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Comment by Mistletoe | Hacker News Reader

My only question is was this slide orchestrated or is it the natural tendency of humanity to slip back to ignorance when all their needs are met, like the Eloi in The Time Machine? Someone made lots of money from this slide, I just don't know if it was random chance or a scheme that worked.

This quote has always stuck with me and I think about it often, perhaps one of the main quotes that have steered my life.

“The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory. The truth is far more frightening - Nobody is in control. The world is rudderless.”

― Alan Moore

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The answer is more often than not alternative c) all of the above.

Development may be a random walk, but there are plenty of people with interest in a certain outcome, and when they get the opportunity they will take it and try escalate the process. That's true in most things.

I also tend to believe that it is not a coincidence that so many societies right now flirt with authoritarianism, for example. We influence each other, even more so now that information is global and electronic.

Is the quote actually true or just something the author made up? Alan Moore appears to be a fiction writer.

Alan Moore is a deeply philosophical person who does a lot of research in general, and as part of his writing process. Here's the source for the quote,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgSbaKpCjq4

However to fully put this into context you also need to understand that Alan Moore is an occultist, so he views both power and chaos (in the social context as well as the metaphysical context) through that lens.

https://www.reddit.com/r/occult/comments/1iv2eic/alan_moore_...

It just makes me think he is a lunatic. I don't think the same person can be deeply philosophical and an occultist at the same time. I recently adopted a practice of reading the author's wikipedia page before reading the book, to make sure the author is an actual expert in the field, and not just a clown.

Oh dear, you should learn more about philosophy.

Plato was deeply esoteric — as were the Pythagoreans for that matter. The history of philosophy is rather enchanted, as it were.

See Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Ficino, Agrippa, Newton…

Say what you will about Moore (though he's the author of Watchmen, widely considered not only the greatest graphic novel of all time and a biting indictment of the entertainment industry and the military industrial complex... no small feat)

But -- I'm an occultist and a philosophical person, so I can tell you from first hand experience that occultism and philosophy are inextricably bound. Any pursuit of metaphysics is occult in nature. Occult simply means "hidden"; it is the domain of those things which can not be perceived directly, but have to be reasoned or intuited out via the mind.

Maybe I am misunderstanding what you mean by metaphysics and occultism? Do you believe in mysticism, casting spells summoning creatures from other realms, etc? Or some other kind of occultism? It is my best understanding that Alan Moore is into this stuff.

My own views on these things have no bearing on the definitions of those words. Occultism is an extremely broad catch-all umbrella of domains of knowledge that all share in the essential trait of having to do with something that is normally hidden from us. The set of all things which lie outside of the realm of our direct apprehension.

Metaphysics, in that sense, is a subset of the Occult. Metaphysics itself is an extremely broad field, dealing with things like ontology, mathematics, physics, onieriology, cosmology, and so on.

One need not identify as an occultist to study a field which would fall under the label of the occult. Many things are occult and people do not realize it. Psychology, by virtue of the fact that our own psyches are largely hidden from our purview, is widely accepted as an asepct of the Occult, for example.

As for my own beliefs, I do not consider them beliefs, as once you know something to be true, does it make sense to still consider it an article of faith?

There is such a thing as a gnostic.

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