Mikä minua ärsyttää

There's a site in Finland, I guess, since the site has a menu in one of the Uralic languages and I'm willing to take a guess that it's in Finnish. Has to be: there are menu subjects with the word Suomen in them, suomen being Finnish for Finland. The site has a long list of topics and links to things that aggravate the author of the texts. The menu for this list of topics is titled Mikä minua ärsyttää which translates into Gringoese as "Things That Get Me Stirred Up."
     Among the many things that stir up the owner of the site is conspiracy theories. The page cited here goes to some considerable effort to point out how conspiracy theories grow, how they are assembled and how they are the work of less than rational thinking.
     Kinda like religion with me, but that's another delusional subsystem.
     Now all this comes up 'cause one of my colleagues at work has been getting into government-sponsored conspiracy theories for the past year or so. I didn't pay too much attention to it at the time, but by the time he moved from Ed and Elaine Brown to the so-called "chemtrail" conspiracy I began to get worried.
     I mean, here's a college-educated guy with a degree in political science and a bunch of course work in history and anthropology to boot, strung out on the InterWebs, looking all the time over his shoulder or up in the sky 'cause he thinks somebody in the government has organized a huge conspiracy to flood our environment with poisons and germs and viruses using alien technology in an effort to suck off all our vital bodily fluids.
     Yeah, that kind of conspiracy theory.
     The paranoid conspiracy theory thing. The PCT thing.
     And to make matters just a little more sensitive to me, the other day he calls another coworker's cell phone to say that the sky was filling up with chemtrails and that it was dangerous to go outside.
     Then when he got to work he called her again and demanded that she come outside to see what he could see just sitting in his car in the parking lot. And he wouldn't take "no" for an answer. When she put on her coat I asked her what was up. She said she had to go out and see the signs of a conspiracy to poison us all with contrails.
     Yeah, she said "contrails," not "chemtrails," which pretty much clued me in on her position on this rather bizarre delusional process. And she's a person with a psych degree & grad course work to boot.
     So here my coworker goes out to the parking lot. I could tell it was another case of mikä häntä ärsyttää. Stuff that ticked her off.
     A few minutes later she came back in, accompanied by the fellow who's become the PCT aficionado.
     A minute or two went by and the PCT guy mentions that we should all go out and see the poisons that are being sprayed on us from four or five miles up by these aircraft of the US government as part of the conspiracy & plot & all that.
     I responded by sticking my tongue out and pointing my face skyward.
     "I lick that stuff out of the air all the time," I said, sticking my tongue out & licking at the air above my face. "It's really closer 'n you think it is."
     Silence from the theorist.
     "Perspective is a part of a plot to make us think that things far away really are far away," I said. "They ain't! They's right here on the tip of your tongue!" I stuck my tongue out again and continued to lick at the air. "It's better if you can catch it while they's still fresh," I said.
     And again the tongue in the air: "Lalla-lalla-lalla-looooo"
     More silence.
     So this morning I come in to work and my friend with the cell phone and I get into a conversation about this bizarre change in my other co-worker's behavior and rational faculties. She said that he'd been going on about this stuff all the time any more, going from one conspiracy theory to another in the usual grand collection of dots that lead to an overarching, all-encompassing sort of "unified field theory" about what was happening in the world and how we are all just guinea pigs for "The Man." Like the Illuminati and the Trilateral Commission and the greys and the dracs and the Nazi flying saucer base on the moon and in Antarctica where the predator species trains against the alien species and all the stuff from the movies is true, man!

A couple weeks ago maybe it was this one fellow had mentioned that he was sorry he ever got involved in looking at this stuff, all this Ed & Elaine Brown and the chemtrails and the Masonic temple and the Lodge of whatever stuff. All the stuff that gets conflated into the PCT handbook.
     Kinda like the DSM IV but with a huge pile less critical analysis of the data.
     I said that I used to read some of that stuff but most of it was just dreck and garbage and anybody with any reasonable consciousness would recognize it for what it is: stuff that might happen or might have happened but which was, either way, way the hell outside of what any government or collusional force might orchestrate or do.
     Bullshit, I said. It was all bullshit.
     And if you want to listen to it and if you want to believe, the only thing you're gonna get out of it is a horribly depressing view of the world that wastes time and sucks energy out of you. And I said all that energy could go toward having a nice day in the sunshine while the increasing airline traffic causes many more planes to be in the air at any given time than even five years ago.
     'Cause that's all it is, the "chemtrail" hypothesis reviewed.
     It has nothing to do with plots or conspiracies. It doesn't involve the tunnels under the entire United States where the aliens control the way toilets flush. It has nothing to do with a supposedly secret cabal of neo-Nazi atheist new agers sitting in a room under a crystal pyramid orchestrating droughts and solar eruptions. No gang of feisty Jews or ascended high mutant overlords of an ancient lodge going back to before the Pleistocene works with the psychological profession to subvert and destroy the hard-core "facts" of $cientology.
     Tom Cruise is good at that enough the way it is.
     He don't need no help from his alien homeys in the volcanoes of Venus.
     We got kooks right here on Earth quite willing to believe that.
     And that's the point where it becomes quite truthfully "mikä minua ärsyttää" and I start shaking my head in abject disbelief.

See, on one side of the human brain there's this marvelous ability to imagine and invent. It's what makes us so easily adaptable: we can imagine and we can plan and we can take evidence and make projections on the actions of other objects. We know when it's unsafe to stand on the rock near the edge of the canyon, not because we saw somebody else fall to their death but because we can see ourselves, right there, right then, in a situation where we might fall to our deaths.
     We're creative.
     Language gives us that creative ability because we are able to symbolize and reassemble symbolic concepts into complete philosophies and technologies and sciences.
     And out of all of this marvelous creative and imaginative mental functioning what do we end up with but delusions so grand that we ignore all signs otherwise present revealing delusions as delusions.
     We are so easily convinced by our creative, imaginative neural structures that we get blinded by our own otherwise uninspiring creativity & imagination. We become part of a process that Steve Quackenbush used in explaining language. To wit:

"It's the failure of the self to coincide with itself that is at the root of the nature of language."

Now what Steve said about language easily applies – at least to me and in this application – to the process by which what we think about things and how we observe things and allow ourselves to fall into delusions. When we lose that "coincidence" between who we are as self-aware entities running on a very specialized and equally ancient neural architecture, we drop out of the pool of reasonable and rational individuals. When our awareness of the specialized human rational abilities fail to coincide with who we are within a sense of being what we are, we let ourselves be led astray by others similarly adrift in their own consciousness.
     It's the old gambit where the monkey sees a rope on the ground, which rope has been laid out like a snake, and thinks that it's a snake and not a piece of rope.
     Out goes the alarm call: "Snaaaaaaake! Snaaaake!"
     And immediately the entire gang of monkeys is in the trees, screaming about a snake that none of the other monkeys has even seen.

Another web site much more easily explains what I've just ranted about. In that it is probably the best example of how conspiracy theories seem to spread and grow in the technology of the InterWeb. And that's because the InterWeb makes it so easy for people to just block-copy and paste horribly and often outrageously incorrect information, turning everything, even the baldest lie, into truth according to somebody else's definition.
     No true evidence and no contrasting information is presented.
     It's all stuff to be read, assumed as true and accepted as one more quite dangerous rope mistaken for a snake, part of an entire process of monkey screaming. It's a process that has been going on since the first scream turned into the first word.
     And for all I can say here, there is nothing I can say to my friend that will bring him back to reason. If I say he's looking at the wrong things in the wrong way he will say that I am either an unwitting accomplice to the conspiracy or I am part of the conspiracy. If I try to protest that assay of my reasoning abilities it will be taken as further proof that I am further down the slip toward hell than even I will ever know.
     That's because once you let Rush Limbaugh start screaming about the snake, the screaming will only be silenced by the silence that awaits us when the sun goes out and nobody's left here to explain that it was just a rope on the floor, a rope that just happened to fall in such a way as to look like a snake.
     And worse yet: nobody will care.