Turning Bullshit Into Gold [TE]
Estimated reading time: 10 minutes, 21 seconds. Contains 2071 words
Welcome back to the Trenchant Edges, a newsletter about fringe culture for the intellectually adventurous.
My backs been especially fucked recently so I’ve been watching a lot of youtube gibberish. A lot of DIY stuff, woodworking/machining/3D printing, and a lot of people complaining about alt or pseudo history/science/archeology.
Kind of has me wondering what the fuck I’m doing with my life, you know? Like, a lot of my interests are just varying kinds of bullshit and lies. From scams and cult leaders to global financial ideologies. I think of myself mainly as a connoisseur of bullshit.
But is all that a waste of time?
Nope!
I’m mostly mocking myself here. I don’t think everyone even should expose themselves to as much paranoid ideation or free associating as I have. I like to move from a wide range of possibilities down.
And a lot of that has been a waste of time.
But that’s a problem of quantity. I’ve dug too deep and seen too much. You could probably learn the important things I know from it with like… maybe 2-5% of the effort.
But that’s part of the fun.
Digging into someone’s thinking deep enough to see exactly where they went wrong is a delight. Pity it’s so time intensive.
Alchemizing Pseudoscience
The human heart desires transformation.
Novelty, Thanatos, epiphany.
That sweet birth of something new.
It’s a double-edged sword of course. What can liberate you can also destroy you, as neoliberal entertainment corporations never cease to enjoy telling us.
This is the heart of the appeal of conspiracy theories, alt-history, pseudolaw, and other counterfeit intellectual traditions. To be ahead of the curve. To see what others could or would not dare.
To look down on those who doubted you and whisper, “No.”
It’s a toxic motivation, of course, corrupting and ripe for the production of delusion.
The Matrix is coming from inside the house.
The orthodoxy position is it’s not worth even risking maybe being burned by delusions. Stay in the rivers and lakes that you’re used to.
I have a somewhat different opinion. Let’s see the fucking ocean. This is a problem, though, because most of what is sold as “the ocean” is just conch shells someone plucked from the beach at low tide.
Still, that gives us something to work with. I’ve had Graham Hancock on the mind lately, and while he’s been touched with high weirdness in perhaps authentic ways, he’s spent the better part of my lifetime hawking baubles to tourists.
Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be about him. Just adding context. He’s far from alone. The marketplace for weird ideas is vast and complex.
A milieu, someone might call it.
More and more I see fringe culture as kind of a waste product of culture. People and ideas that just didn’t really fit in anywhere “normal” (whatever that means) and bounce around each other trying to find… well, what they’re looking for varies even among one person’s lifetime.
Maybe it’s easy to sum up as something better. Less prosaic. More enchanted.
Hold up, it’s ok. I’m a waste product too.
So let’s reason together about this question: Exactly what can we do with all this?
Well, one answer is it can be used to fuel a reactionary pseudopopulist movement, actually let’s just call it fascism. This isn’t about that.
But it is a powerful fuel for such people as anyone listening to any kind of right wing media in the US lately can tell you.
An empire of shit.
As the title implies I think we could find some better outputs. Alchemy in the traditional sense is a spiritual-material practice that seeks the perfection of matter in the divine. To bring union to soul and body.
The cliche was turning base metals like lead into gold.
And that’s what I think we can do with a lot of these fringe ideas. See, while I loathe most of the conclusions, I love the motivations.
Even the spite.
But more important is the curiosity and skepticism.
I was talking with a friend about a documentary on Homo Naledi a few weeks ago and she was talking about the awe she felt at hearing about the cave system where the find was made. Having heard a lot of the scientific controversy I told her a bit about the technical gossip.
She, rightly and more politely than this, told me to shut the fuck up and let her enjoy the awe.
She was *invested* in the subject in a way I still am not.
Now, this isn’t pseudoscience. This is a big open debate happening in real time in archeology. But she took my interest in the controversy the way a lot of alt-whatever fans take any kind of skepticism aimed their way.
Yucking their yum.
As someone who gets off on skepticism I cannot relate to this.
But I do think she was right. She was trying to share some joy, some awe in discovery and the tremendous effort that appears our late cousins spent to get their bodies into the positions they were found.
Punishing someone who wants to noodle about some cool shit by demanding evidence and turning it into a technical discussion is, uh, bad actually.
I don’t think we actually have to choose between enjoying the awe of discovery and making a solid argument.
In fact, I low key have what I think is the solution to the Conspiracy Theorist’s Dilemma.
To oversimplify it: They want to believe what is unbelievable to others.
And most of the things that motivate this desire are good. They address overwhelm and uncertainty and feel like you’re getting insight.
These are important things to overcome.
Before I share the solution I want to clarify: I used to be a conspiracy theorist. I’ve believed just about everything out there at one point or another. I have been a huge slut for alternative ideas.
And I often talk to people about controversial things, including stuff that’s conspiracy bait.
And yet it’s been years since I’ve been called a conspiracy theorist. I know it’s used as a pejorative. Yet, I can tell people about conspiracies without being accused of it. Even around people who would love to dismiss the idea.
It takes a bit of empathy, but my secret is simply uh respecting other people’s skepticism and not taking it as a personal attack. Mixed with avoiding conspiracy thought terminating cliches and even people who hate conspiracy theories are willing to entertain them a lot more than you might think.
Now, all that assumes someone’s acting in good faith and I don’t think that’s entirely common. IMO, most conspiracy theories represent ingroup/outgroup gatekeeping.
Trump supporters saying the 2020 election is stolen are identifying themselves as one of his people to each other and the rest of us. Whether they believe it or not is immaterial. It’s not about truth, it’s about us and them.
I have no solution for those people because they don’t actually have a problem. Telling nonbelievers to fuck off is the point of their beliefs.
But there are plenty of people who are sincere in this or that theory and we should at least be willing to meet them long enough to see if a conversation is possible. It often is.
You can even get to mutual agreement on many points with a little time.
The risk is the latter group can easily become the former. This is why I oppose a lot of debunking as debunking content. It stops being a conversation and starts just being about dunking on someone which almost inevitably gets personal.
Some of that is genuinely hard to stop of course. But it’s worth trying to minimize it.
Speedrunning The Rest of this Essay
I think a lot of the problems of communicating about fringe topics come down to people not having a clear, shared idea of what different kinds of communication are.
Like, common usage of “theory” to mean “speculation” in a world where formal institutions use theory to mean, “A series of deeply tested interrelated ideas that have survived years worth of attempts to disprove them” is bound to cause confusion.
I try to avoid formal language in informal settings so I’d like to pitch a distinction to you all. It’s been a foundation of my thinking for a long time. I took the name from a hypnosis technique: Anchoring.
Basically, what is a new thought actually connected to? You know, like a boat anchor. Something that’s well anchored isn’t going to move around a lot. It’s reliable knowledge as long as the anchor point is steady.
I think a big chunk of the disconnect between academic and fringe culture comes down to how they understand anchoring.
Fringe culture is built around semi-communal shared storytelling. The fundamental move comes from Improv: The Yes And.
Academic culture is built around attacking ideas and exposing their weak points. Improv’s No But.
Now, these improv moves are universal and I’m exaggerating for effect here. All cultures use some of each in different proportions.
Here's the thing: Yes And tends to make for better stories. Because they’re more expensive and have much more energy. You don’t need to slow down to negotiate the details of a point.
With some training, No But can become a powerful engine for developing knowledge that’s difficult to disprove.
Learning to process evidence in a scientific way is a commitment that must be accepted and developed.
It’s a process of its own. Just like learning to process evidence as a lawyer or priest. Or any other archetype you might care to.
And it doesn’t make sense to hold people outside that commitment acting in good faith to a standard they didn’t agree to and probably don’t really understand.
It takes work to understand any of these frameworks and before most people do that work they have to give a shit.
Connecting with people and understanding takes work and people willing to try it.
I don’t think anyone wants to feel invalidated or like they’re stupid. A lot of “anti-disinformation” content plays into the feedback loops that make bullshit compelling.
Ok, so to actually do that speedrunning thing I mentioned:
Exploring fringe ideas can teach us a lot of interesting things. First and foremost, I think they can be a great introduction to a topic you otherwise don’t know about.
I wouldn’t know about half the sites Graham Hancock visits in Ancient Apocalypse without the show. That is a genuine gift.
Learning to spot omissions and bad reasoning when these things are extreme can make us much better at dealing with it when it’s more subtle.
Ex. Ancient Aliens talks a lot in their first season about the precision of the stonework in Puma Punku in Bolivia. Why? Because it’s fucking awesome.
It rules.
But then they get on their ancient aliens bullshit and claim ancient Bolivians couldn’t have done it because it’s too fucking cool.
And on a surface listen I get it. That looks fucking impossible to do with handtools.
It was absolutely really hard. How do I know? Well, my old boss went to Puma Punku on her honeymoon. And you know what she found? A whole hell of blocks no where near this nice. Showed me the pictures and everything.
This is just a masterpiece in a much larger set of blocks.
Alt theories are chock to the brim with shit like this. Handy omissions that make their claims so much more plausible and compelling. Which brings us to learning more about what makes stories work.
Fringe theories are never dull. And that drama is the juice that keeps them going. Creates nagging doubts that can grow into wild worldview shifts.
And by breaking those stories down into their pieces you can understand both storytelling and analysis better. Which makes you better at dealing with evidence in other parts of your life.
You can really get a lot out of this stuff if you want to.
Wrapping Up
Alright my friends that’s about it for today.
I think we’re going to double up on posts for the rest of the month. June is our 5th anniversary month and I want to get back into original research for that.
It’s time to deal with that shit Rick Doty.
Oh, I forgot to deal with the Cryptex. Oh well. It was going to be an illustration for how the human mind fucking loves a puzzle.
Whoops.