Sunday 9 August 2020

Conspiracy Theories

I have always fought shy of conspiracy theories for several reason. Many of them seem far-fetched and the product of eccentrics with bees in their bonnets who home in on only one aspect of the contemporary world. I have also probably been more influenced than I should have been by the sophisticated attitude that loftily sneers at people with tinfoil helmets and knows so much better because we're all rational now, aren't we? Mostly, though, it is because conspiracy theories are normally focused on the political and my interests have always been in the spiritual.

But there are multiple problems with this approach. For one thing, the Bible, especially the New Testament and specifically the Book of Revelation, is one long conspiracy theory. If you are a Christian, a real one, then you are a conspiracy theorist. No two ways about it. We live in a world of spiritual warfare in which demonic powers seek to corrupt God's creation, in particular that most important part of it which is the human race. 

The second reason is of more recent development. The political has seeped over into the spiritual using that word to describe the essential part of what makes human beings human. The dreadful lie, Marxist in origin and now universal in the ideology of the left, that everything is political has taken root everywhere and is believed because the spiritual has been more or less chased off the face of the Earth, certainly insofar as it might have any meaning or real relevance to life. Everything is really spiritual but everything has been made political now. This means that a spiritually concerned person has to take note of what is going on in the world today and cannot retreat to a position of inward detachment.

The third reason I have become drawn to the conspiracy theory point of view is the present time. In all seriousness, how can anyone not look at what has happened to the world over the last few months and fail to see the deep manipulation of human beings that makes them participants in their own enslavement? We are actively encouraged to fear each other, stay away from each other and cover our faces or be shamed. Last night I stood on a station platform waiting for a train in the open air as announcements were made that failure to comply with mandatory mask-wearing in all areas of the station would result in fines of one hundred pounds. This didn't appear to be enforced and a number of people paid no attention but the fact that this authoritarian announcement could be made unchallenged is extraordinary. The only reason I can come up with is that we have been so softened by relentless propaganda over the last 100 years that we are easy pickings unless we have some solid grounding in religion and by that I mean, as far as the West is concerned, Christianity. Other contemporary spiritual approaches will not save us from sin and evil because they can all be accommodated into those things. Only the light of Christ is strong enough to resist them which, by the way, is a very good argument for the truth of Christ.

Who are the most vilified people in the modern world? I'll give you a clue. It's the group who are most likely to resist the corrupt and dehumanising ideology of the modern world. The ones who built the civilisation that is currently being destroyed and who are painted as oppressive and cruel. Many of these people are also among the destroyers because they see some personal advantage to be gained but this group is also the place where you will find the greatest number willing and able to fight for freedom and truth, and that is why they must be undermined and are presented as fundamentally selfish and wicked. Conspiracy theory? Maybe, but I submit it's also true.

In the past I have, for reasons given above, inclined towards the popular view that things go wrong more because of human stupidity and greed than because of some dastardly plot. And if you are looking at the picture from a this worldly, purely human perspective, that may well be so. But you cannot just look at things from that perspective. The real plot is supernatural. The relatively long time span during which all the pieces have been manoeuvred into place proves that even if nothing else does. Plenty else does though. There has been a relentless whittling away at spiritual truths and their replacement with anti-spiritual and, more recently, anti-natural values, if values is even the right word. For they are actually non-values whose only real purpose is to oppose real values. But they have become accepted because we have lost our moorings in transcendent reality so have no grounding in anything real. We can be pushed in any direction because nothing actually means anything. This is always the case when a society loses faith in God. And that means that such a society is destined to go. It will collapse either from external attack or internal decay or both.

In the immortal words of Private Fraser (a terminally pessimistic sitcom character from the 1970s for non-British readers), "We're doomed!". Things will not get better. They will continue to deteriorate. But this is actually a cause for optimism. There is nothing eternal in this world and not meant to be but when outward things are this bad it means, paradoxically, that God is not far away. He is causing us to turn away from the wreckage of this world and towards him, the only place where truth and goodness and real beauty abide everlastingly. As the world descends further into lies and spiritual oppression and most people accept that because it appears to offer them safety and security and they have no faith in anything higher, remember that. When the world turns dark we must hold fast to our inner knowledge of the light that shines just beyond its horizon.

17 comments:

denise said...

I hope you summer break was refreshing. I am glad you have returned. I enjoy your bog.
Peace, Denise

Adil said...

As a teenager, I was extremely drawn to conspiracy theories. I had noticed there was something 'wrong' with the world, and conspiracy theories gave convenient answers that also satisfied a mystical yearning. Now that I look back at it, the conspiracy theories actually usurped a spiritual longing I had. When you think about it, conspiracy theories usurp spiritual narratives and thus become parasitic on people's religious sensibilities. Instead of seeing evil in the supernatural it seeks to replace demons with shady elites and banksters. So the "Illuminati" becomes all about money and power, and off we go into the old Marxist storyline. The fact that we live in a spiritual reality with a symbolic narrative seems lost on the CT crowd - because they are mislead materialists who only look for outer facts. Of course, some conspiracies surely make clear that we are ruled by the shape shifting lizard people, but they just end up mocking the spiritual. Conspiracies of course happen every day, and it's natural for a healthy male mind to try to detect anomalies, but in our domesticated clown world it has become impossible the question our existential condition and the intentions of our elites, which is a mark of sleepwalking insanity. In broad daylight, we are now witnessing open air corona rituals and black masses to the invisible dark overlords. Things are converging and coming together. We must remain acutely aware of this dire reality, but remain calm. As you have said, there may come a time where we must begin to show explicit non-compliance, but as of now we should lay low. Our civilization has reached a new dystopic milestone much faster than I could've imagined.

William Wildblood said...

Thanks Denise. Just a week in Cornwall but I saw some dolphins on a little boat trip which was a new experience for me. Seals as well which looked like startled puppies.

Yes Eric, good point about mainstream conspiracy theories substituting material beliefs for the spiritual. But now the two seem to be coalescing though the direction is all demonic of course.

Adil said...

@William

Yes, they usurp religious symbolic content and apply it onto a material context which ends up making a caricature of both the spiritual symbols and the material situation at hand. Basically a demoralizing ersatz religion that incentivizes unjustified paranoia.

Moonsphere said...

Very true William, recent events certainly lend weight to many "global takeover" conspiracy theories.

I was surprised how angry I was when I learned that TV detector vans never existed. It was just a convenient little hoax - a cheap way of scaring the little people into buying a TV licence. Doubtless we were supposed to laugh indulgently at this quintessentially British, middle class white lie - but I found no humour in it.

William Wildblood said...

I didn't know detector vans never existed. What a horrible deceit.

Bruce Charlton said...

@William - As always, the Left Establishment projects its own behaviour onto enemies - even when the enemies don't really exist.

For example, the whole Western world is crazed with antiracism - and the vast, shodowy, powerful "supremacists" they oppose are a pure conspiracy theory - extrapolated from a mere handful of instances -- many faked, many invented, some agents provocateurs, many from fiction, many from the past.

When was the last time you saw real, explicit 'racism' by anyone European with power or influence; or any significant group organised on such lines? The real racism is entirely - obviously, explicitly, proudly - on the other side.

The truth is places like England were By Far the least racist societies in the history of the world - at least until the antiracists began to lie systematically, to foment hatred and violence. Yet, racism was/is supposed to be the number one problem in the entire West! (Or, it is No. 1 from time to time, in rotation with sexism, global warmisng and the various '-phobias'...)

The use of the conspiracy theorist slur has increased in line with the actual, obvious conspiring of the Establishment to harm the masses - and those who resist them.

MagnusStout said...

"Only the light of Christ is strong enough to resist them which, by the way, is a very good argument for the truth of Christ."

Excellent point & post.

I've been thinking about why this battle must be waged spiritually (as opposed to merely pushing "good" secular politics). An example: take Harry Vox, a leftist who has been one of the few to predict the tyranny of lockdowns (you can Google a video he gave in New York in 2014). He seemed to be following the logic of the Rockefellers (and other globalists) as to where society was heading.

Vox has been right about a lot, but without Christ he seems to be getting more bitter & despondent. It does not seem possible--in practice--to remain an effective secular conspiracy theorist and oppose The System. The machinations of supernatural evil are too much for mere mortals; the Good News is the only thing powerful enough to overcome the Evil of Project Despair.

William Wildblood said...

That is definitely true, Magnus. A secular right is too full of contradictions to be of any long-term use and will eventually be absorbed by the System. I see more and more clearly that the only thing that can resist this onslaught is Christ, and he will not only resist it but utterly defeat it if we give him our allegiance.

Ingemar said...

William and MagnusStout,

I've noticed that there are almost no materialist-atheists in conspiracy circles. They are all devout Christians, devout Muslims or New Age. For the New Agers, the reason they don't choose the monotheistic religions is because they condemn them as being tools for the cabal.

But materialist-atheism is a non-starter for all of them because it is a metaphysical blinder that opens one up to spiritual exploitation.

William Wildblood said...

Ingemar, probably true. I do think though that the problem with most conspiracy theorists is that, even if they have spiritual beliefs, the spiritual aspect of their beliefs tends to take a back seat to the political aspects which is the opposite of what should be.

JMSmith said...

It is significant that the etymological meaning of the word conspire is to move (or be moved) by the same spirit or breath. This tells me that all conspiracies are fundamentally spiritual, although I'd be hard pressed to give a precise explanation of what that means. My best attempt would start with the Christian concept of repentance, which indicates that the wind (breath) is blowing out of a new quarter and one is now sailing (moving) in a different direction. Thus a conspiracy may be likened to a flotilla of sailboats that is moving in the same direction under the same wind. The crew on each ship may trim the sail or adjust the sail, but the common wind decides where they are going.

Anonymous said...

A few weeks ago there was a protest in Germany (Berlin) against the lockdown measures.
It was barely reported, but mention was made of there being 20,000 present.
'Good', I thought, and looked it up online.
The videos I saw showed that the number of participants was clearly far, far in excess of 20,000, and was clearly in the hundreds of thousands.
There were hundreds of comments, from people who stated that they were present, who gave the story that the police had said that in the early stages of the protest there were half a million, and that this rose to over one million later on. A figure of 1.3 million was given by the organisers.
But by the following day (Sunday) all of the large news organisations had reduced the figures to 20,000.
Dozens of videos corroborating the large attendance were still up there at the time - many of them are gone now and some appear to have been deleted by youtube rather than the uploaders (as youtube are stating onthe links).

I read some 'official' articles relating to the event from the news in the days leading up to it - they stated that the 'Far Right'/'Far Left' were organising a conspiracists march against the lockdown measures.
The participants were anything but either (one attendee stated that you cannot organise anything without elements from these groups trying to usurp these events for their own purposes, but he estimated their presence to be less than on-in-a-thousand of the marchers. An 'antifascist' counter-protest had assembled at one point along the route, who were left looking very foolish when thousands of very ordinary German men, women and children chanted anti-nazi slogans back at them).

The scale of this event is undoubtable - though I would be very grateful if some German readers of this blog who might have more information could contribute some more direct knowledge and experience of the event and its coverage in the media.
Whether or not there were 1.3 million I don't know, but the deleted footage I viewed certainly showed and event in the high hundreds-of-thousands.

So we have a very large and very notable event that is intrinsically concerned with the biggest and most central of contemporary global concerns that has been as close to being written out of history as you can get.

It is absolutely true that 'Conspiracy' is at the heart of politics and media.

Anonymous said...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GlXxU1b3dXs

William Wildblood said...

Very interesting. Here in the UK the mainstream media is almost entirely pro all the lockdown measures and has been whipping up coronavirus scare-mongering since it first came out of China.

Anonymous said...

Today in Berlin -

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oFhuqRDoeXk

& London -

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=goFeE-CgwAA

Not everyone is asleep, it seems !

Unknown said...

A few years ago I spoke on the telephone with a tv licence representative, I explained I didn't have a tv! He continued to tell me we can tell if you are watching a tv set because of the signal down the wire!! I knew he was trying to frighten me and politely said goodbye.