On Conspiracies (Part Two)

(This is the second installment in my essay on conspiracies. Part One can be found here.)

Looking again to the conspiracy metric, we observe to the right of the Demonstrable Conspiracies category is the next major classifier: Open-Ended Conspiracies (OEC).

The OEC category, by far, contains the greatest number and variety of conspiracy theories, due to the fact that all conspiracy theories - no matter the subject - begin as open-ended.

It’s here that we find arguments for the existence of cabals of all sorts – usually bent on socio-political or socio-economic domination; also, assassinations, extraterrestrials, and plots intended to keep the public ignorant of knowledge that has been deemed verboten.

Conspiracies plotted on the metric begin as open-ended, before moving, by degrees, to the right or left along the x-axis. Movement of this kind indicates the extent to which the conspiracy might be considered demonstrable, as implied by the previously described category or fantastical, a quality attributed to the last conspiracy theory designation that I’ll define later. 

Now, what do I mean, open-ended?

Simply put, an open-ended conspiracy implies a condition where reliable sources of information are limited, or conversely, overabundant. As a result, reliable judgements on claims posed and evidence presented by a given conspiracy theory are impossible to entirely validate or invalidate.

The Bush Administration’s conspiracy to mislead the UN with regards to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003, for example - now classed in the DC category - would have been initially identified as an OEC.

Due to the scrutiny of international observers and reportage not beholden to Washington, however, the conspiracy – insofar as it was meant to obscure America’s intention to go to war regardless of UN consensus – was exposed, and the deception became common knowledge. 

As far as our metric goes, this revelation coincided with a shift into the DC category, as the historicity of the occasion became a matter of public record.

Another conspiracy theory, related to the outbreak of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), may follow a validation process similar to the U.S./Iraq debacle; a process which will show the theory move from the open-ended category to a condition of demonstrability, as reports of the virus' man-made origins in a Chinese lab are scrutinized by world governments, medical experts, academics and the press.   

Nearest to demonstrable status in the OEC category are conspiracy theories related to the assassination of former American President John F. Kennedy and African-American civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

A few degrees further along the spectrum we find the 9/11 truther movement, which is dedicated to promoting divergent accounts of the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York City and Washington.

This was, in fact, the topic upon which my friend and I discoursed when the germ of this essay was contrived. It brings to the fore an essential characteristic that can be related to the conspiracies listed in the OEC category; which is to say that, in one way or another, these conspiracies are demarcating the limits of what can be positively ascertained  – at least in comparison to the conspiracies classed in the DC category.

By the definition provided, the term open-ended paradoxically implies an epistemic barrier to reasonable certainty, or put another way, a barrier between what is known and unknown. 

I’ll elaborate. In the previous three cases, for example – the assassinations of Kennedy and King, and the 9/11 attacks – the historical record of each event has been complicated. 

Official accounts are disputed, counter-narratives are proposed, key evidence is lost or destroyed, witnesses die or are killed-off, individuals and organizations work at cross-purposes for reasons unrelated to the event itself...

For all these reasons and more, the conspiracies listed in the OEC category are inherently uncertain and lack epistemic veracity – that is, a coherent evidentiary basis, or in colloquial terminology, the facts – to provide a foundation for meaningful social change.

Failing to inspire that change, 9/11 and assassination conspiracies become subjects of cultish devotion, with acolytes advancing their belief online and IRL with wild-eyed religiosity. 

Faith does not align the conspiracy perspective with any truer reality than the non-believer might perceive; instead, the conspiracy theory gets its context from an alternate world view, focused typically on a clandestine organization of powerful individuals who are thought to be the people really running things.

Whatever the particulars of the theories in this category, the idea of the alternate world view is the important takeaway here, for this perspective – no matter what sources inform it - becomes the ground in which all later conspiracy theories take root.

Now at the midpoint of the OEC category, we come to the problematic topic of racist conspiracies, a subject which requires more lucidity of thought than any of the concepts that have come before. 

Conspiracy theories of this sort, deleterious as they are to the better angels of human nature, pervade all societies, and must be confronted here, too, if this is an honest and complete exposition on the topic.

It’s distasteful to write about conspiracies predicated on race, religion or culture, albeit instructive to consider how easily any person might fall into patterns of tribal behaviour, which - in its negative expressions - results in degenerate nationalism, unjust persecution of minorities, and exclusionary social practices.

This instinctive tendency – the bias - towards such behaviour; the psychological predisposition that motivates human animals to organize around shared genetic, cultural or political heritage lands conspiracies of racist orientation in the OEC category, since it’s difficult, if not entirely impossible, to rule out the influence of such bias. 

But to be clear - the evidence is nigh conclusive - there is no genetic basis for believing different races of homo sapiens exist; that is a cultural creation, entirely. 

Yet there are individuals and organizations – whole societies, in fact – that will prop up the notion that one group of homo sapiens are inherently (that is to say, biologically/intellectually/spiritually) unique (that is to say, superior or inferior) to another group of homo sapiens. 

Jews throughout the centuries have been disproportionately represented in this case, at least in European history, where they have been made victims of real conspiracies and blamed for fanciful ones, then made scapegoats.

These fanciful conspiracies (by which I mean delusional) occupy a critical degree along the x-axis of the metric, and are pernicious in Western society, as they advance the notion that the world is controlled by Zionist politicians, bankers and entertainers.

It is here, at the critical degree marking the Jewish Cabal conspiracy, that the metric shows a sharp, parabolic rise on the y-axis to indicate increasing cognitive dissonance, growing, on average, at twice the rate of the increasing epistemological dissonance of the conspiracy theory measured on the x-axis.  

Why is this so? Not because, as I said earlier, humans are vulnerable to tribal thinking, or that we generally have difficulty shedding cultural and cognitive biases. That is a fact older than civilization. 

Rather, the psychological state experienced by an individual having greater dissonances in cognition and epistemology indicate a profound and intoxicating othering that takes place when angst, fear and ignorance experienced by a person (or group of people) is displaced to an external agent, whether that agent is a cultural group, a system of belief, the government, etc. 

This othering makes possible the magical thinking that can result in many forms of delusion, not the least of which is xenophobia that can and has reshaped whole societies. By tapping the tribal instincts of humanity’s ancient ancestors, shaped over many millennia, the demagogues who lead these societies are able to make their people believe all sorts of inane and dangerous notions.

Just past the critical degree that describes racist conspiracies, we find the most severe manifestations of the anti-vaccine movement, chem trail alarmists, as well as radical climate change deniers. As part of a conspiracy continuum, this movement along the metric implies a wider, even more seemingly malevolent othering at work in the world that puts the conspiracy theorist in imminent peril.   

If we consult the metric now, we see that we are on the threshold of a bizarre taxonomy. For it is among the conspiracy theories found at the far extreme of the OEC category that stories of Bigfoot, Loch Ness, fringe technology, ancient artifacts, Atlantis, extraterrestrials and forbidden archaeology prevail.

Subjects like these, in and of themselves, are not inherently conspiratorial. Conspiracy arises from the belief that information about these topics is being knowingly suppressed or maliciously invalidated by the prevailing authority, which is usually institutional in origin.

Situating this exotica where it is on the metric does not indicate belief in a racist conspiracy is the intellectual precondition to assertions that the public isn’t getting the straight goods about Earth’s zoology, or that human civilization is older than six thousand years. Believing in Bigfoot does not a Nazi make, and just because a person thinks Atlantis existed doesn’t mean they’re bigoted.

This menagerie has been put where it is on the metric because it’s the furthest measure yet of things outside the realm of day-to-day experience. Hence these theories rely on anecdotal accounts and subjective impressions, and tend to be increasingly fantastical in content.

Even so-called physical evidence – video of anomalous aerial phenomena, ancient underwater ruins and misshapen animal skeletons – can’t validate claims in theories derived from such artifacts without a contextualizing perspective that authenticates the assertion.

    

Fig.2 shows how a re-visioning of the conspiracy metric might position the center axis [x,y] in the middle of the OEC category, where negative integers along the x-axis would indicate movement toward the DC category, and positive integers in the other direction would occupy the third category.

Four Short Reviews

Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019, Columbia Pictures/Marvel Studios) 

This film is a transitional narrative that acts as an extended epilogue to the Infinity War storyline, while pointing the direction that the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) will take over the next decade. The audience is shown a world irrevocably altered by the events of the last two Avengers films, where eulogizing the recently deceased Tony Stark has become popular obsession. In the midst of this milieu, a narrative unfolds; a parable about climate change and the nature of reality in a post-truth era. Elementals, raging behemoths that appear as giants comprised of water and fire, are revealed to be special effects created by an illusionist, which mask a swarm of destructive human-made drones. Even the public revelation of our hero’s secret identity in the final scenes of the film can be perceived as a commentary on the click-bait culture of ‘gotcha’ moments and online shaming, although editorial bias is far, far older than the Internet.

   

The Boys (2019, Amazon)

A world without moral absolutes is a world of shifting power dynamics, where hierarchical structures jockey to maintain an unnatural asymmetry between have and have-nots. In The Boys, we see these power dynamics play out in a setting where super-humans are tools of corporations, and marketed to the public like pop stars and sports idols. In so many ways, this series is antithesis to idea of the super-hero presented in the MCU; these characters are emotionally stunted, ignorant and self-absorbed to the point of narcissism. The most celebrated collection of these so-called heroes – a group known as The Seven - are a law unto themselves, and yet they are beholden to their corporate masters, who are - in turn – held in thrall by the prospect of state-level influence (ie, government defense contracts). Each episode of this series can be considered an extended meditation on the misapplication and misuse of power in all arenas of human existence, from the biological to the political to the metaphysical.

  

Legion (2017-2019, FX Productions/Marvel Television)

There can be little doubt that this three-season series is the most aesthetically nuanced, surreal and challenging of any Marvel onscreen property to date. Viewers are initiated into the labyrinthine psyche of a gifted yet psychologically-wounded telepath whose personal journey goes from incarcerated mental patient to cult leader, while transcending the bounds of time and space. This psychedelic hero’s journey is truly a trip down the rabbit hole, and probably as close to pixelated LSD as television is likely to get. Psychic conflict on the etheric plane envisioned as a rap battle or a dance-off would never have been considered by most viewers prior to seeing this series; now, popular representations of super-mental abilities – telekinesis, for example – seem archaic next to the consciousness-changing power of shaping reality itself, as imagined on this program. Visionary and provocative, Legion is the most demanding of Marvel Television productions, but it’s also the most rewarding.

Watchmen (2019, HBO)

Perhaps the most relevant to North America’s current political climate, Watchmen revisits many of the perennial themes that made the original graphic novel seem prescient, even though it was published in mid '80s. This updating of the story introduces a new cast of characters in a world that’s like ours, but just a little bit different. Vietnam is a state of the U.S., for example, there’s no Internet, tobacco is a controlled substance, and everybody drives electric cars. Viewers who have read the book (or seen Zack Snyder’s 2009 film adaptation) know why this is so; newbies get to play catch-up as the murder of a police chief in Tulsa, Oklahoma takes center stage. This series is still unfolding at the time of this writing but holds great promise as a worthy successor to one of the 20th century’s great fictions. 

                           

The Last Blockbuster

Blockbuster film sequels used to be liabilities. Now, they’re an essential part of any large motion picture studio’s long-term success. 

Over the last 20 years – since the turn of the century - Hollywood has garnered a significant portion of this success by creating hundred-million-dollar blockbuster franchises based on pop culture icons. 

Yet the era of the blockbuster may have peaked with the release of Avengers: Endgame. It’s an audacious proposition, since the film is on track to become the highest grossing movie ever. But times are changing, and so is the entertainment industry.

If Endgame represents the peak box office achievement of its genre, popular films will still be made in coming years and lucrative franchises will persist, but the reach of these productions is likely to be increasingly limited by economic and societal factors. 

Growth in the video game industry (which matched the U.S. film industry for revenues in 2018) as well as the presence of online streaming services have permanently disrupted film production, distribution and marketing models of the past century.  

Starting with the motion picture adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (2001-2003), two decades of movie blockbusters have made unprecedented use of cultural and commercial content that wasn’t initially created for the big screen, but for novels, television shows, toys, and comic books.    

This long list need not be revisited at great length, but it includes Transformers, Bladerunner, Twilight Saga, Hunger Games, Chronicles of Narnia, Star Trek, Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Hobbit, et al. 

These franchises, however, are not in the same league as the juggernaut known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), which, since the advent of the first Iron Man in 2008, has grown to dominate pop culture like nothing before or since: 22 movies comprising a consolidated, reasonably coherent epic mythology for the new century.    

By one evaluative model, which would measure total box office receipts, production and artistic innovation, and cultural resonance, we can identify three high points in history of movie blockbusters: The Star Wars trilogy (1977-1983), The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-2003) and the two most recent Avengers films, Infinity War and Endgame (2018-19). 

These franchises earned billions of dollars in worldwide receipts and produced the highest grossing films during the years they were released, excepting The Fellowship of the Ring in 2001, and Endgame, which just arrived in theaters, but had surpassed $1 billion worldwide at the time of this writing (05/01). 

In the case of production and artistic innovation, note the breakthrough special effects of the original Star Wars trilogy, the digital wizardry that brought Middle Earth to life (Gollum, my precious), and the fact that Infinity War and Endgame represent the first time that Hollywood feature films were shot entirely using IMAX digital cameras. There are many more examples, but for sake of brevity, these three will suffice.

Cultural resonance is a catch-all term used to get at not just a film’s popularity but how it speaks to audiences, contextually and historically. If box office receipts represent the span, or width, of a film’s influence on society, cultural resonance is the depth of that influence. 

Part of Star Wars’ success resulted from its appeal to myth. The idea that technology and magic could exist alongside one another was novel, and because the hero’s journey - a term borrowed from philosopher Joseph Campbell - was integral to the original film’s plot, it connoted ancient, pervasive and recurring cultural notions of identity and purpose. 

As a result, this coming-of-age fairy tale fantasy about space travel and sci-fi samurai changed films and film-making forever, while making later blockbusters possible, including Lord of the Rings (LotR) and The Avengers.

The cultural resonance of LotR requires little (if any) qualification. Author J.R.R. Tolkien created a modern English myth that achieved global popularity and became a template for a unique form of genre fiction after it was published in the mid-20th century.

One can hardly imagine the millennial pop culture landscape without LotR. Middle Earth has a gravity all its own, and holds in its orbit a vast constellation of books, movies, music, games and art. 

The triumphant film adaptations of Tolkien’s books tapped a deep vein in Western culture’s collective consciousness. And as observed earlier, tapping the vein yielded an unprecedented proliferation of films based on numerous pop culture sources

But there was none to equal LotR’s cultural resonance until the MCU got underway.                

There are many reasons for the unique success of the MCU films, not the least of which is the financing and production resources of Disney, Marvel’s parent company. 

Another factor is the remarkable consistency and quality of casting, which gave the films recognizability and star-power in a crowded media landscape.  

But perhaps most important is the fact that the MCU films draw on a great legacy of story, a legacy created by generations of artists and writers working in an industry that, until recently, was considered second-tier to “serious” art. 

This legacy of story, which – in the MCU’s case - originated with the earliest Captain America comic books in the 1940s, is itself linked to an even older tradition of story exemplified in the ancient tale of Gilgamesh, the poetry of Homer and Hesiod, and the epic verse of John Milton and William Blake - all works which spoke of powerful beings having adventures and doing battle in a moral universe governed by gods.

This is the secret behind the success of these films and the stories they tell: We like them because we always have. Movie producers will try to repeat Marvel’s success; DC will focus its scattered efforts into some cinematic distillation, but the result is unlikely to have the coherence of the MCU. 

When the final chapter in the nine-part Star Wars Saga is released into theaters this December, it will conclude a story that captivated a worldwide audience for several generations. In its place will remain a larger, denser, and arguably less accessible "expanded universe" of related films, books, television and games.        

The MCU will go on as well, with a new canon of films brought from page to screen. And even as video games and streaming services vie for more and more of the public’s attention, it will be obvious to all concerned that movies are here to stay. 

Avengers: Endgame may be the last film of its kind, but it isn’t the end.

Time: Genealogy of a Concept

It surrounds us, yet we only observe its effects. It shapes every aspect of our lives, but we don’t interact with it directly. 

We make it, measure it, save it, waste it, compress it, bend it, extend it; we can’t even hold it in our hands. And when we’re asked to define it, every description seems ephemeral and contingent, as if it’s beyond words to explain. 

It is time. 

What is it? How to explicate time? By a moment, which - whether experienced subjectively or intersubjectively – seems to flow, like a river, from the past to the future? Perhaps time can be quantified by the metrics of cause and effect, and the laws of thermodynamics? 

Will we know time by its absence, when we contemplate eternity? Can we even posit, with intellectual honesty, what time is when we’re always inside of it, three-dimensional beings embedded in the fourth dimension?   

To unpack these questions, it’s useful to think about time’s conceptual evolution like a genealogy, one that’s been mapped onto Western scientific and cultural paradigms of the past two-and-a-half millennia. 

There exists a limited interval in which to complete this genealogy, so some aspects of temporality (used here as a variant of the word time) – its practical relevance in relation to duration, measurement and technological invention, for example - will remain unaddressed so metaphysical issues can be investigated. 

Here, as in all things, time is against us…or is it? 

As we survey perspectives on temporality, a case can be made that there is an inherited prejudice in relation to time, or - to be precise – an inherited prejudice in relation to certain ideas about time. 

This shouldn’t come as a surprise since, next to knowledge of death, temporal awareness is the most persistent reminder that humanity – for all its civilized progress – will never be fully emancipated from nature’s dominion. 

From an evolutionary perspective, modern humans aren’t far from the savannas of Africa where our prehistoric ancestors are thought to have wandered for many centuries, unprotected from nature in the form of sickness and disease, changing weather conditions, and violent or accidental death.

When our ancestors began living in cities and developing written alphabets, ambivalence towards problematic aspects of nature – including time – found its way into language, which informed the way temporality was thought about and discussed. 

Like civilizations before and after them, the Greeks mythologized their relationship with nature, the psyche and society using a pantheon of gods. 

Multiple deities became associated with various concepts of time, but one of the most revered was the titan Chronos. He was also the most feared, having been believed to have eaten his own newborn children to prevent them from taking his place as king of the world. 

By the earliest decades of the Common Era, ambivalence towards time had been sublimated into numerous philosophical and religious systems. 

Plato’s Theory of Forms and the Christian belief in an afterlife were just two of the Western ontologies that established transcendent orders which biased the absolute, the eternal and the everlasting over the transitory, the temporary and the temporal. 

Mathematics and geometry, too, with the stress on fixed shapes and formulas, represented a transcendent reality untainted the vagaries of time.

An example of the ongoing ambivalence towards all things temporal can be found in the beliefs of the ancient Gnostics. This early Christian cult taught the initial descent from the divine state – the primeval fall – didn’t take place in the Garden of Eden, or even when Lucifer was cast from Heaven. 

The first fall occurred when the universe was created, when time itself began. 

For a Gnostic initiate, matter, the material world, and all that proceeded from it – including time - was corrupt. Their goal was a return to a region of light called the Pleroma.

Elements of this doctrine have been articulated in our era, reformulated by physicist David Bohm, who once enigmatically suggested that all matter is light, frozen in time. 

Of course, to a Gnostic living two millennia ago, the inverse to that viewpoint seems the truer statement; that without time, everything is light. 

It’s here, reasoning by negation - via negativa - that we intimate what remains in the absence of time; an opportunity to recognize, like Michelangelo seeing a statue in a block of marble, what pieces of stone must be removed to reveal the figure within.  

Maybe Saint Augustine of Hippo used his own sort of negation when he famously uttered, “What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to a questioner, I do not know.” 

Had he been more forthcoming on the subject, Augustine might have said something like, it is the eternal in us that allows us to perceive time, the eternal part referring to the human soul. 

Like time, the concept of soul is larger than a single religion or philosophy; in the 21st century, scientists call soul consciousness, and seek to know its laws. 

Most of humanity believes soul to be their birthright. This eternal essence of a person, thought to consist of subtle numinous energy, is a wide, soaring arch in the metaphysical lattices of countless worldviews, both ancient and modern. 

Soul was a powerful idea to humanity’s prehistoric ancestors, offering existential certainty alongside a communally acknowledged mortality. 

The idea serves the same function today, even though the focus of the drama is now the soul’s redemption from suffering, death, and the ravages of time by adherence to religious tenets or – more recently – faith in immortality technologies.

The 17th century European Enlightenment traded the transcendent religious abstractions of time and eternity for the transcendent mathematical abstractions of science and the cosmic clock. 

The cosmic clock was invisible and operated perfectly, in perpetuity. Time became an axis on a graph; one of the innovations that allowed the physics of the emerging scientific paradigm to operate with unprecedented predictive power over the natural world. 

This predictive power led, incrementally, to the Industrial Revolution and ultimately made Western modernity possible.  

But the idea that time could be measured the same way - no matter where a person was in the universe - only lasted until 1905, when Albert Einstein married the spatial and the temporal in his Special Theory of Relativity and exploded the cosmic clock forever. 

After that, it was impractical to think of time in the same absolute terms as people in previous eras had. Temporality – in applied and conceptual considerations - became an area of interest for many fields of inquiry.  

Questions about time, and its relationship to memory, sentience and aging; to society, technology and the physics of gravity, continue to shape our lives in the 21st century. 

Yet even in our high-tech civilization, the temporal prejudice persists, not least in the fact that there never seems to be enough time. 

Is there a way to mitigate this bias so that a renewed appreciation of time may be affected?    

Human perception was shaped by pressures of natural selection, and senses that ensured better opportunities for reproduction were favored by evolution. We might conjecture this included spatial and temporal awareness, which can be thought to have developed alongside one another. 

The parallel yet differing progression of these two streams of awareness are envisioned by H.G. Wells in The Time Machine:  

“There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time. There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives.” 

   

Infants learn to navigate the spatial dimension from the moment of birth. For each of us, it is perhaps as close to innate knowledge as we might truly be able to claim; the inner pedagogy that taught our kind to walk upright, with heads raised. 

Perhaps temporal awareness is another sort of innate knowledge, one that develops similarly to the spatial, but more gradually - over a lifetime - so that elders appreciate the folds and creases of temporality in a way that isn’t experientially accessible to the young. 

That, much like infants learning to walk, we embark on a sort of fourth-dimensional ambulation throughout our lives, and it’s only in maturity that an advanced understanding of time becomes possible. Might we call this sort of temporal sense wisdom, if it didn’t undo the nuance of the description just provided…?

With this wisdom comes deeper knowledge of time as a generative force of nature, a force that makes manifest all possibilities - creatio ex tempore, tempore ex creatio – the creative essence from which the world emerges. 

This is the antidote to the prejudice observed in the temporal genealogy; the insistence that time devours all. 

To this valuation is put the notion of a prolific temporality, and the wisdom to know that when the universe speaks to us, it speaks in time.

(Hear this essay read by its author on the first episode of Morganics - A Podcast.)

 

Morganics - A Podcast · Morganics - A Podcast, Episode 1: My New Thing

Astrological Monograph: The Fire Triplicity

One grouping of zodiacal signs – called the triplicities by astrologers – is organized thusly: fire for Aries, Leo and Sagittarius; water for Cancer, Scorpio and Pisces; air for Gemini, Libra and Aquarius; and earth for Taurus, Virgo and Capricorn. 

The triple aspect of the triplicity refers to the number of signs associated with a given element, a word used here in its anachronistic sense to represent the four basic constituents of the physical – and metaphysical – universe, rather than materials on the periodic table. 

An element assumes variable states when occupying different signs of a triplicity grouping. The fire of Aries, for example, can burn out of control, destroying forests and property, or it can be used to clear land of dead wood to make way for a new crop. 

The fire of Leo, in its turn, is literally and figuratively connected with the Sun, since - in the northern hemisphere, at least – the sign rules the height of the summer season. 

There is something to this association, for certain; however, it’s worth noting that while the Sun is dignified in Leo due to its natural placement, its exaltation in Aries; which is to say, the Sun’s potentiality to achieve its highest spiritual expression in the sign, implies a profound and transcendent fire symbology. 

This symbology might be informed by current scientific knowledge about the Sun, which shows how celestial energy is the result of titanic forces of gravity and pressure acting on millions of nuclear explosions in a star’s core. 

The symbology might be developed with the concept that Earth orbits the Sun in a Goldilocks Zone – a region hospitable to life as we know it – as opposed to more problematic vectors of other planets. It serves as a reminder that solar effects vary, depending on location. The energy output of a star, assumed in its totality, is uncontrollable, and what results of that output is difficult – maybe even impossible – for human minds to grasp entirely. 

The Sun shines on without prejudice or restraint, but its light falls differently, depending on whether one observes from Earth, Venus or Mars.         

Yet the Sun is essential for the existence of life on this planet generally, a fact that aligns well with Aries zodiacal position at the vernal equinox and the renewal of spring in the northern hemisphere. Light becomes surplus, and days get longer and warmer during the Season of the Ram.

Conceptualized in these ways, the Sun – as an expression of elemental fire - does seem to have more in common with Aries raw dynamism than Leo’s regal largesse.

      

Despite these arguments, the elemental fire related to Leo will remain associated primarily with the Sun because of its constancy – it rises everyday, whether we see it or not – than for its life-giving qualities. The fixity of the Leonine fire endures; rather than creating or destroying, it is life-sustaining. It is the fire one might use to cook a meal; an apt metaphor for this utilitarian elemental state.

In Sagittarius, the elemental fire becomes expansive and mutable, like lava; liquid fire. The bestial quality of the Centaur’s sign – represented by its animal half – is connected to the natural world, the material world, so the association with molten rock emitted from the Earth is well-founded. 

Another metaphor for this aspect of the fire triplicity could be elemental fire in its explosive or volatile expression, as both states are characteristic of the Sagittarian temperament.

Electricity, too, being a manifestation of elemental fire energy, might be considered aptly represented by Sagittarius, as the sign is ruled by Jupiter - a planet named after the chief sky god of Roman myth, and a deity who wielded lightning bolts in battle.  

On Conspiracies (Part One)

I have a dear friend with whom I discuss all sorts of subjects. The two of us are particularly adept at a kind of conversation that is loose and rambling. These qualities, in and of themselves, are not unique; most people could probably name one or two other individuals with whom they share such a rapport. 

One of the things that made our correspondence special though is the fact that we’ve known each other for over a quarter-century, and as such, we enjoy the kind of conversational shorthand that all long-time colleagues share. Also, he lives on the other side of the world now, in Asia, and so he brings those experiences to bear on our discourse, which widens the scope of its proliferation.

It was during one of these loose and rambling discussions that he and I found ourselves speaking the subject of conspiracy. Now, the two of us share many perspectives in common, so it came as something of a shock to find unsettling differences revealed during our discourse, and it led to a response, which is presented in the exposition I proffer here.

There can be no doubt that conspiracies exist - in nature and human society - and have, for as long as living beings have been able to breathe together (which is the original meaning of the word conspiracy, generated from the Latin conspirare: con-[together with] and spirare [breathe]).  

Even among our faunal cousins, forces align to disrupt the status quo; a head chimpanzee is displaced by a rival who is aided by other like-minded chimps; or the alpha of a wolf pack is tore to bits by would-be usurpers, who then turn on each other until a new leader emerges. 

Could these coups be accomplished without secret alliances, albeit alliances formed on an instinctual level of awareness? That seems implausible...  

But it is conspiracies of the human kind that are, by far, the most imaginative and complex. This is entirely in order, since the peculiar property of Homo sapiens’ sentience is to make abstract realities seem almost tangible to the senses, while remaining just beyond reach of them. 

These realities are not just intellectual abstractions, but emotional ones, too, and more often than not, a combination of both. They can be identified by everyday nomenclature, in the language of law, mathematics, politics, commerce, art, religion, science, and so on. 

Realities represented by language, and the artifacts they produce are the stuff of imagination and reason set to work in the world; the mythos and the logos. My philosophical antecedent called these realities ‘true world theories’, which is as good a signifier as any. Civilization itself, in fact, is built upon the intimation of these realities, which arose in the deep well of time like a flame, a-lighting the dark…  

Steering clear of metaphysics for now (I'll elaborate on mythos and logos later) and having asserted that human awareness has the aforementioned property of conferring reality to a given perspective - we can bring that knowledge to bear on the subject of conspiracy. 

Firstly though, for the purposes of this essay, let’s define conspiracy as the intent of a few individuals to control the majority of the population using coercion, deception, misinformation, disinformation and propaganda.

Secondly, we’ll acknowledge that conspiracy narratives are about power and keeping the mass population in the dark, prostrate to those who benefit from the conspiracy, whether that is banks, big pharma, government, elites, et al.

With these basic definitions in place, a metric can be contrived to measure a range of conspiracy theories, from the proven to the fantastical.

  

Of three broad categories that will exist within the spectrum of this metric, the first is comprised of conspiracy theories that have been shown to be factually, historically and scientifically verifiable by institutions and persons charged with guarding the gate, metaphorically speaking, between what is known and what is unknown.

I know what you’re going to say now, Reader: What if the guardians themselves are conspiring to keep us in fetters, putting blinds over our eyes to conceal and dissemble what truth can be found in this world? “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” as a Roman poet once asked, only the context here isn’t marital fidelity, but fidelity to an idea of knowledge that is incorruptible.   

There is, of course, no knowledge in this world without error. Contingency and uncertainty appear to be essential ingredients of what could be described loosely as a common reality, and these ingredients seem baked into the very nature of things. 

But even with that admission, there is value to epistemic fidelity in some form of objective knowledge, value to the notion there exists a vast, immanent and collaborative transhuman intelligence, and value in believing people can make informed declarations with conditional certainty. Even if this vision is aspirational, its effect in the world is substantive and measurable.  

So in the spirit of such a conceit, here is a way we might think about knowledge claims that validate the legitimacy of conspiracies listed in the first category. 

Consider the factors that go into the making of a diamond necklace. There are the diamonds themselves, which are analogous to facts that can be reasonably asserted about a given conspiracy.

Diamonds are the result of time and pressure, and mined by way of human ingenuity, industry and greed. So too are facts the result of individuals and communities from various disciplines using rigorous, critical and competitive processes to delineate known qualities from what's unknown.      

The size, number and setting of diamonds in the necklace parallels the constellation and arrangement of facts about a conspiracy theory. If someone were to purchase the necklace, there are ways to ensure it isn't a fake; analogously, if a theory is validated, we can consider the facts supporting that validation to be credible.

When we turn on a light or start a car, we expect the scientific theories that inform the object's engineering to produce the desired effect. With conspiracy theories, the desired effect is to know the truth of a event or process, and its relevance to the individual and society.     

To summarize, it is because of legal, historical, academic and scientific factual rigor that the conspiracies in the first category have been shown to meet the definitions of conspiratorial intent described previously: coercion, deception, misinformation, disinformation and propaganda. Evidence offered as proof in each conspiracy’s case is nigh irrefutable.

If measurements on the conspiracy spectrum are made horizontally (ie, along the x-axis), the first category occupies a range of degrees closest to x,y (fig.1).

Proximity of one category to another along the x-axis is an effort to demonstrate a progressive tendency towards more extreme, fatalistic and fantastical beliefs represented in the conspiracy spectrum.

The x-axis measures epistemic veracity and dissonance (or the tension between knowledge and belief). As integers increase along this axis, associated conspiracy theories become less verifiable.         

Cognitive dissonance (or if you prefer, psychological tension) experienced by a conspiracy theorist is measured along the y-axis (vertically). The rate of change here is represented by the rise of an upward concave parabola.  

Least affected by cognitive dissonance are conspiracy theories classed in the first category, called Demonstrable Conspiracies (DC). 

Few people would contest these conspiracy theories. Some of the more well-known include the N.S.A surveillance program revealed by Edward Snowden, the Bush administration’s intent to mislead the United Nations about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Iran-Contra affair, Watergate, among many others. 

Strategies employed by the tobacco and lead industries to hide the dangers of their products in the early and mid-20th century would also appear in this category (although this wasn’t always the case, as I'll explain in a moment). 

Many of the conspiracies in this category are nefarious, like Kristallnacht, or the Catholic Church’s cultural assimilation of indigenous people and suppression of priest sex abuse scandals; others are so famous they’re the stuff of legend - Socrates trial and execution, Jesus’ crucifixion and the assassination of Julius Caesar are good examples… 

The DC category acts a control for the rest of this imaginary metric, and the conspiracies listed here will be obvious to motivated, informed, and curious observers – like you and me. These are events that are recorded in history, studied by scholars, documented by legal precedent, affirmed by experimentation, validated by institutional analysis, and so on. 

 It’s worth noting, however, that events listed in the DC category did not start out there; it is by a sort of  collective intellectual rigor and due the passage of time that conspiracies are exposed.  

Bias is limited, too, as more information about a conspiracy becomes available. Of the classifications represented on the spectrum, the DC category is the one most associated with what might be described as objective knowledge, if such a thing is believed to exist…  

Degrees along the x-axis of the metric represent a gradation which corresponds with the epistemic veracity and dissonance of a given conspiracy theory, as I mentioned earlier. Suffice it to say, the conspiracies listed along the far right of the DC category might be considered verging on demonstrability. 

These conspiracies include the influence of the American military industrial complex, domestically and abroad, and the oil industry’s campaign of disinformation related to effects of pollution in the atmosphere. 

Here also we can observe the institutional and societal structures underlying the systemic oppression of women and people of color in the West, which have been created to benefit a white male minority. 

Economic and financial collusion between the members of a small group of global corporations would be classed in this designation as well.    

The distinction between degrees in the DC category as a whole is the presence of overwhelming legal precedence, coupled with ongoing and intense institutional analysis, and the passage of time. Societal change over successive generations coincides with the collective public response to the conspiracies classed in this category. 

Widespread acknowledgement of the conspiracies listed here results in revolutions, and leads to the prosecution (and sometimes termination) of corrupt entities and agents. 

This fact highlights the most obvious and important aspect of the theories classed in the DC category: Society and its culture are transformed in fundamental ways by the unmasking of conspiracy - provided the conspiracy has affected the lives and-or the well-being of a critical mass of people in that society.  

There is, nevertheless, ongoing resistance to disrupting the status quo and revealing the extent to which people are manipulated from the highest levels of government and commerce. 

Yet even in this time, the male-centric power structures and patriarchal-enforced hierarchies are under siege on all sides. Appeals to traditional authorities are not completely ineffectual, but this is an era of profound existential doubt in the West – a time of fake news and false prophets – and the way ahead is unclear, even, I think, to the most prescient among us.    

Overcoming pernicious doubt requires novel optimism, a spiritual disposition that is resilient in the face of life’s suffering, and not a denial of that suffering. If history provides a guide, political and economic hegemonies are impermanent; even with maintenance, they eventually falter, like a decrepit body, or an old machine. 

That’s why the passage of time is an importance consideration when evaluating the effect of conspiracies on society: It keeps things in perspective. For example, when oil companies fully transition to green energy production - some 20 years from now – it will be easier to acknowledge the corrupt veneer under which the industry operated for more than a century.

In short, conspiracy theories deposited in the DC category are verifiable. And if the conspirators haven’t been outed already – and punished - controlling the classified information they once attempted to suppress has lost value.

End of Part One. Click here for Part Two

(Hear this essay read by its author on the second episode of Morganics - A Podcast.)      

Morganics - A Podcast · Morganics - A Podcast, Episode 2: This Liminal Life

The Last Jedi, Fantasy, and the Art of Defying Expectations

Emerging from a movie theatre on that Saturday in December 2017, I didn’t know what to think. The latest offering in the nine-part Star Wars saga – Chapter VIII: The Last Jedi (TLJ) - had been so different from what I’d expected that I was reluctant to form an opinion about the film. Instead, I sputtered to friends and family about how "I needed to see it again” or that full appreciation would take “a couple times through, to get the whole thing”.

Truth is, I didn’t really know if I liked the movie or not, but as an ardent Star Wars fan, I was compelled to examine my apprehension more closely. After all, I’m invested in the franchise, like millions of other people around the world; not with money, per se, but with devotion to this particular space fantasy.

I explored this devotion at length in a 2016 essay I wrote about The Force Awakens (TFA). In it, I looked back on my personal interest in a process called worldbuilding, an interest inspired in my youth by both George Lucas - the creator of Star Wars – and J.R.R. Tolkien, academic and author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, as well as by role-playing games and comic books.

Worldbuilding is premised on the idea that an imagined story and setting might be so complete, it could be said to have a reality of its own. Though worldbuilding can be thought of as metaphor and/or allegory for our shared human experience on Earth, the imagined setting actually comprises a separate place, containing qualities of internal logic and consistency that encompasses and expands our everyday milieu.

Enchantment was the word that Tolkien used to describe the transcendent affect of fantasy worldbuilding. I used criteria outlined in Tolkien's treatise, On Fairy Stories, to frame part of the argument in my piece on TFA; essentially, that the enchantment of the Original Trilogy (OT) was also present in the first film of the new Sequel Trilogy (ST).  

It’s worth revisiting Tolkien with regards to TLJ, as well, since he made a demarcation between  a fantasy of enchantment, and fantasy where a person might, for a short time, suspend disbelief.

Tolkien wrote, “Enchantment produces a Secondary World into which both designer and spectator can enter, to the satisfaction of their senses while they are inside,” while suspended disbelief was a substitute for “the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe, or when trying (more or less willingly) to find what virtue we can in the work of an art that for us has failed.”

Reflecting on TLJ with Tolkien’s conceits in mind, I was struck suddenly by what I think was the essence of my initial objection to the new film: that I was – upon first viewing - taken out of the fantasy too often; compelled to suspend disbelief - and so had become aware of that disbelief. And while this state of mind had immediate consequences for what I'd just seen in TLJ, I was also reminded of my fraught opinion on the Prequel Trilogy (PT).

I’ll explain what I mean by that statement, but there’s certainly no need to revisit all the difficult aspects of the PT. Most longtime fans have one or two moments (at least) in Chapters I-III that they feel are cringe-worthy, and I’m no different.

In some cases I’m willing to accept the shortcomings were, at least, partially the result of seeing the movies through an adult’s eyes, rather than a child’s. But that's not the whole picture. In my estimation, it wasn’t until after the first act of Revenge of the Sith (RotS) that viewers experience the sustained enchantment of the Secondary World described by Tolkien; to that point, and in the prior two PT films - The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones - moments of this sort were fleeting.

Almost certainly, the lore surrounding the origin of Darth Vader – which had been percolating in popular culture for decades – engaged the imagination of both designer and spectator (to use another Tolkien-ism). From the moment that Palpatine reveals he is a Sith lord to Anakin, RotS takes on a mythic, nearly spiritual, dimension. 

Overall criticism notwithstanding, when it came to the PT, it wasn’t difficult for me to envision a galaxy in which the Jedi Order were the feared and respected "guardians of peace and justice" Obi-wan Kenobi described in A New Hope (ANH), the original Star Wars film. 

The notion, too, that there would be a science to explain the biological antecedent of the Force – midi-chlorians – seemed reasonable in the PT setting, so the introduction of these microscopic beings  deepened the fantasy for me.

Some viewers did not feel the same way, however; and in their opinion, the ineffable qualities of the Force were debased by such an explanation. For them, the materialist description of this “mystical energy field” was enough to take them out of the fantasy.

This phenomenon repeated itself again and again with the PT, whether as a consequence of iffy writing, poor chemistry between performers, Jar Jar Binks, etc., and those of us who had been fans since the OT were particularly vulnerable to having expectations dashed by the second trio of Star Wars films.

We should have known, though, that there was no going back home after George Lucas released the updated versions of the OT in the 1990s. His tinkering with the Cantina scene – the infamous Greedo-shoots-first debacle – became the ultimate symbol of being taken out of the fantasy that is Star Wars.

Part of the appeal of Han Solo’s character in the original theatre edit was that he is an amoral opportunist until Luke and Leia give him a cause in which to believe. He begins a scoundrel, yet he gains honor and a heart of gold, a metaphor that’s made explicit by the medal ceremony at the end of ANH.

That character arc doesn’t exist in Lucas’ revised version of ANH. Instead of gunning down Greedo in cold blood, we are shown that Han reacted defensively after the bounty hunter shoots first. Yet somehow, by portraying Han as reactionary, this one change redefines who he is, giving him a morality that the original character initially lacks, then gains, in the course of the film.

Deprived of this arc, Lucas’ revised Han is a tepid antihero, and less dangerous than the original theatre edit would have had us believe.

TLJ presented some viewers, myself among them, with a similar dilemma; in that we are to accept that the same Luke Skywalker who resists killing his father and succumbing to the Dark Side of the Force in the OT, is the same Luke Skywalker who’s willing to murder his nephew (Ben Solo, or if you like, Kylo Ren) while the boy sleeps (albeit in a moment of weakness, and for a seemingly good reason).

The threat that Ben represents is, by no means, on the same scale as Vader, who kills a group of children in his first murderous act as a Sith lord. Ben, at the point when Luke considers ending him, has done nothing but be implicated in Supreme Leader Snoke’s machinations; as Vader, Anakin Skywalker presided over genocidal acts on a planetary scale.

The gulf between the two is wide, and if Luke was willing to show compassion to his father – who did so many awful things – he would be even more likely to show it in the case of his nephew, who wasn’t yet complicit in any crimes, right? Not so, it would seem!

 

While Luke’s characterization in this way was jarring enough, it was something else to see Leia Organa flying through the vacuum of space, unaided by anything but the Force.

For me, as a viewer, this moment demanded the greatest amount of suspended disbelief; not because I thought Leia incapable of such an act, but because I wasn’t shown that she had received any sort of Jedi training. Consequently, in my assessment, this entire sequence of events lacked the internal consistency required for effective worldbuilding. Again, I was taken out of the fantasy.

I don’t doubt that the extended universe of the Star Wars franchise – which I define as both Legends and Canon content streams, or the accumulated texts, games and television that supplement the Skywalker movies – has a lot to say about Leia’s education in the ways of the Force.

But as a self-proclaimed fundamentalist when it comes to Star Wars (see my essay on TFA), I believe the narrative must be comprehendible using only the contents of the nine-part saga exclusively. Leia’s sudden Force mastery challenges this conviction, since the only power she’s demonstrated to this point in the Star Wars films is a profound intuitive connection with the people she loves.

It is, perhaps, this moment – Leia’s use of the Force – that persuaded me to resist the urge to judge TLJ too quickly. When I watched the film again, it became clear to me that director Rian Johnson had intended to defy expectations with TLJ. There are, at least, two important reasons to take such an approach.

The first has been a subject of discussion for some time already; basically that TLJ brings the Star Wars franchise forward, making it fresh for a new generation of fans. Defying expectations, in this case, is a calculated business risk aimed at ensuring the Star Wars franchise’s profitability (and ubiquity) for the next 10-20 years. 

(For some viewers in the 40+ age range who were fans of the OT, Rogue One (R1) has become the standard for a modern Star Wars film. In fact, a case can be made that TLJ suffered some ill will from segments of the fan community because it wasn’t like R1, which was based in the familiar setting of the OT. In short, R1 met the expectations certain fans had for a Star Wars film by adhering to the established internal consistency of OT worldbuilding.)     

The other, less obvious reason to defy expectations at this point in the nine-part saga is to put audiences off certain pre-conceived notions about the final film. The untimely death of Snoke is a good example of one such notion, in that many viewers saw him as a Palpatine-type antagonist whose backstory would be instrumental to the ST’s ultimate resolution.

Now that Snoke is gone, and Kylo Ren has taken on the mantle of supreme leader, the direction of the ninth film is less certain.

A similar effect is achieved by Kylo ‘revealing’ Rey’s true parentage, that the girl was born to junk traders and sold into slavery for drinking money. This is intended to put to rest speculation about her genealogy, which has been a central mystery of the ST. Here, defying expectations feeds into Rey’s fears about herself, and puts the audience off the possibility that she is familially related to the saga’s central characters.

While this ‘revelation’ is very likely to prove a deception, Kylo clarifies and obscures Rey’s identity at the same time by telling her a believable story about her origins, which sets the stage for a final reckoning between the two characters in the saga’s last chapter.

And just what will be the nature of this final reckoning?

The fact that Leia still lives suggest she has a part yet to play in the drama, an outcome foreshadowed by Kylo’s decision not to kill her in TLJ. Some meaningful exchange between mother and son seems fated for the last film, as does validation of Rey’s parentage by an authority other than Kylo. Will these situations be connected?

Quite possibly, but as conjectures they must remain the subject of speculation. At least for now…

(Carrie Fisher’s deceased status is not a deterrent to her appearance in the saga’s final film, as R1 demonstrated. Audiences might find out about Leia’s demise in the opening crawl of Chapter IX, but it’s also possible that a combination of archival footage and CGI will be used to recreate her likeness, despite claims that have been made to the contrary.)   

TLJ may not be my favorite chapter of the Star Wars saga, but I remain enchanted by these films still; or at least willing to suspend disbelief long enough to see them through to completion.

If the franchise gets away from me after that, I don’t mind. Old testaments are invariably followed by new ones; titans are supplanted by gods; cable replaces dial-up – change is the way of things, and it is the way of the Force.

Like Yoda tells Luke as they watch the Jedi Temple burn in TLJ, “We are what they grow beyond”. That’s good advice, no matter what galaxy you’re from.