There is No Spoon - Paranoid Fears or Fact?

 

Following on from the ideas of dystopian living come the panics about conspiracy and deceit. How much do we control the world in which we live? As a species we are inquisitive, but often this makes us distrustful. Many visions of science fiction prey upon this, representing not only the future but the present as deceitful and unreliable. The suggestion that all might not be as it seems is a disturbingly regular occurrence, from the subjugated human species in The Matrix, to the endless conspiracies of The X-Files.

 

Explorations of the subconscious have usually been cast in Freudian terms, the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious mind. Our unconscious is curiously collective - we all believe in the same sort of dragons (or do we?), if we see ghosts they are often wear white sheets and cause the temperature to fall, and most of the aliens who abduct us in the late twentieth century are of the “small grey” variety (why didn’t X‑Files try for a bit of originality here?).In the same way, our beliefs about conspiracies appear very uniform - Is this inherent to our humanity (the Jungian view) or have cultural icons become so pervasive that we cannot get them out of our subconscious?

 

Main Texts:

The X-Files

The Matrix (A/S office)

We Can Remember it for you Wholesale (handout)

Total Recall (A/S office)

 

Discussion Questions:

 

• Do you want to believe? To what extent are you willing to follow ideas of conspiracy and concealment? Do you think situations like those in The Matrix and We Can Remember it for you Wholesale could happen, or do you consider them too far-fetched? What about The X-Files, which gives a more recognisable series of deceptions?

 

• Plots such as The Matrix, The X-Files and Total Recall revolve around dead ends and inversions: the idea that the truth “might not be” what we think it is. How far can this idea be taken (think about all three plots)? Is there a point at which the author should stop twisting the tale?

 

Essay Questions:

 

• Does the X-Files, with it’s repeated false endings and conspiracy over conspiracy, help or hinder your beliefs?
• Is Quant merely dreaming of wish-fulfilment? What about the ending?
• Is Conspiracy Theory an entirely Millennial preoccupation?
• Which is better, the Matrix or the reality?

 

 

 

Quotes:

 

“The question is why do people want and need to believe all this. The more we know and understand about the natural world, the more people flock to the supernatural. The more we know about astronomy, the more people rush to astrology. As we roll back the frontiers of medicine and cure ever more diseases, more people plunge into homeopathy, reflexology, and a host of other non‑scientific treatments, although I’ve seen little evidence of their healing power.”

 

“But we do need to participate in the rational thought processes that science springs from. It makes no sense to live in an intellectual world constructed by reason, when our beliefs are stuck in the Middle Ages.”

 

Polly Toynbee, Radio Times, 1996

 

“Everybody likes to think that one more piece will complete the jigsaw, that, one day, it will all fall into place. And for young adolescents it seems the most obvious truth. They do feel there is a secret - sex - being withheld from them by a conspiracy of adults. Mulder’s aliens and psi-forces are early-teen metaphors for unimaginable delights and intimacies. But any idle browser of Freud could say as much, and there is more, much more to be said about the X-Files and dozens of other contemporary phenomena. New age mysticism, alternative medicine, dabbling in horoscopes and necromancy, the American-led pursuit of authenticity and self-realisation, the naturalistic spiritualities arising from environmentalism, even the fierce desire of Prince Charles to defend some transcendent truth are all symptoms of the pressing contemporary need to find something more in the world than the glib finalities of mainstream science”

 

Brian Appleyard, Sunday Times, 13 October 1996

 

 

“There is no a priori reason for thinking that, when we discover the truth, it will prove interesting”

 

C.I. Lewis, American philosopher.

 

“How do we account for the current paranormal vogue in the popular media? Perhaps it has something to do with the millennium - in which case it’s depressing to realise that the millennium is still three years away. Less portentously, it may be an attempt to cash in on the success of the X‑Files. This is fiction, and therefore defensible as pure entertainment.

 

A fair defence you might think. But soap operas, cop series and the like are justly criticised if, week after week, the ram home the same prejudice or bias. Each week the X-Files poses a mystery and offers two rival kinds of explanation, the rational theory and the paranormal theory. And, week after week, the rational explanation loses. But it is only fiction, a bit of fun, why get so hot under the collar?

 

Imagine a crime series in which, every week there is a white suspect and a black suspect. And every week, lo and behold, the black one turns out to have done it. Unpardonable, of course. And my point is that you could not defend it by saying: “But it’s only fiction, only entertainment”.

 

Let’s not go back to a dark age of superstition and unreason, a world in which every time you lose your keys you suspect poltergeists, demons or alien abduction. There is certainly nothing impossible about alien abduction in UFOs. One day it might happen. But it should be kept as an explanation of last resort.”

(Richard Dawkins, Dimbleby lecture, November 1996).