Blind Spot

 

Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?

Have you seen Westworld?

I’m talking about the new HBO series, not the 1973 movie.

Actually, on second thought, maybe I do mean both the TV series and the movie.

Both the movie and the new series are based on writer/director Michael Crichton’s original idea: an immersive theme park populated by lifelike androids where guests can engage in their wildest fantasies from sex to murder. In the original movie, the robots predictably malfunction and start killing the guests for reasons that remain largely unexplained. At its heart, the story was a cautionary tale about the perils of technology and hubris. Crichton revisited this theme many years later with Jurassic Park, swapping out Yul Brynner as the relentless robot gunslinger for a genetically engineered T-Rex and some velociraptors.  Those movies, stories of science run amuck, were the nightmares of their time when technologies such as advanced powerful computer systems and genetic engineering were just reaching public awareness.

In 1973, it seemed killer androids and murderously malfunctioning computers were just around the corner.

But the new series is a whole different animal all together and far, far more terrifying.

Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?

That’s how the show begins, with that line. Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?

You see, unlike the original, the new series is told largely through the eyes of the androids – hosts as they’re called in the show. 

Unlike the dull machines of Crichton’s original concept, these creatures are for all intents and purposes living beings with their own goals and needs and beliefs and pain. But while they have become incredibly advanced, sophisticated and self aware, they still exist within a programmed reality – a “narrative.”  When presented with evidence that their reality is an artificial construct, a fiction, part of a larger (and to them invisible) world, they simply cannot see it. “It doesn’t look like anything to me,” they say. And they dismiss that conflicting information and refocus on their fixed narrative.

Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?

In the final episodes of the first season, characters both human and not begin to wonder if they might be something other than what they thought. And the kicker is that for them, both human and android, it’s nearly impossible to tell from inside their own heads.

Like the original movie, like the best of the science fiction genre itself, this new Westworld is a metaphor for the fears and dangers of our current society.

Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?

Well, have you?

Have you ever wondered about the narrative you live within?

How do we know these things are true?

Fake news. False flags. Conspiracy theories. An increasing percentage of Americans seem to be lost within their own manufactured narratives, they bumble about like robots in a strange alternate reality where fact and truth are contemptuously dismissed as lies and illusion.

Conspiracy has gone beyond mere alternate reality and into full blown denial of reality altogether.

Since the election, I’ve watched an emerging trend, alarming in its implications, a step beyond conspiracy theories and into fanatical denial of any truth where reality is entirely subjective.

Now, this isn’t anything particularly new.

Human beings rarely see reality as it truly is.

Instead we tend to view our individual narratives through the filter of our own perception, biases programmed into our minds by environment, by nature, by trauma, by fear and love, by pain and rage, by madness or cold sanity, by education and experience (or lack thereof), and by the forces of religion and politics and community. 

Unfortunately intelligence and self-awareness and reason are rarely enough to overcome such bias, not without specific training and deliberate effort anyway.

 

Very often, we see what we want to see – no matter how ridiculous.

 

For example, in 1990, the longest and most expensive criminal trial (to that date) in US history ended.

What began as a single unsupported suspicion from a questionable source grew virus-like into more than seven years of increasingly bizarre accusations, millions of dollars spent on investigation by dozens of police officers and private consultants and forensic laboratories and so-called legal experts, hundreds of thousands of pages of testimony, and numerous jury trials.

By the time it was over, more than 321 individual criminal complaints had been brought against seven people detailing an unbelievable tale of horrific crimes

But in the end all of those charges, all of them, were dismissed for lack of evidence.

Every single one.

Once the hysteria died down, after the facts were examined and reason prevailed, well then all seven individuals walked free (well, maybe not free exactly. Their lives had been destroyed. They would never be the people they had been. They  would live forever under the stigma of those unfounded and hysterical accusations).

I am, of course, talking about the McMartin Preschool Trial.

The case began in 1983 when Judy Johnson reported to police that her 3-year old son had been sodomized by Ray Buckey (a teacher at McMartin) and her estranged husband.

Buckey and Johnson’s estranged husband were interviewed by police. 

The child was examined.

No evidence of abuse was found. None.

But Johnson was convinced it had occurred, largely because her son was experiencing painful bowel movements, i.e. he was constipated.

As part of the investigation, police sent a form letter to parents of all the students enrolled at McMartin, more than 200 of them.

And that’s when it all went sideways.

Predictably, the parents panicked, terrified their children had been abused.  Accusations spread like wildfire.  The police were overwhelmed, out of their depth, and as such they turned examination of the children over to those who were grossly unqualified.

The press took the story and ran. Journalistic integrity, dignity, ethics, were forgotten. It was everything they could have hoped for, lurid, terrifying, graphic, bizarre, sickening, and like a bloody car accident the public just couldn’t look away. Reason and restraint went right out the window and mass hysteria set in – and this was before the invention of social media and a widespread 24/7 news cycle. 

The hysteria fed upon itself, became self-reinforcing – just as with the Salem Witch Trials centuries before.

The news media discarded its role of skeptic and dispassionate observer and became actively involved in increasing the hysteria as each journalist and reporter attempted to outdo the other with ever more fantastical accounts. Daily the papers and the TV news were filled with reports, deadly serious reports, of secret tunnels beneath the school where teachers practiced Satanism and witchcraft, there were reports of men who could literally fly through the air via the device of dark powers derived from ritual murder, a baby sacrificed in a church and its blood drained and fed to the children of McMartin, animals chopped apart with knives in dark rituals, a horse clubbed to death with a baseball bat by teachers, and hundreds upon hundreds of graphic descriptions of child sexual abuse each more lurid and horrible than the last and lovingly described in a detail never seen before in national news.

In retrospect, now, three decades removed, it’s nearly impossible to fathom how rational human beings could swallow such obvious insanity.

But swallow it they did, Satanism and flying warlocks and murdered babies.

And some believed it so hard that they just couldn’t let it go and they continue to believe it to this very day and no amount of evidence (or lack there of), no amount of reason, nothing, will convince them otherwise. There are literally hundreds of websites and online groups devoted to McMartin. To this day, groups of McMartin “truthers” still hire private investigators, or conduct their own “forensic examinations” of the “evidence.” Even though the school itself was torn down and the foundation pulled up and the ground beneath it excavated in detail and no evidence whatsoever of any tunnels was ever found, there are still thousands of people to this very day who believe that those tunnels do indeed exist – or did at one time, depending on which flavor of insanity you’re dealing with.

There is simply no proof, none, you can offer that will convince the believers that their narrative is false.

If you show them irrefutable proof that their world is a fraud, they respond exactly like the robots in Westworld, “It doesn’t look like anything to me.”

Oh, and Judy Johnson? The woman who started the panic? It turns out that she was quite literally mentally ill, clinically so, she’d been diagnosed with acute paranoid schizophrenia – the very disease that makes you see a false reality and which often convinces the sufferers they or their loved ones are the targets of horrific crimes. Paranoid schizophrenia often leads the afflicted to believe their loved ones are engaged in conspiracy against them just exactly as Johnson believed about her estranged husband. In fact, Johnson had been repeatedly hospitalized for her illness.  A detail that was kept from parents and deliberately ignored by the press, until she died from chronic untreated alcoholism in 1986, a full three years into the case.

Today?

Today it’s #Pizzagate.

Yes, that’s right, #Pizzagate. A bizarre conspiracy theory involving Satanism, kidnapping, ritual child murder, blood drinking (now called “spirit cooking”), and pedophilia, among a world spanning network of millionaires and billionaires, sheiks and presidents and world elites, and all of this supposedly run from the basement of a pizza parlor in Washington D.C. by none other than Hillary Clinton.

The people who believe this, and there are many, believe it hard.

The very suggestion that their narrative is quite literally insane sends them into fury.

There is simply no proof, none, you can offer that will convince them their narrative is false. When I suggested such on social media I was instantly attacked.

 

I can provide examples of hundreds of similar responses.

I’ve got a thousand emails in response, calling me everything from a pedophile to a member of the Illuminati, and threatening everything from formal charges to death.

But don’t take my word for it, search social media for the #Pizzagate hashtag and look for yourself (Or wait a bit and see the comments that show up under this essay).

Now, here’s the thing so pay attention:

Over the period of a week, I made multiple negative comments regarding #Pizzagate and those who believe in it. I did so deliberately, in order to provoke a response. Then I recorded those responses, more than a thousand of them and traced them back to the profiles where they originated. 

Here’s what I found:

1. Many of those responses originated with actual accounts that could be connected to actual people who actually believe in this conspiracy theory,

however

2. a significant fraction were from dummy profiles. Accounts created just prior to the recent presidential campaign cycle (nearly all with an inception date of November 2015), with few followers and dedicated solely to #Pizzagate. Searches against these accounts revealed similar phrases and targets of attack,

however

3. very few of those accounts were bots, i.e. automated accounts. I prodded them enough to elicit numerous responses which identified them as human in origin. Meaning the accounts were manned by people and active rather than automated software.

Again, don’t take my word for it. Run the experiment yourself.

What you’re looking at here is a directed campaign of information warfare.

And that’s the difference between the Salem Witch Trials or the McMartin Preschool Case and #Pizzagate.

Salem, McMartin, those examples of mass hysteria were natural, they grew organically based on human nature and the state of society at the time. 

This, #Pizzagate, is something else – or at least partially so.

It may (or may not) have begun organically, but it’s being deliberately fueled. Why? I don’t know. By who? I don’t know that either. It would be easy to speculate, but it’s just as likely to be a campaign of psychological warfare directed by a foreign power for its own nefarious ends as it is a game by a small group of teenagers from 4Chan entertaining themselves by egging on the gullible.

Whatever the source, whatever the reason, this latest hysteria plays directly to a certain segment of the population.

And this false narrative has very real consequences.

You see, that segment of the population is, after 30 years of being habituated to fear by talk radio and TV pundits, fake news, false narratives, an endless diet of conspiracy theories from bottomless cesspools such as Infowars, conditioned by their religion of suspicion and intolerance and a political party of paranoia, that population, is now uniquely vulnerable to this kind of manipulation.

And that segment of the population tends to vote for one particular political party.

And that party will shortly be in near complete control of our government and nation.

And in that administration, even those who were trained in reason and critical thinking have succumbed to false reality.

And that is the true danger.

“One thing that has been interesting this entire campaign season to watch is that people that say facts are facts. They’re not really facts. Everybody has a way. It’s kind of like looking at ratings or looking at a glass of half-full water. Everybody has a way of interpreting them to be the truth or not true. There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore of facts.”
-- Trump surrogate Scottie Nell Hughes, The Diane Rehm Show

We have become a nation cheerfully willing to humor patently false narratives and regard them as valid and equal to actual fact.

And as such, we have become a people who regard reality itself as a false narrative.

It doesn’t look like anything to us.

The end result of this situation is that we have elected leaders who believe reality is whatever they say it is, whatever they choose to believe, whatever is most politically expedient, whatever fits the narrative they’ve created for themselves. And as a nation, as a people, as a society, we have reached a point where we feel we must humor these false narratives as valid.

Instead of actively demanding more from ourselves as a people, we cater to this insanity and to the lowest common denominator of intellect.

But here’s the thing: reality doesn’t care what you believe.

 

Gravity will kill you whether you believe in it or not.

 

The president-elect, Donald Trump, announced this week that he will forgo the daily Presidential intelligence briefing.

In an interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace last weekend, Trump said that he didn’t need the daily updates because he’s “like” a smart person:

WALLACE: I just want to ask you about your skepticism about the intelligence community. You are getting the presidential daily brief…

TRUMP: Yes.

WALLACE: …only once a week.

TRUMP: Well, I, I get it when I need it.

WALLACE: But is it, is there some skepticism …?

TRUMP: You know, I get, first of all, these are very good people that are giving me the briefings. And I say, "If something should change from this point, immediately call me. I'm available on one-minute's notice." I don't have to be told, you know, I'm, like, a smart person. I don't have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years. Could be eight years. But eight years. I don't need that. But I do say, "If something should change, let us know." Now, in the meantime, my generals are great, are being briefed. And Mike Pence is being briefed, who is, by the way, one of my very good decisions. He is terrific. And they're being briefed. And I'm being briefed also. But if they're going to come in and tell me the exact same thing that they tell me, you know, it doesn't change, necessarily. Now, there will be times where it might change. I mean, there will be some very fluid situations. I'll be there not every day, but more than that. But I don't need to be told, Chris, the same thing every day, every morning, same words. "Sir, nothing has changed. Let's go over it again." I don't need that.

Trump has already created a false narrative for himself and the administration he will control.

The single greatest danger for any human being, but most especially a leader – and even more especially the President of the United States – is to retreat into a world of your own creation, walled away reality.

This is an incredibly dangerous situation.

Trump’s most trusted advisors, those like Mike Flynn – one of Trump’s “great generals” – are actively engaged in looney conspiracy theories, mass hysteria, and patently false narratives driven by unidentified agencies from within social media.

 

 

And if Trump’s national security advisor believes in #Pizzagate, if somebody like Mike Flynn can promulgate obviously ridiculous information as valid to the general public, then what does he believe about the things that really matter? Such as Iran, or ISIS, or border security, or any of the things a National Security Advisor is responsible for? 

Flynn was let go from the Defense Intelligence Agency and forced into retirement in part because he’d come to believe narratives that were simply not true. He wasn’t forced out by Obama, but rather by his peers because he’d become disconnected from reality as his above statement regarding a bizarre fringe conspiracy theory demonstrates.

And now, he’s advising the president-elect and he’s no longer constrained by those of firmer reason.

What people like General Flynn should be telling Trump is this: That redundancy? That repetition Trump so hates, should tell a supposed “smart” person something important and it should tell the Commander in Chief something important most of all.

If the intelligence remains unchanged from day to day, then there are only two possibilities:

1. The situation on the ground has not changed

or

2. The intelligence community was unable to acquire new information.

Either way, that tells the Commander something vital – or it should if he’s competent, experienced, and as smart as he thinks he is.

It tells him what questions to ask next.

If the situation on the ground has not changed, if for example ISIS has not advanced or attacked or retreated or otherwise altered its state, then a savvy commander would ask the following questions:

How sure are you of this?

How have you verified the information?

More importantly why haven’t things changed? Are they gathering strength? Do they feel safe? Have they reached a state of stasis and stability? Or they being constrained by our forces or their enemies or lack of funds or geography or fear of retaliation?

The answers to those questions leads to more questions and that is how actionable and realistic national strategy is born.

When this nation was fighting for its independence from England, in the winter of 1776, the man who commanded the Continental Army and who would become the nation’s first president, asked his own network of intelligence experts to report on the enemy. They told him what they’d told him for days, that the Hessian troops in Trenton, New Jersey were hunkered down for the winter.

Every day the situation remained unchanged.

Based on that information, General George Washington could, like Trump, have told his briefers, enough! Don’t bother me with this unless something changes.

He could have done that, but Washington wasn’t Trump. Instead that unchanging situation told him something. And he crossed the Delaware in the dead of night on Christmas Eve and the rest is American history rather than British.

Lack of change is not lack of information.

More importantly, if the lack of change is because the intelligence community was unable to acquire, process, analyze, and disseminate new information, then as the Commander in Chief it is the president’s job to either reallocate existing assets to acquire that information or to go to Congress and procure the necessary legislation and funding to create the assets required.

If the Commander in Chief was made aware that there were vague indications of a domestic attack, that various agencies had various pieces, but were unable to muster the coordination and resources to run down leads and process mountains of data into a coherent picture in, oh say, 1940 or 2000, for example, then perhaps we might have been able to stop 911 or Pearl Harbor before they happened. 

Or not. 

But if you’re not smart enough to see what the briefing is actually telling you, if you don’t goddamned show up in the first place, if your advisors aren’t sharp enough to explain that to you, then you’ll never know, will you?

Lack of change is not lack of information.

Most importantly, that repetition provides an anchor. 

An anchor that holds you to reality, that keeps you from coming adrift in a sea of information, some true, much more false or unknown and unverified or irrelevant. If the commander is not in the loop, if the commander doesn’t have eyes-on every single goddamned day, if the commander isn’t asking those questions – i.e. is this lack of change because things have not changed or is it because we don’t have the resources to find out – then what happens is the administration and the leadership inevitably begin to create their own false reality.

Always.

Every time.

They become vulnerable to mass hysteria and false narratives and self-reinforcing delusion. They become conditioned to ignoring fact and ground truth and the things they don’t want to hear.  This is always and inevitably a recipe for disaster.  This is true of every nation from the fall of Rome, to the final days in the bunker under Berlin in 1945, to March 19th, 2003, the day the United States invaded Iraq in search of Weapons of Mass Destruction that were no more real than the supposed world-spanning pedophile ring operating out of a nonexistent basement beneath a pizza parlor in Washington D.C.

 

Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?

 

The TV show Westworld concluded its story with a small handful of the androids finally becoming aware of the false world surrounding them.

Many more go mad, unable to accept either their own false reality or the larger one they had glimpsed. They are then turned upon the innocent and their civilization begins to come apart.

In the end, it’s only a TV show, a brilliant metaphor for a larger world.

And we, we are not robots.

Unless we choose to be.