How the Conspiracy Mindset actually helps Authority

in #anarchy6 years ago

Conspiracies do happen, but some people let this idea run away with their thinking until it completely pollutes their minds with garbage. There comes a point where discernment needs to be applied in order for clarity to set in. If you don’t practice discernment, then the decisions you’ll make will favor those in control over you. Why does it never occur to some people that if there’s someone in control, that they might spread some rumors? It is said that it’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.

Skepticism is a quality that should be held in high regard by anarchists. It acts as a barrier to becoming a follower and becoming a follower is exactly what every rumor spreader seeks to make of you. When you become a follower, you can be manipulated. If you allow complete control by leaders, they will eventually do this to you...

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The world is a very complex place with multiple agenda’s. Nobody has complete control of anything. The partial control that powerful entities have is usually counteracted into a stalemate situation that often lasts years. For instance, the cold war lasted about 40 years and finally ended when Russia fell as a military power.

I recently heard someone ask whether bitcoin was created by the “illuminati”. You can insert Bilderberg group, Trilateral Commission, NSA or whatever boogeyman you can think of here. Whichever you choose, it will be false for some fairly obvious reasons.

Bitcoin is a technology based upon interdisciplinary fields

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If you stayed away from bitcoin because “illuminati” might be involved, then you probably just helped prolong the control bankers already have over you. You didn’t take the exit from the system because someone triggered an emotional response that keeps you from investigating further.

Bitcoin is actually based upon several different fields of technology that weren’t invented at the same time. One of them is cryptography which has been around for thousands of years. It is not the work of one person and required refinement beyond many generations to reach a form that eventually became used in computer science. Elliptic curve cryptography which is currently a part of bitcoin, was first created around 1985, and was around several years before there was a workable internet. It was in wide use by 2005 which was several years before bitcoin was invented.

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The idea of a distributed database (which is another of the technologies Bitcoin depends upon) has been around for a long time as well. One of the problems that distributed databases have to solve is how to achieve consensus about the true state of the network. How do you make sure that each node in the network is on the same page? This problem is known as the Byzantine Generals Problem and networks that can achieve consensus easily are said to have “high byzantine fault tolerance”.

The idea of blockchain is unique in the sense that nobody prior to Satoshi Nakamoto had chained together information using SHA256 with hashes before to create immutability and digital scarcity. One of the problems with all things digital is that it’s easily copied. By linking the hash of the previous block to the following block, digital scarcity was able to be created for the first time. But the technology to do this unique amalgamation of protocols was already around.

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Bitcoin has several properties that governments don't like. One of them is the inability to inflate the currency for financial monetary controls (they say quantative easing, but what it really amounts to is theft). It's also more chaotic to track than banking systems that have full KYC (Know Your Customer) regulations. It's borderless and censorship resistant (nobody can prevent you transacting with anyone in the world).

Technology is a field too vast to be created and maintained by a single entity with a single agenda. Humanity isn’t in chains because of some mysterious entities, many of which fight among themselves for control. Humanity is in chains because you believe. And because of your belief, you become obedient. Skepticism is one of the first steps toward freedom because it breaks down the obedient follower syndrome in you.


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Great piece.

I think conspiracy theories keep going on since there is a nugget of truth in each of them. The challenge is there is also a nugget of truth in most scams. That is why so many of them work.

I believe that the elite use esoteric ideas against people. Like you said, our own thinking is the most powerful friend or foe we have. When we believe what is spread (and sure why couldnt the conspiracy theory be started by the elite banksters?) we fall victim to having our minds turned against us.

I dont believe that all are necessarily conspiracies...some stuff is just a natural outcome of years of rigged system run by ever increasing greed. Instead of some grand plan, it is more likely simply a result from a sustained progression down a path of corruption..

Larken Rose on belief in authority: (he wrote a book called "The Most Dangerous Superstition"). You're probably already familiar with his work...

Conspiracies drive me crazy. There's a natural tendency for us to fill in the gaps, but conspiracy theorists also seem to be hell bent on converting the unbelievers. The more fantasy is injected into a belief, the more fervently the believers try to force others to accept it.

I never was one to think 9/11 was an inside job, but I also didn't take my position based on patriotism. It just didn't add up for me. However, I saw so many people who DID think 9/11 was inside job try to devour anybody who didn't. Reminds me too much of the evangelical atmosphere I grew up in, where your job is to prove to the rest of the world that they're going to hell.

On the flipside, we get called conspiracy theorists for believing privacy is a legitimate issue. As @frdem3dot0 pointed out, this is not about a secret organized group of people who are pressing magic buttons that control everybody's mind. It's that generations of mistakes have compounded into this monstrosity that we have now.

The difference between that and a conspiracy, is you can actually trace and demonstrate the flaws. You don't have to take leaps of faith or logic.

Thank you mate !! I was looking for a positive term to ''paranoid for weeks'' without really searching it. You just gave me the answer and this word is skepticism ! I guess the worst part of the story is that it is a word that comes from my language.

What government does not like about bitcoin is what makes it. Blockchain and decentralisation are a life saver and nobody can do anything about it. But I guess they do love crypto currencies as much as we do but not for the same reasons. They can create as much monetary value as they want as most of them are already rich ! So I guess everybody is happy at the end of story. Except the dumb people that criticise bitcoin because they want to create FUD or because they just lost invest their life savings in a pump and dump.

What happens often looks like there is some central and evil planner, but instead it is just multiple layers of human stupidity. On each layer people make small mistakes and add a little corruption, but integrated over the many hierarchical layers the end result is completely broken.

So we are not fighting some small evil secret organisation, but human failure. This is another big advantage of flat networks. Human flaws get averaged out while in hierarchical systems they multiply.

In most cases they make you fight windmills as they laugh all the way to the bank. If you are too busy fighting shape-shifting lizards you are not fighting real injustice in this world, if you are too distrustful of the government, you won't push for it to be more just or help the citizenry as it's supposed to, etc, etc.

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Thanks for sharing valuable post.i appreciate your post.i like bitcoin.

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