Understanding Ourselves Through Weirdness [Trenchant Edges]

Welcome back to the Trenchant Edges, where we dissect fringe culture and search for the real gems of insight hiding in a sea of bullshit.

I’m your host Stephen and this past week we’ve focused on two things: Different kinds of weirdness and the many varieties of culture popping up around UFOs in the US.

I’ve been putting off finishing a couple of bigger issues on other subjects like the rest of the experiment at La Chorrea, so I hope we’ve all had fun with this little digression. Hopefully, I’ll have that out this next week.

So let’s take a moment and look at where we’ve been this week:

This Week in Review

We started off this week by breaking down weirdness into a low/middle/high framework in Normality and The Taxonomy of Weirdness.

Next, we fleshed out low weirdness with a discussion about how crank fraud Erich Von Daniken inadvertently created much of the plot of the Marvel and DC Cinematic universes by publishing Chariots of the gods in 1968.

Which brought us to the, uh, interesting practice of channeling otherworldly knowledge for fun and profit. Or should that be fun and prophet?

No.

Next, we meandered through Amazon’s UFO bestsellers list to see if we could figure out what’s worth reading from it. Spoilers: No. It was fun to look through.

Last we took a break from all the fun schlock to do some more serious thinking with weird critical thinking.

What’s next?

Well, with this in the rearview mirror I’d like to spend a week on high weirdness.

Not sure if that’ll be viable.

Anyway, I’m going to be sending some extra emails to subscribers and other groups of people this week so keep an eye out for those.

Oh, and I finally got a copy on Carl Jung’s collected works that reference alchemy, which is like a thousand pages worth of material. Alchemy is such a big influence on Terence McKenna I felt like I couldn’t avoid talking about it and it’s undoubtedly a kind of high weirdness.

If you like this newsletter, I always appreciate it if someone tosses me a couple bucks with a subscription.

Anyway, will be seeing y’all on Monday.

Take care out there.

-SF