Sometimes there's no avoiding a hot take
I’m not much of a hot-takes guy. I don’t want to give you the impression that I don’t have outrageous and immediate strong opinions, but in my experience hot takes tend to be too closely tied up with confirmation bias. They can be just a fancy way of saying, “I told you so.”
This morning, though, there was a trending story about the CIA that I want to unpack a little bit. In case you missed it, the agency issued a report that “Havana Syndrome” isn’t the result of foreign ray guns. And on the outside chance that you missed the “Havana Syndrome” conversation, the shortest version is that spies and diplomats have claimed for decades to have unexplained symptoms after trips abroad. It was first described (according to Wikipedia) in 2017. NOTE: The Wikipedia article appears to have been curated by someone sympathetic to the ray-gun premise.
There was just too much in this for me to not throw in my two cents worth. As it turns out, 2017 also is the year attributed to the birth of QAnon, which was the subject of this week’s podcast (please consider subscribing) so it was too much on my mind to let it pass.
I’m not surprised by the report. I’m only marginally less surprised that the Twitter conversation included an awful lot of “Of course that’s what they would say,” commentary. My favorite one was this:
A Faraday Cage is a real thing, but it also was the template for Wilhelm Reich’s Orgone Accumulator, which features significantly in my book. When I wake up to news about orgone AND a conspiracy from 2017, I’ve at least got to get some observations off my chest.
First off, I don’t think the victims are liars, dupes, or idiots. I believe they have the symptoms they claim to have, but the entire Havana Syndrome story feels a lot like high-tech ghost hunting.
I want to come right out and say that I don’t believe in “ghosts,” and am only barely even agnostic about the notion of spiritual energy (I’ll elaborate on that in a future post).
Not too long ago, I accidentally hurt a friend’s feelings by saying that believing in ghosts was intellectually lazy. I still believe that, but I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings by putting it that way. I want to reiterate that I don’t think people who believe in ghosts are intellectually lazy. It’s just an intellectually lazy belief. There’s a difference.
I know that ghost-hunting and similar practices are communal and fun. I also know there are people who have had meaningful, life-changing experiences they’ve attributed to ghosts. I don’t want to disrespect that, but I also don’t want to just let it pass unexamined.
So, as an act of good faith, I’ll share my own ghost experience.
Living in a haunted house
For a solid two years, my family was plagued by a ghost that would open one of the doors in my basement that led into the crawlspace. The doors are inside at ground level, meaning they’re about four or five feet up the basement wall. All of the doors have barrel locks, the inexpensive deadbolts that latch.
The door at the far right corner of the basement opened on its own. A lot. So much so that there was a period when I was convinced that someone might be living down there. Eventually, I leaned a ladder up against the door and put a pot on top of it, so that if someone opened it the pot would fall, setting off a general alarm that we had an intruder.
The phenomenon stopped. When I removed the ladder after a few months, the haunting resumed. Then, I was up writing very late one evening when I felt the house shake as a late-night train passed. I had always liked to make the joke from the Blues Brothers saying that the trains passed by my house so often you didn’t even notice it. But it turned out to be true.
During the day, the trains shook the house as much as they did at night, but it was way less noticeable. In the quiet of the overnight, it felt as if the house might come down. From there it wasn’t a long leap to the realization that the lock was loose and days and days of shaking undid the lock in the basement allowing the door to swing open. The idea of the ghost had been exorcised and replaced by a more simple notion: Once you decide you have a ghost, you stop looking for alternate explanations.
What if there are no ghosts?
Not to be too heavy-handed, but what if we approached the supernatural from the perspective that there is no such thing. What if, “There’s no other explanation, it must be a ghost” was banned as a line of inquiry.
I guess that the people who do the best ghost-hunting take this approach, working tirelessly to disprove hauntings with the vague hope that one day they will fail or be struck with irrefutable evidence.
Conspiracy theories aren’t much different, except that conspiracies for a fact exist. The trick, I think, is to eliminate all of the other possible explanations until you’re forced to conclude that it can be no other way. But I know that’s not how we tend to behave, me especially, which is why I avoid hot takes.
We have gone through so much trouble to learn everything we know. Our lives and personal actions are weird, loose packages of everything we believe. It isn’t just easier but also makes the most sense to incorporate new information into what we already know.
We can’t just tear down our entire knowledge database and belief system before we try to understand a new piece of information or a new experience. I mean, how would that even work?
The best riddles are the ones that have an obvious wrong approach to the correct solution, one that is so distracting that it makes it hard to think of the right answer. This one is among my favorites:
You are given 8 identical looking balls. One of them is heavier than the rest of the 7 (all the others weigh exactly the same). You a provided with a simple mechanical balance and you are restricted to only 2 uses. Find the heavier ball.
(The answer and phrasing are here but don’t look).
At the bottom of everything, I think life is like trying to solve a really well-written riddle. We’re often drawn to the obvious (but wrong) way of understanding phenomena to the point where we can’t let it go. It reduces us to saying, “Well, how would you explain it?” when people express skepticism.
The Havana Syndrome story seems a lot like that. We know there are evil forces working against us, and we know they are capable of outrageous behavior and willing to engage in it. We can’t lock down a reason people are feeling sick, therefore it must be hostile foreign intervention with a weapon of indeterminable origin.
What I feel like the CIA is saying is that it may be lots of things, but it definitely isn’t that. Whether we believe them has much more to do with the way we process all the rest of the information in our lives than whether or not it is true. As I’ve written (and spoken about) before, being right is so much more important to many of us than knowing the truth is.
Keep the Faith,
Tony
Personal Update
I finally have finished recording the audio version of Dragged Into the Light. I’m mastering it right now and hopefully will have more news about it in the next month or so. I’m considering doing a chapter-by-chapter audio commentary and making it available as part of a larger package.
I complained to my wife last week that I hadn’t done any writing, including skipping last week’s newsletter. What I meant, of course, was that I didn’t do any unpaid writing. I actually had a pretty busy covering local issues.
I was able to write a bunch of stories about zoning, which I maintain is the most important, least sexy writing a local reporter can do. The short version is the same 12 people who inherited land from their second-son great, great, great... grandfathers are still pissed about having to follow rules made to protect the people who got here after 1650.
I was also on the “One More Thing Before You Go,” podcast talking about how to navigate spiritual beliefs in the face of charlatanism. It was a blast if you’d like to take a listen.