Examining nonsense 6 – Conclusion.

This essay is the sixth in a series called "Examining nonsense". It analyses a speech given by David Icke. You may find the other essays here.

In this final essay we will examine the rest of the speech, which is a rather large chunk compared to the other essays. This is because the tricks that has been unveiled in the previous essays repeat themselves. Thus, there is not much novelty left to uncover. The tricks unveiled so far include

1. grooming the listener
2. vagueness
3. forcing the listener to “fill in the blanks”
4. categorical errors
5. misusing the method of radical doubt
6. noise
7. borrowing authority
8. trojan-horsing a conspiracy theory along with valid theories
9. an overly fast pace
10. non-sequitur
11. going against truthfulness

This list is quite damning. Committing that many errors in just one five-minute speech is almost impressive. Rest assured knowing that the rest of the speech continues in the same style.

The speech concludes as follows:

They talk about dark energy, dark matter. I see that slightly differently, but the principle is the same: What you can see and what you can’t see.

So, you have this massive area of stuff they say exists in this universe, which we can’t see. You then have light, the electromagnetic spectrum, etc., which is 0.005% of what they say exists in this universe. And visible light which is the only frequency band that we can decode into a visual reality is a fraction of the 0.005%.

This is the visible spectrum within the electromagnetic spectrum. Look at it! It’s tiny. And that’s all that we can see in what we call the world. You say to most people:

"Can you see everything in the space you’re looking at?"
"Oh yeah mate."

You can’t see that much of it.

So, this is right. There is no spoon. It’s not the spoon that bends. It is only yourself, because that spoon only exists in that form when you decode it from energetic information.

Information is encoded in what we call light. White light contains all the colours of the spectrum. And colours are frequencies. They’re just different frequencies. And when we decode them, we see that colour and we think those flowers are red and yellow. They’re not. Nothing has any colour. The colour is decided in our perception of it by whether it reflects certain frequencies or whether it absorbs certain frequencies. We’re only seeing light that reflects. Thus, we’re only seeing that colour which is reflected by the object. Therefore, it seems to be that colour. This is the scale of the illusion that we think is real.

Light/radiation is information, and the frequency or wavelength vibration is its delivery system. The information dictates the frequency. And this is really, I think, you know, one of those whoa moments. As the frequency increases, the amount of energy carried by the wave also increases in proportion to the frequency.

So, when you open your mind and open your heart, your frequency goes up. Provable fact, measurable. As your frequency goes up, you’re now being able to hold and access more and more and more information. And thus, you become more aware, more knowledgeable, more insightful, more intuitive.
And Nikola Tesla – the genius from which so much came – he could see beyond the physical that we perceive, and he said: “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of our existence.”

There are more than enough errors here.

Firstly: Dark matter is not characterised solely by not being able to see it. If that was the case, something shrouded in darkness would be considered dark matter.

Dark matter came about because one could observe that galaxies behaved as if there was a lot more matter present than what was observed. Thus, to explain this, the theory of dark matter was introduced. This form of reasoning is what logicians call abductive reasoning.

Abductive reasoning was introduced by Charles Sanders Pierce, and can be explained as “an inference to the best solution when in lack of definitive evidence”. An abductive argument is thus weaker than a deductive argument, because a deductive argument has “enough” information, whereas an abductive argument infers the best explanation when lacking enough information.

Therefore, dark matter and dark energy are only theoretical concepts that physicists themselves admit only serve to “fill in a gap”. In a way, this is a mystery left to solve. Perhaps you will unveil what dark matter really is?

Secondly, it might be true that light makes up only 0.005% of matter in the universe. However, that does not mean that we can only see 0.005% of the universe. This is because light is both a particle and a wave. When we say that light makes up 0.005% of the universe, we mean that out of all the particles in the universe, only 0.005% of them are light-particles. However, light also lights up other things. So, although our eyes only take in light per se, we still see whatever object is emitting that light. Thus, it is not true that we perceive only 0.005% of the universe. We perceive a lot more than that. As for how much, you should ask a physicist, but my educated guess is that we can see about 20% of the matter in the universe.

Thirdly, when he speaks of light carrying energetic information and so on, this is so nonsensical and so void of meaning that tackling it becomes rather difficult. I would invite you to ask some simple questions about these claims:

• How is information energetic?
• What information is not energetic?
• What do you mean by “information” in this regard?

This should reveal the nonsense.

Fourthly, “when you open your mind … and your heart, your frequency goes up.” Which frequency? My heart rate? The frequency of the light that I emit? Do I get warmer? This claim my sound lovely, but it is an unfinished explanation, and void of meaning.

Fifthly and finally: Quoting Nikola Tesla in this speech serves only one purpose, namely to invoke authority. Make no mistake: Tesla was a genius, and he might have been onto something with this quote. However, he was also just another human like you and me. Sometimes we raise geniuses to super-human levels, when really they were all too human. Newton, for instance, believed in alchemy, and tried making coal into gold. His efforts were unsuccessful. Like Newton then, Tesla was just a human with some genius ideas, and probably even more less genius ideas.

How should we then relate to these geniuses? By focusing on the ideas, and not the person. The example of Socrates illustrates this wonderfully. The existence of the historical figure is not beyond doubt. It might be that Socrates never existed. The question is: Does that matter?

For philosophers, the answer is no. If Socrates is purely fictional, the ideas that this person embodies are still valuable. They were valuable 2500 years ago in ancient Greece, and they remain valuable today. This is how we should treat other great minds. We should not praise their person so much as their ideas. For ideas are eternal. Us humans, on the other hand, are only on borrowed time.

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This concludes the examination of the speech. I hope you found it useful. This examination was inspired by the desire to show the utility of a philosophical education. Philosophy can help you to grasp almost everything with more clarity. I hope that this has been illustrated in this series.