(no title)

Personification is a very old, very powerful strategy for sorting huge excesses of information into meaningful narratives. We used to experience the complex, unpredictable dynamics of weather, human relationships and our inner world as the whims of Gods. Shinto is a beautiful limit-case of this tendency, where personhood is wildly and generously distributed. Anyone who has ever yelled at their computer understands this kind of Animism from the inside.

There are a variety of styles of personification in woo-woo. Last time I mentioned Alex Jones of Infowars fame, whose tastes run to the political, and the (relatively) mundane. His favored name for the purported agency that runs the world is the Global Elite, whom he fashions as a group of sinister ultra-rich totalitarian socialists. They’re coming for your guns, and they’re coming for you freedom. Global Warming is one of their malevolent fictions, designed to force taxes and controls on the populace. Vaccinations are another of their tricks, in the venerable tradition of attempts to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids.

There are a goodly number of personifications pitched at this level, with different symbolic structures. Jones’ detractors like the late Bill Cooper, or Jeff Rense prefer the notion that Zionists are the actual secret cabal.

But I would hesitate to call Jones, Cooper or Rense prototypical woo – paranoid politics are introductory woo at best. The good stuff starts with David Icke, a towering figure in the woo community. He picks up precisely where Jones leaves off. Jones has it that the Global Elite are steeped in the occult – they believe they take their orders from demonic powers. Icke starts there and goes on: they actually are being controlled by otherworldly forces. The Powers that Be are, for Icke, fronted by secret societies. But behind the men in smoky rooms are strange beings in even smokier rooms. The Global Elites are merely a cover for the Reptilians, the real Powers that Be, aliens from another dimension who control the structures of authority all over Earth. It isn’t just mainstream political culture that is being manipulated, but the whole of humanity on a very fundamental level. Alex Jones tells it best:

[I'm particularly interested in the first 1:30, but the video as a whole is an interesting picture of Icke and Jones' ambivalent relationship]

The transition from Jones to Icke brings us into the mainstream of woo. By making the personification of the Powers that Be more radically other, Icke’s narrative takes on a metaphysical dimension that Jones’ work lacks. As opposed to more mundane conspiracy theories, this metaphysical dimension is one of the characteristic features of the loose and dynamic collection of narratives I’m calling woo-woo.