Overcoming Ideological Fixation

It is far harder than it might seem.

Azar Gat wrote a book on ideological fixation, but was unable to overcome it himself. In the censored preface of Animal Farm, Orwell wrote that trading one dogma for another was not the path of truth or enlightenment, and I have seen it all the time during my journey. People often reject mainstream dogma, to embrace something even further off-base, such as Flat Earth “theory.” That may seem like an extreme example, but I have heard of people in my circles that subscribe to it. The scientific ideal has never quite been seen in the real world, just like other ideals, such as free markets, democracy, and a free press. In a world of scarcity and fear, everything eventually becomes corrupted. The key to all scientific advancement is to keep an open mind and go where the evidence leads, but scientists often have proven to be as dogmatic as any other professionals. The crazed reactions of denial and fear from scientists and even “visionaries,” when Brian O’Leary even mentioned free energy, led to his open wondering of whether humanity is a sentient species.

Ed Herman’s statistical work convincingly falsified the idea that the American media is an unbiased arbiter of the truth, free from the influence of vested interests. Ed’s work on that matter has never been credibly challenged. To this day, Wikipedia refuses to even mention Ed’s work on that issue in his bio, which he considered his primary contribution to scholarship, as it smears him instead. Ed proposed his Propaganda Model to explain why the media was corrupt, but he was not set on it, like a good scientist should. Others have proposed other filters and other aspects of the media worth investigating, but the basic framework has never been competently challenged. While there is a capitalist media and elites, the Propaganda Model will likely continue to be relevant.

My previous post on the awakening process is germane to awakening to mainstream dogma, but it certainly does not mean that alternative frameworks are valid, either. They should all be subjected to the same tests of validity. On the fringes I have seen many bodies of theory that did not survive my scrutiny, and I have seen many highly creative interpretations of the evidence, which was often thin evidence. Conspiracists do that all the time, as they construct elaborate theories on the flimsiest of evidence. Flat-Earth theory is an example of it, but I have seen it in many other areas.

Thirty years ago, I got sucked into the Velikovsky issue and catastrophism, which also has spin-offs such as electric-universe theory. Very little of what I saw seemed valid, if any of it. Catastrophes happen and have been important, such as the bolide that wiped out the dinosaurs, but the evidence of relatively recent global catastrophes, especially the celestial kind (and particularly those that support the literal truth of Old Testament stories, which was Velikovsky’s primary thrust), did not have any convincing evidence to support them that I could see, and in areas where I am relatively well read, such as the megafauna extinctions, using catastrophic theory to explain them was silly.

Velikovsky theorized that Venus erupted from Jupiter only a few thousand years ago and had a near-miss with Earth, as did Mars. There is not an astronomer on Earth that takes any of that seriously, and I sure don’t. The idea that a rocky planet could erupt from a gas giant like Jupiter is one of the craziest astronomical ideas that I ever heard of. The more that scientists learn about Jupiter (such as through the current Juno mission), the more ridiculous Velikovsky’s idea is.

Velikovsky also theorized that those celestial events wiped out wooly mammoths, for instance, but wooly mammoths died out wherever humans arrived during their conquest of Earth, and the ones that seem to excite American scientists, in North America, went extinct when all of the other elephant-family species in the Western Hemisphere went extinct: soon after human arrival. That kind of effort is what I call one of the “Anything But Homo Sapiens” hypotheses, which tries to absolve ancient humans of that “achievement.”

I have a few of Paul LaViolette’s books. He is one of many who have proposed alternative physics models, and the primary upshot of every one that I have seen is the possibility of free energy. I don’t need any theories, because people close to me have seen free-energy devices in action, and the likelihood is that none of the alternative physics models that I have seen will fully explain those technologies. Even in orthodox circles, Einstein’s cosmological constant, dark matter, and dark energy are suspected to be fudges to preserve Einstein’s general relativity equations, like a phantom planet was introduced to preserve Newton’s gravitational equations.

While LaViolette sensibly dismissed Velikovsky’s planetary-billiards scenarios, he was way off the mark on other issues. He took his own run at the megafauna extinctions, arguing that the continental ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere would have generated winds of hundreds of miles an hour that would have toppled all of the megafauna like bowling pins. The big problem that I had with that scenario was that we have an extant continental ice sheet in Antarctica, and not only have those kinds of winds never been observed, but penguins withstand the Antarctic winds just fine.

There have been many mammoths found in thawing permafrost, and many had sudden and violent deaths, but that is easily explained by breaking ice dams, which has happened throughout this ice age, as ice dams formed with huge lakes behind them. When the dams burst, the resultant flood wiped out everything in the way. In my home state is a remnant of some of those flood events.

LaViolette also said that he had a mystical experience that launched him on his journey, which informed him that Ancient Egyptians had advanced understandings of physics that is beyond even today’s orthodox understandings. Of course, this brings up the issue of technologically advanced ancient civilizations, which I have never seen a shred of viable evidence for. I have never found convincing the arguments that the necropolis at Giza was built with Atlantean or ET tech. In my studies of the rise of civilizations, the only thing noteworthy about Giza is its scale, and pyramids had been built in Egypt long before the Giza structures. It was only a colossal act of elite display that all early civilizations engaged in, as new elites claimed divine status or sanction and produced overawing monumental architecture to enforce that fiction on their subjects. Egypt’s Old Kingdom was only different in scale, not in kind, from other early civilizations, and how it was built was not that difficult, technically. Ancient civilizations were good at working in stone. If the Old Kingdom had advanced technologies, they were unable to even ameliorate the arid period that caused the Nile’s annual flood to wane, and the famine that followed in its wake and collapsed the Old Kingdom. If they really had advanced technology, they sure didn’t know how to use it when it was important. Ancient Egyptians were riddled with diseases (as can be seen in the mummies), which one would not expect of a technically advanced culture.

If LaViolette is that far off on relatively mundane issues, how seriously should his alternative physics work be taken?

The trajectory of human technology, from the first stone tools to today’s quantum computers, does not have any big gaps that I ever saw, or some civilization that took a radical advanced path. I am not against the idea, but there has never been any significant evidence of it that I ever saw.

Graham Hancock is a leading proponent of such ancient civilizations, and a central claim of his is that Antarctica was ice-free in historical times. There is a not a sane scientist on Earth that takes that seriously. The Antarctic ice sheets are many millions of years old.

One of the last bizarre fringe topics that I spent a lot of time on was the Apollo Moon landings, after Brian O’Leary inadvertently dragged me into it. The Moon landings happened as popularly presented, although there may have been cover-ups of ET encounters on the Moon. The ET cover-up is real, and my guess is that most of what my friend was shown in his underground technology demonstration came from ET tech.

I spent a lot of time on those fringe topics in the 1990s, and virtually none of them ever stood up to scrutiny. Some fringe topics were likely valid, at least in part, such as the pleomorphic dynamics first discovered by Antoine Béchamp and independently confirmed by Royal Rife and Gaston Naessens, with their “impossible” microscopes. But those discoveries threaten the medical racket, so those 20^th-century scientists had hell to pay. But I would not call the science robust, either. When thousands of those microscopes are in daily use, only then will the science become solid enough to supplant orthodox understandings, and I am not holding my breath, not before the Fifth Epoch arrives to collapse all rackets. The germ theory of disease is likely flawed, perhaps greatly, but that will likely not be resolved to everybody’s satisfaction in my lifetime.

There are two camps in particular that I have encountered, and each has positions that they slavishly adhere to, no matter what the evidence is. The first I’ll discuss is what I will call the Establishment Left, as exemplified by the Democratic Party, and four topics will suffice: the trans issue, the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and the First Amendment.

There is no scientific evidence that a mammal can change its sex. A mammal’s sex is established when a sperm fertilizes an egg. The resulting zygote has an X or Y chromosome, and that is the end of it. There are chromosomal diseases, often when there are more chromosomes than normal, which can also affect the sex chromosome, but that has nothing to do with today’s trans craze, when males and females pretend that they are the opposite sex. It is like people who pretend that they are dogs and cats (and I have those in my circles, too). Those pretenders are mentally ill, and giving them hormones and surgeries to mimic the opposite sex is a medical atrocity that will go down in medical history with lobotomies and eugenics. That children are being sterilized and mutilated in the name of trans ideology is horrifying. Trump is trying to end this “lunacy,” and the Democrats are fighting him the entire way. Sane feminists call the trans craze a rearguard action on women, to eliminate the idea of women altogether, and I think that they are right. The Democrats abandoned women, children, and the working class, and that is primarily why Donald Trump won the White House.

I have been writing about the medical racket since the 1990s, but the COVID-19 response was my wake-up call on what I am calling Medical Racket, Version 2.0, as Anthony Fauci and his friends in Big Pharma built an infectious-disease racket. My Democratic Party friends are simply unreachable on this subject. When I was a child, I got measles, like virtually every other child in my society, and it was a mild childhood disease that nobody was worried about. Today, however, measles outbreaks cause mass hysteria, and none of my Democratic friends can begin to explain that. Before the measles vaccine was introduced, the measles death rate had declined in England by 99.96%. Why was there a measles vaccine at all? Vaccines are a highly dubious medical intervention. Since the law shielding vaccine makers from liability in the USA was passed in 1986 (because vaccines are “unavoidably unsafe”), American children have been pincushioned by vaccines, and “coincidentally,” chronic diseases in children have quadrupled. My two main candidates are vaccines and the explosion of ultraprocessed food. I know of no other serious contenders. But those topics are off-limits with Democrats.

The grandfather of the neocons was Zbigniew Brzezinski, who bragged that he baited the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan, to give it its “Vietnam.” Many millions of lives were shortened and shattered by Brzezinski’s plan, under the watch of the “human rights” president, Jimmy Carter, who was another blood-soaked emperor. As Noam Chomsky often said, the so-called hawks and doves of American foreign policy were united in their imperial goals, but only differed in their strategies. From Carter onward, every president was surrounded by neocons, Bush the Second most memorably, but Victoria Nuland, for instance, who is married to one of those most prominent neocons, engineered the overthrow of Ukraine’s government while working in the Obama administration. The USA’s Ukrainian “democracy promotion” was only a continuation of Brzezinski’s policy of attacking Russia with any handy pawn, and not only have the Ukrainian people suffered immensely as a result, but the Biden administration openly risked nuclear war with Russia, in something right out of Dr. Strangelove. Trump has pulled us back from the brink of Armageddon. But Trump and Biden have been united in their support of Israel as it commits genocide in Gaza, for an example of what Noam referred to.

The censorship around COVID and Ukraine went into overdrive during Biden’s reign, and one of Trump’s first acts of his second presidency was to protect the First Amendment. The Democrats handed Trump situation after situation in which he became the voice of reason. The Democrats became the woke, neocon, warmongering censorship party that is in Big Pharma’s hip pocket. I grew up Democrat, so this has been extremely painful to witness. The Establishment Left is a tribe and breaking ranks is severely punished, as in all tribes.

Now for another group, which I will loosely call the right in the USA. They agree on ending the trans craze (but are OK with forcing women to have unwanted children), generally agree that we have no business being involved in Ukraine, have seen their freedom of speech attacked for many years, and were very wary of the COVID response, largely because they have watched those around them die and become crippled. But the right is just another tribe with different objects of worship.

The basics of Global Warming are not hard to understand, but I have yet to see a right winger admit that it is an important issue. They either deny it or minimize it, I never saw one of them make scientifically literate arguments to support their positions, and I have yet to see anybody on the right change their mind on this issue. It is an article of faith. A few years ago, my region had a record-shattering heat wave that killed an estimated one billion sea animals, and while it was happening, right wingers here denied that it had anything to do with Global Warming. I have watched the glaciers rapidly melt in my home state, and right wingers are impervious to the evidence. Trump blithely dismisses the issue as a myth.

While Ed Herman specialized in structural analysis, which his Propaganda Model arose from, he did not deny that elite intervention happened in the media, but he argued that it did not impact the media’s basic functionality. During my free-energy journey, we were targeted by the people who really run the world, and it sure isn’t the American president, who sits far down the food chain of power on Earth. But I saw how almost everybody played along, in a dynamic that I have called 1% conspiracy and 99% complicity. The organized suppression that we were subjected to was at least 90% structural. There is a global conspiracy to keep disruptive technologies out of public awareness and use, and the global elite punch far above their weight, but the biggest reason for this situation is the public’s inertia, not conspiratorial intervention, as Brian made clear in his Suppression Syndrome summary. For the herd’s size, the shepherd’s task has been surprisingly easy. I saw this strange schism between structuralists and conspiracists. Structuralists argue that conspiracies explain nothing of importance, while conspiracists claim that it explains everything. It is essentially a battle between two tribes and the truth eludes both of them, because they are both ideologically fixated.

Bucky Fuller remarked on the conflict between Marxists and capitalists, and those categories can roughly apply to those two camps that I discussed. Basically, both were fighting over their share of the scarce economic resources, as all politics does. The only solution is abundance, and only one thing can do that. Only then will the scarcity-based ideologies and the fixations on them end, which is what my work is all about. Until then, all camps will fixate on their ideologies of choice, because they see their allegiance to them as how they survive in a world of scarcity and fear, and they are not far wrong. I am here to help end all of that, and the world as we know it. People in ideological fixation can’t help much with this Epochal task, but it is not easy to overcome. Disillusioned idealists are most of the way there, which is why they are my target audience.