CrazyMaking

A series of projects exploring the nature of belief in the Post-Truth world.

The CrazyMaking Project is an examination of the mechanics of belief systems; How do they work, what do they do to us? The stories we tell ourselves shape our perceptions of the world around us, filtering and distorting, but also clarifying and enhancing what we see and feel. They cast a spell on our awareness. This project is an exploration of the contours of that enchantment.

For the past quarter century, I’ve watched as my colleagues in the building trades have tumbled steadily into the mire of the right-wing Conspiracy Industrial Complex. First, the white dudes over 40. Then, in the last decade, a steadily growing number of Brazilians, Ecuadorians, and Guatemaltecos I work with. In they drifted, and then, for the most part, they were gone. Unreachable. Convinced that the world was a fundamentally sinister place, and that I was part of a boundless malevolent plot if I challenged them. At best, I was merely dismissed, dehumanized as “sheeple,” an unwitting participant in a vast sprawling machination.

I work with various kinds of religious communities, so I know how to retain an attitude of respectful curiosity toward people who fervently believe very different things than I do. But after the 2016 election, it was as if a tiki-torch flame had been lit, as if their licenses to be brazen assholes had been stamped and certified. Things got ugly. Friends became enemies. A pandemic of mass-psychosis had announced itself.

On the flip side of this, we know that beliefs can have profoundly positive effects on us. They can be the anchor for deep and sustaining spiritual life, the motivation for the long labor of community building and what the Talmud calls “tikkun olam,” the repair of this broken world. And the placebo effect, which is fundamentally about belief, can shape our perception, can heal us beyond the capacity of medicine, can alter us at a chemical level.

Belief is many things, but, to be clear, it is not the same thing as faith. Faith is fundamentally an emotional posture. It is the experience of, or the decision to, trust in the workings of the universe, in the processes of growth and decay, life and death, joy and agony. Belief is propositional. It is what happens when language gets involved. At its best, belief lets us share something of the experience of faith, but filtered, simplified, adulterated by the story-telling instinct that language facilitates.

CrazyMaking is an exploration of what beliefs are, how they are changing in the Post-Truth world, and what the stories they tell do to us.

Caveat: I use the word “crazy” as a sometime-resident of that nation, as a neurodivergent human, someone practiced in psychosis, neurosis, addiction. I use this “othering” word and its cognates here, and throughout this project, as a means and an invitation to other ourselves, to gain some outside view of our inner workings. And I reclaim it as a partial prerequisite to sanity in a world running off the rails.

PART 1: Crazy / Risky Where it begins. Origin stories of the project.

PART 2: Q.Public Images A folio of images and visual treatments.

PART 3: Q.Public Fictional Conspiracy Theory A 100% true fictional, prosocial, collaborative, gamified conspiracy theory.

PART 4: Q.Public Records Anecdotes and stories about the deep history of the Q.Public conspiracy theory.

PART 5: Q.Public Knowledge Things I Learned While Building a Conspiracy Theory.

PART 6: Q.Public Glossary Words and terms associated with the Q.Public conspiracy theory.

PART 7: Q.Public Research Laboratory Indexed documentation of the emerging details of Q.Public meta-conspiracy theory.

CrazyMaking At Large

In the Corporate Agora

Acknowledgements:

This project was incubated on the Ronkonkoma Terminal Moraine, on traditional tribal lands of the Shinnecock and Montauket peoples.

By generously sharing their craziest and riskiest beliefs, all the participants in the CrazyMaking project have contributed the foundation for everything that is being built from it.

Research and technical assistance by Alex Huberty and Matthew Davis.

Kythe Heller and Harvard Divinity School’s Vision Lab have provided an invaluable testbed for exploration and feedback.

Workshop opportunities provided by Almond Restaurant’s Artists and Writers events, Boston University.