Amerika

Humans like visual images. These reduce the world to a state of completion: no change or motion, all events visible, order imposed that fits the human eye. These are our weapon against doubt, which is brought on by the ambiguity of our choices and options, because they make the world seem tangible and under our control.

Because we want tangible images, we seek easy explanations for the complex, such as our insistentece that a serial killer has afflicated Austin instead of alcoholism:

For years, police have denied the existence of a serial killer in the heart of Austin, insisting “no foul play” in most cases and concluding they lacked connections beyond a few similar details: often young men, many intoxicated, found floating in Lady Bird Lake.

Rossmo’s report references 7,737 unintentional drownings across the state over more than two decades. 78% of those were males “predominantly between the ages of 22 and 44 years.” It also mentions Austin’s population boom and alcohol sales in the “Downtown/Rainey Street district” increasing by 320% between 2020 and 2022.

Autopsy and toxicology reports, police records, witness accounts and other evidence showed several of the victims were indeed intoxicated. The cause of death for most in the list was accidental drowning or undetermined.

I do not oppose alcoholism. In fact, it is probably the best way to endure this time. But if you add a new watering hole zone to Austin plus lots of new residents, you get more floaty bloaties in the lake. The herd insists this is a serial killer because they do not want to face the mundane reality of alcoholism.

Interestingly, the same conspiracy theory paranoia has happened to the south by a few hundred miles in Houston, a flat hot wet s-hole that no one deliberately visits:

Harris County medical officials have identified three more people found dead in Houston bayous this year, underscoring a string of mysterious deaths that have alarmed residents.

The three new identifications were part of a string of bodies pulled from Houston bayous over roughly one week in September, alarming residents who may question law enforcement’s repeated assurances that there is no serial killer in the city.

Everyone is looking for the serial killer; it is shocking to think that these deaths are the result of ordinary accidents brought on by having more bars in the area (Austin) or more homeless people camping out near the rivers (Houston). It upsets our status picture of the cities in which we live as good places.

However, we can see why conspiracy theories exist: people need some explanation for events that they can understand and therefore, feel they have control over. They need tangible explanations so at least there is not a mystery that makes them helpless like a prey animal.

In the same way, humans demand the importance of the individual be more important than that mysterious reality; this philosophy, called individualism, involves pathological reality-denial:

By suggesting that ultimate value resides in the individual, regardless of their sociopolitical status, the Bible defied some of the world’s most enduring conventions of rank and worth. Genesis declares that adam (Hebrew for “man” or “humankind”) was created in the image of God, thus affirming the intrinsic value of all human beings—a fundamental theme for “peoples of the book,” Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike.

The Bible describes how, for several hundred years, the ancient Israelites governed themselves by tribal councils, maintaining a measure of equality. In a crisis, when tribal councils failed to reach consensus, Israel’s people agreed to choose a king, “like the other nations.” But they also developed methods to resist autocratic power. Those who wrote the Bible well remembered the oppression that Israel’s people had experienced in Egypt and Babylonia.

It is a mistake to see the origin of this philosophy as coming from the Bible; most likely it arises when people no longer have much in common because civilization has created a surplus of extraneous people, delegated-power structures like jobs have created resentment, and culture is under assault from early “organic” diversity.

Civilizations decay as they move from focus on goals/order/transcendence to the individual, and the last stage of this is the abolition of external consistency to reality and its replacement with infinite variations on the theme of human wants, desires, and manipulations.

In the largest picture, individualism is itself a conspiracy theory, an attempt to explain existence in simplified terms based in the individual instead of aiming for a complex understanding of an ambiguous and uncertain reality. Individualism allows the human to believe is in control.

We might see all of this as palliative care. When you get to the point where you have to tell people not to murder each other, the official narrative is completely deranged and unrealistic, and the only way to motivate people is through personal convenience and power, you will seek warm feelings over solutions out of pure fatalism anyway.

Tags: christianity, conspiracy theories, fatalism, individualism, solipsism