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Pill Pod 137 - Groomer Mythology · PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy

0:09
Test Good. I wonder what type of people click on a podcast episode that
0:16
they see is entitled Groomer Mythology. Yeah, you know, it could be
0:21
people who are interested in current events or people who are flirting with extremist views
0:28
on the internet. The groomer myth are calling it that it does have its
0:33
downsides. But I'd like to suggest right off the bat that I have never
0:37
groomed anybody, unless you unless you mean grooming teenagers into reading Descartes, which
0:44
I should not have done and I feel very bad about. But they were
0:48
over eighteen intro to a Western sieve. Yeah, I guess, I guess
0:54
if you're going to break the word grooming then yeah, but I mean grooming
1:00
now is is any if we're teaching them, if we're teaching them critical race
1:04
theory, we're grooming them. According to according to the Florida law that don't
1:10
say gay law and all the book banning stuff, groom actually grooming is just
1:15
becoming more meaningful on its own. It doesn't even need us to use it
1:19
as a metaphor anymore. Yeah, it's perfect because we're doing myth. We've
1:25
been doing myth in terms of semiotics, semiotics science system myth for weeks,
1:30
and when this happens to a word that has a meaning like groom that it
1:34
now comes to mean anything, including teaching, that's a perfect example of myth
1:42
in action. And obviously it's it's got to be part of a narrative.
1:47
So these these words kind of just get folded into these meta narratives about Yeah.
1:53
I mean, in this case, it's you're teaching kids that it's okay
1:57
to be gay, are trying to make them gay? Yeah? To the
2:01
to the the opposite argument is like, yeah, that's making them gay,
2:06
and you're grooming them in such a way that to be part of the LGBTQ
2:12
community means to abandon all notions of childhood and family values and phases of life
2:17
and to make them into like little sex things. I don't know, it's
2:23
a it's a it's a very like extreme kind of I mean this. If
2:28
you've been exposed to conspiracy theories before, you're probably used to this very kind
2:32
of extreme distortion of of what you know politics is about, what being on
2:39
the left is about, or what being social social justice is about. Well,
2:44
if you do see a flag, I've heard this, If you do
2:46
see a rainbow, flag before puberty. That is one of the main causes
2:51
for gayness. Yeah, and this is why it's so appealing to I mean,
2:55
if if you've maybe there's you have those. I mean, this is
2:59
a pejorative term. But turfs right like trans exclusionary radical feminists who are defending
3:05
the sanctity of childhood and family values, and this this term of grooming,
3:09
maybe it doesn't appeal to them. It's more of a right wing or a
3:14
conspiracy theory term. But it is kind of It's it's weird how it can
3:19
pick up these meanings. It just needs to be kind of near, it
3:22
needs to resonate with something, and then it gives this sort of conspiracy theory
3:28
power, you know, the grooming, and then you have the whole constellation
3:31
of you know, the elites and the Hollywood's sex pedophiles and the Yes,
3:38
I assume this does have to some this iteration of this myth does have to
3:44
somehow go back to the Epstein revelations. But this those are the Epstein revelations
3:50
the second time, not the first time that he got he got charged,
3:53
because that didn't really seem to matter to anyone. But despite the fact that
3:57
the loudest anti groomer are Christian Conservatives, the international conspiracy of the most child
4:05
grooming and the most covering up of said child grooming. Certainly that award goes
4:13
to the church, not to the public education system. The church is the
4:16
all time most successful grooming organization award. But again, facts makes no difference
4:23
here. Facts do not interact with myths. Survives fact free and facts can't
4:30
combat it. I mean that's kind of part of the reason to take a
4:34
semiotic approach as well, because you know, when you read news stories,
4:40
news articles obviously written by like center left kind of media outlets, right,
4:45
they're very focused on how much these narratives distort the facts, how they're wrong,
4:49
they look down on them, they're not interpreting evidence correctly, or they're
4:54
just lying, right. But I think when you think that way, yeah,
4:58
it's helpful, okay, to debunk mythbust whatever these things. But I
5:03
think you're missing the underlying kind of cultural and psychological mechanisms behind conspiratorial thinking.
5:12
When you just say, oh, well, these people are just wrong,
5:15
Well, what about the questions of where did this stuff come from, why
5:19
does it why does it keep seeming to bring stuff back, right, Like
5:23
QAnon was not around when Pizzagate happened, right, the child's sex ring going
5:29
underneath one of those pizza parlors that Hillary Clinton was supposedly running. But that
5:33
all comes back again, right once this new event happens, say, I
5:39
mean latest, We're looking at say Balenciaga, and they're uh, oh yes,
5:43
very riskue last year's thing involving children. Yeah, when when that happens
5:49
an event, it gains significance and it gets folded back into the into the
5:54
whole tradition of Yeah, there's an international pedophilix satanic sex ring that is either
6:01
engaging in child sacrifice or harvesting adrenochrome from kids that remember from Fear and Loathing
6:08
in Las Vegas. That's a thing. They picked that up and they and
6:12
they use it as part of this whole I don't know. It's like,
6:15
I can't call it anything other than like a mythos or like a super conspiracy.
6:18
That's what kind of QAnon has emerged as since twenty seventeen, as a
6:24
super conspiracy that folds in a lot of the other ones and connects all these
6:29
dots and very kind of frantic and strident ways that is alarming and powerful.
6:34
Yeah dots, even from fiction. I wanted to just quickly catch up anyone
6:40
who hasn't heard those episodes. We've spent about a month breaking down modern mythologies.
6:46
It comes from a book from the fifties called Mythologies by a French guy
6:53
named Roland Bart. And when we say semiotics, then we're talking about sign
6:57
system. So it might be it might be be a normal thought to have,
7:00
maybe less normal these days, but a normal thought to have that the
7:04
age of myth has over that belongs to a primitive belief system that was crushed
7:11
by the enlightenment in the world is disenchanted, But I would challenge you to
7:15
spend an hour on TikTok and be able to argue that that's the case.
7:21
But it really is interesting that these that you can you can you can hurl
7:27
facts and appeal to facts and be like, this is not a scientific approach
7:31
to the world, as much as you want, but this kind of demonstrates
7:35
why that doesn't work. Why it's it's more appealing to believe in the myths
7:42
that the media runs on, that politics runs on, that advertising runs on.
7:46
And we've covered some of those, you know, the car industry.
7:51
And myth is not just to say it's false, it's to say that it
7:55
has a meaning structure, which is what a semiotic is. So we've been
8:00
looking at that and we've done a ton of research on this, trying to
8:05
find the meaning structure of this groom or myth, and it comes down to
8:11
a myth that we probably all believe in, actually, which is a good
8:16
sign that it is a myth. And when we all agree on something,
8:18
you know something's got to be wrong. But the myth we're looking at today
8:22
is I guess we're calling it the myth of childhood. Yeah, insofar as
8:26
I guess. We're also talking about conspiracy theories, and mythological consciousness has been
8:33
identified as a major component of conspiratorial thinking. And I should make the distinction
8:39
between like a conspiracy, which is, you know, a group of people
8:45
coming up with plan, usually carried out in secret to achieve some goal,
8:50
and then a conspiracy theory, which is meant to out some kind of potential
8:56
conspiracy. It's a conspiracy against conspiracies. So conspiracies are real, they happen.
9:03
Watergate was one of them. But conspiracy theory is kind of a different
9:07
ballgame entirely because these conspiracies they're exposing are secrets we're not supposed to know or
9:15
talk about them, and there's no way to prove that they've well, they
9:18
usually haven't really happened yet, or they're kind of part of some grander scheme.
9:24
And often, you know, just as mythology is, it's a battle
9:28
between good and evil, either evil people, but often you know, forces
9:35
of evil, supernatural forces. And though that's not often made explicit in conspiracy
9:41
theory chat rooms, I mean you can see it all over the place of
9:46
you know, pacts with the devil and Satanic worship and all that stuff,
9:52
So it's it really does have a hallmarks of ancient myth. Yeah, the
9:56
Balenciago one I especially like because they brought in Ball, which is a Canaanite
10:01
fertility god somehow that that God had some trouble with in the in the Old
10:07
Testament, in the Hebrew Bible. But Ball is a part of part of
10:11
this as well. And conspiracy. I haven't checked it, but I guess
10:18
I could real quick, but it looks etymologically like conspira or something like that
10:22
would be breathing together or whispering together you know our words in English, respire
10:30
inspire. That would be my I'd be my guess. But it's this,
10:33
these people are breathing together, and then the conspiracy theorist is telling a story
10:39
about the breathers, the whisperers, the whispering group. I love playing those
10:46
games. Yeah, conspiracy when we all breathe together, and then we influence
10:50
each other and influences influenza right open the window and take a deep breath,
10:56
and you catch conspiracies. But today it's well the myth. Let's start with
11:01
the myth. The myth is childhood. And you probably believe this one.
11:05
I think I do. And again, myth doesn't make anything untrue. It
11:11
just means it's been detached from the normal world, the world where it can
11:16
be corrected and things like that. So children are a paradigm, a paradigm
11:22
of innocence, purity, imagination, creativity, and they're like this white force
11:30
that must be protected against all the dark, demonic influences around it that seek,
11:37
like actively seek to corrupt this state of innocence, the childlike state of
11:41
innocence, which is you know, something's true to that, But I guess
11:48
it'd be just as accurate to say that children are indelibly self absorbed little assholes
11:54
too. You know, they're not necessarily truly this paradigm of purity. But
12:01
Eric, I thought about every every panic about corrupting the youth or corrupting the
12:07
child really comes down to that age old question. Is it a moral to
12:11
tell a child that Santa Claus is not real? Yeah? Yeah, yeah,
12:20
I mean you're you're damaging their their minds. You know. It's like
12:24
it's like they need to they need to have this sort of they need this
12:30
this period where they can just remain in like a cocoon of fantasy until they're
12:33
old enough to deal with the real world. And if you introduce the hard,
12:39
dirty facts of reality to them to early on, it can it can
12:43
you know, it can interrupt their proper cognitive development. Maybe I don't know,
12:48
I'm just I'm just spinning. Well I think that's true. But you
12:50
can see this in even adults, you know, Disney adults. But how
12:56
many family movies from the nineties or like the two thousands have this stern businessman's
13:03
type father and then the kid believes in Santa and the stern father does not,
13:09
and there's like a relationship problem between the stern father and the imaginative child,
13:16
and they believe in Santa and then it turns out that Santa is real,
13:20
like or Christmas or you know, Christmas is real. Elf comes to
13:24
mind, the Santa Claus tim Allen all those like, yeah, I was
13:28
gonna say that one, The Miracle on Whatever Street, or even Mel Gibson's
13:35
new comeback movie where he plays the Santa Claus Fisher character. I never saw
13:41
it, but you know, he went through his period of hiding from the
13:46
public eye until everyone forgot his racist outburst, and now he's secretly making his
13:52
way back in just as Balenciaga is now releasing their new twenty twenty three line.
13:58
And we just saw, you know that that weird mud the mud scene
14:05
where Kanye West was walking along this like muddy track in a really really oversized,
14:11
heavy duty looking set of clothing. So they're they're coming back. They've
14:16
done their period of they've done their they've done their rehab period, the silence
14:20
period. Yeah, they've reset the clock. I didn't know that coming back.
14:26
Isn't he making a Jesus movie too? I would not be surprised,
14:30
Like, what do you do after Passion of the Christ. Three. You
14:33
can't sequel that, like Jesus finished, he's gone. I guess it could
14:39
be the Book of Revelation it comes back there. No, you can't really
14:43
write any new material. You're gonna have to go find some some alternative history
14:46
for that too. Yo'll do an extended universe of the Bible. Awesome Marvel's
14:52
Bible. Alternate universe Bible. Okay, let's look at the Let's look at
14:58
this modern myth though, the myth childhood child as a place of whatever purity,
15:03
unrestrained imagination, and it's sexuality is the thing that you're not allowed to
15:09
introduce into this universe. So look true, whatever really happens, the facts
15:16
don't matter here. It's the sign childhood. Will put the sign in a
15:20
little circle in your mind. Here, this the childhood is doing the work
15:26
and it's carried away into like we've been talking about, this mythical conflict of
15:31
good and evil, which is the basic structure, the most basic structure of
15:35
the mythology. Yes, and this isn't just a right wing thing either,
15:41
because most people probably agree with this, which is why there are institutions that
15:46
decide, you know, what is allowed to be on TV is a function
15:50
of we need to protect especially the children. The arguments for the Hayes Code,
15:56
Yeah, that's right, they're introduced as we need to protect children from
16:02
these images because the images are too powerful and dangerous and scary. And this
16:07
is this is new, Like you, why is it okay when you're thirteen
16:11
but not when you're twelve? You know, the PG thirteen rating. Yeah,
16:17
it's it's hard, we're breaking off. Childhood is like a chunk,
16:19
but it always seems to come sort of more generally with kind of traditional family
16:25
values. That seems to be the thing that conspiracy theorists are positioning themselves to
16:30
protect in a strange way, right, like family values. So you have
16:33
this movement that says, you know, you know, like heterosexuality doesn't have
16:38
to be this essentialized norm around which we're always constructing our whatever, our social
16:45
units. So the nuclear family is maybe being questioned, and then that is
16:51
a great opportunity for conspiracy theorists to start a panic about about the traditional family
16:57
values, specifically children and grooming and and and child sexuality being no longer protected,
17:04
right, because that's that's clearly what the LGBT community is all about is
17:08
about like pedophilia, right, well, well whatever whatever, that's how the
17:12
that's how the QAnon types are going to argue it, right, and it's
17:18
just folded into this whole international conspiracy thing. But every event that occurs,
17:23
whether it's a movie that comes out that sexualizes kids, right, it's that
17:29
immediately reconnected to this this overarching subversive way of yeah, like like stealing kids
17:37
to get their adrenochrome for Hollywood elites, or just traffic them like that like
17:45
the sound of Sound of Freedom movie. Again, probably stuff like that happens,
17:51
but it wasn't, it wasn't unfolded into this grand story. But Balenciaga,
17:56
I think this is the most interesting case here. Balenciago is really awesome.
18:02
Not they are awesome. I don't. I don't give a shit.
18:04
They committed the kerfuffle was awesome because they committed a sign crime. And you
18:11
don't see this happen very often where someone just created they did a crime against
18:18
the sign system because materially speaking, and what they did was the Teddy Bears.
18:26
There was kids holding teddy bears in these images, right, the kids
18:30
were holding a teddy bear and the teddy bear had at c and m like
18:33
a leather a leather suit on. But here's what I'm saying. Materially,
18:38
there's nothing inherently sexual about a leather suit. You know, it's a leather
18:45
suit. But in our culture it is inscribed into the world of sex basically
18:56
as like alternative sexuality in a way r sound exactly exactly. And so the
19:02
the image is sexualized. The child doesn't know that it's sexualized because they're not
19:07
part of that that sign world yet. But the thing that the right wing
19:12
or I shouldn't even say, the right wing deviant sexualities, you know,
19:19
quote unquote, like homosexuality is included in the world of sex signs, whereas
19:27
a heterosexual relationship is not. Yeah you have like for for whatever reason,
19:33
this is this is not like arbitrary. It goes back to like Christianity and
19:37
all this. But but for whatever reason, even seeing a gay couple holding
19:41
hands is perceived as belonging to the sexual sign system, whereas a straight couple
19:48
holding hands is not considered sexual. It's like neutral and naturalized, right,
19:53
It's like a it's it's coded as normal, whereas like child sexuality or even
20:00
children being juxtaposed like with like the children weren't necessarily even in any kind of
20:06
S and M bondage gear, but just the juxtaposition was enough to make that
20:11
connection to assign this signifier a A a place in the in the meta text
20:18
of conspiracy theory, and that was enough. It didn't it didn't matter,
20:23
you know, Balenciaga tried to sue the people who like the company they hired
20:29
out to to make that scene. They tried to sue them, and then
20:32
they apologized for that. Later they admitted to doing a sign crime by trying
20:37
to sue the creator of that, and they ascribed it to oh yeah,
20:42
we just didn't like check it closely enough. And there was also this document
20:47
very deviously placed that was about some some Supreme Court decision about child pornography and
20:56
and it's all very strange. It seems like they were trying to you,
21:00
something kind of edgy and it just it just but yeah, they went too
21:04
far. But the point is it got picked up by conspiracy theorists and folded
21:08
back into this grooming homophobia, satanic panic stuff. Right yeah, wrong place,
21:14
wrong time. But you know, if you want children to not be
21:17
exposed to sexual imagery, I mean, how here's a personal question, how
21:22
did you first see porn? I think I was probably nine and one of
21:26
my friends still like a magazine from their dad or something like that. Remember
21:30
the good old days the magazines. Oh yeah, I didn't. I didn't
21:37
have any older siblings. The magazines were I saw my friends with those things.
21:41
But it was probably more so the peer to peer software once that started
21:45
coming out. The very first thing it was filled with, Yeah, Kazah,
21:52
LimeWire, aries, Napster, all those old school ones that, yeah,
21:56
obviously the first thing that they were filled up with porn. And parents
22:02
don't understand that shit, so they can't put parental controls on it. And
22:06
I'm still imagine that's the that's a big anxiety around how it you need to
22:10
create like a controlled digit virtual atmosphere for your children where they won't accidentally click
22:15
on anything that'll take them somewhere and show them things you don't want them to
22:19
see. I assume that's how kids are exposed. So it's it's tablets and
22:26
phones that are that are doing the grooming, that are invading this the mythic
22:30
purity of children. I would expect far more than something like the school system,
22:37
because when you get sex ad in school, like I think I it
22:41
was grade six for me or grade five. Yeah, I don't know if
22:47
the history of it is interesting, right, because we were looking at this
22:51
very famous book that was written called Centuries of Childhood, Yeah, Philip Alies,
22:57
and this is one of the first major points where there it was argued
23:03
that childhood is a modern concept. It's a modern phenomenon, and by modern
23:07
we mean like kind of going into the sixteenth fifteenth century, like post Renaissance
23:12
or kind of modern. So before that, purity couldn't have even been a
23:18
kind of issue with specifically with childhood, right, purity has been an issue,
23:23
and you know, it has very religious overtones. But once children became
23:30
a kind of a conceptualized and distinct phase of human life with its own rules
23:37
and its own you know, protocols that have to be followed in order to
23:42
raise a child properly, suddenly, like the purity of children became a very
23:48
specific focus and it's interesting. So that's where that's perhaps where some of this
23:56
the impetus to protect save the children comes from. And also Fuko talks a
24:02
lot about this too. In the figure of the child. Masturbator is a
24:07
new figure in the nineteenth century. So all these ideas anyway are coming up
24:14
about childhood over the modern period and how children should be and that's where that's
24:21
got to be some of the historical basis for this, although some of these
24:26
plot types are much older. Yeah, the guy who started you know,
24:29
Kellogg's cereal, that guy who I don't remember his first name, but the
24:34
Kellogg guy was, in addition to making corn flakes, obsessed with child masturbation.
24:41
And there's like a book of signs that you can tell if your kids
24:47
masturbating or not because it's going to cause like acne and stuff like this.
24:52
So it's a weird thing for a grown ass adult businessman to be obsessed with,
24:56
but there you go, and look, yeah, not so different from
25:00
like a manual for how to find out witches, right, how to discover
25:03
the signs that there are witches around, right, what to look for in
25:07
people? Right, And so you can take that and be like, Okay,
25:10
what to look for for the child masturbator? And I think what Fucao's
25:14
talking about is also like children that will run around and like masturbate other people
25:19
doing like kind of forms of prostitution and stuff like that, Right, like
25:23
that became a major concern in the nineteenth century, and it was psychiatry that
25:29
that kind of staked its fortune on normalizing the family around the mother, father,
25:37
parent child situation, the nuclear family. Yeah. Yeah, so that's
25:44
coming up in the eighteenth nineteenth century, the psychiatry movement, which as we
25:49
know in the twentieth century gave way to the anti psychiatry movement not till much
25:56
later. But psychiatry originally had a stake in in how children were and I
26:03
guess you could say maybe imposing bourgeois values and fears and anxieties onto the general
26:07
population. And this is one of the most important parts of what makes a
26:12
myth a myth that you mentioned the book Centuries of Childhood, But the book
26:18
basically argues that before the seventeenth century, I believe there's no concept or category
26:26
really of childhood. Childhood is not its own thing that's distinct from adulthood because
26:34
of conditions and all this stuff. You like, we have at least three
26:41
categories, which is child than teenager, the teenagers of more recent invention,
26:48
which was I think like the forties even but you have child now teenager are
26:52
now adult. But before that there just was no concept of childhood, this
26:56
guy argues, So it's introduction into the science system was contingent. It's not
27:03
a natural category. We think of it as a natural category because of like
27:07
you said, psychology and psychiatry, that there's differences there. But I want
27:14
to stress this, it's not always been the case, and that's kind of
27:18
how a myth emerges and how it builds itself. Now we can recognize it
27:23
our own experience, we can recognize it naturally as just a consumer demographic.
27:30
Like I assume one hundred years ago there were no children's books specifically for children,
27:37
or maybe longer than that, one hundred and fifty, and children's toys
27:41
that are distinct from adult toys. But now children's toys, backpacks, diapers,
27:49
they're clearly marked, they're clearly laid in. They usually have like Disney
27:53
characters and Mickey Mouse and cars all over them. And there's a bunch of
28:00
them. There's a bunch of these two kids channels in YouTube speaking of speaking
28:06
of grooming, but in the top five channels of YouTube, like they're at
28:11
least two of them are just specifically selling shit to children. So I find
28:17
I found it interesting that this anything. Any exposure of a sexual image to
28:22
a child is considered corrupting their purity, but exposing them to the market a
28:30
predatory you could call it market of advertising, which is demonstrably psychologically damaging,
28:38
but this is not considered grooming. Yeah, which is completely in line again
28:45
with this conspiracy theory universe where they position themselves as defenders of competitive markets right
28:52
against socialism. So you have that sort of hangover of the McCarthy era right
28:57
where communists are infiltrating the government at all levels and conspiring to bring about a
29:03
new world order based on socialist principles. Right, So, at least in
29:07
the West, you actually have a probably have a parallel theory like that,
29:11
but towards capitalism in certain other places. But in North America the dominant strain
29:18
is fear over you know, socialist values creeping in and getting rid of markets.
29:23
All right, So clearly, yeah, introducing children to the market as
29:27
early as possible doesn't become a doesn't become a controversial thing as long as you
29:33
have you know, regulatory bodies that look at the content of the films you're
29:38
showing them and make sure that you're not advertising cigarettes to kids. Although you
29:45
can kind of find workarounds with candy cigarettes and things and big league chew for
29:51
teaching kids to love sticking tobacco in the front of their lip and stuff like
29:53
that. But you know, those things are very kind of subtle and they're
30:00
kind of clever, right. They don't get they don't get the attention that
30:03
something like you know, yeah, a cartoon character who's signified as gay would
30:10
get. Then then suddenly you're in full blown moral panic mode because you've presented
30:15
them with a gay character and you're sending certain messages through that. According to
30:19
the according to the paranoid response, yeah, it's associating with the there were
30:26
the uh sexual imagery for for reasons that can be traced. Homosexuality is included,
30:34
like I said, in the sexual universe, and straight people are not.
30:40
But if we look back to this creation of the childhood, we can't
30:45
really separate it. This is what myth does. It naturalizes history away and
30:52
doesn't doesn't want it to. It can't look at its own contingency. Really,
30:56
we think of childhood as a natural date, a natural state of innocence,
31:02
And there's some like philosophy that dealt with this a little bit like Rousseau
31:07
wrote a book on how to educate a child. He wasn't very good at
31:11
children though, he just left orphans all over Europe and abandoned his own children.
31:18
But he told everyone else how childhood education should go. But if you
31:22
think about this in practice what he preached. Yeah, but if you think
31:26
about this from a like a class perspective, as we talked with with Diego
31:33
two episodes ago, you wouldn't have needed a category of childhood until something like
31:41
public school, which was sort of a bourgeois invention, because before that I
31:48
would assume something like when the kid is ready to start working, they can
31:55
go to work, and now you're suddenly an adult cleaning up, cleaning the
32:00
looms with your tiny fingers in the English factories. Yeah. Yeah, it's
32:06
easy to forget that the public schooling system grew up in proximity to industrialization and
32:15
struggles over the working day and labor laws and women and children in the workplace.
32:21
And yeah, public the public schooling system as a kind of democratization of
32:27
education. I mean, it seems like a noble and institution today, and
32:34
of course it is, but I mean, yeah, it comes from educating
32:37
people to be part of a workforce not to be you know, self realizations,
32:43
self realizing individuals with aspirations. That's that's foolish, right. Look at
32:50
how public schools are set up right batches, but based on years and certain
32:53
kinds of things. They have to know by the time they're out so that
32:58
they can go into the workplace or go on to higher education. But it
33:01
kind of also produces the interregnum period where now a child can be created,
33:08
you know, the concept of child, not an actual child, but the
33:10
concept of child is not yet working. So we gave them something to do
33:15
during the day, reading, writing, rithmetic. Yeah. Yeah, it's
33:21
like there's like a it's like a little period of just free freedom and protection
33:28
from the world, just to grow and develop on their own. It's no
33:30
longer. You know, kids are the ones who are going to take over
33:36
the family business, so you just get them. They're probably living in the
33:38
workplace, they're living in the workshop. They're receiving the same sort of education
33:45
their parents would have received, which is just whatever the parents are passing on
33:47
to them and showing them how to do. They're not getting a formal education.
33:52
But that all changes in the modern era. You have public schools and
33:54
industrialization. Yeah, I was. I even brought up. William Blake had
34:00
a lot to say in poetry, especially about children in newly industrialized Britain and
34:07
some of those jobs that they were given because they were small adults. They're
34:13
being treated as small adults. So they're sent into the chimneys to be chimney
34:16
sweeps because they're the only ones who can fit cleaning out those coal burning chimneys
34:22
or even in coal mining, right, kids could go through little holes and
34:24
drag stuff around much better than larger adults. And he was pretty outraged.
34:30
And there's a lot of people, including you know, people in the aristocratic
34:37
echelon too, who are very upset at this a kind of treatment of children.
34:43
But even you even find it all over like marks as well, you
34:46
know, kids being put into work in factories in appalling conditions and paid half
34:52
the amount and adult would be paid, and that sort of thing. Yeah,
34:57
so that's another dimension of it, the labor. The child's literally half
35:01
an adult, but they can fit under you know, the looms, It
35:05
can fit under the machines in a way that an adult can't. Yeah,
35:08
And he mentioned that these kids would be put together in workplaces not divided by
35:14
gender, so the kids would be all put together, there might even be
35:16
older people there with them, and he and he kind of speculates about what
35:21
kind of depravity is going on in these places, which are basically kind of
35:28
boarding houses for the workers of a factory. And if the factory employs children,
35:32
they're often just thrown in there amongst the adults and not really supervised properly,
35:37
and they become you know, kind of rough because of that, because
35:43
they're treated so poorly. Yeah, this is the beginning of Oliver Twist,
35:45
right, he's in a he's in a workhouse when he asks for more food
35:50
and then he's cast out. Yeah, Dickens wrote some pretty powerful stuff point
35:57
in that that kind of thing out too. Yeah, but this is I
35:59
guess, yes. Well, the reason we're bringing this up is these are
36:00
the first instances of responding to like direct conditions, responding to conditions in front
36:08
of your face and then pointing it out and saying, you know, this
36:13
is wrong to do this to these people. You can do it to adults.
36:16
But it's a bourgeois creation of the public school system after this as a
36:22
result of you know, liberals basically saying we should take them out, they
36:27
should be educated, they should have access to some kind of life of the
36:30
mind. This is what it was on its face anyway, and it should
36:35
be public. And it began, you know, private expensive and sort of
36:42
became quote unquote universalized as a liberal value there, which is to protect children
36:47
from the market, or that the labor market, the workplace. Is this
36:52
first instance of honing off or defining as separate childhood as something that needs to
36:59
be defended. Yeah, and like kind of implicitly accepting Arius's argument that childhood
37:07
is a modern concept and so outlining some of this stuff. But it makes
37:12
sense to me when we think back even to our episode on fairy Tales,
37:15
right, because there they are tales about children, but the children are kind
37:22
of ambiguous. They seem very adult. Like we did. We kind of
37:25
looked at at Little Red riding Hood on the side. We didn't say much
37:29
about it, but Little Red Riding Hood is given this very adult task of
37:32
going through the woods, right or but which one did we actually read like
37:37
snow white, right or no, sleeping beauty. That's the one we did,
37:40
right and uh no, snow white. I was right, snow white.
37:45
And again ambiguous kind of what phase of life is she and we kind
37:52
of have an idea of what age she might be, but she's simply just
37:55
presented as a fully formed human being. So it's it seems like even fairy
38:00
tales kind of confirm a little bit that these really old stories they don't make
38:06
this modern distinction between childhood and adulthood, and that the traditional way of doing
38:14
it versus the modern way of making that distinction now ironically is reversed. The
38:20
traditional way is to make that distinction and now the modern way is blurring those
38:23
lines. Again, the conspiracy theory does have a way of kind of turning
38:29
things upside down like that. And then the childhood or in the fairy stories,
38:34
there's definitely not I mean as opposed to the Disney infantilized version of the
38:38
fairy stories. There's definitely no like moral line there because at the end,
38:45
you know, the evil Stepsister, the evil Stepsisters have to dance on a
38:50
fire until they die and burn to death, and this is seen as retributive
38:55
justice for their treatment of Cinderella the witch. The witch has to where the
39:02
hot the hot sandals and dance to death. Yeah. Yeah, and these
39:07
are tales about children. They might have been told in the presence of children,
39:12
but you can really see the switch between the original stories and then the
39:15
disnification of those stories, which is the purity thing we've been talking about,
39:20
right, Nobody can die in those stories. Everybody has to be you know,
39:24
nice and beautiful and often very white, whitewashed in the earlier ones,
39:30
right, Disney disnification. I think that means to everybody that it's going to
39:37
be very watered down. Nothing really high stakes is gonna happen, except something
39:43
scary, but it's gonna all be fun and playful in the end. Nobody's
39:49
gonna die in the end horrifically like they often do in the old stories.
39:52
Right. And in addition to their like this sign system we can see over
39:58
basically one hundred and fifty plus years is built to include now the child in
40:05
the form that we receive it today. And the form that we receive it
40:08
today is what we say we call naturalized myth, where we look around the
40:15
world and say, of course, it's like that, this isn't a contingent
40:19
production, this isn't invented because of all this history that we're going through,
40:22
which is the reason that we're going through it, and similarly, at basically
40:28
the same time, well a little later, I would say, like twentieth
40:31
century also develops this rigorous sign system about sexuality. Like I don't think at
40:40
any time in history it was considered haram for children to see breasts, for
40:50
example, but with the Hayes Code as one example of a larger code,
40:57
a cultural code, now breasts speak come something sexual and they must be covered
41:02
up, as opposed to I don't know, the male nipple. Yeah,
41:06
and I really wish I read a more more on Freud specifically for this topic.
41:10
But yeah, like those those are erogynous zones and and really like the
41:15
psychosexual development of children, even talking about that stuff can make people kind of
41:22
uncomfortable. It still does when you bring up an Oedipus complex and then explain
41:25
to somebody what it is, they go, oh, and it's gross.
41:29
Right, But Freud's saying, you know, our literary our earliest literary masters,
41:36
like Sophocles, actually had a kind of pre psychoanalytic theory going or not
41:42
a unified theory, but they were the forerunners of his own insights, right,
41:46
he takes them up. Yeah, I wish I read more of that
41:50
for today. But that's the way it goes with such an enormous topics as
41:54
this. And I would even bring in one more sort of overarching component of
42:05
conspiracy theory, as it at least relates directly to childhood, is Catholicism and
42:10
the Catholic Church. We already mentioned it, but some of the earliest conspiracy
42:16
theories were focused one on Mason's Freemasonry. So some of the earliest conspiracies were
42:23
anti Masonic, claiming that you know, and that there are famous people involved
42:30
in these debates, like the guy who invented Morse code. He was writing
42:34
screeds against the Mason Guild like this, surprisingly yeah, like they are yeah.
42:43
He says here the quote the celebrated painter and inventor of the telegraph F.
42:49
B. Morse says, quote within my quote, a conspiracy exists,
42:55
Its plans are already in operation. We are attacked in a vulnerable quarter which
43:00
cannot be defended by our ships, our forts, our armies. And this
43:05
is what the author then says about that the main source of the conspiracy Morse
43:08
found in Metternick's government. This is a Prussian military leader saying Austria is now
43:19
acting in this country, which is America. In this country, she Austria
43:24
has devised a grand scheme. She has organized a plan for doing something here.
43:30
She has her Jesuit missionaries traveling through the land. She has supplied them
43:35
with money and has furnished a fountain for a regular supply. Why Austria,
43:43
Because apparently Austria is like the HAPs S. Yeah, yeah, the Habsburgs.
43:51
Right. They apparently they're involved in some kind of pro Catholic Oh right,
43:57
They're involved in a kind of a pro Catholic conspiracy. So the anti
44:00
Catholic That's what I wanted to say. I presented this in the worst way
44:06
possible. The earliest ones are anti Masonic, and then the other one is
44:09
anti Catholic. Those are the two kind of proto conspiracy theories. Right.
44:15
So Morse is writing here about the Jesuits being the agents of a Catholic conspiracy
44:22
to undermine Protestant individualist culture and freedom and markets and things like that in a
44:30
new order. Another, right, the Poe, like another pope is the
44:36
Antichrist there, yeah, yeah, kind of papal plot. And so another
44:42
Protestant militant writes here, and I quote again in this article the paranoid style
44:49
that Jesuits are prowling about all parts of the United States in every possible disguise,
44:54
expressly to ascertain the advantageous situations and to disseminate popoury, not popery,
45:02
but the Pope stuff popoury. A minister of the Gospel from Ohio has informed
45:09
us that he discovered one carrying on his devices in his congregation. He says
45:14
that the Western country swarms with them under the name of puppet show men,
45:19
dancing masters, music teachers, pedlars of imagery and ornaments, barrel organ players.
45:24
And so this anyway, this paranoid kind of leap into the fantasy of
45:29
some kind of global plot to undermine, in this case Protestantism. Right,
45:36
so you have, you know, the Masonic reaction to the Masonic anti Masonic
45:43
reaction, which are generally a reaction to the French Revolution, and then the
45:47
anxieties that that provoked in other countries. And then you have this now sort
45:52
of Protestant Catholic kind of back and forth being folded into its own kind of
46:00
right with the Jesuits and the Pope plotting to undermine free society and all the
46:07
good values that come along with the Protestants, right, so you know that
46:13
that that Catholic basis then quickly, you know, you can imagine how that
46:16
picks up, meaning over time, you know, Catholic abuse of children,
46:22
this and that, the all these isolated things just get folded back into this
46:25
sort of anti Catholic version of conspiracy theory. And we're skipping a few.
46:32
But I mean, this is so it's so particularly American to be like,
46:37
the Pope's trying to take over your country. But also we've skipped a few,
46:43
like Baphomet is a bastardization of Mohammet. So there's this the Muslims are
46:52
trying to take shit over, and of course the Jews. We can't ignore
46:58
the Jews. We have the Illuminati, which are the Masons on one hand,
47:04
and then the Jewish conspiracy which riled everybody up, not just in America
47:07
but Europe as well. Yeah. Yeah, some no it all has probably
47:10
told you at some point that the Illuminati aren't a real thing. They are
47:15
based on the Bavarian Illuminati of history gone by, and they're no longer around,
47:21
right Well that, yeah, I mean that is kind of the start
47:27
of this conspiracy is this Bavarian Illuminati and this movement to I don't know,
47:35
it's an illuminism. It's called in this article, and it was started in
47:39
seventeen seventy six by a man named Adam weiss Hopt who worked at the University
47:45
of Ingolstadts. And somehow the Knights Templar started like the eleventh century. That
47:53
gets all mixed up in this, but these are like, oh yeah,
47:55
Assassin's creed amazing, getting good stuff on that. This goes back to the
48:00
like any these secret societies, there seem to be threats to the good,
48:07
the public good at large. And we've just named a bunch of them.
48:12
We don't have to go into detail into any of them. But the point
48:15
is that in the modern myth, in the Groomer myth, all of these
48:22
things become interchangeable in the war of good versus evil. So sexuality is on
48:29
the side of evil. Whatever group is the target of the day that's threatening
48:36
the public social order, they become part of the evil. And childhood it's
48:42
like, we don't want to just defend ourselves from these people, because you
48:46
know, we're adults, we can take it, but children they need to
48:50
be defended. So everything we do is on behalf of them. Everything we
48:55
post and and you know, fighting the good fight. We're not doing it
49:01
for ourselves because we're so benevolent and good. We must, though, protect
49:07
the children. We must protect the children from Satan and whatever the Satan figure
49:14
is. It was literally Satan in the eighties and now it's groomer, groomer,
49:20
pedophiles and gays. Huh yeah, But Satan will be there right in
49:23
the stable of references, ready to trot out if if one of these incidents
49:28
seems to have a particularly kind of religious if you can find a religious signifier
49:32
there, right, then the Satan part of that myth will be readily deployed.
49:37
But it doesn't have to be right, it's it's a on the here's
49:44
an interesting quote, right, So there's a there's a an Estonian Semititian,
49:51
very famous named Uri Latman, and I'm reading a paper that is, you
49:57
know, discussing his views in relation to the so object and says, the
50:00
value of a sign in the semantic hierarchy is determined by its proximity to the
50:07
originary order provided by the meta text. Okay, so the meta text is,
50:13
you know, the conspiracy theory in its sort of general amorphous form,
50:20
and an event or a sign, a sign commune event is put into that
50:24
semantic hierarchy based on how well it fits in. Right. So, again,
50:30
to continue the quote, while the originary order is included in every event
50:36
perceived as significant in some, it is nevertheless thought to be more clearly present.
50:40
Right, So the event kind of has it's the opposite, Right.
50:44
We don't do the empirical research and then try to come up with a theory
50:46
to explain the questions. We look for the events that already fit best with
50:52
our theory. It's that classic thing, right, But in this case it
50:57
is the mythological consciousness that determines what the originary order is. The cosmic battle
51:02
of good and evil, right, which is why there's always that weird kind
51:07
of satan stuff ready to come out when when any kind of incident like Balenciaga
51:13
happens, Right, they're gonna trot it all out. Interestingly, though,
51:16
with the Balenciaga thing, they went back to ball, which again our bail
51:22
Bile, which is a Canaanite rain god. For whatever reason, he's being
51:30
roped into this the guy that you pray to, So that your grains get
51:35
watered. I'm really interested in what you said there though, because we call
51:40
it. You know, when we're saying you're not doing facts, you're cherry
51:45
picking the evidence. Basically, what you're saying is these events are cherry picked
51:51
based on their sign value. Do you have a you're you're an expert in
51:57
semiotics. Where does this sign value come from? Is it just their flexibility
52:02
or is it the emotional resonance? Obviously when you're talking about child grooming,
52:07
it's emotionally resonant to everyone, like, I don't want my kids to be
52:13
exposed to this when they're out of my care for eight hours a day.
52:20
Where does the sign value come from? Yeah, the sign value, I
52:23
mean this is in a kind of register closer to Ferdinand des Socer's idea of
52:30
the value of a sign being its difference from the other signs in a formal
52:36
semiotic system. So when we're dealing with a system like language, right,
52:39
the value of a sign is differential. Right, And the example always given
52:45
is stop lights. Right, when we pull up and see a green light,
52:47
Well, it's not red, it's not yellow. That's what gives it
52:52
its value in that system. If you have a meta text like a like
52:58
a like a a conspiracy theory related to children. Right, if the event
53:04
or the image being presented on social media or the event has religious signifiers in
53:12
it, like bail. Right, that's really close to the originary text.
53:15
Right, that's got huge value. That's much more densely connected then something that
53:21
might be a little harder to connect, like I don't know if it like
53:25
just a horrific incident where children are dying, but there's no there's no signifiers
53:31
available there to make it seem like it's part of some global conspiracy or cabal.
53:37
So the value is determined by the meta text of the conspiracy and the
53:42
conspiracy of the conspiracy theory, I should say, and the conspiracy theory itself
53:47
is a I mean, the terminology here is a trans cultural meta text.
53:52
So think of it just like you know, the Fall of Troy was the
53:55
trans cultural meta text for hundreds and hundreds of year. You have Hesiod,
54:01
Homer, like all the Athenian playwrights. Right, it's a transcultural meta text.
54:07
They're talking about this sort of mythos, this universe of the Fall of
54:13
Troy and the time before when gods and humans walk the Earth and the time
54:16
after the fall and time afterwards. Right, that's another example of what a
54:21
meta text would be. So you find a stone tablet that says something about
54:24
zeus. Hey, that's close to the originary order in the theogony boom,
54:29
that has high value. Whereas you know, one of the grandchildren of theseus
54:34
gets themself killed fighting a monster or something. Right, still there, but
54:37
less value. Right, it's more distantly connected to the originary kind of cosmic
54:44
order of things and the struggles of the unfolding of that cosmic order, battle
54:49
against good and evil and all that good stuff. I think I explain that,
54:52
Okay, I think that's all right. I think just to clarify though,
54:58
So the trans culture meta text is I guess Christian mythology is what you're
55:05
saying here. So this is why Satan and bile are reintroduced to talk in
55:12
TikTok. Yeah. The actual quote for that part is, you know,
55:17
mythological consciousness is characterized by its focus on the sacral order contained in a transcultural
55:24
meta text. So the sacral order is contained in the transcultural meta text.
55:30
Events in the here and now, images, statements made in public, whatever
55:37
they get linked to that transcultural meta text, and their value is then determined
55:43
by how high on that semantic hierarchy of the conspiracy that that signifier is able
55:47
to be connected. I can't, it's difficult, right, So Pizzagate,
55:52
you know, you have to connect that to Hillary Clinton and then to the
55:57
international cabal of should satanic child molesters. So it's got it's got pretty high
56:02
value, right, Same with the Balenciaga thing. You see the kids,
56:07
Okay, just like weird navant garde oh s and m gear and a Supreme
56:12
Court decision against child pornography. Okay, yeah, this is part of the
56:15
elite conspiracy to snatch up our kids and harvest adrenochrome from them or something like
56:21
that. Right, Like, that's basically the kind of semantic logic is how
56:24
closely to that originary order that the signifier can obviously be made to be connected.
56:32
So if I can, if I can ask you, how like where
56:37
does it fit into the order? Christianity piggybacked off of a certain sect of
56:45
Judaism pharasitical Judaism, which or which piggybacked off Zoroastrianism and Zoroastrianism. Is this
56:55
Manichean conflict where you have her the pure good and then the pure evil.
57:02
So in the Christian mythos, actually Satan is supposed to not have power.
57:10
So we were actually reintroducing an older Minichian universe here, where it's a kind
57:16
of an equal struggle between good and evil rather than we have this all powerful
57:22
god. So is that kind of what you're saying. Is it the semantic
57:28
value of good versus evil is equivalent forces, and we need to be soldiers
57:32
of light with our swords defending the children from any demonic images that they might
57:38
see. Is this more compelling? Is this showing that this is a little
57:43
bit of a more compelling story. Then Jesus came and saved everyone already,
57:49
so we don't have to worry about it too much. Oh yeah, yeah,
57:52
because in the end, these conspiracy theory narratives are being strategically deployed in
57:59
order to achieve certain goals. But there's also you know, that's the most
58:04
worrying part about conspiracy theory is groups consciously using them to you know, so
58:10
dissent, cause chaos and further their agendas. And then there's the not harmless
58:17
but less focused kind of just entertainment conspiracy and there's no real clear boundary between
58:23
the two. Right, the stronger that sort of aimless stuff can be,
58:29
the the more dangerous and readily people might jump onto or be manipulated by people
58:35
who are coming in and consciously using it. You could think of like an
58:37
Edward Burnet's type getting his hands on something. Oh, is that right?
58:40
I was just going to bring this up because there's a CIA document about fomenting
58:49
unrest that Burne's certainly had input into, and the CIA playbook. I made
58:54
a video on this a while back. But the CIA playbook is about drawing
59:00
phenomena together, and they include stuff like weather. If you have freakish weather,
59:06
you can bring that together with the what do you call it, the
59:09
narrative, the meta textual narrative. And I wanted to say this connects materially,
59:15
I would think, And this is I'm not really a conspiracy theorist in
59:20
the sense that I think this is very well organized. But you do have,
59:24
particularly in the United States, a push by Christian conservative groups, very
59:31
wealthy ones, including what was her name, Betsy de Vos, Right,
59:37
they want to defund or they want public funding to go to their private religious
59:43
schools because they're kind of christologically minded. We need to keep our kids pure
59:49
and have them sent to a Christian school or the homeschool movement equivalent. The
59:54
public school system is bad and indoctrinating your kids into feminism and secularism and whatever
1:00:02
else that is cast as demonic here. So if you could say there's a
1:00:07
material interest at base here. And again I'm not suggesting that this is being
1:00:14
thought through, but if it were being thought through, if it were actually
1:00:19
a conspiracy that was orchestrated like this, the purpose might be something like to
1:00:23
sow distrust and discontent in the public school system so we can realize our Christo
1:00:32
fascist takeover of the republic. Yeah, and when you were talking about that
1:00:40
Minichian stuff too, Yeah, you know, you can even think of,
1:00:45
well, there's this really interesting concept called structural maximalism, which is basically just
1:00:52
to say that conspiracy theories are all or nothing. Either you're thinking non conspiratory
1:01:00
orally in which life is messy and there are no true oppositions between things,
1:01:05
or you're thinking mythologically and in a kind of paranoid register where everything is sort
1:01:09
of against something else or everything is connected. Right, you immediately parse things
1:01:15
out into good and evil, friend and foe, ordering chaos, all those
1:01:19
binary opposites, binary structural maximalism. Right. So even just think of the
1:01:22
Star Wars universe, Right, what does red mean in your daily life when
1:01:27
you encounter it? Okay, now, when you know you're watching a Star
1:01:30
Wars movie, what does red signify? Evil? Dark side, cosmic force
1:01:36
of stealing kids from the Jedi Temple and brainwashing them and turning them into evil
1:01:42
wizards, evil space wizards. Right, that's again a great example of a
1:01:46
more contained structural maximalism. But imagine, yeah, conspiracy theory kind of just
1:01:52
floating transculturally and transhistorically through social media and all of our interactions with people in
1:01:59
our meaning making activities. Right, if you get into a kind of a
1:02:02
structural maximalism when you're dealing with those situations, then yeah, you're going to
1:02:08
interpret things in this very polarizing kind of again like meta textual framework. And
1:02:15
it's partly a cultural and a partly a psychological kind of method. But these
1:02:21
are semiotic theories. So it's the kind of the logic of the signification of
1:02:25
mythical thinking in conspiratorial thinking, and it's I would just say it's kind of
1:02:31
obvious. Right. If there's very clear binaries, very clear oppositions, this
1:02:36
is much more likely to get you involved. You know who the friend is,
1:02:40
you know who the foe is, and it's much more enticing to jump
1:02:45
on one side or the other, as opposed to a world that's presented a
1:02:51
little bit more messily. I would say, And I wonder what you thought
1:02:54
about this, because you've you've been referencing the Greek mythos a lot, and
1:03:00
the mythos doesn't have concepts of good versus evil. So how does their myth
1:03:07
play out differently on a cultural level when it's not based on a fundamentally binary
1:03:15
system of something like good and evil. Well, it's difficult to say,
1:03:20
because you know, structuralism has had a lot of success in studying ancient myth
1:03:23
right, Jean Pierre Vernand is that his name? Vernont? Who is a
1:03:29
favorite reference of a famous philosopher who died a couple of years ago, Bernard
1:03:35
Stiegler. But Vernont writes a lot about binary oppositions in Greek thought as evidence
1:03:43
through mythological texts. Yeah, so in Greek mythology, Yeah, you're right,
1:03:49
there tends not to be those maybe global or universal binaries like good and
1:03:54
evil, but there is the chaos in order thing there right in the beginning
1:04:01
was chaos, the chiasm, the gap, and out of it emerged all
1:04:05
the gods. And eventually when you get by the time you get to the
1:04:09
end of the theogony, you have an order established under the patriarchal rule of
1:04:14
Zeus, who is above everybody else, and it's about the settlement of the
1:04:18
universe into a cosmic order. So we go the opposite way. Now we
1:04:24
see the order is already being there and chaos threatening at every turn, right,
1:04:29
So it's kind of they're there. They're there, they're just not you
1:04:33
know, you need hundreds of years, you need Christianity, you need Minichianism,
1:04:38
you need all these like absoluteizing theories of good and evil, theory of
1:04:43
God, things like that before you maybe get to what you're asking about.
1:04:47
But yeah, in Greek thought, there's plenty of those kinds of binary oppositions.
1:04:53
They're just a little more local, like seeing and being invisible or something
1:04:58
like that, right, just little simpler oppositions that structure the stories that you're
1:05:01
reading. And perhaps civilization and barbarism. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
1:05:09
The Greeks are very elitist in that sense. Yeah, self and other
1:05:14
You know, myth is very much an aristocratic phenomenon. So you know in
1:05:18
group warrior class, outgroup, non warrior class, slave class, whatever they
1:05:24
are the So yeah, I mean it does have this sort of same effect.
1:05:30
You could say, yeah, there's a structural maximalism there too. And
1:05:33
you know, these stories are our cultural touchstones for understanding the world. And
1:05:40
when we say today, you know, in times of social stress and anxiety
1:05:44
and uncertainty, this kind of ancient form of mythological thinking, this mythological consciousness
1:05:50
tends to re emerge in times of stress, in times of uncertainty. And
1:05:56
what times are not stressful and uncertain these days, Yeah, like they always
1:06:00
are with climate change and moral panic and polarizing politics. Right, we're all
1:06:06
stressed out, we're all looking for ways to understand the world. These things
1:06:10
simplify all that complexity, give you a nice vocabulary to talk about it,
1:06:15
and everything tends to make sense. Of course, I'm just saying this is
1:06:19
the appeal of it, right, this is why it catches on. So
1:06:24
when there's a social stress or social uncertainty, the most stable system the most
1:06:30
stable belief system. What you're calling structural maximalism is to turn everything into a
1:06:36
binary and yeah versus right liberal versus conservative, pedophiles versus non pedophiles. Yeah.
1:06:48
Here, good Christian soldiers versus Satan. Yeah, or even you know,
1:06:54
Protestants versus like evil plotting Catholics or you know the evil Masons and all
1:06:59
that stuff. Right, Like, here's the definition. When we think of
1:07:03
the meaning side again semantic thinking. It's characterized by quote structural maximalism, in
1:07:10
which every conflict that casts even the slightest suspicion on the originary order takes on
1:07:15
the image of the battle between good and evil. So the originary order say,
1:07:20
something important in that system is family values. And then you see kids
1:07:26
next to bears with bondism gear that challenges the originary order, and it immediately
1:07:31
takes on the image of a battle between good and evil. There's no continuing
1:07:36
the quote here, No intermediary forms are recognized. The world is binary order
1:07:43
a chaos, good, evil, friend, foe, et cetera, et
1:07:45
cetera, and end quote, and those ETCeteras were my addition. But yeah,
1:07:49
and there is a binary there too, with the child versus the adult.
1:07:54
It's like the adult has already been lost to culture, they've been exposed
1:07:59
to the evil, but the children has not yet. So as an adult,
1:08:02
even though you are corrupted, even though you are you're burdened with the
1:08:08
original sin of having uh seen pornography, you can still take the side of
1:08:13
the good, the not yet corrupt, and be on their side against the
1:08:18
forces of evil. Yeah, like it's a pure fantasy. Like this fight
1:08:23
you're engaged in against the forces of evil is obviously a kind of fantasy projection.
1:08:30
I mean oftentimes, right, conspiracy theorists are using these topics to explore
1:08:36
the things about themselves that they can't talk about, so they project them onto
1:08:40
other people. Oh, these people are like pedophiles doing these things to kids.
1:08:45
I'm not saying conspiracy theorists are all pedophiles. What I am saying is
1:08:49
it is it is a way of filtering those feelings through a kind of discourse.
1:08:56
Right, But you said, would you say it's like psychologically they sense
1:09:01
their own corruption or their own I don't know, passivity or inability to change
1:09:09
things. Because in the system, a child is an object. Right.
1:09:13
The child has no agency for itself. There's no conception of the kid wanting
1:09:17
to see porn and then stealing their parents' phone and like googling porn. This
1:09:21
doesn't exist. The child is a is a blank slate of innocence. And
1:09:28
maybe maybe you could say that the conspiracy theorist about this feels somewhat of a
1:09:33
burden of their own corruption, their own loss of innocence, and their own
1:09:38
inability to do anything about it. So it's projected as well. At least
1:09:43
I can defend it. I can defend children from being exposed to, you
1:09:48
know, the darkness that I've seen. Yeah, yeah, well yeah,
1:09:54
and it's important to It's not because of maybe a feeling of any kind of
1:10:00
of internal corruption or a sense of that it's a fact of dispossession. I
1:10:05
think again, you know, you have people who are dispossessed, right,
1:10:09
They don't feel like politics is going in their direction, right, or you
1:10:14
feel like you know, yeah, I mean we all had those conversations about
1:10:19
why people voted for Trump, right, the feeling of feelings of dispossession,
1:10:24
They were left behind, they fell through the cracks of the welfare state whatever,
1:10:28
and they turned to more extreme views. I mean, you got to
1:10:30
think that that is in the background too. It's not you don't want to
1:10:34
attribute this to individuals. It's a cultural phenomenon. Like I said, when
1:10:40
you you know, when you're in your life and you're in a relatively good
1:10:43
mood, you have a pretty high tolerance for uncertainty and lack of structure,
1:10:46
and maybe even if you wax a bit poetic, you can enjoy the uncertainty
1:10:51
and the contingency. But when you're having trouble dealing with life, as many
1:10:58
of us often do, then that becomes a huge burden, right, the
1:11:00
uncertainty of it all. And you can imagine that on almost like a social
1:11:05
psychological level, where widespread uncertainty and dispossession can lead to large groups of people
1:11:13
embracing these kinds of quote unquote explanatory theories of why shit sucks. Right,
1:11:19
Yeah, And i'd like to I'd like to reference back to our we did
1:11:24
an episode. Last episode was on myth or two episodes ago, excuse me,
1:11:29
was on myths of the left and myths of the right. Because leftism,
1:11:33
orthodox Marxism has its own binary right proletariat hmm, bourgeoisie. And I've
1:11:42
seen, or we've all seen so many of these basically online strategy debates about
1:11:49
why why can't we get people to believe in our binary because this is the
1:11:55
one that's materially testable. But I think obviously precisely because it's not materially testable,
1:12:01
it doesn't have gods, it doesn't can't include, but bile into it.
1:12:09
You can see why the one is far more seductive than the other,
1:12:14
because it seems much easier to combat pedophiles than it does to combat a ruling
1:12:23
class or an ownership class. Plus, every incentive that exists in the system
1:12:28
is trying to push you the other way, which is why leftists only have
1:12:32
bad myths. According to Rolling Bart. Yeah, maybe it's also helpful to
1:12:40
believe that all these events are connected. So anywhere I choose to intervene is
1:12:45
having an effect on the whole, right, right, the whole is visible
1:12:48
in the part, and then the part is visible in a hole at a
1:12:55
w HO l E hole and so but then you know, Hollywood, child
1:13:01
abuse, Pizzagate, Balenciaga, those are not connected. Well, sorry,
1:13:08
I'm making factual statements. Now. If you see those things as connected,
1:13:13
then it makes it much clearer what's going on. If they're just just instances
1:13:17
of people being fucked up, power hungry, greedy, disturbed, but they're
1:13:23
isolated and contingent and they just happen. Then how do you process that?
1:13:29
Right, Like, oh god, we've just lived in this horrific world where
1:13:32
people are capable of somehow making being okay with you know, sex trafficking underage
1:13:41
people. Right, it's much more easy to accept that reality if you have
1:13:45
this sort of big story, I think, and I think conspiracy theory gives
1:13:49
you that, and it makes you the shittiness of your own situation. You
1:13:55
can then have someone to blame for it. You have somebody who's made you
1:13:59
this way, or or somebody who's plotting to overthrow the stability that you've been
1:14:04
enjoying for many years or right, whatever whatever it might be. And you
1:14:09
have a role to play. Onward Christian soldiers, Yeah yeah, and then
1:14:14
yeah, you get to be a soldier in the army, right yeah,
1:14:16
and watch your hero Trump or whatever fight the satanic pedophiles. Yeah, even
1:14:23
though he hasn't really done much. And yeah, I mean the real world
1:14:28
problems with that sort of thing as well. You know, it does take
1:14:30
away if you're coming up with all these crazy explanations about why child abuse happens.
1:14:35
Then you're going to be ignoring like the real world causes, and you're
1:14:39
going to be screwing over, you know, doctors without borders or which is
1:14:45
probably a George Soros thing or something, right, But anyway, you're going
1:14:48
to be interfering with people like doctors without borders of ability to put out rhetoric
1:14:54
and intervene in such situations because this crazy theory is going around, right.
1:15:00
Yeah, well it takes away We just covered a shitload. But anyway,
1:15:06
the constellation here between Satan Satan against children, it's not new. It's in
1:15:15
fact one of the oldest myths we have, but nevertheless myth. No,
1:15:20
and actually the last thing I'll say that reminds me, the last thing I'll
1:15:25
say about this is actually, yeah, the myth of childhood and anti Catholic
1:15:32
conspiracy theories and this panic over you know, child abuse, they actually all
1:15:41
have a very common origin. I'll just read it because it's a it's a
1:15:44
fascinating passage, he says. Probably the most the most widely read contemporary book
1:15:51
in the United States before Uncle Tom's Cabin was a work supposedly written by one
1:15:57
Maria Monk entitled Awful Disclosed. This appears in eighteen thirty six. This Maria
1:16:04
Monk, the author who purported to have escaped from Hotel Dieu Nunnery in Montreal
1:16:12
after five years there as a novice and none reported her convent life in elaborate
1:16:16
and circumstantial detail, reported having been told by the mother superior she must obey
1:16:21
the priests in all things, and to her utter astonishment and horror, she
1:16:28
soon found what the nature of such obedience was. Infants born of Convent Liaison
1:16:33
were baptized and then killed, she said, so that they might ascend at
1:16:38
once to Heaven. Her book, hotly attacked and defended, continued to be
1:16:43
read and believed, even after her mother gave testimony that Maria had been somewhat
1:16:47
addled ever since childhood after she rammed a pencil into her head. Ria died
1:16:51
in prison in eighteen forty nine after having been arrested in a brothel as a
1:16:57
pickpocket. So the sexuallyus goings on and cloistered communities is one of the originary
1:17:05
parts of what we're talking about today, and of course it goes back a
1:17:10
little bit to the anti Catholicism kind of yeah, yeah, it's that I
1:17:15
mentioned earlier, anti Catholicism and child sacrifice. Yeah, yeah, and the
1:17:23
child's sacrifice as well. It has a Moloch. I think the god was,
1:17:30
but I think the Hebrew Bible alleges that Moloch or people were sacrificing their
1:17:35
children to Moloch. So there we go. The papacy demands child sacrifice,
1:17:44
and here's Moloch and everything you believe can be traced to the common source of
1:17:48
a lady who stuck a pencil in her head. Yeah, and the and
1:17:53
the and the Jesuit infiltrators that the Habsburgs are sending over here and funding.
1:17:59
Well, you should say, like, you can find facts, you can
1:18:02
find individual events, but the point of the myth, and we're not discounting
1:18:09
that, of course, but the point of the myth is to unify all
1:18:13
of the independent, contingent variables that are dependent on whatever their own circumstances are,
1:18:20
including some fucked up people, but the myth draws them all together,
1:18:27
makes one grand story that's been taking place for at least what three thousand years?
1:18:34
Yeah, the evidence is wide open to interpretation. You can say whatever
1:18:39
you want about it, go onto some chat room and look at whatever they're
1:18:43
interpreting, and they'll be contradicting each other. One of those interpretations will eventually
1:18:46
win out. And that's like the Petrie Dish effect right on the Internet and
1:18:50
the Eight Chance and the Four Chans of the World. Right, it's a
1:18:54
little Petrie dish. These things grow, one of them becomes dominant, and
1:18:57
then boom, they're sent out into the sphere and they take over our minds
1:19:02
and our behaviors, which I'll say is fascinating. I like it when it
1:19:06
happens, I know, and it's happening so much now. Internet, YadA
1:19:13
YadA, YadA, yea is cold War. There's so many components to these
1:19:16
stories. It's it's and the history of where all this stuff came from.
1:19:20
I should say, yeah, it's it's it's overwhelming but fascinating. Yeah.
1:19:25
Anyway, I thought that was a great episode. We can wrap it there
1:19:28
though, thank you very much. Eric. Yeah, we scratched some surface.
1:19:34
Maybe we could continue possibly, but this is uh, we're gonna continue
1:19:38
with miss I just don't know which one. But this has been pill Pod
1:19:43
one seven. For all the rest of our stuff. It's on Patreon dot
1:19:48
com. Excellent. Catch you next time, all right, see See why
1:19:54
did I say that? See Yuah sit up I was There was a sign