Universe Conspiracy Quotes

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There seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting and was always at least a long-distance phone call from the frankly interesting.
Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
We are gene-copying bio-robots, living out here on a lonely planet in a cold and empty physical universe.
Thomas Ligotti (The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror)
One cringes to hear scientists cooing over the universe or any part thereof like schoolgirls over-heated by their first crush. From the studies of Krafft-Ebbing onward, we know that it is possible to become excited about anything—from shins to shoehorns. But it would be nice if just one of these gushing eggheads would step back and, as a concession to objectivity, speak the truth: THERE IS NOTHING INNATELY IMPRESSIVE ABOUT THE UNIVERSE OR ANYTHING IN IT.
Thomas Ligotti (The Conspiracy Against the Human Race)
For there was a conspiracy of dullness in the world, a universal plan to shut out the resurgences of spirit which might interfere with clockwork. Better to keep your elevation unseen until it is higher than strangers' hands can reach to pull you down to their level.
Tennessee Williams (Collected Stories)
But they can rule by fraud, and by fraud eventually acquire access to the tools they need to finish the job of killing off the Constitution.' 'What sort of tools?' 'More stringent security measures. Universal electronic surveillance. No-knock laws. Stop and frisk laws. Government inspection of first-class mail. Automatic fingerprinting, photographing, blood tests, and urinalysis of any person arrested before he is charged with a crime. A law making it unlawful to resist even unlawful arrest. Laws establishing detention camps for potential subversives. Gun control laws. Restrictions on travel. The assassinations, you see, establish the need for such laws in the public mind. Instead of realizing that there is a conspiracy, conducted by a handful of men, the people reason—or are manipulated into reasoning—that the entire population must have its freedom restricted in order to protect the leaders. The people agree that they themselves can't be trusted.
Robert Anton Wilson (The Eye in the Pyramid (Illuminatus, #1))
It’s not that bad. Conspiracy theories come up whenever people feel like the universe is too random. Absurd. If it’s all an enemy plot, at least there’s someone calling the shots.
James S.A. Corey (Cibola Burn (The Expanse, #4))
For there was a conspiracy of dullness in the world, a universal plan to shut out the resurgences of spirit which might interfere with clockwork.
Tennessee Williams
Tacitus appears to have been as great an enthusiast as Petrarch for the revival of the republic and universal empire. He has exerted the vengeance of history upon the emperors, but has veiled the conspiracies against them, and the incorrigible corruption of the people which probably provoked their most atrocious cruelties. Tyranny can scarcely be practised upon a virtuous and wise people.
John Adams (Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, Volumes 1-4: Diary (1755-1804) and Autobiography (through 1780))
So they trust in the deity of the Old Testament, an incontinent dotard who soiled Himself and the universe with his corruption, a low-budget divinity passing itself off as the genuine article. (Ask the Gnostics.) They trust in Jesus Christ, a historical cipher stitched together like Frankenstein's monster out of parts robbed from the graves of messiahs dead and buried - a savior on a stick. They trust in the virgin-pimping Allah and his Drum Major Mohammed, a prophet-come-lately who pioneered a new genus of humbuggery for an emerging market of believers that was not being adequately served by existing religious products. They trust in anything that authenticates their importance as persons, tribes, societies, and particularly as a species that will endure in this world and perhaps in an afterworld that may be uncertain in its reality and unclear in its layout, but which states their craving for values "not of this earth" - that depressing, meaningless place their consciousness must sidestep every day.
Thomas Ligotti (The Conspiracy Against the Human Race)
Egnaro is a secret known to everyone but yourself. It is a country or a city to which you have never been; it is an unknown language. At the same time it is like being cuckolded, or plotted against. It is part of the universe of events which will never wholly reveal itself to you: a conspiracy the barest outline of which, once visible, will gall you forever.
M. John Harrison (Things That Never Happen)
If greed were not the master of modern man--ably assisted by envy--how could it be that the frenzy of economism does not abate as higher "standards of living" are attained, and that it is precisely the richest societies which pursue their economic advantage with the greatest ruthlessness? How could we explain the almost universal refusal on the part of the rulers of the rich societies--where organized along private enterprise or collective enterprise lines--to work towards the humanisation of work? It is only necessary to assert that something would reduce the "standard of living" and every debate is instantly closed. That soul-destroying, meaningless, mechanical, monotonous, moronic work is an insult to human nature which must necessarily and inevitably produce either escapism or aggression, and that no amount of of "bread and circuses" can compensate for the damage done--these are facts which are neither denied nor acknowledged but are met with an unbreakable conspiracy of silence--because to deny them would be too obviously absurd and to acknowledge them would condemn the central preoccupation of modern society as a crime against humanity.
Ernst F. Schumacher (Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered)
I propose a conspiracy of orphans. We exchange winks. We reject hierarchies. All hierarchies. We take the shit of the world for granted and we exchange stories about how we nevertheless get by. We are impertinent. More than half the stars in the universe are orphan-stars belonging to no constellation. And they give off more light than all the constellation stars.
John Berger (Confabulations)
He is not just nice, he is brilliant. He is the smartest man who ever lived. He is now supervising the entire course of world history (Rev. 1:5) while simultaneously preparing the rest of the universe for our future role in it (John 14:2). He always has the best information on everything and certainly also on the things that matter most in human life. Let us now hear his teachings on who has the good life, on who is among the truly blessed.
Dallas Willard (The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God)
If the average man is made in God's image, then a man such as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God, and so God may be jealous of him, and eager to see his superiority perish with his bodily frame. All animal breeders know how difficult it is to maintain a fine strain. The universe seems to be in a conspiracy to encourage the endless reproduction of peasants and Socialists, but a subtle and mysterious opposition stands eternally against the reproduction of philosophers.
H.L. Mencken (In Defense of Women)
So how can we determine what’s real and what’s not? We can’t. We can just pick and choose what we want to believe and rationalize it as best we can. Reality, after all, is basically a movie projected inside our heads. It’s based on the colors our senses permit us to see, the sounds they permit us to hear and whatever else our brains let slip through the gates. But outside our limited senses, surrounding us, there is, unquestionably, a much greater reality, a universe we live in but cannot see. Well, most of us, anyway. Out there, in the dark, All Things Are Possible.
Richard B. Spence (The Orphan Conspiracies: 29 Conspiracy Theories from The Orphan Trilogy)
Conspiracy theories come up whenever people feel like the universe is too random.
James S.A. Corey (Cibola Burn (Expanse, #4))
Good use of time is the universal ingredient in cooking a palatable dish—doesn’t matter if you are baking, boiling, frying, brewing, or grilling.
Pawan Mishra (Coinman: An Untold Conspiracy)
He would tell you that music is truly a universal language, and that we the listeners will always impose our own fears and biases, our own hopes and hungers on whatever we hear. He would tell you that the rhythm that spurred on Tchaikovsky is the same rhythm that a kid in a redneck North Carolina town would beat with a stick against a fallen tree. It is a rhythm in all of us. Music is about communication, a way of touching your fellow man, beyond and above and below language. It is a language all its own.
Brendan Slocumb (The Violin Conspiracy)
Conspiracy theories come up whenever people feel like the universe is too random. Absurd. If it’s all an enemy plot, at least there’s someone calling the shots.
James S.A. Corey (Cibola Burn (Expanse, #4))
an unceasing spiritual being with an eternal destiny in God’s great universe,” as
Dallas Willard (The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God)
Radical space technologies never reach the public because unknown groups do not wish humanity to have access to the highest knowledge or the most advanced scientific inventions. Perhaps this suppression is out of fear that the masses may be able to explore our Solar System and the Universe beyond it. Whatever the case, it seems they want us to stay at ignorant levels forever.
Takaaki Musha (The Orphan Conspiracies: 29 Conspiracy Theories from The Orphan Trilogy)
God’s plan to suicide himself could not work, though, as long as He existed as a unified entity outside of space-time and matter. Seeking to nullify His oneness so that He could be delivered into nothingness, he shattered Himself—Big Bang-like—into the time-bound fragments of the universe, that is, all those objects and organisms that have been accumulating here and there for billions of years. In Mainländer’s philosophy, “God knew that he could change from a state of super-reality into non-being only through the development of a real world of multiformity.” Employing this strategy, He excluded Himself from being. “God is dead,” wrote Mainländer, “and His death was the life of the world.” Once the great individuation had been initiated, the momentum of its creator’s self-annihilation would continue until everything became exhausted by its own existence, which for human beings meant that the faster they learned that happiness was not as good as they thought it would be, the happier they would be to die out.
Thomas Ligotti (The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror)
I sometimes wish my childhood had been less obsessed with the question of why we are here. But that must be the question of any childhood. To write about your mother and father is to tell the story of your own close call, to count all the ways you never should have existed. To write about home is to write about how you dropped from space, dragging ellipses behind you like a comet, and how you entered your country and state and city, and finally your four-cornered house, and finally your mother's body and finally your own. From the galaxy to the grain and back again. From the fingerprint to the grand design. Despite all the conspiracies of the universe, we are here; every moment we are here we arrive.
Patricia Lockwood (Priestdaddy)
To repeat: we can tolerate existence only if we believe—in accord with a complex of illusions, a legerdemain of impenetrable deception—that we are not what we are. We are creatures with consciousness, but we must suppress that consciousness lest it break us with a sense of being in a universe without direction or foundation. In plain language, we cannot live with ourselves except as impostors.
Thomas Ligotti (The Conspiracy Against the Human Race)
I would have loved to live in a world of women and men gaily in collusion with green leaves, stalks, building mineral cities, transparent domes, little huts of woven grass each with its own pattern— a conspiracy to coexist with the Crab Nebula, the exploding universe, the Mind—
Adrienne Rich (Diving Into the Wreck)
In 1953, Allen Dulles, then director of the USA Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), named Dr Sidney Gottlieb to direct the CIA's MKULTRA programme, which included experiments conducted by psychiatrists to create amnesia, new dissociated identities, new memories, and responses to hypnotic access codes. In 1972, then-CIA director Richard Helms and Gottlieb ordered the destruction of all MKULTRA records. A clerical error spared seven boxes, containing 1738 documents, over 17,000 pages. This archive was declassified through a Freedom of Information Act Request in 1977, though the names of most people, universities, and hospitals are redacted. The CIA assigned each document a number preceded by "MORI", for "Managament of Officially Released Information", the CIA's automated electronic system at the time of document release. These documents, to be referenced throughout this chapter, are accessible on the Internet (see: abuse-of-power (dot) org/modules/content/index.php?id=31). The United States Senate held a hearing exposing the abuses of MKULTRA, entitled "Project MKULTRA, the CIA's program of research into behavioral modification" (1977).
Orit Badouk Epstein (Ritual Abuse and Mind Control)
I believe that the Big-Bang Theory and the Evolution Theory, as well as Einstein’s Special Relativity Theory which does not allow for the existence of faster-than-light (superluminal) phenomena, all have flaws in them and must be replaced by new theories that can give Mankind a more concise view of our Universe. But the fact is exceptional discoveries and theories that challenge official science have been ignored by the Establishment for decades.
Takaaki Musha (The Orphan Conspiracies: 29 Conspiracy Theories from The Orphan Trilogy)
Many people in this world are always looking to science to save them from something. But just as many, or more, prefer old and reputable belief systems and their sectarian offshoots for salvation. So they trust in the deity of the Old Testament, an incontinent dotard who soiled Himself and the universe with His corruption, a low-budget divinity passing itself off as the genuine article. (Ask the Gnostics.) They trust in Jesus Christ, a historical cipher stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster out of parts robbed from the graves of messiahs dead and buried—a savior on a stick. They trust in the virgin-pimping Allah and his Drum Major Mohammed, a prophet-come-lately who pioneered a new genus of humbuggery for an emerging market of believers that was not being adequately served by existing religious products. They trust in anything that authenticates their importance as persons, tribes, societies, and particularly as a species that will endure in this world and perhaps in an afterworld that may be uncertain in its reality and unclear in its layout, but which sates their craving for values not of this earth—that depressing, meaningless place their consciousness must sidestep every day.
Thomas Ligotti (The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror)
With this magnificent God positioned among us, Jesus brings the assurance that our universe is a perfectly safe place for us to be. The
Dallas Willard (The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God)
There seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting
Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
It seems I’m involved in a conspiracy that spans space and time and a conflict whose outcome will determine humanity’s fate in two separate universes. I’m never flying again.
A.G. Riddle (Departure)
This present universe is only one element in the kingdom of God. But it is a very wonderful and important one. And within it the Logos, the now risen Son of man, is currently preparing for us to join him (John 14:2–4). We will see him in the stunning surroundings that he had with the Father before the beginning of the created cosmos (17:24). And we will actively participate in the future governance of the universe. We will not sit around looking at one another or at God for eternity but will join the eternal Logos, “reign with him,” in the endlessly ongoing creative work of God. It is for this that we were each individually intended, as both kings and priests (Exod. 19:6; Rev. 5:10). Thus, our faithfulness over a “few things” in the present phase of our life develops the kind of character that can be entrusted with “many things.” We are, accordingly, permitted to “enter into the joy of our Lord” (Matt. 25:21). That “joy” is, of course, the creation and care of what is good, in all its dimensions. A place in God’s creative order has been reserved for each one of us from before the beginnings of cosmic existence. His plan is for us to develop, as apprentices to Jesus, to the point where we can take our place in the ongoing creativity of the universe.
Dallas Willard (The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God)
Shoddy explanations that yield correct predictions are two a penny, as UFO enthusiasts, conspiracy-theorists and pseudo-scientists of every variety should (but never do) bear in mind.
David Deutsch (The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes--and Its Implications)
the intention of God is that we should each become the kind of person whom he can set free in his universe, empowered to do what we want to do. Just as we desire and intend this, so far as possible, for our children and others we love, so God desires and intends it for his children. But character, the inner directedness of the self, must develop to the point where that is possible.
Dallas Willard (The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God)
Szasz opposed any involuntary psychiatric intervention and, along with the Cuckoo’s Nest portrayal, paved the way for the disastrous dismantling of U.S. mental health facilities. But more generally they helped make popular and respectable the idea that much of science is a sinister scheme concocted by a despotic conspiracy to oppress the people. Mental illness, both Szasz and Laing said, is “a theory not a fact”—now the universal bottom-line argument for anyone, from creationists to climate change deniers to antivaccine hysterics, who prefer to disregard science in favor of their own beliefs.
Kurt Andersen (Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History)
Universal experience,” he began, proved the necessity of “the most express declarations and reservations … to protect the just rights and liberty of Mankind from the Silent, powerful, and ever active conspiracy of those who govern.” The new Constitution should therefore “be bottomed upon a declaration, or Bill of Rights, clearly and precisely stating the principles upon which the Social Compact is founded.
Pauline Maier (Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788)
Shaw once remarked that all professions are conspiracies against the laity. I would go further: in Technopoly, all experts are invested with the charisma of priestliness. Some of our priest-experts are called psychiatrists, some psychologists, some sociologists, some statisticians. The god they serve does not speak of righteousness or goodness or mercy or grace. Their god speaks of efficiency, precision, objectivity. And that is why such concepts as sin and evil disappear in Technopoly. They come from a moral universe that is irrelevant to the theology of expertise. And so the priests of Technopoly call sin “social deviance,” which is a statistical concept, and they call evil “psychopathology,” which is a medical concept. Sin and evil disappear because they cannot be measured and objectified, and therefore cannot be dealt with by experts.
Neil Postman (Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology)
By all means let us agree that we are pattern-seeking mammals and that, owing to our restless intelligence and inquisitiveness, we will still prefer a conspiracy theory to no explanation at all. Religion was our first attempt at philosophy, just as alchemy was our first attempt at chemistry and astrology our first attempt to make sense of the movements of the heavens. I myself am a strong believer in the study of religion, first because culture and education involve a respect for tradition and for origins, and also because some of the early religious texts were among our first attempts at literature. But there is a reason why religions insist so much on strange events in the sky, as well as on less quantifiable phenomena such as dreams and visions. All of these things cater to our inborn stupidity, and our willingness to be persuaded against all the evidence that we are indeed the center of the universe and that everything is arranged with us in mind.
Christopher Hitchens (The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever)
By refusing randomness and unpredictability, conspiracy theories and paranoid reality tunnels reify the hubris of systematic rationality as such. “Maybe all systems—that is, any theoretical, verbal, symbolic, semantic, etc., formulation that attempts to act as an all-encompassing, all-explaining hypothesis of what the universe is about—are manifestations of paranoia.” As an “antidote” to such paranoia, Dick called for an injection of surprise into life—a cultivation, as it were, of noise on the line. “We should be content with the mysterious, the meaningless, the contradictory, the hostile, and most of all the unexplainably warm and giving.
Erik Davis (High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experiences in the Seventies)
It would be the twentieth century before the opening of the British Headquarters Papers at the University of Michigan proved what the eighteenth century refused to believe that a young and beautiful woman was capable of helping Benedict Arnold plot the greatest conspiracy of the American Revolution and then completely fooling the astute warriors around her.
Willard Sterne Randall (Benedict Arnold: Patriot and Traitor)
When I look back at how the idea that "the universe conspires" has played out in my life, it becomes clear that this notion isn't some mysterious or mystical conspiracy. To the contrary. The universe is comprised of all of us -- everyday people -- who choose to toil for our deepest passions with abandon. The universe is full of those who help guide others to discover new paths to old goals. The universe is made of each one of us who learns to believe in our own limitless potential and accept help from others to realize that potential. The universe is us -- every single one of us. We are mutually interdependent, whether we acknowledge it or not. That is why we must continue to reach toward each of our greatest aspirations.
Stephen DeBerry
More stringent security measures. Universal electronic surveillance. No-knock laws. Stop and frisk laws. Government inspection of first-class mail. Automatic fingerprinting, photographing, blood tests, and urinalysis of any person arrested before he is charged with a crime. A law making it unlawful to resist even unlawful arrest. Laws establishing detention camps for potential subversives. Gun control laws. Restrictions on travel. The assassinations, you see, establish the need for such laws in the public mind. Instead of realizing that there is a conspiracy, conducted by a handful of men, the people reason—or are manipulated into reasoning—that the entire populace must have its freedom restricted in order to protect the leaders. The people agree that they themselves can’t be trusted.
Robert Shea (The Illuminatus! Trilogy: The Eye in the Pyramid/The Golden Apple/Leviathan)
The yogurt man went back to threading the needle through his cheek. I thanked him for sharing his perspective about evolution, the existence of an alternate universe, and the physical science of hijacking a plane, and then asked him once again for directions, wondering what kind of directions I was likely to get from a self-identified conspiracy theorist with an exceptionally high pain tolerance.
Maya Binyam (Hangman)
The Left Behind series takes the position that what will cause the end of civilization is a worldwide conspiracy of secret societies and liberal groups whose purpose is to destroy “every vestige of Christianity.” Coconspirators include the ACLU, the NAACP, Planned Parenthood, the National Organization for Women, major television networks, magazines, and newspapers, the U.S. State Department, the Carnegie Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the United Nations, Harvard, Yale, two thousand other colleges and universities, and, last but not least, the “left wing of the Democratic Party.” If these united organizations and societies have their way, according to LaHaye and Jenkins, they will “turn America into an amoral, humanist country, ripe for merger into a one-world socialist state.
Sylvia Browne (End of Days: Predictions and Prophecies About the End of the World)
To those who accuse catch phrases, like pseudoscience, conspiracy theorist, and now fake news that is not an argument but an excuse to continue on the wrong path without conscience bothering them, if you actually read Velikovsky's work he makes complete sense and they know they cannot beat him with facts he uses their own sources and connects the dots,so instead they use terms to slander, it's all they have
Gregory Jay Hunt
We should, to begin with, think that God leads a very interesting life, and that he is full of joy. Undoubtedly he is the most joyous being in the universe. The abundance of his love and generosity is inseparable from his infinite joy. All of the good and beautiful things from which we occasionally drink tiny droplets of soul-exhilarating joy, God continuously experiences in all their breadth and depth and richness.
Dallas Willard (The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God)
About Reincarnation Q~ After death can one be lured backward into physical reincarnation rather then transcendence into the higher Celestial Realms of the One? A~ In the realm of transcendence you will find no conspiracy. Those who reincarnate do so because they have not yet balanced the effects of Karma within their consciousness. So they are not yet fully Realized. They have not yet stepped off of the wheel of the birth death cycle of the cause and effect realms of the material plane.
Leland Lewis (Angel Stories. Angelic Tales of the Universe. Tales 1 through 6.)
You say: “Is it enough for us to just be? But my gut feeling is that I need to do something to be worthy, to contribute, to give…” It is not a gut feeling, it is just what has been conditioned in you by the society. The society has been telling you continuously, persistently, day in, day out, from your very childhood—in the school, in the college, in the university, in the church, the priest, the politician, the parent, the professor—they are all joined together in one single conspiracy to give you the idea that as you are, you are unworthy. You have to do something, you have to prove yourself, then only will you be worthy. This is the strategy of the society to exploit you; this is the society’s ugly way to make slaves of you—not creators but slaves. But in beautiful, sophisticated ways you have been conditioned. Beautiful words cover very ugly realities. The ugly reality is that the society wants to use you as a slave, the society wants to manipulate you, the society wants to control you. It manages it in two ways. On
Osho (Living on Your Own Terms: What Is Real Rebellion?)
Fascist politicians justify their ideas by breaking down a common sense of history in creating a mythic past to support their vision for the present. They rewrite the population’s shared understanding of reality by twisting the language of ideals through propaganda and promoting anti-intellectualism, attacking universities and educational systems that might challenge their ideas. Eventually, with these techniques, fascist politics creates a state of unreality, in which conspiracy theories and fake news replace reasoned debate.
Jason F. Stanley (How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them)
[L]ife presents itself by no means as a gift for enjoyment, but as a task, a drudgery to be performed; and in accordance with this we see, in great and small, universal need, ceaseless cares, constant pressure, endless strife, compulsory activity, with extreme exertion of all the powers of body and mind. Many millions, united into nations, strive for the common good, each individual on account of his own; but many thousands fall as a sacrifice for it. Now senseless delusions, now intriguing politics, incite them to wars with each other; then the sweat and the blood of the great multitude must flow, to carry out the ideas of individuals, or to expiate their faults. In peace industry and trade are active, inventions work miracles, seas are navigated, delicacies are collected from all ends of the world, the waves engulf thousands. All push and drive, others acting; the tumult is indescribable. But the ultimate aim of it all, what is it? To sustain ephemeral and tormented individuals through a short span of time in the most fortunate case with endurable want and comparative freedom from pain, which, however, is at once attended with ennui; then the reproduction of this race and its striving. In this evident disproportion between the trouble and the reward, the will to live appears to us from this point of view, if taken objectively, as a fool, or subjectively, as a delusion, seized by which everything living works with the utmost exertion of its strength for some thing that is of no value. But when we consider it more closely, we shall find here also that it is rather a blind pressure, a tendency entirely without ground or motive.
Thomas Ligotti (The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror)
A lot of people old enough to know, but sheltered long enough and well enough inside privileged walls that they never learned, discovered in those years that power is not something you possess, but is something granted to you by those you have power over. The genteel pale men who quietly, blandly, courteously ran the university were revealed to be unapologetic, sexists and racists, who considered prejudice their right, and their right to be identical with the good of the nation. It was impossible to accuse them of conspiracy, for their collusion occurred on a subconscious level.
Marilyn French (The Women's Room)
Bahnsen declared that, appearances to the contrary, all reality is the expression of a unified, unchanging force—a cosmic movement that various philosophers have characterized in various ways. To Bahnsen, this force and its movement were monstrous in nature, resulting in a universe of indiscriminate butchery and mutual slaughter among its individuated parts. Additionally, the “universe according to Bahnsen” has never had a hint of design or direction. From the beginning, it was a play with no plot and no players that were anything more than portions of a master drive of purposeless self-mutilation.
Thomas Ligotti (The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror)
So how can we determine what’s real and what’s not? We can’t. We can just pick and choose what we want to believe and rationalize it as best we can. Reality, after all, is basically a movie projected inside our heads. It’s based on the colors our senses permit us to see, the sounds they permit us to hear and whatever else our brains let slip through the gates. But outside our limited senses, surrounding us, there is, unquestionably, a much greater reality, a universe we live in but cannot see. Well, most of us, anyway. Out there, in the dark, All Things Are Possible.” ― Richard B. Spence, The Orphan Conspiracies: 29 Conspiracy Theories from The Orphan Trilogy
Richard B. Spence (The Orphan Conspiracies: 29 Conspiracy Theories from The Orphan Trilogy)
Schaffer recounts one especially bad experience, in 1948, when Gates was working briefly at Howard University, the historically black college in Washington, DC. “A petition was got up to remove him because of allegations that he was a racist—which he was. But he was stunned by that,” Schaffer says. “He articulated his understanding of that as a manifestation of an international Jewish conspiracy, as opposed to just understanding that, in a historically black university, the kind of work that he did and the kind of things that he said were always going to be challenged.” Even when he agreed to leave Howard, Gates grumbled in private that only a few “ignorant Negroes” were fit to be in a university at all.
Angela Saini (Superior: The Return of Race Science)
It seemed insane that two such identical senses of humour could think of each other only in terms of hatred and destruction. He suddenly saw the political establishments of the world as a conspiracy of the humourless against laughter, a tyranny of stupidity over intelligence; man as a product of history, not his true inner, personal nature. He might, if he had browsed further in the book he had picked up in JAne’s drawing room in Oxford, have seen that Gramsci once said almost exactly the same thing, though he had derived his proof of it from the failure of mankind to make socialism universal. Dan saw it much more in existential terms, a universal failure of personal authenticity, faith in one’s own inner feelings.
John Fowles (Daniel Martin)
Dr. Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West was born in New York City on October 6, 1924. He died of cancer on January 2, 1999. Dr. West served in the U.S. Army during World War II and received his M.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1948, prior to Air Force LSD and MKULTRA contracts carried out there. He did his psychiatry residency from 1949 to 1952 at Cornell (an MKULTRA Institution and site of the MKULTRA cutout The Human Ecology Foundation). From 1948 to 1956 he was Chief, Psychiatry Service, 3700th USAF Hospital, Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas Psychiatrist-in-Chief, University of Oklahoma Consultant in Psychiatry, Oklahoma City Veterans Administration Hospital Consultant in Psychiatry. [...] Dr. West was co-editor of a book entitled Hallucinations, Behavior, Experience, and Theory[285]. One of the contributors to this book, Theodore Sarbin, Ph.D., is a member of the Scientific and Professional Advisory Board of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF). Other members of the FMSF Board include Dr. Martin Orne, Dr. Margaret Singer, Dr. Richard Ofshe, Dr. Paul McHugh, Dr. David Dinges, Dr. Harold Lief, Emily Carota Orne, and Dr. Michael Persinger. The connections of these individuals to the mind control network are analyzed in this and the next two chapters. Dr. Sarbin[272] (see Ross, 1997) believes that multiple personality disorder is almost always a therapist-created artifact and does not exist as a naturally-occurring disorder, a view adhered to by Dr. McHugh[188], [189], Dr. Ofshe[213] and other members of the FMSF Board[191], [243]. Dr. Ofshe is a colleague and co-author of Dr. Singer[214], who is in turn a colleague and co author of Dr. West[329]. Denial of the reality of multiple personality by these doctors in the mind control network, who are also on the FMSF Scientific and Professional Advisory Board, could be disinformation. The disinformation could be amplified by attacks on specialists in multiple personality as CIA conspiracy lunatics[3], [79], [191], [213]. The FMSF is the only organization in the world that has attacked the reality of multiple personality in an organized, systematic fashion. FMSF Professional and Advisory Board Members publish most of the articles and letters to editors of psychiatry journals hostile to multiple personality disorder.
Colin A. Ross (The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations by American Psychiatrists)
It was astonishing that the pseudo wreckers, who knew perfectly well that they weren't wreckers, believed that military men and priests were being shaken up justifiably. The military men, who knew they hadn't worked for foreign intelligence services and had not sabotaged the Red Army, believed readily enough that the engineers were wreckers and that the priests deserved to be destroyed. Imprisoned, the Soviet person reasoned in the following way: I personally am innocent, but any methods are justified in dealing with those others, the enemies. The lessons of interrogation and the cell failed to enlighten such people. Even after they themselves had been convicted, they retained the blind beliefs of their days in freedom: belief in universal conspiracies, poisonings, wrecking, espionage.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago)
For example, while 5s are driven by their desire to know all the answers in the world, they are also scared by the idea that perhaps one day, God will appear to them and expose the secrets of the universe, which could collapse their world as they know it. Unhealthy 5s could believe that God will come to them and show them those people who they have hurt or how the difficult lessons that they have mastered are all based on some large conspiracy, etc. This paradoxical conflict can cause a lot of damage to the minds of 5s. Again, interestingly, most 5s opine that belief in God is not necessary to learn and master things. Yet, they also feel a deep reverence for the complexities in the universe. Paradoxically, they also believe that the world is so complex and deep that it could ruin them.
Mari Silva (Enneagram Type 5: What You Need to Know About the Investigator (Enneagram Personality Types))
I laid out the charges against him of subversion, conspiracy, and murder, but emphasized that he was innocent until proven guilty, which made him laugh. Your American puppet masters like to say that, but it's stupid, he said. History, humanity, religion, this war tells us exactly the reverse. We are all guilty until proven innocent, as even the Americans have shown. Why else do they believe everyone is really Viet Cong? Why else do they shoot first and ask questions later? Because to them all yellow people are guilty until proven innocent. Americans are a confused people because they can't admit this contradiction. They believe in a universe of divine justice where the human race is guilty of sin, but they also believe in a secular justice where human beings are presumed innocent. You can't have both. You know how Americans deal with it? They pretend they are eternally innocent no matter how many times they lose their innocence.
Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Sympathizer (The Sympathizer, #1))
... nature did not make us to feel too good for too long (which would be no good for the survival of the species) but only to feel good enough to imagine, erroneously, that someday we might feel good all the time. To believe that humanity will ever live in a feel-good world is a common mistake. And if we do not feel good, we should act as if we do. If you act happy, then you will become happy—everybody in the workaday world knows that. If you do not improve, then someone must assume the blame. And that someone will be you. We are on our way to the future, and no introverted melancholic is going to impede our progress. You have two choices: start thinking the way God and your society want you to think or be forsaken by all. The decision is yours, since you are a free agent who can choose to rejoin the world of fabricated reality—civilization, that is—or stubbornly insist on . . . what? That we should rethink how the whole world transacts its business? That we should start over from scratch, questioning all the ways and means that delivered us to a lofty prominence over the amusement park of creation? Try to be realistic. We made our world just the way nature and the Lord wanted us to make it. There is no starting over and no going back. No major readjustments are up for a vote. And no nihilistic head case is going to get a bad word in edgewise. The universe was created by the Creator, goddamn it. We live in a country we love and that loves us back. We have families and friends and jobs that make it all worthwhile. We are somebodies, as we spin upon this good earth, not a bunch of nobodies without names or numbers or retirement plans. None of this is going to become unraveled by a thought criminal who contends that the world is not double plus good and never will be and who believes that anyone is better off dead than alive. Our lives may not be unflawed—that would deny us a future to work toward—but if this charade is good enough for us, then it should be good enough for you. So if you cannot get your mind right, try walking away. You will find no place to go and no one who will have you. You will find only the same old trap the world over. It is the trap of tomorrow. Love it or leave it—choose which and choose fast. You will never get us to give up our hopes, demented as they may seem. You will never get us to wake up from our dreams. Your opinions are not certified by institutions of authority or by the middling run of humanity, and therefore whatever thoughts may enter your chemically imbalanced brain are invalid, inauthentic, or whatever dismissive term we care to assign to you who are only “one of those people.” So get the hell out if you can. But we are betting that when you start hurting badly enough, you will come running back. If you are not as strong as Samson— that no-good suicide and slaughterer of Philistines—then you will return to the trap. Do you think we are morons? We have already thought everything that you have thought. The only difference is that we have the proper and dignified sense of futility not to spread that nasty news. Our shibboleth: “Up the Conspiracy and down with Consciousness.
Thomas Ligotti (The Conspiracy Against the Human Race)
The connection between dopamine and belief was established by experiments conducted by Peter Brugger and his colleague Christine Mohr at the University of Bristol in England. Exploring the neurochemistry of superstition, magical thinking, and belief in the paranormal, Brugger and Mohr found that people with high levels of dopamine are more likely to find significance in coincidences and pick out meaning and patterns where there are none. In one study, for example, they compared twenty self-professed believers in ghosts, gods, spirits, and conspiracies to twenty self-professed skeptics of such claims. They showed all subjects a series of slides consisting of people’s faces, some of which were normal while others had their parts scrambled, such as swapping out eyes or ears or noses from different faces. In another experiment, real and scrambled words were flashed. In general, the scientists found that the believers were much more likely than the skeptics to mistakenly assess a scrambled face as real, and to read a scrambled word as normal. In the second part of the experiment, Brugger and Mohr gave all forty subjects L-dopa, the drug used for Parkinson’s disease patients that increases the levels of dopamine in the brain. They then repeated the slide show with the scrambled or real faces and words. The boost of dopamine caused both believers and skeptics to identify scrambled faces and real and jumbled words as normal. This suggests that patternicity may be associated with high levels of dopamine in the brain. Intriguingly, the effect of L-dopa was stronger on skeptics than believers. That is, increased levels of dopamine appear to be more effective in making skeptics less skeptical than in making believers more believing.8 Why? Two possibilities come to mind: (1) perhaps the dopamine levels of believers are already higher than those of skeptics and so the latter will feel the effects of the drug more; or (2) perhaps the patternicity proclivity of believers is already so high that the effects of the dopamine are lower than those of skeptics. Additional research shows that people who profess belief in the paranormal—compared to skeptics—show a greater tendency to perceive “patterns in noise,”9 and are more inclined to attribute meaning to random connections they believe exist.
Michael Shermer (The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths)
Fascist politicians justify their ideas by breaking down a common sense of history in creating a mythic past to support their vision for the present. They rewrite the population’s shared understanding of reality by twisting the language of ideals through propaganda and promoting anti-intellectualism, attacking universities and educational systems that might challenge their ideas. Eventually, with these techniques, fascist politics creates a state of unreality, in which conspiracy theories and fake news replace reasoned debate. As the common understanding of reality crumbles, fascist politics makes room for dangerous and false beliefs to take root. First, fascist ideology seeks to naturalize group difference, thereby giving the appearance of natural, scientific support for a hierarchy of human worth. When social rankings and divisions solidify, fear fills in for understanding between groups. Any progress for a minority group stokes feelings of victimhood among the dominant population. Law and order politics has mass appeal, casting “us” as lawful citizens and “them,” by contrast, as lawless criminals whose behavior poses an existential threat to the manhood of the nation. Sexual anxiety is also typical of fascist politics as the patriarchal hierarchy is threatened by growing gender equity. As the fear of “them” grows, “we” come to represent everything virtuous.
Jason F. Stanley (How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them)
There followed a three-year spectacle during which [Senator Joseph] McCarthy captured enormous media attention by prophesying the imminent ruin of America and by making false charges that he then denied raising—only to invent new ones. He claimed to have identified subversives in the State Department, the army, think tanks, universities, labor unions, the press, and Hollywood. He cast doubt on the patriotism of all who criticized him, including fellow senators. McCarthy was profoundly careless about his sources of information and far too glib when connecting dots that had no logical link. In his view, you were guilty if you were or ever had been a Communist, had attended a gathering where a supposed Communist sympathizer was present, had read a book authored by someone soft on Communism, or subscribed to a magazine with liberal ideas. McCarthy, who was nicknamed Tailgunner Joe, though he had never been a tail gunner, was also fond of superlatives. By the middle of 1951, he was warning the Senate of “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.” McCarthy would neither have become a sensation, nor ruined the careers of so many innocent people, had he not received support from some of the nation’s leading newspapers and financing from right-wingers with deep pockets. He would have been exposed much sooner had his wild accusations not been met with silence by many mainstream political leaders from both parties who were uncomfortable with his bullying tactics but lacked the courage to call his bluff. By the time he self-destructed, a small number of people working in government had indeed been identified as security risks, but none because of the Wisconsin senator’s scattershot investigations. McCarthy fooled as many as he did because a lot of people shared his anxieties, liked his vituperative style, and enjoyed watching the powerful squirm. Whether his allegations were greeted with resignation or indignation didn’t matter so much as the fact that they were reported on and repeated. The more inflammatory the charge, the more coverage it received. Even skeptics subscribed to the idea that, though McCarthy might be exaggerating, there had to be some fire beneath the smoke he was spreading. This is the demagogue’s trick, the Fascist’s ploy, exemplified most outrageously by the spurious and anti-Jewish Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Repeat a lie often enough and it begins to sound as if it must—or at least might—be so. “Falsehood flies,” observed Jonathan Swift, “and the truth comes limping after it.” McCarthy’s career shows how much hysteria a skilled and shameless prevaricator can stir up, especially when he claims to be fighting in a just cause. After all, if Communism was the ultimate evil, a lot could be hazarded—including objectivity and conventional morality—in opposing it.
Madeleine K. Albright (Fascism: A Warning)
Information or allegations reflecting negatively on individuals or groups seen less sympathetically by the intelligentsia pass rapidly into the public domain with little scrutiny and much publicity. Two of the biggest proven hoaxes of our time have involved allegations of white men gang-raping a black woman-- first the Tawana Brawley hoax of 1987 and later the false rape charges against three Duke University students in 2006. In both cases, editorial indignation rang out across the land, without a speck of evidence to substantiate either of these charges. Moreover, the denunciations were not limited to the particular men accused, but were often extended to society at large, of whom these men were deemed to be symptoms or 'the tip of the iceberg.' In both cases, the charges fit a pre-existing vision, and that apparently made mundane facts unnecessary. Another widely publicized hoax-- one to which the President of the United States added his sub-hoax-- was a 1996 story appearing in USA Today under the headline, 'Arson at Black Churches Echoes Bigotry of the Past.' There was, according to USA Today, 'an epidemic of church burning,' targeting black churches. Like the gang-rape hoaxes, this story spread rapidly through the media. The Chicago Tribune referred to 'an epidemic of criminal and cowardly arson' leaving black churches in ruins. As with the gang-rape hoaxes, comments on the church fire stories went beyond those who were supposed to have set these fires to blame forces at work in society at large. Jesse Jackson was quoted was quoted in the New York Times as calling these arsons part of a 'cultural conspiracy' against blacks, which 'reflected the heightened racial tensions in the south that have been exacerbated by the assault on affirmative action and the populist oratory of Republican politicians like Pat Buchanan.' Time magazine writer Jack White likewise blamed 'the coded phrases' of Republican leaders for 'encouraging the arsonists.' Columnist Barbara Reynolds of USA Today said that the fires were 'an attempt to murder the spirit of black America.' New York Times columnist Bob Herbert said, "The fuel for these fires can be traced to a carefully crafted environment of bigotry and hatred that was developed over the last century.' As with the gang-rape hoaxes, the charges publicized were taken as reflecting on the whole society, not just those supposedly involved in what was widely presumed to be arson, rather than fires that break out for a variety of other reasons. Washington Post columnist Dorothy Gilliam said that society in effect was 'giving these arsonists permission to commit these horrible crimes.' The climax of these comments came when President Bill Clinton, in his weekly radio address, said that these church burnings recalled similar burnings of black churches in Arkansas when he was a boy. There were more that 2,000 media stories done on the subject after the President's address. This story began to unravel when factual research showed that (1) no black churches were burned in Arkansas when Bill Clinton was growing up, (2) there had been no increase in fires at black churches, but an actual decrease over the previous 15 years, (3) the incidence of fires at white churches was similar to the incidence of fires at black churches, and (4) where there was arson, one-third of the suspects were black. However, retractions of the original story-- where there were retractions at all-- typically were given far less prominence than the original banner headlines and heated editorial comments.
Thomas Sowell (Intellectuals and Society)
Universities are fueled in large measure by what's called overhead of the grant...so if you get a million dollar grant, half or more will go to your university, right? So that's what builds the buildings and fuels the place. So the university has an incentive to get as many people to file grant applications as they can, and they have an incentive to hire people whose grant applications will be large rather than small. So this, for example, is one of the reasons that science has taken up arms against theory –that is to say, proper scientific theoreticians like me – and it has instead hired people who run big expensive experiments: Because big expensive experiments have big grants, and those big grants bring in money. But if you were a university and what you wanted was to have people writing big expensive grants who were capable of getting them, then what you would want to do is...you would want to free those people from teaching, and you would want to get people who weren't so expensive to do the work of the university...and the way you do that is: you bring them on as graduate students; and you pay them an appalling wage; you claim that they are not actually workers, that they are students; and they do most of the teaching, and they do a lot of the work of the university, for incredibly low amounts of money; they live under poor conditions; and increasingly they have to come from abroad where they are in some sense getting a deal that still makes sense. But this means that we overproduce PhDs. We give people degrees instead of money to do the work of the university, in order that people who are capable of getting the grants spend almost full time doing that job. And it's a racket. The person who knows the most about this is actually Eric, my brother. So...what he unearthed was actually that there was an explicit conspiracy to game the visa system in order to keep this system running...that effectively a fake shortage of science students was created to allow the universities to basically flood the market, to drive the wages down.
Bret Weinstein
In the nineteen sixties and seventies, there were people in all the democratic countries who didn’t have any real power, and they started going to the people who did have all the power and saying, “All these principles of equality you’ve been talking about since the French Revolution are very nice, but you don’t seem to be taking them very seriously. You’re all hypocrites, actually. So we’re going to make you take those principles seriously.” And they held demonstrations and bus rides, and occupied buildings, and it was very embarrassing for the people in power, because the other people had such a good argument, and anyone who listened seriously had to agree with them. ‘Feminism was working, and the civil rights movement was working, and all the other social justice movements were getting more and more support. So, in the nineteen eighties, the CIA—’ she turned to Keith and explained cheerfully, ‘this is where X-Files Theory comes into it – hired some really clever linguists to invent a secret weapon: an incredibly complicated way of talking about politics that didn’t actually make any sense, but which spread through all the universities in the world, because it sounded so impressive. And at first, the people who talked like this just hitched their wagon to the social justice movements, and everyone else let them come along for the ride, because they seemed harmless. But then they climbed on board the peace train and threw out the driver. ‘So instead of going to the people in power and saying, “How about upholding the universal principles you claim to believe in?” the people in the social justice movements ended up saying things like “My truth narrative is in competition with your truth narrative!” And the people in power replied, “Woe is me! You’ve thrown me in the briar patch!” And everyone else said, “Who are these idiots? Why should we trust them, when they can’t even speak properly?” And the CIA were happy. And the people in power were happy. And the secret weapon lived on in the universities for years and years, because everyone who’d played a part in the conspiracy was too embarrassed to admit what they’d done.
Greg Egan (Teranesia)
The detail over which these monks went mad with joy was the universe itself; the only thing really worthy of enjoyment. The white daylight shone over all the world, the endless forests stood up in their order. The lightning awoke and the tree fell and the sea gathered into mountains and the ship went down, and all these disconnected and meaningless and terrible objects were all part of one dark and fearful conspiracy of goodness, one merciless scheme of mercy.
G.K. Chesterton (Varied Types)
The Lance deHaven-Smith book Conspiracy Theory in America (published by the University of Texas) reveals that the phrase “conspiracy theory” was invented by the CIA to discredit doubters of the Warren Commission, which claims that John F. Kennedy’s assassination was carried out alone by a single “lone gunman.” Distraught by the murder of President Kennedy, a Beverly Hills housewife named Mae Brussell took it upon herself to buy all 26 printed volumes issued by the Warren Commission report, and attempt to make sense of the thing by cross-indexing the entire work. Mae was disturbed by the contradictory information and unreported realities she discovered in those volumes. As a result, she started subscribing to many major newspapers and magazines, whose stories she filed and organized, uncovering disquieting connections and patterns behind government and corporate malfeasance.
Mae Brussell (The Essential Mae Brussell: Investigations of Fascism in America)
No man is an island. What happens to one, happens to us all, for we are all made of clay and stardust. We share the same moments of time. The universal second hand starts its unforgiving sweep toward the next minute:
Sidney Sheldon (The Sky is Falling: An explosive conspiracy action thriller novel)
The Intellectual Vacuum of Current Moral Thought Toward the beginning of this chapter we made the statement that the centuries-long attempt to devise a morality from within merely human resources has now proven itself a failure. Now we want to return to this point in the light of Jesus’ exposition of the rightness of the kingdom heart. What is the basis of such a statement? Simply this: that, as noted in the opening of chapter 1, there is in fact no body of moral knowledge now operative in the institutions of knowledge in our culture. This is the outcome of the now centuries-long effort to develop a moral guide to life within the framework of human thought and experience alone, unassisted by revelation. By contrast, the Christian teaching about moral goodness that derives from the principles laid down by Jesus does have a historical, theoretical, and practical claim to constitute the true body of moral knowledge. This is not said to encourage blind acceptance but precisely the opposite. It is said to encourage the toughest of testing for those teachings in all areas of thought and real life. We saw in chapter 1 the young lady who went to Professor Coles on her way out of Harvard and said to him, “I’ve been taking all these philosophy courses, and we talk about what’s true, what’s important, what’s good. Well, how do you teach people to be good?” Then she added, “What’s the point of knowing good, if you don’t keep trying to become a good person?” But, as we pointed out, knowing good is not seriously proposed in college or university courses today. Any “knowing” in such matters is thought to be totally impossible. In fact, both knowing good and being good are for the most part treated with open scorn in the academic settings which determine so much of our lives. That is the outcome of the long effort to establish a secular ethic in the modern period. But the concern for becoming good and being good remains, as the words of both President Bok and Professor Coles show, for it is a real-life issue that will never go away. And it is with regard to this issue of what kind of people we are to be that the teachings of Jesus about the rightness of the kingdom heart show him to be the unrivaled master of human life. Any serious inquirer can validate those teachings in his or her own experience. But they cannot invalidate them by simply refusing to consider them and hiding behind the dogmas of modern intellect.
Dallas Willard (The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God)
To write about your mother and father is to tell the story of your own close call, to count all the ways you never should have existed. To write about home is to write about how you dropped from space, dragging ellipses behind you like a comet, and how you entered your country and state and city, and finally your four-cornered house, and finally your mother’s body and finally your own. From the galaxy to the grain and back again. From the fingerprint to the grand design. Despite all the conspiracies of the universe, we are here; every moment we are here we arrive.
Patricia Lockwood (Priestdaddy: A Memoir)
Norman Cohn, in his book Warrant for Genocide, quotes the postwar testimony of SS captain Dieter Wisliceny, who was tried and executed in 1947 for his part in killing Hungarian, Greek, and Slovak Jews. A straight line, said Wisliceny, ran from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the precepts of the Nazis, and from there to the attempted murder of a race. The straightness of this line is evident from the activities of the Nazi academic Professor von Leers, last seen propagating the “Rabbi’s Speech” at the University of Jena, but by 1942 publishing The Criminal Nature of the Jews. As the Holocaust moved from improvisation to industrial organization, von Leers wrote, “Not only is each people morally justified in exterminating the hereditary criminals—but any people that still keeps and protects Jews is just as guilty of an offense against public safety as someone who cultivates cholera germs.
David Aaronovitch (Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History)
But this “gospel” turns out in practice to be little more than another version of the world-famous American dream. Other words associated with it are “egalitarianism,” “happiness,” and “freedom.” As a professor of education at Bradley University recently stated, the American dream is that “people can do or be what they want if they just go ahead and do it.”22 Desire becomes sacred, and whatever thwarts desire is evil or sin. We have from the Christian left, after all, just another gospel of sin management, but one whose substance is provided by Western (American) social and political ideals of human existence in a secular world.
Dallas Willard (The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God)
we can be sure that heaven in the sense of our afterlife is just our future in this universe. There is not another universe besides this one. God created the heavens and the earth. That’s it. And much of the difficulty in having a believable picture of heaven and hell today comes from the centuries-long tendency to “locate” them in “another reality” outside the created universe.
Dallas Willard (The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God)
The material universe is both an essential display of the greatness and goodness of God and the arena of the eternal life of finite spirits, including the human.
Dallas Willard (The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God)
Soon I began to realize that cultural camouflage also obscured the universality of emotional process in institutions. For example, frequently, the leaders of a church would come to me seeking techniques for dealing with a member of the staff or a member of the congregation who was acting obstreperously, who was ornery, and who intimidated everyone with his gruffness. I might say to them, “This is not a matter of technique; it’s a matter of taking a stand, telling this person he has to shape up or he cannot continue to remain a member of the community.” And the church leaders would respond, “But that’s not the Christian thing to do.” (Synagogue leaders also tolerate abusers for the same reason.) Overall, this long-range perspective brought me to the point of wondering if there were not some unwitting conspiracy within society itself to avoid recognizing the emotional variables that, for all their lack of concreteness, are far more influential in their effects on institutions than the more obvious data that society loves to measure. Perhaps data collection serves as a way of avoiding the emotional variables. After all, the denial of emotional process is evident in society at large. If, for example, we succeed in reducing the number of cigarettes smoked by our nation’s youth but do nothing to reduce the level of chronic anxiety throughout the nation, then the addiction will just take another form, and the same children who were vulnerable to one kind of addiction will become easy prey for the as-yet unimagined new temptation. It
Edwin H. Friedman (A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix)
One of those captured was d'Ailly, as ordered by Louis of Anjou and the future king of Naples, on the charge of blasphemy, as well as conspiracy to create a governmental body above the Holy Office. Royal decrees were swiftly issued, prohibiting all discussion and mention of the general council, or “via concilii” on campus.  Spooked, the theology department was left with no other alternative but to rein it in. In 1383, the University of Paris officially declared their support for Antipope Clement VII of Avignon. Though
Charles River Editors (The Western Schism of 1378: The History and Legacy of the Papal Schism that Split the Catholic Church)
Conspiracy theories are also a way for people to give context and meaning to events that frighten them. Without a coherent explanation for why terrible things happen to innocent people, they would have to accept such occurrences as nothing more than the random cruelty either of an uncaring universe or an incomprehensible deity.
Thomas M. Nichols (The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters)
I don`t believe on them… but I am positive they exist.
R.C. Albertini (Chariot 3: Conception)
Tokhtakhounov was indicted and arrested by Italian police on charges of conspiracy to rig the competition. For months the FBI worked with the Italians and with Interpol to get him extradited. Before long, word came to the squad that a Russian oligarch had pledged two hundred million dollars to get Tokhtakhounov out of jail. Next thing we knew, his release was ordered by the Italian Supreme Court. He was gone, in the wind, back to Russia, where he has been living openly. (And from there, he allegedly continued to run criminal enterprises in the United States. In 2013, Tokhtakhounov was indicted for money laundering in connection with an illegal gambling ring that operated out of Trump Tower. Several months after this indictment, Tokhtakhounov was a VIP guest at Donald Trump’s Miss Universe contest in Moscow.) We’ve never had a chance to get him again. In the scheme of things, the evident corruption behind a figure-skating medal may seem trivial. But for me and for a lot of guys on our squad, this was a critical turn of events. One of our worst fears was that the top tier of the vory v zakone would use money to undermine Western institutions in which many millions of Americans have reflexive faith. That fear had now been realized, and we asked ourselves what institutions might be next, and we asked whether any American public official might be susceptible to a two-hundred-million-dollar bribe, and we asked whether democracy itself might become a target. HOW WE WORK Enterprise Theory Muddy Wingtips Most FBI investigations are conducted by the Bureau’s criminal, counterterrorism, or counterintelligence divisions.
Andrew G. McCabe (The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump)
So, what is it that makes an ‘open conspiracy’ open, as in placed there in plain sight for everyone to see? Larry Hecht explains: “what makes the ‘open conspiracy’ open, is not the laying out of some secret master plan, not the revealing of the membership roster of some inner sanctum of the rich and powerful, which the typical deluded populist supposes to be the secret to power in the world. It is, rather, the understanding that ideas, philosophy and culture, control history. What constitutes a conspiracy, for good or evil, is a set of ideas which embody a concept of what it is to be human, and a conception of man’s role in universal history.
Daniel Estulin (Tavistock Institute: Social Engineering the Masses)
Joseph Joffe aptly differentiated between these two concepts in a lecture on anti-Americanism at Stanford University: “To attack particular policies—say, the refusal to sign on to Kyoto, the Complete Test Ban or the Landmine Ban—is not anti-American. These issues are amenable to rational discourse.. . . To argue that the U.S. defied international law by going to war against Iraq may be true or false. It is certainly not anti-American.”3 What, then, is the “real thing,” the real anti-Americanism? In his analysis, Joffe groups anti-Americanism with other forms of “anti-isms” that—for him—must satisfy the following five conditions: 1. Stereotypization (that is, statements of the type: “This is what they are all like.”) 2. Denigration (the ascription of a collective moral or cultural inferiority to the target group) 3. Omnipotence (e.g., “They control the media, the economy, the world.”) 4. Conspiracy (e.g., “This is what they want to do to us surreptitiously and stealthily—sully our racial purity, destroy our traditional, better, and morally superior ways.”) 5. Obsession (a constant preoccupation with the perceived and feared evil and powerful ways of the hated group)
Andrei S. Markovits (Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America (The Public Square Book 5))
Another peak rises above you. High, elegant, it draws you, but looking down there is a forest blocking your path. The forest is dark, the way is rough; strange fogs confuse the trees; you hear growls on one side, howls on the other. It is a fearful route but, for the bold adventurer, this makes it all the more imperative to find a way through. Not just for the high peak that waits on the other side, but the forest itself contains infinite riches of beauty. If I may, I would like to look at a part of our history as just such a journey. The Han Dynasty and Tang Dynasty are plainly commanding heights in our history. They were such powerful empires and cultures that I sometimes like to refer to all of Chinese civilization as Han-Tang culture. But we must not forget that between the high points of the Han and the Tang, there was a deep thicket of history: the wars of the Three Kingdoms, the brief and troubled Jin Dynasties, and the divided China of the Northern and Southern Dynasties. Within this dark forest, there was no certainty, no single universe under watchful skies. There was no unity of vision: Everywhere was chaos and conflict; every moment was flight and death. Conspiracies sprouted in all corners. The names we know from that time trailed drama in their wake, but all the chaos, all the disruption did not douse the human spirit.
Yu Qiuyu
Slut shaming, it seemed, was a universal language.
Ronan Farrow (Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators)
Stay still, shithead. And get used to those cuffs. You are under arrest for murder, attempted murder and general conspiracy to be an asshole.
Michael Connelly (A Darkness More Than Night (Harry Bosch, #7; Harry Bosch Universe, #10))
They all fundamentally dwell in the same alternative universe—a semi-functioning epistemological bubble composed of misinformation and disinformation and fabulist conspiracy theories leavened with a few grossly distorted facts, which I have elsewhere named Alt-America. They occupy varying zones of this universe, meaning that they differ at times on the details and emphasis, but are united in the essential view that the world—its politics, its media, its cultures—are being deviously manipulated by the same cabal that brought down Trump to impose their “New World Order” enslavement on us all.
David Neiwert (The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right's Assault on American Democracy)
Over the course of his political career, Donald Trump perfected a three-step tango with the radical right—a dance in which he’d pull them close in an embrace, spin away while staying connected, and then pull them back to close quarters. Acknowledge, deny, validate. Lather, rinse, repeat….It was a dance that enabled Trump to court and embrace the radical right with a wink and a nod while maintaining a plausible deniability that he supported them. All of them, Trump and extremists alike, were united in their shared reality: the alternative universe of right-wing conspiracism, founded on the essential belief that the world is being secretly controlled by a cabal of elite “globalists” whose agenda is to place the world, America particularly, under their totalitarian control.
David Neiwert (The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right's Assault on American Democracy)
You know that the topmost priority for any head is that every single person in his team should be able to do his/her job with perfection and without complaint. Secondly he should be cooperative with other team members so that they can deliver projects on time. But imagine if as a head, all you get to hear are complaints, conspiracies and the nagging attitude of people to somehow evade the job. The rhythm of the universe is almost the same it searches for humans who can be grateful in life for the task assigned to them and can cooperate with other living beings to create a harmonious environment.
Deepanshu Giri (Rituals of Happy Soul: A Self-Help Guide to Unlock Your Inner Power and Transform Your Life.)
his view of the Princeton population took on a dark edge. “The values of the secular elite university are so radically anti-Christian,” he warned. “They are the harbingers of the culture of death. They create the culture of death. This is where the seeds are planted. You can see what is coming down the line by just looking at the atmosphere there now: hedonistic, naturalistic, secularistic.
Gareth Gore (Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy inside the Catholic Church)
Dear Voyagers, Your cameras have shown us the vastness of the universe, Our eyes too can gaze upon the heavens and revel in nature, But behind our eyes, There’s something called a mind that processes it all. What we call the mind Spins countless tales and stories, With such variety that one could say, For every human that has ever lived, there exists a different image, emotion, analysis, and worldview, and this can be beautiful and at the same time terrifying. I imagine mapping the universe completely, Discovering life in other systems and galaxies, Might be much sooner than charting the map that could explain human existence. So many questions remain for me, Like if, In the coming decades, poverty is eradicated, Freedom is universal, Mars is colonized, and people live there, Cities rise above Venus, Plant-based diets replace meat, Equality reaches every person and no one is questioned for their beliefs, orientations, or thoughts, Diseases are cured, Physical labor becomes meaningless, and robots end the hardship of human toil, Earth’s climate change is halted, Firearm possession is made free, and today’s concerns are all resolved—will everyone then live in peace? My mind, my eyes, they know the answer: “No.” Probably then, Conspiracy theorists Would say it all happened in a studio, Some would claim that veganism’s goal is to destroy chakras, Others would start revolts against order and law, criticizing even that beautiful state. This dissatisfaction doesn’t belong to any specific class or group, It’s what we all are. Environment and culture matter, but I think even if a brain chip were made To transfer every piece of knowledge on Earth, All fields of science, memories, Experiences, languages, and the stories of every civilization, every human, and everything ever experienced to our minds, We’d still harbor doubt. Our efforts to prove ourselves to each other Will be in vain. Perhaps the right path Is to continue and enjoy the unknown, Or maybe to accept and find joy in never truly experiencing joy. I play Hans Zimmer’s “Stay,” Yet my mind continues to drift, Time passes, Those around me age as I move forward towards an unknown destination. Perhaps someone, something, 4.5 billion light years away, Is staring at a point in the sky, They don’t know I’m here in an existential crisis, That Earth is in a fight for survival, How I envy them, Staring into that dark spot in the sky, They too are fortunate for not existing in this moment, Or for their light not having reached me. If Earth’s light reaches them, They would surely grieve for these restless, lost souls, For human history is tied to sorrow, pain, separation, and nothingness. Perhaps the Big Crunch, Absolute nothingness, Is the only cure for this pain— The pain of being and existing. Dear Voyagers, When your signal to Earth is lost, It will feel like the death of a loved one, Even though I know you’re alive somewhere, traversing an unknown path, Something I doubt will happen after human death, And even if it does, It wouldn’t lessen the grief of those left behind who have yet to join that unknown journey. I fear oblivion, I fear the oblivions that disappear from history and memories, as if they never were, Like the meal of a Native American grandmother a thousand years ago, Or the kiss of two lovers and the story of their union and parting, never recorded anywhere.
Arash Ghadir
Given its diverse meanings and lack of specificity, the word “scientism” should be dropped. But if it’s to be kept, I suggest we level the playing field by introducing the term religionism, which I’ll define as “the tendency of religion to overstep its boundaries by making unwarranted statements about the universe, or by demanding unearned authority.” Religionism would include clerics claiming to be moral authorities, arguments that scientific phenomena give evidence for God, and unsupported statements about the nature of a god and how he interacts with the world. And here we find no lack of examples, including believers who blame natural disasters on homosexuality, tell us that God doesn’t want us to use condoms, argue that the acceptance of evolution by scientists is a conspiracy, and insist that human morality and the universe’s “fine-tuning” are evidence for God.
Jerry A. Coyne (Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible)
The best and fastest way to break a conspiracy was to identify the weakeast link in the chain and find a way to exploit it. When one link was broken, the chain would come loose.
Michael Connelly (The Black Box (Harry Bosch, #16; Harry Bosch Universe, #25))
The universal tendency of our times is to “get together.” Isolation in church life is regarded as intolerable. Those who keep themselves separate for the sake of the truth are denounced as bigots. The well-being and prosperity of the Church is sought in the merger of church bodies even at the cost of truth. Sad to say, this destructive virus of unionism has infected also many Lutheran circles. This modern striving after external union despite spiritual disunion brings to one’s mind the words that God spoke to Israel by the prophet Isaiah: “Do not call conspiracy all that this people calls conspiracy, and do not fear what they fear, nor be in dread. But the Lord of Hosts, Him you shall honor as holy. Let Him be your fear, and let Him be your dread” [Isaiah 8:12–13].
Matthew C. Harrison (At Home in the House of My Father)
You are under arrest for murder, attempted murder and general conspiracy to be an asshole. - Harry Bosch
Michael Connelly (A Darkness More Than Night (Harry Bosch, #7; Harry Bosch Universe, #10))
Constantine appointed his political ally Eusebius, the head of the Church at Caesarea in Palestine, to draft a compromise settlement. What Eusebius came up with were, in essence, the religious dogmas that still remain the central pillars of the established Church. Nearly everyone present objected to something or other, and Constantine lost patience. He decreed that anyone who refused to sign the agreement would be banished from the empire. And he enforced his ruling: those who dissented were never heard from again and those who conceded became the hierarchy of the Universal or Catholic Church.
Graham Phillips (The Virgin Mary Conspiracy: The True Father of Christ and the Tomb of the Virgin)
Communism is a disease of the intellect. It promises universal brotherhood, peace and prosperity to lure humanitarians and idealists into participating in a conspiracy which gains power through deceit and deception and stays in power with brute force.
John A. Stormer (None Dare Call It Treason)
Too many are tempted to dismiss what Jesus says as just “pretty words.” But those who think it is unrealistic or impossible are more short on imagination than long on logic. They should have a close look at the universe God has already brought into being before they decide he could not arrange for the future life of which the Bible speaks.
Dallas Willard (The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God)
While belief in the supernatural is only superstition, the sense of the supernatural cannot be denied. It is the sense of what should not be at its most justly potent, the sense of the impossible as we often experience it in our dreams and in unsettling moments of our lives, particularly during those intimations of mortality or madness that for some are as regular as a heartbeat. The evil here is not bound up with bad men but with the nature of existence itself, or at least with our existence as victims of consciousness. The supernatural may be considered as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity and, as such, is the best possible hallmark of the uncanny nightmare of a conscious mind marooned for a brief while in this haunted house of a world and being slowly or swiftly driven mad by the ghastliness of it all. This viewpoint does not keep tabs on “man' inhumanity to man” s but instead is sourced in a derangement symptomatic of our life as transients in a world that is natural for all else that lives, yet, by our lights, when they are not flickering or gone out, is anything but. The most phenomenal of creaturely traits, the sense of the supernatural, the impression of a fatal estrangement from the visible, is dependent on our consciousness, which merges the outward and the inward into a universal comedy without laughter. We are only passersby in this jungle of mutations and mistakes. The natural world existed when we did not, and it will continue to exist long after we are gone. The supernatural crept into life only when the door of consciousness was opened in our heads: the moment we stepped through that door, we walked out on nature. Say what we will about it and deny it till we die—we have had a knowledge imposed upon us that is too much to know and too secret to tell one another if we are to pace along our streets, work at our jobs, and sleep in our beds. It is the knowledge of a race of beings that are both specters and spectators in this cobwebbed corner of the cosmos.
Thomas Ligotti (The Conspiracy Against the Human Race)
vacant lots in the vicinity of University Avenue. The signature item identifying the killer was a balloon left behind, marking the body like a buoy. The balloon was always the same—a
Roger Stelljes (The St. Paul Conspiracy (McRyan Mystery, #1))
It's time the world knew what was really discovered at Delphi." says Dr Moses Frank, in The Elena Text. But who is Moses Frank and what was he referring to? The Elena Text is a controversial and provocative thriller set in the world of antiquities and archaeology, based around the untold story of what was really discovered at Delphi in Greece - but has remained a closely-guarded secret since the 1930s. In Moses Frank we have a character who single-handedly defines the extremities of recent times, the stateless survivor, against all the odds, the refugee turned millionaire, the entrepreneur who creates his own rules, a charming and educated artist with a first class degree from the university of life, a thinker but an unashamed money-maker and pleasure-seeker. Moses Frank is a man who can be forgiven almost anything because he is so hugely admired as a dealer, a canny sleuth who has tracked down the world’s greatest missing antiquities. But despite all his gifts and talents, Moses Frank is also a man bristling with self-doubt - searching endlessly for the finest examples of human art, the sensual peaks of female beauty and some thin slivers of meaning in his terribly successful life. I believe Frank is a rich, unpredictable and multi-facetted lead character who will continue to fascinate readers in volumes 2 and 3 of THE MOSES FRANK TRILOGY.
Martin Weitz (The Elena Text (The Moses Frank Trilogy #1))