Salssify

As information expands and becomes ubiquitous, disinformation becomes equally overwhelming and pervasive. This is what pollutes our global information ecology. It has also made people skeptical of nearly everything, even what common sense, factual analysis, and our own intuition should make somewhat obvious. This is ultimately a problem of sensemaking in an era of mass propaganda, algorithmic control, and governments shanghaiing their populations. Case in point, the recent Florida Learjet crash is being questioned all over social media as either a hoax or some other kind of conspiracy. But what I am asking is: does everything need to be a conspiracy? Can there not be accidents where normal people fuck up in spectacular fashion? Does everything need to be a cover-up? Better yet, IS everything a cover-up or false flag? The current social model, which relies heavily on innate distrust and over-the-top skepticism, would suggest that everything is a lie perpetrated by governments, corporations, and the establishment. I would argue that they are not wrong to question everything, but also that questioning everything is what governments, corporations, and the establishment want! They relish the idea that people will chase mirages and delude themselves into thinking everything is fake. It's through this type of self-deception that governments actually break people's capacity to think and create a population of veritable paranoid schizophrenics. And indeed, a population of people with government-infused psychiatric conditions is not a threatening population. They are a population of people who could easily be rounded up and put into the psych-ward. The established elites would love that. We could call this type of mental illness a "kratogenically" derived psychosis. Krato means power, and genic means produced or originating from. In essence, people are suffering from a kind of institutional or "carceral psychosis" that stems from a poor-quality information ecology and the government's love of mass confusion. So, in this environment of kratogenic psychosis, how can we calibrate our epistemic tools? 1) We must cultivate our reasoning capabilities. When we consume media, we should first and foremost use reason to unveil the truth. We should be able to simplify and leverage smart tools like Occam's Razor. Not everything has to be a mega-conspiracy that requires a perfectly fitted tin-foil hat. Reason and current knowledge should be enough to get fairly close to the truth. The simplest answer is probably closer to the truth (but not always). It's just good to learn not to overcomplicate every bit of information. We should also always reason from our own first principles rather than relying on proxies for our knowledge. This helps us center our reasoning on our own skills rather than a random online midwit. 2) Understand the importance of primary sources. When you consume information, make sure you know where it originally comes from. It is also important to understand what biases, flaws, and blind spots the source contains. Bad journalists often use secondary or auxiliary sources. This is just a form of yellow journalism. A good rule of thumb is to assume media sources always have their own biases and to check primary sources yourself. If you can't access the primary sources, that can be good information in itself about the veracity of a given media soundbite. 3) Acknowledge that governments and certain entities want you to endlessly chase your tail. In other words, they want you to assume everything is a false flag, fake, or a conspiracy. In a way, this is information warfare. It generates hearsay and noise that distract from other issues. The more people who chase who-knows-what and handicap their own epistemological interior, the more they lose sight of any semblance of truth. This is why we must fully understand the first and second points. The consequences of assuming everything is fake are that we become a kind of epistemological nihilist who lacks the capacity to reason about base reality. Then they have a higher likelihood of descending into kratogenically induced psychosis. I have more information to share, and plenty of writing to do on the subject. But sensemaking is one arena where all of us should work hard to clarify and expand...especially as we move into a world that is increasingly "deterritorialized" by combative electronic information flows that harbor their own agendas and seek to undermine sanity worldwide.