What is the relationship between fake news and mythology?
Religious myths, conspiracy theories, and new gnosticisms.
First a definition, so we all start on the same page. A definition of fake news:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_news
But what about myth? The term has acquired several, sometimes contradictory meanings. In the post-Enlightenment era (19th century and beyond), myth has come to mean a false - "primitive", "superstitious" or "pre-scientific" - description or narrative of the world. Traditionally though, stories that we today call myths - at least the Great Myths of religion - were taken as absolute truths in much the same way that a modern rationalist believes in the statement "two things plus two things gives four things".
Myths in the traditional - religious - sense were critically important parts of human psychic architecture. They situated the person in a universe full of sense, meaning and purpose. (In practice, the purposes of some of the hypothesized entities - spirits of the enemies one killed, nature spirits, offended divinities - could be quite malevolent.) The animistic universe of ancient hunter-gatherer peoples was a world full of life, purpose and intent. One placated angry gods, one offered sacrifices to obtain their favor in enterprises. We have forgotten how revolutionary the ancient Greek "philosophers of nature" were. Rather than seek the causes of events in the whims of gods and spirits, they sought to understand the unfolding phenomena and processes of the physical world in terms of material processes (which could be captured in the elegant intellectual forms of mathematics).
Pythagorean theorem: in a right triangle the length of longest side squared is equal to the sum of the squares of the lengths of the other two sides. Pythagoras flourished six centuries before Christ.
One can draw several conclusions from an "evolutionary" perspective. The most obvious is that "Reason" - at least as the dominant mode of thinking - is a relative newcomer on the historical stage. Myth as a form of explanation of the world is vastly older! (In reality, it is an open question if Reason is the dominant mode of thought today.. We seem in some ways to have hit upon the worst of both worlds. We have, collectively, great powers for manipulating the physical world with technology but too often, alas, that manipulation is for idiotic or antihuman ends.)
In their highest manifestation, myths are "sacred stories" told to explain the world, why it is like it is, who "we" (the members of our tribe) are and what values we hold. Myths describe the Good Life (particularly the Good Life in a social context). Myths, as narrative, are an outgrowth - an extension and an elaboration - of the "primate politics" of our biological ancestors. They tell who did what to whom, what the outcome was and why that outcome is important to us living today. Myths are "hard-wired" into our human nervous systems: myths and stories are universal, wherever there are humans there is story telling and sacred narrative.
But why are myths and narrative universal? One can hazard, with some anthropological and psychological evidence supporting, that it is natural for humans to view the world through the lens of narrative. Because of hard-wired primate political thinking we naturally wonder who did what to whom and why. Our minds are simply hard-wired to think along narrative lines.
From this perspective, the formal, mathematical abstractions of science are more recent evolutionary acquisitions. As such, "abstract thinking" lacks the compelling force of concrete narrative. Here we see one of the disadvantages that climate scientists and environmental activists have in dealing with the raw, more primitive, emotional narratives of GW "sceptics" and deniers. Quantum mechanical energy exchanges at the molecular levels are hard to grasp (abstract scientific thinking). Our primate political genes though, are programmed to identify and understand the following narrative-type: crooked university professors peddle the "climate change hoax" in order to make trillions of dollars on the carbon credit trading market. In other words, climate scientists are an enemy clique plotting to do "us" in dirty - this is pure primate politics!
A general listing of Authoritarian Personality traits (both leaders and followers)
authoritarian personality traits
In general, "classical" authoritarians see the world in black and white terms: "us" versus "them", "Good" versus "Evil". Their perceptions of social groups tends toward stereotypy: all wo/men (blacks, Jews, gays, Muslims..) share a common set of characters. The group one belongs to is more important than one's individuality. In addition, authoritarians demonize the excluded groups they hate: people belonging to out-groups are treated as subhuman, incarnate all evil, plot to enslave the world to their wicked ends.
I mention the Authoritarian Personality here because it represents a particularly primitive (hence emotionally compelling and "natural") expression of primate politics that is activated in situations of threat and uncertainty. The paranoid narratives of Authoritarians flourish in critical periods of social transition such as the one we are living through today. "Fascistic" paranoid delusional narratives become prevalent - even dominant - myths at times of social breakdown and transformation.
It is hard to describe how wacky the paranoid delusional worldview can become! To do justice, I can only copy verbatim from a "chemtrails, New World Order conspiracy" website. Hold on t'yer hats, folks, the wind she's goin' t'blow!
"Population "Control," New World Order Style
The Illuminati's
idea of Population Control falls into two broad categories:
1.
Limiting the size of human societies and
monitoring/controlling
the movement of individuals within that society, and
2. Intentionally reducing the bulk
of the world's population through GENOCIDE
via the introduction of
orchestrated conflicts, intentionally inserted
toxic substances into the
air (chemtrails),
environment (depleted uranium),
water/
food supply (GMOs), and
bioengineered, weaponized disease organisms (AIDS, Ebola, Bird & Swine Flu, etc.) along with
anti-fertility compounds introduced via
vaccines and
other means of external transmission.
....
In order to preserve the 'best' of humanity when the
supposed 'self-destruction' of the earth takes place around the year 2,000,
the JASON Society proposed that a vast network of underground cities
be built in order to secure living quarters for the chosen Illuminati elite,
high level cooperative politicians, and selected military elements.
Underground cities are also co-habitated by extraterrestrial alien
groups that the secret government has made treaties with for technology
exchange and human-alien hybrid breeding programs. The idea of the earth 'self
destructing' around the turn of the century due to overpopulation was perhaps
an early cover story for the justification of the underground cities. In the
1950's and 60's, the American public was led to believe that the contiuance
of government, in the event of worldwide nuclear war, was
a logical reason for undeground facilities, but we now know that the entire
Soviet/American cold war and MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) scenario was
an orchestrated Illuminati deception to bleed both Russian
and American citizens of their wealth in order to finance black budget operations,
secret technology developments, underground city construction, genetic engineering
projects, time & space travel research, and anti-gravity, flying saucer
spacecraft development.
Based on 1989 information, it was claimed that there
were at least 75 underground cities in existence below
the soil of America interconnected by high speed, frictionless trains called
Maglev trains (Magnetic Levitation). The former
Atomic
Energy Commission had also constructed
22 seperate underground
cities for their own use...
.... recommendations for population "control".
They included:
1. Birth control (birth prevention and
abortion -
43.8 Million babies aborted yearly worldwide.)
2.
Sterilization (today includes vaccines) and
3. The
introduction of deadly microbes to reduce or otherwise slow
the growth of the earth's population.
Bioengineered Diseases
AIDS,
Ebola,
Gulf
War Illness (GWI), and many other "new" diseases were
intentionally
bioengineered in laboratories that are mostly found in the United States
and include the Army's secretive facilities at Ft.
Detrick Maryland (2.). Drs. Nancy and Garth Nicholson have done a great
deal of research and investigation into the cause and treatment of Gulf
War Illness, since they and their daughter (who was a helicopter flight nurse
in the 1991 Gulf War) ALL came down with GWI. In 1996, the Nichols published
a paper which states their deep suspicions that GWI is due to bioengineered
pathogens and that a hidden population control agenda appears to be in
place.
Some bioengineered pathogens were designed to target certain ethnic groups
for elimination. These groups likely include
blacks,
hispanics,
Black
Africans,
Native Americans, and
homosexuals. The preferred
Iluminati method to introduce disease is via
vaccinations.
Tthe
HIV virus which causes AIDS was introduced and spread
throughout the majority of black populations in Africa via the
World
Health Organization (WHO) during their
mandatory smallpox
vaccine campaigns of 1976-1980.
The pathogens which produced
Gulf War Illness were introduced to a
limited number of Gulf War troops via "special" vaccinations (
not recorded
on the troop's official vaccination records) for
Anthrax and other
supposed dangers posed by Saddam Hussein. It was a CIA test run to see how
many Gulf troops would succumb to the disease and how quickly they might die
off. The results have been somewhat disappointing for the CIA/Illuminati planners.
They thought their new little bugs would wipe out a lot more people, a lot
faster than it has.."
And so it goes, on and on and on.. Pretty wild, eh?
From http://educate-yourself.org/nwo/nwopopcontrol.shtml
Was the death of God a liberation for humanity? Or did it simply blow the doors off hell, liberating all its inhabitants.. Above, a modern degenerate myth, the Aryan Master Race (a degraded form of the Chosen People)
Which brings us to the central theme of this article: are such degraded forms of mythology related in some way to the "death of God" announced a century and a half ago by the Austrian philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche? (See note 1.) Nietzsche's view is contested from various perspectives but it is clear that he was, at the least, merely giving a name to a process of secularization in Western thought that goes back to the Renaissance. That secularization brought us the scientific and technical revolution, the modern concept of citizenry, democracy, the belief in human rights, feminism..The modern world of Progress. However a question remains unanswered for the unbiased observer. If Western thought is no longer guided by Christian theology, who gets to establish the new norms, the new values, the new definition of the Good Life, etc?
Religion and culture, claim some anthropologists are social mechanisms which regulate, control and direct human drives and behavior into socially acceptable channels. Religion and culture replace much of the instinctive (genetically programmed) behavior patterns observed in non-human animals. In culture and religion, the human has partially escaped the determinisms of instinct. To some degree, we humans are self-defining, self-determining, self-creating animals. We have, to some degree, escaped the strictures of Darwinian evolution and determine some of the conditions of our own future evolution.
But what happens when "God" -the dominant cultural and religious system - "dies"-, bcomes inoperant, no longer credible to a growing (and eventually critical) number of people? Certainly, God's death means the end of certainty. It means an interregnum, a period of cultural, spiritual and political anarchy till a new "God" and a new "tables of the Law" rise and once again provide wo/men with meaning, sense, direction.
In this perspective, the current spate of Conspiracy theories and fake news is the symptom - and the embodiment - of the current state of philosophical, moral and cultural anarchy. These degenerate myths constitute a "regression", in the Freudian sense, to an earlier state of behavioral adaptation. Such states imply that an ecosystem, a society, an organism is experiencing an "existential threat", a life or health threatening situation requiring some sort of creative response (note 2).
An interesting synchronicity. Just as I was finishing this piece, I received a notice concerning the first article of John Michael Greer's new blog Ecosophia. It treats the same themes I have in pretty much the same way I have above. Such a convergence says something about the zeitgeist - The Spirit of the Age - we inhabit..
http://www.ecosophia.net/the-twilight-of-anthropolatry/
notes:
1- http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/philosophy/friedrich_nietzsche_quotes.html
".. Nietzsche is concerned about.. relating.. that
God is dead in the hearts and minds of his own generation of modern men - killed by an indifference that was itself
directly related to a pronounced cultural shift away from faith and towards rationalism and science...
Nietzsche had been raised in an intensely devout and pietistic family atmosphere that he saw as having been unduly restrictive..
As an atheist who saw aspects of the influence of the traditions of christianity within which he grew up
as having been regrettable Friedrich Nietzsche tended to welcome what he saw as The Death of God!
For Nietzsche a recognition that God is Dead to his own generation of men and women ought to come
as a Joyous Wisdom allowing individuals to lead less guilt-ridden lives in a world that was no longer to be
seen as being inherently sinful. He considered that earthly lives could become more joyful, meaningful and "healthy" when not
lived within narrow limits set by faith-related concerns for the state of an individual's eternal soul.
Nietzsche seems to be suggesting that the acceptance that God is dead
will also involve the ending of long-established standards
of morality and of purpose.. the
possible emergence of a nihilistic situation
where people's lives are not.. constrained by faith-based
considerations of morality or.. guided by any faith-related sense of purpose.
What are we now to do?
Given what he saw as the "unbelievability" of the "God-hypothesis" Nietzsche
himself seemed to favour the creation of a new set of values
"faithful to the earth." This view perhaps being associa[ted] with
the possibility of the "Overman" or "Superman."
"I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be
overcome. What have you done to overcome him? All beings so far
have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be
the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather
than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a
painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the
overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment..."
Friedrich Nietzsche ~ Thus spoke Zarathustra"
2- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_%28psychology%29
"Regression: a defense mechanism leading to the temporary or long-term reversion of the ego
to an earlier stage of development rather than handling unacceptable
impulses in a more [adaptive] way. The defense mechanism of regression,
in psychoanalytic theory, occurs when an individual's personality
reverts to an earlier stage of development, adopting more childish
mannerisms.
Psychiatrist Joel Gold suggests that careful use of "ARISE" (Adaptive
Regression in the service of the Ego) can sometimes yield creative
benefits. To the extent that one is handling thoughts and impulses less
like an adult, ARISE involves play, appreciation and primitive pleasures, and imagination."
