Get out of your trenches

Pick a side, a camp, a party to support! Well, don't they all entrap themselves, deteriorate over time, and turn less than trustworthy? Let's agitate everyone.

For a more immersive experience, Arrival is a cinematic masterpiece that will support the conclusion of this article – Image source here

This article is an experiment.

It’s meant for you to experience some tension before it is resolved, to experience some rising action before resolution … to notice your trench.

If you nod in agreement in response to one part and flinch to close the tab in another, then I’ve done half of my job. I hope I managed to bring strong argument for two apparently opposing sides, so you will likely encounter a notion that you will (markedly) not agree with.

If you then resist the urge to quit and instead read all the way to the end to find what the purpose of it was, then I’ve done the other half of my job.

If you have a smooth ride throughout … kudos.

Refusing to dine on what’s served

I have a chronic condition:

In almost every possible example I can think of, neither side or camp or party does it for me. Unless, of course, they’re strikingly nuanced and balanced in their own regard. Which, of course, they rarely are whenever it is sensible to speak of sides, camps, and parties in the first place.

So when it comes to truthworthy positions that I find myself agreeing with:

1. In terms of political affiliation, that’s neither the right nor the left.

2. It’s neither a dogmatic reductionist scientific understanding of the world that floats my boat, nor is it an all-forward magical-spiritual narrative about reality that appears so prone to grifting and make-believe.

3. I can neither resonate with those who have never asked any question about, say, key events of the years 1968, 2001 and 2020, nor can I meddle too happily with folks who overshoot the mark on ‘critical thinking’.

Picking a team comes with a desire to wear their colors, and typically with pronounced emotional or intellectual biases. It’s where motivated reason becomes inevitable, sensemaking suffers, and an openminded quest for truth gives way to delusions.

Over the years, and with rising tension between all kinds of belief systems, I’ve seen countless people pick a team and then shit all over the other team until they’ve psychologically barricaded their way back to a more balanced view of reality.

So?

So I prefer my sensemaking coin to not give me either heads or tails but do the unlikely … and balance on the edge.

Bonus points if there’s kangaroos – image source here

So why pick the middle at all?

Isn’t that just a gooey, vague, undecided tangle?

No, it’s an acknowledgement that it’s probably not half of all humans that are hopelessly confused, 'misinformed’, or even ready to be dehumanized for their perceptions and sensemaking. Wherever we find polarization, there’s at least some merit to either side, as are a share of human error, bad actors, and perverse incentive from money to be made.

And, obviously, there are complete buffoons that often turn out to be the loudest voices, casually deepening the trenches. When we’re forming our position on the basis of these surfaces glances – attention captured by attention whores – we’re losing track of the intelligence and integrity of the best players on ‘the other side’.

Doing that, we’ll come out with a horribly insufficient picture of the whole.

For the purpose of this article, I’ll mostly focus on the mainstream media vs alternative media point of tension and keep political division aside, although there has been some conflation happening.

I’ll keep it all on a meta level and will avoid explicit events or theories.

I am after a pattern underpinning it all.

Overshooting the mark and recalibration

The years from late 2013 to early 2016 were a curious triad of years for me.

A couple of striking experiences put me on the rails of exploring a world beyond, say, proven science and proven history. I was opening up not only to what you might call transcendental or spiritual notions, but also to more ‘conspiratorial’ notions.

Apparently, these weren’t all theoretical.

There were intriguing notions around how history might have unfolded differently from what we’ve been taught and I have to admit that, initially, I abandoned my skepticism.

I picked a side.

Some of these ideas were just theories, others came with pretty damning evidence.

A skyscraper that came down in free fall was entirely missing from an 'official report’, and president-killing ‘magic bullets’ were anything but magic, but rather an unmistakable cue if you weren’t playing dumb.

The shock of there being an entire cosmos of not only metaphysical phenomena, but unexamined historical lies, was immense. That most of society and media so smugly discarded them as paranoid hogwash bred a profound distrust in our collective judgment within me, and into the authorities that an evidently misled public so blindly believed in.

A revealing lack of open dialogue about them pushed me deeper, tenderness indicating a sore spot. I went all-in for a while, my mind blown wide open and receptive toward what we might sum up as alternative takes on the world.

It was enough for me to go all-in and overshoot the mark myself for a long minute, driven by some key questions many of which I’ll share along this article.

Thankfully, it wasn’t too long before my rush balanced out a bit. Over time, inevitably, I had to notice that I had to recalibrate. There was just as much crap floating around in the realm that I had just opened up to. There was some hogwash, maybe even the majority of it, but that didn’t justify the cognitive shortcut of sweeping dismissal – an important signal amidst the noise wasn’t to be simply overlooked.

Still, those who branded themselves as ‘critical thinkers’ were often strikingly uncritical toward their own sources of information, not recognizing that their disagreeable temperament was just as much a target for the same manipulation mechanisms that they saw all the ‘sheep’ fall for.

Soon, my skepticism was more equally distributed between both sides of this epistemological wrestling match.

Now, from a more balanced perspective of my own, I saw people believing stories that they’ve hopelessly bought into, with no awareness of their subconscious biases and motivated reason. Only few appeared equipped to spot where their psychological shadow stirred while they ‘unmasked the elite’, or became ‘light workers’ the very second that they first read the phrase.

Much of what I saw wasn’t exactly it.

But there was no place to go back to, I couldn’t unsee what I’ve seen.

What now?

Stirring things up and watching what happens

Trying to figure things out, I started stirring up conversations about these topics.

Many of them.

Hours long.

I was a menace to people’s Saturday evenings, to the dismay of friends and strangers alike. They just wanted to chat lightly and have a good time.

Well, buddy: Wrong place, wrong time.

Looking back, I notice that I tried to square what someone believes in and consciously communicates to me with what’s between the lines and how they appear to me:

• Ignorant?

• Paranoid?

• Dogmatic?

• Neurotic, even psychotic?

• Blindly trusting in authority?

• A captured mind or a free mind?

• Able or unable to admit to bias or error?

• Fantasizing instead of receiving insight?

• With a need to feel above the sheep, or a terror of being one of the nutjobs?

• Trying to save mental energy with cognitive shortcuts, and compensating with strength of conviction?

• In it with their ego, or with curiosity, humility, and educated openmindedness?

Whenever I could, I tried to zoom out. I tried to take in the whole scene and make sense of all the signals that are available.

That meant to include myself into the observation:

• How did I appear, to myself and to them?

• Did I admit to bias or error?

• Did I feel like I knew better?

• Did I try to compensate mental sloth with strength of conviction?

• Did I apply what I knew about psychology, turning assertions into questions and working Socratically?

• Did I live the humility about what one can know for sure that I started to preach, or did I snap into a different mode of defending my own beliefs as if I could know?

• (I did snap)

I’d love to claim that I did, indeed, honor Socrates.

I often didn’t.

Instead of turning them into questions, I spilled many of my assumptions as assumptions, or worse: Convictions.

But even if I couldn’t prevent the occasional assertion from slipping out, I worked hard to measure both sides with the same stick.

It was taxing, but I loved the process and got better at it. More often than not, I got into significant flowstates with excess mental energy for the task. Typically, the conversation only stopped when we were interrupted, or when my partner in dialogue declared fatigue.

I had a habit of consistently bringing up arguments against whatever side someone was taking, as if I was trying to balance out onesided and overcommitted positions whenever I encountered them. As if I had a job there.

I created common ground – which I genuinely had with either position – and then went ahead to introduce my doubts.

In these conversations, I gained a feel for where people were coming from, what their drivers of reasoning were, and what made them so often ‘lock in’ and entrench themselves in one side or the other.

Let’s attack the trenches.

Questioning the Unquestioning

Inevitably, in their blind trust, who we could provocatively call mainstream media acolytes had the biggest blindspot.

Often having never questioned what they’ve believed all along, this is where the emotional and intellectual rigidity seemed the greatest. The shortcut of trusting the walking microphones that report on world events on my TV screen has its benefits:

I can simply turn on the TV and not think beyond, and I’ll be aligned with all the others who do so, too.

Ahhh, a safe spot in the tribe, with no threat of being expelled for stirring things up.

No danger of becoming one of them, one of the Unspeakables.

God forbid.

Logic or emotions?

This first part will close on emotions, but let’s already check in with the emotional guardrails of our sensemaking for a second.

Sure, there are logical reasons to trust what’s official and established, and we’d all sure hope that this is a fit-for-reality heuristic to apply.

Things would be easier.

Yet I assumed subconscious emotional drivers and the emotional manipulation of the public to be the biggest piece of the puzzle. Emotions govern our behaviour, rule our subconscious, move or freeze us more than any isolated thought could. It’s emotions that spark a child’s reflexive trust into the figures of authority that aid their growth – parents, teachers, relatives.

Our childhood emotions determine what kind of foundation-shaping information we first open up to. This priming then anchors our confirmation bias. Blindly trusting what and whom we’ve always trusted, this will snowball into the world views and sensemaking foundations of adults.

These adults will then talk about facts and logic and will point to ‘reliable sources’.

But at the bottom of it all, miles down in the ocean of the subconscious?

An emotional anchor made of childish innocence and trust.

Sounds like it could be played.

Blinders on

A question that wouldn’t let me go was:

Once anchored, what becomes possible?

How would this anchoring show up in conversations?

Well, I found a profound struggle to comprehend that there could be things going on beyond what we’re actively reported on, that we all have been born into a world already shaped by authorities and established power structures that we (of course) have been brought up to trust.

That:

• power might corrupt

• winners write history

• in war, truth dies first

• secret services have secrets

• blind trust invites to bamboozle

• divide & conquer helps … well, conquer

• given the emotional anchoring, get ‘em while they’re young could be a thing

• trojan horses don’t announce their wooden nature, you need to be able to tell wood from flesh yourself

• the public hivemind can be stirred and toyed with by those who have mapped human crowd psychology

… were these notions really so far fetched?

Weren’t they instead utterly, outrageously obvious?

We’ve all heard some aphorisms that alerted us to the general possibility of monkey business behind smoke screens. We all had some tip-off on the seductive lure and notorious opacity of power. Most people were aware of the theoretical possibility of propaganda, manipulation, and white-collar deceit, but there’s this curious gap between things we know are possible and things we’re equipped to catch when they happen.

We typically fail to spot the practical monkey business opportunities that are taken.

We don’t really see how they apply today, how these mechanisms of narrative control are relevant:

1. at this moment

2. in this world

3. that you think you understand

4. regarding stories that you’ve filed away as ‘true and trustworthy’

We hear winners write history and then go on to trust the history books in school to be thorough and conclusive accounts of our historical course.

We hear power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely and fail to apply this to the authorities that we trust, as soon as they have the stamps and badges and emblems to soothe our need for competence signaling.

We’re aware of divide & conquer and then fail to spot it in everyday political division.

We know that in war, truth dies first, but when the next set of news comes around that [initial event] happened that allows us to [dehumanize enemy] and [legitimize intervention] to [democratize terrorists] …

… I don’t see us stopping and thinking.

If you’re willing to kill, what kind of hurdle is a lie?

There are people and institutions that depend on this pattern of public obliviousness to roll along unimpeded.

It seems obvious that it would be fiercely protected due to the stakes of it all. Whoever waged war, controlled proof, occasionally evaporated a witness, and forged media consensus wouldn’t go out of their own way to also proactively notify you about it.

»This just in: We’ve investigated outselves and we found shocking things!«

… or how is that supposed to work?

This kind of tip-off had to come from somewhere else. This somewhere else *might* not be held in the highest regard by the same established authorities.

This somewhere else might come under attack by an military-industrial complex that explicitly excells in attacking. So how on God’s sweet, sweet Earth did I run into a blind trust into established power and authority so, so often?

Fool me once …

The range of public discourse was clearly contained by artificial guardrails of emotional coercion and reputational threats.

The very fact that some of the theories I encountered were possible, if not likely, if not overwhelmingly likely and supported by ample evidence, yet failed to be acknowledged as such and instead were dismissed as a wacky conspiracy theory, what did that tell me about the world?

That there was a bunch of derogatory labels ready to be slapped on your forehead as soon as you dared to go off-road – well, that only increased the likelihood that something was up:

Wasn’t that exactly what things would look like if something was up?

Wasn’t there a powerful incentive placed to not go there, entirely irrespective of truth?

If these mechanisms of coercion and narrative control were in place and working – well, then which next steps did this lovely tandem ride of successful deception and reciprocal blind trust enable?

What becomes possible as soon as this groove has been carved out?

How will the gravitational pull of ‘public consensus’ act on any subsequent flow of information that seeks a path?

Our tribal reflexes of aligning with the tribe and avoiding exile were clearly exploited, allowing oblivious people to point to other oblivious people to confirm that they’re not alone, but rather in the assumed safe space of common consensus.

What fools we were, how easily bamboozled.

How hard it was to alert people to the bamboozle once it had coagulated and solidified. In a habit of collective circular reasoning, a trusting majority trusted that the majority couldn’t be that wrong. The bamboozle found strength in numbers and safety in its audacity, possibly placing us on the Nth level of compound deception and confusion.

Once unhinged and uprooted from truth like that, you could move people anywhere.

Go hard enough … and noone would assume that we’ve all drifted that far from truth.

The subconscious failsafe agaist existential crisis

It freaked me out that all of this was so hard a point to get across.

That I, too, had been oblivious to these mechanisms for almost all my life wasn’t just a bit embarrassing, it was undeniable proof of it working.

Apparently, there was something really hard-to-confront about this.

I brooded a long time over people’s resistance to consider what – to me, by now – appeared to be quite obvious notions. I concluded that the resistance I faced was not conscious, but rather another set of subconscious guardrails.

This time not something that keeps the public hivemind in, but a subconscious protection mechanism that keeps something out:

An existential crisis that’s downstream of confronting the level of deception that we’re surrounded by, and that would require us to destabilize our habitual trust-placing and sense-making quite deeply.

It’s a crisis that people simply can’t afford.

They didn’t just have their beliefs, but a job to do, a job to keep, kids to care for, a partner to love (and not alienate) … a life to live. Neither did they have time to play detective on world events, nor did they have as much interest in shaking their own foundations – no matter how much insight might be on the other side of it.

As a student with little more responsibility than to show up to enough lectures to pass the exams, my stakes were lower when it came to taking a head dive into these topics. I was kinda free to do so, and weirdly called toward it on top. My own openness to disturb myself with this part of reality was an exception: People’s subconscious minds knew that if they opened up to this level of questioning, they’d be in for a ride they weren’t ready for, making them complicit with their own deception.

While I saw the exploitable pattern there, my way of approaching these topics in conversations got gentler. I started to respect the subconscious defenses against entering said existential crisis.

I increasingly saw the vulnerability behind it, because after all: I got hurt in the process. It’s not like this was a fun, smoooth ride. People didn’t refuse to enter this confrontation out of an irresponsible ignorance toward crucial topics, but out of an existential vulnerability that applies to all of us.

This was an exceedingly uncomfortable place to be, so few people took the plunge.

Let’s now turn toward those who did.

I had a problem there, too:

All too often, it was forgotten that the rabbit hole elevator had an emergency stop.

Questioning the Questioners

With the other camp, I often pointed out a chaotic and wild world with noone ultimately at the steering wheel.

Yes, clearly hierarchical structures of dominant institutions allow for scenarios that are often painted as overly paranoid while they’re, frankly, quite sensible to assume. And yet, when hyperfixating on that, one can overshoot the mark and feel as if everything is orchestrated.

Spurred on by the same questions that occupied my mind, fellow ‘conspiracy theorists’ extrapolated wildly. Many jumped to conclusions. Some bought into everything.

It’s this all-inclusive conspiracy experience that appears to have a major blind spot:

If I, in the shoes of established power, were to hijack the resistance in order to weaken it … then I’d probably try to make them overshoot the mark. If the PsyOp game was truly mastered, their power would just as likely be directed toward the critical opposition.

If you can’t outlaw or censor it, then you better:

Ridicule

Let me put it like this:

• Baby: Calibrated questions about power and our shared history

• Bathwater: Reptilian Shapeshifters ruling us on a Flat Earth

Or at least I really hope so.

Specifically the Flat Earth stuff I consider to be a serious psychological operation, it just makes for the perfect ridicule. It sounds – quite literally – medieval and backwards. From a position of power, it would only be strategically sound to plant some bogus theories like that and blur the lines between them and a more measured more of inquiry.

Conflating them would certainly be helpful in inviting most people to keep discarding, dismissing, ignoring this whole cosmos of notions:

Make people throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Divide

This movement of critical inquiry would be a much more sizable wrecking ball to the pillars of corrupt power if it’s organized, sober, and coherent, not scattered, high, and fearful.

If you can’t allow a joint critical opposition to persist unimpeded, throw a wrench into their wheels. Some will stop at the most outrageous theories and nope the fuck out, others will charge ahead.

Let them haggle among themselves and spend a good portion of their energy on ridiculous theories that you’ve seeded yourself.

Disempower

It’s not like this realm of topics is immediately empowering with liberating insight.

It’s dark, it can freak you out, it can make you question your own power.

Well … that’s useful.

If a bunch of people are not anymore confused by a world that’s brutal, chaotic and entirely accidental, then they might still be intimidated by an all-powerful (!) bunch of reality orchestrators that can fool the people of a planet about the shape of … well, the plane(t).

An overly paranoid, scattered, disempowered, passive and demoralized state of a critical opposition would clearly be an asset to structures of power. The trick is to keep people within their emotional grooves despite them changing their minds:

When starting to consider scenarios discarded by most of the media and public, and especially when overshooting the mark and slipping into paranoia, the emotional signature often doesn’t change. The fear of a chaotic world with noone at the steering wheel gets replaced with the fear of an orchestrated world with someone at the steering wheel, just not a benevolent actor.

There’s not yet any change in how we feel about the world, no true inner paradigm shift. It’s like a second matrix that encloses the first one, holding hostage the minds and hearts of those who consider themselves red-pilled.

That’s not exactly what we’re after when looking for liberating insight.

Leaving the shore another time

Assuming a critical position all the way to the end would require us to hold any information and belief lightly.

That includes beliefs that affirm our cognitive biases and emotional needs. It would require the critical-thinking-bunch to suspect not just a hijack of mainstream narratives, but also their own set of ‘alternative’ narratives.

In my book, that’s a forcing conclusion if you try to truly understand the ways of power and to illuminate what’s notoriously under-lit. It’s a call to distribute skepticism equally across all sides, camps, and parties, and to never be too sure about what you think you know.

Since so much hinges on our ability to make sense of the world, communicate, cohere, and ultimately collaborate, this might turn out to be a crucial collective skill.

So should you happen to have entrenched youself just a little bit on the side of orchestration suspicions, then it might be time for a second departure. You’ve departed from a mainstream understanding of the world for a damn good reason, now you might be called to depart again:

Yes, you’re right, there’s a signal here.

But there’s also so much noise.

Using the openmindedness and sincerity in truth-seeking that might have once brought you to question established narratives in the first place, ask once more:

What’s truly true, what isn’t?

What theory have I ‘let in’ when I first looked into this cosmos that I now reflexively consider to be true – not from sound reasoning, but from habit?

Have I stopped to check what the ‘meta-signature’ of a particular theory is, how it hits my mind and how it affects my emotional disposition, maybe demoralizing, disempowering, or passifying me?

What have I accepted as true, not because it’s objectively true and passed a rigorous selection, but because it fulfilled an emotional need of feeling superior to ‘the sheep’, or affirmed a victim status that my sense of self depends on?

Which narratives have I accepted because they allowed me to project my psychological shadow, draw the line between good and evil between myself and ‘the elite’?

Would I be able to stomach it if there was something to ‘the sheep’s’ POV, something that I too squarely discarded in a hasty response to their ignorance?

Would I be okay if the truth turned out to be somewhere closer to the middle?

Am I willing to let the pendulum swing back to the center, the point of balance and true epistemological humility?

Or in the spirit of the initial metaphor:

Am I cool with my coin landing on its edge?

An inevitable detour

What happens if we go all the way and truly digest that there’s definitely something up, and unsurprisingly so?

The trick might be to see the inevitability in the lies of empire, to not be stumped by their existence like a child just learning – eyes wide and incredulous – that people do lie and that empires do so at scale.

What if we rather developed some grace in handling this kind of reality?

The trick might be to see the natural in the orchestrated, the inevitable and organic nature of our collective detour into what – at times – appears to be a rather ‘artificial’ and ‘inorganic’ age. I am not convinced that the course of any advancing species can look very differently. That chimpanzees or bonobos or gorillas would have had an entirely smooth ride all the way toward a Type 1 civilization if they had beat us in the evolutionary race toward planetary domination.

Chances are, any species that we today romanticize would have the capacity to act more concerningly if they had developed a brain capable not only of self-reflection and holistic thinking, but recursive loops of abstraction and self-alienation.

What we’re experiencing here appears to be a big cosmic cake with alternating layers of:

• The organic chaos of a world that’s ‘just happening’ as it trundles along

• The influential touch of centralized powers

One doesn’t exclude the other, but one is nested within the other:

Yes, there are dominant players that have outsized leverage over the human hivemind and the trajectory of our collective fate, but they’re inevitably affected by systemic pressures that force their hand.

In some way, they’re opportunists at best.

Even if some players in this world not only theorize conspiracies but practice them, it might be important to see them, too, as subject to a larger thing going on beyond all of our comprehension. If it’s true that »people don’t have ideas, ideas have people«, then those influential players might be captured and driven by something that exceeds their conscious comprehension just as much.

Neither am I saying that there’s no free will, nor am I freeing them of responsibility – but seeing it this way could positively influence how we respond emotionally.

This more cosmic perspective might help to respond to the ways of power – and the opportunity costs of war, greed, and manipulation – with somewhat of an open heart, not contempt and bitterness. It might help to sidestep the disempowering emotions that you might feel around these topics – that I experienced myself, sometimes still do, and that I see burning within many that ask these painful questions.

After all, bitterness only hurts ourselves and never really those we’re bitter about.

So how can we find a stance that would finally shift our emotional signature, away from fear, disempowerment, bitterness, contempt and ego … toward selfless contribution, lightheartedness, creation, and trust?

The power of »Yes, and …«

Let’s grow our capacity to consider yes, and notions.

We can admit to bits of plausibility on the other side without feeling like we’re turning naive, become one of them, or traitorously concede whatever appears to give form and function to our chosen side, camp, or party.

What if ‘sheep’ and ‘nutjobs’ talked to each other, and recognized that there are neither sheep nor nutjobs in the room, but people with temperaments, inclinations, and often understandable – if not thoroughly sound – reasons to place their trust the way they do.

Yes, there are buffoons.

Most people aren’t.

Can we please not lose track of that?

We need each other to advance the ball on collective sensemaking, to get a better feel for the reality we live in, and to have a shot at sustaining life worth living on this planet.

We can’t be torn and confused like this – whether it’s a result of an evolved modern-day application of divide and conquer, or simply a natural phenomenon of polarization without any evil intent or history of deliberate orchestration.

Given the complexity of the world we all share, who would be surprised if it turned out to be a mix of both?

The trickiness of this particular Earth-shaped puzzle might be that its own pieces have been convinced that they don’t belong to the same puzzle.

They’d hate it if it turned out that they did belong to the same puzzle, or even – god forbid – in adjacent spots: Finding a perfectly inverted outline with them and have a reason to … touch?

Ew.

But all of this fits together.

The space between us doesn’t just separate us so that we have fresh air to breathe, it connects us so that we can find the closure of uniting and synchronizing what appeared to be hopelessly torn.

If the act of un-dividing and re-attuning isn’t the signal that this wild age smuggles past its own incessant noise, then I don’t now what is.

Our ship is grounded here.

May we make this work?