In his Substack article "Discrediting Our Cause" (7 Aug., 2023) James Delingpole takes to task those fence-sitting "purple pillers" who, he claims, though themselves partially red-pilled, effectively sabotage our attempts to create awareness of government lies by cherry-picking for public endorsement only those they deem palatable, while still dismissing as absurd those others which they judge too outlandish to be taken seriously. Thereby, he points out, they encourage the logical fallacy that "if a person thinks A then they must perforce be wrong about B", further discrediting the source by false association, and unjustifiably appropriating the role of judge with their unfounded assumption that the stranger the theory the less likely it is to be true.
If you have accepted the truth of even one conspiracy theory, no matter what it is, moon landings, JFK, whatever, then you have abnegated the right to declare any other conspiracy off limits.
The reason for this is simple. You have already acknowledged that there are forces out there so corrupt, powerful, devious, entrenched and malign that they have happily and gleefully lied to you about something really big. And if they happily and gleefully lied to you about one really big thing, who are you to say that they haven’t happily and gleefully lied to you about lots of other really big things (and small things) too?
Yes, sure, you can be agnostic about this or that other ‘conspiracy theory’. But what you can no longer do is be dogmatic about its falsehood – at least not until you’ve put in the necessary research, and perhaps not even then.
continuing -
What usually happens to the purple-pilled when this logical sloppiness has been pointed out to them is that they retreat to their second line of defence.
“Well... we just shouldn’t go there because it just frightens off the Normies and we need to focus on the issues that matter.”
But this line of defense is at least as weak as the first.
It presupposes that there are commonly agreed ‘issues that matter.’ But there is no such common agreement – as we saw, inter alia, during the ‘Pandemic.’
In the name of pragmatism and unity – ‘Let’s not frighten the horses’, ‘We need to build a broad coalition’, etc – the resistance movement was hijacked by a claque of suspiciously well-organized activist groups like Together which declared that certain areas of discussion should be off limits.
Apparently, it was OK to campaign on issues like ‘vaccine mandates’ and the importance of bodily autonomy. But questioning the safety or efficacy of these ‘vaccines’, or the malign nature of the corrupted institutions pushing them, or the agenda behind the ‘vaccines’, was deemed a step too far because such ‘unproven conspiracy theories’ might alienate potential allies.
OK, it's true that one confirmed conspiracy that was previously merely a contemptible theory undoes all the pretended logic behind continuing to bad mouth other theories still unredeemed. But it’s not really logic that the world runs on, so much as common sense, and the sanity which that collective agreement confers on its adherents. As one staunch blue-piller has objected to me as I regaled him with yet another “theory”; “Yes, but is it likely?” We inescapably evaluate all new evidence in the existential light of the “facts” we already believe, and by no other means. From where I stand theory X is indeed likely. From his it simply isn’t, and if I insist on him admitting to it as a theoretical possibility, well, our friendship is likely to suffer, because friendship and community and trust all depend on things – sense – we have in common. What we have in common is the defining character of our group, whether family, fellow hobbyists, religious brothers, comrades-in-arms, or even physicists. There is always a group orthodoxy, its center of gravity, whose affirmation confirms our membership, while its repudiation brands us heretics, or rank disbelievers.
It’s not that we don’t know everything. It’s that we don’t know anything. Our group membership is our only claim to knowledge! What we describe as "truth" is what we collectively currently believe. Our task is always to gain adherents; to convince as many significant others as possible to agree with us, in order to validate our belief by pointing to its popularity. Now there’s a heresy for you, but there’s no escaping that there’s safety, or at least reassurance in numbers. The truth is not the truth unless and until significant influencers believe it. At that point it becomes true – for now. Those outside the fold identify themselves precisely by their unbelief in our truths. We validate our truth by fighting, and winning, by whatever means available. Might is right – another heresy which unfortunately appears to be “true” for now, and perhaps for the foreseeable future.
TV talking heads know which side their bread is buttered, which (as Ambrose Bierce quipped) is the purpose of deliberation. Martyrs who fearlessly bare all their unorthodox beliefs may or may not in time be vindicated. The rest of us mostly go along to get along.
Pablo
