Radagast: A fata morgana in the desert of the real

Radagast: A fata morgana in the desert of the real

The nice thing about 9/11 is that it taught a lot of people never to trust anything their government is involved in ever again. The reward for that lifelong distrust you were immunized with came in 2021. Am I saying it’s an inside job? Before psychedelics I would say yes. Now I would say: 9/11 happened in your head. There’s no objective reality, it’s all in the eye of the beholder and you’re (un)lucky enough to have ended up in synch with mine.

And you might say I should watch some 2 hour documentary that proves who did it. But here’s the thing: They caught FSB agents in Russia with explosives in an apartment complex, yet you can’t PROVE that the FSB caused the Russian apartment complex bombings. And in a world where you can’t prove the FSB committed a terrorist attack, after the FSB agents were caught planting explosives in an apartment complex, what chance do you have to prove that Cheney and the PNAC gang had those planes fly into those buildings?? It’s a fool’s errand.

The point is: Physical matter doesn’t determine what happened. Rather, these are the constraints within which we, the conscious observers, have to maneuver. And from your angle it’s obvious what happened, but that can only ever tell us something about you. It’s a Rorschach test: It’s not designed to have a single correct answer.

It’s like the wave-particle duality. Is it a wave, is it a particle? It’s both as long as we don’t force the function to collapse through sufficiently careful observation. And events like 9/11 or the Russian apartment bombings are forever in that grey zone, where it looks like a particle, but it might just be a wave.

The sufficiently paranoid conspiracy theorist will point out that the attacks were FORESHADOWED! Look at Neo’s passport in the Matrix! It expires on 9/11!

Or look at that Lone Gunman episode, where the government flies a plane into the WTC to increase defense spending!

Or look at how the Simpsons predicted 9/11!

So what happens is you find yourself expanding your conspiratorial vision of the world. Apparently these people insist on giving you hints. As part of their Satanic religion, they must foreshadow what they’re going to do. And they are dedicated enough that a Lone gunman Episode is insufficient, the SImpsons have to be made complicit too.

But what I would argue, rather than calling you crazy, is that you haven’t expanded your paranoid view of the world enough yet. You’re looking for an agent here within this world. That’s the mistake. It’s something that designs this reality you experience, that’s toying with you. It’s pulling your legs, never quite giving you concrete proof of what’s going on, forever keeping you guessing, forever keeping you deeply suspicious, but unable to prove that something is not adding up. And when it decides to troll you through the Matrix out of all possible movies, it’s just laughing in your face.

You’re stuck with a society that expects you to believe a completely ridiculous story, about the mightiest nation in the world that has two of its skycrapers brought down by a guy in a cave in Afghanistan who decides a bunch of dudes have to hijack some airplanes and fly them into the buildings. Buildings that were bought by a guy a few weeks before, who then went on to sue his insurer to insist the two buildings being hit by airplanes constitute two separate terrorist attacks and thus entitle him to double the money. What actually happened on 9/11 appears more like a parody of a conspiracy, than as an actual conspiracy.

The Pentagon somehow announces the day before a couple of trillion dollars are unaccounted for. The people involved in the accounting are blown up the next day by an airplane strike into a section of the building that was recently reinforced.

The top dogs in government write a creepy document where they explain how they wish to build an American empire, for which they will need a “new pearl harbor” to pull the whole thing off. And they even go around, giving speeches where they warn about such a surprise event:

And simultaneously, at the end of the day you’re just unable to poke a sufficiently strong hole in this whole thing to deflate it, the kind of big hole that allows you to move on with your life. Your choice is: Either ignore it like all the normies do, or turn yourself into a social pariah by digging and digging and digging in an attempt to find that one silver bullet that allows you to finally put the whole thing to rest. But you won’t find it. It’s a rabbit hole, filled with quicksand at the bottom.

And the mistake you make, is that you play along in the game. You signed up to go on the fool’s journey. Like a young farmhand who has his colleagues ask him to get the strawberry ladder, they’re going to keep the game going as long as you’ll play along with it: “Where’s the strawberry ladder?” “Oh haha it was out there somewhere in the attic, see if you can get Joe to get it for you, ask him about it.”

Because the real game here, is metaphysical. You’re looking for something concrete, here in this world. Something you can grab and hold and show to someone else: “Look, this type of metal doesn’t create this kind of crystalic structures until 1200 degrees Fahrenheit, which JET FUEL CAN’T REACH!” And so you’re like the young farmhand looking for the strawberry ladder. As long as you play the game, your coworkers will help you out in search of the strawberry ladder.

The joke is that you won’t find it here in this world. I’ll never find that video again that proves Timothy McVeigh was still in the army months after he had supposedly quit, it was on Youtube, it was deleted and nobody bothered to back it up. You’ll never find that video that proves the controlled demolition beyond a doubt. And http://archive.org won’t have that news article you seek. But if you’re naive enough to play along, this world will happily keep you forever searching, searching for your very own strawberry ladder.

It’s a supernatural event. 9/11 happened in your brain and what really happened is in the sight of the beholder. There is no objective answer, because there is no objective reality. It’s all subjective. From time to time events happen, events where us mere mortals can’t agree on what took place.

What 9/11 is, is the desert of the real. When Slavoj Zizek wrote Welcome to the Desert of the Real, he was quoting Morpheus in the Matrix. And Morpheus, was referencing Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. A Simulacra, according to Baudrillard, is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none.

To Baudrillard, we live in a world of symbols, symbols which serve to obscure the fact that reality, insofar as it may even exist, is irrelevant to our lived day to day experience. So it is with 9/11. What actually happened on 9/11 is irrelevant, what matters for our lived experience is what it became as a symbol. And when you try to find out what really happened, when you try to replace their symbol with that of your own, first you will encounter a conspiracy, but as you dig deeper, you will merely encounter a void.

These events are like forks on the road. And as our boats split off into different directions on the river, we try to hold hands, we try to pull each other back towards our direction: “Look at this obscure Youtube video I found! This proves it beyond a doubt! Your fact-checkers have nothing to say about it!”

But again, it’s a fool’s errand: The boats will be pulled apart. The forks on the road exist for a reason. Maybe a consensus reality with 8 billion people is just hard to run, maybe it takes a lot of processing power.

You’re stuck in a ride in an amusement park. And what runs this amusement park is entirely indifferent to your suffering and confusion. It seems to find it hilarious that you continue to believe any of this is even real.

You could call this a metaphor if you want, about the nature of reality. But I would say: Just smoke it. Smoke the Salvia plant. The metaphor will manifest itself before your very own eyes. The clowns will appear and they will joke with you, they will mock you, you will see their whole circus, along with the device within which they put you through all of this insanity.

And when you do, when you return from the circus, you can forget for a moment about trying to prove what happened on 9/11. Two skyscrapers where 3000 people were immolated by their own government becomes among the least of your worries. You felt as if there is a joke that’s being played on you, but it’s much bigger than you held possible.