Many people believe that history is a record of objective facts, but its foundation is the worldview that forms the core of the philosophy of history and social theory founded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the 19th century, “historical materialism※1 (“also called the materialist conception of history”), and at its core lies the proposition that “the history of society is determined not by spirit, ideas, religion, or culture, but by the material mode of production (the economic base).”
That is to say, it asserts a reversed causal relation in which it is not human consciousness that determines social being, but social being (relations of production, economic structure) that determines human consciousness; the base (economy) determines (decides) the superstructure (politics, culture, law).
On this view of history, history is said to advance dialectically through “the development of productive forces” and “the contradictions of relations of production,” and concepts such as “supernatural powers,” “intervention by gods and buddhas,” “spiritual entities,” “parallel worlds,” and “time alteration” are, in principle, excluded as incapable of being drivers of history.
However, when we reexamine history from the perspective of the Mandela Effect, we confront the fact that “history is a story someone has told, and it can change depending on how it is told.”
The materialist conception of history (material determinism, the materialist view of history) put forward by Marx and Engels was a direct transplantation of the modern-scientific (Newtonian classical-physics) model of “cause and effect (causality)” into the realm of human society and history. “Material productive forces are the foundation (the base), and thought, religion, and culture (the superstructure) are nothing more than their reflection”—this proposition at first glance looks like an extremely rational and objective law.
However, underlying it all is the closed, deterministic paradigm that says “the world exists fixed outside of human consciousness, the Second Law of Thermodynamics (increase of entropy)*2—flows only one way from past to future.” The only reason human intellect so readily comes with this “OS of entropic laws of matter” as its default install is that it is extremely convenient for predicting, managing, and controlling the world.
Authoritarianism and fascism*3 are highly compatible with this view of history, because by fixing history as “a single line that progresses according to laws,” they thereby gain a footing of authority from which dissent and irregularities (paranormal phenomena, memory discrepancies, ideational motives) that deviate from that line can be excluded as “ignorance” or “madness.”
When you deal with the Mandela Effect, you start to get the idea that perhaps genetics-based anthropology, linguistics, and historiography cannot solve their deepening riddles precisely because they assume this universe to be a closed, fascistic Big Bang cosmos governed solely by the law of entropic action and the laws of matter (there is the saying “fukusui bon ni kaerazu” (spilt water will not return to the tray—what’s done is done), and since long ago philosophers and refined aesthetes have likened unchanging things to a river of flowing water), which is a thought that also comes up.
For example, perhaps Yamataikoku (an ancient polity in Japanese historiography) also existed in a Japan of parallel worlds, and because the story surfaced through the incorporation or reorganization of histories, its location cannot be fixed.
Scientific authoritarianism and occult authoritarianism share a common nature.
For instance, in Japan there is a thesis–antithesis style adversarial frame of “science vs. the occult,” symbolized by Beat Takeshi’s (a major comedian/filmmaker) year-end occult specials featuring “Professor Otsuki, Emeritus of Waseda University School of Science and Engineering, VS Junichiro Nirasawa of Tama Publishing (an occult publisher).”
At first glance this looks like a battle of reason versus the absurd, but in reality it is a power struggle on the same plane over “which side possesses the absolute ‘authority of the correct answer.’”
Scientific authoritarianism is the dogma that “only empirically verified laws of matter are absolute, and nothing else exists,” while occult authoritarianism is the dogma that “cover-ups hidden by science and the laws of psychic powers and spiritual entities are what are truly absolute.” The two entirely share the OS (modern objectivism) from the previous section: “there is a single absolute objective truth somewhere.”
Therefore, whichever side one takes, when confronted with phenomena that fall outside it (a nonconformity between objective records and subjective memories, as in the Mandela Effect), some people may experience the terror that the entire system is collapsing (in some cases, physical shock such as a violent adverse reaction or nausea)*7 being triggered.
In my (the author’s) case, if you had to say right or left, I lean to the right, and although I am in a position that ought to confront the fascistic historical materialism of Marxism, when I first noticed the Mandela Effect phenomenon I became nauseated, vomited everything in my stomach, could not sleep a single minute for about 72 hours, could not eat anything, could drink only water, and my legs trembled uncontrollably just going down the stairs.
Later, after repeated self-reflection, I realized why, at first, my consciousness had ended up that way: because there is, quite naturally, a base and ignoble fascistic mindset within me, it brought on an anomic state*6.
As for me (the author), my parents were members of a low-level new religion, and I was a second-generation believer, so, embarrassingly, even while nominally on the side of religion I had been contaminated since childhood by the authoritarian scientific ideology, the fascistic scientism of Marxist historical materialism, and I had all along carried this thesis-like sense of a clash between different authoritarianisms—like Professor Yoshihiko Otsuki, Emeritus of Waseda University, vs. Junichiro Nirasawa of Tama Publishing on Beat Takeshi’s year-end occult specials—that tries to set science and the occult as opposing concepts, that is, an occult-as-another-authoritarianism set against the authoritarianism of science.
When it comes to Mandela-Effect-style talk, I am truly fed up with shallow authoritarian types who, as if it were only natural, brandish authority and heap insults or mockery on the occult, and I am genuinely sick of the authoritarian adherents of the existing Marxist scientific paradigm who, with no self-awareness, wield scientific authoritarianism and scientific fascism not as ideology or doctrine but with the attitude that it is mere common sense.
That said, a few people who have read a bit of Thomas Kuhn and correctly understand paradigm shift*4—granted, they are a tiny minority—are reasonable folks, and to some extent we can communicate, but I feel they make up at best about five percent of the science-and-engineering population.
Even the Occult board of 5channel, until a little while ago, when you opened the top page, had at the very beginning a notice that seemed to accommodate the anomie of a certain hysterical subset with a science-authoritarian paradigm, something like: “This is the Occult board. People who want to pursue the occult academically and people who want to enjoy it as entertainment each participate from different positions. Let us respect one another and take care not to cause discomfort.” (It has since been removed.)
What Thomas Kuhn showed in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is that the essence of a paradigm shift is not “approaching objective truth,” but rather that “the perspective (worldview) shared by scientists is updated.”
Human intelligence tends to default to the idea that the very first universe was a disorderly, chaotic Big Bang universe ruled by entropy and the laws of material properties, and that over an eon of evolution within that universe future humans with superintelligence were born, and, in a form encompassed by that disorderly, chaotic first universe, they created a simulation universe (the Matrix) by computational processing inside computer machines such as simulations—but is that really true?
Probably, this universe is not a disorderly, chaotic Big Bang universe governed only by entropic laws of material properties.
Just as quantum mechanics revealed that “observation collapses a state,” the universe and history are not hard machines that exist independently of the observer. Rather, they are closer to dynamic databases that are constantly being compiled and recompiled by the observer’s cognition, shared language, and the accumulation of memory (information).
The fact that the location of Yamatai-koku (an ancient Japanese polity recorded in Chinese chronicles) has not been pinned down, and in the social sciences, for example, the “unnatural distortions that cannot be explained by a single structural theory,” such as the irrationality suffered by the so-called “employment ice age” generation (people who came of age in Japan’s job-hiring freeze era), can be taken as evidence that this universe is not a flawlessly complete physical machine but a system pregnant with informational inconsistencies and reorganization (the creaking of paradigms).
Even today it is not as if there are zero people who, when drunk, lose themselves and go on a rampage, but the fact that alcohol has not led to insurrections or civil wars (like Japan’s Onin War, or America’s Prohibition era) may be due to a paradigm-shift-like Mandela Effect.
There are also, in Japan, things like camphor (a camphorate stimulant), and overseas, salt, sugar, tea, coffee, chocolate, and so on and so forth—complete with vested interests attached to them—and there are various cases where wars seem to have broken out over things that make you go, “Huh? Over something like that?” but it is possible that all of them are being regulated and managed by higher-dimensional beings via the Mandela Effect, with paradigm shifts occurring.
When you study Japanese history or world history, there are a ton of such things, and truly smart, genuine researchers and physicians—although they may not know the very word “Mandela Effect”—take this kind of thing as a given, so for example there are medical doctors and medical books that write the view that if “cancer” were eradicated, yet another incurable disease would arise, and such commercially available books are plentiful, purchasable and readable even by ordinary people who do not belong to a university or a laboratory. Or, stories of that sort exist across various fields, for instance in economics and finance, and in all sorts of other academic disciplines.
However, in Japan, the occult and science are opposing concepts, and the sense of a clash between different forms of authoritarianism (thesis) is strong, so it may simply be that it is difficult for differing approaches to merge.
If the world is not a cold Big Bang cosmos governed only by entropy and the laws of matter, how then should we live? What becomes crucial here is “Existenz (existence)*5.” As the existentialists such as Sartre and Kierkegaard proposed, “existence precedes essence.”
So long as one thinks, as in Marxism, that “social structure (essence) determines the human being (existence),” humans become nothing but the cogs of history, or the slaves of the system (fascism). However, if history and the universe themselves are “malleable, information-theoretical narratives,” then there is no longer any need to entrust oneself to meanings decided by external authorities (be they scientific laws or religious dogma). From the dominion of structure to the restoration of “existence.”
The universe is neither a mere machine ruled by disorderly entropy nor a perfectly managed Matrix simulation.
It is “a perpetually updatable space of meaning woven between the cognizing subject (the self) and the observed world,” and no matter how past history is narrated, or how it is reorganized in parallel, the existential self who is here now, and the subjective will of how to reinterrogate the world from there—those alone cannot be taken away by any kind of authoritarianism or laws of matter.
※1 historical materialism A view of history systematized by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It explains the history of society on the basis of material modes of production and economic structures, and is also called the materialist conception of history. On this page, it is handled as a critical problematization by the author.
*2 entropy A state quantity used in thermodynamics; it is a concept that indicates the direction of irreversible processes and statistical disorder. On this page it is also used as a metaphor to explain the one-way directionality of time.
*3 a fascistic mindset Here “fascistic” does not refer to any particular historical party or state; it is the author’s own critical term for an attitude that uniformly excludes dissent and exceptions and enforces a single authority or single correct answer.
*4 paradigm shift A large-scale transformation in the problem-settings and worldview shared by a scientific community, as discussed by the historian of science Thomas Kuhn. On this page, the term is used as a concept that points to the possibility that our view of history and the cosmos may be updated.
*5 existentialism A philosophical position that does not explain human beings solely by abstract essences or social structures, but understands them as agents who live concretely and make choices. Sartre’s formula “existence precedes essence” is representative.
*6 anomie A sociological concept that denotes a condition in which social norms and values are weakened and standards for action are lost. In the main text, it is used as a metaphor for the psychological state when existing cognitive frameworks are shaken.
*7 depersonalization (feelings of detachment) This can refer to feelings of detachment in which oneself or the surrounding reality feels distant or unreal. It may arise in connection with intense stress, anxiety, or lack of sleep, and the background and course of symptoms vary by person. The description in the text concerning physical shock does not generalize individual experiences or reactions. If the distress or interference with daily life continues, please consult a medical institution or helpline.