I regret taking such an adversarial approach earlier in the thread. Such is life.
Anyway, I had a weird thought: Is conspiracy theorising on PSI an attempt to rationalise the irrational?
I'm not exactly sure what I'm talking about yet, so, I hope the following makes a kind of sense.
First, I think it might be useful for discussion purposes to split conspiracy theories into two categories - mundane conspiracies (political corruption, corporate malfeasance, organised crime, etc.) and extraordinary conspiracies (archons, chemtrails, global elite satanism, no one died at event x, etc.). I'll admit that I've chosen obviously polar examples to get the point across.... I suppose Chomsky and Zinn would fit in the middle somewhere. I reckon, the first category is not particularly controversial as most people have an innate degree of distrust when it comes to politicians, large corporates, etc. It's also very mainstream to assume that elites protect their own.
Also, in what follows, I'm not really talking about individual conspiracies, but, rather, about 'conspiracy culture' in which world events are seen as evidence of an underlying dark agenda perpetrated my a small, consistent group of individuals.
To be even more specific, I'm only really interested here in conspiracy culture's handling of PSI and the paranormal.
Here we go:
Jasun Horsley's website front-page mentions liminality quite prominently. I think this is an important concept here as both PSI / the paranormal are highly liminal phenomena.
Liminality means threshold and indicates a border or boundary state. It has a number of characteristics: An association with deception, an inversion of status, the blurring of boundaries and a tendency to undermine binary oppositions. Thus, liminality can be declared powerfully anti-structural in nature.
PSI and the paranormal are highly liminal phenomena. First, they both have a long (not unjustified) association with deception, and have a tendency to confer low-status on those involved. Second, and most importantly, they are powerfully boundary blurring and undermine the clear distinction between a number of important oppositions: internal/external, awake/dream, physical/non-physical, real/imaginary, personal/collective, alive/dead, object/subject, etc.
The extensive overlapping that occurs between phenomena (PSI, UFOs, synchronicity, NDEs, OOBEs, psychedelics, etc.), too, is very suggestive of a liminal underpinning.
So, we can conclude that the paranormal is, at heart (or at least partly), an irrational phenomena.
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Moving on: It's important to state that the liminal definitely has its dangers. For one, owing to its powerful tendency to blur boundaries, a long contact with the liminal can make it very hard to tell the difference between reality and fantasy, making paranoaia a real potential. Its effects can also increase at an exponential rate - being potentially quite damaging to social relations and general mental health. A loss of status by association can have very negative professional consequences, too.
Liminal phenomena's picking away at binary oppositions is also deeply undermining of Aristotelian logic and thus threatening to highly complex societies such as our own, based as the are (in theory, anyway) on a rationalised system of hierarchies, bureaucracies and laws. Perhaps this goes some ways towards explaining the establishments hostility towards PSI and the paranormal. This would also explain the loss of status experienced by those who dare to take the phenomena seriously as the functioning of a complex, rationalised society's immune response.
Interestingly, traditional, less rationalised societies also recognise the dangers inherent in liminal phenomena and take steps to contain said danger, with rituals and the use of designated practitioners being two examples of protective techniques. I suspect occultists demarcating a magical circle may serve a similar purpose (among other, more esoteric purposes, that is).
Ok, owing to the destabilising nature of excessive boundary blurring, it is quite natural for people to want to impose structure on the anti-structural. (Perhaps we can look at Whitley Strieber as an example of what living in a semi-permanent liminal state looks like.) I think attempts at imposition of structure on the liminal can take a number of forms, for example: imposing a religious structure, a scientific structure, denial, pathologizing, debunking, an on. Regardless of which approach is taken, the intended outcome is the same: The maintenance of clear boundaries.
I think many parapsychologists and nuts and bolts UFO people are guilty of trying to over-rationalise the paranormal. They do this by ignoring tricky evidence and trying to impose a rational framework on what seems to be an irrational phenomena. And it's perfectly understandable that they do, trying to get your head round a liminal phenomena and its full implications is absurdly hard. Their attempts at rationalisation can also be seen as protective behaviour against the negative effects associated with the liminal.
Their approach also reveals a belief in a myth shared by materialists - that the ultimate nature of reality should yield to Aristotelian logic.
Anyway, all this got me wondering if conspiracy theorising wasn't also an attempt to contain the boundary blurring nature of the paranormal by imposing a rational frame-work of bad actors and disinformation over the tricky and irrational aspects of the paranormal. So, instead of a confounding collapse of oppositions between reality and imagination, we get mental illness brought on by sinister government experiments. Instead of UFOs that straddle the divide between physical and non-physical, we get a series of government hoaxes. Instead of a history of PSI research that strongly indicate a false dichotomy between internal and external, we get a government attempt to create a one world religion. You dig?
So, in this regard, conspiracy theorising on PSI reveals a belief that the irrational must yield.
The problem is, 'Conspiracy Culture' is itself a highly liminal field and carries with it all the dangers of the paranormal - a loss of status, having to fend off attacks from the system, a potential difficulty in telling fact from fantasy, potential paranoia, etc.
So, it's no wonder that an attempt to impose structure on the liminality of the paranormal with another highly liminal phenomena ends in all sorts of weirdness.
I'd also be tempted to explain the tendency towards superiority felt by many conspiracy theorists as an attempt to regain the status lost to them by their engagement with the liminal.
And if I'm correct in assuming that Whitley Strieber's 'MK Ultra' memories were retrieved through hypnosis, then we're adding another liminal phenomena to the mix and I don't know how anyone has a hope of sorting this shit out.
Am I onto something here? Do I even make sense?
Speaking of hypnosis:
@David Bailey I think your completely right to be suspicious of Derren Brown's exploits. I remember years ago reading a thorough critique (by a fellow hypnotist) of Brown's apparent programming of an assassin via hypnosis. The piece convincingly demonstrated (to me, anyway) that Brown had not hypnotised someone into performing an assassination, but, rather mundanely, had hypnotised someone into believing they were target shooting at a gun range. And this effect was only achieved in a highly managed environment.
Then there's this quote from someone who's apparantly participated in one of Brown's shows:
“I agreed to take part because I thought it would be a fun experience. I enjoyed Derren Brown’s shows and it was exciting to be a part of it. I approached it as a kind of acting role; like I was playing a version of myself – rather than it being me.
“And as a piece of entertainment I can appreciate the finished item; it worked well. But it was really strange to see people’s reaction after it was broadcast; how seriously some people took it. They don’t see it as entertainment, they genuinely believed Derren Brown was demonstrating some kind of special power.
“The reality is nothing like what you see on screen. With me, they made it look like I was being secretly filmed during my day-to-day life. It’s something they often do. But that was all planned and pre-arranged with the production team. They told me where to go and what to do. There was a man lugging a big camera around right in front of me – so it was hardly secret.
“When it came to the final scene I was supposed to have been ‘programmed’ to act in a certain way by various subliminal messages and triggers, but that was just part of the misdirection for the benefit of the viewers. The way it actually worked was that Derren was off-camera and giving me directions, telling me what to do.
“Before the filming had started he’d been through a hypnosis routine with me; although this was never mentioned or shown in the finished item. I never felt hypnotised but I went along with it.
“And after a couple of minutes Derren seemed to drop the pretence and switched to more of a work mode. When it came to the filming he was directing me from off-camera – not much different to how a producer would direct an actor.
Source:
https://sabotagetimes.com/tv-film/dont-believe-in-derren-brown
My brother once had a bit part in another mentalist's show, and he told a similar story to the above.
OK, crazed ramble over.
[If any of what I've written on liminality makes sense..... I owe it to Michael P. Hansen's book, The Trickster and the Paranormal.]