Conspiratorial Occasionalism
If Everything's a Psy-Op, Then Nothing Is
Personal Note: My writing will be far more sporadic over the coming months as I move to a new state and begin a new job as a math/science teacher for a classical high school that will take up far more of my time than my past few enterprises. (Shh… but I do have to review Euclid’s Elements at least once before I can teach it! How do we construct an octahedron again?) Please pray for me as I go to Austin, TX!
A lot of us have a pretty pessimistic view of reality: The CIA controls the world, the pedophiles control the Church, the Central Bankers control the economy, the billionaires control the real estate, Israel controls all of these, etc., etc.
For many of us, everything’s a psy-op,1 every politician an asset or a blackmailed Epstein stooge, and every “conservative” in politics or traditionalist in the Church is “controlled opposition.
But with such a worldview, such a “blackpilled” view of everything, past a certain point, there’s actually no reason to care or get involved in anything or to even bother trying to fix any problem.
No hope, no reward, no risk, no danger, and no dispute is real, all politics is theater, all is WWF kayfabe, and you’re just an agentless, impotent bystander to the show, unable to change the outcome, the program, or even, meaningfully, the channel of Plato’s cave-esque theater from one unreality to another.
Such a worldview is a type of conspiratorial occasionalism. Like the philosophical occasionalism, where God is the only true cause and all secondary causes, all apparent beings in the world aren’t actually affecting each other but are mere unfree puppets for a singular show put on by God for God’s benefit, the conspiratorial occasionalism many of us unwittingly subscribe to has a singular cabal running everything.
Like in the philosophical version, where fire merely appears to be heating a pot but God in fact is merely making it appear that the water in the pot is heated by the fire but is actually causing it Himself, in our conspiratorial version of reality no country’s reactions to events, no political program, no murder, no love, no company, no war, no idea, no nothing is real. All is a show.
Unlike the philosophical theory, however, the conspiratorial version has an all powerful but all evil cabal as its omnipotent center. Occasionalism makes philosophy and theology meaningless as if everything’s fake, nothing signifies anything, and there is no ground reality, no ground truth to understand God’s motivations.
Similarly, the conspiratorial occasionalism many of us all fall into would end the very act of hunting down conspiracies, trying to understand the world in general, trying to change the outcome of anything, and even, really, caring about anything.
Pascal’s Wager for the Truther
And maybe it’s true. Maybe the Rothschilds, the Vatican Bank, and Mossad really do control literally everything and have controlled everything since the dawn of human history.2
But something in me, perhaps merely my human desire for order and belief that there is a ground truth buried somewhere beneath the propaganda and political theater, wants to believe otherwise. Something is real. No group of humans, no matter how devious and deceitful, is all powerful. History means something.
And so, in a version of Pascal’s Wager, as I must credit Mark Bisone for the inspiration), it at least doesn’t hurt to act as if the “deep state” goons aren’t omnipotent. It doesn’t hurt you, in the final analysis, to live as if history and politics are at least somewhat real. At the very least, if everything’s a psy-op, then nothing is, as the psy-ops themselves, if we ever understood them, would be theater for some higher level psy-op, which is itself a psy-op covering up something else, and so on. If everything’s fake, then nothing is, as there’s no base reality to compare it to, no truth in fact relative to which to make psy-ops “fake.”
Doing something is at the very least a lot better than stewing in a paralytic, angry, depression railing against the Jesuits, Jews, or Jacobins as the sole cause of all the evil in the world.
The Wizard of Oz Psy-Op of Pretended Omnipotence
But I say more. I think, in fact, the greatest psy-op of the puppet masters is the trick that they’ve played on their greatest enemies, of the “based” and “trad” right, those who’ve woken up to the dark realities of manipulation within our reality.
As I replied to
’s great recent podcast on the psy-ops he’s fell for in his life, many of us don't want their psy-ops to work, but we're terrorized into thinking the various deep state networks are one single all-powerful Demiurge with an irresistible evil plan.The deep state plans work most of the time because this was their greatest psy-op ever, making us think they are all powerful. The conspiratorial occasionalism that follows leads us to disbelieve that there are any real causes besides the deep state, that they are in control of literally everything, and because on some level we believe it, we never coordinate enough to make an effective resistance.
But, again, I don't believe they're all powerful. I don't believe Israel or AIPAC or Mossad or the KGB or the CIA or Klaus Schwab actually control that much other than being very good at tricking us with "magical feats" from time to time that reinforce our belief in their power. It's much easier for these groups and the intelligence agencies in particular to fake competency and scare us all into submission to their supposed almighty power than to actually exert the level of control they appear to have.
Perhaps these agencies, cabals, and networks, like the man behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz are actually very very weak but very good at putting on flashy fake performances that trick us into thinking otherwise.
It would explain to me why “they” (at least the CIA, but probably others) get themselves so involved in the film industry and cultural products more generally. Most of their effort is put into fakery and not into reality. I’m not saying the Moon landings were fake… but it certainly would have been a lot cheaper and easier to fake them!3
The insinuations of the US Army psychological warfare crew in this now infamous video seem aimed at making us think they literally control everything. And that’s probably the real reason they released it:
Fake shows and pretend competence frighten and terrorize opponents into compliance—and wow other cabals into alliance or submission. AI video makes the process even easier, with cultural moments generated out of whole cloth from the “Ghost of Kiev” to fake bombing footage in the recent Israel-Iran War serving propagandistic purposes for one organization or another without real life military exploits, skills, and equipment needing to catch up to the synthetic theater of online reality.
And AI video, perhaps, will only make it all worse, even as it enables all of us to become our own propagandists rather than just a few:
But darkly, however, it’s almost as if the conspiratorial occasionalist, under the psy-op of thinking the dark powers are omnipotent, winds up worshipping the very objects of his hatred. Nick Fuentes and his Groyper clan,4 for instance, probably wind up spending more of their time thinking about Jews than most Jews themselves do, and libertarian truthers ascribe more power to the central bankers than they probably ascribe to themselves.
There’s No Singular Deep State
So what sort of a deep state is there? Not a singular all powerful network, not even one or two, but in fact dozens, hundreds, of powerful organizations with disparate goals and disparate alliances, changing sometimes aligning closer and sometimes edging towards conflict.
The best model I’ve yet come across for “how the world actually works” comes by way of Mike Benz, a former U.S. Department of State official who’s spent the last several years exposing the financial networks of the U.S government such as the now-well-exposed U.S.A.I.D. Now, one of the evil networks of the axes of evil in the minds of conspiracists and truthers is The Soros Foundation.
For, Benz, the foundation, from the perspective of the U.S. government, is like a foreign ally. They influence the U.S. but they also serve the U.S. government's interests. I think the relationship between MI6, Mossad, CIA, Soros, the WEF, Freemasonry, Central Bankers etc., all of these so called organs of the deep state, is like that. All of them relate to each other as "government" to "government" but these power structures are all "networks" of influence in competition with each other.
Yes, it just seems sometimes like the CIA serves corporations and is sometimes above but sometimes below other mobs/drug cartels. And all of them can be influenced by the bankers, but not completely (as the CIA, could, for instance, smuggle drugs/money in ways not controlled by them (gold/Bitcoin)).
Intelligence agencies, like the CIA/MI6/Mossad are near the top of this anarchic pile of squabbling cabals, as is the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) but none of them are "THE top." They squabble but they're also aligned with each other on issues where they all mutually benefit. The CIA is an independent power base from the US government, but sometimes it works with the U.S., for example.
There is no single "banker conspiracy" or "CIA conspiracy" or "Mossad conspiracy" etc. but tons of people using the power they have to advance their interests. There isn't one single deep state, but 15-20 different influence networks competing for dominance over the plebians. JFK, for instance, was not taken out SOLELY by the CIA. He had angered just about everyone (mob, Mossad, CIA, Lyndon Johnson, etc.) and they all had a part in his murder.5
Carroll Quigley in his books Tragedy and Hope" and The Anglo American Establishment gives a great overview of how the British establishment and the U.S. establishment have colluded against the better interests of Americans and the British, for one, but neither are the two establishments all one and the same, nor totally unified within themselves. The intelligence agencies themselves sometimes get taken over or influenced by others, as
for instance, thinks happened during the Cold War, where the CIA "turned" the Soviet Union but the KGB simultaneously turned the U.S. establishment.In such a synthetic view of the situation I’m not adopting the normie view that events just happen and all our institutions work as they officially should and events in history went the way history books officially describe them. Neither, however, do I adopt the view of conspiratorial occasionalism. Rather, we live in a semi-feudal system, as Neoliberal Feudalism describes on his site, where differing networks, organizations, companies, and cabals all have influence on events and often throw up theatrical distractions, psy-ops, and, in general “ops” to guide events, but no one has full control.
You have hope, don’t fall to the despair and paralysis that your actions, your life, and politics have no meaning.6 Cabals will try to corrupt and influence good things that do happen in history, yes, but that’s no excuse for doing nothing. It’s just fallen human nature (and demonic temptation) in action, and we should actually expect that cabals and conspiracies of evil can’t sustain themselves forever without stumbling. Even if the deep state controls 99% of history, a version of Pascal’s Wager tells us that we can’t be hurt for trying to affect it. The future won’t be perfect, but it’s no excuse not to try to make it better!
The deep state isn’t all powerful, but they love the people who tell you that! In fact, these deep state networks love it when you spend all your time trying to puzzle out their agenda, how they’re behind everything, and how impossible it is for you to resist. Whenever you spend time thinking like that, you’re not resisting them, but darkly worshipping them as the evil Demiurge they aren’t. This applies even to the devil. His greatest psy-op is his only one, making us believe he has power over us. When we fall for it, we give him power.
And, really, unless we’re pretending that it’s all theater, like literally all theater, can someone tell the deep state that they need more believable psy-ops? Like literally, the Biden Presidency Inc., COVID Emergency Eternal, and Iran War Extravaganza shows were so on the nose! Couldn’t they come up with better plotlines? If anyone’s in touch with the director of the conspiracies, please connect me to them, so that I can send them my resume!
Psychological operation: An attempt at influencing our minds, wills, and choices by some sort of advanced trickery, either through media narrative, faked news events, or the like.
For people who supposedly control the world, they certainly seem to lose out a lot over the course of history and be very foolish on average:
I won’t even get into the “nukes are fake” argument right now, but there is some interesting stuff there, even if it is really, really out there!
See David Talbot’s The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government.
And yes, you do have free will, though maybe not to the full extent we sometimes think we do:
Excellent. Have fun in Austin. Godspeed 🙏
Gods, big G and small g's, do not care about belief--thats not significant. They desire reverence. That reverence springs from trusting they are who they say they are, whether in terror or in affection.
And so, to give reverence in meditation of the awful power of the gods (small g) of the world is far more than they deserve. It also removes reverence from the Author of Hope, who's will will be accomplished regardless of the turmoil in earthly things.