A Post-QANON World?
There was no Storm. So now what?
The Storm never came.
I am sure that many of us feel relieved after Biden’s inauguration. I know I do — even though I am no fan of the Democrats. During the Trump years, it felt like one’s sanity was under constant assault — that some new, more bizarre and horrible thing might happen at any moment.
Douglas Rushkoff coined the term “media virus” to describe how certain cultural memes seem to self-replicate as they swarm the collective Psyche. I found Trumpism to be slightly different. Trumpism was more like a media fungus, a mental disease spreading in all directions. The rancid growth of Trumpism revealed that American institutions and ideological constructs have rotted from within and are ready to collapse. Biden offers a temporary reprieve from the abyss of insanity opened by Trump, but nothing close to a resolution.
One side-effect of Biden entering office is that it has dealt a shocking blow to the QANON belief system which hypnotized so many people. According to this popular narrative, there was going to be the “Great Awakening” and the “Storm:” A military takeover before January 20th. Trump would remain in power as he ordered the arrest of something like 500,000 pedophiles and ritual Satanists among the ruling elites. This would include the Clintons, Obama, Tom Hanks, George Soros, and so on. In a bizarre twist, QANONers believed that this authoritarian coup was going to protect the Constitution and deal a death blow to the conspirators plotting a New World Order / One World / Chinese Communist takeover.
In the failure of QANON, I find resonances with the aftermath of “2012.” Many people anticipated some extraordinary transformation was going to happen on or near the date of December 21, 2012, the end of a 5,125 year Great Cycle, thirteen Baktuns of 394 years in the prophetic calendar of the classic Maya. Some writers certainly tried to cash in on this phenomenon, while others were genuinely concerned.
While my book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (2006), contributed to the fascination with the date, I never specified that anything in particular would happen on or around that time. In fact, I made a documentary with director Joao Amorim, 2012: Time for Change, released in 2010, where we saw the end of the Great Cycle as an opportunity for modern civilization to recognize the value of indigenous stewardship and Earth-based spirituality. We explored how humanity could make a rapid ecological transition involving mass implementation of permaculture, local currencies, and renewable energy systems.
In the long build-up to December 21, 2012, Graham Hancock published Fingerprints of the Gods, which argued that ancient civilizations around the world foresaw a massive ecological catastrophe — meteor shower or world-ending flood — coming at that time. From his mushroom journeys and study of the I Ching, Terence McKenna envisioned the Eschaton or Singularity as the end of what he called Time Wave Zero, and suggested we would collectively transcend the physical plane. Jose Arguelles believed we were going to mutate into a “post-technological” civilization, merging with the “Noosphere," the thought envelope around the Earth, at that precise juncture.
Some researchers theorized that the Earth would be hit by massive solar flares or undergo a sudden polar reversal that would take down our electricity grid, perhaps exactly at 11:11 on 12/21/12. Geoff Stray, a researcher from Glastonbury, wondered if these solar flares would unleash a flood of DMT in our pineal gland, leading to a new level of psychic awareness: a sudden, inescapable enlightenment for humanity. While Stray discussed this possibility with humor, many believed it was possible.
I learned a great deal from the 2012 phenomenon. I saw how easily people could delude themselves, become convinced of some extreme possibility, based on a distorted perception. In fact, I still believe that the end of the Long Count Calendar was a significant prophetic juncture. It seems clear that our world is undergoing a profound, accelerating transformation that has intensified since that time. I have sought to define this shift in recent essays. The transformation is taking a different form, in some ways, from anything we might have anticipated. But that also seems appropriate. The movie of consensus reality wouldn’t be very interesting if we could easily predict the outcome.
As a result of modern acculturation and a dualistic way of seeing the world that is built into the syntax of Western language, we tend to be very literal-minded. We are trained to seek hard evidence, immediate outcomes, and definitive proof. It is hard for people brought up in our society — even well-educated, intelligent people — to handle ambiguity, complexity, paradox, and other edge-spaces where something may not quite be or not be. We innately seek safety, security, and conviction. This influences how we think and what we believe.
With Trumpism and QANON, we have witnessed the terrifying process of cult formation happening on a massive scale. I have not studied the psychological mechanisms involved in the construction of a cult belief system in depth. I do know that it is extremely difficult to deprogram someone from a cult once they are in one. A cult belief structure wraps around the individual’s ego-based identity to the point where it becomes much easier to ignore all the inconsistencies and logical fallacies in the cult program than to surrender the belief structure which has become a primary source of comfort and security.
One friend of mine — a male peer who shares many similar interests — became a rabid QANON believer (or Q-rack head). When I asked him for evidence backing up his position, he sent me what I found to be a pathetic compendium of extremist Alt Right websites, nut job videos, and poorly made documentaries including anti-Semitic propaganda like The Fall of the Cabal. The Fall of the Cabal rehabilitates the Protocols of Zion, known to be fake, which the Nazis used to justify the Holocaust. Long ago, I edited and helped publish a book, The Open Source Everything Manifesto, by a former CIA operative, Robert Steele. Even post inauguration, Steele remains convinced that QANON is real and the Storm is coming.
Writing this, I admit I am still deeply troubled by this bizarre collapse of reason and coherence that has infected so many people in my circles and far beyond them. I don’t entirely understand it, perhaps because it can’t be understood: It is not logical or rational. The magnetic attraction of QANON and Trumpism has to do with something like the “feeling tone” of our civilization as a whole, which certainly cannot survive much longer in its current state due to the ecological mega-crisis it has unleashed, as well as its other internal contradictions.
One of the more pensive thinkers backing QANON was Martin Geddes, a British computer network analyst who was brought up as a Jehovah’s Witness. Geddes escaped from that religious cult as a child. As a result, he says he learned to be suspicious of ruling narratives and ideologies. There is much in Geddes’ analysis, as expressed in his book Open Your Mind to Change, that I sympathize with. Some of his work seems an honest attempt to see behind the curtain and understand the motivations of what he identifies as a psychopathic power elite. However, I find that Geddes made a tragic error in judgment when he jumped from analysis to promoting the QANON narrative, including the bizarre idea that Donald Trump was somehow a force for “the light,” fighting against Satanic baby-eating Neoliberals, the thirteen ruling families, and the controlling forces of the Deep State.
Geddes thinks that contemporary society is a dynamic expression of a long-term battle between a psychopathic ruling minority and a much larger population that the psychopath group have figured out how to control via economic, military, and ideological means. The world has been trapped in a debt-based system of servitude that is, he thinks, part of a master plan developed over thousands of years. According to Geddes, the three ingredients required to advance this malevolent agenda are: “hierarchical structures under the cruel control of psychopaths; hidden (occult) knowledge, curated by secret societies, to create persistent covert power; and processes of infiltration, infection and inversion to redirect the resources and energies of institutions, especially those of a spiritual or religious nature.” I find this analysis compelling. I explore similar ideas in my short book, Conspiranoia.
In Conspiranoia, I propose that one of the essential reasons for the mass popularity of QANON is that many people possess a very strong, even overwhelming intuition that there are hidden, occult forces manipulating our world from behind the scenes. This possibility is something that neither the mainstream media nor our academic institutions will seriously explore or even entertain. Therefore, it falls to alternative thinkers and pundits (David Wilcock, David Icke, etcetera) to speak about it and try to make sense of it. Unfortunately, these alternative thinkers lack rigor and precision. They often seem to be pandering to their audience, purveying whatever outlandish theories will generate an emotional response. In many sectors of the alternative community, there still seems to be a strong unconscious desire for a benevolent father figure who will save our situation. This unconscious desire fixated on Trump, the archetypal con man, who alternative thinkers like David Wilcock uncritically embraced.
I recently gave a talk on Rudolf Steiner (1861 - 1925), an extraordinary occult philosopher known for developing Waldorf Schools and Biodynamic Farming. According to Steiner, we need to separate our faculties of thinking, feeling, and willing so they no longer overlap or interfere with each other. This is difficult to do, and requires constant vigilance. How we feel about something and what we prefer as an outcome often shapes what we think and, eventually, what we believe. (In fact, as was brought to my attention again after my talk, Steiner himself had some awful beliefs about race, arguing for the spiritual superiority of Europeans. While this is terrible, I don’t think it invalidates all of Steiner’s ideas. All thinkers must be understood in the context of their time).
Despite his initial effort at intellectual rigor, Geddes — like various self-styled gurus falling under the new label of “conspirituality”— loses his ground. He haplessly confuses the faculties of thinking, feeling, and willing. This leads him to make unsupported claims and suppositions. Eventually, through a series of distortions, he ends up a QANON fanatic.
To take an example, Geddes writes: “The unacknowledged reality is that there is a spiritual war raging around us, and it can be seen in classical terms of light versus dark. The good news is that the light is winning, as it always eventually must. For however you describe and define it, the universe fundamentally is interconnected and seeks unity. Evil always collapses under its conceit that it can maintain separateness.” Such ideas are innately compelling. They mesh with the simplistic moral framework we have received from Christianity. Yet we cannot say we know for certain that the universe is organized in this way. It might also be the case that the universe works like this, but on a vast time-scale. Millions of Earth-like planets could end up under the cruelest form of domination for millennia, yet “the light” might still triumph eventually.
Conned by QANON, Geddes’ strong moral bias about the world and his yearning for there to be an immediate reckoning congealed into unshakeable conviction: “Over the next few months and years, there is going to be a Great Awakening as society comes to terms with some staggering and unexpected changes.” After that, his position disintegrated into paranoid shards. A month or so ago, after the election but before the inauguration, Geddes wrote: “Today, Biden voters are celebrating his being the media’s “President-elect” (hint: the media has no constitutional role in elections); the funding of his transition (hint: another sting operation); and Trump’s imminent departure from the White House (hint: he has planned this operation for decades and isn’t going anywhere)... There is absolutely no way that the US military would have spent years tangibly preparing us for this watershed event, including bringing Trump into the Presidency, only to allow assets of the Chinese Communist Party to (re)take control over the United States of America. It just isn’t happening.”
You may wonder why I find it worth the time to analyze a position that is now so self-evidently busted. One reason is that there are millions of QANONers still around. While some of them will find ways to retrench and stay in the cult — which threatens to turn into an American version of the Taliban — many of them must be seeking a new interpretative framework for understanding their world. That makes this moment an opportunity and an opening. I also think this is a chance to study how ideas and feelings morph into erroneous convictions which believers may act on, with severe consequences.
Personally, I would like to see QANON followers undergo a process of self-reflection, move away from delusions that feed populism and nationalism, and rally around the inherent economic injustice of the current system, finding common cause with the multitudes across the political spectrum who all want a better life.
Also, as I explore in Conspiranoia, I have sympathy for QANONers. I understand the frustration that people feel at strongly intuiting that there is a veil over the truth of our world, and hidden powers are manipulating us from behind the scenes. Geddes looks at several well-known CIA operations: Operation Paperclip, where thousands of Nazi scientists were secretly brought into the US and employed in research facilities; Operation Mockingbird, through which intelligence agencies infiltrated the mainstream media to control the information they disseminate; and Operation Northwoods, where the US Government showed it was willing to use “false flag" attacks to manipulate popular opinion. These cannot be called conspiracy theories, as the evidence is clear.
I agree with him that the US mass media is deeply compromised by intelligence agencies. Many examples reveal this. I think it most probable that 9/11 was an engineered false-flag event designed to give the US a mandate to access the strategic oil reserves of the Middle East through an invasion of Iraq. I also agree that psychopathic personality types rise to the top of our hierarchical control systems in government and business, and this is an extremely serious problem we must confront.
Trump was not a light warrior in disguise. He had no interest in exposing “Deep State” corruption — he was a beneficiary of that system. I agree with Sarah Kendzior, author of Hiding in Plain Sight and host of the Gaslit Nation podcast, that Trump was backed by a transnational crime syndicate, including Russian oligarchs seeking to crush and humiliate the United States. I suspect that those aspects of QANON which feed Far Right Neo-Fascism are part of a sophisticated Psy Op and disformation campaign.
The reason that QANON, as well as Trumpism, found fertile ground in the US was the failure of Neoliberal Democrats, such as Bill Clinton and Obama, to address the underlying problems of the US financial system while in power. As we will no doubt learn again, the Democrats Wealth inequality has increased exponentially as working class jobs disappear. Compared to European countries, US health care and public education are a travesty. Opportunity is shrinking in the US, as a small group of billionaires increase their wealth and power.
The histrionic projections of Satanism and cannibalism onto Obama and Clinton express the bitterness, frustration, and sense of betrayal felt by the voiceless masses against our corrupt, tone-deaf leadership. If QANONers can step back and realize they have been had — that Trump was never on their side, that both political parties work for the wealthy, seeking to thwart the interests of the people — we could see the birth of a new, unified social movement demanding meaningful change. In future newsletters, I will consider the kinds of change that I think are necessary.
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Hi Daniel,
I just received and read your piece “A Post QANON World,” and I was quite impressed with your analysis. Just as with the 2012 phenomenon, Q-Anon does tap into some deep intuition that we see only a fraction of what is going on, that we are subject to large-scale cosmic movements and other-than-natural systems of control, but somehow their interpretation of such structures then goes completely haywire, perhaps, as Steiner said, due to the scrambling of thinking, feeling and willing.
As you may remember, I was one of the main organizers for Evolver Boston from 2008 to 2013. While I am a firm believer in the existence of large-scale time cycles, I was always disturbed by the obsessive focus of group members on the 2012 date, which I saw as a kind of one-size-fits-all projection screen, or a balloon waiting to be popped. And sure enough, the group did dissolve shortly afterwards. (Luckily, many of the good writers, artists, and musicians that I met there continued to come to the bimonthly salons that my wife Deni and I organized up until the start of the pandemic.) From the time that I joined Evolver Boston, I had argued against our investing too much of our energy in any linear prediction, but the temptation was far too seductive for most members to resist. I would clutch my head and grit my teeth as people fantasized about grand, overlapping plans of “world transformation” while brushing aside all practical actions that could actually sustain the group and lead to hard accomplishments. My own vision was that that the group should define itself in terms of the explosive power of the seed, that we should, as the 1960s cliché went, “think globally but act locally.” This was, I think, the model for such groups as the Pythagorean Circle. Sadly, the local part proved all too difficult, and the global part proved easy but disastrous. I have been shocked to find how many Facebook friends that I once met through Evolver have drifted over to the hard right. Oh well. Enantiadromia. Can’t live with it. Can’t kill it.
In 2013, with the collapse of millennial expectations—once again, not mine—I set out to write a kind of autopsy, an exploration of time and of the difference between prophesy and prediction. I did a complete revision of the piece, “The Snare of Distance and the Sunglasses of the Seer,” over the summer. I thought that the essay might interest you. It’s attached.
In “A Post-QANON World,” you write,
"As a result of modern acculturation and a dualistic way of seeing the world that is built into the syntax of Western language, we tend to be very literal-minded. We are trained to seek hard evidence, immediate outcomes, and definitive proof. It is hard for people brought up in our society — even well-educated, intelligent people — to handle ambiguity, complexity, paradox, and other edge-spaces where something may not quite be or not be. We innately seek safety, security, and conviction. This influences how we think and what we believe."
I once said to author James Curcio that I tended to see Nazism as a failed art movement, in that it literalized archetypal forces that should have been expressed in the form of ritualized play. We have just seen a similar thing with Q-Anon. While, on some abstract level, I am grateful to them for lifting the contents of the Underworld into full daylit visibility, I am horrified by the utter stupidity of the way these contents were expressed. While I do not in any way discount the idea that there are powerful archetypal forces at work behind the scenes (as well as political arrangements that lead to the steady consolidation of wealth and power), most conspiratorial thinking tends to take a childlike form, which can be broken down as follows:
1. I am an innocent victim, with no dark impulses. I only want what is best for the world.
2. A global elite possessed of occult knowledge is responsible for all of the evil in the world. They are evil in their evilness. The extent of their power and knowledge is too vast to even comprehend, but I can piece together the small but damning details that show how mischievous they are. Did so and so A’s cousin eat at the same restaurant as so and so B on September, 14th, 1987? Aha! You can see how it all fits.
3. I am very special. I am not a “sheeple.” I am one of the chosen few who see through their deceptions, who has begun to disentangle the threads of this vast conspiracy. Let these rulers tremble, for it is I who will sow the seeds of their destruction!
Or, to simplify: The self is good. The other is bad. The self is here. The other is over there. This type of thinking violates one of my key principles: All genuine vision must proceed from the integration of the Shadow. We are part of the world body, and we can’t come to terms with our actions if we separate them from the context of the whole. If we define ourselves as victims, as beings who are only good, then we will tend to see the movement of archetypal presences and forces—even benevolent ones—as a threat, or else to divide them along purely tribal lines. (In Hollywood movies, for example, supernatural forces are most often seen as demonic.) If we see the self as a point on a continuum, however, if the self exists in a multitude of locations—both on physical and subtle planes—then what first appears to be a threat then presents itself as an opportunity for knowledge, as a lesson that we have not bothered to learn.
Over the past two weeks, I’ve been revising a piece called “Anonymous, and His International Fame”—again a piece started in 2013, no relation to the Anonymous of Q-Anon—which plays with the idea of “planetary rulers” without falling into any hard and fast oppositions. This is the first section of the essay.
Part one
Genetic engineering of the planetary rulers has projected each subject’s shadow as a hex, as a door that none should open, as a gulf that none should cross. All attempts at purification are shaped like a figure eight. We are not natural. Our powers are congested. If we were to add up all of the experiences that define us, we would note, upon closer scrutiny, that it is always the key element that is missing. Why do people we do not know dare to occupy our homes? They do not dress well. We must hurt them. An archaic wound pursues us like the voice of superconsciousness.
From the end of the last ice age, when what were first small streams broke through the dams of the Himalayas, when whales were stranded on the Andes, when ships crashed on the sky, Earth’s rulers have agreed to play the role of our absent yet somehow abusive guides, and to model, in the mists of our imaginations, those behaviors we would do well to avoid. If they have set up signs and left us rules for their interpretation, we might, in the end, perceive such help to be a threat. If, however, the self exists in a multitude of locations, then what haunts us may be the lesson that we have not bothered to learn.
For what harms can heal. What does not kill us can potentially make us stronger, unless, as with Nietzsche, it strips us of our identity altogether. True harmony is disjunctive. We know that evil exists. We know the top 28 people hold as much wealth as the bottom three and one half billion. Trauma? Whose fault is that? We are fetuses. We are innocent. You can see how happily we kick against our wombs. It is said that the spheres make music.
Earth’s rulers would prefer to rule, for that is the role to which their memories have assigned them. This leads them to see the destruction of an ocean in the light of a bigger picture. In terms of vision, it is only practical that I not attribute too much virtue to myself, that I not be quick to accuse. I have benefited as much as anyone from the extraction of rare elements, such as tantalum, from the Congo. I wear socks manufactured by starving children in Bangladesh. I keep my milk in a refrigerator, thus adding to the spread of HFCs and helping to push Earth’s temperature towards the point of no return. Like the rulers who have conspired to take away my breath, I am also very old, what did not kill me has made me stronger but less sane, and my relationship to the living has grown steadily more ambivalent.
I have taken what I need. I fear no unseen hand, and I do not need to be liberated. Able finally to act as a good parent to the child that I was, and am, I am intent on making use of every scrap of my experience. The years now rearrange themselves, permitting me to wander through each period of my development. Time turns into horizontal space, as though the future and the past were no more than the handicapped-accessible rooms of a museum.
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Untimely Books will be publishing my book of essays Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence sometime over the next few months. If you have a chance, perhaps you could let me know of any podcasts that might be good for me to do.
Keep up the good work.
Best wishes,
Brian George
Excellent article Daniel. I find your clear-headed and grounded analysis refreshing. Have you read Paul Levy’s Book, Dispelling Wetiko? Its conceptual framework of a mind virus which haunts and distorts our reality seems to be another important articulation on how to find our way into greater discernment and clarity. Thanks so much for your work. I will subscribing.