Face, accept, float, let time pass: Claire Weekes' anxiety cure holds true decades on

 via The Age

On October 23, 1977, a diminutive Australian stepped onto the stage in New York. The audience saw an elderly woman whose regular uniform was a tweed skirt, twinset, spectacles, and sensible brown lace-up shoes with low heels. Her dark hair was permed and for adornment, she wore a string of pearls. At the age of 74, Dr Claire Weekes was the guest speaker at the 18th Annual Fall Conference of the Association for the Advancement of Psychotherapy. She was an unusual choice for this gathering, as she ranked as an unqualified outsider.

However, Weekes had one measurable claim to fame: her books on anxiety were a global sensation, hitting the bestseller lists in the US and the UK from the early 1960s onwards. She’d found a popular  audience by identifying and describing the havoc nervous illness could create, and explaining and treating it in a fresh way. Weekes had been invited to address this professional association despite divided opinion over her approach. Many psychiatrists had heard of her methods from their patients, and a number accepted that some patients they had treated unsuccessfully had read her books and felt, if not entirely cured, then on the way to recovery.

While her audience saw a populist, Weekes started life as a scholar, an evolutionary scientist. In 1930 she made history as the first woman to gain a doctorate of science at the University of Sydney, and also won the university medal in zoology. By then she already had an international reputation in her field, which lives as vigorously today in academic circles as her work on nerves thrives in the popular market.

In 1945, she qualified as a medical doctor, eventually becoming a specialist general physician dealing with difficult-to-diagnose cases. She then hurdled what was then the highest bar in medicine, being selected as a fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians. Her medical peers recognised what went unappreciated by her New York audience: Weekes was a scientist and a doctor who had mastered an understanding of the nervous system.

Yet on the podium in New York, Weekes inspired no awe and many in the audience dismissed her as offering nothing more than the equivalent of grandmotherly advice. She was the author of self-help books, not a psychiatrist, and she was in huge demand in the media. Her fame invited critical attention to her lack of specialist credentials, which was enough to wound her reputation in her own profession.

The psychiatrists in the New York audience fell into one of two schools. They were either psychoanalysts, who followed the techniques of Sigmund Freud and his intellectual descendants, or cognitive behaviourists, who worked on changing habits of thought and associated behaviours. Weekes’ approach could not have been further from that of Freud. Referring to the legendary psychiatrist’s pioneering technique of interrogating his patients while they were prone, Weekes boasted of being “one of the first to deal a blow at the old Viennese couch technique. I led them out of the consulting room, into the world where they were to live successfully.” She was equally critical of attempts by the behaviourists to “desensitise” their patients using relaxation techniques.

She understood that trying to teach a patient to relax in the face of phobia or panic was not only counterproductive but an almost impossible mission. Instead, she argued that by fully experiencing the panic, the individual learnt it was possible to “pass through” to the other side. Their nervous system needed to be reordered, which they could learn to do themselves. They didn’t then need a shepherd or psychiatrist.

“To recover, they must know how to face, accept and go through panic until it no longer matters …” Weekes said. “Recovery is in their own hands, not in drugs, not in avoidance of panic, not in ‘getting used to’ difficult situations, nor in desensitisation by suggestion. Permanent recovery lies in the patient’s ability to know how to accept the panic until he no longer fears it.”

The New York audience made her acutely aware of their disdain. They looked at their watches and talked among themselves, and the famous South African psychiatrist Dr Joseph Wolpe tore her to pieces after she dared challenge an approach to treatment that he favoured. At least one psychiatrist in the audience appreciated her pioneering work, however. Dr Manuel Zane, who ran a New York clinic for anxiety and phobia, had firsthand experience of the success of her method, even with intractable cases.

“The remarkable thing was that patients came to me talking about her,” Zane wrote in a nomination he made for Weekes for a Nobel Prize in the late 1980s. “That was the difference between Weekes and other professionals. She was coming to us from where the patient is, and not from our top, where we were telling patients what it’s all about, why they are the way they are.” Weekes also offered something unique to the field: hope.

Years later, Weekes chided another professional audience. “I am aware that many therapists believe there is no permanent cure for nervous illness. When I was on the radio some years ago in New York with a physician and a psychiatrist, the psychiatrist corrected me when I used the word ‘cure’ and said, ‘You mean remission, don’t you, Dr Weekes? We never speak of curing nervous illness!’ I told her that I had cured far too many nervously ill people to be afraid to use the word.”

It was a provocative claim, but one that sat on an unshakeable foundation. Weekes’ work anticipated advances made decades later in both neurology and psychiatry, and her approach, akin to modern psychology’s Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), has been vindicated. She changed the way anxiety was understood and treated, yet her huge global footprint is invisible, and her achievement remains largely unrecognised by professionals.

Hazel Claire Weekes was born in 1903 into a modest middle-class Sydney home. Her father, Ralph, was a musician, and this clever eldest daughter of four children was the favourite of her mother Fan, a preference all too obvious to Weekes’ two brothers and younger sister. Fiercely proud of this child, who showed early scholarly success, Fan determined to see her daughter fulfil her promise. So off Weekes went to Sydney University, securing her first-class honours degree in science and university medal.

In 1928, at the age of 25, she identified a new challenge: a Rockefeller Fellowship, with which she planned to further her evolutionary studies in England after completing her PhD. But before she got there, she lost her footing and found herself in freefall. It started with a sore throat, followed by a botched operation on septic tonsils resulting in a haemorrhage.

“I’d had severely infected tonsils. I’d eaten very little for months and had lost two stone,” she said years later in an interview with the BBC. For a small, slightly built woman, 13 kilograms was a significant weight loss. In her weakened state, she experienced heart palpitations and was referred to a Sydney specialist she knew as a “famous cardiologist”, who gave her injections of calcium, which had little or no effect.

Fragile, emaciated, and with a racing heart, Weekes was a puzzle to her local doctor, who finally, with scant evidence, made a monumental diagnosis. He concluded she had contracted the dreaded disease of the day, tuberculosis. “I thought I was dying,” she recalled in a letter to a friend. “I was sent away to the country and I was told that I must make no effort, not even to pull a blind down.” Tuberculosis invoked the terror of the Black Plague of earlier years; the public response to it was a preview of that to the HIV/AIDS epidemic to come generations later.

Her studies were put on hold, and the young woman who hated being alone was packed off to the Waterfall State Sanatorium, 38 kilometres south of the Sydney CBD. Here there was no occupation and no one to keep Weekes company in the face of the death and dying around her. Her heart continued to race. “I was more or less confined to lying on the couch, with nothing much to do, and six months on my hands. So that I knew what it was to become introverted, worried,” she said of that period.

The sanatorium was the perfect petri dish for a fear that would grip and not let go. Yet Weekes was one of the lucky ones, for, after six months, the doors of the sanatorium swung open. The doctors concluded a mistake had been made; that she’d been wrongly diagnosed. Far from being relieved, Weekes felt immeasurably worse. Now she was convinced that she had a serious heart complaint as the tachycardia, or racing heart, was unceasing. Once outside the sanatorium, she was terrified and overwhelmed.

“I can remember, I had lost all confidence in what I could do, because I’d been told, ‘You mustn’t do this, you mustn’t do that!’ I remember walking out alone and thinking, ‘I wonder if I can walk as far as the corner of that street?’ I remember being aware of every footstep I took, and wondering how much faith I could still have in my body to get there,” she said in a media interview years later.

Rather than immediately returning to university, she chose to recuperate in “the country” with a female friend who was married to a doctor. Weekes hoped for some advice on her heart problems, but instead, found more medical incompetence.

“My heart would palpitate if I woke up at night, just the shock of waking up would make it accelerate. I can remember very clearly how, one night, I called out to her when my heart was beating fiercely and thought my last gasp was coming. Her husband, the doctor, said, ‘No. I won’t go to help her. She’ll think she’s worse than she really is!’”

The doctor was right in one respect. There was nothing wrong with Weekes’ heart. She was to live for another six decades. However, something important had gone unexplained. It was fear that was managing her heartbeat, and, without knowing this, she was trapped in a vicious cycle. It would be years before she cracked the anxiety code.

In 1929, aged 26 and not long out of the sanatorium, an unsteady Weekes boarded a Dutch liner. With a professional record that eluded most men of her generation, and the backing of eminent scientists in her field, she was finally heading to England on that Rockefeller scholarship, bound for University College London, where she would continue her studies in evolution.

The rhythm and vibrations of the ship helped camouflage the movements in her body, and she regained composure for the first time in two years. Yet on stepping ashore, a rapidly beating heart reclaimed her. The return of her symptoms was devastating. At night, she would just be dropping off to sleep when she’d wake with a start. “Then I would sit up for hours for fear that I would die if I lay down.” There was no way out. Newly arrived in London but close to collapse, she felt keenly the paradox of her situation. “I had everything to live for and I knew it. I had achieved so much, the whole of life lay before me, but I was incapacitated.”

The potency of this experience would inform her advice, many years later, to patients and readers.

She knew the return of fear carried with it real despair, the death of the hope so badly needed but impossible to secure. In her books, she had a typically practical word to describe this state: simply, a “setback”. It was not defeat, she counselled, but was to be embraced as an opportunity to practise.

Stress, fear and panic could return, but it was possible to learn how to ride the terrifying waves back to the shoreline. In this way, what she would later call “the habit of fear” could be broken. Not long after she began working in her University College lab, a friend came to visit. Beyond dissembling, her first words to him were: “Oh, I can’t take this any longer. I’ve had it!” When told of her racing heart and indescribable distress, far from being surprised or concerned, he shrugged.

“That is nothing,” he said. “Those are only the symptoms of nerves. We all had those in the [World War I] trenches.” He told Weekes that her heart continued to race because she was frightened of it. It was programmed by her fear. This made immediate sense. “All the time I have been doing this to myself?” she asked. “He said ‘yes’ and laughed,” she would later recount.

His words spoke to the scientist in Weekes. War offered empirical examples: men got scared, their hearts raced, and they often continued to race after the threat had passed. Her friend, decorated for bravery in the savage battle of the Somme, had noticed that he and his fellow soldiers had become distressed by their racing hearts, which further aroused and primed them for panic. Yet there was nothing wrong with their hearts. They were consumed with a fear that felt overwhelming in the body, so the mind concluded something was terribly wrong and continued to feed the fear.

Fear could not be extinguished by the rational brain. Thinking inevitably lost the battle to feeling. Weekes’ substantial cognitive abilities, which delivered scholarships, awards and opportunities, were sidelined by an all-consuming dread. It was this feeling she was desperate to extinguish, this feeling against which she fought so futilely, this feeling that was accompanied by racing panicked thoughts.

The discovery that she’d been frightened of fear itself was a profound revelation. Weekes was shocked that not one of the handful of doctors and specialists she’d consulted had explained how fear could have such a deranging effect on the body. She immediately grasped the point that she needed to stop fighting the fear, an instinctive response yet counterproductive. There was no benefit gained by striving, trying to think rationally, or attempting to exercise willpower. She later reported it as the breakthrough insight.

“After my friend told me the cause, I just lay as calmly as I could, ‘Okay, I’ll just go to sleep, palpitating if necessary.’ ” When she ceased engaging so intensely with her symptoms, her heartbeat returned to normal. “The whole thing cleared up,” as she put it. Once she understood “fear” was bluffing her, she decided to ignore the messenger. She accepted the palpitations instead of fighting them. No battle, no fighting. The keyword was “acceptance”.

The turnaround was swift. If Weekes had been devastated by her lack of understanding of what ailed her, she now felt exhilarated, liberated by an explanation from what had been incomprehensible suffering. With this new understanding, she regained control. Her friend had planted the seed for the bestselling books that Weekes would eventually write, but years of professional medical experience were needed to shape this single brilliant insight of acceptance into a comprehensive understanding of the anxiety state.

Weekes’ own distress, which had so piqued her interest in “nerves”, was to find its professional purpose back in Sydney, when she began practising as a doctor, first in Bondi and then as a specialist general physician in Macquarie Street. Here she learnt that panic and anxiety played a medley of dissonant bodily tunes, from breathing, swallowing and digestive difficulties to headaches, dizziness and muscle fatigue among many others.

Now other doctors began to refer their difficult cases to her. With the support of her partner, the accomplished pianist Elizabeth (Beth) Coleman, and her mother Fan, she had unlimited time and sympathy for anxious patients. Determined not to be like the doctor who had long ago failed to ease her own suffering by explaining the effects of fear on mind and body, her dedication to those she deemed nervously ill went far beyond any normal professional boundary. She even invited some of them to live in her home, to better help their recovery.

Weekes knew the effect anxiety had on the body, later describing in her books “the whiplash of panic” and the “electrifying quality of sensitised panic” to communicate to a non-sufferer the way in which continued distress prepared the body to ever more swiftly respond. The nervous system became primed to experience anxiety more quickly and savagely than ever. It had become “sensitised”, and understanding this process was the key to recovery. Desensitisation would follow as a natural consequence. That is, there was no need to practise becoming desensitised to whatever was particularly feared.

So instead of structured exposure to fears, she prescribed total acceptance of the fear as the way out of distress and panic. The problem was inside, not outside. To address it required total acceptance of what felt unacceptable. For it was exactly this fighting against tension, fear, anxiety and panic that perpetuated the problem. Weekes’ treatment protocol was just six words: face, accept, float, let time pass. It was not designed to eradicate all the stresses of life, but to enable people to find their own way out of distress. It was, she would later say, simple but not always easy. Her point was that it worked.

Weekes put her success as a doctor down to her scientific training, telling the BBC years later that it allowed her to see the trunk of the tree, rather than being distracted by the leaves. She had a gift for discerning the relationship between the mind and the body – what was clinical illness and what were symptoms driven by fear and anxiety. Understanding fear and its relationship to physical illness had become a mission.

Such was her success that throughout the 1950s, people were referred to her from across the nation.

She came to believe she had something unique to offer the huge, unmet market for effective treatment for severe anxiety. In 1962, she wrote the prosaically titled Self-Help for Your Nerves, and by the time she was standing on the podium in New York 15 years later, there had been two more books, which were prominently displayed in airports and translated into at least eight languages.

Two more were to follow in the next decade. She later explained to an American doctor that, instead of writing research papers, she had seen “the need was so great” that she went directly to the people.

The books were slim volumes that explained the nervous system and how it could go awry, how the mind and body were interconnected in arousal, and the trouble this could cause. Yet the clarity of work that drove the books’ runaway success also repelled professional recognition. Self-help was not yet a genre that inspired psychiatrists’ attention or respect. In a field more familiar with failure, and one riven with division, Weekes achieved success and as psychoanalysts struggled to prove that their methods worked, Weekes had the numbers running in her favour. People bought her books and queued to thank her for “saving” their lives. She was writing about “them”, and they often chose a religious metaphor to express their gratitude: the books were their “bible”.

Weekes died in 1990, aged 87. Along the way, she’d hurdled a series of different careers – evolutionary scientist, travel writer, singing coach, GP – and it was a lifetime of scholarship and deep experience of the anxiety state, as well as exceptional communications skills, that delivered the books that saved lives, and changed history.

People as diverse as 1960s housewives, the daughter of Richard Nixon’s drug czar, a British television producer, the late poet Les Murray, the singer Clare Bowditch, the famous US environmental activist Erin Brockovich, even prisoners have benefited from her work. The eminent anxiety specialist David Barlow, professor emeritus of psychology and psychiatry at Boston University, confirms she “created a treatment protocol to the unending benefit of tens of millions of patients over the years”.

It was her training as a scientist and a doctor that enabled Weekes to understand the nervous system and explain it in a way that is state-of-the-art today, although many mental health professionals are unaware of the debt they have to a woman whose work was discovered by a wide, thankful suffering public.

Her face, accept, float, let time pass method was based on a biological understanding of fear. Today, psychologists use a version of her method; neuroscientists study the interaction between different fear circuits in the brain and many psychiatrists are revising the mind-body connection that was the hallmark of her work. “Acceptance” is the treatment du jour, and many mental health professionals explain fear in the same way she did all those years ago, when she identified how the body’s simple alarm system, the unconscious fight-or-flight system – which she called first fear – could be distressingly perpetuated by what she called “second fear” which kicked off a vicious “fear-adrenalin-fear cycle”, as she called it.

Weekes was chagrined by the professional resistance she faced over decades as it so starkly contrasted with her huge success in the marketplace, where she met intense, continuing gratitude. When she spoke on US television networks, switchboards were overwhelmed, and in England in the 1980s, the BBC post office could not handle the avalanche of letters that followed her appearance in an interview series on daytime television. The broadcaster was forced to rent extra space and employ outworkers to handle the mail.

Over time, the professionals were educated by their patients who had found her work so useful, and some leaders in the field, such as England’s renowned anxiety expert, Dr Isaac Marks, and Albert Ellis, considered one of the originators of the so-called cognitive revolution in psychology, came to understand the power of her books. Yet her loyal audience never needed persuading and her enduring public value is easy to identify to this day.

Her books are still being read and a social media foreign to her continues to share her work. If history has forgotten Weekes, her public remembers. In 2014, when US magazine The Atlantic invited readers to respond with tips on anxiety, just three writers were cited and their books listed. One of these was Self-Help for Your Nerves, or, as it was retitled for the US market, Hope and Help for Your Nerves. It had been written over half a century before, and Dr Claire Weekes had been dead for almost 25 years.

This is an edited extract from The Woman Who Cracked the Anxiety Code: the Extraordinary Life of Dr Claire Weekes by Judith Hoare (Scribe, $40), out October 1.

Why Can’t You Remember Your Future? Physicist Paul Davies on the Puzzlement of Why We Experience Time as Linear

 via brainpickings

“If our heart were large enough to love life in all its detail,” French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote in his 1932 meditation on our paradoxical experience of time, “we would see that every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer.” Nowhere is this duality of time more disorienting than in the constant mental time travel we perform between what has been and what will be in order to anchor ourselves to what is. As our lives tick on, gradually robbing the future of potential and robbing the past of relevance, we trudge along the arrow of time dragging with us this elusive curiosity we call a self — an ever-shifting packet of personal identity, mystifying in how it links us to our childhood selves and misleading in how it maps out our future selves.

That puzzlement is what Australian theoretical physicist Paul Davies explores in a wonderfully mind-bending passage from his altogether terrific 1995 book About Time: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution (public library), which embodies my three criteria for what makes a great science book.

Davies writes:

    "When I was a child, I often used to lie awake at night, in fearful anticipation of some unpleasant event the following day, such as a visit to the dentist, and wish I could press some sort of button that would have the effect of instantly transporting me twenty-four hours into the future. The following night, I would wonder whether that magic button was in fact real, and that the trick had indeed worked. After all, it was twenty-four hours later, and though I could remember the visit to the dentist, it was, at the that time, only a memory of an experience, not an experience.

    Another button would also send me backwards in time, of course. This button would restore my brain state and memory to what they were at that earlier date. One press, and I could be back at my early childhood, experiencing once again, for the first time, my fourth birthday…"

Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman addressed this perplexity in his model of the experiencing self and the remembering self, but for Davies the more interesting question deals not with the pure psychology of the experience but with how the accepted physics of time, seeded by Einstein’s relativity theory, gives shape to that psychological experience. He returns to the larger questions arising from his childhood thought experiments:

    "With these buttons, gone would be the orderly procession of events that apparently constitutes my life. I could simply jump hither and thither at random, back and forth in time, rapidly moving on from any unpleasant episodes, frequently repeating the good times, always avoiding death, of course , and continuing ad infinitum. I would have no subjective impression of randomness, because at each stage the state of my brain would encode a consistent sequence of events.

    […]

    The striking thing about [such] “thought experiments” is, how would my life seem any different if this button-pushing business really was going on? What does it even mean to say that I am experiencing my life in a jumpy, random sort of manner? Each instant of my experience is the experience, whatever its temporal relation to other experiences. So long as the memories are consistent, what meaning can be attached to the claim that my life happens in a jumbled sequence?"

In the remainder of the thoroughly satisfying About Time, Davies goes on to probe the answer to this question by examining how the history of human thought, from St. Augustine to Einstein, has left us with a model of time that simply doesn’t reflect the nature of experience, and what we can expect from the evolution of science as we reach for more complete models of this timelessly puzzling dimension of reality.

Complement it with T.S. Eliot’s beautiful ode to the nature of time and Virginia Woolf on the elasticity of time, then revisit the historic debate that shaped our modern understanding of time.

Joe Rogan goes full retard

Joe Rogan's interview with Nick Bostrom was kinda fun except for the last hour when he couldn't understand probability theory.

How the Brain Finds Meaning in Metaphor

 3 minute read

You can grasp a hand. You can also grasp a concept.


One is literal. One is metaphorical. Our brains know the difference, but would we be able to understand the latter without the former?


Previous studies have suggested that our understanding of metaphors may be rooted in our bodily experience. Some functional MRI, or fMRI, brain imaging studies have indicated, for example, that when you hear a metaphor such as "she had a rough day," regions of the brain associated with tactile experience are activated. If you hear, "he's so sweet," areas associated with taste are activated. And when you hear action verbs used in a metaphorical context, like "grasp a concept," regions involved in motor perception and planning are activated.


A study by University of Arizona researcher Vicky Lai, published in the journal Brain Research, builds on this research by looking at when, exactly, different regions of the brain are activated in metaphor comprehension and what that tells us about the way we understand language.


Humans Love Talking in Metaphors

Humans use metaphors all the time; they're so ingrained in our language we often don't even notice we're doing it.


In fact, researchers have found that on average, people use a metaphor every 20 words, said Lai, an assistant professor of psychology and cognitive science at the UA. As director of the Cognitive Neuroscience of Language Laboratory in the UA Department of Psychology, Lai is interested in how the brain processes metaphors and other types of language.


Her latest study used EEG, or brainwave studies, to record electrical patterns in the brain when participants were presented with metaphors that contained action content, like "grasp the idea" or "bend the rules."


Study participants were shown three different sentences on a computer screen, each presented one word at a time. One sentence described a concrete action, such as, "The bodyguard bent the rod." Another was a metaphor using the same verb: "The church bent the rules." In the third sentence, the verb was replaced with a more abstract word that conveyed the same meaning as the metaphor: "The church altered the rules." 


When participants saw the word "bent" used in both the literal and metaphorical context, a similar response was evoked in the brain, with the sensory-motor region being activated almost immediately – within 200 milliseconds – of the verb being presented on the screen. That response differed when "bent" was replaced with "altered."


Lai's work supports previous findings from fMRI studies, which measure brain activity changes related to blood flow; however, the EEG, which measures electrical activity in the brain, provides a clearer picture of just how important the sensory motor regions of the brain may be for metaphor comprehension.


"In an fMRI, it takes time for oxygenation and deoxygenation of blood to reflect change caused by the language that was just uttered," Lai said. "But language comprehension is fast – at the rate of four words per second."


Therefore, with an fMRI, it's hard to tell whether the sensory motor region is truly necessary for understanding action-based metaphors or if it's something that's activated after comprehension has already taken place. The EEG provides a much more precise sense of timing.


"By using the brainwave measure, we tease apart the time course of what happens first," Lai said.


In the study, the near-immediate activation of the sensory motor region after the verb was displayed suggests that that region of the brain is indeed quite important in comprehension.


Exploring the Power of Language

Lai's current research extends understanding of how humans comprehend language and will help foundationally with some of the other questions her lab is exploring, such as: Can metaphoric language be used to improve people's moods? What role might language play in healthy aging? And, can metaphors aid in the learning of abstract concepts? Lai recently presented ongoing research on the use of metaphors to aid in the teaching, learning and retention of science concepts at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society in San Francisco. 


Lai's fascination with metaphors stems from an early love of literature, which evolved into an interest in linguistics. As a linguistics master's student in Taiwan, she collected and studied hundreds of Mandarin Chinese metaphors. That eventually led her to psychology and her work at the UA.


"Understanding how the brain approaches the complexity of language allows us to begin to test how complex language impacts other aspects of cognition," she said.

This article has been republished from materials provided by the University of Arizona. Note: material may have been edited for length and content. For further information, please contact the cited source.

Carl Jung: …even the enlightened person remains what he is…

The Christian Church has hitherto. . . [recognized] Christ as the one and only God-man.

But the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, the third Divine Person, in man, brings about a Christification of many, and the question then arises whether these many are all complete God-men. . . .

It is well to remind ourselves of St. Paul and his split consciousness: on one side he felt he was the apostle directly called and enlightened by God, and, on the other side, a sinful man who could not pluck out the “thorn in the flesh” and rid himself of the Satanic angel who plagued him.

That is to say even the enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky.

~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 470.

Can Neuroscience understand free will?

by Brian Gallagher

In The Good Place, a cerebral fantasy-comedy TV series, moral philosophy gets teased. On YouTube, the show released a promotional video, “This Is Why Everyone Hates Moral Philosophy,” that gets its title from a line directed at Chidi, a Senegalese professor of moral philosophy who suffers from chronic indecision: The pros and cons of even trivial choices have long paralyzed him. We see him, as a precocious boy, urged to get on with picking teammates for a soccer game. Flustered, Chidi explains, “I have to consider all the factors: athletic strategies, the fragile egos of my classmates, and gender politics! Should I pick a girl as a gesture toward women’s equality, or is that pandering? Or do I think it’s pandering because of my limited male point of view? I’m vexed!” The kids waiting to play shake their heads, facepalming. A friend later insists he “fix his brain.” An M.R.I., courtesy of a neuroscientist named Simone, shows he’s fine. “Wow, there are actual answers here—data you can observe, and learn from,” Chidi says. “Yeah, man! Science is all about getting answers,” Simone replies. “You philosophers can spend your entire life mulling over a single question. That’s why everyone hates moral philosophy professors.” Both of them chuckle and she adds, “No offense.”

This is mock-hate, born of love. Before Mike Schur, the show’s creator, started shooting scenes, he paid a visit to the UCLA moral philosopher Pamela Hieronymi for insight. She’s interested in the sort of control humans have over our intentions and emotions, and how it might differ from control over our actions. Her favorite thought experiment comes from a 1983 paper, “The Toxin Puzzle,” by Gregory Kavka. A delightful head-scratcher, it invites you to imagine that an eccentric billionaire has offered you a deal: If you merely intend to drink a toxin tonight, at midnight, that will make you painfully ill for a day, he will wire you a million dollars—it’ll be in your bank tomorrow morning. A sophisticated and reliable brain scanner will determine whether you really formed the intention to imbibe the toxin. After you have the funds in your bank account, you’re free to decide not to drink it. An easy way to become a millionaire, no? Just intend to drink it for the scanner and, once you have the cash, switch your intention.

The sense of freedom we have to act on our moral understanding is regulated and vulnerable, and can break.

This is absurd, of course, and that’s Kavka’s point: We don’t have that sort of control over ourselves. If you intend to drink it (for the sake of the scanner) but also intend, later, to not drink it (to avoid the sickness), you’re really intending to not drink it. Our intentions are only “partly volitional,” Kavka says. “One cannot intend whatever one wants to intend any more than one can believe whatever one wants to believe. As our beliefs are constrained by our evidence, so our intentions are constrained by our reasons for action.” The sense that you have of being in control, of having free will, is just that—a sense. And it can break.

Clinical neuroscientists and neurologists have identified the brain networks responsible for this sense of free will. There seems to be two: the network governing the desire to act, and the network governing the feeling of responsibility for acting. Brain-damaged patients show that these can come apart—you can have one without the other.

Lacking essentially all motivation to move or speak has a name: akinetic mutism. The researchers, lead by neurologists Michael Fox, of Harvard Medical School, and Ryan Darby, of Vanderbilt University, analyzed 28 cases of this condition, not all of them involving damage in the same departments. “We found that brain lesions that disrupt volition occur in many different locations, but fall within a single brain network, defined by connectivity to the anterior cingulate,” which has links to both the “emotional” limbic system and the “cognitive” prefrontal cortex, the researchers wrote. Feeling like you’re moving under the direction of outside forces has a name, too: alien limb syndrome. The researchers analyzed 50 cases of this condition, which again involved brain damage in different spots. “Lesions that disrupt agency also occur in many different locations, but fall within a separate network, defined by connectivity to the precuneus,” which is involved, among other things, in the experience of agency.

The results may not map onto “free will” as we understand it ethically—the ability to choose between right and wrong. “It remains unknown whether the network of brain regions we identify as related to free will for movements is the same as those important for moral decision-making, as prior studies have suggested important differences,” the researchers wrote. For instance, in a 2017 study, he and Darby analyzed many cases of brain lesions in various regions predisposing people to criminal behavior, and found that “these lesions all fall within a unique functionally connected brain network involved in moral decision making.”

Nevertheless, the fact that brain damage affects moral behavior only underscores the reality that, whatever the “will” is, it isn’t “free.” The sense of freedom we have to act on our moral understanding is regulated and vulnerable, and can break. In a 2016 paper, Darby noted that people who have behavioral-variant frontotemporal dementia “develop immoral behaviors as a result of their disease despite the ability to explicitly state that their behavior is wrong.” This complicates how moral responsibility should be understood, he explains. People can be capable of acknowledging wrongdoing and yet be incapable of acting accordingly. Responsibility can’t hinge on any simple notion of “reason responsiveness,” Darby says, which is a view of how free will can be compatible with determinism—the idea, in the case of behavior, that brain activity causes feelings, intentions, and actions, moral or not.

It’s still not clear whether lay people tend to lean toward “compatibilism” or not. Experimental philosophers have been trying to find out for years, but haven’t landed on a consensus. A recent study explains why: “People are strongly motivated to preserve free will and moral responsibility, and thus do not have stable, logically rigorous notions of free will,” the researchers found. After conducting a series of studies probing people’s philosophical intuitions, the researchers concluded that people seem to be flexible in their views. They don’t have “one intuition about whether free will is compatible with determinism,” the researchers concluded. “Instead, people report that free will is compatible with determinism when desiring to uphold moral responsibility.”

The concept of free will doesn’t make any sense to me. As Kavka’s thought experiment shows, we don’t have much control over our thoughts. Take this article I’m writing: The words I’m committing to print pop into my mind unbeckoned. It’s less me choosing them and more them presenting themselves to me. The act of writing feels more like a process of passive filtration than active conjuration. I’m also convinced that humans can sensibly hold one another morally responsible even if we jettison the idea of free will. The reason is that, as a social mechanism, it has salutary effects. Generally, if people know that they will be held to account for moral violations, they will be less likely to commit them; and if they don’t know what the moral rules are, they will be motivated to learn them. Indeed, in the study on compatibilism, the researchers found that “participants reduced their compatibilist beliefs after reading a passage that argued that moral responsibility could be preserved even in the absence of free will.”

In any case, the mystery of free will isn’t going away anytime soon. In March, a group of neuroscientists and philosophers announced that they’ve received $7 million to study the nature of free will and whether humans have it. Uri Maoz, a computational neuroscientist at Chapman University, is leading the project. “As a scientist, I don’t know what it entails to have free will,” he said in an interview with Science. That’s a philosophical puzzle. But once Maoz’s philosopher colleagues agree on a definition, he can get to work to see if it occurs in humans. “This is an empirical question. It may be that I don’t have the technology to measure it, but that is at least an empirical question that I could get at.”

Maybe, as Chidi said looking at his M.R.I. results, there will be answers there, data we can observe and learn from. Perhaps free will won’t forever be an issue philosophers mull over for a lifetime. Whatever the result, there’s always the ironic answer to the question of whether we have free will: “Of course we do. We have no choice.”

Is life a dream?

via Psychology Today

One of the strange things about dreams is that, most of the time, we aren’t aware we’re dreaming. Typically, our memory and our reflective ability are substantially limited within dreams (Fosse et al. 2003; Hobson et al. 1998), causing us not to notice incongruencies within the dream and to take for granted that what we experience is real. It simply doesn’t occur to us to consider whether it might not be.

Perhaps even more strangely, even when we do on occasion become aware that we’re dreaming—and according to various surveys carried out around the world, anywhere from 26% to 92% of people have had at least one lucid dream (Stepansky et al. 1998; Erlacher et al. 2008; Palmer 1979; Yu 2008)—the “sensory” experiences of the dream can remain just as convincingly real. I remember in one of my own dreams realizing that it was a dream and then marveling at how solid and real the cell phone in my hand still felt.

The ability of the dream world to appear real has led many thinkers—philosopher René Descartes (1641) being the most prominent Western example—to wonder whether the world we experience while awake might itself be a dream. If the dream world feels just as real as the waking one (at least while we are in it), how can we know for sure that we’re not currently living in a dream—a dream from which we may one day wake up?

One way that philosophers have tried to dispel such worries is by appealing to differences between the dream world and the waking one. For instance, our waking world has a coherence that the dream world often lacks. (For an example of a coherence-based argument against the skeptical hypothesis, see Norman Malcolm (1959).) You may recall that, in the feature film Inception, the characters learn to recognize that they’re dreaming by asking themselves how they came to be in a certain situation, then realizing that they can’t remember, because the dream just dropped them there.

But does the coherence of our waking world guarantee that it’s real?

I believe the coherence of our waking world does give us evidence that it is not merely a figment of our imagination. Specifically, it gives us evidence that, when we are awake, something is causing our experience that is independent of the experience itself. For instance, the relative permanence of the objects and environments we experience in waking life would appear to be best explained by there being something real and enduring that our experiences are reflecting.

However, the relative permanence of the objects and environments we encounter in the waking world is no guarantee that the waking world is as real as it gets. After all, a high degree of permanence is also found in the worlds of video games, in which the “environments” and “objects” one interacts with are merely the creations of computer code. So, while perceived permanence does seem to point to there being something objective/enduring out there, the true nature of whatever is “out there” might resemble our experience of it as little as computer code resembles the images we see when we play a video game.

In fact, physics teaches us that the objects we experience as being solid are actually made up almost entirely of empty space. And the results of quantum mechanical experiments indicate that, under certain conditions, the building blocks of matter do not behave as discrete particles at all, but rather as waves of probability. If we nevertheless experience the world as full of enduring, solid objects, this is due to the usual way that our senses interact with it and to the way these interactions are represented in consciousness.

This means that there is, in fact, an important sense in which all of us do live constantly within a dream—that is, within a world created by our own minds. It’s just that, when we’re awake, our minds conform our dreaming to a reliable set of patterns, which we assume to be determined by a reality that exists independently of our experience of it, though we have no way of knowing that reality except through the complex ways in which it affects our “dream.”

But might there be an even deeper sense in which our waking life is a dream?

Just as we often wake from sleep to realize that what we were experiencing in the sleep state was not nearly as coherent and “real” as what we experience when awake, could there possibly come a day when we will emerge from the dream of waking reality to experience a world that is even more coherent and vividly real, a state in which we experience levels of knowledge, memory, and other cognitive function that vastly surpass those we experience in our current lives?

In fact, a rather startling number of people report having already had experiences like this. That is, they report having had experiences that appear to them as even more real than those they have in their normal, waking state of mind. For example, “realer than real” is a description often used by those who have had near-death experiences (Moody 1975; Thonnard et al. 2013; Palmieri et al. 2014), those who have used psychedelic drugs such as DMT (Strassman 2001), and those who, by various other means, have experienced non-ordinary states of consciousness.

Many near-death experiencers also report enhanced cognitive function and a sudden increase in knowledge (Owens et al. 1990; Greyson 2003). This perception of enhanced cognitive function and increased knowledge is often dismissed as an illusion by those who are unfamiliar with the scientific literature on near-death experiences, but careful investigation has shown that concrete, verifiable information has been obtained in these states that was not available to the experiencer by way of their five senses (Rivas et al. 2016).

The experience of those who have tasted non-ordinary states of consciousness raises the possibility that the age-old question of whether “life is but a dream” is more than the idle worry of a few philosophers comfortably ensconced in their armchairs by the fire. The answer to this question could very well have major empirical consequences, including startling implications for the types of experiences that are available to the human mind. We have every reason to stay alert to this possibility as we continue to investigate the true nature of the world that we take ourselves to be living in.

References

Descartes, R. (1641). Meditations on First Philosophy.

Erlacher, D., Schredl, M., Watanabe, T., Yamana, J., and Gantzert, F. (2008). The incidence of lucid dreaming within a Japanese university student sample. International Journal of Dream Research 1(2): 39–43.

Fosse, M. J., Fosse, R., Hobson, J. A., and Stickgold, R. J. (2003). Dreaming and episodic memory: a functional dissociation? Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 15(1): 1–9.

Remembering Sandy Hook

I will begin this article by stating forthrightly that I am a “conspiracy theorist” in the normative sense of the term. That is, I am someone who supposes that conspiratorial activity takes place between people of means and power in a way that is not a matter of public record. I contend that this is the default position of sanity and I assert that those who have a particular problem with the assertion I just made are what might be colloquially called “idiots”.

Taking my cue from 9/11 and the egregious violations of common sense that attended that event, I have come to see the “fourth estate” in North America as non-existent. In its place is, I contend, a sophisticated propaganda apparatus that supports the varied agendas of our plutocratic rulers, whose vested interest in endless war is furthered via the manifactured consent of the masses through strict narrative control.

I contend that most of the civilian mass shootings and killings in recent history in the Western democracies have been the result of a social engineering program(s) by various intelligence agencies in support of specific agendas. I have suspected this for a while. What really caught my attention was Sandy Hook, and it is that event which I wish to examine in detail in the remainder of this article. I realize it is past history, but in recent days there has been a disturbing sign that soon “conspiracy theorists” are going to be labeled as domestic terrorists just for entertaining such thoughts, so I thought I would lay out the case for Sandy Hook being fishy while it is still legal to do so.

Let me begin, then, by emphasizing that I don’t know what transpired at Sandy Hook. I wasn’t there, I wasn’t involved. What I do know is that the “official” narrative surrounding Sandy Hook as presented by various media sources was flawed and questionable. I am willing to have my mind changed about this, but to change my mind, someone would have to address the following points to my satisfaction. Much of the following text was borrowed from an article written by James Tracey which I can no longer find online.

1.> Details omitted. The New York Times, the “official historians” of the United States, concluded its final report on Sandy Hook with an article that did not include the names, ages, or gender of the alleged victims of the shooting. The only time in the history of crime reporting that such information has been omitted has been in the case of sex crimes.

2.> Twenty-eight people allegedly died: 27 children and adults, including Adam Lanza, at the school, and his mother, Nancy Lanza, in her home at 36 Yogananda Street, Newtown. However, there is no direct proof of their death: no photographic evidence or video footage was released to confirm the official story that these 28 persons actually died. In fact, no video surveillance footage shows anything — not even Adam shooting out the front plate-glass window or walking through the halls like Rambo, even though this is a school that had updated its security system at the start of the 2012–13 academic year.

Compounding the situation, the parents were not even allowed to view their children’s bodies to identify them. Instead, they were reportedly shown photographs of the deceased. This was done, according to the Medical Examiner, Wayne Carver, in order to “control the situation.” But what was there about the situation that required “control”? No parent of our acquaintance would have agreed to accept the death of a child without viewing the body. James Tracy has published a discussion of the medical examiner’s performance. According to Carver:

Uh, we did not bring the bodies and the families into contact. We took pictures of them, uhm, of their facial features. We have, uh, uh — it’s easier on the families when you do that. Un, there is, uh, a time and place for the up close and personal in the grieving process, but to accomplish this we thought it would be best to do it this way and, uh, you can sort of, uh … You can control a situation depending on the photographer, and I have very good photographers. Uh, but uh —

Remarkably, the state has done its best to avoid releasing the death certificates and even recordings of the 911 calls. Death certificates were eventually “released” but not to the public or those who might want to investigate the case further, where only a short, general summary was available. According to The New York Times, in relation to the 911 calls, “no children are identified by name, no callers indicate that they can see a child being shot, and the only injury described is that of an educator’s being shot in the foot.”

Moreover, the funerals were all “closed casket,” with one exception — that of Noah Pozner, which supposedly included a private viewing before the public ceremony.. As recounted in interviews with the families, the circumstances of their last encounters with their children (or with their caskets) are strange to say the least.

3.> There is no evidence of any frantic effort to save lives or to remove bodies to hospitals; instead the scene outside the school looked calm and largely bloodless — with police and other personnel milling around casually and a severe shortage of dead or injured victims.

In a Mass Casualty Incident (MCI) like Sandy Hook, the proper protocol is START triage (Simple Triage and Rapid Treatment) using tarps of different colors with the aim being to save lives and get the injured to the hospital for treatment. Not even the black tarps for the dead were used, much less the red ones for those who needed immediate treatment.

Sandy Hook Fire Chief Bill Halstead was ready to help the victims but could recall only two wounded people. A few survivors were reportedly taken to the hospital, but, oddly, these people were never interviewed. There were no first-hand accounts that proved anyone was killed or injured. Nonetheless, according to Lt. Vance, 18 children were pronounced dead at the scene, two children were removed to “an area hospital” and were pronounced dead at the hospital, and seven adults were pronounced dead at the scene, including the shooter (NBC).

No emergency vehicles were present at the school or even lined up in the fire lane for a rescue attempt — the parking lot was filled with parked cars, police cars and possibly media vehicles. Such rescue activity as occurred was centered, not on the school premises, but at the nearby Firehouse. Emergency vehicles at the Firehouse were jammed together impeding access to the school, in case anyone might have thought about attempting a rescue. The scene at the Firehouse was quite peculiar, with people milling around and circling through the building, walking out one door and into another.

4.> According to initial reports in the media, weapons used in the shooting included four handguns recovered at the scene, the only guns taken into the school (NBC). Then an AR-15 was said to have been found in the trunk of Lanza’s car (NBC). Then it was reported that Lanza may have carried only two handguns and that a rifle was also found in the school (NBC).

Wayne Carver, the Medical Examiner, said that all the victims were shot with the “long weapon.” Lt. Paul Vance then said that a Bushmaster AR-15 assault weapon with high capacity magazines was used “most of the time” and that Lanza was carrying “many high-capacity clips” for the weapon (Huffington Post).

In January 2013, Connecticut state police released a statement indicating that they had found four guns inside the school: a Bushmaster .223 caliber XM 15-E2S semi-automatic rifle with high capacity 30 round clips, a Glock 10-mm handgun and a Sig-Sauer P226 9mm handgun. They said they also found an Izhmash Canta-12 12-gauge shotgun in Lanza’s car (NBC).

Lt. Vance then asserted that Lanza had killed all his victims with the .223-caliber semi-automatic rifle (ctpost.com). Regarding the confusion, Vance told reporters, “It’s all these conspiracy theorists that are trying to mucky up the waters.” Perhaps “The Top Prize for Fantastical Reporting” goes to Fox News, however, which announced that a 12-gauge shotgun along with two magazines containing 70 rounds of Winchester 12-gauge shotgun rounds had been found in the glove compartment of Adam Lanza’s Honda Civic — that’s right, in the glove compartment.

5.> Adam Lanza can’t have carried out the shooting. Adam Lanza, reportedly a frail young man weighing 120 pounds with Asperger’s Syndrome, is said to have carried massive weaponry on his person when he shot his way into the Sandy Hook school and proceeded to kill 26 people and then himself. This after he supposedly killed his mother before driving to the school.

According to State’s Attorney Stephen Sedensky, Lanza killed his 26 victims with the Bushmaster .223-caliber rifle and then killed himself with his Glock 10-mm handgun. Lanza was also supposedly carrying three 30-round magazines for the Bushmaster as well as a Sig-Sauer 9 mm handgun (see above). The victims were shot multiple times each in a fusillade of bullets from these military-style weapons. In order to wreak this havoc, he fired more than 150 rounds, and he must have carried more rounds in addition. Lanza was reportedly found dead wearing a bulletproof vest and military-style clothing (AP).

As Mike Powers, a professional military investigator and ballistics expert, has observed, this young man of slight build could not have carried all these heavy, bulky weapons and ammunition on his person. Furthermore, since first responders were supposedly inside the school within seven minutes, there was not enough time for Lanza to have carried out the shooting as reported. In an interview with Joyce Riley, Powers states that Lanza could not have fired so many times continuously without destabilizing himself from the intense noise from the Bushmaster. As a novice, he could not have shot an AR-15 with such speed and accuracy, supposedly changing magazines 8–10 times without a stoppage.

According to Lt. Vance on the night of the shooting, one victim survived. So in less than seven minutes — or less than five minutes according to the media — Lanza killed 26 people and then himself, producing only one injured victim. This is a 96% kill ratio, which is unheard-of accuracy among the most experienced marksmen. Powers thinks the whole scenario is a physical impossibility. He is not even convinced that Adam Lanza was a real person. The story of the shooting should not be taken seriously.

The final travesty involves the weapons and other paraphernalia that were allegedly found in the Lanza house. The “arsenal” supposedly included guns, Samurai swords, knives, a bayonet and more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition, according to search warrants released. Other items of interest were ear and eye protection, binoculars, holsters, manuals, paper targets, a military-style uniform and Lanza’s NRA certificate (Fox). Lanza had reportedly compiled a spreadsheet 7 feet long and 4 feet wide in 9-point type detailing 500 victims of other mass murders (CBS). We are supposed to believe this, and, at the same time, that Adam Lanza was a shy, quiet kid who didn’t like noise and chaos, as promoted by the PBS Frontline Special,“Raising Adam Lanza.”

6.> A man dressed in black was seen fleeing into the woods from the site of the incident. Police chased him, apprehended him, and put him in handcuffs in the back of their squad car. Video of this is readily available on Youtube for the time being. Seem plausible to you that none of the news networks had any interest in covering this angle of the story?

7.> Key participants displayed bizarre behaviour. There are many bizarre media reports and interviews of those associated with the “shooting.” Some examples:

Wayne Carver — Medical Examiner Wayne Carver’s surreal press conference is one of the most startling of all the media offerings. Widely available on youtube, this event shows H. Wayne Carver II, a public official of some standing, clowning and acting outlandish — grinning strangely, making irrelevant comments, and basically appearing unknowledgeable and unprofessional.

Robbie Parker — Perhaps the most famous press conference is that of Robbie Parker, the alleged father of victim Emilie Parker, speaking on a CNN report of December 15, 2012. He chuckles as he walks up to the camera, then gets into character by hyperventilating, and finally feigns distress as he talks about his daughter — and about the fund set up to help raise money “for Emilie.”

The families — In addition to Robbie and Alissa Parker, other parents and family members take their turn in the spotlight, including (but not limited to) Mark and Jackie Barden, Jimmy Greene and Nelba Marquez-Greene, Ian and Nicole Hockley, Neil Heslin (alleged father of Jesse Lewis), Chris and Lynn McDonnell, Veronique Pozner, Carlee Soto, and David and Francine Wheeler. Anderson Cooper is the interviewer in two notable instances: his conversation with the McDonnells mentioned above, and an interview with Veronique Pozner, remarkable for its green-screen effects such as Anderson’s disappearing nose.

The school nurse — Numerous reports offer detailed and totally fictitious information, some of which was later abandoned in favor of more tenable versions. On the evening of December 14, a USA Today reporter said she had spoken with the school nurse, whom she had met on the street. The nurse told her that the gunman had come into her office, “they met eyes, she jumped under her desk,” and he walked out. The nurse said that the gunman was the son of the kindergarten teacher, who was known to her and “an absolutely loving person.” It later developed that Nancy Lanza had not been a kindergarten teacher at all, and that neither Nancy nor Adam had any connection to Sandy Hook school whatsoever.

Dawn Hochsprung — In an embarrassing fiction, The Newtown Bee reported on 14 December 2013 that Dawn Hochsprung, the Sandy Hook school principal, told the paper that a masked man had entered the school with a rifle and started shooting multiple shots — more than she could count — that went “on and on.” Of course, Dawn Hochsprung was allegedly killed by Adam Lanza and so could not easily have provided this statement. In fact, Dawn was said to have acted heroically, dying while lunging at the gunman — although one wonders who witnessed and reported this act of heroism. On 17 December 2013, The Bee retracted the report and apologized:

An early online report from the scene at the December 14 shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School quoted a woman who identified herself to our reporter as the principal of the school. The woman was not the school’s principal, Dawn Hochsprung, who was killed in the Friday morning attack. The quote was removed from subsequent online versions of the story, but the original story did remain in our online archive for three days before being deleted. We apologize for whatever confusion this may have caused our readers and for any pain or anguish it may have caused the Hochsprung family.

Now, let’s be clear. None of this is proof that “nobody died at Sandy Hook” or that “crisis actors” were involved in creating a dramatic spectacle. I am not a fan of trying to figure out what did actually happen in these cases, because theories can be tenuous and become low-hanging fruit for people to debunk or make straw men out of. All I know is what didn’t happen at Sandy Hook, and I know Adam Lanza didn’t single-handedly murder multiple children in the way we were led to believe. The evidence to say otherwise doesn’t exist.

I’m not sure any of this will matter to those who are determined to ignore it because of cognitive dissonance or whatever, but I thought it was worth the effort to preserve some of this information for those who in the coming days need to know the history of what appears to be an ongoing effort to engineer consent for an enhanced police state.

Two things stick in my mind about the Sandy Hook ordeal more than anything else. One was the photo of Adam Lanza that was circulated… his eyes vacant, his face expressionless, his cheeks hollow and sunken… due to a very very obvious photoshopping of his likeness. The other thing that sticks in my mind was Barack Obama breaking down in tears while discussing the event, and again four years later… a career politician, a hard-nosed pragmatist, bomber of 8 countries, surely no stranger to political theatre. One might well imagine his teleprompter at the time read: “weep here”. I don’t know much, but I know when someone is trying to manipulate my feelings and jerk me around. I’ve worked in sales enough to be that cynical.

I can only conclude that we’ve been conditioned to be duped and that we’re being not-so-subtly played by people even more cynical than I am. Perhaps it takes a cynic to see the handiwork of others, I donno. Anyways, from the looks of things, the other shoe is about to drop. Perhaps it’s best that it does… it seems like those who aren’t already awake to this kind of thing have made a choice to stay asleep. I’m not sure it’s my place to tell them that’s a bad idea.

 

Changing your mind about "Pizzagate"

I have been wondering for quite some time now about whether to try writing about this topic, how I would approach it, and what the repercussions might be for making the attempt. In recent days, having had some time to reflect on the topic and take some renewed interest in it, I guess I have decided that the best thing to do is just go for it, even though I am not gleefully anticipating the blowback I imagine I’ll take from friends and acquaintances.

The difficulty I’m having here is, I want to change your mind about something, but I don’t really think I can. As you might have noticed from your own forays into using the internet, changing people’s minds about things is notoriously difficult… and that sad situation is only getting worse. There are reasons for this… some of them have to do with basic human psychology, some of them have to do with the increasing deadening of our critical faculties by bombardment from questionable information sources, some of them have to do with our own intellectual laziness and willingness to go along with propaganda.

Of course, it has been noted that ‘literacy’ in the 21st century will be a word used to describe those whose opinions can remain fluid enough to change with new information. But that can and must be a gradual process. Drastic changes of opinion in a short period of time are extremely disorienting.

So with that out of the way, what I’d like to do is pitch a really absurd, far-out, wild-sounding idea that you’ve probably already encountered, and been so offended or short-circuited by that your brain just immediately went ‘nope, not having that’ and switched itself off, allowing you to get on with your life. It’s a shocking idea, a horrendous idea, a heartbreaking idea, and at first glance, a seemingly absurd idea so alien and repulsive that it feels ethically wrong to even contemplate it. And I don’t want you to believe me, or take me at my word. I’m asking you to empathize with me when I tell you the story of how and why I changed my mind.

You see, I am an average middle-aged Joe from Canada. Never married, no kids. I struggle with my weight and my mental health. I like science fiction and I like playing board games with my buddies and I like take-out food. I have been diagnosed with schizo affective disorder, and anyone who cares to do away with my opinions on that basis can doubtlessly do so easily. I’ve had a lot of trouble coming to terms with what I know and with what I think I can prove. It’s hard to keep a sunny perspective about the human species or its prospects sometimes. You see, I have come to be of the opinion that our civilization appears to be run, at the highest level from behind the scenes, by literal Satan-worshipping child molestors. And I sometimes wonder how to live in a world like that.

Yes, I know. Many of you think this is alt-right troll chatter from the bowels of neckbeard 4chan, and I’ve lost my mind, and there’s all sorts of reasons why it just can’t be so. I hear you. I mean, what can I say? I could start by saying I skew politically left-libertarian in terms of my ideology. I think it’s important to falsify the notion that this is a ‘right wing’ talking point. I could then point to examples of UK pop culture icons who were high-ranking Freemasons and friends of the Royal family who are documented to have worn robes, chanted Satanic prayers, and raped children, but what you want is proof. You want to hiss at me that I’m a kooky conspiracy theorist. You want to get on with your life and pretend this is just nonsense.

Well, I mean, I wish you were right. I really do. And man, I really feel for you, because there’s nothing I’d rather be doing right now than smoking a joint and playing a video game and saving the world from imagined alien menaces. I mean, I don’t have kids, so I have no actual personal investment in what kind of world this turns out to be in the long run, it might be argued. I guess I’m thinking about those of you who do have something to live for though. I mean, hypothetically, I guess, I have to say that I find myself wondering, if this kind of, well, let’s call it ‘evil’, is actually, factually, loose in the world, doesn’t our refusal to acknowledge it kind of, like, make us complicit?

I think pondering questions like the one I just posed will give you some indication of why so-called ‘conspiracy theorists’ are so invested in their hobby of trying to get people to think outside of their current abstractions.

Let’s talk, briefly, about that ‘conspiracy theorist’ thing. If you find the words ‘conspiracy theory’ coming to mind as you read this, you kind of need to be honest with yourself that that’s a knee-jerk reaction. Ask yourself this; are you using the term in the pejorative or normative sense? If it’s the pejorative, then please admit to yourself that it’s intellectually dishonest by definition to construct a criticism of another’s position that is founded on pejorative epithets. If you are using the term in the normative sense, intending to allege only that I am supposing that human beings occasionally can be observed to collude in their own best interests in ways which aren’t a matter of public record, then I am in agreement with you. You and I are both conspiracy theorists in the normative sense, and well we should be, for that is the default position of sanity. So now we are just arguing about how far along things have gone downhill.

My perspective on such things shifted gradually over the course of many years, having taken a steep turn into less-familiar territory around the time of 9/11 in 2001. I had always thought of governments as stupid and myopic, but I was initially slow to embrace the idea that the powers that be could be deliberately malevolent. I think many of us hide from facing the idea that things aren’t all on the up-and-up because it becomes an exercise in recognizing evil in oneself. But, for example, if we contemplate war and its nature for very long, it becomes fairly obvious that the people who profit from such activity are deeply unhealthy and malevolent. The question then becomes not “How could anybody think the world works this way?”, but rather, “How could anybody think otherwise?”

“Pizzagate” was a term given to a putatively debunked ‘conspiracy theory’ that a child molestation ring was being run out of a Washington, D.C. Pizza parlour. If you look it up on Wikipedia, you will find a detailed outline of the ‘facts’ surrounding this bizarre controversy and you will be soundly assured in no-nonsense language that it has all been thoroughly discredited by everyone, not least of which by that stalwart defender of reason and right-thinking snopes.com

I don’t believe it has been ‘debunked’ at all, and I am presenting forthwith the facts that changed my mind on the topic.

1.> Wikileaks published John Podesta’s emails. Some allege these publications were falsified. People who say so are ignoring the fact that John Podesta has admitted via Twitter that the emails are in fact his.

2.> The emails contain multiple examples of Podesta and his allies emailing each other strange gibberish involving what appear to be food-related codewords. Stuff like “Do you think I’ll do better playing dominos on cheese than on pasta?” Some folks think these code words relate to some clandestine activity, and some specifically allege they relate to pedophilia. One letter indicates Obama, for one function, spent 65,000 dollars of public funds to fly “hot dogs” in from Chicago.

3.> James Alefantis, a friend of Podesta’s, is mentioned multiple times in those emails. Alefantis runs an ostensibly family-friendly pizza joint in Washington named Comet Ping Pong. He is well-connected politically, considered (by GQ Magazine at least) a Washington power player for some reason, and is the former partner of David Brock (described by Time as “one of the most influential operatives in the Democratic party”) who runs the Democratic “media watchdog group” Media Matters.

4.> People visiting Alefantis’ public profile in Instagram for his restaurant found a great deal of disturbing imagery. You can easily see it for yourself with a cursory search engine lookup. Pictures of babies taped to tables with stacks of cash behind them. Kids wearing shirts emblazoned with the logo “Pizza Slut”. Comments by Alefantis and his employees, including “#hotard”, adorned the pictures. Alefantis’ instagram profile picture was (and still is) an image of Antinous, the greek boy sex slave of Emperor Hadrian from ancient legend. All of this is verifiable by using a search engine to look up images tagged “James Alefantis Instagram”. Though some have alleged that these images are fake and do not originate from his Instagram account, Alefantis has never denied the images’ authenticity, and in fact has confirmed their legitimacy on camera in an interview he did outside his restaurant with several picketing ‘conspiracy theorists’.

5.> Alefantis immediately reached out to the media for support against the defamation of his character by the crazy conspiracy theorists who took issue with the contents of his Instagram page. Major newspapers including the Washington Post ran articles defending Alefantis as the innocent victim of insane kooks run amok. None of the articles made an issue out of the contents of the Instagram account or of Alefantis’ connections with John Podesta. Nobody thought to say, “Gee, Mr. Alefantis, it seems like maybe your family friendly pizza restaurant shouldn’t have a child sex theme if you want people to not get the impression that you’re running a sex shop out if it.”

6.> Not a single newspaper, radio, or television show anywhere in the Western world had a reporter on staff apparently willing to look into the matter critically, by, say, spending 45 seconds doing a search engine lookup on Alefantis’ Instagram. With one exception. Ben Swann of CBS did a five-minute television news segment about Pizzagate where he mentioned this issue. Ben Swann had been an award-winning journalist with a history of doing slightly fringe newscasts. Within a week, his social media accounts were cancelled, and Swann was pulled off the air.

Excitable ‘conspiracy theorists’ are not always well known for their restraint, and some have badly overreached in their attempts to prove that there’s a secret dungeon underneath Comet Ping Pong or what not. This is a tenuous claim, and thus is low-hanging fruit for debunkers who want to sweep all this stuff under the rug and pretend it doesn’t exist. But the fact that tenuous claims have been advanced and falsified around the ‘pizzagate’ narrative should not serve as the straw man that allows one to dismiss the information provided in this article out of hand. The facts presented here are just that, and the only claim I am making is the one they seem to support: that these are weird, disturbing pictures for a politically connected businessman to have associated with his family-friendly pizza restaurant.

So, look. This is a deep rabbit hole. Ted Gunderson was a lauded and accomplished FBI agent who late in life made it a mission to spread the word about satanist child molesters operating through the alphabet agencies of the United States Government. The Jeff Ganon story during the W Bush years hinted at a massive behind-the-scenes sex trade. During the Reagan years a story broke about a White House sex ring… a story which quickly vanished.

I’ve already alluded to the Jimmy Savile case. Every so often a woman will go on a talk show and discuss her background as a victim of ritualistic sex abuse, and then never be heard from again. Usually any mention of “satan worship” brings the bible thumpers out of the woodwork, leaving most modern sophisticates to conclude that this is the delusion of fundie Christian nutbars, and pay it no further mind.

My contention is that the astute observer will have noticed that the persistence of this rumour, and the trail of verifiable cases which appear to have broken through to the surface world, hints at a terrifying truth, most significantly because the breadth and scope of it, were it to be true, should leave us with serious questions about how we could be so blind as to be letting this happen right in plain sight.

I can point to any number of examples in history when the nobility got carried away with satisfying debauched appetites. The French nobility comes to mind. Roman orgies come to mind. What makes anyone think human nature has changed that much? And should we suppose that the war profiteers who bomb other countries as part of their business model have healthy personal interests and appetites?

What I’m trying to do is point out that what may at first seem like an implausible idea is in fact entirely plausible. In all honesty, you shouldn’t need training in critical thinking to put two and two together based solely on the information I’ve just provided to you. When a guy is posting pedo images on social media and then yelling foul when he’s called out on it, you are really on the wrong side of history to be defending his virtue. And of course, Alefantis’ putative guilt in this matter isn’t by itself sufficient evidence of a worldwide conspiracy of evildoers. I want to be very clear on this. But we also need to consider that the deafening silence of the sockpuppet corporatist mainstream “media” sources on this very alarming issue most certainly is indicative of a cover-up of sorts on a large scale. These facts I have presented are, I want to reiterate, not obscure or hard to discern. Everything is right there in plain sight for any journalist worth his or her salt to bring to our attention. So why are major publications like The Washington Post instead intent on defending Alefantis’ honour? These are questions one should ponder at length.

If you just can’t get your head around it, well, ok. I couldn’t either for a long time. There are people who couldn’t come to terms with OJ Simpson being a murderer. They wanted x to be true, so could not be convinced that it wasn’t. Once I realized I was making the same mistake, I began to have second thoughts about this stuff.

The difference, really, is that in the former case, nobody’s affected by our silence or misinformed opinion. In this case, presumably, innocent children are suffering horribly partly because of our collective refusal to see the facts, admit to them, engage with them, and backtrack on our falsified narratives. That means that despite this being a horrible, ugly thing to contemplate, we are morally obligated, it seems to me, to contemplate it.

The good news is that a lot of people are aware that this is taking place, and are involving themselves in the fight to get the word out. I would encourage you to search your own soul, think hard about the issue, and see if there’s anything that you can do. We all want the world to be a better place. I’m not sure myself how to bring that vision to life… but if the world is, as it appears to be, being run by horribly corrupt soulless psychopaths who literally worship the mythological incarnation of evil, maybe getting them out of the way would be an important first step.

What do you think?