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.
__
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.
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.
Thank you Daniel. It is harder than ever to tread this middle ground of complexity and ambiguity; the construction of narratives which seem to offer to explain the deep wrongness in the world, and the truths we are told about it, finds itself at every corner of the political and spiritual field. These are some thoughts on the psychology of conspiracy theories in general.
I absolutely agree that the ways our conditioning lends almost all its weight to the objective and the proven, and orients us to look for causes rather than effects, can be a very big problem.
So diffuse, complex, system-wide, emergent qualities are hard to deal with. We are not trained to look for them - it is far simpler to create a basic causal explanation. Imagining a small group of distant people, and concentrating all the power of the whole system in their hands, and all its badness in their evil intention, creates a sense of relief. As knowledge=control/power=safety. Even more so, when the narrative includes the idea that they don't want you to know... It is also, of course, a relief to have the problem taken out of one's own hands. These people are so powerful that despite my knowledge, it's not my fault if...
This is also the same pattern of projection of shadow fear and uncertainty onto another, that can result in Holocaust, slavery, nationalism, hatred of every sort. If this process helps assuage that pain, it is only illusory or temporary. Indeed, it can create a feedback loop whereby ever more fuel is needed, to draw ever more oxygen into the fire, ever more fervour to project outwards.
Satan, in the original Hebrew, meant adversary. In a way, the ultimate projection of our own deepest shadow...
One big problem I see is that this process of literalisation can distract from some harder to grasp aspects of the situation, which are more hidden, harder to express, and more vulnerable to manipulation. Most widely, I believe, is that we are all to some extent implicated in the complex web of the system, in one way or another we are all party to imbalance and abuse, as well as its victims. Perhaps simply by neglect. Perhaps we have been duped into giving our consent for this, without ever realising. Some deep part of us probably does though!
That these subtler, perhaps more subjective things are harder to express - that our culture, conditioning, and language give so much more validity to the objective - can lead to a massive devaluation of our own sense of truth and reality. Validation, of truth and of ourselves, can only really happen with authority (is the tendency towards seeking and imagining intention a reflection of a conditioned need for powerful parent figures/god controlling the universe?). Many people feel this, in many ways. Yet without the culture or language to see it, let alone express it, the disturbed and threatened emotion finds the only way out that has any weight - fact, objective truth, causal narratives. These don't actually track fully to the inner motivation, which I believe contributes to even more anger expressing itself. And of course, as 'facts' can be found to support anything, we are often left with opposing sides throwing opposing facts at each other, not just stuck in a binary system but perpetuating it. All the stress, itself highly addictive, helps keep all this energy in this level of reality, in which we are trained to constantly project everything uncomfortable outwards, so never have the resources we need to go inwards when it's necessary.
(I wonder whether on some level, choosing to engage in these head-on, stiff, brittle conflicts, might involve the unconscious desire that they stay unresolved?)
When binary truth is the basis for an alternative view, it can be a distraction. Simply illustrated - Chem-trails: whether anybody is deliberately intending to do this or not, does it matter? When all the pollution of our constant normalized travel is something we ourselves are responsible for, yet have done such a good job of hiding from ourselves. Likewise constantly plugging in to all these mediated modes of brain-control. 5G: some studies show it's physically harmful, others the opposite. Because we never kicked up a stink about any of the previous G's, and we're all fairly ok with 4G really, we feel we're not allowed to simply draw a line and say in fact, we don't want or need more connectivity. That is what is harmful, mentally, psychologically, spiritually. Also, that we have no say in the disposition of the space we share, that the vibrations of the air itself belong to the highest bidder.
I often feel the one issue underlying all these theories is the absolute necessity of reclaiming reality from the monopoly those in power have developed over the millenia. This is vital on the individual, communal, and planetary level; yet in order to do it, we have to go outside the reality we've been brought up with, and find tools not based in that reality.
And of course, none of this is to say that there aren't also, simultaneously, people deliberately conspiring to do these things, obscured by both the murkiness and complexity of the system, and possibly also by overly-simplistic conspiracy narratives. Or that some of the narratives are also right. The skill of discernment, as you say, between thinking, feeling, desiring, and denying, is sorely lacking in our world. We could all do with a bit more systems thinking too...
Mr. Pinchbeck, must I remind you that QAnon is not a political movement, as much as it is a form of mass insanity? (I suggest you read The Devils of Loudun, by Aldous Huxley, if you don't have a clear idea of what that means.) Your notion that QAnon believers are capable of the kind of "self-reflection" you talk about, is incredibly naive, for someone of your intelligence. These people aren't just badly mistaken, they are suffering from pathological, paranoid delusions. A rational argument between peers is not possible with them, as long as they act as a group, and as long as each individual believer cannot acknowledge that they are coming from a place of traumatic suffering, that has nothing to do with politics. Only a psychological approach can help them. The flagrantly-obvious, key theme in this delusive fantasy is an obsession with pedophelia, and other forms of severe child abuse. I would wager any amount of money that the vast majority of these individuals have experienced some form of severe traumatic abuse in their own childhood, which is either totally unconscious, or has been disguised, in the form of projection onto the world. As long as they are unwilling to at least look at the nature of their suffering, the only thing that can be done is to deliberately marginalize the movement, and put individuals in jail if they break the law — which a significant portion of this cult say they are willing to do, including violent acts.
My guess is that only when they see that their life is falling apart in many ways, and that it's connected with the time they spend in the game, will they begin to ask the right questions about their suffering, instead of looking at world events for clues.
Very interesting link! But it only reinforces my contention that these people are driven by unconscious trauma, which is evoked by the pedophelia meme. What else but keeps them playing such a silly game? Jim Stewartson offers no explanation of this. No un-traumatized person has any motivation for remaining there for as long as they do. The game may well be influenced by Russians, but without the pedophelia meme, it would have fallen apart long ago.
I agree that the power of QANON feeds on sexual repression and distortions of sex energy that are endemic in our society. However I don't think that it follows that the vast majority of the 30 million who are in the QANON field to some extent are victims of devastating childhood trauma. I think people are more brittle than we think and can be inflicted with mind shadows at any age. The psychological conditioning of QANON, as Stewartson talks about, actually creates trauma-response in the individual as part of the indoctrination. I think deconditioning, deprogramming, is possible for many. Not that it is an easy task.
But as I keep trying to express, their are reasons that people have such a strong intuition that they have invisible enemies... the energy of QANON could be re-directed toward this.
I disagree. Such "redirection" will sooner or later result in another "us vs. them" conspiracy theory (in the pejorative sense), as long as these people (or any people, for that matter) deny their own shadows. Shadow-denial, both individual and collective, is what Trumpism is all about, from the word Go. In my opinion, the only conspiracies we really need to address are those which are quite obvious to anyone who has read and understood the analyses of thinkers such as Noam Chomsky, for example. I'm not saying I agree with everything Chomsky says (he neglects the spiritual aspect of reality, for example), but I agree with his fundamental critique of conspiracist reasoning.
We don't need "conspiracy theory" to see how power is operating in the world today. The tech billionaires whose wealth has skyrocketed because of the pandemic. Karl Schwab starts the new virtual WEF conf with an address from Xi Jinping. Etc. The effort is to go from gamified conspiracy theory to sensible evidence based analysis which is enough to create the basis for a legitimate global insurrection. The travesty of health care and personal debt in the US, while the financial elite grow exponentially wealthier. All people need is to reflect on what is being done to them.
Exactly, Daniel! I confess, I'm relieved to hear you say that. I obviously misunderstood, when I thought you were hoping to rationally “re-direct” the arguments of deeply paranoid people. What you say now is very close to what Chomsky has been saying for decades, about the waste of energy (at BEST) when otherwise well-balanced and intelligent dissenters (which rules out Q-Anons and their ilk) start getting fascinated, and then obsessed by conspiracies. However, the weakness in Chomsky that I see (and I surmise you might agree with me here...) is his near-total neglect of the psycho-spiritual dimensions. He, and many intellectuals like him, seem to think that institutional analysis is sufficient, and that deep psychological insight (never mind spiritual...) is of secondary importance, at best — if I’m not mistaken, Noam even said that once, pretty much… Anyway, he’s mistaken, as are all the Progressives who think like this. The psychic and spiritual aspects are crucially important, if we are to understand what makes Americans, especially, so resistant to 1) acknowledging our huge national Shadow (as many European countries have begun to do), with regard to our history, right up to recent times; and 2) acknowledging the corrupt, oligarchical nature of the “1%” that rules our economy and our government, through the corporate stranglehold on both of them. I don’t want to ramble too much here, so I’ll try to sum it all up with a personal anecdote, which reveals much of this psychological problem revolving around our collective Shadow: A few years ago, I spoke to a relative of mine — a very intelligent, well-educated woman, who began to vote (and worse, think) Republican a decade or so ago. When she accused me of being an “America-hater”, I was inspired to turn the tables: “No. Not only am I not an America-hater — my love for it is realer and deeper than yours. You cannot bear to face America’s Shadow, as I do. You, and your fellow right-wingers, cannot imagine how it is possible to face the full horror of that Shadow, and the crimes it has committed ... and yet, still love this land, and keep faith in the potential it represents. You speak for the America of Reagan, Bush, and their ilk. I speak for the America of Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, and Mark Twain."
So much good info here. One thing that I ran across in the early 2000s is that the original definition of "meme" is what you are describing. It came out of Richard Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene. I watched with great annoyance when the term was beginning to be applied to cat videos because the real definition is quite frightening. The phenomenon had been discussed quite a bit at mimetics conferences in the late 90s and those geneticists had begun to observe and write about how religion especially embodied the thought virus traits. It's like that information is gone from the dialogue now. That is the real conspiracy in my opinion--yes, wetiko, wendigo, etc.. So yes, that's the real epidemic and it's been like a slow train wreck to watch for me.
I had 2 semesters of Russian history way back in the early 90s with a wonderful professor and I recognized the pattern immediately of the Russian coup d etat immediately in the 2016 election. This is just education.
Then there are the current Nazis coming out of the woodwork, being tools. I tried to talk people that America was under threat post 2016 election. Before Q was born I was warning on FB about the brewing domestic terrorism and that it was no different from ISIL. This current event was no surprise for the FBI. I agree that the original Nazis were super into theatre! That is after all, the origin of theatre, the Eleusian mystery plays and the process of many modern and postmodern pagan religions, like the Order of the Golden Dawn.
The trend of terrorism rising correlative to the addiction to "the screen" was predicted by Beaudrillard, who incidentally was the inspiration for the Matrix. (I say this because one of his books is the book that Neo pulls off the shelf that is his hiding place for the hacked code at the beginning of the first film.)
Magickal practices: I tried to tell people about the super creepy Kek phenomenon that emerged on 4chan initially. It indicated the influence of the dangerous new practice of Chaos Magick and the power of the internet as channel and a tool for the exploitation of symbols and archetype to manipulate and constellate power. As to the theatre macabre of what was going on on Jeffrey Epstein's island, I don't think we have to view that as unverified conspiracy stuff now.
I observe, as you have, that there are several common facets and traits to the conspiranoia phenomenon. I have studied and drilled deep into the culture, and my own psyche, and am just now really feeling the pieces coming together in the context of my own journey in the labyrinth at age 58.
Here are a few more related points to mention:
People are immensely disconnected internally and from each other as they experience the hyperreal of the screen more and more. Terrorism pulls people back to "the real" from the hyperreal, which they are addicted to but subconsciously know is not "real." The disconnect from the Universe/Cosmos, Nature and Soul in the predominant story of the West results in devolution towards extremes of polarization and the Wasteland. This begins much earlier than most people realize in our trajectory as a species. Probably pre-Hellenic from what I am finding in my research. ( This is my current project.)
The devolution creates a nihilistic drive and a urobouric path back to what is essential for survival. The loss of or diversion from frontal lobe connections over-activates the primitive survival mode that "sees" and thus recreates its world (as we are always creating). However, it attempts to recreate a world sans the connectivity to the cosmos/universe that we see expressed in paleo and neolithic art. It creates a world of suffering and sacrifice, which the pagan world that we know of perhaps had already devolved into. We barely have glimpses of our true past, of our deep ancestors' world view and their holism. We do surmise from the archeological record that a shift happened on a global scale around 40000 years ago with the symbolic art. The beauty of it is that these are our ancestors and we carry them with us. We can be connected and whole so there is hope for recovery of the Wasteland that we have created. We have to retrieve our real story and our real lives beyond our personas and belief in the false narratives of the cosmic story as a great war that never ends. I believe this narrative began with the Crusades as a branch of the Good/Evil polarity that had already been cultivated and nurtured by BOTH the medieval Church AND Islam. Our world is the result of that story because we are expressing the creative energy of the Big Bang EVERY DAY. We have to understand that our stories matter.
Daniel, As usual from you, this is brilliantly written and thought provoking. It also, in my estimation, skips over or ignores the obvious, “real” explanation for our self-destructive, cruel, drastically unfair and unhinged system — namely, predatory capitalism
Capitalism, though its modern, most virulent form originated with the birth of the Industrial Revolution, goes back thousands of years. It is patriarchal in nature. One does not need an occult conspiracy of any kind, however emotionally attractive that might be, to account for its effects. For example, when all kinds of white supremacist hogwash is cleared away, the basis for the slave trade — for seeing other people as sub-human — was the profit motive.
As I’ve said to you before, I believe that yes the very nature of capitalism will definitely allow for like-minded winners to form alliances and dominate, but it will not allow for a conspiracy of the sort all kinds of people from one end of the “mental” spectrum to the other seem to need
Why no grand, planet-wide conspiracy? Because by nature capitalists are sunk in winner take all competition, in unrelieved aggressive fixation. They don’t trust one another. They do not have each other’s back
In fact, what’s missing from them and also from the rest of us is true community. Community as it existed for hundreds of thousands of years in various tribal iterations before the takeover of the profit motive regardless of the consequences. For which we are now paying the price, no matter what theories we spin out in books
(And by the way, I just emailed you a Vice article on the latest Q turn toward the “sovereign nation” movement. They’re not going anywhere. However gullible we are when we fall in love, much more so are we when we fall in hate
Ultimately, I would say humanity took a wrong turn a long time ago into a whirlpool of deranged ego supremacy and greed and is, when all its current manifestations are weighed together, certifiably insane)
As usual from you, this is brilliantly written and thought provoking. It also, in my estimation, skips over or ignores the obvious, “real” explanation for our self-destructive, cruel, drastically unfair and unhinged system — namely, predatory capitalism
Capitalism, though its modern, most virulent form originated with the birth of the Industrial Revolution, goes back thousands of years. It is patriarchal in nature. One does not need an occult conspiracy of any kind, however emotionally attractive that might be, to account for its effects. For example, when all kinds of white supremacist hogwash is cleared away, the basis for the slave trade — for seeing other people as sub-human — was the profit motive.
As I’ve said to you before, I believe that yes the very nature of capitalism will definitely allow for like-minded winners to form alliances and dominate, but it will not allow for a conspiracy of the sort all kinds of people from one end of the “mental” spectrum to the other seem to need
Why no grand, planet-wide conspiracy? Because by nature capitalists are sunk in winner take all competition, in unrelieved aggressive fixation. They don’t trust one another. They do not have each other’s back
In fact, what’s missing from them and also from the rest of us is true community. Community as it existed for hundreds of thousands of years in various tribal iterations before the takeover of the profit motive regardless of the consequences. For which we are now paying the price, no matter what theories we spin out in books
(And by the way, I just emailed you a Vice article on the latest Q turn toward the “sovereign nation” movement. They’re not going anywhere. However gullible we are when we fall in love, much more so are we when we fall in hate
Ultimately, I would say humanity took a wrong turn a long time ago into a whirlpool of deranged ego supremacy and greed and is, when all its current manifestations are weighed together, certifiably insane)
Hi Geoff, I am honestly sorry and offer an apology. That was how I remembered it but my memory may be wrong. I will try to rephrase the article. Thanks for writing.
I accidentally deleted the message to which Daniel has replied below (while editing my second post), so repeat it here as accurately as I can: "Sorry readers, but Daniel has sunk to the level of gutter journalism with this article, by telling a blatant lie and telling it loudly. There were many theories that were chewed over in the book Beyond 2012 – and the one Daniel mentions was actually my favourite – but I didn’t predict that it would definitely happen – and certainly not at 11.11 on 21 December 2012 (though I did uncover the fact that the winter solstice would occur exactly at that time according to the US Naval Observatory). The bigger lie is that, according to Daniel, I have since admitted to being “embarrassed and ashamed” about a promoted but failed prophecy. Not only have I never said that but I am NOT embarrassed OR ashamed. So, Daniel, what is the source of this gossip? Your imagination? Surely not revenge for a bad book review of 13 years ago?" http://www.diagnosis2012.co.uk/pinch.htm
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.
Thank you Daniel. It is harder than ever to tread this middle ground of complexity and ambiguity; the construction of narratives which seem to offer to explain the deep wrongness in the world, and the truths we are told about it, finds itself at every corner of the political and spiritual field. These are some thoughts on the psychology of conspiracy theories in general.
I absolutely agree that the ways our conditioning lends almost all its weight to the objective and the proven, and orients us to look for causes rather than effects, can be a very big problem.
So diffuse, complex, system-wide, emergent qualities are hard to deal with. We are not trained to look for them - it is far simpler to create a basic causal explanation. Imagining a small group of distant people, and concentrating all the power of the whole system in their hands, and all its badness in their evil intention, creates a sense of relief. As knowledge=control/power=safety. Even more so, when the narrative includes the idea that they don't want you to know... It is also, of course, a relief to have the problem taken out of one's own hands. These people are so powerful that despite my knowledge, it's not my fault if...
This is also the same pattern of projection of shadow fear and uncertainty onto another, that can result in Holocaust, slavery, nationalism, hatred of every sort. If this process helps assuage that pain, it is only illusory or temporary. Indeed, it can create a feedback loop whereby ever more fuel is needed, to draw ever more oxygen into the fire, ever more fervour to project outwards.
Satan, in the original Hebrew, meant adversary. In a way, the ultimate projection of our own deepest shadow...
One big problem I see is that this process of literalisation can distract from some harder to grasp aspects of the situation, which are more hidden, harder to express, and more vulnerable to manipulation. Most widely, I believe, is that we are all to some extent implicated in the complex web of the system, in one way or another we are all party to imbalance and abuse, as well as its victims. Perhaps simply by neglect. Perhaps we have been duped into giving our consent for this, without ever realising. Some deep part of us probably does though!
That these subtler, perhaps more subjective things are harder to express - that our culture, conditioning, and language give so much more validity to the objective - can lead to a massive devaluation of our own sense of truth and reality. Validation, of truth and of ourselves, can only really happen with authority (is the tendency towards seeking and imagining intention a reflection of a conditioned need for powerful parent figures/god controlling the universe?). Many people feel this, in many ways. Yet without the culture or language to see it, let alone express it, the disturbed and threatened emotion finds the only way out that has any weight - fact, objective truth, causal narratives. These don't actually track fully to the inner motivation, which I believe contributes to even more anger expressing itself. And of course, as 'facts' can be found to support anything, we are often left with opposing sides throwing opposing facts at each other, not just stuck in a binary system but perpetuating it. All the stress, itself highly addictive, helps keep all this energy in this level of reality, in which we are trained to constantly project everything uncomfortable outwards, so never have the resources we need to go inwards when it's necessary.
(I wonder whether on some level, choosing to engage in these head-on, stiff, brittle conflicts, might involve the unconscious desire that they stay unresolved?)
When binary truth is the basis for an alternative view, it can be a distraction. Simply illustrated - Chem-trails: whether anybody is deliberately intending to do this or not, does it matter? When all the pollution of our constant normalized travel is something we ourselves are responsible for, yet have done such a good job of hiding from ourselves. Likewise constantly plugging in to all these mediated modes of brain-control. 5G: some studies show it's physically harmful, others the opposite. Because we never kicked up a stink about any of the previous G's, and we're all fairly ok with 4G really, we feel we're not allowed to simply draw a line and say in fact, we don't want or need more connectivity. That is what is harmful, mentally, psychologically, spiritually. Also, that we have no say in the disposition of the space we share, that the vibrations of the air itself belong to the highest bidder.
I often feel the one issue underlying all these theories is the absolute necessity of reclaiming reality from the monopoly those in power have developed over the millenia. This is vital on the individual, communal, and planetary level; yet in order to do it, we have to go outside the reality we've been brought up with, and find tools not based in that reality.
And of course, none of this is to say that there aren't also, simultaneously, people deliberately conspiring to do these things, obscured by both the murkiness and complexity of the system, and possibly also by overly-simplistic conspiracy narratives. Or that some of the narratives are also right. The skill of discernment, as you say, between thinking, feeling, desiring, and denying, is sorely lacking in our world. We could all do with a bit more systems thinking too...
Parsifal
Mr. Pinchbeck, must I remind you that QAnon is not a political movement, as much as it is a form of mass insanity? (I suggest you read The Devils of Loudun, by Aldous Huxley, if you don't have a clear idea of what that means.) Your notion that QAnon believers are capable of the kind of "self-reflection" you talk about, is incredibly naive, for someone of your intelligence. These people aren't just badly mistaken, they are suffering from pathological, paranoid delusions. A rational argument between peers is not possible with them, as long as they act as a group, and as long as each individual believer cannot acknowledge that they are coming from a place of traumatic suffering, that has nothing to do with politics. Only a psychological approach can help them. The flagrantly-obvious, key theme in this delusive fantasy is an obsession with pedophelia, and other forms of severe child abuse. I would wager any amount of money that the vast majority of these individuals have experienced some form of severe traumatic abuse in their own childhood, which is either totally unconscious, or has been disguised, in the form of projection onto the world. As long as they are unwilling to at least look at the nature of their suffering, the only thing that can be done is to deliberately marginalize the movement, and put individuals in jail if they break the law — which a significant portion of this cult say they are willing to do, including violent acts.
I think it was a carefully engineered Psy Op. This article is quite good: https://link.medium.com/L9pUOuTlodb
Whether or not people can escape from it is an interesting question.
My guess is that only when they see that their life is falling apart in many ways, and that it's connected with the time they spend in the game, will they begin to ask the right questions about their suffering, instead of looking at world events for clues.
Very interesting link! But it only reinforces my contention that these people are driven by unconscious trauma, which is evoked by the pedophelia meme. What else but keeps them playing such a silly game? Jim Stewartson offers no explanation of this. No un-traumatized person has any motivation for remaining there for as long as they do. The game may well be influenced by Russians, but without the pedophelia meme, it would have fallen apart long ago.
I agree that the power of QANON feeds on sexual repression and distortions of sex energy that are endemic in our society. However I don't think that it follows that the vast majority of the 30 million who are in the QANON field to some extent are victims of devastating childhood trauma. I think people are more brittle than we think and can be inflicted with mind shadows at any age. The psychological conditioning of QANON, as Stewartson talks about, actually creates trauma-response in the individual as part of the indoctrination. I think deconditioning, deprogramming, is possible for many. Not that it is an easy task.
But as I keep trying to express, their are reasons that people have such a strong intuition that they have invisible enemies... the energy of QANON could be re-directed toward this.
I disagree. Such "redirection" will sooner or later result in another "us vs. them" conspiracy theory (in the pejorative sense), as long as these people (or any people, for that matter) deny their own shadows. Shadow-denial, both individual and collective, is what Trumpism is all about, from the word Go. In my opinion, the only conspiracies we really need to address are those which are quite obvious to anyone who has read and understood the analyses of thinkers such as Noam Chomsky, for example. I'm not saying I agree with everything Chomsky says (he neglects the spiritual aspect of reality, for example), but I agree with his fundamental critique of conspiracist reasoning.
We don't need "conspiracy theory" to see how power is operating in the world today. The tech billionaires whose wealth has skyrocketed because of the pandemic. Karl Schwab starts the new virtual WEF conf with an address from Xi Jinping. Etc. The effort is to go from gamified conspiracy theory to sensible evidence based analysis which is enough to create the basis for a legitimate global insurrection. The travesty of health care and personal debt in the US, while the financial elite grow exponentially wealthier. All people need is to reflect on what is being done to them.
Exactly, Daniel! I confess, I'm relieved to hear you say that. I obviously misunderstood, when I thought you were hoping to rationally “re-direct” the arguments of deeply paranoid people. What you say now is very close to what Chomsky has been saying for decades, about the waste of energy (at BEST) when otherwise well-balanced and intelligent dissenters (which rules out Q-Anons and their ilk) start getting fascinated, and then obsessed by conspiracies. However, the weakness in Chomsky that I see (and I surmise you might agree with me here...) is his near-total neglect of the psycho-spiritual dimensions. He, and many intellectuals like him, seem to think that institutional analysis is sufficient, and that deep psychological insight (never mind spiritual...) is of secondary importance, at best — if I’m not mistaken, Noam even said that once, pretty much… Anyway, he’s mistaken, as are all the Progressives who think like this. The psychic and spiritual aspects are crucially important, if we are to understand what makes Americans, especially, so resistant to 1) acknowledging our huge national Shadow (as many European countries have begun to do), with regard to our history, right up to recent times; and 2) acknowledging the corrupt, oligarchical nature of the “1%” that rules our economy and our government, through the corporate stranglehold on both of them. I don’t want to ramble too much here, so I’ll try to sum it all up with a personal anecdote, which reveals much of this psychological problem revolving around our collective Shadow: A few years ago, I spoke to a relative of mine — a very intelligent, well-educated woman, who began to vote (and worse, think) Republican a decade or so ago. When she accused me of being an “America-hater”, I was inspired to turn the tables: “No. Not only am I not an America-hater — my love for it is realer and deeper than yours. You cannot bear to face America’s Shadow, as I do. You, and your fellow right-wingers, cannot imagine how it is possible to face the full horror of that Shadow, and the crimes it has committed ... and yet, still love this land, and keep faith in the potential it represents. You speak for the America of Reagan, Bush, and their ilk. I speak for the America of Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, and Mark Twain."
So much good info here. One thing that I ran across in the early 2000s is that the original definition of "meme" is what you are describing. It came out of Richard Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene. I watched with great annoyance when the term was beginning to be applied to cat videos because the real definition is quite frightening. The phenomenon had been discussed quite a bit at mimetics conferences in the late 90s and those geneticists had begun to observe and write about how religion especially embodied the thought virus traits. It's like that information is gone from the dialogue now. That is the real conspiracy in my opinion--yes, wetiko, wendigo, etc.. So yes, that's the real epidemic and it's been like a slow train wreck to watch for me.
I had 2 semesters of Russian history way back in the early 90s with a wonderful professor and I recognized the pattern immediately of the Russian coup d etat immediately in the 2016 election. This is just education.
Then there are the current Nazis coming out of the woodwork, being tools. I tried to talk people that America was under threat post 2016 election. Before Q was born I was warning on FB about the brewing domestic terrorism and that it was no different from ISIL. This current event was no surprise for the FBI. I agree that the original Nazis were super into theatre! That is after all, the origin of theatre, the Eleusian mystery plays and the process of many modern and postmodern pagan religions, like the Order of the Golden Dawn.
The trend of terrorism rising correlative to the addiction to "the screen" was predicted by Beaudrillard, who incidentally was the inspiration for the Matrix. (I say this because one of his books is the book that Neo pulls off the shelf that is his hiding place for the hacked code at the beginning of the first film.)
Magickal practices: I tried to tell people about the super creepy Kek phenomenon that emerged on 4chan initially. It indicated the influence of the dangerous new practice of Chaos Magick and the power of the internet as channel and a tool for the exploitation of symbols and archetype to manipulate and constellate power. As to the theatre macabre of what was going on on Jeffrey Epstein's island, I don't think we have to view that as unverified conspiracy stuff now.
I observe, as you have, that there are several common facets and traits to the conspiranoia phenomenon. I have studied and drilled deep into the culture, and my own psyche, and am just now really feeling the pieces coming together in the context of my own journey in the labyrinth at age 58.
Here are a few more related points to mention:
People are immensely disconnected internally and from each other as they experience the hyperreal of the screen more and more. Terrorism pulls people back to "the real" from the hyperreal, which they are addicted to but subconsciously know is not "real." The disconnect from the Universe/Cosmos, Nature and Soul in the predominant story of the West results in devolution towards extremes of polarization and the Wasteland. This begins much earlier than most people realize in our trajectory as a species. Probably pre-Hellenic from what I am finding in my research. ( This is my current project.)
The devolution creates a nihilistic drive and a urobouric path back to what is essential for survival. The loss of or diversion from frontal lobe connections over-activates the primitive survival mode that "sees" and thus recreates its world (as we are always creating). However, it attempts to recreate a world sans the connectivity to the cosmos/universe that we see expressed in paleo and neolithic art. It creates a world of suffering and sacrifice, which the pagan world that we know of perhaps had already devolved into. We barely have glimpses of our true past, of our deep ancestors' world view and their holism. We do surmise from the archeological record that a shift happened on a global scale around 40000 years ago with the symbolic art. The beauty of it is that these are our ancestors and we carry them with us. We can be connected and whole so there is hope for recovery of the Wasteland that we have created. We have to retrieve our real story and our real lives beyond our personas and belief in the false narratives of the cosmic story as a great war that never ends. I believe this narrative began with the Crusades as a branch of the Good/Evil polarity that had already been cultivated and nurtured by BOTH the medieval Church AND Islam. Our world is the result of that story because we are expressing the creative energy of the Big Bang EVERY DAY. We have to understand that our stories matter.
Michael Brownstein <michaelbrownstein777@gmail.com> wrote:
Daniel, As usual from you, this is brilliantly written and thought provoking. It also, in my estimation, skips over or ignores the obvious, “real” explanation for our self-destructive, cruel, drastically unfair and unhinged system — namely, predatory capitalism
Capitalism, though its modern, most virulent form originated with the birth of the Industrial Revolution, goes back thousands of years. It is patriarchal in nature. One does not need an occult conspiracy of any kind, however emotionally attractive that might be, to account for its effects. For example, when all kinds of white supremacist hogwash is cleared away, the basis for the slave trade — for seeing other people as sub-human — was the profit motive.
As I’ve said to you before, I believe that yes the very nature of capitalism will definitely allow for like-minded winners to form alliances and dominate, but it will not allow for a conspiracy of the sort all kinds of people from one end of the “mental” spectrum to the other seem to need
Why no grand, planet-wide conspiracy? Because by nature capitalists are sunk in winner take all competition, in unrelieved aggressive fixation. They don’t trust one another. They do not have each other’s back
In fact, what’s missing from them and also from the rest of us is true community. Community as it existed for hundreds of thousands of years in various tribal iterations before the takeover of the profit motive regardless of the consequences. For which we are now paying the price, no matter what theories we spin out in books
(And by the way, I just emailed you a Vice article on the latest Q turn toward the “sovereign nation” movement. They’re not going anywhere. However gullible we are when we fall in love, much more so are we when we fall in hate
Ultimately, I would say humanity took a wrong turn a long time ago into a whirlpool of deranged ego supremacy and greed and is, when all its current manifestations are weighed together, certifiably insane)
Michael
Michael Brownstein <michaelbrownstein777@gmail.com> wrote:
As usual from you, this is brilliantly written and thought provoking. It also, in my estimation, skips over or ignores the obvious, “real” explanation for our self-destructive, cruel, drastically unfair and unhinged system — namely, predatory capitalism
Capitalism, though its modern, most virulent form originated with the birth of the Industrial Revolution, goes back thousands of years. It is patriarchal in nature. One does not need an occult conspiracy of any kind, however emotionally attractive that might be, to account for its effects. For example, when all kinds of white supremacist hogwash is cleared away, the basis for the slave trade — for seeing other people as sub-human — was the profit motive.
As I’ve said to you before, I believe that yes the very nature of capitalism will definitely allow for like-minded winners to form alliances and dominate, but it will not allow for a conspiracy of the sort all kinds of people from one end of the “mental” spectrum to the other seem to need
Why no grand, planet-wide conspiracy? Because by nature capitalists are sunk in winner take all competition, in unrelieved aggressive fixation. They don’t trust one another. They do not have each other’s back
In fact, what’s missing from them and also from the rest of us is true community. Community as it existed for hundreds of thousands of years in various tribal iterations before the takeover of the profit motive regardless of the consequences. For which we are now paying the price, no matter what theories we spin out in books
(And by the way, I just emailed you a Vice article on the latest Q turn toward the “sovereign nation” movement. They’re not going anywhere. However gullible we are when we fall in love, much more so are we when we fall in hate
Ultimately, I would say humanity took a wrong turn a long time ago into a whirlpool of deranged ego supremacy and greed and is, when all its current manifestations are weighed together, certifiably insane)
Michael
Done! Please let me know if that suffices. I will then wipe away this nasty comment. I will admit the mistake in an upcoming newsletter also.
Thank you, yes, that is much more accurate.
Hi Geoff, I am honestly sorry and offer an apology. That was how I remembered it but my memory may be wrong. I will try to rephrase the article. Thanks for writing.
I accidentally deleted the message to which Daniel has replied below (while editing my second post), so repeat it here as accurately as I can: "Sorry readers, but Daniel has sunk to the level of gutter journalism with this article, by telling a blatant lie and telling it loudly. There were many theories that were chewed over in the book Beyond 2012 – and the one Daniel mentions was actually my favourite – but I didn’t predict that it would definitely happen – and certainly not at 11.11 on 21 December 2012 (though I did uncover the fact that the winter solstice would occur exactly at that time according to the US Naval Observatory). The bigger lie is that, according to Daniel, I have since admitted to being “embarrassed and ashamed” about a promoted but failed prophecy. Not only have I never said that but I am NOT embarrassed OR ashamed. So, Daniel, what is the source of this gossip? Your imagination? Surely not revenge for a bad book review of 13 years ago?" http://www.diagnosis2012.co.uk/pinch.htm
Geoff Stray