Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
The existence of conspiracies, current and historic, is uncontroversial. (as we all agree)
OK, then we are, to an extent, on the same page. It's just a bit odd that you feel the need to contradict me so often and so vociferously when we largely agree on the fundamentals. I wonder if it's mainly a question of language and style rather than content.
The internet is laying bare the collective unconscious and it is as fascinating as it is horrifying.
Laying it bare, yes, but also playing a huge role in shaping it in the first place - or rather, reshaping it, from one year to the next.
I consider it to be hubristic to assume that one has a better grasp on reality than anyone else. This is the basis of my railing against ‘common sense’ which is just an unwillingness to examine underlying and often unconscious assumptions.
Now this is where I have to disagree. I don't think it's hubristic for me to think I have a better grasp on reality than someone who thinks global warming is a con perpetrated by the Chinese state, or that vaccines cause autism. I'm happy to accept that there are many things I don't know, and that even that some things I think I know are probably false, but the relativism of worldview you're talking about cannot lead anywhere but madness. I cannot accept that the statement "The Earth is 6,000 years old" is equivalent to, or just as useful, or just as good, as the statement "The Earth is some billions of years old". I don't think "The Earth is flat" is on an equal footing with "The Earth is roughly spherical", or, for that matter, "The Holocaust is a Jewish hoax" is on an equal footing with "The Holocaust was a real event".
What's interesting is the extent to which this "Nothing is True..." gambit is being used, and with an undeniable degree of success, by forces in world politics - the very real-life conspiracies you allude to - which are overwhelmingly reactionary in nature. This is coming simultaneously from the well-oiled alt-right lie machine that helped put Donald Trump in the White House, and the constant stream of dezinformatsiya emanating from their opposite numbers in the Kremlin and their various fronts and organs. It seems pretty obvious to me that placing some sort of value in empiricism and objective truth is likely to be a good weapon for counteracting all this. You don't have to make it the only thing that matters to you, but at least not dismissing it out of hand might be wise at this point.
Basically, much of what you've written here rings true, although you lose me again when you go all "if you can't rearrange matter, force and spacetime at will through your Third Eye like I can, then you're not as good as me" - that stuff just reminds me of zhao at his most pompous and risible. It's also ironic given your constant railing against smugness, hubris, condescension and so on, and just makes me want to say physician, heal thyself. (Please don't take that as an attack on imagination per se - just a recognition that it is by amplifying and manipulating the public's imagination that so many conspiracies are perpetrated in the first place, and it's only by causing these lies to snag on the hard, sharp rock of something real that they can eventually be unravelled. You can't fight them just by using your own imagination in the opposite direction.)
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