So, the crazies, I mean the very nice people who follow Q and Proud and whatever, have they:
a) always been here, just variations of the same throughout human history
b) what R's been talking about for years now, chaos resulting from Crash Space
Well, I don't think these are separate though. Yes, A has always been the case (because humans are still just humans) but B is sort of the case, because the environment (read: cognitive ecology in Bakker terms) is different now, more apt to exploit the fact of A ever more so.
Crash Space, from how I (mis)understand it is the psychological blow back of scientific discovery stressing religion. As more lose faith, it can lead to a trauma and to nihilism. The possibility of life having no meaning will trip us up and many may go crazy, doubling down on religious identity to the point of violent absurdity, failures of institutions and the like.
Well, yes, in a sense, but also not quite, since the "collapse" doesn't necessarily predict a "return" to something like religious faith. The same result can come of overly secularized, Logo-centric thinking as well. Take Bakker's summary:
We’re conscripting heuristic systems adapted to shallow cognitive ecologies to solve questions involving the impact of information they evolved to ignore. We can no more resolve our intuitions regarding these issues than we can stop Necker Cubes from spoofing visual cognition.
‘crash space,’ a circumstance where ecological variance causes the systematic breakdown of some heuristic cognitive system.
So, the crash space is where the cognitive "tools" we have been "given" through evolution, simply fail to be good enough to deal with all the stressors, factors, pressures, and gaming that we can now put on our heuristic cognitive apparatuses. In other words, our thinking
isn't immediate, or un-mediated, it is very much heuristic, meaning that we don't utilize anything like "reason" or "rationality" directly and our thinking is often just an approximation based on some "shortcuts" we have at-hand. So, that means if we can game those heuristics, by preying on what information can slip past, or intentionally trigger the heuristic warning bells, we can game people's reactions and so game their behaviors.
So, what is going on? We have the technology to exploit your supposition A and the result is actually something like supposition C, it's rather chaotic seeming. However, because that exploitation is not just random, or scatter-shot, it is directed and so it is out to benefit those who would use it, so it ultimately isn't all that chaotic. That's not some sort of shadowy conspiratorial thinking though, I don't think, because there is nothing shadowy about it, the exploitation is out in the open. Vested interests have vested interests and are well out working on their behalf.
