Waiting for Nibiru [Trenchant Edges]
Are we cursed with remembering?
Is apocalyptic ideation a trap?
This is the Trenchant Edges and we’re going to prod these questions with our meaty brains today. That’s trenchant as in cutting and edges as in the far corners of our maps.
We're kind of following up on Zecharia Sitchin whom we touched on earlier this year. For reasons I cannot explain (ADHD), I rediscovered Nancy Lieder’s ZetatalkRadio over the weekend. She builds off Sitchin’s 12th Planet mythos for her decades of fringe theorizing.
What made Lieder fascinating to me for enough of this weekend that this essay is days late?
I’m your Humble Narrator Stephen. Let’s find out.
NOTHING GOES AWAY, EVER
Years of observing fringe ideas, conspiracy theories, and pseudosciences prove how rehashed it all is.
As I’ve said before, you can usually trace an idea back decades, often to either Theosophy or New Thought. Sometimes it’s a single book: Graham Hancock rarely talks about Ignatius Donnelley, but his whole career is remixing his arguments. Hancock's deal since leaving journalism is talking about an advanced civilization in prehistory and a comet wrecking the evidence for it. Donnelley did too- in 1882! And 1884! With Atlantis: The Antediluvian World and Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel.
Thanks to writing, Donnelley’s wrong ideas didn’t fade away after being disproven or his death. People have been going back to them again and again. Every story about Atlantis you’ve ever heard is more Donnelley than Plato.
And sometimes that’s fine.
But then our old friend the bullshit cycle comes back.
This endless remix of ideas pushed out of mainstream respectability is the core of fringe culture. Living as long as someone cares enough to repeat it.
That, btw, is why I was interested in Terence McKenna a decade after his prophecy self-invalidated in the first place. Most of the December 21st 2012 crowd just kind of moved on and tried to pretend nothing happened instead of admitting themselves as fools or frauds.
But that brings back to one of our core themes of this entire project: While the intellectual foundations of fringe ideas are often incoherent at best, the social foundations are often very coherent.
Personality and identity are created in both positive and negative ways. Positive: I am a writer. Negative: I am not a Christian. There’s a dynamic push-pull of attraction to some ideas or groups and repulsion towards others.
This is why people with extreme positions often trade around for other extreme positions: They’re trying to escape the middle.
So within the context of literacy, industrial capitalism, and narrowly rational scientific materialism there are always going to be people who want ideas *because* they’re not mainstream and there’s no shortage of service providers thrilled to shovel alternatives at them no matter how little they work.
No matter what identity you have, you won’t have any trouble find people and groups who annoy you. The brain reasons through associations and it doesn’t take much to link an arbitrary bad or good feeling to anything else. That’s why cults love bomb new members: They really want to anchor in those good feelings so as demands get more unreasonable the person will think about how important the new group and identity is to them.
Here’s the important bit: there’s never any shortage of good reasons to position away from social groups. Even if you’re trying not to be caught up by your own reactions. And even if they’re genuinely trying to do some good. Personal decisions can also be directed to move other people in and out of identities.
Conspiracy theories accumulate along lines of social tensions made up from these accumulated movements.
Modern reactionary movements share a foundation with modern alt spirituality. And this is why so many soft leftie types went hard right during Covid. Politicized epidemic responses created an environment where few people wanted to step outside their side and people with mixed beliefs were pushed to pick one.
Isolated and rejected by friends trying to push against right wing narratives, those hippies found the fringe right happy to validate them.
Shifting to an earlier round of this that will be relevant in a few weeks: It’s not an accident that Alien Abduction narratives got more paranoid and extreme during the 1980s at the same time as stranger danger and Satanic Panic.
People remake tropes suit the moment.
Social consciousness passes away and is recreated, mediated by available information. Which means media.
Marshall McLuhan tried to show this with The Medium is the Message. Engaging with a message, you engage with the style of its medium which trains you to view the world in certain ways.
And those cognitive habits persist even when you’re not dealing with that media.
So, uh, what does this have to do with Nancy Lieder?
What’s The Matter With Nancy?
Nancy Lieder interests me for a few reasons.
First, she’s a latter day Contactee, a trend in UFOland that mostly ended in the 70s. She got her start in the 90s, which is interesting.
Second, she’s still at it.
From 8/31/24, lol.
She’s been at this so long there are all but geologic layers to her web presence. I’ve found sites clearly made in the 90s, a youtube channel, and this notification was from her ning.com profile, a website for building communities I haven’t heard of since 2011 and would have told you definitely closed a decade ago.
But no, it’s still kicking as a premium platform for people to build niche communities around.
Wild.
Third, because she’s been at things so long you can use the Zetatalk archive to sample fringe opinions since 2006. the table of contents of her 1999 book is such a perfect container for 90s fringe themes I’m going to have to buy a copy.
Wait, no, actually I just asked someone to buy it for me. And they did! It’s not here yet though.
We could spend weeks unpacking Nancy’s views but we’re not going to. After all, this isn’t about Nancy. It’s about what she’s an example of.
Here’s about as good summary as I can do without getting lost in her writing and speaking for weeks:
Broadly, Zetatalk is about Nancy’s channeling the Zetas (from Zeta Reticuli), spiritually advanced aliens with a message of despair and hope for those of humanity willing to listen. She synthesized a ton of fringe ideas and got on the early internet to share her thoughts.
She runs a cult, more or less. Far from the most dangerous UFO cult you could join, but the sheer amount of Bill Cooper in that table of contents tells me she probably buys into the Protocols of the Elders of Zion somewhere I haven’t seen.
So it’s not without some risk.
There are a ton of of touchstones to other fringe belief constellations like Earth Changes, government conspiracies, and of course our beloved Planet X, Nibiru.
Nancy’s core idea is the poleshift. Where the gravity of the returning Nibiru rips earth’s crust apart and the horrific consequences of that. She says such events have happened before and will happen again. They’re part of a natural cycle of changes that define different eras. She’s predicted that something catastrophic will happen in many of the last 30 years.
The question, though, isn’t why Nancy believes this. Especially after decades of failed predictions.
The question is why does it appeal to so many people?
What needs does Nancy serve?
Why are there so many people just like her and her followers?
The Curse of Linear Time
A premise threat is the negative space of a story idea. The kind of thing that you have to agree to ignore to suspend disbelief and engage with a story.
You know James Bond would be a terrible spy and a sex criminal, but you ignore all that for the fantasy of being the cooldangeractionguy.
The same is true for ideals, including the big ones. None are really spared.
Let’s take the classic Christian example: How can there be a just and loving god if bad things happen, good goes unrewarded, and evil goes unpunished?
Note that it doesn’t matter if those questions can be answered. What counts is the structure of the ideology provokes questions and if they’re not addressed some people will peel away.
That might seem a random example but it’s not. We’ll get back to it.
There’s an interesting distinction between many traditional/tribal cultures and those that grew out of Christendom (as well as others, but I’m sticking with what I know well): Cyclical time vs Linear time.
For most of humanity for most of the time we’ve been around, time was cyclical. Seasons changed, years go by, the cycles of the natural world defined the pace and context of everything. A constant cycle of death and rebirth, contextualized by local conditions.
After the development of agriculture and writing, alternatives developed. Time changes its nature, exiting the garden and pasture into the city. Cultures developed their own senses of time just as powerful as natural forces. And Christianity in particular developed a peculiar obsession: Time would end soon.
The earliest Christian writers expected Christ’s glorious second coming to happen within their grandkids time. When it didn’t happen they did what we all do when a beloved belief is proven untrue: We shift the goalposts around.
A short wait for the literal return becomes a long wait for a metaphorical return. Reasons for things not happening are invented and go in and out of fashion.
For this I don’t mean literal time as in the 4th dimension, but the metaphorical ways humans relate to time.
As technology bubbled into being and usage, sometimes popping away and being lost, and sometimes accumulating into a frothy boil, cultural time grew steadily more powerful than natural cycles. By the time the industrial revolution really got going it was overwhelming and we’re there now, locked into a an endless anticipation for the future we were promised.
I could digress about the progressive/Whiggish view of history as collective improvements from our dark and benighted past to our glorious and enlightened present but let’s save that rabbit hole for another time.
The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does
If Stafford Beer was right and the Purpose of A System Is What It Does, and our social systems generate conspiracy theorists at scale, then we know that they do provide some kind of service to the overall system. They’re *doing* something.
But what?
We could address that subject from many perspectives, but let’s keep is simple: They’re a kind of mostly harmless cultural cul-de-sacs that keep people from making trouble for the mainstream. Annoying, sometimes dangerous, but not as dangerous as people really committed to changing the mainstream.
That might fuck with the money.
Society tries to organize people into doing work that’s useful for it and most people end up somewhere in the mainstreams within it. Cults and other subcultures act as a release valve for frustration and suspicion. They address needs that otherwise go both unmet and ignored.
They usually go unmet in subcultures too, but at least there’s a discussion around it. You get a ton of validation and perspective at least.
Macrocultural leaders have to avoid addressing cultural premise threats because those are their own weaknesses. So, the US President can’t say that the value of the dollar is built on gunboat diplomacy, global exploitation, and a complicated series of deals to jack off various rich bastards.
These things are not good for ordinary citizens, and most citizens don’t approve of them. After all, that shit oppresses them too.
So no matter what happens or who’s in office the economy is always looking great or just about to turn around! And we can’t have an open discussion about reality because if we start talking about that then the stock market is going to lose a lot of fictitious capital and it will be harder for the president to do anything.
It sucks, but it’s true… if you want the president doing things.
Let’s start to bring this home: The Curse of Linear Time is wondering if that line is going to change directions or stop.
We usually call these things euphemisms: “Collapse” or “apocalypse” or “the end of the world.”
And a *lot* of us are obsessed with it.
It’s one way that the rich and poor are alike in the US. The rich get bunkers and to ask futurists if they should make bomb collars for their future security guards and the poor get Fallout games and Left Behind.
How nice.
This Thanatos-flavored drive towards resolution is built into our culture in so many ways I don’t even know where to start with it. Point is, the drive pushes some of to believe some wild shit to resolve felt internal and external tensions.
Complex and persistent anxieties, confusion, and ambiguity can push us to some incoherent beliefs. And all that assumes you’re not crazy or divinely inspired.
And that’s what Nancy Lieder has been doing for the last 30 years. She’s built up a worldview that is at least internally consistent enough for her (or she’s a total fraud, but I don’t get that vibe).
People don’t have beliefs randomly and they aren’t simple computers. They react, often unpredictably, to information in their environment. Just the same as you do.
Now, Nancy could be a grifter. There are plenty of those. But her sites aren’t really optimized for that. Hell, she only wrote one book from the 90s! She’s produced a mountain of content since then. Almost 1,000 newsletters since 2006! A lot of money on the floor there.
I kinda think she’s sincere.
And there are tens of millions of people just like her out there who have built bespoke little worlds in their own heads. And that probably includes most of the people who have gotten this far and definitely includes me.
But these things don’t just happen: They’re an accumulation of actions and reactions piled on each other for years and millennia folding in on each other and pushing things ever further. Material conditions as the Marxists say. We build categories out of the actual things in our lives and many people build them along somewhat different lines.
It’s down to people coping with their internal and external worlds and needing to go a little nutty to make the math work well enough.
Where Does This Go?
Well, I’m inclined to think cyclical time is probably more accurate for human lifetimes, but we’ve accelerated whatever counts as the natural cycles of culture through industry and media so much that I don’t know if we even can develop some grounding.
Social grounding requires trust and, lol, there’s not a ton of that going around.
This isn’t great for a lot of reasons and not just because low social trust is a good sign your society is entering the fabled Cool Zone.
Yet, we don’t really know how any of it will play out. So a ton of us will seek to have that soothed before trying to understand more. And they’re not even really to blame for that. Most of the time just staying alive is hard enough especially if you’ve got a family.
The upside of the apocalypse is you finally get certainty, even if it’s only the certainty of the grave.
I would like to suggest a different approach. Because while I feel some sympathy for Nancy, it’s hard to respect her choices. And sure, maybe I’ll also end up 18 years into this newsletter with a moderately successful cult and a slew of failed prophecies.
Or maybe not.
My suggestion is learn to approach the ambiguity and stay with it even when it’s uncomfortable. Stretch yourself a bit there so you can hold a little more of a stretch every week.
That means recognizing and challenging your own cognitive dissonance or recognizing when you’re letting social pressure influence your decisions. You don’t even have to change or push back all the time. Just know you’re doing it can help.
This is also a place where learning about other cultures (and especially other languages) can be a huge benefit.
I’ll leave you with a book recommendation and a quote in the same move.
All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God
Is Change.
-Octavia Butler, Parable of The Sower
Wrapping Up
Alright, that went pretty well.
My original plan for today was to release an audio version of it at the same time but I got very distracted doing bullshit to get my audio recording working.
That said, don’t be surprised if you find more of me than you expect in your inbox this week.
That’s all I’ve got for now.
Oh wait, one more thing: The new opening theme is called Popp by AK FRU who’s generously donated its use for now. If you’ve got music you’d like a captive audience to enjoy, reply to this email. :-D
Nas said it best. No idea’s original. Nice write up.
“I could digress about the progressive/Whiggish view of history as collective improvements from our dark and benighted past to our glorious and enlightened present …”
Please do, at your convenience of course.