Amateur sleuths and Sherlock Holmes types, when looking to penetrate a cover-up, need to factor in various dynamics.
Having just slogged through more 911 videos, prevalent on Youtube, I feel this observation is apropos: even if you have no idea who did it, you may see your rank or position as tied to the perception you might know.
As a player, you may wish to foster your reputation for being in on whatever plan. You might even do this to further your own investigation. If people know you already know (but you don't) then some who really do know might let their guard down in your presence, imagining you already know their secrets.
Consequence: many people will adhere to a cover story not because they themselves believe it, and not because they know the truth, but because it's safer or otherwise more productive to follow an insider party line than to sound like an outsider skeptic.
Lets take Allen Dulles for example. He not only served on the Warren Commission, he of course supported its chief finding, that Oswald acted alone as a lone gunman.
Given Dulles was a one time CIA director and the CIA itself has been fingered as a chief suspect in the Kennedy assassinations, at least the first one, does that mean he knew the details of what really happened? Not necessarily. Ditto regarding the U2 "shot down" over the Soviet Union -- he stuck to the cover story.
Working backward from the above, one sees the need for a cover story that people might cling to, an authoritative version of events. But what if those with the most access to the media don't actually know what happened? Inventing an official explanation that later unravels at least gives people something official to hold on to, which is what they wanted. "Playing it safe" is the name of the game.
So serving up a "likely story" is sometimes the next best thing, even when it's full of holes. Why? In part to comfort those who were freaking out. But also to deny one's enemy the satisfaction of controlling the narrative. Pumping misinformation into a system is a way to degrade it, and sometimes that's the intent, in order to counter a perp. "If I don't know, nobody else gets to know either" might be the mantra here.
That's another aspect of psychological warfare some people miss. Lets consider the profile of a serial killer who really wants to be noticed and who takes pleasure in leading the police on a grisly chase, following a path of dead bodies.
The police might intentionally come up with a confused story in which murders the killer had nothing to do with are considered "linked" in the newspapers. The narrative becomes blurred, misinformed. The perpetrator experiences frustration at not seeing credit given where credit is due.
The purpose of a cover-story is therefore at least two-fold. Wannabe insiders, such as politicians who want to seem "in the know", may get to bolster their reputations by supporting a cover story, even a clearly false one.
"They must know who really did it then" the clueless spectator falsely concludes, "which means they're powerful insiders" (what the politician wants these spectators to believe).
But then as mentioned, another purpose of a cover story may be to divert all or most of the attention away from the perp's intended cause or message. Without even knowing who did it, one may see ways to control the narrative nonetheless, or at least ways to not surrender to someone else's.
My recommendation to conspiracy theorists is to think deeply about what it means to lose control of a narrative. One becomes an outsider, no longer authorized to tell some story.
Some players fear losing control of the story more than they fear the truth, which seems unlikely to be agreed upon any time soon, and for this reason they continue to cling to a version that feels safe to them, unlikely to come apart at the seams. To others, this same version may seem shallow and phony.
Of course the classic / conventional situation is the cover story is invented by the perps themselves to hide their true motives and actions. My point here is to counter that over simplification. Sometimes the cover story is invented not by the perps, but by those still keenly hoping to find out more. That the cover story is clearly full of holes only motivates others to sift through it more. Who said that's bad?
Having just slogged through more 911 videos, prevalent on Youtube, I feel this observation is apropos: even if you have no idea who did it, you may see your rank or position as tied to the perception you might know.
As a player, you may wish to foster your reputation for being in on whatever plan. You might even do this to further your own investigation. If people know you already know (but you don't) then some who really do know might let their guard down in your presence, imagining you already know their secrets.
Consequence: many people will adhere to a cover story not because they themselves believe it, and not because they know the truth, but because it's safer or otherwise more productive to follow an insider party line than to sound like an outsider skeptic.
Lets take Allen Dulles for example. He not only served on the Warren Commission, he of course supported its chief finding, that Oswald acted alone as a lone gunman.
Given Dulles was a one time CIA director and the CIA itself has been fingered as a chief suspect in the Kennedy assassinations, at least the first one, does that mean he knew the details of what really happened? Not necessarily. Ditto regarding the U2 "shot down" over the Soviet Union -- he stuck to the cover story.
Working backward from the above, one sees the need for a cover story that people might cling to, an authoritative version of events. But what if those with the most access to the media don't actually know what happened? Inventing an official explanation that later unravels at least gives people something official to hold on to, which is what they wanted. "Playing it safe" is the name of the game.
So serving up a "likely story" is sometimes the next best thing, even when it's full of holes. Why? In part to comfort those who were freaking out. But also to deny one's enemy the satisfaction of controlling the narrative. Pumping misinformation into a system is a way to degrade it, and sometimes that's the intent, in order to counter a perp. "If I don't know, nobody else gets to know either" might be the mantra here.
That's another aspect of psychological warfare some people miss. Lets consider the profile of a serial killer who really wants to be noticed and who takes pleasure in leading the police on a grisly chase, following a path of dead bodies.
The police might intentionally come up with a confused story in which murders the killer had nothing to do with are considered "linked" in the newspapers. The narrative becomes blurred, misinformed. The perpetrator experiences frustration at not seeing credit given where credit is due.
The purpose of a cover-story is therefore at least two-fold. Wannabe insiders, such as politicians who want to seem "in the know", may get to bolster their reputations by supporting a cover story, even a clearly false one.
"They must know who really did it then" the clueless spectator falsely concludes, "which means they're powerful insiders" (what the politician wants these spectators to believe).
But then as mentioned, another purpose of a cover story may be to divert all or most of the attention away from the perp's intended cause or message. Without even knowing who did it, one may see ways to control the narrative nonetheless, or at least ways to not surrender to someone else's.
My recommendation to conspiracy theorists is to think deeply about what it means to lose control of a narrative. One becomes an outsider, no longer authorized to tell some story.
Some players fear losing control of the story more than they fear the truth, which seems unlikely to be agreed upon any time soon, and for this reason they continue to cling to a version that feels safe to them, unlikely to come apart at the seams. To others, this same version may seem shallow and phony.
Of course the classic / conventional situation is the cover story is invented by the perps themselves to hide their true motives and actions. My point here is to counter that over simplification. Sometimes the cover story is invented not by the perps, but by those still keenly hoping to find out more. That the cover story is clearly full of holes only motivates others to sift through it more. Who said that's bad?
