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“Thought for the Month
3.11.93 Jia Shen, Year of the Monkey

I don’t believe anything, but I have many suspicions.

I strongly suspect that a world “external to,” or at least independent of, my senses exists in some sense.

I also suspect that this world shows signs of intelligent design, and I suspect that such intelligence acts via feedback from all parts to all parts and without centralized sovereignity, like Internet; and that it does not function hierarchically, in the style an Oriental despotism, an American corporation or Christian theology.

I somewhat suspect that Theism and Atheism both fail to account for such decentralized intelligencce, rich in circular-causal feedback.

I more-than-half suspect that all “good” writing, or all prose and poetry that one wants to read more than once, proceeds from a kind of “alteration in consciousness,” i.e. a kind of controlled schizophrenia. [Don't become alarmed -- I think good acting comes from the same place.]

I sometimes suspect that what Blake called Poetic Imagination expresses this exact thought in the language of his age, and that visits by “angels” and “gods” states it an even more archaic argot.

These suspicions have grown over 72 years, but as a rather slow and stupid fellow I do not have the chutzpah to proclaim any of them as certitudes. Give me another 72 years and maybe I’ll arrive at firmer conclusions.”

(från http://www.rawilson.com/main.shtml)

Jo, jag har äntligen, efter många år och men, påbörjat Illuminatus-trilogin.

Som kretsar väldigt mycket kring konspirationsteorier; vad Sebastian Lütgert har att säga om ämnet är intressant:

“konspirationsteorier.

Mycket, mycket viktiga! Paranoia är ett absolut giltigt, användbart, produktivt, månglovande och nödvändigt koncept. Om vi ska ha teorier ska vi även ha konspirationsteorier; det är ytterst sällsamt att folk oftast är mycket mer kritiska mot konspirationsteorier än mot alla andra sorters teorier. Precis som science klarast kan framställas som science fiction, blir politics klarast framställt som politics fiction. Burroughs!”

Även Hakim Bey kan ha nåt att säga:

“I love conspiracy theory. I make some use of it in my work but I try to keep it on a metaphorical level and not to get carried away and become a literal believer in anyone’s conspiracy for a number of reasons. Because first there is an old problem, with which even Tolstoi was dealing with – is whether history is made by great individual human beings, who act on history, or whether history is made by great unconscious surges of economic and social movements, that are far greater and broader than any individual. So that Napoleon is simply the one who is carried on the front of this wave. Rather than being a leader he is actually pushed forward by the wave of history.The great-men theory of history is a very dangerous trap and clearly if you believe literally in conspiracy theory, then you are believing in the great-men-theory. You are believeing that a very small group of very brilliant individuals who can actually conspire to change history, usually to their advantage.

XXX: Like Bill Gates?

H.Bey: For example. Is he the leader of this thing or is he just pushed forward on the wav e of some kind of techno-economic development and if it was not Bill Gates it would be someone else. Robert Anton Wilson likes to quote: “When it is steam engine time it steam engines.” Like when it is time to rain it rains. When it is time for steam engines some vast IT produces the steam engine. In fact we know plenty of examples where the same scientific discovery is made simultanously by five or six people within minutes around the world. Not because of some Jungian archetypal anima floating around but because science got to that point. And five or six people were smart enough to realise it right away. There is also the point that the first working steam engine was actually built on an incorrect scientific theory, if I am not mistaken. It was made by someone who thought he was doing one thing but actually did something else alltogether and it just happened to be a steam engine. That happens plenty of times too.

The problem with conspiracy theory is to believe that there is one particular group of human beings who are in control of my destiny. That’s a philosophical extreme to which I don’t wanna go. On the other side it’s obvious that people do conspire. That there are conspiracies, secret forces behind outward political shows of power.It is clear that there is not one single known politician in America who has any real power at all. They are simply working for big corporations and economic interests like oil, or the global market itself. The best model is, that there are many, at least several conspiracies and that they interlock, that they compete, that they melt into each other, that they separate
from each other. If we wanna know what’s going on, if we wanna understand history as it is happening we should know something about these conspiracies. Again critical consciousness is a useful tool here.”