Between knowledge and delusion

Between knowledge and delusion
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Conspiracy theories challenge existing paradigms. But when does healthy skepticism turn into delusion? And what does healthy activism look like?
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Hardly anyone would claim that the world as portrayed in the media is a reflection of an unalterable reality. No one would seriously deny that there are corrupt links between politics, science, and industry. Almost everyone would consider such an attitude naive. But the other end of the spectrum is more difficult to grasp: How far do the machinations of these elites go? Who are they, where do they come from? And why is such an attitude publicly discredited? Finally, at what point does a theory leave the realm of healthy skepticism?

by Marcus Zeller

[This article posted on 11/29/2023 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.manova.news/artikel/zwischen-wissen-und-wahn.]



Conspiracy theories are not necessarily a bad thing. They are hypotheses for finding the truth. Without conspiracy theories, there would be little progress. Christopher Columbus, Martin Luther, and Isaac Newton were conspiracy theorists in this sense, just like Galileo Galilei or Albert Einstein. Conspiracy theorists consider an existing paradigm to be a belief construct that has been deliberately installed or established out of ignorance and that must be questioned. In doing so, they pave the way for new insights. This cannot happen without resistance.

Conspiracy theories do not need to be combated, because over time they will inevitably be verified or falsified. It should therefore raise eyebrows when a term is used to stigmatize, generalize, and conveniently avoid discussion. After all, history teaches us that truth has always been shaped by authorities to suit their own purposes. What “propaganda” is in systems with totalitarian structures is perhaps ‘enlightenment’ in Western capitalist systems. So let us first examine the longing behind the desire for truth.

"The conscious and deliberate manipulation of the behavior and attitudes of the masses is an essential part of democratic societies. Organizations working behind the scenes control social processes. They are the real governments in our country. We are ruled by people whose names we have never heard. They influence our opinions, our tastes, our thoughts. But this is not surprising; this state of affairs is only a logical consequence of the structure of our democracy: if many people are to live together as smoothly as possible in a society, control processes of this kind are inevitable ..."

What begins like the introduction to a digression into conspiracy theories actually comes from Edward Bernays, the inventor of “public relations” or, as he called it, “propaganda,” and the book of the same name published in 1928.

The world should be understandable
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For thousands of years, humans lived in manageable worlds. The world around them was ordered by divine will, in which humans had a fixed place. Everyday life was oriented toward the cycles of nature, and human culture was embedded in these circular processes.

Despite the ever-present and unpredictable dangers such as natural disasters, accidents, and disease, such a world enjoyed great stability. Organized religion was the first to attempt to explain the world in a monocausal way through dogmatization and exclusion; in this sense, religions and sects could be described as conspiracy theories of the masses.

This stability no longer exists today. Our world has also lost its cyclical character; it is more like a line on which life is accelerating, and it is important to keep up with this pace in order not to be left behind. God has been virtually abolished and replaced by a scientific interpretation of the world. He exists only in the world of the individual, in the private sphere. Everything mythical and spiritual, the transpersonal and the supernatural, has no place in the general consensus.

Today, the human mind is—to put it polemically—the sole owner of the world.

It has “subjugated” it by believing that it can explain it completely. The mind “ventures into galaxies that no human has ever seen before,” to paraphrase the introduction to Star Trek.

Mechanisms of reality creation
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Is it even possible to grasp reality in this way? Is the mind the only “sharp” tool for further development? What is the goal of the development that is taking place at such an accelerated pace today? Does the “shuffling madness” have a goal at all, or has it become a self-perpetuating phenomenon? Or are we facing a staged theater play? Is there such a thing as a mind that rules this world beyond physics? Are we free, and is the existing system a healthy, organically grown result of social necessities?

These are questions that each individual must find answers to if they want to take a halfway serious stance. This seriousness and intellectual honesty are often lacking when it comes to explaining our world. We cannot remove ourselves from this equation. It is my own openness and tolerance, my curiosity and honesty, my fears and complexes that form my limitations.

The fact is that the world has become unmanageable. This vastness and complexity overwhelms the individual who is “thrown” into this world, as the philosopher Martin Heidegger put it. He is by no means free to shut himself off from its demands; he must, he is supposed to have an opinion on issues that only touch him superficially or have nothing to do with him at all, issues that he can neither influence nor comprehend in their entirety. They are expected to take a stand on the world, to be politically correct, to promote democracy, to think ecologically, and to act sustainably.

The idea of being able to explain the world completely, which is as old as humanity itself, can be considered megalomania.

Even if this idea is often relativized today, it is an indirect conviction, especially one that characterizes the natural sciences. Humans seek truth; it is part of their nature. When they feel free and their culture—and thus their worldview—is not threatened, they are tolerant. When things get “tight” because their worldview is attacked in public discourse or problems “spill into their living room,” so to speak, and they feel threatened by global issues, they begin to look for someone to blame. In doing so, they tend to overlook the fact that the intertwining and overlapping criteria have reached a level of complexity that can no longer be grasped and thus understood from a single perspective.

At this point, it becomes clear that information processing is never neutral, but always ties in with one's own favored worldview. “Facts” are always interpretable metrics that never stand alone. They are static points in a dynamic system.

This gives rise to opposing camps that not only believe they have the “facts” on their side, but also employ divisive rhetoric, accusing each other of “fake news” or “fake science” and adorn themselves with quotes from great thinkers (1). Blind to the fact that this standard could also apply to their own convictions, the world is divided in advance into “true” and “false,” with morality and integrity located only on their own side.

Reality as a temporary delusion
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Now the delusion begins, no longer generating purposeful explanations, but instead radiating—figuratively speaking—radially in all directions. The individual recognizes his helplessness, his insignificance in a cosmos that repeatedly shows him that it cannot be fully explained and cannot be reduced to the format of the human mind. But he does not want to give up his perceived privileged position. He cannot accept this affront.

Knowledge in the pure sense exists only on a narrow level. Facts do not explain processes, and observations represent only a particular point of view. The well-known psychologist and behavioral scientist Paul Watzlawick distinguished between first-order and second-order truths. First-order truths are conveyed to us directly through our senses—which are already filters, but that is beside the point here—and he described second-order truths as attributions based on our interpretation of reality. We usually speak of “second-order” truths when we talk about the world. By their very nature, these can only have the quality that corresponds to the cognitive, educational, and moral-ideological characteristics of our society. These characteristics form the invisible boundary of our imagination; they are the natural barrier of our mental integrity.

But this is precisely what conflicts with our inner longing for reliability, for one truth. And, please, one that is superior to all others! The more insecure people feel, the more radical the new models of explaining the world become. In the process, established worldviews are often radically overturned. The mind has only one goal: to confirm this truth.

In conspiracy, truth and delusion are closely intertwined, because the truth that has been believed up to now is being questioned—in some cases for good reasons. However, the “new truth” is based on hypotheses that are initially difficult to prove.

The conspirator must therefore detach himself from reality to a certain extent in order to develop and maintain his idea.

At this point, there is a danger of premature dogmatization, which is already a product of delusion. There are certainly a number of psychological effects, known as cognitive biases, that can be observed here. The Dunning-Kruger effect is often mentioned, whereby people with insufficient competence overestimate their own abilities and underestimate the abilities and knowledge of others. In so-called illusory correlation, connections are recognized where none actually exist, while in the clustering illusion, patterns are recognized where none exist. Belief bias is the effect whereby conclusions appear correct and conclusive even though there is no factual basis for them.

The homeless human being
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However, this does not sufficiently describe the depth of the phenomenon. To do so, we need to look at the bigger picture. The megalomania of humans, which is expressed in the dominance of their intellectual level described above, has its root cause in the desire for security.

The uncertainty of one's own existence, which is part of life, must be eliminated.

This uncertainty does not only come from the threat of global catastrophes or other cataclysmic changes, but has a deeper dimension: since humans in the modern world are no longer at the center of the cosmos, and this cosmos is perceived as a hostile, meaningless place of chance, humans no longer see themselves as deliberately created beings, wanted by God and endowed with meaning.

This affront causes two things: On the one hand, humans now stand isolated and abandoned in the cosmos and must apparently create their own raison d'être. On the other hand, they are no longer accountable to anyone higher. This means that everything is permitted: In addition to exploiting and abusing their home world, they can now completely detach themselves mentally, breaking free from their embeddedness in naturally existing orders.

They are also hardly in touch with their intuition, let alone their inner guidance. They have questioned everything and now enter a mental “free field.” Megalomania continues to judge, wants more, wants to know. In the process, the isolated mind has left the ground that was its home. The lifeless, hostile cosmos that has, so to speak, “ejected” him by chance is filled with intellectual material and thus equally limited. This material represents only the content of the available information, which, as we have seen, is usually already (pre-)interpreted and filtered. Moreover, it cannot be understood in its true meaning and context because it simply exceeds the limits of our cognitive abilities. No matter how “long” I stretch myself out on the beach, I will never be able to see beyond the horizon; it moves further away, no matter how hard I follow it.

‘True’ and “false” conspiracies
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So when does a conspiracy theory no longer serve the search for truth? The answer is simple: when it is presented as a given or a “fact” and must be defended with zeal. The modern “witch burnings” under the distortion of the judiciary and the concept of freedom are such indications of actual conspiracies: Certain elites want to establish a very specific truth that must be enforced even in the face of resistance. It is not the evidence of certain theories that carries the decisive weight, but the intention behind the theories. The arrogant defamation of dissenters and skeptics is also an indication of the prevalence of an artificial truth over a natural one.

Those who use the term “conspiracy theory” to stigmatize and devalue their critics thus unwittingly confirm its accuracy.

Those who use it pejoratively are most likely victims of “propaganda” in the sense of Edward Bernays.

The complexity of this world naturally extends to areas that are beyond the reach of reason. A wide variety of levels are interwoven there, and these entanglements and causalities themselves form new shapes and patterns, condition each other, and create a dynamic that is neither predictable nor comprehensible. Therefore, the transition from truth to delusion is always fluid, because what can be considered verifiable truth becomes blurred at its boundaries, becomes unclear, and ultimately disappears altogether. “Beyond the horizon, it goes on.” However, no one can say for sure whether this “on” is constructed by our minds or is real—that is, corresponding to reality.

Many dead ends have been explored, many ideas have been marketed in a sect-like, ideological manner, and a broad spectrum of exotic ideas has been presented to suit every taste. And the individual believes that they have done the thinking themselves, which is true to a certain extent. But the direction of thought is already fixed and ideologically constrained and anything but free. Above all, the “believer” is cut off from their own connection to the world.

Sects make use of these techniques. They provide holistic and sometimes complex explanations of the world, “truths” that are convincing because of their internal consistency (2). Both the sect leaders and the ‘little’ believers are “conspirators,” as are their opponents, who, with their distorted and fragmentary perceptions, overshoot the goal of true enlightenment. The mental stretching exercises that would be necessary for genuine tolerance are usually too much for both sides.

And so the conspirator is in possession of “the truth.” He has found a new faith; the world “out there” is hostile or misguided. That is why arguments do not work. A “believer” cannot answer the question of which argument he would accept. He is a prisoner of himself. What remains invisible to him is that he has once again become a victim of his ego, which does not see through itself and directs the show unnoticed. The ego needs to feel important in an overwhelming, incomprehensible, and questionably meaningful world. In the process, belief—in this case, the conspiracy—becomes a lifestyle.

If the conspirator really believed, he would accept the consequences and leave this world behind; he would opt out of the madness whose inhumanity he has recognized and would no longer support it with a single breath. He would realize that preaching has never changed anything. He would not need others to confirm or carry out his ideas. So: drop out, first mentally, then in reality, by treating this sick world as one would treat a sick person: with “hygiene and distance” (Klaus Koeppe). They would turn their back on it and—within the framework of a community, for example—create a world in which they could live.

Outer and inner freedom
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But just as a cult can only exist through its believers, every conspiracy, large or small, needs believers. The cult needs people who are faithful, inauthentic, and unfree. By identifying with the conspiracy, I become its victim. There is hardly any room left for my vision of the “good life” because I feel controlled and dependent on circumstances.

It is only in large and unmanageable contexts that people become a mass and thus manipulable. It is only in these dimensions that madness can be comprehensively and virtually invisibly established as normality.

As an individual, I can only step out of the crowd, but I cannot reproach it for its mass character. Nor will it lead to recovery to make suggestions for improvement within the masses or to point out the methods of their leaders as misleading. I must first detach myself from it and de-identify myself.

Every fight against the supposed and actual error and madness of the system gives power and existence to the opponent. The new may arise from the ruins of the old. But the conspiracy does not end with the victory of truth over it, but solely because the conspiracy is deprived of its foundation. Truth needs protagonists, not fighters. This is the call to all who truly believe in the possibility of a better world.

Sources and notes:

(1) A notable example is the well-known American literary critic Michiko Kakutani, who, in her 2019 book “The Death of Truth,” attacks “vaccine critics and climate deniers” and posits the existence of a “single objective truth,” quoting Hannah Arendt for her idea: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced communist or Nazi, but the person for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, between true and false, no longer exists” (from: “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” 1951).

(2) For further reading, please see my articles “The Sect Called System” (a comparison of the parallels between the two fields), available at https://ausstiegsberatung.com/gesellschaftskritik/die-sekte-namens-system/, or “The Sect System” (a psychological analysis of the sect phenomenon): https://ausstiegsberatung.com/psychologie/das-phaenomen-sekte-eine-religionspsychologische-analyse-oder-sekte-ueberall/

Marcus Zeller, born in 1973, is an educator. He grew up in a Christian fundamentalist sect. After leaving the sect, he studied the psychological mechanisms of self-manipulation and manipulation by others. Today, he lives as a carpenter and coach on La Palma in Spain. For more information, visit ausstiegsberatung.com.