Obviously, as organic, frail beings thrown into time, we quickly learn to protect ourselves from possible future dangers by focusing on them rather than on the unthreatening, the predictable, the familiar and the understood. Ignoring the familiar, predictable, harmless and unthreatening is efficient. Except when it leads us astray.
It leads us astray when, focusing on dangers, anomalies, the unexplained, we begin to suspect everything non normal is dangerous and forget that most of life is predictable and harmless. This is a kind of probability mistake, ignoring Bayesian reasoning. The base rate of events in life is harmlessness. The likelihood of any event being a danger is low unless you're in the midst of a war. The asymmetry of focus -- that we save energy by ignoring the harmless 99% of life -- inclines us to distrust, as we focus on every possible danger. You could call it the predictive mind's Frequency Sieve that retains nothing but the rare heavy nuggets, most of which don't even contain anything of worth.
I'm thinking of two possible types that might be most susceptible to this oblivion: those who spend too much attention on such dangers like conspiracies -- government conspiracies or corporate marketing conspiracies and the like -- and those who understand little of engineering or science or how anything works including societies, politics, economies. To predict harm, we develop theories about the unfamiliar; the less we understand, the more we can impose our biases and fears on the world. I imagine both these types would be inclined to distrustful theories, the one because those theories seem fully justified by their experience or reading or media consumption, the other because they have no alternative approach to understand unfamiliar events for which they have no explanation.
A friend says that "chem trails" will kill us because they want to thin the herd. Lacking any explanation for the trails, he accepts the one he's heard, without asking which chemicals and exactly how they work, and without wondering why the hearsay doesn't include any such detail, which would surely have been included if the story was a reliable leak -- and if it wasn't a leak, well, where does this story come from? Ah yes, from someone who saw trails, didn't know what they were and imagined they were devised by a nefarious conspiracy. (Of all the possible explanations, conspiracy is the meme that's most likely to spread, since playing on fears of uncertainty, misinformation spreads faster than truth.)
I point out that they also guarantee him every day with electricity, indoor plumbing, heat in winter, roads, public transit -- the 99% of life that we all depend on. That they depend on the herd's constant purchasing: no wealth without a broad base -- the broadest base possible -- of consumers somewhere in the pyramid scheme. Far from thinning the herd, what they most want are more of consumers. Look at Zuck, buying yet another platform having run out of customers on the last. They even get their government to distribute funds so you can consume all the way to your grave. And all that insidious surveillance we all complain about is designed to get you to consume yet more. He's right that it's all a conspiracy of the wealthy, but it's not to corral us all into prisons and death traps, but to corral us into Amazon Prime.
I call this forgetfulness of the normal 99% of life "the Oblivious Obvious" (OO, pronounced with Ominous background music, the OOO music). It is so plainly obvious and familiar that it can be actually hard to find. It doesn't stick out. You take it for granted. It's just not on anyone's radar and you don't know where and how to look for it 'cause it's everywhere.
The media, of course, don't help. As a market, they reflect the interests of its audience. That's mostly lots of anomalies, dangers, threats. If it bleeds, it ledes. Covid was a festival of fear in the media, new symptoms every day along with mortality rates, co-morbidities, ways of dying, causes of contagion, renegades who refuse to protect you and grandma and who will kill us all. Before covid, when I'd read about a disease in Wikipedia, half way through the page already I'd be thinking, do I have this disease? and way before the end of the page I'd already concluded I have only 6 months left to live and had better prepare a will and testament, planning for a world without me. Imagine that dread 365x for two years. It's no wonder our informational flat earth turned upside down and shook and tossed everyone into two camps of torch and pitchfork judgmental haters.
And social media is no better. Disputes and controversies are of course debates about what's wrong with society. Where things are going well, dispute is academic -- "why is it working so well?" is a scientific question for the scholars. What's gone wrong? is everyone's personal concern, and your opinion tags your social identity.
So much for the Frequency Sieve.
9-11 presents a distinctive case of oblivion. It reveals something more about how and why and when we fail to observe the obvious. It's a kind of Bias Bait for oblivion. Let's take a look.
There are several factoids that are taken as evidence for a government conspiracy: the owner of the building clearly had prior intelligence of the event, Building 7 collapsed without being hit by a plane, same building also contained government documents; a UK news caster announced the fall of the the second collapse. Each of these are alone suspicious, and that there are many suspicions increases the likelihood of a false flag conspiracy.
There are other factoids as well, but I just want to point out the role of the oblivious obvious in these, especially Building 7's collapse because it is so glaringly illogical. To be honest, I don't know or care whether the event was staged, my sole interest here is to point out the absurdity of these cases of the oblivious obvious.
The premise of the conspiracy is that the planes were an elaborate decoy to deceive the public into thinking that terrorists destroyed the buildings not an internal demolition. The fact that no plane hit 7 obviously contradicts the premise. That should be the end of the story, obviously.
In case you don't see the obvious logic here, imagine you're a conspirator. Let's start at the beginning. You can't just internally demolish the towers for the all too simple reason that the public would be outraged that the buildings were internally demolished. So you've got to come up with a way to hide your demolition plan. This is the 9-11 conspiracy theory. You coordinate an elaborate conspiracy plot involving terrorists, planes with passengers, secrecy, a script for the news; for some reason you tell the owner, maybe because you need him to install the thermite, or maybe he is the one who came up with this conspiracy in the first place. On the day of, your planes hit the towers. The towers fall as planned so that the public is given every evidence that the terrorists in the planes did it and the internal demolition is hidden. It's a foolproof plan: terrorists target a global icon of American wealth and influence.
And then, after all that careful planning and elaborate coordination, and above all secrecy, you internally demolish Building 7 because, of course, no one will notice that there was no plane. Of course, you think, no one will notice that the building falls without a plane. Why would anyone think it was an internal demolition? And, of course, the public will believe that Building 7 was demolished by ... invisible terrorists? No matter, a building collapsing by itself happens all the time. Why, we could have internally demolished the other two buildings and the public wouldn't have noticed at all. That's why we coordinated that conspiracy. Because ...
You get the glaring incoherence. If there were conspirators, the last thing they'd let happen is a building collapsing apparently by itself. Internally demolishing it would give away to the public all their cards -- showing that the whole event was an inside job. In other words, far from being the central evidence evidence of a conspiracy, Building 7 collapsing is the strongest evidence against the internal demolition theory. It couldn't have been internally demolished because it wasn't hit. It literally and directly contradicts the entire premise of the conspiracy which is that the planes were there solely to deceive the public into believing the terrorists did it, not conspirators. And btw, 7 was an unknown even in NYC much less a global icon. What kind of nutty conspiracy is this?
Bu, bu, bu, bu, but the conspirators wanted to destroy the government documents contained in 7. S orry, that doesn't help your case. The building burned for seven hours. If you are trying to hide the internal demolition of the Twin Towers, and you want to destroy documents in 7, all you do is let it fry until it burns to a crisp and everything in it is ashes. When the smoke clears, bring the insurance investigators, watch them declare the building irreparable and call for a wrecking ball, a straight forward, conventional public demolition no questions asked from the public.
Alternatively, instead of tearing down three giant buildings, put the documents in the shredder at your leisure, no need for thermite installation.
Let's just follow this a bit. If logic -- contradicting a premise is the essence of illogicality -- tells us that it couldn't have been internally demolished, what destroyed it? The only explanation is the fire. Now, many engineers claim that fire couldn't cause such a collapse, but those buildings were unlike any others I've ever seen. If you'd ever been there you couldn't help noticing the extreme lack of supporting structure. They were built like egg shells. The only way to know for sure how they could be destroyed is by empirically observing buildings exactly like them being destroyed. But where oh where are you going to find such empirical observation?
Yes. Building 7. : ) You know by the logic above that 7 fell because of the fire -- any supposed conspirators wouldn't publicly demolish the building internally for all to see. And you also know how it fell -- exactly what such a building would look like falling and how fast. And 7 fell just like the other two. So not only does 7 provide the strongest argument against the internal demolition theory, it shows us exactly how and why the other buildings fell. Building 7 is not The Great Puzzle that points to internal demolition, it's the clear and obvious answer to all the questions about how and why the buildings fell as they did.
What is obvious about it? Because the internal demolition conspiracy theory premise is "the planes were decoys to hide the internal demolition" -- that the internal demolition was licensed as it were by the employment of the decoy planes, so it should logically be obvious that a building not hit by a plane woudn't have been internally demolished by conspirators trying to hide their conspiracy.
Why is this obvious entailment of the theorists' own premise ignored? Two likely reasons: one, the theorist stubbornly believes the fire can't have demolished the building, so the theorist already concluded what was to be proved and is just looking for an explanation for the fall of the building other than fire; and two, motivated reasoning: the theorist wants to believe that 7 fell by internal demolition. The theorist has, in the case of two, simply stopped thinking. The theorist has his conclusion, all that's wanted is the desired explanation. This is what I call "thinking stops there" (TST, hat tip to Kahneman's WYSIATI). "I found my explanation, I don't ask further questions even if they are obvious ones". TST is truly human, all too human. Thinking is the gift of humanity, and that gift includes not using it when convenient. We are the non thinking species. Privilege!
Bu bu bu but Silverstein knew in advance. Well, of course. He bought the building after it had already been bombed once, so he knew it was a target. No doubt he had some lacky amanuensis who called the FBI and CIA every morning at 6 am and every evening at 6 pm to find the latest intel.
Bu bu bu but he didn't tell anyone. Of course not. Think. Suppose he told all his giant corporate tenants, "don't come to work today". And suppose nothing happens -- after all, intel is not perfect. The terrorists or the government conspirators might change their mind at the last moment, especially if they see no one is coming to work. Silverstein would be sued by them all for every cent of lost work. And even if they didn't sue him or he won on the grounds that the "CIA told me", suppose this happens again -- don't come to work, and then no event -- he'd have no more corporate tenants at all. Silverstein is not stupid. He followed the intel and kept it wisely to himself. What else would you expect? He's a landlord. He's in business, high stakes business.
Bu bu bu but the government knew in advance. Why didn't they stop it? Surely you've thought about this every time a mass shooter turns out to have been providing evidence prior to his murder spree. Why didn't the anyone take that manifesto seriously? Why didn't the principal call the police after the student expressed frustration and anger? And surely you came to the conclusion, as all free American citizens would, that the government should arrest everyone who has written a manifesto or expressed frustration and anger before they have committed any crime, before any crime has even happened. Yes, that's the America you want, a government that arrests citizens before they commit crimes, when no crime has been committed yet at all. Sounds like stop and frisk to me, which you-all approved heartily, no? Guilty until proven innocent. Guilty even when nothing happened. That's the America that you complain about because it merely surveilles you. You complain vigorously about that even though there's no evidence that the government does anything with that surveillance and you willingly give your data to corporations that surveille you to sell you the movies it thinks you will enjoy. Please folks get your priorities straight. How can you complain about harmless surveillance and yet expect law enforcement to intervene in your affairs when you haven't done anything yet and nothing has even happened yet? This is the oblivion of one's own contradictions generated by motivated reasoning: if government does something, it must be dangerous and if it doesn't do it, that's dangerous too.
Bu bu bu but, what about the news script. Yes, when planes fly into globally renowned structures, the news aren't going to report it when it collapses. The government has to compromise its secrecy by giving a script to news media across the globe, otherwise, you know, the media might forget to report it.
Bu bu bu...
Now, there are two objections to all this. It could be that the conspirators demolished 7 without a plane in order to demonstrate that a mere fire could destroy such a building. I've never heard that risposte, so 9-11 Truthers can't take credit for observing the obvious and are stuck with their oblivious assumptions, but in any case, demolishing another building doesn't add any additional support to the fire-theory demolition of the Twin Towers, since the Twin Towers fell from fire and their falling is supposed to show that such towers can fall from fire.
The second objection has more weight. The conspirators wanted to demolish 7 but the terrorism decoy wouldn't work since 7 was not a global icon. But if it caught fire, it would have to collapse because the fire-theory says that such structures will fall from a fire. So the conspirators would have to demolish it internally, assuming that fire is insufficient for the task. Such a plan would have to have anticipated the objection to the fire-theory. But it doesn't actually answer that objection. In fact, the objection is still common among 9-11 truthers.
So a false flag? To invade Afghanistan? If it were a false flag, the government would surely have identified Agfhanis among the terrorists. But there were none. Or maybe the false flag was to initiate a war on terrorism generally, not just Afganistan. But the government identified seven Saudis and an Egyptian. No Iranians, no Libyans, no one from Hezbollah, no Iraqi, no one even from US enemies, no North Korean, no Russian. That's gotta be a very confused false flag. In the Gulf of Tonkin, the US accused the Vietnamese of firing at US ships. LBJ then escalated the war against the Vietnamese. That's a false flag. Colin Powell presented (phony) evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and so Bush invaded Iraq. Seven Saudis and an Egyptian. If the admin wants a Saudi in there, okay, include one like including one Egyptian for whatever reason. But at least one Afghani and an Iraqi for sure, and an Iranian and a Libya, just to cover our bases for the future.
Was the government hoping for a terrorist event to justify the Patriot Act? I wouldn't be surprised, but the Patriot Act hasn't had much of an effect. The government has always surveilled us, so it seems unlikely to me that the government would bother with a catastrophic event that led to expensive consequences like an unnecessary and ultimately failed war in Afghanistan just for the sake of this paltry, albeit repugnant, legal overreach of government.
Back in the late 80's, I had a conversation with an Irish friend about how much the US is hated across the globe. We agreed that it was just a matter of time before the US would be hit by some foreign terrorist attack, and that it would be big. So 9-11 was no surprise to me. I was impressed with its simple means, and the scale of its effectiveness.
From my point of view then, why would the government coordinate a complex, secret event when so many foreign agents are willing to do it for them and spare them the secrecy and complexity? That's why when it happened it didn't occur to me that the government would be involved.
So there's the theory that the event was orchestrated to distract the public from the Secretary of Defense's press briefing that mentioned the $2.3 trillion that the Pentagon has no account of. It assumes that Pentagon and its chief aren't on the same page, which is possible, considering that the so-called deep state is non partisan, an institution always protecting itself and its prominent members. But it also assumes that the Pentagon had suicide terrorists on call to act. Since they bought their tickets in advance, the Pentagon must have known in advance weeks before that Rumsfeld would not only give a speech the day prior, but also that the content would include the mention of the 2.3 trillion. This all implies a close collaboration with suicide terrorists, a Pentagon infiltrator organizing them. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed supposedly was the day-by-day coordinator, but who knows, he's stuck in Guantanamo.
Did the government expect the collapsing of the World Trade Center and the many deaths? I kinda doubt it, but it seems possible to me, even likely and normal, that the government took a laissez faire approach to it: "Will their plot succeed? Will it be huge and devastating? Not our problem." If it succeeds, no need to speculate on its size, we'll all hear about it post hoc. That's efficiency.
I don't know for sure what happened on 9-11, it could all be propaganda including the seemingly endless, forlorn white-dusted parade I saw that day filing north from the FiDi. But I do know this, taking the factoids above -- Building 7 proves internal demolition, the UK "premature" announcement, Silverstein's advance notice -- as evidence of conspiracy are examples of oblivious obvious. It's like the many conspiracists who jumped on Silverstein's "I told them, 'pull it'" interview as evidence of admission of guilt. That's beyond oblivion. It's just stupid.
As a friend pointed out to me, why internally demolish the buildings? Two planes flying into them isn't enough? Now that friend has a thinking mind. That's observing the obvious.
