ACFM - #ACFM Trip 12: The Cosmic Right

Episode Date: August 16, 2020

Nadia Idle, Keir Milburn and Jeremy Gilbert are back to discuss the recent rise of conspiratorial thinking within New Age, spiritual and ‘wellness’ communities, and what implications this has for the Left, with music by David Bowie, Mark Stewart and Coki. Edited and produced by Olivia Humphreys and Matt Huxley. PRS LICENCE NUMBER: LE-0016481 Music: […]

Hello, you're listening to the podcast version of ACFM on Navarra Media. And on the podcast version of this show, you'll get the stimulating and mind-expanding discussion from our hosts, but you won't get the music. That's because of the way rights and licenses work in the digital age. So you're really only getting half the picture, but there is an easy way to fix that. If you head over to the Navaramedia.com website, you can stream the full show. It's easy enough, just follow the link in the description of this podcast. Otherwise, enjoy the standalone discussion in this episode of ACFM. Why are you angry if I wear a mask? Because you're wearing a mask out of stupidity and you're further pushing the agenda. And the agenda is the

deep state which wants to control all of us and have us living in fear and thinking that you're contaminated. It is false narrative. And when you wear a mask, which you can certainly do, you are further pushing the agenda that is condemning all of us and keeps us living. And keeps us living. in the state of terror. She's not alone in those views. Welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Nadia Idol, and today, as usual, I'm joined by Jeremy Gilbert. Hello.

And Kea Milburn. Hello. And today we're talking about the cosmic right. We're through the looking glass here, Pee. So, guys, I think this was another one of Keir's exes. excellent ideas. So why are we talking about this now? Well, I think it was kind of my idea. The phrase the Cosmic Right comes from an internet friend of mine from Australia, Dave Eden, because I was thrown around the idea, this concept of acid fascism, but it doesn't capture

acid fascism to go along with acid communism, of course. But basically, it refers to a phenomenon and that's been sort of been developing over the last couple of years but has massively, massively accelerated since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. And it's this sort of spread of conspiratorial thinking and in fact, conspiratorial thinking

tending towards sort of far right, even racist sort of themes, the spread of that sort of thinking within sort of new age, have seen spirituality communities and in particular since the pandemic has started in wellness communities and it's like so basically that there's been a complicated theme there's been other upsurges of conspiracy theories around 9-11 for instance the assassination of John F Kennedy is probably like the mother load that's where it all starts no actually it goes back a long way before that but like

in contemporary times but like this is something new this is something strange and in some ways it's the emergence of like right wing well we'll discuss with their right wing patterns of thought

but like conspiratorial patterns of thought crossing over into Trumpism and into conspiracy theory thinking around the sort of like Trump movement the spread of that sort of thinking into communities which would have been thought of traditionally is aligned to the left.

So it's pretty appropriate to us to discuss it. I mean, I think it's worth saying, it's worth stressing from the start. Like, I mean, as Keir's already alluded to, it's really, I mean, the history of, like, relationships between, like, indeed, cosmic thinking, magical thing, you know, magic, you know, strands of yoga, you know, alternatives, you know,

sort of what we think of as alternative culture, even vegetarianism and, like, the far, right. I mean, goes back at least to the early 20th century. There was always, there was an esoteric strand of Nazism and they were into some strands of Hindu philosophy, some of them. And so this stuff does, you know, it often, I mean, and often, and obviously like, you know, protocols of elders of Zion, you know, the forged text claiming to be the sort of minutes of the secret meeting of the Jews and their plan to take over the world, you know, that was kind of, you know, that's probably the most historically significant conspiracy theory.

So it's not really new. But then the question, I guess, is like, well, what is exactly happening now? And Keir said a bit about this already, like what's happening now that makes it particularly worth talking about. And obviously, like you say here, the context of COVID seems to have really accelerated certain things. But even without COVID, there was this really obvious acceleration of a certain kinds of conspiracy thinking, certainly in American political culture. So for the show, you know, as a microdose, I did an interview with Eric Davis, and one of the

things we talked about in that was the kind of genesis and the growing importance of the Q&N conspiracy theory, which is this completely insane, this is completely insane sort of right-wing of fantasy, basically, according to which Donald Trump is actually the, a sort of James Bond-like figure, I mean, sort of better than James Bond, sort of secretly, leading a secret campaign of kind of good guys within the sort of security services and bits of the media and what have you, and they're fighting against this evil conspiracy of bad people in the deep state who were all, who were paedophiles and engaged in various kinds of, you know, magical practice and whatever. And it's, and it all comes from just a series

of very, of kind of, you know, of sort of posts on 4chan on this, you know, this challenge. that side. So just before you go on, Jeremy, just because I think when we were chatting about this in the beginning, and then I listened to the Eric Davis, excellent Eric Davis interview, and then you brought up, is it QNON? Yeah, Q and on. Q and on, right. So I had never heard about this.

And I'm, I guess, I'd like us at this stage just to, like, I guess, expose to, like, where does this stuff play out? Like, why is it that I've not heard about it? Is it because, like, you've just mentioned, I'm not on 4chan. Like, is it a certain section of the internet and it's a certain kind of person that is involved in this kind of thing?

Like, is this, like, whose reality is it? Well, I think if you, I think it's mainly because you're just, you're not in the state and you're probably not, like, listening to as many American left podcasts. Right, okay, fine, fine. It's just that.

Like, everyone in the States knows about it. I mean, everyone who follows news media and kind of follows political knows about QAnon because you can't really know about the whole culture of Trumpism now without knowing that a big strand, a significant strand of Trump's, like, active support base is people who believe this fantasy. And it's been sort of extraordinary to watch it unfurled

over the past four to five years. And yet, you know, it's kind of gone from being the situation like five years ago with the alt-right and people, you know, was this kind of, you know, scary, but very niche part of the, of sort of internet culture and meme culture to this situation where you seriously have, you know, I mean, the percentages of people in America who say they believe, like, the QAnon story, I can't remember what the percentages are that. But you're not talking about like tens, but you're talking about, you know, there's like

probably, there's something like between 5 and 20% of people who actually believe it. And this is like, this is flat earth levels of insanity. I mean, this is like, and it is, and it has a direct implication on people's, you know, political behavior. Yeah, and that's the key thing, isn't it? It's like, how does it, how does this play out in terms of, like, both policy, activism, etc? Just to sort of like, where has this gone? Like, who believes in this thing?

Like, there is a story of, like, leaking out from internet chat rooms into real world in a couple of different ways, as in, like, someone was selected to be, I think it's like the House of Representatives. So they're going to be in Congress, a Republican candidate who is openly references Q and is an open believer in the Q and on. Yeah, Q is the name of the anonymous poster on 4chan

who posts these like enigmatic phrases which their followers interpret like some kind of oracle. But it's all kind of gesture towards an understanding of and they seem to offer, they claim to offer their readers are kind of an understanding of the true event going on underneath the surface.

So, you know, when Trump seems to do something stupid in a speech, he's actually giving a secret signal to some of his agents, you know, as part of their campaign against the evil, you know, paedophile lizard people. And it's probably important to say that it relates to paedophile rings in elite society, the Clinton, the organised crime family of the Clintons, as it said, in Q and on law and Obama, etc. Right, so there's sort of high-level pedophiles, you know, and Trump is part of a secret organization

which is going to reclaim democracy and it's going to be a great awakening and, you know, hundreds of years of distortion of democracy will be resolved. That's the sort of like, it's something like that. But there isn't a Q&N canon, apart from like the Q, these little nomic announcements, comes from whoever cue is like basically it's one of those it's a do-it-yourself conspiracy theory you know

it's a participative it's like participative world building basically it's all about like they're little clues dropped and then you have to join in the discussion to try to work out what it means basically which I think is probably like something it's probably something I don't know if it's new or not but it really really does fit with the way in which people like to use the internet you You know what I mean? It's something about the training that the internet's given us that what we want to do is like not be given these truths, but we want to go and pick out and try and find our, you know, work our own way, thread our own way through the conspiracy. What you've just described seems like, you know, as we were saying when we were chatting about doing this show, quite mapping quite similarly onto the kind of anti-vaxing position of like, I know, I've discovered something that the doctors don't know. or I know something about COVID which other people don't know.

So is it part of the technology or the architecture of part of this? Is the kind of the throwing the clues which allows people to feel a level of agency in kind of discovering the truth? Is that what makes it more effective than it being viewed as out there for everyone to see?

Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I mean, you can argue that it's symptomatic of the sort of general, you know, what Leotard in the 70s called the postmodern condition, you know, the situation in which there's a kind of general declining faith in authority, whether it's scientific authority or religious authority or kind of media authority and there's a growing tendency of people to just sort of, to basically just believe things on

the basis that they seem to work for them, that they actually produce some effect or some affect or that they just, you know, they give them a kind of, you know, what Frederick Jameson calls a cognitive map, you know, to make sense of the world in a way that, you know, produces results for them even if it doesn't actually correspond to any objective reality. And this is, in some ways, this is, yeah, this clearly is a sort of acceleration of that tendency. And it's sort of, you know, I mean, that postmodern condition is always a sort of two-edged thing. It's partly, you know, it has, partly it comes from a genuine democratic rejection of kind of traditional forms of authority.

but what it doesn't use the reason it produces a sort of social crisis is it doesn't replace them with like properly democratic or deliberative alternatives it doesn't it doesn't produce it doesn't replace them with a situation in which people actually have a democratic opportunity to both learn about the world in a meaningful way and then deliberate with others to make decisions about the kind of world they want it just throws you into the kind of infinite marketplace in which you know ideas and knowledge just becoming sort of exchangeable for you know and just become sort of commodified but i think i mean that all is that is a really tempting analysis of like the conspiracy thing but you know i you know i've been sort of teaching still you know that stuff and kind of leotar for years and you know decades now almost but it's really tempting but i think it is important also to to acknowledge well as we've already alluded to like there are massive like historical precedents for this stuff and like you know we mentioned the anti-semitic conspiracy theories but then you know you know you in some sense is like the ultimate one is, you know, I mean, one of the ultimate ones is the long history of kind of paranoia about Freemasons and Freemasonry and, you know, there's even like a, you know, there's such a big political issue in the United States, like shortly after the independence.

So there's a whole anti-fremasons party. And so there's obviously other reasons for all this stuff, which are kind of much, I think, sort of deeper than, they're deeper than just. anything going on in the past 30 years. Mark Stewart was in this post-punk band, the pop group, and after he left, he had this quite a long career. In fact, I saw him a couple of years ago. Yeah, it's still ongoing. He produced a whole series in the sort of like early to mid-80s. He produced a whole, well, a couple of really, really interesting albums

as Mark Stewart and the Mafia. The first one was learning to cope with cowardice and the second one was called As the Veneer of Democracy starts to fade So one of the songs on that coping with cowardice is called None Dare Call It Conspiracy And it's part of this sort of It's part of this sort of

This sort of The way that it's sort of like quite like conspiracy not taking, conspiracy theory is not taken too seriously, were part of like a certain, certain subculture, the sort of post-punk sort of subculture at that time, so you'd have magazines like vague, which started off as a sort of post-punk fanzine and turned into like these sort of like situationist sort of screeds, etc.

But that went through a real conspiracy theory moment. We could sort of say that. There are probably ideal conditions in which conspiracy theories grow, more than just, you know, you know, the sort of like breakdown of authority over the last sort of 40, 50 years. God is, yes, probably is 40, 50 years. Like they probably, this sort of breakdown authority

probably takes place when you have what we do have now, which is like this huge, huge, huge, and insane levels of inequality, material inequality, and huge concentrations of wealth, which is what we have now. So you do have elites, which are incredibly powerful.

Right. And then it probably also takes off when you have unexpected events, right? So COVID-19 has a very specific upsurge at the moment, very specific sort of like conspiracy theories, really, really accelerating fast. And it's probably because COVID-19 is just such an unusual event. And so like JFK is one of these er-conspiracy events. You know, when people look back at that, they sort of think, well, yeah, you know, part of what it was was this sort of feeling of disruption in your, in your world view that, like, that, like, the president could be shot by one person and history could change in such a contingent events, do you know what I mean? And then you have a huge, huge upsurge around 9-11, so 9-11 truthers, like a really big upsurge of conspiracy theories. And it was because, you know, it just seemed, you know, such a difficult event to get your head around, particularly if you were American and, you know, there have not been foreign attacks on American soil for so long. I think COVID is a bit like that. It is just such an unusual situation. It's such an interruption in what we thought the future would be like that is very hard to just incorporate into, you know,

you have to adjust your worldview to take COVID into account in some way. But is that because the world has been relatively stable? I mean, instinctively, that feels like the wrong, the untruth. Or is it because neoliberalism has sold this story to people, a lot of people in the West who, you know, have not had to experience, you know, war in the explicit sense, but of course, you know, I've been under like economic war for, you know, decades. Where you tell yourself this story, you know, that same, you know,

that capitalist realism thing where you think, well, this is what the world looks like and then an external event like 9-11 or COVID or whatever comes and because of how like materially real it is, it shakes that up. Is that what we're kind of saying? Or is it that is, I guess what I'm trying to say is it like there's the reality shifting but there's also the narrative that was told before that

for that to be that stark. Well, I think that... No, go on. Well, no, no. I mean, that just, like, leads us to question, like, what... COVID's this huge, really unusual event.

But Jesus, it's come at the end of, or in the middle of a whole series of events, which just completely defied the common sense understanding of how the world works. From 2008, then, you know, Trump, Brexit, etc. You know, it's part of this general breakdown of a period of hegemony. know if it's the final breakdown of it,

but basically a period of like what seemed like relative stability in the 1990s, perhaps even the early 2000s, goes into this period of really extended, so far a decade-long period of like just crises after crises, unexpected event after unexpected event. You know, that will produce that sort of millinarian thinking, basically, that we're entering the end times,

that, you know, the whole society is going to break down. And then, you know, come in, other way is this other sort of millenarian end times type event, which is climate change. And so some of what we might want to think about, perhaps a little bit later, is how much of this conspiracy theory, and there's loads we have to go through, how much of these conspiracy theories is actually a sort of like sublimated recognition that this event is coming down the line, but your worldview is not going to allow you to see that event in its full force because it has unpleasant

consequences for your life and in fact it's probably better and more reassuring to think that there is somebody in control, a small group of people in control

and therefore another small group of people the Q and on the Trumpist could solve that problem where in fact you know

actually the real if you look at it with stark reality it's actually much much more difficult to solve if there is no conspiracy of people

control in the world I mean, there's two different types of explanation partly, which both, you know, beyond conspiracy theory just being nonsense, like, you know, there's put around to, you know, just do people or waste their time. And there's one is that sort of psychoanalytic explanation that it's a displacement, it's a sublimation, meaning it's, you know, the sort of emotional energy you should be investing in thinking about climate change, you're investing in thinking about this other thing because climate change is too big to look at or whatever. But then there's also sort of Gramsci an explanation. Gramsci always says in common sense, in everybody's kind of distorted, ideological, everyday understanding of reality, there's always elements of good sense. You know, there's elements of just the truth.

I mean, you know, and even in QAnon, I mean, I would say, you know, there's an element of, there's big elements of good sense. I mean, I think, you know, the idea of the Clintons is the great villains. I mean, I do think, you know, if humanity survives the next century, The Clinton period will be, it is Clinton who will be looked back on us, this like colligula-like villain, you know, who just sat there, who had all the science in front of him, who knew perfectly well what was going on in terms of climate change.

And instead of doing anything about it, destroyed the global kind of regulatory regime that could have actually tackled it. On purpose, you know, that's what, you know, they set up the World Trade Organisation and imposed this free market deregulated, the agenda and everything, you know, destroying all the governmental operators that had been in place since. the war that could have actually dealt with climate change. This is Bill Clinton for our younger listeners.

Well, it's Bill Clinton, but also Hillary Clinton absolutely is an agent. It's part of the same. Joe Biden. The same sort of dynasty. You know, so, you know, it's not, they're not wrong that those guys are the villains in a way which even like Trump isn't, really. They're not wrong about that. And, you know, they're not wrong about their kind of parasitic relationship to the world. And it's also, you know, with Kennedy, like it clearly is.

everybody it's just a matter of it's just there's no he's there's virtually no historian of the matter now he doesn't assume there was some kind of you know conspiracy of security services and you know even you know that was all you know it was Eisenhower who when he left office at the end of the 50s who told everybody look you've got to watch out for this growing military industrial complex because he knew what was going on with the development of the growing kind of power and total unaccountability of the CIA and their sort corporate allies. So there is obviously there's a powerful sort of elements of

truth in it and you know, and in all these so-called conspiracy theories. And to some extent, the very labeling of, you know, I mean, one of the issues to get to is like what we mean by conspiracy theory. What was the definition of conspiracy theory? Because of course,

sort of liberalism, common sense liberalism accuses of conspiracy theory, anyone who has a systematic account of power relations or who argues that there are sort of, you know, there are political and historical forces at work other than the immediate intentions of individuals and the accidental aggregation of their effect. So they call us, I mean, they call Marxist conspiracy theorists. They say, you know, you get this incident media studies all the time that basically liberals will just use the term conspiracy theory to

refer to like, you know, like British cultural studies that accuse of being a conspiracy theory because it has because it says that like the ruling class use their media power to serve their own interests. So the question of what, what then is a conspiracy theory is a really interesting question. And I don't know, what do we think? So because I think we want to say there are conspiracy theories that even though they may contain elements of, they are a distinctive type of discourse and even though they may contain elements of truth, they then wrap those elements of truth up in a false story, which has politically debilitating effect. Yes. So I think that's the key ACFM question for us. So we should go on to define that and

talk about the right or left bit. But I think the key question for us, one of the key questions is exactly that, is that what is the effect of this kind of thinking? And when does this kind of thinking arise? And what does it give, what does it bear for the future? And who does it, you know, is a certain kind of person it attracts and what's the effect on the political landscape? I think that's one of the key things. Well, the effect, I think it never benefits the left, does it? I mean, from our perspective, from a left perspective, it's a historical constant. The conspiracy theory is basically always an alternative to a properly leftist understanding of distributions of power and the way in which they're exercised. But isn't that

because we would think that our view, like we would, well, we do, we know, let's say we know because, you know, we believe in our truth, is that, you know, if you're talking about the relationship between the elites and the media, like to us, that's a fact, the right would, like you just mentioned before, would accuse us of that being conspiracy theory, when we would be like, nah, mate, it's a power analysis. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. So we have, so, but we need to define what we, like, you know, example, flesh out some of the

examples we talked about in the top of the show about what in contemporary life, like QAnon and you know, talk about COVID and, you know, humans are the virus and all the rest of it. Because those are things that we think are conspiracies. But there's people outside our political realm, which would call things that we know to be true as conspiracies. So that's the thing, right? So if you're saying there are no, like conspiracy theories never benefit the left. It's like, Well, I can see how there could be an argument made from the right about that. Does that make sense? Yeah, I think so, yeah.

I mean, I think, I mean, you're raising the question, aren't you? Like, what, I mean, to what extent do we assume a position of sort of, you know, what philosophers would call it an epistemological privilege? Like, we know the truth about the world. The others don't. And, you know, it's always a problem. It's an interesting, again, in the interview I did with Eric Davis for the show, one of the, this is an issue that kind of, we don't touch on it that much explicitly.

It kind of came up tangentially a few times because Eric is kind of, I think Eric is sort of, I mean, probably more than me, he's sort of a postmodernist in that he's sort of very committed to a notion of the sort of provisionality of truth, even though he always says he's like he's not a skeptic, like he's not, he's someone who does believe in science, for example. And, well, actually I suppose that, and I'm saying, I'm trying, it's not really accurate to characterize him as having a different position from me. than that, because I would say, I would say, there is a sort of, you know, there is a sort of, I would say, a sort of left perspective which comes out of, which really comes out of disillusion with the dream

of scientific Marxism in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the 20th century, the dream that Marxism could establish itself as this absolute science of history that would have, would be sort of objectively verifiable and would tell you an absolute truth about the world. And the fact that that became, that notion of Marxism became basically an ally part of the alibi for Stalinism, you know, generated it, and it became associated with the authoritarianism of the Communist Party in places like France. Really, you know,

was one of the things that led to the sort of wave of post-modernist and post-structuralist thinking, which sort of questioned all those ideas. But I would say, if you take on board, even people like Leotard, actually, who tends to be really denigrated, say, by people like Jameson, if you take it on board sort of, you know, in good,

faith and it's never saying it's never saying we absolutely don't believe in truth it's saying that as scientific thinkers we recognize that any truth is always provisional it's always a hypothesis based on the best available evidence to we have at a given moment and so if you believe and so you know you but also based on the best available evidence you have to make the most you know the best judgment you can and then you have to you know remain committed to the notion that that is the truth of the situation so from that point of view yeah we do we do believe you know would part of what it needs to be on the left is you basically do believe that if you do certain things, it will probably have certain outcomes. For example, if you deregulate

global financial markets and impose free trade on every country in the world, you will probably not cut carbon emissions to the extent the scientist in 1994 are already tending you you need to do. That is probably true. And it turns out that we were right about that. But You know, in relation to things like Hugh and on, you know, it's probably, you know, we would want to say it's true, well, it's true that the Clintons are part of a global and international, neoliberal political class

that serves their interest and those are their allies in Silicon Valley and Wall Street and basically doesn't really serve anyone else's interest apart from by accident. But we would want to say, like, it's not true that, you know, that they're in ally, that they're allied to vampire lizard people. Whether it makes any difference, I don't know.

Vampire lizard? Are they vampire lizards? I feel like... I'm elaborating that. Not much. Because I thought the image in my head kind of, yeah, I was like, wow, vampires, that's... I mean, even when I say the statement, Hillary Clinton is not in line with, in league with vampire lizard. People, I don't really believe it.

I don't really believe the statement that she isn't. I think we have to come back a little bit later about, like, what do we do about this? Like, what can a left... Well, how can the left relate to this? But also, what can the left perhaps learn from this? I think there is something the left can learn from something like Q and on. And I think we also have to return back to what Jeremy was talking about, which in some ways is a sort of defence of the project of reason, right?

And I'd probably say, like, what distinguishes the left is that, like, we want to defend, like, a collective project of freedom, of reason, sorry, of reason. And freedom. They're probably very, very related. And so, like, you know, democracy and actually science, right, those are both collective projects of reason, you know, where you're trying to come to a shared common view of the world in order to be able to act on the world,

and you're trying to do it through deliberative debate. I mean... In public, importantly, like in public, which is one of the key things, I think, one of you brought up when we were chatting about this, is that, you know, science is done in public. like reason it has to be public and that I guess is one of the key differences with the whole

conspiratorial mindset is you know that things are behind closed doors and in secret and all of that and you know things that you don't know and it's all dark and dingy and that's that's the opposite but I'd also say this though right just that the other thing about that is like basically I think science does get distorted

right that the actual practice of science gets distorted by funding money power dynamics, etc. I think democracy, as we practice it now, is very, very impoverished. And in fact, it would probably take, you know, it's a real, real big, big project to actually bring about the conditions where real participative democracy could actually take place, right? You know, that's a sort of, it's like an iterative project. We have to build the conditions for the expansion of democracy. So it's not a case of this post-truth sort of stuff, which is if we could just go back to 2015 before Trump, we would be back in

a land of liberal reason, etc. No, that's, you know, it wasn't working then. We have to go somewhere else. You have to build the instruments of collective reason. They're not just, they weren't already in existence. Yeah, I completely agree with that. And I think there's a tendency even among, you know, some of our own sort of friends on the sort of, you know, independent intellectual left in Britain to over, to be wrong, basically be wrong about when the crisis of democracy occurred. It didn't occur when people invented Twitter. You know, it occurred with the...

It occurred with the deliberate assault on democracy by the right in order to prevent the resurgence of the left in the 70s. It's when it really... If it occurred any time. I'm an alligator. I'm a mama, papa coming for you. I'm a space invader. I'll be a rock and rolling bitch for you.

So Ziggy Stardist is a character created by David Bowie. But it's an interesting one where it's a deliberate, it's a character which plays on a lot of sort of cultic and paranoid sort of fantasies. So Ziggy Stardist is this character who's come to, is an alien who's come to Earth to try and save the Earth from ecological collapse. And he ends up getting killed by,

you know, killed in the last Alba... Well, that's in the man who fell to Earth, isn't it? That's the move. Well, yeah, well, yes. Isn't it? Yeah, but that's also what the Ziggy Stardist mythos is. And the man who fell to Earth is sort of a start...

The story that sort of riffs off that. So there's an album in 1972 called The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders of Mars. And so David Bowie puts this character together through a range of influences, but one of them was he met this, this sort of like 1950s singer called Vince Taylor

who'd had a breakdown he basically was probably a paranoid schizophrenic and really did actually think he was an alien god person sent to earth to save it basically and those are the sorts of like they're the sorts of

sort of origin stories that basically a lot of cults like you know Scientology etc sort of form around so it was sort of playing with that with that sort of idea But it was also really interesting as a sort of world-building experiment, the whole Ziggy Stardist thing. And people really, really loved it, obviously.

I once invented the origin myth for a left-accelerationalist version of Ziggy Stardist called Jijek Stardist. It was going to be called Zijek Stardis and a communist from Mars. And it was a riff off this. I wrote the origin story. We did the sort of art project, me and a couple of friends in a free association, did an art project. Why did I know about this? This sounds great.

We basically invented this origin myth, which was an interview with Xijek Stardist, which goes on about like, there was this interchange between Ernesto La Klau and Jizek, the Marxist, Le Canean theorist, where they're having this dispute, and at one point La Klaus says,

for revolution to happen and the Jizek's world, you'd have to have communists from Mars, basically. Oh, yeah, Jizzeck Stardis and the communists from Mars. So anyway, We did this art exhibition at Bradford University where we invented a left-accelerationist, OI-Ban from the early 80s called Red Plenty,

and we created all a paraphernalia, so like an album cover, and like the badge, and like a couple of reviews that they'd had in sounds. And we were trying to claim that Red Plenty were the inspiration for Gijsardist. The punchline is I forced, I forced my daughter to play a couple of gigs as Gishex Stardist.

Oh my God. Gishek Stardis playing Red Plenty songs. That is intense. We could talk a little bit about the specific COVID or the other sort of conspiracy themes that have been exploding during this particular, well, this year, we should just put it like that. So one of them is the conspiracies around whether COVID actually exists, whether it's man-made, whether wearing masks makes it worse.

All of these sort of conspiracies, which put into question... 5G. Yeah, the 5G conspiracies. The 5G conspiracy. One of the things that made it really go... The COVID conspiracies go viral was this viral video called Plandemic, which is an interview. with a sort of disgraced scientific researcher called Judy Mikovits,

which sort of like, you know, basically puts all vaccinations under doubt, you know, so vaccinations don't work. And, you know, it leads to sort of like conspiracy theories like Bill Gates is using the vaccinations we'll have to have because of COVID to inject microchips into our skin so they can track us all the time, which obviously leads you to the question of, well, why would they bother that you've

were all carrying a phone round I mean you know what's the what would they gain from that nothing

basically um but that sounds like a really bad trip sounds like somebody had I mean

I mean it's not I mean the problem is right it's not it's there are so many

elements of truth in yeah in that like you know that 5G there's a lot there's lots of reasons to critique 5G

and the reasons why people are you know what are what's the interests and the power behind between 5G and bringing 5G to Britain and how it relates to surveillance, etc.? I think that's the problem with these things, you know. When did we have a public debate and decision about introducing 5G?

Obviously, we don't. We don't make public decisions about that. There's a sort of, you know, I actually don't know if the government actually regulated it or not, but it's private corporations bringing this in. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, and so basically, you know, yeah, Of course, you know, basically what you see is like, you know, an imposition of something or whatever.

Yeah, so I think that's semi-different to the sort of like, so the other part of the anti-COVID or the COVID conspiracies is, you know, this, how it maps onto anti-mask activism and the sort of polarization, particularly in the UK, but in the UK, particularly in the US, but in the UK as well around whether wearing masks is an infringement of freedom. which a writer has really, really taken up. I think that's a really interesting thing. But then it also, like, one of the big things that's happened is that this pandemic video has caused a load of, like, wellness influences to go full conspiratorial, basically. And that sort of happened really quite recently. And that's a really interesting one,

because it brings up one of the things that they're pointing to around, like, anti-vax, vaccinations, wearing a mask, etc, is this idea of bodily autonomy, right, that we should be control of our own bodies. I just think it's a really interesting thing because that's a sort of argument that I would be sort of sympathetic to in some sort of ways, do you know what I mean? I think basically what that throws up is a crisis

in an individualised form of freedom. So vaccinations and lockdown in particular, they show the limits of any form of freedom which purely begins from individual autonomy because what you do affects everyone else, do you know what I mean? So if you don't have a vaccination, well, you know, or if you don't wear a mask, you know, you're not just affecting your own health.

You are potentially killing somebody else. So you have to then think of freedom on a collective level. And yeah, and is that because of the poverty of collective thought that in the kind of individual people's minds because of how individuated our experience of the world is. Well, I'd say it's, yeah, it is that. And it's coming from, I mean, there's a number of different layers on which that's being compounded.

I mean, one thing to say about all this is just that, you know, I think liberalism tends to generate, because liberalism believes the world is just made by individuals, and it is suspicious of any form of collective action. It thinks it will always tend towards Stalinism or fascism. And, you know, it's always suspicious of it. And it has no understanding of structured power relations. Therefore, you know, you see, you know, in the 18th century,

you see that, you know, members of the board, the radical bulls who are going to some clubs. And, you know, they use things like Freemasons's Lodges are basically just where they're meeting and talking about politics. And that becomes a sinister conspiracy. It's your way of thinking about it because you can't really imagine people just acting collectively as anything other than sinister. You know, conspiracy just means, like, to breathe together. That's the Latin origin.

It just means to, like, be in the same room together. basically. That's pretty interesting in a COVID environment. Yeah, no, it is. That's true. That's really good point. And then, so there's that and then people, but then people's, as we've talked about many times on the show, you know, people's actual, people's actual lived experience, a kind of neoliberal culture is that, you know, the only form of meaningful agency on autonomy you're usually offered is just as an individual consumer. And I think when people, when people just kind of extend that, it's very natural to extend that to experience of your own body and then to find, you know, and then to find, you know, and then to experience any imposition on your body and your sort of bodily state, whether it's by medical

authorities or public authorities, as being a kind of intolerable imposition. But this is not that far away from us, as in, I guess, are we saying, like, we've all come across people who we thought kind of had OK views, who have started to take on these kind of, like, cosmic right beliefs? How close is it to us? Well, it's a good, yeah, that's a good question, isn't it? Because I mean, one of the reasons we wanted to talk about this is because of this obvious phenomenon that section, that some of the things we were interested in on the show, like psychedelic culture, have been, you know, are actually, you know, have more, have more, have more, relate, closer relationships than I would have expected, like even in like three years ago with, I would say, the sort of political right. And, you know, along that continuum that Keir was sketching out, they include, you know, wellness influences going full,

5G conspiracy theory and you know sort of in and and people who you might have thought would would be saying like believing in QAnon I mean in that sort of same zone is the world of people who were sort of they're into mushrooms and DMT but they're big fans of Jordan Peterson and you know they get sort of pulled into the

alt right and I guess I mean I mentioned on the show last time actually I said you know I said you know some of my closest friendships with people who you know I sort of did psychedelic drugs with but that was you know that was like 25 years ago, to be honest. And, like, I wasn't really, I, before the sort of acid-corbanism thing started, I didn't have much exposure to, like,

what was going on in, in sort of psychedelic culture after the early 90s. I sort of tried to keep an eye on it. Occasionally, the same way I sort of try and keep an eye on what's happening in, you know, fantasy role-playing games, which I was into when I was 12, because I'm interested in knowing

what's going on in these cultural zones. I was once participating in. But there's this huge scene. There's this huge culture of people who enter, They're mostly into mushrooms, but I mean, load to them in the entire HUSCA. I mean, probably actually being into things like a classic, you know, the most classical cyclical psychedelic LSD is probably pretty marginal now within that scene. But like most of them are not sort of lefties.

They're not, most of the people as far as I could work out in this scene are sort of liberal Tories, actually. They're sort of individualist, quite privileged. They're sort of concerned about the environment, but from a very, really sort of conservation perspective, they've got no, there's no, not interested in any sort of power analysis of, of what's causing climate change and how they might really be, sort of complicit with it,

except insofar as it offers them a route into a very enjoyable lifestyle, kind of like driving a Tesla, you know, stuff like that. So it's not, I mean, there were lots of people not like that in that scene, but I was really sort of surprised because I had always assumed, like, historically, that, you know, because really my set,

my kind of cultural coordinates were thinking about this stuff come from the sort of 60s, 70s, 80s, that, you know, that there was a necessary kind of, there was a necessary sort of overlap between being on being involved in psychedelic culture or whatever and being on the left of course there's a there's a lot of there's two things to say about that I mean one is there's been some really good historical research recently published around you know kind of exposing that idea and exposing the extent to which there were you know there were people with far right sympathies like in the 50s who were interested in LSD and we'll put you know

some put some references in the show notes I guess and and But also, you know, there was always, you know, there's this kind of, there's this growing developing culture over the past kind of 20, 30 years, which I suppose most people know about now, whereby the kind of hypercapitalist of Silicon Valley, you know, partly just because it was part of their culture in California, were really into psychedelics. And that has now, that is one of the engines, which has driven these moves towards legalization, the leads towards medicalization of psychedelics.

And what's happening now in the States is there's a huge, you know, a huge move by big companies to try like companies like this uh this company called compass pathways to finance to patent commodify privatize and financialize what they see is this huge emerging growth market of legal or quasi legal psychedelics and psychedelic therapies so i mean if people are interested in that you should look you should look at this there's a website called symposia p s y m p o s i which is produced by a group of writers, including this guy, David Nichols. But they're this very kind of marginal voice in the American sort of psychedelic scene, which is basically arguing A for an ethic of what they call open science,

like precisely the idea of science as a public good, as a democratic, you know, as a democratic resource and not simply as a source of profit. And are protesting against this huge, this kind of juggernaut of financialization, which is coming down the tracks to kind of, absorb, amplify, and completely sort of capitalise on, you know, psychedelics and psychedelic culture. And that is really a sort of interesting example of what we might think of as being the sort of thing that gets reflected as in a distorted way in conspiracy theory. Because we've talked a bit about, which probably talk a bit more about, about kind of anti-vaccination discourse. And it's,

you know, which we have kind of characterised, I think, as a sort of conspiracy theory. But anti-vaccination discourse is also responding to a very very. clearly very true situation, which is that indeed, big pharma, the big pharmaceutical companies, although they claim to be acting somehow in the public interest, and that they claim that they can only act in the public interest to the extent that they're allowed to charge huge amounts for their products are clearly not. They are clearly, they are a sinister conspiracy to capture science and to use it, you know, to profit, tiny elite, at the expense of vulnerable people all over the planet. So that is, there will be lots of people listening to this who probably are themselves,

you know, vaccination sceptics and I think we're all not, you know, I think the evidence that it's a vaccination's a good public policies. Yeah, we're not. It's overwhelming. But my sense is I for one welcome Bill Gates' overlord injecting you with microchip. I've been wanting to be microchipped from day one. It's my fantasy. Get it over and done it. It's my boy. my microchip. But, you know, but it's exactly that. It's exactly the people I know who remains committed to it.

They're good people. They're mostly very, you know, good left-wing people. They're not even sort of liberals. But they're people who I think, you know, to me it gives them a sense of agency. It gives them a sense of a capacity to control what's happening to them and their children, which isn't, which I think is completely illusory.

But it's, you know, and that is, you know, and it's completely that. It's a symptom of the fact that, you know, advanced neoliberal. post-democracy sort of takes away our sense of sort of agency. And I think, actually, I'm thinking something now in terms of whether all the question, the historical question, is all this conspiracy stuff getting worse. It's given that we've identified that it's always been there.

But one of the things that's specific about our historical moment, it's not, it's that, yeah, there's always been elite power. There's always been a sense that no one knew what the hell was going on and that no one was really in charge. There's always been all that. But one of the things that specific about our historical moment is that we have the memory of this brief period of a few decades, sort of from the 30s to the 70s, when it seemed like, well, you sort of had democratic institutions that basically worked. And you sort of had

public science that can actually do stuff. Like, during that period, I mean, at the beginning of that period, the 30s, like, you know, antibiotics are a new thing. During that period, you get science, you get the medical revolution, the greatest medical revolution in history, you get people going to the moon. You get the national health service. You get the medical health service, you know, you get this sense that public capacity, there is a public capacity to get shit done and that includes science. And that life will get better. And this feeling that of progress with a capital P, right? Exactly. And now, and the difference about our, the reason our historical moment is different from all those other moments when everything was shit and just the

rich, just enriched themselves and told people ridiculous fairy stories to justify it is we can sort of remember, we can see the residues all around us of that moment. And I think partly that in a lot of people, that probably really does intensify the sense of loss and the sense to look for different explanations and the sense, and also not just the desire to. I mean, there's a greater than ever degree of effort being exercised by those in power, by those elites, using these fantastic new tools like Twitter and Facebook, everything, you know, to tell people that all this bullshit, to spread all this bullshit because it's much because you know for for three thousand years of human civilization you could say to people oh well you could do democracy but you know who what would that even

look like you know now we've had a few that we had a few decades when we actually had it something like it sort of and now you've got to work much harder to tell people no no you can't have that anymore now and there's also the angle i think i'm thinking uh thinking allowed here, live on the show, about where the state fits into this, because it feels like one of the anti-vax kind of sentiments as well is this disbelief that the apparatus of the state could possibly be, you know, the NHS, you know, these institutions could be doing something that is right. Whereas I think in the kind of post-World War II consensus and what came out of it, at least in, you know, Britain, a lot of the Western world, this idea that we can have

these institutions and these infrastructures and we pay tax. and we get all of these things back. You know, we get investment in science. You know, we get free school meals, we got all these things. But it feels like if you don't have a belief in that anymore, like it makes sense not to believe in it anymore because a lot of it is disintegrating. So therefore, this idea that, you know,

it's only in going back to the conspiracy theory of things, it's only individuals, you know, like it's not the state. It doesn't really do anything for us. It's like these are the bad guys and this is what's happening. And these are the linkages. It's a map like, you know, stars in the sky and you link them this way. And the way for me to avoid that is to opt out and then going back to what we were saying earlier about, you know, the body autonomy or like family autonomy. And you go down to these units, which actually, to me, is a sign of like despair over like the concept of society and what society can be and what community in the largest sense can be.

You know, that narrative fits that despair, but it's not. told in a tonality of despair, it's actually a kind of like a one-upmanship. Like, I understand something that you don't. And I'm going to do the right thing for me and my family. It's the opium of the people. It's the, you know, the cry of a heartless world. The sigh of the oppressed, though, isn't it? It doesn't it? Exactly. The sigh of the oppressed. But, yeah, perhaps like the good sense in the nonsense of the conspiracy theory is is that, like, it is a search, it's a search for meaning. So, So Jameson talks about this,

when he looks at like the conspiracy films that come out in the 1970s, like the Parallax View, et cetera. Who is that, sorry, who looks? Frederick Jameson. Right, okay. Really famous sort of Marxist scholar. He was looking at like these films

which were influenced by Watergate, you know, this revelation that the government was up to no good, etc., which led to this huge disillusionment in government. You know, he was saying, look, you know, a little bit like it's the side of the oppressed. It's like, you know, don't condemn people for religion, you know,

it is the opium of the masses, but also it does something for them, you know, it allows them some sort of grip on the world, probably allows them a whole load of, of collectivity in a sense of collective agency, do you know what I mean? Even though we have to overcome it eventually. And like a conspiracy theory is a bit like, you know, the problem facing us is that the world as it operates

is incredibly complex and we cannot get a good understanding of them. that just from our own personal experience. We've talked about this before on the show. And so basically that when you're faced as an individual in the face of this, of this huge complexity, what you get is paralysis through like this sense of anxiety and like being overwhelmed with the amount of complexity in the world. Do you know what I mean? So conspiracy theories are an attempt to put some sort of meaning or some sort of mapping.

And in fact, Jameson sort of says, you know, they don't do a bad job. conspiracy theories, or some of them anyway, the less whacked out ones, do you know what I mean, of how the world works? It's actually more complicated than that. And in fact, if you're a Marxist, you believe something really much more far out, basically, than that there are just conspiracies of people. You also believe that, you know, that capitalists are not freely choosing agents who make their own way in the world. They're deeply influenced by the social structures around them.

You know, they're sort of, in some ways, animated by this sort of abstract force of capital. but so they have to behave in a certain way. You know, that is sort of like a fairly far-out way of seeing the world. So, you know, we're talking about something, a system called capitalism, which you can only see by its effects. You know, that's a really hard thing. You can't see it, you can't touch it. You know, it's a hard, a difficult thing to get your head around.

And so, like, perhaps conspiracy theories are sort of like, you know, they're a poor person's attempt to sort of do that, right? But they're also perhaps what we're seeing with queuing on is that there are also an attempt to impose to try and get some sort of collective process of reasoning the world out. If you're thinking about conspiracy theory and conspiracy theory culture,

in literature, in kind of, you know, in English language prose fiction, the writer who's always talked about as the kind of the writer of conspiracy theory culture is Thomas Pynchon. And Pynchon's first novel, Crying of Lot 49, is basically a sort of response to

this whole sense of this sense that, in fact, the true story of the 60s isn't the kind of glorious dream of the flower of children or the revolutionist of 68. It's the story that includes the assassination of Kennedy, the assassination of Martin Luther King of Bobby Kennedy that would manifest itself in the early 70s as the Cointel Pro campaign to destroy the Black Panthers from within by the security services. It's this world, this new, this world of paranoia of the military industrial complex, not having been successfully checked. And that book comes out at the end of the 60s. And it does coincide with the emergence of sort of the paranoid tone in rock.

And there's a couple of kind of anthems of that moment that are always worth mentioning. There's obviously there's Black Sabbath's sort of definitive, definitive sort of heavy metal track really, so paranoid, which is just about the kind of subjective experience of paranoia. You could also mention the Stooges, I think especially on their second album, Funhouse, in 1970. There's tracks like TVI, this very sort of paranoid lyric, like she's got a TVI on me what they all share in common is this sense that

the hopes of the 60s are dead or dying and that what has successfully neutralized the promise of acid communism in this is not just some sort of is a kind of set of political forces which include these very sinister kind of security forces is very sinister kind of agencies and you know you can tie all that to that

I mean you carry that stuff to its furthest conclusion I mean there was a conspiracy theory that the reason LSD was disseminated through the new left by security agents who basically wanted people just to waste their time kind of tripping out instead of fermenting revolution like I don't think that's true

but that was part of the menu of the time and that was part of the context in which people started to turn away from the sort of, you know, sun-kissed sound of the Grateful Dead to this kind of heavy, dark rock of people like the Stooges. I mean, thinking about it now, of course, you could pick almost any sort of jungle track from sort of 92 through sort of 97, and a certain kind of deliberately cultivated sense of dark paranoia

was, you know, was part of the aesthetic, and then that carries on into dubstep. and the idea that somehow by by by aestheticizing your paranoia by deliberately cultivating a very nuanced affective experience of paranoia through smoking too strong kind of hydroponic skunk and then listening and then listening to this very dark music that somehow you could you could negotiate the sorts of horrors of of late capitalism you know by sort of aestheticizing its dark.

and sort of getting off on it a bit and sort of inhabiting it. That was basically, that was central to the sort of affective culture of all those musics. I mean, for me, that was always a real limitation of them, was that you could go, you know, you could go to like a dubstep rave and smoke weed and feel like really dark and sort of alien, a bit alienated and weirdly empowered by your embrace of that. but it didn't have any means by which either sort of affectively or intellectually to get outside it or get beyond it. And, you know, it's not really an accident that most people connected to that scene either had no politics or was sort of affiliated to people like knit land who ended up, you know, being part of the sort of old right.

But that was a really, it's interesting to think about that, that really right through to the early 2000s, like the most formerly innovative music is coming out of Britain all constituted themselves. was their aesthetic, partly in terms of this deliberate rejection, actually, of the sort of what they saw is the banality of the forms of collective joy being promoted by kind of rave culture, and instead, you know, a kind of aestheticisation of the very experience of urban paranoia. I watched a film the other day called Under the Silver Lake, which is a film that plays with all of this conspiratorial stuff.

But, like, it's utterly littered with, like, little clues and ciphers which are not resolved in the film. And so basically, you know, as soon as you finish the film, you get on the internet, and there's just huge reddits about people trying to put together these little Easter egg ciphers, etc. And like, you know, some of them lead to a grid reference on a map

and people have gone off to search that grid reference, etc. You know, it's this, it shows, it's a really clever film because it shows this sort of real desire for world building, I think. Do you know what I mean? So people can build their shared sort of world. and in some ways, Qanon is a little bit like world building. And that's why I sort of link, I recognise it from that sort of, some of the sort of subcultural worlds that I've been in,

because those subcultural worlds are sort of world building as well. Do you know what I mean? But you can build different types of worlds. You can build worlds which are paranoid and enclosed, or you can build worlds which are open, basically, and inclusive. Do you know what I mean? Which is interesting because, you know, one of the things that we talk about on the show

as well. I mean, that was definitely a strong part of Plan C's politics, is this idea of needing to invent the future. Of having to basically world build, because if you can't imagine it, then you can't have it. Or we can't, we can never

get to something that we can't imagine to be true, or we're then stuck in this kind of capitalist bubble. So it's interesting how that interacts with what you're just saying. I mean, I would come back to this stuff around sort of open science, for example, I mean, I think, and also media. I mean, you know, also it's a friend of the show, Dan Hind wrote this great book a few years ago now, which I'm always citing. I now can't even remember the title of it, but it's about, you know, Dan,

Dan does a podcast with Tom Mills, the, what's the media democracy podcast, and he's a media democracy sort of campaigner, and his argument was, look, what we need as a sort of left demand and our left policies, you know, to have a media. system within which the public can kind of collectively deliberate on actually on things like investigative journalism like what stories do we want investigated you know and and you would have sort of professional journalists working for organisations of the BBC would do it and what what kind of content do we want you know when mark and I wrote that Mark Fisher and I wrote that pamphlet reclaim modernity a few years ago we were partly influenced by that and I'm always citing that

and it's sort of a similar and it also that's an idea that relates to I mean obviously that partly speaks to just what we're talking about which is that how do you have have public media that people can actually trust. Like, how do you have public media? Because everything we've been talking about is related to the sense of fake news being everywhere. It's related to the sense that there are no longer any media institutions you can trust. So you might as well believe some wacko on YouTube because you know that even the BBC are probably lying to you, like in the service of their own kind of class interests.

So that has to be resolved. So that's a demand. But I think that also, and it is historically, it has been the kind of left demand at moments of very high kind of political consciousness for, you know, for public and democratic science, for like, you know, science to be conducted in a way which is free from the imposition of, you know, capitalist interests, but instead is clearly done in a way which anyone can get access to, anybody can verify, and is clearly being done in the public interest. And I think that has to be part of our demands as the left. And I think the idea that the fact that that is

something that can happen just has to be part of our discourse. Because Today, I've been, whole generations have grown up, not even having any sense of that's possible. Hi, folks, this is Matt, part of the team who put the show together, with a quick note to say that we at ACFM are taking a short hiatus for the next few months, but we'll be back in late autumn to elevate your consciousness once again. If you can't wait that long for your next trip, various members of the extended ACFM crew are taking part in the World Transform Festival this September. Head to theworldtransformed.org to register. Stay alert, expand your mind, and we'll see you soon.

This broadcast is brought to you by Navarra Media. Go to navaramedia.com slash support.