The Death of Scooby Doo Nation and the Rise of Seahaven
(In this post I talk about the creation of simulated realities as a means of social control, and how a kind of “Scooby Doo” ethos can keep that in check. Later on I’ll get to a metric for understanding risks that you’ve almost certainly never heard of, but will immediately want everyone to use. I don’t want to give too much away here, but there will be a talk of Icelandic monsters, decibels, Potemkin villages, kayfabe, Khabib, plane crashes, and a taxonomy of conspiracy theories.)
Let’s start with one of my assumptions. I take it as a given that you are red pilled, or beyond: You understand that official narratives aren’t designed to illuminate, but to hide the true nature of the world around you. If you wanted to measure the power our institutions have to keep us in the dark, you could look at the size of the divide they are able to create between public perception, and the facts on the ground. Or you might evaluate how easily they can derange our focus, for example getting us to to obsess over a rude customer, while they’re busy sneaking expensive merchandise out of the back of the store.
The extent to which institutions succeed in misleading you about the nature of your world, is the extent to which you live in a simulated universe. There are actually two similar, but distinct, endpoints for total control, though one can be embedded within the other.
Before I get to those, though, I want to introduce the idea of categorizing conspiracy theories. The foundational text for this is Jesse Walker's 2013 book “The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Reader” (I interviewed him in 2020 for my podcast). Walker has a five point taxonomy of conspiracy theories, and please note that the examples I’ll use to describe these aren’t meant as me passing judgement on their validity, or lack thereof. I can’t stress enough that the label “conspiracy theory”, as I use it, is to be taken completely at face value: it’s a belief in coordinated and secretive (or hidden) actions. Nothing more, nothing less.
The first Jesse Walker category of conspiracy theories is the enemy above — think the Rockefellers or the Trilateral Commission meeting in secret to decide our collective fate. Category two, the enemy below, is the unwashed masses conspiring to overthrow the system. The external threat is Russia subverting our democracy and installing their puppet ruler. The internal threat is all those regular looking people around you who might actually belong to dangerous cults like Q-anon. Category five, the benevolent conspiracy, is the idea that aliens keep watch over our nuclear arsenal to help us avoid total war (and yes, that’s a real theory). Q-anon itself is the benevolent conspiracy that secret forces in the government are trying to expose and purge evildoers from the system.
I like Walker’s taxonomy, but I think he's missing two interrelated types of conspiracy theories. Both of these posit that we live in a synthetic, or constructed, reality of some kind, and both are possible endpoints of total control, as I alluded to above. These two categories are the simulation hypothesis and the Truman Show conspiracy. The simulation hypothesis is “The Matrix” universe, where we exist in a digitally constructed space of zeros and ones, or some kind of wet-ware simulation created by programmers.
I’ll note, because this will come into play soon, that if the simulation hypothesis is correct, then the programmers, or The Architect character in “The Matrix” (show above), will seem to us a lot like God, or at least a god. Also note that religion itself is a kind of ultimate “enemy above” conspiracy, though theology is often mixed with elements from the benevolent conspiracy — God loves you and is willing to sacrifice for your soul. But also, don’t cross Him or He will burn your city to the ground and condemn you to an eternity of hellfire!
The Truman conspiracy is a synthetic reality, but it’s constructed out of “real” reality, not zeros and ones. For those who don’t know, “The Truman Show” was a movie in which the main character is an orphaned newborn, who is adopted by a company that creates a reality TV show around his life. Everywhere he goes is on set, and everyone he interacts with is an actor, but this fact is hidden from Truman, until he begins to figure it out. The god figure in the Truman Show is the beret-wearing sociopath Christof, brilliantly played by Ed Harris with just the right level of creepiness.
It turns out this conspiracy theory, that you are living in some version of the Truman Show, is fairly common among the paranoid, which makes sense as it isn’t far removed from the idea that a powerful cabal is monitoring you, and trying to control your behavior. Once you’ve added a large dash of voyeurism to “secret agents are tracking my every move and hiding the truth from me”, you basically have the Truman conspiracy.
“The Truman Show” movie itself is about how this conspiracy begins to unravel, but it’s mostly about how it’s constructed. Until he breaks out of the literal shell they have built around him, Truman’s world is a simulacra, and his actions are taken in reaction to what look like real people in an actual town, but in fact everyone is an actor and all the buildings are paper-thin facades that hide, not reality, but the reality that there is nothing backing them. Truman’s world is a simulacra in the direct Baudrillardian sense: “Seahaven” isn’t a a Potemkin village, it’s not shiny white veneers that cover up stained and rotting teeth. Seahaven is a veneer laid on top of nothing. It has elements modelled after small town life, but ultimately it references only itself. The simulacra is the artifact, and for Truman, this veneer is reality.
The Christof in all of us
If we live in a computer simulation of the Desist kind — where some programmer set the odds for all kinds of things, either explicitly or implicitly, then went away — then the best we can do as humans is try and figure out what those odds are, as a guide to living in alignment with reality. But if we live in the Truman Show, or in a simulation that’s more like the Matrix, then our world is curated in an ongoing way to keep us in the dark. In the Matrix movie, this is done by upgrading the Matrix. In the Truman Show, Truman is conditioned to fear a boat ride that would bring him to Seahaven’s fake horizon. When Truman finally overcomes his fears and takes to the water, Christof makes those waters artificially dangerous with a fake storm. Truman’s actual reality is bent to conform with the fake perception they want him to have.
Chances are, your parents did the same thing, and you might be too.
Before I get to that, though, note that the phenomenon of creating fake perceptions to mold behavior exists throughout the animal kingdom as well. Many bugs that look poisonous aren’t. Moths are patterned to look like snakes. And of course camouflage is so common as to seem unremarkable, but it’s worth remarking that camouflage is the creation of a fake reality that hides the truth of an animal’s existence. In some sense, it’s a simulated reality.
Humans, though, are the masters of this kind of reality manipulation. It’s so much a part of our reality that you were likely introduced to it as a toddler.
Did you believe in Santa Claus when you grew up? If so, you were the victim of a psy-op to get you to believe in the benevolent conspiracy theory that good kids (and only good kids!) get a yearly delivery of gifts created by a cabal of north pole based creatures.
This approach to encouraging compliance among the young is widespread across human cultures, and often takes a much less benevolent form. Shown below is Grýla, an Icelandic monster who eats bad kids. That'll get you to eat your vegetables, no?
Returning to the topic of benevolent conspiracies theories we tell our young, how else could you describe the personification of a bill working its way through congress in the pre-pubescent targeted propaganda of Schoolhouse Rock?
Setting aside the anthropomorphism, which even young kids will understand as symbolic, the idealized path of this “patient and courageous” bill is so far removed from reality that it makes even the most wild-eyed conspiracy theories seem well-grounded by comparison.
Scooby Doo Nation
To continue with the idea that humans construct false realities for each other, and not just when we are children, I should note that much of the work of a powerful political regime consists in creating these false realities. I already mentioned the Potemkin villages of Soviet Russia.
One of the things that drives the creation of these false realities, or in the extreme case of the Truman Shows, or completely synthetic realities, is the establishment of what some call The System, or The Cathedral (a term coined by Curtis Yarvin, also a guest on my podcast). To explain what those terms mean, let’s start with an explanation of what the roles of the various branches of government, as well as the political parties and journalistic outlets, are supposed to be.
In a free and open society, these are competing institutions which guard our liberty, and promote truth, justice, and the American Way. The modern answer to the Zen koan and eternal question, “Who watches the watchman”, is all the other watchmen. As somewhat of an aside, this is the way cryptocurrency works as well, to the extent that it does. Everybody watches everybody.
We know that people act badly. We know those in power will always attempt to create real, or figurative, Potemkin villages to hide their failures. They will lie, they will cheat, they will steal, and they will try and tell you it was all done for your benefit. The role of all the other institutions is to help keep them in check.
So if president says, “I’m not a crook,” you have a free press to investigate if he’s lying. Expose the scandal. Reveal the reality.
The US, ideally, works as a kind of Scooby Doo Nation. We accept that bad people will always be with us, and that those bad people will do bad things and try and hide them with subterfuge (though, disappointingly, very few of these real world schemes involve people pretending to be ghosts).
The Scooby Doo Nation ideal requires two conditions:
You can’t have a System or Cathedral, where powerful institutions all work together towards shared goals.
People have to recognize reality when it spits them in the face, and they have to care.
Condition 1 should be clear. I’ll discuss it a bit more later. To understand condition 2, let’s compare a couple sports: the mixed martial arts world of UFC fighting, and the “professional wrestling” world of Hulk Hogan and The Undertaker.
UFC fighting is a real sport, an athletic competition with specific rules and norms. If you, an MMA fan, learn that the outcome of a fight was predetermined, you would reject this outcome. You have a vested interest in fairness, and recognizing underlying reality. This is true even if you have a favorite fighter! For the UFC world to hold value as a league for meritocratic fighting, even the people who support Khabib need to be outraged if they learn he only won because his opponent took a dive.
That’s not how professional wrestling works. In this context, we understand, either implicitly or explicitly, that everything is fake, but either we don’t care or we actively enjoy the fiction known as kayfabe. If your seven-year-old is shocked at how biased a ref seems to be, you might not want to spoil the illusion for him. As an adult, you might be upset that a ref lets the bad guy get away with an “illegal” move, but you’ll be upset because you’re invested in the characters and the stories, not because you’re offended that the purity of the sport has been violated.
We now live in a world where our elites view politics entirely as kayfabe with real consequences, where the important thing isn’t a fair game, but that the outcome achieved is the one desired. And the most important outcome is that all us Trumans out there never figure out how to escape Seahaven.
My second favorite quote by musician and Dada master Frank Zappa is this one:
The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.
In 2016 Trump pulled off what might be the greatest political upset of American history, defeating the Clinton dynasty to win the presidency on his very first run for office. Unlike in Truman’s world, the one we inhabit has choices. We’re not forced to drink the beer that sponsors our show — we can choose Bud, Miller, or any of the tasty offerings by Cigar City Brewing, a favorite down here in the Keys (though, sadly, not a sponsor of The Filter). When it comes to politics, American’s have a choice as well. They can pick Bob Dole or Bill Clinton, John McCain or Barak Obama. They can have any politician they want, so long as it’s someone who agrees with the bipartisan consensus on foreign policy and respects the fine folks who run our administrative state.
When Trump won his unexpected victory, it was no longer profitable to continue the illusion of actual democratic choice. The people were sailing towards the fake horizon with its emergency exit. It was time for Christof to generate the mother of all storms.
If we didn’t have a System, we wouldn’t have the functional equivalent of a Christof. We’d have competing ideologies and narratives, each supported by its own powerful institutions. Conservatives would be more than just “progressives driving the speed limit,” as author Michael Malice is fond of calling them. These competing camps would keep each other in check, and not just debate whether to spent $7.2 or $8.3 trillion this year on all our essential wars and subsidies.
The end of shame
I’ve used this analogy over and over, and I do think some on the Right are finally beginning to get it, but thinking of journalists as (merely biased) refs of a normal basketball game is the wrong analogy. The corporate press is like the refs at a Harlem Globetrotters game.
In Scooby Doo Nation, the refs would be ashamed if a video replay showed they clearly made the wrong call. But in our world, making the wrong call, so long as it reinforces the establishment narrative, is part of the job. This is why you see regime-friendly outlets leaving up absurdly wrong stories, like the one about gunshot victims who were denied emergency care because Oklahoma hospitals were overwhelmed by people OD’ing on “horse dewormer”. That story was accompanied by an even more absurd photo of non-bleeding people in winter jackets in early September.
Just this past week, Tampa Bay’s NBC News hack Evan Donovan posted a video of Governor Ron DeSantis rebuking him for dishonestly portraying a bill in the Florida legislature. An honest but biased ref would be ashamed to share this takedown, but for Donavan it was a virtue signal: he was willing to make the right call for The System, even if it meant getting blasted for making the wrong call in terms of honestly representing reality.
For Scooby Doo Nation to work, it has to be backed up by cultures and politics that used to be viewed as core to the American ideal — intense curiosity, institutional transparency, free speech and open debate, fair trials with punishments proportionate only to the crimes (blind justice), dispassionate analysis beating out witch hunts and moral panics (a topic Jesse Walker discusses often in his book about conspiracy theories). Scooby Doo Nation doesn't depend on reason never sleeping, or on an absence of monsters; it depends on enough powerful people actually caring when bad guys do bad things, and not just when they’re done by political opponents.
Which brings us back to the Trump era. Even after the Russia collusion hoax unraveled and everyone could see that our intelligence agencies had spied on his administration and tried to take him down, not a single Democrat politician of note was upset by this, and very few Republicans. What about all those press outlets that flooded the zone with years of misleading coverage? They shrugged, blamed Trump for acting suspiciously, and moved on. Even the chosen fall guy for what could be the biggest scandal in American history, the man who fabricated a key document to get a FISA warrant, he avoided jail time. As always, The System takes care of its own.
The missing piece you didn't know was missing
In understanding how we ended up in a society that looks ever more like the Truman Show, and ever less like Scooby Doo Nation, there’s one more missing piece, and I’m going to predict with 99.9% certainty that even you, my well read, red-pilled audience, haven’t given any thought to it.
One of the biggest challenges to seeing our world as it really is, and reacting reasonably, is that our way of viewing probability is completely non-intuitive anywhere outside of a core sweet spot.
I want you to think about how you think about risk, or chance. You probably measure these things with a percentage, like what’s the chance of rain on Monday? Right now Weather.com says it’s 20% in this part of the Florida Keys.
Percentages work fine for things in the middle of the spectrum. Most free throw percentages are in the 60% to 80% range. If you toss throw a perfect coin it’s 50/50 whether you get heads or tails. A good baseball player might get a hit 30% of the time, which is confusingly expressed as having a batting average of 300, but nonetheless we don’t have much trouble conceptualizing the idea that a good batter gets on base about a third of the time.
At the fringes, though, we are awful at understanding percentages, because percentages are the wrong way to express these extremes. For example, your chance of getting into a fatal crash on a commercial flight is 0.000005%. What does that mean? As a percentage, almost nothing.
The right way to understand probabilities, for values well outside the sweet spot of about 5% to 95%, is to use something called log odds. These are expressed in units called decibels, which share some similarities with our scale for measuring noises. I won't go deep into the mathy details behind these, but if you like that kind of thing, I highly recommend this short PDF.
I will go through some examples, so you can understand how log odds work, and — hopefully! — why they are so much better than percentages for rare events. But let’s start with the midpoint, the chance that fair coin lands on heads. That measures a zero on our scale, or 0db, to be precise. Outcomes with a less than a 50% chance of occurring are represented by negative numbers, ones with a greater than 50% chance land in positive territory. With me so far?
Now let's move away from the middle. Each additional 10db is another 10-fold increase in chance. A 10db event is about 90% certain to happen. A 20db event is 99% likely to happen. A 30db event? You go it! 99.9% likely.
Are you seeing how nice this scale can be, especially for extreme events? The chance you'll survive that commercial flight is 70db. Since log odds are symmetric, that means dying is a -70db risk. Very small! But so too is the chance you’ll die on a cross-country drive. By my calculations, that’s about 0.00002%, which is hard to compare to the flight risk percentage, until you turn it into -63db. So, significantly more risky than flying, but not absurdly so, and both risks are clearly very small. Also, if you’re a highly competent driver, maybe driving is safer than flying, at least in terms of the risk of a fatal crash.
The flying versus driving example is worthwhile, but to really see why log-odds should be our go-to metric, let’s apply them to a subject that until recently was the only thing anyone could talk about. Hang on to your hat, we're climbing back down into the catacombs of Covid data.
Remember early on, when everyone was losing their minds about the disease, and some people tried to calm things down by talking about how the survivability rate was “99 point whatever”, and this convinced absolutely nobody to calm down? That’s because whatever came after the point, people had no real way to conceptualize or contextualize that risk.
Here’s what those risks look like when explained in log odds:
For an 80 year old male, the overall chance of kicking the bucket in any given year is about the same as losing a round of Russian roulette, or -7db. If he get Covid, his chances of dying with it are about -10db. He should probably stay as clear as he reasonably can of the disease, though he might not want to isolate from family for too long — little Timmy’s ’rona breath is still less likely to kill him than life itself.
To put these risks in perspective, if you happen to be a man in his late 40’s, as I am, on any given day your overall chance of dying is -45dB. Low, but just living is much riskier than flying, as you’ll recall a -70dB risk. Maybe if you are in really good shape, your all-cause mortality risk at my age is about ten times less, or -55dB. Still, that’s way higher than flying.
As near as I can tell, the risk of dying from a Covid infection (OG strain) for a man of my age was about -35db. Bad, but that’s before adjusting for good health, or any changes I might make to my lifestyle to improve my odds. And speaking of my lifestyle, there’s a sobering -16db chance it will come to an end this year regardless of any Covid infection. That’s about ten times less than the octogenarian playing Russian roulette with his life each year, but even getting middle-aged is dangerous business!
Remember all those bang-your-head-against-the-wall discussions you had in 2020 about Covid and risk? Now imagine you are talking with someone who is able to understand extreme probabilities with the same ease as free-throw percentages. How worried should one be about the disease? Russian roulette is -7db, Covid infection for me is -35db, while life itself this year is -16db, or almost 100 times more dangerous than the disease by itself.
And now imagine that every suggested Covid intervention came with a demand for risk analysis in terms of decibels (to be fair, this demand would likely have been ignored without the other 2 requirements for Scooby Doo Nation). Exactly how much are we reducing risk by shutting down businesses, and what evidence do we have for that number? That healthy schoolgirl with a -60db risk of dying from Covid, how much does her number improve by forced masking or Zoom classes? And how does that -60db risk compare to other risks she faces? Spoiler alert: childhood leukaemia is about a -50db risk per year for death, or ten times higher.
Trying to reason about these kinds of risks in the current way, using percentages, is like trying to do long division with Roman numerals. Yes, it’s possible, but if a normal person finds long division hard enough with decimals, imagine how unrealistic it is to expect them to do it with strings of letters.
A postscript on ethics
One final thought to chew over, as we drift ever farther from Scooby Doo Nation, and ever closer to Seahaven. How do you evaluate the ethics of Truman’s behavior, within the context of his intentionally clipped wings? What are his moral obligations, once he’s pulled back the curtain and seen the solid wall that he’d been told was an exit to the outside world? If a group of pedestrians occupies the only road out and, like the band in Don McLean’s “American Pie”, refuses to yield, can Truman run them down? What if there’s some other Seahaven inhabitant who’s unaware of the wall, but has internalized the vital importance of staying in town. If that guy tries to prevent Truman from leaving, can Truman kill him?
I don't have an answer to that, and The Filter is about analysis, not ethics, so I'll punt in the lamest possible way, and give the final word to Morpheus’s perfect description of the problem:
The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.
Where you go from there, in terms of ethical action, that’s a choice I leave to you.