When Prophecy Fails

Often when adults make conclusions about a child's "fantastical beliefs" it is usually to belittle the child's grasp on "reality" and reaffirm the adult in their ability to "perceive," as if perception was in their nature as adults. Clearly though, with the number of unverifiable beliefs that adults hold at any one time, adults are no better "perceivers" than children, it's just adults have a larger "sphere" in which they can draw resources from when perceiving and practicing meta-cognition. Nowhere was the fallibility of adult perception more dramatic than in the Festinger research into cognitive dissonance.

It's 1956. A story in the local Chicago news reports: "Prophecy from planet Clarion call to city: flee that flood." Apparently a housewife came to the conclusion that she had received a message from the planet "Clarion" about how the world was to end due to a massive flood, and that how on December 21st, all of human civilization would be wiped out.

In the analysis of the apparent similarities between childhood behavior and adult behavior, invariably the subject of "prophecy" comes up, and likewise, what happens to individuals when their beliefs about the world and their activities are incompatible. This tale of the housewife and her message from Clarion became the subject of a landmark study headed by Leon Festinger.

This housewife was successful in amassing a close-knit collection of believers from the community and surrounding areas, and they founded an encampment, where through their various stages of shedding selfishness (giving up jobs, families, all their money and possessions), they would be deemed worthy and be spared the devastation by the interception of a flying saucer. All of this was revealed through the "automatic" writings of the housewife, Mrs. Marion Keech.

More skeptical minds saw this event as an opportunity to gain some anecdotal insight into how human beings adjust when their beliefs and their behaviors come into conflict, for surely the the scientific community assumed the prophecy would fail. The idea, as carried out in Festinger et al. (1956), was for a team of social psychologists to infiltrate the group as prospective members and record the happenings as they observed them, the justifications, rationalizations, and social dynamic of the group. It was known that each member of the group had invested heavily in the belief that they would be saved from a great flood through their actions. Festinger hypothesized that following any disconfirmation of their belief the group would proselytize in order to lessen the negative effects of the disconfirmation.

The research team was so successful in presenting themselves as believers that one of them was thought to be an alien messenger in disguise, and soon the night of December 20th was drawing to a close. When midnight struck and no saucer appeared, the group wasn't devastated, and insisted that it wasn't technically midnight yet because another clock in the room was slow 5 minutes. By 4:00 am, with no visitors yet, another automatic writing session produced a "new response" from Clarion--that the "God of Earth" had spared the planet due to their actions. There was to be no devastation.

"The little group, sitting all night long, had spread so much light that God had saved the world from destruction" (Festinger et al. 1956).

The term "cognitive dissonance" refers to the uncomfortable feeling from having two conflicting thoughts at the same time, or from engaging in behavior that conflicts with one's beliefs, or from experiencing apparently conflicting phenomena. The theory put forth by Festinger based on his observations, as well as other more experimentally designed studies, is that when a human being is placed in a state of cognitive dissonance, they will engage in some thought or behavior that will sooth the discomfort--they'll warp their beliefs to fit their behaviors, ignore information that does not support their beliefs, or create new information that does.

My first comment in regards to this episode is that young children could not have constructed such a belief as elaborate as these individuals did in 1956. This is due to a number of factors: that children normally have little knowledge of extra-terrestrial bodies, extra-terrestrial intelligence, and the phenomenon of automatic writing, and that children don't physically own anything, and therefore "investment" in any one particular belief can not be measured in terms of what the child has "financially invested," (but it can be measured in other ways). Often if children do seem to have inordinate amounts of knowledge about such things, less skeptical adults see them as "Indigos," "Star Children," and other such entities, and more skeptical adults are right to point out the proliferation of children's educational media for the early appearance of such leaps of cognitive reasoning. It takes a lot for a young child to recognize the permanence of the Earth, and once a child is capable of doing that, they will broaden their cognitive sphere to that of the cosmos, as this adult cult was capable of doing.

To be fair though, to both developmental stages (and all those in between), the beliefs described above about the cult represent only a small fraction, a fringe in a larger majority. The majority of individuals do not believe such radical beliefs, but they experience conflicting beliefs nonetheless. One does not need to be a fringe, a cultist, or mentally disturbed to hold beliefs that could be termed "irrational beliefs," and one does not need to be less cognitively mature to experience cognitive dissonance over those beliefs when they fail to be confirmed in reality.

Beliefs lead to the amazing diversity of the human imagination, and to much of human culture, lore, and myth. The human race would not be as socially cohesive without these shared traditions. The point is not to diminish the importance of irrational beliefs but to understand the difference between what is fact and what is fiction, and the larger gray area in between that the human mind, for all it's abilities, has not been able to perceive yet. Most importantly, this notion of adults having the ability to perceive the optimum should be dismissed. It is simple arrogance on the part of one adult over another, and one adult over a child. Instead, human cognitive development should be interpreted as a summation of the resources physically and mentally available to the individual at each stage of development, along the lines of a continuum, the likes of which Piaget only hinted at: that the adult is in fact not a sage of "cognitive competence," but like children, simply displays a "relative degree of functioning."

If this is so then adults couldn't design a test to verify whether or not adults are cognitively competent, because to do so would require knowledge about the universe and higher functions of the mind that human beings have not accessed yet. It would be the equivalent of children testing themselves on knowledge and cognitive functioning that only their respective biological and psychological development has access to, and then declaring that result definitive. If this is true, than it poses a problem scientifically, and must be taken on its own terms.

Saving Isn't Helping

There's going to be a cultural war between the members of the millennial generation --between those who are rational and skeptical, and those who are influenced by the visceral and sensational. This is to say, it will be waged between those who accept reality and the unshakable flaws and powers of human nature, and those who want to save the world with uncompromising ideology. And how can someone like myself know this outcome with such certainty? It is probably because there is nothing new about it.

There will always be those who want to save the world and those who want to help the world. Those who have endeavored to save the world have failed, and those who have worked to help it, have succeeded only so long as they are permitted to do so by those who are trying to save it. Helping is a selfless act to assist another when it is needed and asked for, whereas saving is a selfish act meant to make one appear like a savior when the assistance is neither required or asked for. Those who help try to accept the failures of human nature and persevere in spite of them. Those who play savior try to eliminate the failings of human nature so that they may supersede it with an ideal. There is nothing new about cult behavior though. We must be weary of it, but not fearful of it or destructive towards it. Ideology seeks out enemies to destroy, and creates new ones by doing so. Rationality speaks truth to power, and finds friends with all those who seek justice without destruction.

The same is true for how we respond to our children. There are those who want to help children and those who want to save the children. Those who help children are able to see their fallible human nature, and find ways to work around it with them. Those who want to save children either want to pretend that children are infallible (Indigo children), or try to eliminate the fallible qualities of a child's human nature completely so that they may match with the cultural standards of children as infallible. The mechanism by which the adult saves children appears to be by subverting their humanity, whereby the mechanism the adult helps children is through recognizing and empowering it (by overcoming faults). What is true for how we raise children, is true for society.

Human nature has a variety of expression, but it is a finite expression that is then malleable by culture and economics. Anyone who attempts to posit that it is entirely a creation of culture and circumstance (the Marxists), or posits that it is entirely innate, is preceding from false assumptions. Anyone who thinks they can invent some ideology to "wake the world up" from its sleepwalk into doomsday by convincing the people that their governments and corporations have created human nature in its entirety, is selling a contradiction. On the one hand, they say human nature is being exploited in order to propagate an ideology, and on the other, that human nature is a mere creation and doesn't exist naturally. How can human beings be as we picture children--mindless drones one minute when in the hands of the group the onlooker despises, and the next, intentional beings once fallen under the spell of that onlooker? The onlooker exploits their human nature by telling them their nature is a creation.

There has become such a thing as an anti-ideology ideology. It proposes that people are becoming sedated by the ideologies they absorb on a daily basis in their information-rich contexts--leaving out of course that the "ideology of ideological sedation" is itself part of that information bombardment. So we have people panicked over how children will grow up with impairments due to exposure to certain ideologies, not realizing that restricting them from ideology is itself an ideology that they are inadvertently exposing their children to. This is not to say that we ought to be anxious that anti-ideologies are still ideologies, falling prey to an endless loop of paranoia about the effects of anti-ideology ideologies--if that is confusing, good, because it's irrational. Instead, what is meant by this is simply that we ought to accept that reality, accept that things we may not like exist and will always exist, and then do our best to recognize them and step around them when we see them.

Children are human beings, they are not lifelong slaves to the ideology they heard when they were three years old. They can break out of the system if we work with them to teach them about the system. They can not break free if we shut them off to that critical information or neglect to teach it in fear that they will "fall prey to it." There is no reason to concern ourselves so much with what is going into them, because when we do that we fail to attend to what is coming out. When we focus our attention on covering their ears so that information we don't like can't seep in, we forget to listen to what is coming out of their mouths. When we spend our time blocking their eyes so that they can't see something, we blind ourselves to what is coming out in their physical movements. For every inch we think we gain on their ability to understand the world, we give up our understanding of them.

Now this should not be a worrisome trend, seeing as what will happen will happen--intervention only stops what we imagine from happening, it doesn't stop what we can't imagine. In all likelihood, what we can't imagine is what is probably going to happen. We have no control over outcomes, just the social devices we choose to get there. Discussion and education is what informs a human being's choices, and a child's outcomes, not mere exposure to certain ideas. What is true for children is true for society.

The Zeitgeist Cult

The Zeitgeist films and the Venus Project have captivated the children of the information age. They have played right into a demographic who has been reared on the internet and knows little else but. They have attempted to claim science without the benefit of hindsight, for every movement that has ever attempted to claim science has led to atrocity. They have toured too long in the foreign land of history without the benefit of a guidebook and have lost themselves to fitting together its disparate themes into neat and orderly conspiracies. They worship the guru they see in Jacques Fresco, rather than apply the principles of evidential argumentation to his bold-faced assertions. They have become drunk on their own propaganda of flying cars and futuristic city plans and have yet to sober up to the oppression inherent in the technocratic, totalitarian globalist, machine-driven superstructure they envision with utopian simplicity.

Given all this, every cult has its kernels of truth. The Zeitgeist films are best described as propaganda vehicles to assert a political agenda that is anti-free market, anti-democracy (as we know it), anti-human nature, and anti-freedom of religion. They fabricate the lore and mythology of human antiquity to fit their schema for the baselessness of religious ideas, and build upon those outright fabrications intricate truths about the state of the planet and humanity. We are lead to believe these various pathways and narratives are somehow related when they are not--the Egyptian god Horus was never considered to be a Christ figure, and even if he were, it would have nothing to do with how consumerism is destroying our global ecology. The shortest distance between two points is always a straight line, and that's the only line the filmmakers wish to present, because it's the only line they want their audience to know about. In Nietzsche's terms, these are but castles built on spider webs.

We are, once again, led against scientific rigor. There is a contempt for science which is all too predictable in movements that stress absolute certainty--perhaps it is because science stresses no such certainty, merely, beliefs based on evidence. It is not as if the claims being made are of the same degree of fabrication as was the case with their historical narratives, it's just that in their presentation of genetics and behavior, of environmental science, of sociology..etc., they present information as if they alone are the ones busting the lid off this information--as if none of what they say hasn't already been the main argument of researchers in the scientific realms for decades. They then use that presentation to make it seem like they alone are telling the truth while suggesting that all of science is make believe consumer-driven hocus-pocus.

When the scientific community is invoked, we see images of outdated 19th century dioramas with the implication that they are still accepted beliefs, and then when they bring up what 21st century science has uncovered, it is always in the context of their movement (once again, as if they are responsible for the progress science has made in the past 50 years). It is effective propaganda for the masses, but unconvincing for those who know how propaganda works. For instance, they would be hard pressed to find a developmental psychologist who disagrees with their supposed "claim" that nature vs. nurture is a simplistic view of development, but that doesn't stop them from touting it as if they've just stumbled onto this discovery for the first time, and that they'd be decried as heretics for even suggesting it. Nothing could be further from the truth.

This is not to say that science is not corrupted, or that corporations are not corrupted, or that governments are not corrupted. They make these points and they are valid points, but what they desire to do is utterly destroy our current civilization and rebuild it along their own half-baked principles (vehemently opposing all perspectives and evidence that is contrary to their assumptions). Just as the Marxists, just as the Bolsheviks, they believe that only after society has been dismantled and reconstituted to match with their ideal, that we might finally see Utopia--that all the disparate people of the earth will somehow unite around their vision and we'll finally all be free from the grip of [whatever we distrust in the present]. These are fantasies, illusions, flights of incomprehensible naïveté  no matter how genuine they may be felt.

It is not freedom, or even the rights of human beings they are after though, for they treat human beings as secondary to their technological and environmental pursuits--and one can only imagine the atrocities that would be rendered if their contempt for human vice were brought to full-scale fruition. One has only look at the history of uncompromising extremism to see where this thinking leads ('extermination' always factors in). There is absolutely nothing new about any claim or statement made in the Zeitgeist films, they are simply dressed up to look as if they are presenting a new ideology. One could even argue that another term for the political ideology being espoused in these films is a technological National Socialism, only on a global scale rather than within a country, where the needs of the individual become secondary to the needs of the "world citizens." It seeks to subjugate human interest and channel those energies toward perpetuating the utopian vision, carried out by machine-driven enforcement. The individual comes second to the centralized global state. The undesirables (those who might disagree to living under this system and lash out at it) would naturally have to be eliminated.

It's a cult because it fails to subject itself to the same standards of critique it reserves for society. Instead of working to create solutions out of the system, it diverts attention towards formulating some grandioise vision for a utopia where no one is allowed to work, no one is allowed to practice faith, no one is allowed to be evil, or good, or even human. This is a sad distraction, but such seems to be the case with the information age--the age of distraction--which is why solutions are so tough to come by to begin with. Progress can only come from that which allows all things, and promises little. The Venus Project and its propaganda is a cult because it allows so little, and promises everything.