The Conspiracy of Solopism
In the Ojibwa language the word for truth is actually an entire sentence. The word is commonly spoken as debwewin. Broken down the first part is de, which means to speak. The second, we, means to certain extent, to the limits of ones knowledge and ability. The last part, win, makes it a noun. Taken together it means to speak to a certain extent. This is the ancient native concept of truth for one group of people.
Consider the implication of this. That truth is not an absolute, and niether is it a subjective. Rather it is a construct of perception, and that perception is limited by the variables which exist in any human mind. It’s knowledge, beliefs, axiomatic presuppositions, emotions, points of view, all working seamlessly together to form a perspective which we see as the truth. In an abstraction based language like english, truth is something very different from the native concept. It’s a rigid and defined structure, it’s definition understood and contained within a predefined and agreed upon meaning codified in a dusty tome on a library shelf with the words Merriam Webster written in bold letters somewhere on the cover.
Understanding this structure helps us to take apart the modern phenomena of the conspiracy theorist. Whom to themselves see each other as purveyors of a truth to those who labor under a unifying mythos as dispensed by the mass media in all it’s myriad forms. For one part they are not entirely wrong, yet the extent to which they are correct and where that may lead them is purely an internal construction externally manifested.
The modern conspiracy theorist exists on a spectrum. To label them all under this single banner is in a sense to do them a disservice, however the abstract language we use limits us in the ways we can approach a shared understanding. So this blanket term is used in the way fish equally describes a shark and a blob of jelly floating aimlessly along in a vast and endless blue ocean. Sure they both breath water, but there is where any fair comparison ends. Of course there are many more if you ask a biologist, but hey, debwewin.
Conspiracy theorists very often themselves detest this moniker. It’s history is found in the assassination of JFK and the attempt to discredit as absurd and even insane those who refused to accept the official unifying mythos. However over time this name has been accepted and even embraced by those who might find themselves so labeled. Was there someone in the grassy knoll? I don't know, I can’t possibly know, and this is where the conspiracy theorist distinguishes themselves from many people, because they can insert a narrative that substitutes for first hand knowledge. For being in that bush in Dallas on that bright sunny day. They can know. That’s their super power. It doesn’t make them right, doesn’t make the belief they have come to hold the truth from another perspective, but that’s not the point. To them it is.
It is presumptuous to assume a conspiracy theorist to be irrational. In fact while some arguably may be the vast majority are in fact rational and highly intelligent people. Their beliefs formed in a rational analysis of data which taken on balance does not represent an entire picture. This is important because about this they are most certainly not wrong. Much of the information we receive through modern media is sculpted and molded to one degree or another, it’s not the raw data. It’s optimized for consumption for an audience with varying degrees of ability to understand and rationalize and designed to generate revenue through clicks and hard interactions or just by holding our attention through the commercial breaks.
However what that means in terms of motive and intention, what that implies about the society promulgating myths for mass consumption is a pure subjective assessment. It is this that demonstrates more than anything that the average conspiracy theorist is a solopist. They see trust as something that can not be easily tendered if ever at all, and while they have good and justifiable reason for thinking and feeling this way, it is none the less a reinforcing architecture for an inability to see truth as they understand it to be something which to them is freely given by anyone. Be it society, or the person next to them at the bar, the author of an essay, the nameless face behind the avatar on the internet. They can see there is a narrative layer to which they are denied, a substrate just beyond their grasp because the narrative they are being given is incomplete very much on purpose.
Thus average everyday people become those who don't get it. Those who are hypnotized by a process as ancient as a shaman waving a feather covered stick over a camp fire are engaged in a tribal behavior. Defined and codified since the ice age to keep people in check and under control.They accept blindly information which to the solopist does not remotely represent the truth because in may respects it doesn't. It is a wholesale rejection of a tribal mentality which, conversely, leads them directly into a set of tribal beliefs and behaviors all their own. In the rejection of the obvious tribal dichotomy, they become a tribe of one. And just like any tribe it needs validation to thrive, it needs veracity to persist in it’s own existence. This is found not in what’s said, but in what’s left unsaid, and this frees the solopist to insert at will those things which to them, from their own unique perspective, make the most sense if the axiomatic presupposition is that what they are being fed is done so on purpose for reasons not articulated and made apparant on the surface.
When we consider the many points of view on the COVID vaccine, we see people who have a rational distrust of a gene therapy constructed out of sythetic Mrna designed to rewrite the very structure of our cellular makeup. We also see people who think everything from it’s as harmless as water to those who believe it contains a secret technology of nanobots injected into the body to track and even control what people think. As with most things it’s a spectrum of nuances. We can argue the merits of rational and irrational beliefs as we understand them to be, but that is to miss the point. The point is that people are substituting the limits of their knowledge with a subjective construct, with a core element of the solopists inability to find veracity in information they are either given or don’t understand. Yet in the end many of them, most of them, will roll up their sleeves when it comes their turn because the limits of their compartmentalized knowledge leaves room for what they cannot know. Leaves space for the off chance that they in their own perception may be wrong. This makes them less of a conspiracy theorist and more of a rational actor who behaves in a way which aligns with their own self interests.
When we look up at the night sky we can pick out many constellations. My favorite is Orion, the hunter from Greek mythology. Comprised of many stars the four main are Betelgeuse, Bellatrix, Saiph and Rigel. They form the corners in a roughly trapezoidal rectangle while the stars across the middle form his belt and sword. Easily spotted in the night sky the alignment of these bodies form a pattern which has fascinated mankind throughout all of human history. It can be found on everything from cave walls to Egyptian tombs, from the Bible to Babylon. Yet it is only this pattern from our particular point of view on our rapidly spinning blue mudball hurtling through the cosmos. The debwewyn is these bodies are in no way related to each other. They are separated by billions upon billions of miles of vast and empty space. If we were to move from the side of our spinning viewpoint up into the sky and beyond the confines of our solar system and look again we wouldn’t see the image of a mighty hunter ever drawing back a massive eternal bow. What we would see would be something perfectly random and disconnected. The pattern we could once discern scattered across the sky like a hand full of shining marbles tossed pell mell by God himself, or herself. The pattern of which we were once so sure of we could sail ships across a tractless ocean by it would disappear into the scattered stars.
It is precisely this penchant for humankind to see patterns in disparate and disconnected objects that are at the heart of what drives conspiracy theorists. They see patterns, sometimes better than anyone, and even though the objects or bits of information from which they construct this pattern may be as unrelated as stars with light years of empty frozen vacuum between them they nonetheless see a pattern, and therefore are driven to understand it. to assign it meaning from their own limited extent of knowledge and experience. What they perceive as truth is a memetic representation of a pattern to which they must themselves assign meaning because they are the only ones who can do it, they can't trust others to do it for them. If others have done it then it needs to resonate with them on some level that usually involves a basic agreement that they can't trust something they understand or equally something they do not.
Understanding what drives a conspiracy theorist to internalize what could be arguably described as objectively absurd is important because even the concept of objectivity itself is limited to a shared and agreed upon base of knowledge and awareness and at any time that may not itself necessarily constitute the truth in the Merriam Webster sense, but in the debwewin sense. These are not crazy people who harbor arbitrary beliefs, they are rational intelligent people who take a solopistic approach to understanding the world they see around them. Who reject axiomatic presuppositions spoon fed to them by a society they have learned cannot and should not be trusted. Who tend to add layers of subjective complexity because they know some form of complexity exists and they are substituting something they can't or don't know for something that they do. Themselves.
We can't and shouldn't judge them. Neither should we dismiss them out of turn as nutjobs bent on turning the world upsidedown for their own purposes. They like us are regular people who spend their transient existence trying to understand their place in a universe so vast it strains the imagination to concieve of in any real sense. Once we begin to see the conspiracy theorist as they are, people who are straining against the bonds which constrain them to find some sense of truth in the world, we can begin to discuss degrees of shared awareness and agreed upon knowledge. To portray ourselves as part of that shared calculation so that cannibalism doesn't seem like a rational explanation for the behavior of some politician whose policies we tend to disagree with for reasons we ourselves may not be completely aware of. It’s a simultaneous holding a belief of both importance to exist in the same universe as the stars while at the same time reconciling that against the feeling of total irrelvance and a distrust of things which exist beyond the scope of anyones individual experiences. That truth is neither something we get to judge from anothers perspective or something we may never really get to know ourselves and that what we have, all any of us really has, all any of us can really know, is debwewin.
Thanks to Griz for giving me the motivation and gentle nudges I needed to stretch my legs and write.