Christian Woo

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.

anti-Zeitgeist

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.

oldtimers on the y2k apocalypse

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.

Zeitgeist

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.

The Story So Far, and Where this Blog is Headed

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.

Awful Stories are Better than No Story

Sinfest: The Woo-Woo Edition (click to see the source)

Have you ever heard of chemtrails? You’ve undoubtedly seen them: those long streaks left behind planes. The non-woo explanation is that these are in fact contrails, trails of condensation left from hot water vapor, a normal product of jet engines, mixing with cooler air around it and condensing into clouds.

My brother has training as a pilot: he can look at the kind of clouds in the sky, and tell you something about the weather. Not everything, of course. But for him, the patterns in the sky have practical significance. They really mean something.

If I grew up in an agricultural society, they may have meant something to me too. That knowledge may have been on the level of “if the black stripe is wider than the brown stripes on the back of a Woolly Bear caterpillar, the winter will be long and harsh” or “When the chairs squeak, it’s of rain they speak” (from here). But at least the different parts of my world would be correlated in some way. At least nature was given a grammar, and enticed to speak. To me, the sky says nothing.

But to woo-woos, the skies speak again. For them, Chemtrails are the visible signs of the Powers that Be interfering with us. They are planes which spread mind-control chemicals. References to them are pervasive in the woo-woo community, so I had trouble picking one. That is, until I saw this clip of Prince attributing the senseless violence in his childhood neighborhood to them:

[I'm particularly interested in the first 1:30 or so]

All of this bad luck and unhappiness must have some cause – if Hume was right about anything, it is that we have a very deeply ingrained habit of looking for causes. The style of explanation that is offered by Prince is a very old one. In Shamanic societies, illness, physical or mental, was attributed to the ill-will of the next village over, a malevolent sorcerer, or just evil spirits that were wandering through. The very same style of explanation is being employed here.

The theme of widespread mind-control, whether to incite or placate, is all over the woo-woo world. Why is the body politic so apathetic? Systematic mind control by HAARP, an American research facility in Alaska (this claim is made here, at about 23:00, for instance). Various conspiracy theorists believe that they are able to broadcast Very Low Frequency electromagnetic waves that alter people’s brainwaves (see here, for example). But it isn’t just human facts that call out for explanations: natural events, like hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis also need explaining.

HAARP is also pressed into service for this task as well. There is quite a good article on Boing Boing about it here. The recent earthquake in Haiti, as well as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami are sometimes attributed to HAARP. Why? Because otherwise, they would lack meaning. If they can be attributed to the malevolent machinations of the Powers that Be, at least they make some kind of sense, hideous though it may be. It is interesting to compare the woo-woo style of explanation with the kinds of explanations religious folks put out after the 2004 tsunami: here.

The moral, I think, is that we find it better to have a horrible story than no story at all. We should contrast this conclusion against the kind of lame explanations that people give for buying into woo: that it makes life more interesting, or more pleasant, more enchanted. Woo is just wishful thinking. I would find the idea that the U.S. Government is pumping out mind-control rays and causing natural disasters quite unpleasant, and not that enchanting. It is awful, but at least it is a narrative.

Have you ever made, or considered making, a hat out of aluminum foil as some kind of protection device?

I’ve just happened upon the WooWoo Scale, which you can find here.  You can play along: it’s a 10 point scale which you can find your place on.

It is the first time I’ve seen another attempt at categorizing and contemplating the fantastic world of woo. Their categorization scheme differs considerably from my own, which is to be expected. I’m generally using ‘woo-woo’ as a term of art, for a particular vein of woo. I have never, for instance, looked into the dragons/ogres/sprites side of things, whereas they feature prominently on the WooWoo Scale. But all the same, I’m excited to see even a glimmer of someone else playing around with this stuff.