The real truth is hidden

In my talk the other day with my trainer, he brought up the famous ancient aliens conspiracy - that it was aliens that built the pyramids of Giza, because the sheer task of moving millions of stones seems impossible without modern equipment. Conspiracy theories like this used to annoy the crap out of me when I was younger, mostly because they’re really easy to disprove. But as I got older, I realized they serve a different purpose - they reify our model of the world. Specifically, they reify the idea that the truth about our world is hidden. If something incredible happened…why would they simply publish how that happened in books, newspapers and TV? Clearly, the valuable things in the world are hidden away from you.

People can arrive at this core belief - that the “truth is hidden” - from very different starting points. I know some people who were the subject of intense gossip at their college. This scarred the person so much that when they meet a new person they will dump everything about themselves out into the world. They wanted to loudly say “There is no hidden truth about me, right? This is who I am!”. Others might have worked somewhere with a clear, written set of rules that no one seems to follow or care about. Instead, there was a hidden, secret set of rules and those who follow those but flout the written ones get promoted.

When people talk about conspiracy theories, the mechanics of the theory are not that important. If the mechanics were, you would naturally end up with everyone testing the theory of a flat earth with $20,000 gyroscopes and discovering that indeed, the world is round. These theories often have mechanics that are untestable by the average person - can you verify that there is an American flag on the moon? Nah, it’s really hard! You’d need a special telescope and all, need to know exactly what it is - and once you finish doing it…then what? Either you were right and there’s no flag, or you were wrong in this one instance. The prior “the truth is hidden” will remain intact.

Is it good to even get people to disassemble this prior? No! The truth is that the world does have mysteries. Overall, it is a good belief that gets people into conspiracy theories, and some conspiracy theories are actually real - like the time the CIA gave a bunch of people in Guatemala syphilis!

Rather than trying to attack this core belief that the truth of the world is hidden, I have been focusing on just the mechanics of uncovering the truth of the world for myself. Or rather, uncovering my truth. Ancient aliens and flat earth, other such conspiracy theories are all buttressed by beliefs in and about the world system. Ultimately, these conspiracy theories are the axioms you need to build later theory. In the case of flat earth, much of it is driven by a kooky group of Catholics who believe in the infallibility of the Pope and church - because that gives them permission to occupy the new world. It makes them ‘natives’ of Florida. The same god who declared open season on the Americas also declared Galileo a heretic, and if all it takes to keep my land deed is to burn one scientist, maybe I too would fetch the kindling.

In the case of ancient aliens, it reminds me a bit of the conspiracy theory of Great Zimbabwe. British anthropologists came across a vast ruined city in Zimbabwe and had to figure out how built it. All the evidence pointed to the local black people having built it some hundreds of years ago. But this didn’t fit with the British understanding of racial science - there was no way black people could have built cities. Rather than say that black Africans built it, the anthropologists struggled to find a way that Indians or Chinese or Europeans made their way to Zimbabwe and built a city using local techniques, tools and materials. It is, in some ways, easier for Western audiences to believe that aliens built an incredible thing in the tropics, than to acknowledge that the natives of the horse latitudes are capable of something that Europeans aren’t.

This is, in some ways, the story of my first few years in America - kids were upset that I could memorize the dictionary and speak at a higher level of vocabulary than they did. I did better on English tests than most American kids, despite speaking weird. They came up with conspiracy theories then too, about how I was sucking the teacher’s dick or whatever (the teacher was a woman, these kids didn’t have sex ed yet). This is in some ways, the story of Asian, African and indigenous American people for the past 100+ years. I have a conspiracy theory of my own too - I believe that we, as humans, are full of infinite kindness. We can see and understand the stories of others. Including those very different from us. That we have the power to be in awe of the creation and ingenuity of our fellow mankind. But it’s been suppressed, by middle-brow ideologies of skull-measuring and Gatling guns. I also believe that we will get out of it. We will one day destroy this type of thinking, and in the future when people look back at the people of today, they’ll see aliens.