The Illusion of Objectivity

From The Interstellar Housewife:

Ufology:  Live at Budokan
"I do have sympathy for abductees who have placed their faith in things like the alien hybridization program, because questioning hypnosis questions the result of hypnosis. Those who have spent years believing they have had certain experiences would surely have a difficult time considering those experiences may not have existed at all -- or at least occurred anything like they thought or were led to believe."

Sympathy is very much in order, as it always is when a person's belief system - any belief system - collapses.

An example.  Politics, as I once knew it (the two-party model to which politically active Americans subscribe), was a civic responsibility.  After three or four decades - yeah, you read that right - of discovering one lie after another, I reached a different conclusion: politics is theater.  Left and Right are an illusion crafted by The Have's against The Don't Have's. 

Now *that* is missing time.

Painful, too.  I grew up on Watergate and believed The Law, in the anachronistic Constitutional sense, was noble.  Journalism was one of the few high school courses I  enjoyed.  Woodward and Bernstein, to people who read newpapers, were damn near everybody's heroes.  This was right around the time it became difficult to hear anyone admitting they voted for Nixon.  Twice.

That I ever thought well of Bob Woodward is enough to give me diarrhea and an intractable headache.  So what if I was eleven years old.   Who's got the Lortab?

The essence of a paradigm shift - not to be confused with the new paradigm itself - is this:  It fucking hurts.  No pain, no gain.  There is no smooth transition to a new reality.  There is only a sprawling, pitch black Abyss with steep drop-offs and hard ground.  Rolling tumult.  Quaking chaos.  If you possess the courage, tenacity and masochistic willingness to crawl in the dark over shards of glass and bone, over the killing fields of rotting myth and willful delusion, you will eventually reach more hospitable terrain.  Good luck getting there without a little faith and a great deal of humility.

We Won't Get Fooled Again?  Sure, whatever you say.  Over the course of a lifetime, it happens enough that anyone with two neurons can figure out they will get fooled again.  Eventually, you come to understand you're being fooled right now.  The most any of us can hope for is we don't get fooled in perpetuity.  This, in my more lucid moments, seems like an unreasonable expectation.  But it's a hard way to go through Life.

If you have an experience that is based purely on so-called retrieved memories, the reliability of those memories is often at the mercy of the regression hypnotist and what an individual might think have happened to them, which in many cases could be based on pop culture and their own research and interest in ufology and abduction. 

When you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. 

Less mentioned is this:  If you've ever been a nail, everything looks like a hammer.

The abduction paradigm models all interactions between human and other cosmological intelligences, be they extraterrestrial or intraterrestrial, in terms of power dynamics.   Victimhood. 

The nails run are still running the show.

The Interstellar Housewife continues:

"As Kevin Randle put it in his recent piece 'A Response to Budd Hopkins:

'If these people, and their clients, aren't already "programmed" to believe in an abduction, then why search out Hopkins for assistance? Wouldn't anyone versed in hypnosis be able to help them learn what happened during this supposed missing time? Aren't each of them "primed" for an abduction, just as those who go to a reincarnation specialist are "primed" for learning about a past life.'

An excellent point -- one that is pretty fucking obvious, but needed to be said. If abductions are happening as frequently as some believe, or happening at all, shouldn’t the same results come from non-biased therapists and hypnosis specialists?

It would be easier to prove the existence of highly advanced non-human, trans-human or non-corporeal intelligent lifeforms than prove the existence of non-biased therapists or hypnosis specialists.

Is there an Association of Non-Biased Therapists and Hypnosis Specialists?  I suppose I could just ask one. Hey, before plunking down my $130 for this regression - and, please be honest with me:  Are you biased or non-biased?

I'd bet everything on the answer.

There is a term for people who are non-biased: anthropomorphic robots. 

Kevin Randle does, indeed, make some very good points, and they all illustrate how people seek out experiences likely to confirm their biases.  It isn't clear whether Randle and The Interstellar Housewife appreciate that no one gets to claim an honest exemption from the dynamic.

Randle's use of the term "supposed missing time" appears to signify one thing:  He's never missed any.  Nor have I, although I'll cop to having stumbled over the tripwire of crude language.  (I didn't create ufology's errant lexicon; if I had, there would be no ufology in it.)

What I experienced was one incident involving a peculiar episode of unambiguous amnesia which did not involve traumatic brain injury, tequila, scotch, wine, kamikazes, benzodiazepines, narcotics, sedative-hypnotics, bad-ass indica or any combination thereof. 

Despite having considered myself a contactee for nearly a year prior to that experience, I had remained ambivalent about whether or not reports of missing time represented a valid phenomenon. Although I remain skeptical of missing time reports, I am absolutely, unequivocally, uncharacteristically certain amnesia does, in fact, occur during at least some close encounters.  Experience has a way of winning over doubters.

But it's late - 4:24am, to be exact - and I have a long week ahead.

Let's do this again soon, though, and I'll tell you about it.


UPDATE:  Deirdre of Interstellar Housewife was kind enough to leave a comment citing a follow-up post, Clarification on a Statement.  Thanks, Deirdre.