it blow up to storm here and there.
As recently as August 2021, thousands of Germans marched for several weekends in a row around the country to demonstrate against government measures to prevent the coronavirus from spreading. Several signs read: Qanon. The latest conspiracy theory on the lips of all conspirators - a small group that secretly controls a worldwide pedophile network that includes many famous and powerful people.
The demonstrations were loosely composed demonstrations consisting of libertarians, constitutional loyalists and skeptics of the science behind the policy to fight the pandemic. Media reported that there was also supposed to have been a smaller crowd from the far right political edge, radical left-wing activists and nationalists to vaccination opponents and conspiracy theorists.
My friend has a communist vein. His late father, who migrated from the east in the 60s, mistrusted the western system in general. He had a painting of Lenin hanging on the red colored wall in the kitchen and he was hiding hard cash (Euro) in his house because he didn’t trust the banks.
The bills were only discovered after his death, hidden in books, in bookshelves and behind Lenin himself on the wall. A great place of inspiration to grow up in? I actually met his father a couple of times, a short, close-knit, silent fellow around his seventies. He never fully learned the language (intentionally I suppose).
In average I used to get one message per day from my friend and a couple of phone calls per week. It’s been a year now since I answered the last phone call but we occasionally exhange a few messages. There is a limit to how much nonsense one can digest and I have reached that limit some time ago. This article is my way to empty the hard drive and reset my mind.
