My apologies for leaving such a long time between posts. I’ve started several, but completed none. For now, I feel like the project has come as far as I need to take it. I’m going to lay it aside for now, but if and when it begins again I’ll be sure to make it known.
Thanks very much to everyone who followed along. It has been fun writing, and I hope you had fun reading.
-the Bunkologist
In his book First as a Tragedy, then as a Farce, Slavoj Zizek spends a few pages thinking about the brand of militant woo that is poking its nose into the mainstream discourse in the form of “semi-illegal groups preparing for the apocalyptic final battle in the interstices of state power”¹. He ascribes to them a kind of populist narrative:
Populism is ultimately always sustained by the frustrated exasperation of ordinary people, by the cry “I don’t know what’s going on, but I’ve just had enough of it! It cannot go on! It must stop!” Such impatient outbursts betray a refusal to understand or engage with the complexity of the situation, and give rise to the conviction that there must be somebody responsible for the mess – which is why some agent lurking behind the scenes is invariably required.”
There is a history of this style of reasoning in America, and quite a long one at that. Take for instance American medicine in the 19th century, and the movement known as Thomsonianism. Back when medical licensing was largely a symbolic thing (unlicensed doctors practiced unmolested), Samuel thomson made his living selling ‘alternative’ herbal medicines, and made himself an opponent of the medical orthodoxy. But he lead the charge to have medical licencing abolished altogether. Why? John Harvey Warner explains:
The chief target was the honorific distinction that had been granted regular doctors on the basis of the claim to special knowledge and special access to knowledge that came from education in the regular medical tradition. Recognizing this is important, for it underscores the fact that the assault on the medical profession was above all an effort to undermine the idea that specialised professional knowledge should constitute a valid source of distinction and authority in American society.²
The line was that there was a conspiracy amongst doctors, who dreamed up fancy theories about the body and wrote them down in Latin for the sake of bamboozling the public, falsely taking authority onto themselves. Warner argues that the rhetoric of egalitarianism and the free market resonated so strongly in American society that the idea that anything worth knowing would be unknowable to the common man was regarded as intolerable.
Though this attitude is by no means universal across woo, I do think it underwrites much of what I’ve called the Principal of Inverse Authority. The impression woo-woos have is that science hard, but not so hard that it can’t be done better by independent researchers than those who spend their life immersed in training and the scientific community. The example that spring to mind are the Pole Shift folks, who believe they understand solar dynamics better than astrophysicists (who are probably in the pocket of the military industrial complex).
But Zizek thinks the whole apocalyptic narrative follows this same logic. The populists are right – the world as we know it is coming to an end. They’ve just personified the process rather than look at it in its complexity. For Zizek, it is the internal contradictions of capitalism that are bringing the world down, rather than the Powers that Be. If we were to indulge this Marxist reading of woo for a minute, we might speculate that woo is a populist symptom of the class struggle. By personifying the contradiction in capitalism as the Powers that Be, they’ve developed a distinctly populist narrative (ie. one that doesn’t presuppose an expensive education) that captures the experience of the class struggle.
I don’t know how convinced I am of that interpretation, but I’ll keep it on the back-burner to see if the evidence stacks up for or against it.
______________________________________________________________
Zizek, Slavoj. (2009) First as a Tragedy, then as a Farce. Verso: Brooklyn, NY. p.60
Warner, John Harley (1992) “Fall and Rise of Professional Mystery” in The Laboratory Revolution in Medicine. Cunningham and Williams eds. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. p.115
I just came across an excellent blog which follows the latest news in the woo-woo world called Swallowing the Camel. She’s got some really excellent links, and nice short updates on all the latest woo. I will be following it closely. She’s also got a more focused blog of the same nature called Leaving Alex Jonestown, specifically on Jones. Her blogs are the closest thing to careful Bunkology I’ve found so far.
A bit of analysis from her April 19th post on Leaving Alex Jonestown got me thinking. She wrote:
One thing I hope to show you on this blog, over time, is that Alex Jones lurches from crisis to crisis like a drunk trying to navigate his way home by grasping random streetlight poles in the dark, never glancing back at the ones he’s left behind. Once a crisis has passed – often without any major repercussions – he moves on and only rarely mentions it, except to retrofit some of its details to make it appear that he was “right all along”.
This is exactly right I think, and typical of the way woo-woos deal with unfulfilled predictions. There is no felt need to go back and revise the narrative. Those who are predicting, for instance, that Planet X, aka Nibiru, aka the Dark Star was going to arrive in the year 2000 did not appear overly perturbed. Nancy Lieder was predicting its appearance in May 2003, though did not seem overly disturbed when it failed to show up (her response is here). I mentioned in a previous post the swine-flu hysteria, and subsequent downgrading of the issue.
More from our friend David Dees
But in trying to understand the dynamics of woo, I think its important to see the active, open quality of the shifting narrative, as well as its apparent imperviousness to counter-evidence. I’ve reviewed some academic work on conspiracy theorists which suggested that what typifies woo is closed mindedness, or ‘crippled epistemologies’ in the form of lack of credible sources of information. This way of seeing portrays woo-woos as simply lacking information. But the image of Jones drunkenly staggering from one crisis to another strikingly suggests another dimension in which woo-woos are entirely open: they are constantly responding to what mainstream culture is doing.
When swine flu was in the news, swine flu was the Powers that Be’s next big move. After the Haiti earthquake, it was HAARP testing their sinister weapon (BoingBoing covered that one here). When FEMA was in the news after Hurricane Katrina, the notion that they were some kind of super-agency preparing to take over America was popular.
The temptation is to regard woo-woos as somehow disconnected from the mainstream – but I can only see this as true in a mitigated sort of way. Their narratives are deeply connected to what is going on in mainstream culture, but in a fun-house mirror kind of way. The responsiveness of woo to mainstream culture suggests to me that they are linked. The typical psychoanalytic line would be that woo represents a kind of cultural shadow – that which is denied and pushed into unconsciousness by popular culture reemerges as a neurotic symptom: woo. In the next while I’ll do an analysis of the anti-semitic streak in woo along those lines, but I’m somewhat dissatisfied with it as a general formula for the relationship between woo and the mainstream. Getting a better sense of what the relationship is an ongoing project.
I’ve been thinking about the below video:
Dolores Cannon (the interviewee) is a hypnotherapist who specializes in past-life regressions, and has done since 1979. For those of you not familiar with past-life regression, that’s when you induce memories from past lives to surface. It’s a not-uncommon technique amongst New Age therapists to help people make sense of the course of their lives. The idea is that what you remember from your past lives throws light upon, and helps you to make meaning out of what has been going on for you in this life.
What nonsense right? What kind of fool could be convinced that they remember things that haven’t happened?
Well, there’s actually a pretty robust psychological literature on false memories, and it turns out just about everyone can be convinced that they saw or heard things that they did not. The locus classicus is F.C. Bartlett, Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology(1932). He told his white subjects the Indian folk story ”The War of the Ghosts”, and had them then tell it back to them. It came back changed, I’m told largely distorted in ways that make the story fit better with the narrative structure the subjects were used to. Bartlett coined the distinction between reproductive and reconstructive memory.
The trend in cognitive psychology is now towards regarding all memory as reconstructive, meaning it is an active construction of the knowing subject rather than a passive store of recorded sensory experience. Some smart-ass psychologists have even pointed out that the literature about Bartlett(1932) has systematically misremembered his work through the retrospective lens of this consensus (here). Anyway, there’s a goodly body of experimental work on getting people to remember things that didn’t happen. For instance, if you give people a list of words like pin, thread, sewing, etc., they’ll tend to remember, and confidently assert, that they also heard needle. There’s some resources here if you’re interested, and this is a fun example examining Bush Jr.’s inconsistent recollections of the moment he heard about the 9/11 attacks.
The common finding in this literature on false memories is that when we’re trying to remember, what we do is reconstruct events in a way that maximizes their meaningfulness to us. So I remember needle (even though it wasn’t on the list presented to me) because it is meaningfully related to pin, thread and sewing. Rather than stupidly just heaping up piles of sensory data, your brain is busily sorting the world into meaningful wholes, and your memory is designed to retrieve meaningful wholes, rather than disconnected chunks of meaningless sense data. One can see why this is a good way for memory to work, even if it does cause us to make mistakes sometimes. (It also demonstrates how totally inadequate rote memorization is as a pedagogical strategy, but anyhow..)
So what is up with past-life regressions then? It seems plausible (and I don’t think this is a novel hypothesis) that what people are doing is asking their memory to produce memories which don’t exist, and what memory comes back with is the most meaningful sounding thing it can come up with, given the history and personality of that person. They’ll produce stories which make sense of their life as it is now, which would help them ‘explain’ why they are the kind of person they are. This is exactly what we should expect memory to provide, given the psychological analysis above. The stories produced are therefore positively oozing with meaning for those who produced them, making them very compelling for them.
So far from having unusual or defective minds, I think those who have past-life memories are experiencing something great about human memory – it seeks to maximize the meaningfulness of our memory. They’re using one of the basic facts about human memory, it’s reconstructive rather than reproductive nature, and using it in a way that helps them experience their life as a meaningful whole. This comes at the cost of (in my opinion) being wrong about there being immortal souls and the history of their own, but that is not bunkologically relevant.
You may recall my complaint that no one else seems to be doing Bunkology. After I wrote that, all of 10 minutes on Google Scholar showed me my error. I’ll just briefly summarize some of what I found now, and hopefully weave these thoughts into the ongoing discourse later.
Mostly what I found was on conspiracy theories. For instance, the article “Beliefs in Conspiracies” by Abalakina-Paap et al. (1999) (you can read it here). They did some fairly basic work on the prevalence of certain beliefs, as compared to indicators of personality types. They summarize past work on why people believe conspiracy theories:
This brief review of the theoretical and empirical literature on conspiracies suggests that there are five types of reasons that people believe in conspiracies: (a) they are alienated, (b) they feel powerless, (c) such conspiracies simplify a complex world, (d) conspiracies can be used to explain their problems, and (e) such beliefs provide an outlet for their hostility.
Their results helped confirm some of these hypothesis, but not all. They write:
The hypotheses that suggested that beliefs in conspiracy theories would be associated with distrust of authority, hostility, feeling powerless, and being unfairly disadvantaged all found support in the results. However, the idea that beliefs in conspiracies or attitudes toward the existence of conspiracies are related to a need to seek simple explanations for complex events was not supported in this study.
I don’t know how much weight to assign to this study. For one thing, their entire subject group was undergraduate psychology students, so we already have self-selection for people willing to at least engage with higher education. When the legitimacy of standard sources of authority is the subject under study, this seems like a serious confound. As I noted here, it is one of the leitmotifs of true woo that academia is not to be trusted.
Another thing that worries me is the tendency to lump all conspiratorial thinking into the same pile. Those who believed that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone were treated the same way as those who believed that the government is covering up alien contact. The Congressional committee that concluded that there was indeed another shooter on the grassy knoll may feel there is a difference worth preserving there.
Goertzel(1994) did a bit better in his paper “Belief in Conspiracy Theories” (read it here), at least empirically. His data came from a phone survey of just under 350 people in New Jersey. From his abstract:
People who believed in one conspiracy were more likely to also believe in others. Belief in conspiracies was correlated with anomia, lack of interpersonal trust, and insecurity about employment. Black and hispanic respondents were more likely to believe in conspiracy theories than were white respondents. Young people were slightly more likely to believe in conspiracy theories, but there were few significant correlations with gender, educational level, or occupational category.
His theoretical contribution is interesting. He argues for a distinction between two types of cognition: monological and dialogical thinking. He writes: “Dialogical belief systems engage in a dialogue with their context, while monological systems speak only to themselves, ignoring their context in all but the shallowest respects. This mathematical model quantifies the philosophical distinction between the “open” and “closed” mind.” This is somewhat similar to Sunstein and Vermeule’s idea (here is the paper, and I discussed it here) of crippled epistemologies, the idea that conspiracy theorists simply aren’t working with enough information.
My worry about Goertzel’s analysis is the same as my worry about the crippled epistemologies notion – if you actually look at what woo-woos are writing, they don’t have systematically “closed” minds. Their minds are wide open in some sense, even if closed in others. Non woo minds are also closed to some things: shapeshifting reptile vampires from another dimension, for instance. It doesn’t seem to be a question of open vs. closed, but the structure of their openness.
There are more studies that I’d like to look at, but I’ll leave it at that for now. I’m a little disappointed in the banality of the conspiracies looked at, so here’s hoping I find a similar treasure trove of studies on juicy New Age woo as well.
The Ascension by Catherine Andrews
One of the things that worries me in doing this analysis is the circularity of selecting sources. I’m trying to extract regularities from the world of woo, in order to get at the underlying regularities which drive it. But I’ve got my own, fairly circumscribed definition of what proper ‘woo’ is. So my worry is that I have a pre-existing narrative which I’m cherry-picking sources to fit, not discovering any regularity in the world.
But then I run across things like the Christian take on woo, I feel a bit better. If there were nothing holding the woo-woo narrative together, if it were a semi-random collection of stories with no underlying logic, then we should expect that it would fail to translate outside of a New Age context. But there are a goodly number of Christians who adopt, in one measure or another, the very same themes and tropes that have become familiar in these posts.
Take for example the website The 2012 Deception (here). I came across them looking at 2012 debunkers, and they do indeed strive to debunk the standard 2012 woo. For instance, they posted a fairly reasonable video analyzing the arguments of woo-woos about galactic alignment and suchlike (here). But at about 5:00 through the second part, you may notice a slight narrative shift. The narrator starts saying that, in fact, we are in for cataclysms and upheavals in the next few years, just not for the reasons the woo-woos think we are. They explain in detail in the video (it’s a three parter) below.
Here’s a summary if you don’t feel up to watching the whole thing:
Ascension stories (ala David Wilcock, see here) are from the spirit world, meant to deceive us about the coming apocalypse – the Christian apocalypse. Governments will leverage these stories to create a mockpocalypse, a simulation of the book of revelations. This involves a war meant to look like the final war, a man meant to look like the anti-christ who will ‘make peace with israel’, etc. Then, when things are really bad, a fake UFO landing will crystallize their plans. Aliens will claim to have genetically engineered us, which will finally give ‘evolutionists’ some way of explaining where DNA came from. Nation-states dissolve into a world government, as we all believe ourselves to finally be part of a galactic family. Some faux avatar will come to destroy the patsy-antichrist. He will sell the story that he is the original Christ, allowing him to take over the world. He will force us to worship him (possibly with implanted chips), ‘milking’ us of our worship. Since true Christians have the power to resist this evil, they are the most important ones to eliminate – therefore the New Age war on old power-structures.
This is a disinformation flip the likes of which I have rarely seen. The whole woo-woo narrative is taken to be the work of the Powers that Be, which in this case means demons. Which means that the disinformation being spread by the mainstream (that there is no apocalypse coming) is modified by the double-disinformation of woo-woos.
A Representative from the Fake Alien Invasion, ca. 2020
I love this example, and I may return to it because it really is quite juicy. But the point for now is that the apocalyptic narrative is retained, virtually whole, within the double-disinfo flip performed on it by the 2012 Deception site. The basic narrative structure remains, with the Powers that Be, the coming apocalypse, even the Jonesian style One World Government. This reassures me that something about this story coheres, that it holds itself together in some sense.
If you’d like another example, take this (quite long) video testament from Pastor Michael Hoggard: here
You can get the sense of it by skipping around in the video.: it’s Christian woo, essentially at the Ickian level. Demons are the Powers that Be, trying to control the world through the Masons, the Illuminati, etc. It’s fairly standard woo, but Christianized.
Again, the story seems to hold itself together, even removed from its context. I am slightly reassured.
Let’s do a short case study. Above is a video is a response to Zeitgeist, David Icke and Alex Jones, claiming that they are all disinformation agents of the Powers the Be. There is a very clear invocation of the Principle of Inverse Authority – since all those who cause trouble are killed (eg. JFK, John Lennon and Princess Di are the examples given) and Icke, Jones and Zeitgeist are all popular and not dead, they must be working for the enemy. As I mentioned in my post about Zeitgeist, it is (from a woo-woo perspective) suspicious when anyone becomes famous.
Alex Jones - The guy can really get his yell on.
Also, he does an interesting disinfo flip on Zeitgeist’s argument about the symbolism of Christianity. This is the Principle of Disinformation at its best, where large portions of a narrative are lifted, but their significance inverted. He speculates that the symbols of other cultures were deliberately lifted, and Christ deliberately deified. The argument is made (and I can see why one would think this) that Christ’s worldview is contrary to the idea of deifying Christ as the figurehead of a power structure. But they conclude from this that the whole thing is therefore a setup. The ‘whole thing’, in this case, is apparently the entire history of Christianity, its symbols, rituals and hierarchy. When the time is right, the Powers that Be would expose the symbolic continuity between Christianity and other religions in order to drive people away from the lessons Christ taught and towards Sorcery and Satanism.
A parallel is drawn between the Icke/Zeitgeist notion that religion is a tool of the Global Elite to controll populations, and Evolution, secularism, materialism, etc. The Nietzschean death of God is therefore personified as a plot by the Powers that Be. The video says: “Yes, the true teachings of peace and light have been hijacked and replaced with dogmas, rites and superstitions.”(8:28) However, it was not by the internal contradictions of Christianity, or the natural selection of institutions for durability – it was some conscious, human force wishing to secularize us.
I’m probably just excited about this because it fits my narrative so nicely. There is a rift in the semantic cultural fabric, we have lost our transcendental signifier (God). The movie Zeitgeist itself (and the attendant woo of Jones and Icke) is identified as the source of the narrative implosion. The process which created that rift is personalized, such that it can be grappled with. Narrative cohesion is therefore restored, and the broader culture can again be engaged in with, though on different terms.
I asked them all if they felt confident people could survive if everything fell apart and they had to grow their own crops and raise their own stock again.
Annie: The older people, but not the younger people.
Robert: …and the older ones are old enough that they almost can’t do it.
Leanda: Me? I could do it, cause I learned it…That’s what a lot of people should learn how to do…to grow things in the garden or put a henhouse in and let the chickens hatch their eggs, raise their own fryers, raise their own hogs and calves and butcher ‘em themselves.
Evelyn: Well, some would try to survive and some wouldn’t. Some people can’t take what happens in everyday life It might get so bad that a lot of people might take their own lives, can’t face the situation.
I could, in some way or another. I did it all my lifetime. There is very little that I have bought, like frozen vegetables and such. It’s getting more now because I can’t garden now as much as I used to.
Years back, we bought very little from the grocery store except for our staples. Ever’thing else we raised. I still work my garden every year as far as I can. I have a small plot and I’ve already tilled it up…It’s going to be ready for planting pretty soon. We used to raise our own meats but now I don’t any more.
This is a little bit from here, an interview by Chris Travis in the Register, the “On-line newspaper from the Biggest Little Town in Texas”. Chris does a lovely interview with some of the elders of the town, Round Top, Texas, about the not-yet-arrived year 2000 and the risk of Y2K collapse. The oldtimers don’t think that Y2K will be a big deal, but are confident that if something were to happen, people would work out how to survive.
If you remember this post, I talked a bit about the feeling of impending apocalypse being rooted in alienation from the basic things that keep you alive, and the presence of that absence coming to you in the form of anxiety. I found this to be a beautiful example of people for whom that alienation doesn’t exist, or at least, isn’t included in their basic orientation in the world. I also find it interesting that they clearly sense in the younger generation that disconnect from the material ground of life.
an·o·mie – noun Sociology.
1. A state or condition of individuals or society characterized by a breakdown or absence of social norms and values, as in the case of uprooted people.
2. Alienation and purposelessness experienced by a person or a class as a result of a lack of standards, values, or ideals: “We must now brace ourselves for disquisitions on peer pressure, adolescent anomie and rage” (Charles Krauthammer).
[French, from Greek anomiā, lawlessness, from anomos, lawless :a-, without; see a-1 + nomos, law; see nem- in Indo-European roots.]
(Cobbled together from Dictionary.com entry)
Anomie is not uncommon, and it is not exclusive to woo by any means. Lots of people see no upside to their disconnection from the world of shared values. But woo-woos see through anomie, to the other side. They see hope precisely because things are so perilous, because all has gone awry. Nietzsche makes an important distinction:
Nihilism: it is ambiguous.
A. Nihilism as a sign of increased power of the spirit: as active nihilism.
B. Nihilism as decline and recession of the power of the spirit: as passive nihilism.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p.17 §22 (Kaufmann and Hollingdale trans.)
Woo-woos are, as far as I can tell, very active nihilists. Or rather, they are nihilists with regard to the standard values which society holds up. Their activity is constituted by their hope for a new order of meaning and value in the world. This hope is always deferred, as the apocalypse is always just over the horizon – but at least the believe in it. Watch this, and see if you see what I mean:
This video captures exactly the feeling, I think, that underwrites apocalyptic woo. The suburbs are full of hideous monstrosity, and even their ideals (the sunbathing babe) are horrific. Hope comes from an inverted sun, some radical upheaval of the normal spiritual order.
I said in the last post that I would look at the film Zeitgeist, so I’ll at least make a start of it here. It’s pretty good woo, nicely produced and something of a pop-culture phenomenon (and yes, that does make it suspicious to the woo community).
If you’ve got two hours to burn, here it is.
I’ll go through the basic structure of the movie for those of you who haven’t watched it lately, or don’t care to watch it.
The opening scene is a discourse on ‘nowness’. The rest of the movie is about conspiracy theories, which on the surface makes the opening strange, so let’s stop and think about it for a moment. I think my model of the opacity of the world makes sense of how these things are connected: it is a fairly common Buddhist doctrine that being present, being in the now, has the tendency to make the medium of your experience opaque to you. If you abide in nowness you can experience the world ‘directly’, seeing through your old illusions to the reality beneath. This sounds, phenomenologically, precisely like the breakdown of naive realism as I described it. This opening discourse would therefore serve to soften up the viewer’s grip on naive realism – a bit of Descartes may have had the same impact:
How sure are you that you’re not dreaming right now? Got the willies yet? Ok, good.
Then we get a short burst of repeated images of the planes crashing into the twin-towers. The rapid-fire, repetitive images recall flashbacks from a trauma – we the viewers are being asked to relive that trauma, that eruption into our worldviews. Nothing is said about the event at this point: we are simply meant to have our sense of the stability of the world softened.
We then move on to some comparative mythology, intended to show how all the particularities of the Jesus story are present in older cultures. The intent seems to be to cause the bottom to drop out of your trust in the old religious narratives.
Then, the film moves on to the 9/11 conspiracy theories. The arguments are fairly standard, and the point is clear: you cannot buy the political narrative being sold.
Finally, we get an overview of the Federal Reserve system, with some Jonesian style conspiracy theorizing about the collusion of bankers to exploit the rest of society.
So what is up here? To return to the beginning of the post, where is the active part of this breakdown of meaning? To answer that, we have to look briefly at who made the movie and why. Meet Jacque Fresco:
Jacque here is the man ultimately behind the movie. He is the creator of the Venus Project (their website here). Jacque is an architect, a designer and most importantly, a futurist. He has a vision for the total reorganization of society, and he wants to share it with you. Radical city design, the elimination of money as a means of exchange, and total social reform are but a few of his exciting proposals for a new and better future.
And so there you have it: after the picture of a society duped and misdirected since its inception, Fresco offers up a picture of a society completely transformed and rid of virtually all of its ills. But the way to get there, as always, is through the crucible of an apocalypse. For Fresco, it is an economic apocalypse, brought about by the coming advent of artificial intelligence, and the over-automation of everything:
The Venus Project can not be put into practice on a global scale until the economic systems of the world fail to provide for the needs of people.
What will bring about the collapse of the world’s monetary systems is the infusion of automation [ed. he says elsewhere this means AI] and the outsourcing of jobs. This includes not only assembly line workers but also doctors, engineers, architects, and the like. As workers and professionals lose their purchasing power, the industries that depend on them can no longer function. This will bring an end to the monetary system. It is not a question of owners giving up their industries so much as the fact that people will not have the purchasing power to sustain this system. Even the motion picture industry is generating computerized people who will replace many TV announcers and personalities.
[From here, question 14]
The story of Zeitgeist, which begins with the strange discourse on nowness, somehow ends with an economic apocalypse brought on by AI, followed by Utopia. To make sense of how it all hangs together, I can only suggest that it is a kind of anomie, which corresponds phenomenologically with the transparency of the medium of value, even of experience. But the woo response to this is not to shrink and wither, but to imagine something beyond it.
And for no reason, Time Cube!!! (click for source, you'll thank me)
I feel like I’ve got the basic coordinates of my area of study more or less laid out now. If you haven’t been following along, here’s a very brief summary of where we are:
The Powers that Be is a generic name for a group of (rich people|aliens|transcendent beings) that woo-woos believe are secretly running our world. Because they control all the traditional structures of authority in our world, mainstream sources of information like the media, scientists, religious leaders, etc. cannot be trusted. I called this the Principle of Inverse Authority. The fact that the Powers that Be don’t silence the woo-woo community is somewhat mysterious, and when a woo-woo gets too famous the Principle of Inverse Authority is invoked against them as well – their fame indicates that they are disinformation agents. This narrative tendency, the Principle of Disinformation, is also invoked to explain radical differences in the woo-woo community – if someone has a nearly identical narrative to yours with a few opposed elements, they are likely a disinformation agent. Thus, the community is preserved from refutation from without and from within. Phenomenologically, I postulated that the apocalyptic thread running through woo is an expression of the various ways in which the world can become opaque (here at the social/political level, and here at a more basic level of reality).
So that is the story so far. If you have been following along, I invite your comments and criticisms.
In the short term, there are a few more things I feel I need to cover just to get the basic staples of the woo-woo community represented here. I have yet to comment on one of the most visible pieces of woo around, the film Zeitgeist. I expect that will be my next post, followed by a look at an interesting video response from within the woo-woo community. I would also like to spend some time doing more extended case studies on the personalities we’ve already seen, and some that have been in the margins. Getting a sense for the individuals involved is crucial to really get where they’re coming from, and will hopefully help flesh out the rather abstract story above.
In the longer term, I’d like to move into looking at the temporal dynamics of the woo-woo community. For example, how does something like the swine-flu get assimilated into the ongoing narrative as it moves through popular consciousness? When it looked like a serious threat, it was popular to suggest that it was created by the Powers that Be to depopulate the planet. As it fizzled as a serious threat in and of itself, fear of forced vaccination became the thing. Now that neither a killer virus nor forced vaccinations have come to pass, the whole thing is either forgotten, or actually viewed as a victory for the woo-woo community. In this case, the lack of forced vaccinations is attributed to the work of woo-woos (in this case Jane Burgermeister).
I’d like to look at a few such cases to see if patterns emerge in the dynamic relationship between mainstream cultural narratives and woo. Did woo look different in the 1980′s and 90′s? How so? And what narrative elements show long-term stability? It will only be through such questions that I can really be confident in the picture I sketched above.
Finally, I would very much like to connect more with other Bunkological researchers. I can’t possibly be the only one thinking about this, but I have yet to find many others. There are non-woo people who find this as fascinating as I do, but virtually all of them fall into debunking or merely poking fun. I would particularly ask that if you know of or encounter anyone doing Bunkology, please let me know.
