PowerSwitch

Dmitry Orlov wrote:Here, reality becomes fractured into parallel universes as soon as we make the realization that we are being lied to. Were there weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? No, and the vial of white powder which Colin Powell menacingly held up at the UN was fake. The Iraqi mobile biological weapons factories did not exist. Was Al Qaeda active in Iraq prior to the US invasion? No, we know that it wasn't. These lies are now known to be factual—uncontested, commonplace knowledge. Next: do we make the arbitrary leap of judgment and declare that that's all the lies we will have ever been told, or do we admit the possibility that this is only the tip of an iceberg of lies, that lying is a modus operandi for the operatives behind them? If we do, then, to be conservative, for every official narrative we must construct one or more unofficial but also plausible (and perhaps much more plausible) narratives. Each of them constitutes a parallel universe, and we can't know which of them we inhabit until some happy accident—a leak, an investigation, a damning bit of physical evidence, or an outright admission of complicity or guilt—collapses the probability waveform, destroying all the parallel universes but the real one.

If we do, then, to be conservative, for every official narrative we must construct one or more unofficial but also plausible (and perhaps much more plausible) narratives. Each of them constitutes a parallel universe, and we can't know which of them we inhabit until some happy accident—a leak, an investigation, a damning bit of physical evidence, or an outright admission of complicity or guilt—collapses the probability waveform, destroying all the parallel universes but the real one.