jonolan on First, Coffee: “Thanks, Tyler. And yes, I tend towards including "visually enticing" bits in a lot of my posts. But your coffee…” Sep 2, 08:04
Tinfoil Wisdom
Who’s shaking the jar? Somebody has to be shaking it! There has to be some spider in its web and/or some shadowy cabal pulling the strings for their own nefarious ends. Or, so says one variety of common wisdom. A variety I choose to call Tinfoil Wisdom.
With the exception of the Lamestream Media, who shakes things up for their own profit as much as any agenda, there doesn’t have to be any shadowy figure “shaking the jar.” Certain sorts are quite capable of behaving heinously without manipulative instigation. They’re just that bad all on their own.
This is unfortunately the curse of being sentient. We’re built to make use of pattern recognition and, hence, we’re susceptible to false pattern recognition aka Apophenia. We are, as Klaus Conrad wrote, prone to the unmotivated seeing of connections accompanied by a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness and to engaging in self-referential, over-interpretations of what we see and hear.
There doesn’t have to be some spider in its web and/or some shadowy cabal pulling the strings for their own nefarious ends. With the ease of communication and the resultant online “echo chambers,” we’re quite capable of producing conflicts organically.
Of course, all that said, that doesn’t mean that sometimes, at some various levels, that there isn’t someone “shaking the jar.” It just means that there doesn’t have to be and that we should jump to the conclusion that there is. Sometimes, probably the majority of times, that “Shaker” didn’t start the shit; they just enabled existing troublemakers in order to profiteer off of them.
Tags: Apophenia | Conspiracy Theories | Fear | Politics | Psychology | QAnon | Society | Tinfoil Hats | Truisms | Wisdom
