I tell a friend some piece of information he doesn't know - and he accuses me of making it up. I'm sure we've all experienced this.
"That can't be true," he says. You reply: "but you didn't even let me finish speaking. You don't yet know and already that makes it a lie? Are you in possession of all the facts... about everything... and all possible interpretations of those facts?"
Effectively he is saying "That can't be true because I don't know it. It is not included in the information I have been told." This comes with an awful social pressure, a strain on our friendship, because he is implying that I must edit my knowledge so it comports with his. I am supposed to delete this information from my brain because HE does not know it.
This vignette illustrates that "conspiracy theorist" is a mental precept, a "general rule intended to regulate behaviour or thought." It is in the mind of the beholder.
The definition of conspiracy theorist is not based in science, but psychology certainly does confirm the appeal to authority. Whatever the father figure says must be true, is what holds the schooled masses in cognitive dissonance.
People processed through the school system are taught what to think, not how to think. That which is true can only be what they’ve been told. On meeting someone who thinks differently, they “discount their arguments without ever looking at the evidence” - exactly as Iain Davis writes in his excellent article, A Conspiracy Theorist Confesses https://off-guardian.org/2020/06/03/a-conspiracy-theorist-confesses/
Conspiracy theory is “an umbrella term for a huge array of ideas and beliefs” because it represents everything “out there” — anything that does not fit what the schooled masses have been told to think.
Conspiracy theory is how the schooled masses cope with the unknown. It exists only in their head as a way of seeing us.
To put it brutally, you cannot kill conspiracy theories by killing those who seek to convey information. The unfathomable would still be there. You would have to kill the masses in order to kill the idea of conspiracy theory. Or at least render them unable to think.
Maybe that's why the Khmer Rouge or Stalin's henchmen could never complete the purge. The killing fields extended to infinity.
So many of the victims were completely innocent yet could be forced to confess. They had not conspired but the concept of conspiracy did exist in their minds and could be extracted under torture. The final, cruel insult is that the authorities had implanted those ideas in their minds. It was the government that concocted conspiracies of wreckers, saboteurs, fifth columnists and the "running dogs of imperialism" and the media that pumped them into the public mind.
We “out there” are the imaginary conspiracy theorists. That is simply how schooled masses describe what they don’t understand: also called the circles of darkness.
As Iain writes, it was after WWII that academics began to push the idea that non-conformists were conspiracy theorists. “Questioning authority, and certainly alleging that authority was responsible for criminal acts, was deemed to be an aberration of the mind.”
The 1940s was exactly the time when public education had been universalized in order to narrow the mind. It is no coincidence that this came after two bouts of wartime propaganda.
The Reece committee of 1953 was set up precisely in response to this narrowing of the public mind. The recollections of its chief investigator Norman Dodd provide evidence that the tax-exempt foundations representing America’s wealthiest families, had decided that the Western world needed compliant workers, educated to the degree required to do their jobs and no further. This project had begun half a century before and was tested in China before it was fully imposed on the United States. https://book.douban.com/annotation/34355932/
As early as the 1880s, Charles Francis Adams, of the presidential family, wrote: ”What was being fashioned for children destined to be caught in the proposed school net combined the characteristics of the cotton mill and the railroad with those of a state prison."
Looking Backward: 2000–1887 was a utopian novel by Edward Bellamy (1888). Much admired by Rockefeller and John Dewey, it openly disdained literacy which they blamed for individualism. Dewey went on to attack primary education in the The Primary-Education Fetich (sic). Dewey was as good as his word: he went on to destroy literacy through his quackery of Look, Say, turning generations of children into dyslexics, including all of J.D. Rockefeller's.
“We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.” ― Woodrow Wilson, president of Princeton 1902-1910, of USA 1913-1921.
This social engineering extended of course to academia. In the rough and tumble of academia, as opposed to the ordered curriculum of school, this could only be achieved by promoting the careers of compliant academics and authorized historians. That is exactly what happened.
The minutes of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace concluded: "We must build our own stable of historians." They approach the Guggenheim Foundation and the minutes show that they ask, "When we find young men in the process of studying for doctorates in the field of American history and we feel they are the right caliber will you grant them fellowships on our say so."
“Transcript of Norman Dodd Interview”
1982 A.D.
with
G. Edward Griffin
Is it a surprise that the people who conspired to direct education in their own interests - convicted by their own words - should use that very system to cover their tracks?
Authors who have described the activities of Rockefeller, Carnegie and Ford include: Charlotte Iserbyt "The Deliberate Dumbing Down Of America"; John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down; Samuel Blumenfeld, Crimes of the Educator.
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