"...it has to start with perception, at some point people just have to see [the truth about September 11, 2001]."


As Thomas Huxley concluded a lecture on Darwin, he was immediately accosted by a little, old lady who challenged him to refute her conviction that the world, which was flat, rested on the back of a turtle. Before Huxley had a chance to respond, the lady concluded:

"I know what you are going to ask, Mr. Huxley, and the answer is ‘turtles all the way down.’"

The question of course being "but what does the turtle stand on." What for Huxley (or Bertrand Russell in another version) is an obvious "gotcha" is no problem for the little old lady, who is not put off by the idea of infinite regression. That vertigo of the depths that puts so many people off at the idea of infinite recursion, or for that matter an infinite universe, also keeps them from wanting to see too far into the depths of the deception and manipulation that came to their most intense focus on 9-11.

By an odd dynamic, stopping short of seeing the full strangeness and perversity of 9-11 actually makes one an agent of the ongoing cover-up (in some cases a witting agent, but usually not). By the act of staking out a claim to one particular level among the many limited fallback stories and rejecting everything beyond that as a conspiracy theory, one becomes a gatekeeper, saying in effect "the outer limit of acceptable consensus reality ends here." This allows the gatekeeper to encourage others to take action that would seem rational based on that particular fallback position: e.g. simple incompetence==>vote them out. But these are all safe channels for the energies of protest, guaranteed to make some people feel better but have no effect on the outcome.

The underlying problem is cognitive dissonance, and the attachment people feel to their particular model of the world. The human brain is wired in such a way that the highest-level construct, the "world view," is very hard to change. Changing higher-level assumptions about the world has a lot of practical consequences and cannot be undertaken lightly by creatures in an environment of relative scarcity, where a less-than-optimal survival strategy could lead to death.

But we live in a largely human-made world that can change much more quickly than the natural world we are adapted to, and because of that our "ontological conservatism" can work against us. We live in a world based on artificial abundance that dulls our survival instincts, and creates a new mediated reality whose fundamental structure can change almost overnight. That great stack of turtles receding into the abyss may in fact be finite, but for practical purposes it might as well be infinite. Only a willingness to accept that there could be one more level of deception beyond what we have understood will allow us to find the real contours of this all-encompassing fake reality that is attempting to control us all.


Plague Puppy