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.

The Opacity of the World (con’t)

Sleep and his half-brother Death by John William Waterhouse, 1874

I’d like to follow up the rather theoretical framework I set up last time with some examples, to substantiate the ideas a little bit. I argued that for Ickian/Wilcockian level woo-woos, the world, the very texture of reality, has become insubstantial. It is always poised on the edge of apocalypse. The transparency of the processes which turns a chaotic mess of sensory data and turns it into a world in which we can move and live has broken down. It becomes as if the world itself is being projected, like the Truman Show, a play put on for the subject.

Let’s take David Icke’s experience as one example. In an interview with Project Camelot, he said:

The conscious mind is actually not the decision-maker at all. It’s the observer and experiencer of it, and it literally is the same principle as a movie projector which comes from within, within what we call the subconscious, where all those patterns of air which we’re being influenced by and are affecting our projection and our reading of it. And it comes out of the subconscious. By the time it hits the screen in-here, symbolically on the movie theater, it’s a done deal.

This is where the change has to take place — within us — to change the projection which is our conscious mind’s experience. People are so caught in the conscious mind as if that’s the only level.

(transcript from here )

David Icke, if you recall, is the one deeply concerned about the Masons, a front for the Illuminati, who are secretly working with the Reptilians. His narrative starts from socio-economic control and coercion, and ends up with manipulative space-aliens. When then, is he on about consciousness as a projection of the unconscious mind? What does that have to do with anything?

If you buy my story about the continuity of the Jonesian, Ickian and Wilcockian apocalypses, it all actually ties together pretty well. The political apocalyptarian experiences the material conditions of our existence as under threat, and therefore opaque (see my argument here for the details). The same phenomenon, taken to a metaphysical dimension defines the Ickian/Wilcockian apocalypses. The pre-conscious processes that create a world for us have become opaque for them, and concurrently those processes are shown to be fragile, always on the brink of apoclaypse.

Let’s look at David Wilcock’s apoclayptic narrative for comparison. He calls his version of the apocalypse Ascension, and it comes with a fairly standard New Age/mystical cosmology:

In the beginning, there was just infinite oneness. But oneness got bored, so it differentiated into finite parts. There were galaxies, planets, and conscious beings. These were beings with total awareness of themselves and their unconscious roots in onenness. But because they were totally aware of their ultimate oneness with the origin, they were still bored.

That is, until someone got the bright idea that cutting off consciousness from the source would spice things up. Symbolically, this is like eating the apple in the garden of eden; knowledge of good and evil, of duality, means we are cut off from the original paradisal unity from whence we came.

Wilcock makes this connection explicitly in his review of the Ascension symbolism in The Phantom Menace (I shit you not):

… we came to the Earth in its Edenic state. In order to do this, we had to leave behind our own Mother Light that had sustained us in the past. [...] We were not “stuck” in our bodies but could return to the life that had supported us in the past [...] Then, the real “apple” of temptation was when we fell from grace, or became hardened into our physical bodies. At this point we forgot our true heritage, forgot the spiritual lives that had sustained us, and became engrossed with the physical world. We no longer even remembered what we had given up and left behind in our state of blindness.

I won't insult your intelligence by belabouring the connection.

I want to suggest that the “blindness” that Wilcock thinks almost everybody is trapped in almost all of the time is what Metzinger would call naive realism. Our brains trick us into thinking we are dealing with the world, when in fact what we experience almost all the time is some model or representation of a world.

For Wilcock, the coming Ascension is the immanent lifting of this blindness. We will become aware of the illusion we have been trapped in and realize the reality of our “higher selves”. Or in Metzinger’s language, Wilcock thinks we will break out of naive realism and experience directly the previously unconscious processes that generate a world for us.

To give people a sense of what he thinks is going to happen, Wilcock asks us to think about lucid dreaming. He pictures the first phase of the Ascension as being staged on something like our world, except it will be as though we have woken up from the dream that has been our lives, becoming lucid. We are able to do all the typical lucid dream things – flying, producing objects from thin air, and so on.

Are you dreaming right now? Try to wake yourself up from the dream you are in right now. Humour me, and try for a moment.

Do you get a small sinking feeling in your stomach from that like I do? A tiny bit of vertigo?

But when I stop directing my attention into the exercise, my experience of the texture of reality snaps back to usual. I hope yours does too. But image that feeling, imposed from without on your awareness, everywhere and all the time. I think it is actually quite common for people to have that experience, and I think it is the breakdown of naive realism. That is, I want to argue, the Wilcockian apocalypse – the immanent and ongoing experience of the breakdown of the veil that separates us from our own unconscious.

The Opacity of the World

Last time, I was on about the experience underlying the apocalyptic streak in woo, at least at the Jonesian level. I postulated a kind of irreversible opacity of the material conditions of existence: rather than just absentmindedly flipping on the light, one is surprised that the government hasn’t taken away electricity yet. Now I’d like to extend the same style of analysis to the Ickian and Wilcockian levels of woo. In this (and I suspect in other respects) the Ickian and Wilcockian levels blur together, so I’ll mostly treat them as one.

The purest cultural expression I know of the Ickian version of this apocalyptic experience is The Truman show. It is the classic paranoiac experience of the world being make-believe, a show put on for the subject. If you’d like a more metaphysical (ie. Wilcockian) example, think about the Hindu notion of Atman – the universal subject which has gotten lost in pretending it is a finite being, forgetting its divine origin. In both cases, the world is a kind of play, put on for subjectivity. The apocalypse then, would be waking up from the dream, realizing that the play is just a play.

Here is a tentative hypothesis on what, psychologically, is going on here. If you have time to burn, I highly recommend the video immediately below. If you have much more time, I even more highly recommend the book that it is based on, Being No One, by Thomas Metzinger. But since you’re busy, I’ll summarize the ideas below the video.

[Note: The actual content starts at about 7:00]

Metzinger tries to show that what we experience, everything we experience, is in fact a model of the world generated by our brain. In fact, he wants to claim that this is just what consciousness is – essentially, an illusion generated by the brain. Our brain is generating maps and models of our bodies and the space-time that they inhabit, and we constantly mistake those maps for the world itself. We’re trapped in what Metzinger calls naive realism. We experience our world through a complex set of filters which turn the chaotic (and therefore useless) raw data of experience into a coherent representation of a world. But we are hard-wired not to notice that we’re dealing with representations. Our representations are transparent to us, we see through them rather than seeing them as representations. He writes:

“We do not experience the reality surrounding us as the content of a representational process nor do we represent its components as internal placeholders, causal role players, as it were, of another, external level of reality. We simply experience it as the world in which we live our lives.”(Metzinger, Being No One, p.169)

For a dramatic example, take the phenomenon of phantom limbs. Very commonly, people who loose limbs have the experience afterwards that the limb persists.

[Phantom limb talk starts at 9:30]

Usually this experience fades with time, but in a minority of cases the phantom limb can persist for years, even decades. The theory is that your body has an internal body map that, upon loosing a limb, becomes dated. But amputees don’t experience a malfunctioning body-map, they experience their lost limb.

But suppose for a moment that whatever neural process that keeps us trapped in naive realism was disrupted, or partially suspended. What would happen if the representation of a world that we have consistently mistaken for a world suddenly became apparent as a representation? This, I propose, is the Truman Show experience. This proposal is consonant with Metzinger’s suggestion that when people take psychedelics, their visual experiences are of pre-conscious levels of visual processing (Metzinger, ibid. p.171) Similarly, the Truman Show experience is fairly common on psychedelics, which makes sense if they cause us to experience our pre-conscious representational processes, rather than experiencing through them. This way of thinking about consciousness is far from established fact, but it seems to me plausible in its broad strokes.

So perhaps, and this is even more speculative, the woo-woo experience of the world as a stage is underwritten by this kind of mental phenomenon. Perhaps what they are talking about is a very real experience of the breakdown of naive realism for them. In Hinduism, the goal of spiritual aspirants is to break out of precisely the illusion that Atman has created for itself, to experience directly (rather than to just know conceptually) that all the world is a stage. For them, this is spiritual freedom – once you realize it is all a game, you are free from the anxiety and suffering that results from it. But in India, it is well understood that this process has to be done carefully, and in quite specific contexts. Otherwise, straightforward madness is the result.

Apocalyptic Phenomenology

The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse
Lithograph by Daniel Stolpe and Philip Wankier

I’d like to work through some more thoughts on the eschatological streak in woo. There are a lot of people in our world, not just woo-woos, who think the end is nigh. It is important, and I should say, very difficult, to keep in mind that the truth or falsity of this belief is not what is relevant, bunkologically speaking. The robustness or lack thereof of a particular apocalyptic narrative in the face of apparent disconfirmation may be an important clue to its inner dynamics – but it is not the primary object of investigation here.

What I am interested in is what the experience of a person who is living the apocalypse is like – what apocalyptic narratives do for them experientially. As usual, it may be useful to start at the Jonesian level of woo, and work our way up into esoterica from there. I will expand this analysis into the Ickian/Wilcockian levels another time.

Take laughing-boy on our right, for instance. If you check his website, you may find as I did adverts for Survival Garden supplies, Food Insurance emergency packages, and most importantly: Gold. These are the sort of things you really want in the case that the government either collapses, or in fact rises up against their own citizenry – the case of a Jonesian level apocalypse. It goes without saying, this is all part of his narrative. The same story is told in properly woo-woo circles – the same style of ads can be found prominently displayed on the site of woo guru Jeff Rense.

Stop a moment to think about Gold, and what it means to us. Money has become an enormously abstract thing, in an important sense. Most of my money has no physical presence for me beyond a few (all too few) numbers on a screen. I am alienated from it in a profound way. It is also a precarious thing, being created out of thin air by fiat.

This precariousness has not gone unnoticed by the woo-woo world. In a follow up to the widely popular film Zeitgeist, the federal reserve system is explored:

[Note: The content starts after about 7:00 of spooky music and such]

I have to admit, knowing how currency is added to the money supply kind of weirds me out, even without the spooky music. It is profoundly alienating, but in a way that maybe doesn’t impress itself constantly on the mind of you or I. When I stop thinking about it, I use money unconsciously – it becomes the transparent medium of exchange once more.

I would like to suggest that for woo-woos, particularly those who are constantly living the apocalypse, this kind of transparency is impossible. The alienation between them and the source of value has become visible to them, in a permanent and terrifying (or for some liberating) way. The response is to keep at least tokens of the source of value around them – Gold is the perfect image for this.

But I don’t want to give the impression that I think this is a purely financial thing. Think for a moment about how alienated we are from all of those basic things that keep us alive. I turn a tap and clean potable water comes gushing out. Rather than being astounded every day by this incredible achievement, I see right through it. I don’t even notice what is happening. The depth of this alienation can be measured by the feeling of shock we get when this transparency is unexpectedly disrupted.

Suppose you went to the grocery store, and there was no fruit from other countries there. Just out of the blue one day, most of the space where juicy grapes and strawberries were was empty. I can’t speak definitively for you, but I would be spun. Stunned. It would be a world upside-down.

But how absurd is that? How transparent has the materiality of my world become to me, where oil was pumped from under the sea, and taken to a refinery where it was turned into something burnable, then shipped to a shipyard and put in a boat, which used it to cross the ocean and bring me a banana for breakfast, and if that doesn’t happen, that is when I’m surprised?

But if you’re living the apocalypse, you are surprised when it all goes smoothly. You have at least some experiential relationship to the material conditions that are keeping you alive. That connection is bought at a price, of course: you feel your place in the world through anxiety and fear. You appreciate the potable water streaming out of your tap every day because you’re constantly worried about it going away.

Gnosis and Woo

Who in the present administers spiritual authority?

Whoever comes into direct personal contact with the living one. [Gnostic Christians] argued that only one’s own experience offers the ultimate criterion of truth, taking precedence over all testimony and all tradition – even gnostic tradition! They celebrated every form of creative invention as evidence that a person has become spiritually alive. On this theory, the structure of authority can never be fixed into an institutional framework: it must remain spontaneous, charismatic, and open. (p.30 Gnostic Gospels, Eileen Pagels)

Last time, responding to Sunstein and Vermule’s paper on Conspiracy Theories, I gestured towards the idea that woo-woo has a gnostic streak. Rather than being epistemically closed, woo at all levels shows a constitutive openness. It may be a selective openness; for instance, the PoIA suggests openness to marginal sources but not mainstream ones. But I think we should take seriously woo-woo’s protestations that they are simply being true to their experience.

This is Dr. Stephen Greer of The Disclosure Project, having a pretty heated debate with Project Camelot about whether we should trust the aliens. Greer thinks they are all benevolent, where the Camelot duo advise caution. On the surface, this sounds like a practical debate about political and technological questions. But if you look at the evidence both sides are drawing on to make their cases, the conservation is revealed to be about different phenomenologies.

For instance, much of the “contact” Dr. Greer builds his understanding of the character of extraterrestrials on is gathered through remote viewing, astral travel and meditation. He does have a Jonesian level narrative as well: in his case the Powers that Be are called “Majestic”, and they are blocking our contact with the Ickian level of alien contact. Majestic is associated with the typical traditional power structures (major media, government, Masons, so on), and has wide-ranging powers to manipulate mainstream cultural narratives. Fortunately for Greer, he has insider access. He teaches courses on meditation and astral travel in order for people to initiate contact with extraterrestrials (a brief description of the technique is here).

At this point, Greer transcends both the Jonesian and Ickian levels of woo – the nature of reality itself is narratively reconstituted. Greer is atypically (though not uniquely) active in his attempts to experience other-worldly. But the ultimate source of his authority is this personal and direct knowledge, his gnosis.

I have the impression that the kind of gnosis that drives Bill Ryan of Project Camelot is more typical, in the sense that he was the passive subject of his experience. Below, in the first few minutes of the video he describes his own gnostic event, his abduction experience.

Ryan’s gnosis was the recovery of this abduction experience. He describes how this experience, this eruption into the narrative fabric of his reality, was the catalyst for his work on Project Camelot, perhaps the finest locus of woo on the internet. His own experience, which he could not integrate into the popular cultural narrative, became the point around which his worldview became reorganized. In the debate above, much of the evidence that Ryan and Cassidy marshall is of the same basic nature – people have gnostic experiences which are not straightforwardly integrable into their previous understanding of (politics|humanity|reality), and so an alternate narrative must be constructed to contain it.

Crippled Epistemologies

I’d like to look more carefully at the paper by Sunstein and Vermule that I mentioned last time. Their argument is interesting, but I suspect that the picture they paint is mistaken in some important ways.

Sunstein and Vermule are interested in understanding why conspiracy theorists have the views that they do, and what the response of governments should be. It should be noted that their interest is primarily in “conspiracy theories relating to terrorism, especially theories that arise from and post-date the 9/11 attacks”(p.3). They are trying to formulate policy proposals, and so are mostly worried about politically relevant theories. I’m not that concerned about being relevant. But their work is still interesting to me, and relevant to woo nonetheless.

Their narrative goes in two steps – first, they diagnose the causes of conspiracy theorizing. Briefly, they believe that people buy into conspiracy theories because they are working with crippled epistemologies, by which they mean “sharply limited number of (relevant) informational sources”(p.3) So conspiracy theorists have crippled epistemologies because they aren’t getting enough good information from diverse enough sources.

Having identified crippled epistemologies as the basic problem, they recommend cognitive infiltration as the appropriate response. That is, governments should infiltrate conspiracy theory groups, and try to let a little air in, dispelling false beliefs and so breaking up their narratives.

Maybe this strategy makes sense for 9/11 truthers, and maybe it doesn’t. I tend to think it would be ineffective: it is already common for 9/11 truthers to engage (with varying levels of seriousness) the arguments of 9/11 debunkers. (eg. here). A government sponsored entry into the fray would only feed the discussion.

But regardless of the status of this strategy in the cases Sunstein and Vermule focus on, I’m quite confident it would do nothing to disrupt the woo-woo community. The basic problem, I tend to think, is with their model of theorists as driven by crippled epistemologies. I’m not saying that woo-woos have their epistemological ducks all in a row; far from it. But the suggestion that these alternative worldviews are the result of a lack of information is to get things all wrong.

I agree that woo is kept insulated from debunking by mistrust from authoritative sources of knowledge. This is precisely the function of the Principle of Inverse Authority. But that they distrust mainstream sources doesn’t entail that they are closed minded, or are only looking at a few source of information. The incredible narrative diversity in the woo-woo world should be enough to demonstrate that much.

They are not, emphatically not, simply reading books and beliving what they read. The compelling power of these narratives doesn’t derive from a few half-baked arguments, but from the living experiential connection woo-woos have with their world. They have resolved to trust their own experience above anything else, their own moral and semiotic compasses.

To see how this gnostic streak in woo functions, consider the role of “witnesses”, as the good people at Project Camelot are wont to call them. Information is constantly being fed into the woo-woo world from people claiming to have contact with (aliens|CIA black ops|NASA insiders|trans-dimensional beings|the Illuminati). Quite often, the contact is explicitly described as being (psychic|telepathic|remote viewed), what we would call their inner experience. Not all of these experiences are accepted by the entirety of the woo community of course – if someone’s report contradicts someone else’s narrative, it will be written off as either disinformation or an erroneous interpretation. But when someone’s report of an experience they have had confirms, augments or even advances the narrative of someone else’s woo, it will be incorporated as fresh data.

So further than just being open to arguments (which we can see even at the mundane level of the 9/11 truth movement), proper woo-woos are open to a whole different dimension of new information. They are actively engaging with their unconscious minds and opening up new narratives all the time according to what they find there. This makes their narratives adaptive and flexible. If there is a sense in which their epistemology is crippled, it is surely not because of a lack of information.

The Principle of Disinformation

But just being on the margins doesn’t ensure that someone is trustworthy for the woo-woos. Some of those on the margins are sent there on purpose, as disinformation agents. They are sent by The Powers that Be. Take for instance, this letter produced by one woo website (Rense) about another (Project Camelot), and the reply. If you don’t feel like reading it, here is a concise summary of the content:

Rense: You’re a government mouthpiece.

Camelot: No, you are.

I think this makes it’s own kind of sense. In fact, a recent (non-woo) paper “Conspiracy Theories” (Sunstein and Vermeule, 2008, available here) argued that governments ought to engage in precisely that kind of infiltration:

“Our principal claim here involves the potential value of cognitive infiltration of extremist [ed: woo] groups, designed to introduce information diversity into such groups and to expose indefensible conspiracy theories as such.”(p.3)

One of the reasons I think that Sunstein and Vermeule’s proposed strategy would not be effective (I’ll have more to say about this paper later) is that the woo-woo community is acutely aware of the potential for disinformation, as we can see in the above exchange between Rense and Project Camelot.

In fact, I want to propose that the awareness of disinformation is a major stabilizing factor in the woo narrative. In another community, if half of the members had radically different opinions about basic tenants of the shared story, it would sow doubt. In some contexts, everyone would become less confident in their story. The community couldn’t cohere and continue to cross-fertilize. But woo-woos believe that they have aroused the ire of the Powers that Be, and that the Powers that Be are actively intervening in their narrative. So people with very similar narratives, but with one or two radically opposed elements, don’t come to doubt their own stories.

I’ll posit the pervasive suspicion of disinformation by the Powers that Be as another principle:

The Principle of Disinformation[PoD]: A lot of woo is disinformation, specific attempts by the Powers that Be to mix truth with lies to dilute true woo.

The PoD actually serves to promote narrative cohesion in the world of woo. In the face of the PoIA, there is a constant need to justify how the woo-woo is allowed to air the secrets of the Powers that Be, without being stopped or molested by them. They speak out, courageously defying the Powers that Be to stop them. What they find is that, not only does no one stop them, no one even seems to take notice. What explains this? Their ideas are being specifically combated with disinformation.

Although it seems naive to suppose that there is any conscious or unconscious design going on here, there does seem to be a selective pressure for narratives which embrace the PoD. When you accept the PoD, it becomes possible for narratives with considerable overlap, but also radically opposed elements to co-exist. Since the Devil always mixes his lies with quite a bit of truth, the fact that many of your fellow woo-woos believe things that completely undermine your own narrative is not evidence that woo in general is bunk. Rather, that so many otherwise on-point woo-woos believe falsehoods is evidence that the Powers that Be are concerned enough to attempt interference.

Take, for example, the ambiguous status of Zionism in the woo-woo world. Rense argues that Zionists are identical with the Powers that Be. The video below argues the opposite, that Zionism is the truest resistance against the Powers that Be.

Here we have a good example of both the Principle of Inverse Authority and the Principle of Disinformation working together. The narrator makes a fairly cogent political argument that Zionism, defined as a national liberation/soverignty movement, is fundamentally opposed to globalization. This stands opposed with the Rense line that Zionism is identical with the movement to create a NWO. In both cases, the Powers that Be are defined by the PoIA as whatever power structure is Other to myself. But a difference in who is the Other creates narrative incompatibility. The narrative difference is explained by the PoD – because his narrative is almost but not quite true (apparently only the identity of the Powers that Be is incorrect), Rense must be a disinfo agent. This is speculative, but I think Rense would return the compliment.

Thus, the community remains stable. Both actors have their narratives confirmed, rather than defused by opposing views: the Powers that Be are obviously interested enough to spread this disinfo, therefore I must be on to something.

The Principle of Inverse Authority

One of the correlates of personifying the Powers that Be is the disreputability of the cultural mainstream. It is almost always the case that the Powers that Be operate from within traditional structures of authority, rather than autonomously, or against them. There is therefore a very strong tendency to favour culturally marginalized sources of information. They generally prefer their information to come from those “unschooled, but highly educated”, as Cliff High put it, to avoid The “taint of academic leanings”(Here, at 4:34-4:40).

I’d like to propose a hypothetical principle, generalizing this position. I think it characterizes a lot of woo:

The Principle of Inverse Authority [PoIA]: The more Authority (as defined by the cultural mainstream) a source of information has, the less likely it is to be true.

This could be restated, from the view outside woo, as “Those on the fringes tend to get fringier”. Once your confidence in one or a handful of very widely accepted sources of authority, for some people it becomes much easier to disbelieve other sources of authority. If you believe the U.S. government lies all the time, for some people the notion that NASA lies all the time thereby becomes easier to swallow. Since the very widespread tendency is to locate the Powers that Be within traditional authority structures, truth therefore has to come from the margins. Fringe  fringe politics, fringe science, and fringe spiritual traditions are brought into dialog with each other to make up the spectrum of woo.

The PoIA functions to insulate the woo-woo community from having to engage in arguments with experts in the fields that they claim to have improved. Those who believe there will be a pole-shift, for instance, can summarily dismiss debunkers – they are tainted with academic learning, and therefore cannot be trusted. Witness, for instance, Patrick Geryl:

He is of the opinion that in 2012, the crust of the earth will shift as much as 30degrees over the course of a few hours, due to a massive sunstorm. He’s not a professional scientist, but he is unwaveringly confident in his narrative nonetheless.

When asked in the interview why he is so confident, he recalls another one of his predictions from when he was a young man. When it was fashionable to believe that the expansion of the universe was decelerating, he was boldly claiming the contrary. He believed that (due to an error in Special Relativity that he claims to have identified) the univere is in fact accelerating in its expansion. Recently, and anomalously, a number of observations have been made that suggest that this is true. Geryl’s reasons why this acceleration is happening are not widely accepted, but he was several decades ahead of the game on the observable facts.

So when asked about the reliability of his apocalyptic 2012 crust shift scenario, he points to his previous success with the acceleration of the universe (see 31:55 of the video above). Everyone thought I was crazy, he protests, but I was right. Everyone thinks I’m crazy again. I must be right. This is the PoIA, elegantly self-applied by Geryl. The fact that no one believes him becomes clear evidence of the truth of his claims.

Woo News

Mytron The Fifth, Illuminati Ruler And Secret Overlord Of All Humanity, Dead At 112 - http://www.theonion.com/content/news_briefs/mytron_the_fifth_illuminati

Just that.