Some government conspiracies are real. They tend to align with openly stated policies; the US government was hostile to the civil rights movement; in secret, they did many terrible things to discredit it. While there are false flags here, logic chains are not completely tortured. Cointel pro is understandable. A 911 missile strike on the Pentagon covered up by a plane-full of people mysteriously disposed of off camera isn’t.
The most seductive aspect of the conspiracy theory is that once freed from the bonds of available, impeccable information sources, you are free to build logic chains that lead, literally, from anything to anything else you want to believe in.
Something about breaking that first logical chain, throwing out traditional media sources completely as corrupt, empowers the conspiracy theory to break the next logic chain. And the next. And so on.
As an example, New World Order conspiracists who saw 911 as an attack by the NWO on American ‘sovereignty’ (keep an eye on that word, always, it’s very slippery, like the word ‘freedom’) had no problem seeing GW Bush’s flouting of the United Nations as a conspiracy by globalists who were behind… greater United Nation control of national government.
Wut? You say.
I had a conspiracist explain it to me. Bush was so obviously insane, so obviously corrupt, and the process by which we went to war was so obviously illegal, that it damaged the reputation of the US, leading us down the road to greater United Nations control.
In the long game, ignoring the UN was a plot by UN lovers to create an all powerful UN. Obviously.
This is idiotic.
This is an example of the If X-then-Y reasoning, where X and Y are non-causal, that conspiracy theory abounds in. False flags! Deep, long games!
Pro tip: the reason the world stands on the brink of climate change disaster? Nobody, not even the rich elites, ever plays a long game. EVER!
THERE IS NO LONG GAME!
The only people playing long games do it in the open with think tanks and white papers trying to create a policy consensus around a given world view. Communitarian values on the left; libertarian values on the right.
Now, does this mean I don’t believe in conspiracies? No. The US government spends hundreds of billions annually on agencies whose only job it is to uncover conspiracies! If they didn’t exist, we wouldn’t stand for this.
Do false flags never happen? No. Look at the COINTELPRO portfolio from the sixties.
But prematurly embracing conspiracy of any sort is a slippery slope into the world of electing Donald Trump. In the Trumper’s world view, all expertise is seen as corruption and collusion. All graphs are fake. All data is suspect. Anecdotes and gut feelings replace data and research and academic opinions.
And while academics aren’t always right, gut reactions are more often wrong. Because we think with our brains, not our guts. A gut reaction is a deep, primitive brain response from reptilian brain centers responsible for fight or flight, panic, fear, mating, death and hatred.
Those emotions are not a great foundation for good policy choices.
Occam of Occam’s Razor fame. His principle states that among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.
To some of my beloved and funky friends; I think you are being played by the fake news makers.
There’s no clear reason to make up the Vegas shooter story. None. We’re all shell shocked by Trump and North Korea and the hurricanes and Russia and everything else. What does the Vegas story do? Insert gun control debate into a schedule already so crowded that nobody can focus on anything for more than ten seconds?
Look Trump was doing that already AND IT HAS BEEN WORKING GREAT. Trump’s twitter account is like a squid spewing ink trying to escape a predator.
Trump has the ability to make us insane already, and he’s fully deploying that ability.
Liberals and gun control people are all useless and powerless and hampered by our ‘we don’t want to shoot people’ fetish. This attack is beyond us.
This isn’t a big C conspiracy.
There might be a small c somehwere lurking, still. The dude might have bribed hotel security to wipe some hard drives. Why? Because he didn’t want to be stopped during the set up. Is there evidence for this? NOT THAT I KNOW OF. But its the kind of thing that might explain any discrepancies, and it’s pretty boring.
That the thing about the little c conspiracy (all that conspiracy means is some people are keeping secrets.) The little c stuff is petty and stupid and ugly and whether you accept it or not, the big story stays mostly the same.
So on 911 we were uniquely vulnerable to the Saudis because of Bushes ties to the kingdom / and / or various forms of criminal incompetence. So the administration fought any investigation of 911 and quietly shredded evidence for years to the degree it could.
This little c conspiracy generated the big C conspiracy. The PNAC they were all in on it New World Order stuff. The biggest C 911 conspiracy insisted that there were no planes used. It was holograms and controlled detonation. (This was called the web fairy theory.)Variants of the web-fairy also say no plane hit the pentagon. it was a missile.
The missile theory is fascinating. It seems to have merit. But why? Why use a missile? What happened to the plane?
It doesn’t matter; all that matters is that you have something that seems hard to explain, small hole in the pentagon; very little intact debris, and the conspiracy theory explains it. Like the American flag ‘rippling’ in the vacuum of space on the moon. (The razor thin aluminum sheeting was reacting to sunlight, buckling as it expanded and contracted.) There are no stars in most of the moon shot photos! Exposing for the surface light condition, raw unfiltered daylight, meant there wasn’t enough light hitting the emulsion for the stars to register. Standard photographic stuff, and you don’t think, if They were faking it, that They would stick some stars in the goddamn backdrop?
And on and on.
The US military and the intelligence agencies used UFO reports to mask several kidns of secret surveillance missions against the Soviets; U2 sightings and the Mogul balloon program. A Mogul balloon crashed in Roswell. They said it was a flying saucer.
Whups. They’d started a big C conspiracy that will never, ever die. Why won’t it die? Because there’s money in it. That’s the other thing to understand about Conspiracy—it is a consumer product.
Little c is true, often, and kind of boring. Big C is seldom true, and when it is, that truth emerges generally only after the culprits are beyond justice. (Gulf of Tonkin; Zimmerman telegram.) Big Cs are exciting. Big Cs sell in certain segments of the population like hotcakes.
US intelligence agencies, fearful that the UFO craze could be exploited by the Russians, many people thought that UFOs didn’t like our nuclear weapons, caused the US military to conduct experiments where they exposed hundreds of soldiers to mock-ups of alien craft, and people in odd space suits, and they asked the soldiers what they would have done, if strange orders started being barked at them through megaphones from these people.
Then they told the soldiers never to talk about this.
So the area 51 alien crashed saucer government knows about the aliens thing? It IS a conspiracy! A little c one. No aliens, no saucers. Just a fear of Russians, and of a pop culture phenomena.
(This all from the work for Jacques Vallee, a french researcher, who was offered, on many occasions, a chance at taking a cab to the pentagon to see alien bodies–but only off the record. This was some psy ops thing. He turned down the offers. If the pentagon wasn’t going to make any official statements, Vallee refused to go to their halloween haunted house. He agonized over this. It was the right decision.)
I know all this because…
I LOVE CONSPIRACY THEORIES AND I WANT THEM TO BE TRUE VERY VERY BADLY!
But I also have a really sharp brain (so sharp it cuts itself sometimes) and I can inhale books, I have access to the best libraries in the world, and so I have spent—wasted?—tens of thousands of hours trying to dig to the bottom of these things, trying to find the Truth, capital T, when there is only ever a little t truth. And while there are mysteries on this planet, the little c conspiracies so far outnumber the big C ones, that I can tell, from the get go, when a conpiracy theory smells like capital C, because it smells like bullshit.
Not the first Shaver text, but an illustration of how all beings grow into magical giants when not cooked under the rays of a poisonous sun, like ours. Our shitty, shitty sun.
A third of the way through 1947’s Most Sensational True Story Ever Told, I Remember Lemuria, wondering why I’m bothering, when the text finally hits its stride.
The flow of the text is interrupted by a structureless mass of footnotes and commentary from Palmer, explaining the made up words and the ridiculous made-up science of Shaver. Again, the language of science is mostly an invocation, a magic spell meant to help induce belief.
(Imagine a time, when simply gesturing at nonsense and shouting SCIENCE could inspire belief. Ah. The good old days.)
Some worldbuilding tidbits of the Shaver-verse:
Life is growth; not just intellectual or character growth, but growth growth. When not poisoned by disintegrative particles from a dying sun, people live forever and grow to be hundreds of feet tall.
The shaver-verse is basically atheist; our religion is distorted memories of ancient astronauts; Shaver is the original Erich von Däniken, of Chariots of the Gods fame. “There were giants in the earth in those days,” the old testament line, is trotted out to explain the growing forever idea.
Only it isn’t really atheist, there is a celebration of a life force (which has both male and female aspects) and a reverence for super-hot, as in sexually hot, giant elder gods. Our POV character after orchestrating an escape from the madness enveloping Earth is brought into the presence of an 80 foot tall elder goddess, which whom he instantly falls into uncontrollable love with.
The force of energy in Elders overwhelm young Ro, (human scale people) and turn them into mindless sycophants.
So after a horrific bit of business in which our hero Muon Mu, or something, witnesses rays murdering ancient Titans and Atlans (humans are Atlans; Titans are another race, giant, with animal features) he escapes off planet by pretending to be going for a simple joyride.
He knows his thoughts are being monitored. A group of humans and aliens and human animal hybrid, including his new girlfriend, whose cute tale and hooves are mentioned frequently, follow along with him, sensing that he somehow knows something is up and is handling it well by by not admitting anything weird is going on.
The invisible rays are striking people and Titans dead all around. Panic attracts the rays.
Masking his thoughts, his fear, Muon and Atla (his faun girlfriend) and some mars maids and big-heads accompany him on a joyride to the moon; they are pursued, of course, by a deros agent in a ship, but by using his belt and all his strength, combined with the strength of others, he can pull on the joystick of the spaceship and over-ride the speed controls built into the stick.
So they escape.
To some advanced sunless worlds (no suns, no disintegrating particles) a few light-days away (the speed of light, by the way, is bullshit. he doesn’t come and and say it’s a jewish conspiracy, it’s just wrong, because Einstein didn’t understand some made up words and friction with the Shaver version of Ether.)
Here they meet with vast ancient beings who make the 80 foot tall Goddess they’ve all fallen in love with look like Peter Dinklage. A plan is formed, to save what can be saved of Earth, and to quarantine our planet forever after.
But first Muon Mu must create a manuscript… hey, you’re reading a manuscript aren’t you! to save future man from the evil poison sun particles, which shorten our lives (we should be immortal) and which make us violent and crazy.
Our food and air and water basically need to be hugely purified, by centrifuges and electrically.
Then we can live forever.
Muon Mu and his Faun girlfriend are placed in Nutrient tanks for a week, where their minds and bodys grow, a century of married bliss is injected into them, and Mu is freed from his inescapable love of the 80 foot woman that took them to the God Council. The nutrient baths, the crystal eye-cups, the wires and tubes, are all really delightful, by the way.
The story moves at a breakneck pace. There’s very little description of anything. How does the architecture work, when some members of a race are 100 feet tall, and some are 6 feet tall? It’s never mentioned. Tall ceilings, basically.
But what drives it is a feverish velocity, a peculiar sensuality, and the aw-shucks messianic quality of Muon Mu, who was just a shitty art student with a bit of insight and intuition, bravery and pluck, who becomes, or will become, the savior of all mankind; us, in the future, when we learn to centrifuge our food and air and water, and live forever.
They dreamed big, back then, in those days, after the bomb was dropped, and the post war boom had begun.
I’m reading the manuscripts co-created by Ray Palmer and Richard Sharpe Shaver (1905-1977) that form the nucleus of The Shaver Mystery, a bit of twisty SF culture from the 40s and 50s that has long fascinated me. Shaver exhibited all the symptoms of classic schizophrenia, his first psychotic break coming in the early 30s:
As Bruce Lanier Wright notes, Shaver “began to notice that one of the welding guns on his job site, ‘by some freak of its coil’s field atunements’, was allowing him to hear the thoughts of the men working around him. More frighteningly, he then received the telepathic record of a torture session conducted by malign entities in caverns deep within the earth.”
Shaver suffers from a form of hallucination broadly known as The Influencing Machine, which has been a central shared myth of many schizophrenics since the first documented case, that of James Tilly Matthews.
The Middle Man operating The Air Loom–an ‘influencing machine’ similar to the sadistic Deros of The Shaver Mystery
Tilly described a world of futuristic machines, “magnetic spies” and mass brainwashing, woven into a bizarre but well-informed narrative of the high politics behind the Napoleonic Wars, in which Tilly played a very real role.
Seeking distraction from the madness of the present, I found a free ebook of I Remember Lumuria, the first of the Shaver Mystery texts attributed to Richard Shaver but mostly crafted by Palmer using the world building in his letter “A Warning to Future Man,” a 10,000 page outpouring of schizophrenic pseudo-science and paranoid delusion retrieved by Palmer from an editor’s trashcan.
Two years after the atom-bombing of Hiroshima Amazing Stories publishes the first Shaver Mystery Novel,”The Most Sensational True Story Ever Told”, co-written by editor Ray Palmer.
While John W. Campbell strived for a degree of scientific rigor and literary quality in the pages of Astounding magazine, nurturing the seminal voices of the golden age of science fiction, Ray Palmer’s Amazing stories was more mercurial, adolescent, sensationalist…
In a word, I guess, deplorable.
Anyway, I’m halfway through I remember Lemuria, and have noted some recurring motifs of pseudo-scientific thought, including POE. Purity of Essence, the term given for General Jack D. Ripper’s vanished state of potency in Dr. Strangelove
In the shaver cult POE is invoked as the notion that the Earth’s sun has burned off its layer of ‘clean carbon’ 20,000 years in the past, and is now combusting dirtier, heavier elements, resulting in a constant wash of dirty particles which accumulate in our tissues. These accumulations cause aging, death, and disease, which are not natural. (old testament stories of giants and century-old patriarchs form a scaffolding for the Shaver Mystery, it seems.)
Shaver’s astrophysics is wrong, in ways understood even in the 40s; stars burn lighter elements (hydrogen, helium, etc0 by fusing them into heavier ones, with the heaviest elements being formed only in the heat and compression of supernovas. You know, the bit about all the iron in your blood having been formed in the explosion of a star? That’s true.
Shaver’s vision of the birth of our sun, in the atomic combustion of a dead planet’s fossil fuel layer, is wrong and ridiculous, but unlike John W. Campbell’s Astounding, Ray Palmer’s Amazing doesn’t care; the language of science is used as an incantation, a magic spell to induce the suspension of disbelief, and in the years following our destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the idea of nuclear poisons from our own sun raining down on us being responsible for all death and disease rang with a certain horrible truth.
If you’re interested in reading more about the Shaver Mystery, I found this article to be awesome, and googling it will give you links to other esoteric groups who believe in parts of the Shaver stories to this day.
Mysteriously, this article says it’s part one of a two part piece, but the second part is… missing. Attempts to leave a comment also generate an error… Gulp!
Why am I interested in this now?
For a time, the Shaver Mystery worked, vastly increasing the circulation of Amazing; Palmer would go on to found Fate magazine, an occult journal, but for a time Palmer and Shaver blurred the boundaries of science fiction and fact. The more respectable John W. Campbell would later follow suit, with his embrace of the Dean Drive and Scientology in the fifties and sixties, but his disregard for reality was never as flagrant as Palmer’s.
What we see in the Shaver mystery is the appeal of paranoid delusions to large groups of people. We see a huckster cynically milking the popular delusion of a sincere, but sick, man, and using it to enrich himself. A deranged manifesto in a trash-can is turned into a shared delusional world which infected hundreds of thousands of people, some who enjoyed it as entertainment, and other’s who took it seriously.
Traditional SF, its fandom and institution, scoffed at The Shaver Mystery, but that didn’t slow it’s explosive growth among the less sophisticated, the adolescent, the less educated, and the people attracted to the lurid sadism of the Deros, and the simplistic Manichean struggle between good and evil robot demons in vast caverns hidden beneath our feet.
I guess I’ve figured out why I’m drawn to Shaver and Palmer now.
I’m trying to figure out what story I want to tell with all this.
The story I need to tell.
Wish me luck… or a ray of inspiration from a Tero, one of the good ancient robots, buried deep in the stygian depth of the collective unconscious.
