An Idea Most Infectious

Trapped in a dream with an incepted idea

Today I write about how infectious the idea is. This testimony explores people, perception, and manipulation, and I use the film Inception as a connective anchor. At times my tone becomes lyrical and obscure so forgive me in advance for any vagaries.

Just like in the film Inception by Chris Nolan, my life has taught me one lesson.

There is nothing more infectious than an idea, and once it takes root in the mind and grows, it’s nearly impossible to excise. Eventually, its impossible for the mind to distinguish the idea from reality itself.

I teach English online, but it’s been a bumpy road. Over the past two years, there have been dramatic changes in my teaching that defied explanation. At first, I was having a lot of fun, and I gained a full schedule very quickly. I had a variety of students from all over the world, and we were getting along great! But after a while, students started to disappear strangely. Students with whom I’d developed a great rapport suddenly went AWOL. Over time, my schedule dwindled more and more, and now I’m lucky if I have three classes per day.

I’ve known for a while that the cause of my dwindling schedule is hacking. I’m under attack from hackers who sabotage my teaching and scare away my students.

Hacking Hackers

On the one hand, I can’t seem to separate my teaching practice from my hacked devices. I have taken my devices to be repaired over and over again, but they just keep getting hacked. These hackers use my identity to hack my students. They reach out to my students, pretending to be me. They pressure my students not to patronize me. They have interfered in classes. They may have planted viruses on my students' computers. And they have often had contact with students who are children.

Because I tried to un-hack myself and failed over and over again, I have all but given up on straightening this out. My hackers are motivated by a false belief about me and want to disrupt my teaching practice as payback for something they think I’ve done. Although their idea of me isn’t true, they won’t let go of it. How can I disabuse them of their illusion?

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The Dream / Nightmare

There’s a great scene in the movie Inception where DiCaprio and Page are in a dream, discussing how to plant an idea in the mind of the dreamer. DiCaprio plays a man named Dominic Cobb, and Page plays Ariadne. Cobb and Ariadne are actually together in a dream, in Cobb's subconscious. They’re in downtown Paris, sitting in a café and discussing the role of ‘the architect’ in a dream. Then, a scene begins where they’re walking through the streets of Paris. Ariadne manipulates the dream landscape, and suddenly, all of the pedestrians set their eyes on her as they walk by, making Ariadne feel uneasy.

Ariadne: “Why are they all looking at me?”

Cobb: “Because my subconscious feels that someone else is creating this world. The more you change things, the quicker the projections start to converge on you.”

Ariadne: “Converge?”

Cobb: “They attack like white blood cells fighting an infection.”

Ariadne: “Wait, they're going to attack us?”

“No… just you.”

Ariadne comes to the end of the street where it meets a high traffic underpass that separates her from the riverbank. Wanting to walk straight through to the Seine, she uses her imagination to build a footbridge that would arc over the throughway and take her to the water.

Cobb: “This is great but I'm telling you if you keep changing things like this…”

One of the dream's projections, a young Vietnamese woman dressed in black urban wear thumps into Ariadne while walking by. Ariadne looks back at Cobb.

Ariadne: “Do you mind telling your subconscious to take it easy?”

“It’s my subconscious, remember? I can’t control it.”

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What happens to Ariadne in that scene happens to me in real life all the time. In Malta, I didn’t notice it as much, but in Athens last summer, it started. I rode the subway, and a woman sat in front of me and looked right at me. She stared into me as if she wanted to peer into my soul. Later, I went to a concert at a small club, and many of the attendees gathered outside. I was sitting at a street-side bar, waiting for the concert to start, and I felt people looking at me and talking about me. I could see heads turn and eyes fall on me before drifting away. The uneasy feeling was so strong that it made me leave.

In Bangkok, the attention on me was so overt and obvious that part of me was entertained. I was noticed nearly every time I rode the subway, and a few teenagers caught me on video while pretending to film themselves entering the subway with their cell phones. I had met two locals in Bangkok—nice, wholesome ladies—and they wanted me to take them out for lunch. I obliged, and people in the restaurant recognized me, of course, and were visibly disturbed that I was there having a meal with normal folks.

I’ve got lots of stories like this—incidents where complete strangers turned on me like the projections in Cobb’s dream. Except I’m not the dreamer; I’m the architect—and my presence is warping the dream.

Without writing out the rest of the scene, you can see the danger Ariadne is in here: Feel free to jump ahead to minute 4:00. Ariadne’s changes are too drastic and the Parisians gather to attack her. One Parisian in particular almost subdues her.

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So, I’m aware that my students are getting hacked by hackers who’ve hacked me, and I also know that these hackers are forcing limits on how many classes my students may take with me. They often coerce students into missing classes, and sometimes they make them quit working with me altogether.

These hackers warn my students against working with me by claiming that I’m a sinister character, and they use defamatory rumors as leverage against my clients. I think they probably threaten my students with reputation damage if they don’t go along with the hackers’ demands. I have even seen cases where they took control of my students’ computers and damaged their projects or their lives. I’ll detail the incidents I’ve witnessed in another story.

There is nothing I hate more than a person who prevents another person from learning.

In another post, I’d love to detail the hacking and provide a timeline of all the methods, ways, and the evolution of said hacking. However, for now, I have to ask that we leave the hacking issue to the side because there’s another aspect of this situation that we’re focused on today.

RUMORS

One way or another, a rumor started that I was a child predator, and this rumor was especially problematic because I worked with children full-time. First of all, I’m not a child predator. I’ve taught thousands of children, so if I were a predator, there would be a mountain of evidence. I’m also not rich or politically connected, especially in the United States, where I lived and taught for around 15 years. I was a substitute teacher for a time, and I was a full-time teacher for many years. Such jobs don’t come with a great deal of political pull. I did my job right and by the book, and I got good at it. I became highly skilled at inventing engaging arts curricula and adept at understanding disruptive behavior and the motivations behind it, allowing me to respond effectively in the classroom. Although there were breaks in my employment—starts and stops—I was never fired from any job for misconduct.

Because I know my life and history, I’m certain that this rumor originated from the ex-partner of one of my ex-partners. It was a rumor fueled by jealousy, revenge, and abuse.

It was intended to hurt my ex by damaging my career and lowering my standing in the eyes of the public. It worked, and she ended up hating me—or so it seemed to me. This was ten years ago, and we eventually divorced because we were constantly fighting. However, she never told me that her ex-husband was targeting me. On some level, she was embarrassed—ashamed that her past was disrupting our relationship. I wasn’t perfect, but I was no child molester!

My complex romantic history and my recovery itself are why I have such difficulty confronting the rumor and the situation I’m in with people I barely know. I don’t know my students very well, and I don’t feel that I can talk to them about a rumor involving addiction, abuse, manipulation, recovery, hacking, and defamation of character—at least not without scaring them off.

Not to mention, I’m teaching online using my devices, and anything I say could be recorded, edited to make me look bad, and used out of context. Furthermore, I don’t know what could happen if my words are misconstrued by students who don’t yet speak English well.

These rumors spread and followed me for years while I was teaching in Boston, yet I had no idea they were the source of disruption to my career and social life. When people, one at a time, turned their backs on me and pushed me away, I just figured they were assholes. Eventually, I started feeling as if everyone was a huge asshole except me and the few people who hadn’t turned on me yet. I didn’t realize there was a toxic narrative I needed to address. Now, in addition to taking care of myself, I must try to dispel people of their illusions about me.

I also thought people wouldn’t believe such extreme rumors and gossip. I expected them to inquire and ask questions. I assumed people would develop a way to distinguish a normal person from a predator. I was naive. People have no reliable system for differentiating good people from bad, and they actually know very little about pedophiles and the kind of abuse that creates them. People just go by what they hear, and if they hear bad news more than twice, they believe it’s true.

Are you a good person or a bad person?

In my life, I’m faced with a lot of people who believe their good by disrupting my life and my work because they think I’m up to no good. When the truth comes out, and eventually it will, they’ll have to take a hard look at themselves.

If a person kills a bad guy - good person . If a person kills a good guy - bad person . If a person kills a good guy because he thinks he’s a bad guy - very bad person.

Most people feel that if someone is a bad person, then it’s okay to harm them. If a good person harms a bad person they are still a good person. But if it turns out that the bad person was actually a good person, then the people that harmed them, those who participated in the pattern or system of harm are bad people. This is called persecution, and it’s very easy to gather the ignorant into and under a wave of such persecution.

To illustrate the philosophical weight of this situation, look at Albert Bandura’s Dehumanization Experiment in 1975, where participants were placed in rooms with red buttons that delivered electric shocks to a person or group in another room. I presume there were one-way mirrors between the two rooms.

Participants were told that people in the other room were either "nice," "neutral," or "animals."

Those who heard the "animal" label were more likely to administer stronger shocks.

A variation could have framed them as "criminals" instead of "animals."

This is the experiment we are in. The experimenters forgot to end the experiment, and I essentially discovered what was happening ten years after it started.

The people who spread rumors about me, hack me, and disrupt my life are assimilating themselves into the web of abuse that started in 2005, right after I met my now ex-wife. They’re easily collected as pawns on the chessboard of my personal nightmare, and though these people may be dreaming up something that isn’t real, I can’t seem to wake them up!

People who spread the rumor think they are being good people or protectors, but if they knew the truth, they’d realize that they have become abuser. Sometimes the difference between abuse and reponsability is a simple lie, but if a lie’s all it takes to turn good ones bad, then how good were they really?

These people think of themselves as good Samaritans, yet, because of their ignorance, they are joining a pattern of abuse that has persisted for more than a decade.

In the States, my cultural and ethnic background fits a certain stereotype. For some inexplicable reason, Islamophobic American media loves to talk about child marriage and associate it with Muslims. It’s baffling because I’ve met thousands of Muslims and their wives, and none of them are children. Regardless, I’m not a stereotype.

What I mentioned above, combined with the fact that I changed jobs multiple times and am in recovery, prompts people to fill in the gaps with their own imagination. It takes no effort at all for them to believe that I’m a predator. As long as they don’t know me, or understand how child protective services or the justice system in the United States works, they’re free to adopt the idea that fits their most intriguing fiction. They are easily led to see me as the monster, even though I’m a completely decent person who has served communities and given back for more than a decade.

I deal with a lot of loneliness because I’ve been shunned socially. I can’t interact authentically with most of my friends without risking that they’ll suffer the social penalties I have. Meanwhile, I’m the center of attention when I’m among strangers, which makes me feel uneasy. To top it off, there are a few people in my life who vehemently deny the foul play and try to convince me that I’m acting out of paranoia.

Whether people realize it or not, the purpose of this social ordeal is to try to kill me. Being shunned—a significant feature of my current condition—has killed people. Shunning produces a great deal of social stress, and prolonged stress leads to illness, including cardiac arrest. Isolation also causes depression, and if one is already prone to it, it could lead to suicide.

I think my spiritual work in mysticism, spirituality, and recovery has made me resilient and different from the typical person. I use a particular blend of intuition, strangeness, and humor to cope with my present infamy.

How a Mystic Responds

This next part is a little psychadelic and challenges our notions of reality and sanity. It’s not for everyone so it’s behind a paywall.