The Ship of the Sun is Drawn 2: Usura

And also let the golden and silver vessels of the house of God, which Nebuchadnezzar took forth out of the temple which is at Jerusalem, and brought unto Babylon, be restored, and brought again unto the temple which is at Jerusalem, every one to his place, and place them in the house of God. -- Ezra 6:5

 


In their article "Manufacturing the Deadhead: A product of social engineering," Joe Atwill and Jan Irvin make the bold claim that the 1960s counterculture in the U.S. was largely the product of the efforts of two men:

Culture normally changes slowly and for many reasons, and the 60’s American drug counter culture was certainly a long time in the making. But, incredibly, most of the events that led to it can be traced back to two men: Gordon Wasson and his close friend Edward Bernays, the father of propaganda. Given Bernays’ background and political perspective, his role in bringing about the drug culture is highly suspicious.

It is interesting in the extreme to consider that the counterculture was manufactured by an elite conspiracy. Examining the lives of people like Wasson and Bernays we can definitely find suggestions of such a conspiracy. The conspiracy that Atwill and Irvin reveal, though, is not a small one.

Their claim, in full, is that just as Christianity was a conspiracy by the Roman Empire to entirely shackle the minds of the masses, so was the counterculture a conspiracy by top elites to break traditional conditioning, cause widespread confusion and dependency, dumb down the culture and ultimately pave the way for a neo-feudal Dark Age.



Atwill and Irvin identify six immense changes that they believe the agents of the elite, men like Bernays and Wasson, brought about by the 1960s in order to irrevocably transform traditional America.

If one compares the culture of Woodstock and the music drug scene of the 1960s with that of America at the beginning of the century, a number of distinct differences are visible:

1. Overt sexual images in the popular media (pornography)
2. Wildly uninhibited dancing
3. music idols
4. feminism
5. integration
6. psychedelic drug use

The present post will not look into the shady dealings of Bernays and Wasson. It will also not delve into the conspiracy of the Roman manufacture of Christianity. This article will, however, deeply examine the origins and scope of the counterculture and the idea that it emerged solely as the result of a vast conspiracy, as presented by Atwill and Irvin.

Germination

An excellent 2003 article by Gordon Kennedy and Kody Ryan entitled, "Hippie Roots & The Perennial Subculture," explores the possibility that much of the sixties counterculture in the U.S. can trace its roots directly back to much earlier alternative movements in Germany. Kennedy and Ryan discovered that these roots stretch far back into the past.

The authors explain that Roman historians, in observation of the "uncivilized" German tribes, noted their deep respect for both women and nature. In 98 A.D. Tacitus wrote:

According to German outlook, pronouncements of destiny seem to acquire a greater sacredness in the mouth of women. Prophecy and magic in a good as well as an evil sense is by choice the gift of women. If it is inherent in the nature of men to show the female sex a great consideration and respect, then this was particularly shaped on the German people from of old. Men earn deification through their deeds, women through their wisdom.

Feminism, it seems, long predated Edward Bernays. In the German Middle Ages we can also find abundant evidence of this "countercultural" spirit. Kennedy and Ryan discuss the heretical neo-Adamites and medieval mystics like Meister Eckhart. It is towards the end of the 19th century and start of the 20th, though, that we can begin to single out the direct ancestors of the hippies.

Kennedy and Ryan write about Eduard Baltzer, an ex-minister and author inspired by the works of Goethe and others, who in the 1860s set up vegetarian communities and considered himself the follower of Pythagoras. Baltzer inspired many others including a painter, Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach, who in turn set up "natural life style" alternative communities and gained his own inspired followers, including one of the first truly psychedelic artists known simply as Fidus.



Another of Diefenbach's followers, the poet Gusto Graser, became the friend and teacher of writer Hermann Hesse. Hesse in 1908 wrote about how he and Graser lived and fasted in the caves of the Swiss Alps, and later used their relationship as a model for the guru-disciple relationship explored in his still very famous novel, Siddhartha. 

Hesse and Graser were eventually to become members of perhaps the most known and influential of the "natural life style" communities of that era. This is Monte Verità (the "Mountain of Truth") in the Swiss fishing village of Ascona.

Further south in Switzerland, Ascona was a little fishing village on the shore of Lake Maggiore, on the Swiss side of the border with Italy. In the year 1900 a counter-culture renaissance began and lasted until about 1920. Ascona became the focal point for all of Europe’s spiritual rebels.

Life experiments were in vogue: surrealism, modern dance, dada, Paganism, feminism, pacifism, psychoanalysis and nature cure. A few of the participants were Hermann Hesse, Carl Jung, Isadora Duncan, D.H. Lawrence, Arnold Ehret and Franz Kafka.

The mythos of Ascona has grown to such stature that in 1986 an academic study by Martin Green was published, Mountain of Truth: The Counterculture Begins, Ascona, 1900-1920. Despite Green's title, though, Kennedy and Ryan make it clear that Ascona was only the most famous of several "life-reform" communities and movements that existed in Germany and elsewhere in the last decades of the 19th century. The counterculture did not even begin in Ascona.



One German alternative movement formed in 1896, the Wandervogel, had a lasting influence on the counterculture:

Wandervogel members, aged mainly between 14-18 years and spread to all parts of Germany eventually numbering 50,000. Part hobo and part medieval, they pooled their money, wore woolen capes, shorts and Tyrolean hats and took long hikes in the country where they sang their own versions of Goliardic songs and camped under primitive conditions. Both sexes swam nude together in the lakes and rivers and in their hometowns they established "nests" and "anti-homes", sometimes in ruined castles where they met to plan trips and play mandolins and guitars.

Aside from possessing obvious similarities to the much later hippies, the Wandervogel also had a complicated relation to the later Hitler Youth. Many of the Wandervogel directly opposed the Hitler Youth, which attempted to mimic the older movement's style and spirit, but a sizeable minority were also seduced into Nazi ranks. The Nazis went on to outlaw the Wandervogel and all other youth groups that contested their hegemony by 1933.

Before WW1, though, tens of thousands of Germans involved in "life-reform" movements like the Wandervogel and others involving nudism, vegetarianism, alternative medicine, yoga, feminism, modern dance, intentional communities, etc. -- AKA the counterculture -- emigrated to the U.S., particularly California, in order to escape the increasingly authoritarian turn of the German Empire under Kaiser Wilhelm.   



Many of these German immigrants to California continued to promote "life-reform" in a land that was much more tolerant of new ways of being. One such couple was John and Vera Richter who established the "Eutropheon" -- the model for all subsequent health food stores -- in 1917. Eventually the Eutropheon attracted and hired as employees young American men who, inspired by the Germans,  grew out their hair and beards, ate raw foods and lived in the mountains. They were called the "Nature Boys."

Kennedy and Ryan note:

This was decades before the Beats or Hippies and their influence was very substantial. In "On The Road" Kerouac noted that while passing through Los Angeles in the summer of 1947 he saw "an occasional Nature Boy saint in beard and sandals".

Where were Wasson and Bernays here? The Nature Boys gained international recognition when a song written by one of their own, eden abhez, became a hit. This was "Nature Boy" performed by Nat King Cole. Nature Boys like Gypsy Boots went on to have a huge influence on the early hippie scene, inspiring legendary bands like The Seeds and the earlier "Surf Bohemians" of the late fifties and early sixties.

The article by Kennedy and Ryan gets into all of this in far more depth than I've outlined here, but my point in including so many of its details is to show that the complex and multi-layered roots of the counterculture run deep into the past. And yet this German connection is only one of many points of origin. It certainly goes well beyond the influence of the "two men" that Atwill and Irwin isolate.

Diabolic Forces

The method of guilt-by-association that Atwill and Irvin use to peg individuals like Terence McKenna as agents of the Conspiracy can, with some irony, be used against themselves. An easy starting point is Jan Irvin's relationship with the late and very controversial researcher, Eustace Mullins.

Irvin's website proudly boasts that he gave the "last interview" to Eustace Mullins (died 2/2 2010) on September of 2009. It is obvious that Mullins, "the greatest conspiracy theorist," has been a huge influence on Irvin's subsequent ideas, including his theories on the manufacture of the counterculture. But who is Eustace Mullins?



Mullins is now perhaps best known for his book, Secrets of the Federal Reserve  (originally published under the title Mullins on the Federal Reserve in 1950). Mullins often visited the poet Ezra Pound while the latter was being held for treason at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington D.C. According to Mullins, it was Pound who inspired and encouraged Mullins to study and write about the U.S. Federal Reserve and the wider uber-conspiracy of international banking. Much of what is now written about by critics of the Fed can be traced back to Mullins' book.

Mullins, though, was not a passive researcher. He was a far right-wing activist who was openly associated with neo-fascist and white supremacist organizations. He was an avowed anti-Semite who wrote articles and books such as "Adolf Hitler: An Appreciation" and The Biological Jew, which leave little doubt about his most heartfelt beliefs. He writes about his background in "My Struggle Against The Jews:"

I became the object of the Jews hatred by events which moved in a straight line. Successively, I became the protégé of George Stimpson, the most respected journalist in Washington, who founded the National Press; and of Ezra Pound, the world-famous poet; and of H. L. Hunt, one of the world’s richest men.

Of the three, only Ezra Pound fought the Jews openly. And he suffered grievously as a consequence, spending thirteen years in a hideous, urine-soaked madhouse in Washington D.C.

Disturbingly, for a lot of conspiracy theorists today being an anti-Semite, which they prefer to spin as "anti-Zionist," is far less condemnable than having ties to the international Elite. At least one of Mullins' mentors, H.L. Hunt, did have extremely close connections to the very inner circles of the Conspiracy.



Researcher Josh Reeves, who like Jan Irvin came to discover that his own subculture -- the conspiracy/Truther movement itself -- was largely a product of conspiratorial manipulation, has much to say about Texas oil billionaire H.L. Hunt and sons in his documentary series, "The Secret Right."

Reeves explains that it was Hunt's son, Nelson Bunker Hunt, who was the primary financial backer for the foundation of the Council for National Policy in 1981. The CNP acts as a "conservative" counterpart to the "liberal" Council on Foreign Relations, although it is even more secretive and media-shy than the older CFR. In reality, however, both organizations attract highly elite and elitist individuals as members intent on furthering their own narrow class interests.

The CNP stems directly from the John Birch Society, co-founded by Robert Welch Jr. in 1958. Welch is actually a key figure in the present Spaghetti Theory of Conspiracy because it was Welch who first popularized the notion that behind even the Communists, behind all efforts to subvert and destabilize Western Civilization, lurked the sinister Illuminati:

But the Communist movement is only a tool of the total conspiracy. As secret as the Communist activities and organizations generally appear, they are part of an open book compared to the secrecy enveloping some higher degree of this diabolic force. The extrinsic evidence is strong and convincing that by the beginning of the Twentieth Century there had evolved an inner core of conspiratorial power, able to direct and control subversive activities which were worldwide in their reach, incredibly cunning and ruthless in their nature, and brilliantly farsighted and patient in their strategy. Whether or not this increasingly all-powerful hidden command was due to an unbroken continuation of Weishaupt's Illuminati, or was a distillation from the leadership of this and other groups, we do not know. Some of them may never have been Communists, while others were. To avoid as much dispute as possible, therefore, let's call this ruling clique simply the Insiders.

This is from Welch's 1966 essay "The Truth in Time," and it was largely Welch's Illuminati conspiracy theory that became the target of satire for groups and individuals like the Discordians and Robert Anton Wilson.



A surprising twist to all of this, however, is that Eustace Mullins was adamantly against the John Birch Society, which had expelled the racists and anti-Semites from its ranks in the 1960s. Mullins often claimed that the JBS was set up and funded by Nelson Rockefeller, and that Welch himself was a 32nd degree Freemason. Mullins also accused author G. Edward Griffin, a long term Bircher and a close friend of Welch, of plagiarizing his own work in Griffin's 1994 book, The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve.

It's quite obvious that Griffin's expose on the Fed was heavily influenced by Mullins' earlier work, but there are substantial differences between the two. Griffin and the Birchers advocate a full return to the gold standard as a foil against the abuse of fiat money by private bankers. Mullins, following Pound as we'll see, believed that gold was at the heart of the problem. The bankers have historically always hoarded gold. What was needed instead was a form of social credit -- money loaned by the State, not the banks, without charging interest, without usury.



And unlike the Birchers, who argued that vague and shadowy groups like the Insiders or the Illuminati or later the New World Order were behind it all, Mullins was not at all shy in pointing fingers and naming names. At the crux of the whole conspiracy were the same Jewish banking families who have been ruling the West behind the scenes for centuries. And for Mullins at least, if not for Ezra Pound, Jews in general benefited from this conspiracy, which favoured the "parasitic" nature of all Jews.

It is alarming that Mullins gets a pass on this by "Truthers" and others in the "Patriot Movement." As noted above, though, discussions of the "Jew World Order"are now par for the course among "Patriots." The research of people of Josh Reeves, however, begins to pull the rug from under this whole milieu of hate. The entire "secret right" -- the Birchers, the Council for National Policy, Christian Identity, anti-communist militia groups, Mullins' own mentor H.L. Hunt -- is just the flipside of the same conspiracy. 

In the last decade, for instance, it has come out that H.L. Hunt, through his involvement with the "Suite 8F Group," was potentially a major player behind the JFK assassination. Would this be a conspiracy that Mullins backed? Would his followers? Or was Mullins wrong about Hunt? Was Mullins inadvertently working for the same Agenda that he thought he was against? Can the same be said for Irvin and Atwill?



In any case, though, the influence of Eustace Mullins is enormous. Through Griffin, in modified form, Mullins' critique of the Fed became a banner cry for the Ron Paul movement and the Tea Party. But the origins of Mullins' ideas, by his own proud and repeated admission, was from the only of his mentors who had openly "fought the Jews," Ezra Pound. Pound, in a sense, began this entire movement. But can the great poet Ezra Pound by reduced to just this?

A Lead Role In A Cage

Pound was arrested on the May 2nd, 1945 at his house in Rapallo, Italy. By May 24th he was brought to the United States Army Disciplinary Training Center to the north of Pisa. For three weeks Pound was confined to a six by six and a half foot steel cage with a concrete floor and very open to the elements. He was denied exercise and conversation and at night his cage alone was floodlit to disturb his sleep. At the end of the three weeks Pound suffered a near complete physical and mental collapse.



He was then moved to a tent in the Medical Compound where he stayed for the next six months. It was here that Pound wrote much of his most celebrated work, The Pisan Cantos, which was controversially awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1948. In November of 1945, Pound was transferred to the U.S. to stand trial for treason, largely because of a series of radio broadcasts he made on Rome Radio for income during the war. He was deemed mentally unfit and was incarcerated at the St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in D.C. for almost 13 years. 

Pound had many guests at St. Elizabeths including some, like the young Eustace Mullins, who were attracted to Pound because of his exposure of what they thought was an immense Jewish conspiracy. Whatever Pound really thought of these cranks (and at this time Pound was almost universally reviled as a fascist crackpot himself) they did come to his aid. Mullins assisted Pound with his research and eventually wrote the poet's only authorized biography. 

Pound's own anti-Semitism cannot be easily overlooked and brushed away, although there have been many attempts to do so since the poet's death in 1972. Sympathetic critics have pointed to the fact that Pound dedicated one of his later books to his old friend the Jewish poet and communist, Louis Zukofsky. 



These critics claim that while Pound was a supporter of Mussolini and sympathetic to Hitler, that this support was almost entirely on economic grounds. Pound sincerely believed, as did many others, that these leaders were opposed to the same usurious international banking system that he wanted to abolish. This, however, was not so.

Pound, like nearly everyone in Italy and the vast majority of people in Germany, had no idea what was really going on in the German concentration camps. That horror did not become public until after the war. And Pound thought that the "small Jews" were being used as scapegoats for the crimes of the handful of "big Jews" -- the international banksters. In an article from November 1935, Pound wrote:

USURERS have no race. How long the whole Jewish people is to be the sacrificial goat for the usurer, I know not.

Towards the end of his life Pound denied to several people, including to Allen Ginsberg as I'll get to, that he was an anti-Semite. He seemed to regret the whole thing. Just a couple of weeks before his 87th birthday, Pound read some verses to friends at a cafe which appear to challenge even his conviction that usury was at the heart of the world's problems:

re USURY / I was out of focus, taking a symptom for a cause. / The cause is AVARICE. 

Nonetheless, Pound cannot be given a clean slate on the matter of anti-Semitism. Reading the transcripts of his Rome Radio broadcasts bring much of the poet's inner ugliness to light. Here he is in a 1942 broadcast to the people of Great Brittain:

You let in the Jew and the Jew rotted your empire, and you yourselves out-jewed the Jew. Your allies in your victimized holdings are the bunyah, you stand for NOTHING but usury.

And above metal usury; you have built up bank usury, 60% against 30 and 40%, and by that you WILL NOT be saved. Corrupting the whole earth, you have lost yourselves to yourselves.

And the big Jew has rotted EVERY nation he has wormed into.

This is a classic Jew-hating diatribe, euphemisms about the "big Jew" aside, and the fact that Pound's ideas are still being used to educate and inspire avowedly anti-Semitic and racist groups to this day demonstrates that these notions were not at all peripheral to the poet's philosophy. Instead, they remain a fundamental part of his understanding of economics. 

Dionysus Stalks The Suburbs

Ezra Pound was struck by two things as he advanced in his career as a writer. The first was how impoverished he and his fellow writer, artist and musician friends and acquaintances were despite of their obvious talent and occasional genius. Unlike artists during the Renaissance who, because of very generous grants provided by rich and ruling class patrons, were able to flourish creatively Pound and his friends, like almost all artists of today, were just barely scraping by. They were forced to produce art-objects to sell and/or take on secondary jobs just to feed and shelter themselves.



Creativity is obviously stifled under these conditions. Pound began to see this as being very intricately related to the other, even bigger, tragedy of his time -- the First World War. The war left his entire generation either dead, wounded, traumatized or bereaved. An analysis by Pound on what caused this senseless war, as well as the economic collapse that occurred shortly after it, led him to conclude that the main beneficiaries were the big banks. War is a racket and the money-men, through loans and debt, profit at the expense of both sides.

These two, war and the impoverishment of the arts, are related. Pound began to become attracted to the Social Credit movement of C.H. Douglas. Hugh Kenner in The Pound Era neatly summarizes Douglas' teaching which grew to have such an immense impact on Pound:

To recapitulate: the Douglas hypothesis, that the money distributed by production will not buy the product, means that there is a perpetual shortage of money. The money is created as interest-bearing debt: this, and not any quibble over interest rates, is what Pound means by usura.   

As more and more money is required to pay off existing debts, and the interest payments to these debts, investment in general becomes more conservative. Loans, issued by banks that create them out of nothing at high rates of interest, are only provided to projects and products that can be easily sold and resold. 

Products, and culture in general, become increasingly standardized. Quality takes a back seat to quantity and ease of distribution. Planned obsolescence becomes essential. Usefulness becomes equated with salability. Things are manufactured to be quickly disposed of, and individuals as "consumers" become likewise interchangeable, disposable. And when the economy becomes entirely saturated in debt, to the point where the system begins to crack, wars are also manufactured -- projects of creative destruction to sell munitions to both sides and build anew.



This is the system that Ezra Pound rightly railed against. It is a system of waste and strife that everyone should recognize still very much encages us today. 

Douglas, and later Pound, realized that Karl Marx had overlooked the crucial importance of usury. The basic contradiction in the economy is not the profit gained by production -- the so-called "surplus value." Workers generally concede that their employers should deserve a higher return for risk and initiative. What causes the real imbalance in the system, however, is the existence of finance capital that greatly profits, at higher and higher amounts, and yet produces nothing.

 

The solution to all of this, for Douglas, was obvious -- the government issue of abundant non-interest-bearing loans. Pound certainly agreed, but as his studies progressed and the international situation deteriorated he began to look beyond the ostensibly flawed system to the class of individuals who solely profited from it. Hugh Kenner explains Pound's divergence from Douglas:

And where Douglas in 1919 had argued that humanity was being impoverished by a mistaken accounting system that inflated prices by including false costs in them, Pound in 1938 was convinced that the mistaken economic system masked conscious evil, willed by elusive men who had gathered into their hands the power to issue what everyone else went into debt to borrow, and into still deeper debt to repay.  

We know from Pound's later Rome Radio broadcasts that the "conscious evil" that he had unmasked became increasingly identified by him, as by many others in his day and unfortunately far too many even now, as the Jews. The Jews, in his mind, became synonymous with usura. He began to speak of "jewsury."

If it is possible, though, to re-separate these two I think much progress can be made. And in opposition to present-day advocates of the absolutist Zionist/Illuminati conspiracy theory, the anti-Semite brain tumour should be sliced off as a gross category error in logic -- something Irvin and the Trivium junkies should be very interested in. Simply put; not all bankers are Jews and not all Jews are bankers. 

If, for historical reasons, there are proportionally more Jews involved in international finance than are other ethnic groups (most likely excluding WASPs) then this constitutes a mafia, a mob, not a group that represents all Jews. 

Exactly like all other mafia organizations -- the Italians, the Russians, the Japanese, the Chinese, the Anglo-Saxons, etc. -- members of the Jewish mafia (Pound's "big Jews" if we want to be generous to him) have absolutely no loyalty to their poorer cousins. Their narrow class interests, in contrast, ally them naturally with their elite counterparts of every other ethnic background. 

The 0.01% have no creed, colour or religion and we are divided and conquered by them when these things start to obsess us. Almost nobody is anti-Japanese because of the Yakuza or anti-Italian because of the Mafia. We would call a person a fool if they were. So should it be in every case.   



In a letter Friedrich Nietzsche, another great thinker whose words were later twisted to justify generalized hatred, wrote to a friend in 1889 he exclaimed:

I am just having all anti-Semites shot.
-- Dionysus

Pound, who in spending almost thirteen years in "a hideous, urine-soaked madhouse" arguably suffered a worse fate than being shot, appeared to experience remorse towards the end of his life. Allen Ginsberg finally met the legendary poet in Venice in 1967. Pound was having his eighty-second birthday party. Ginsberg remembered their conversation:

Ginsberg: "The more I read your poetry, the more I am convinced that it is the best of its time. And your economics are right."

Pound: "Any good that I've done has been spoiled by bad intentions -- the preoccupation with irrelevant and stupid things... The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism. All along that spoiled everything."

Ginsberg: "Ah, it's lovely to hear you say that."

Ginsberg later played the Beatles and Bob Dylan for the old poet, chanted Hare Krishna, and smoked a joint. The two poets enjoyed each other's company.

Towards Amor

This meeting is remarkable in many ways. Ginsberg, a Jew and a longtime Marxist, both forgives Pound and admits that his critique of finance capital and usury is correct. Pound, in his turn, confesses that his anti-Semitism is where he went wrong.

Beyond this, though, is the fact that for people like Mullins, and perhaps even Irvin, such a meeting should never have taken place. Here we have, according to Irvin, the arch-conspirator Ginsberg embracing and being embraced by a man who was one of the first to expose the conspiracy. What's going on?

If we look into this, though, it's really not that surprising. Ginsberg's own mentor was William Carlos Williams, an old and close friend of Pound's and a great Modernist poet in his right. The whole Modernist movement practically owes its existence to Ezra Pound.



Pound was the editor of T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway. Eliot and Hemingway were later awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature, and Ulysses is still widely acclaimed as being the best novel of its century. All three authors very openly acknowledged that their success was in large part due to Pound's excellent editing skills. Pound was also the secretary of Yeats, an editor of several literary magazines, and an invaluable aid to numerous writers and artists.

If, as the article by Kennedy and Ryan outlines, the multifaceted German "life-reform" movement of the late 19th/early 20th centuries was a source for the sixties counterculture then another, related, source was Modernism. And Ezra Pound was at the heart of it. The Modernists directly inspired the Beats and the Beats were the major inspiration for the Hippies.


   
Ezra Pound, then, really spawned two movements which revisionists like Jan Irvin would have us conclude are entirely at odds with each other. Pound, through Mullins and later monetary reformers like Griffin and Ron Paul, is the major source behind the End the Fed movement. Pound, through Williams, through the other Modernists, and through Ginsberg, is also a major source for the sixties counterculture.

When we read deeply into Pound's writings in The Cantos and in other works, ignoring, forgiving and husking away the "stupid, suburban prejudice" that occasionally bears its ugly head, we can begin to see how the psychedelic/alternative spirituality counterculture structurally and energetically syncs with the movement against debt-based finance. Pound realized long before most that cultural and economic transformation and liberation must occur together. The two movements should exist as one.

The Ship of the Sun is Drawn 1

I got the revolution blues, I see bloody fountains,
And ten million dune buggies comin' down the mountains.
Well, I hear that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars,
But I hate them worse than lepers and I'll kill them in their cars.

The spaghetti theory of conspiracy is nothing if not psychedelic. In a psychedelic fashion, though, conspiracy theory loops back upon itself, paranoid and snarling. As I've tried to show with these posts just as conspiracies extend and branch out from the tiniest biological organisms to the realm of the gods themselves, conspiracy theorizing is likewise diverse, contradictory and in a marginal existence of ceaseless vicissitude. 

For this reason conspiracy theories about the psychedelic movement especially, one would think, should mirror the groundless, fluctuating nature of their subject. Not necessarily so. In very recent years, in contrast, there is a fast-growing tendency to conclude that the psychedelic movement emerging out of the sixties and continuing in fractured pieces even today can be explained very simply: the whole tie-dyed cloth was designed and manufactured by the malefic Powers That Be.

A Deliberate Creation

This is exactly the thesis of a May, 2013 article by Joe Atwill and Jan Irvin entitled, "Manufacturing the Deadhead: A product of social engineering." Beyond the title itself, the authors explicitly state their full thesis early on in the long essay.

Most today assume that the CIA and the other intelligence-gathering organizations of the U.S. government are controlled by the democratic process. They therefore believe that MK-ULTRA’s role in creating the psychedelic movement was accidental “blowback.” Very few have even considered the possibility that the entire “counterculture” was social engineering planned to debase America’s culture – as the name implies. The authors believe, however, that there is compelling evidence that indicates that the psychedelic movement was deliberately created. The purpose of this plan was to establish a neo-feudalism by the debasing of the intellectual abilities of young people to make them as easy to control as the serfs of the Dark Ages.

Such a thesis, denying "blowback," accidents, spontaneity, unforeseen consequences, unpredictability, limited autonomy, etc. is thoroughly absolutist in nature. Absolutist conspiracy theories, as explored in previous posts, however satisfactory they are in creating a comprehensive narrative to ostensibly explain the current sociopolitical reality, do not accurately reflect the complexity and nuances that make up that reality.

There is really no doubt that government and far more nefarious agencies were and are involved in promoting and "manufacturing" various aspects of the psychedelic counterculture. The name of their game, after all, is control. However, we go far astray in our analysis, I believe, when we conclude that every facet of this movement was contrived and engineered from the get go. Such a conclusion is not only inaccurate, failing to account for obvious complexity, but it also robs us of taking inspiration in and gaining knowledge from genuinely liberatory elements of the sixties counterculture.

It is crucial that we attempt to know precisely how we are being manipulated and hoodwinked, and in this the research of Atwill and Irvin, as well as others like Dave McGown, is indispensable. We must not cling to illusions. But we must also not make the opposite mistake. The same dominant faction that gains from tweaking and prodding the counterculture in desired directions also gains in the widespread acceptance of conspiracy and revisionist theories that reject the counterculture in total. Such theories promote paralysis in the face of a seemingly omnipotent elite and they also severely limit our own options of resistance.

The present post, then, will not try to demonstrate that the counterculture which captured the attention of the world in the sixties and onward is wholly good. Neither, though, will it conclude, along with Atwill and Irvin that it was and is just a product of social engineering, just a colossal hoodwink. Instead I hope to show that any comprehensive theory of the psychedelic movement, and similar movements, must be psychedelic in itself -- spaghetti-like. This doesn't make for an easy-to-grasp, black-and-white, Hollywood storyline, but is reality ever really like this?

Mud humping

There is no need for a point-by-point refutation of Atwill and Irvin's article. Much of their research appears pretty sound. Jan Irvin's research on R. Gordon Wasson is especially revealing and alarming if accurate. The authors present a somewhat garbled grab-bag of every available anti-counterculture conspiracy theory and criticism, from Timothy Leary being a CIA spy to Woodstock being a designed spectacle to debase US culture through its images of stoned hippies humping in the mud. The John Birch Society in its heyday likely could not have produced a more damning indictment.

Unlike the more conventional right-wing based attacks on the counterculture, however, which made the case that the hippies were a sort of Trojan Horse for world communism, Atwill and Irvin go much further in their conclusions. The goal of the Agenda, as we've seen, is not communism but a neo-feudal Dark Age featuring eugenics, depopulation and near universal, back-breaking servitude for the masses.



Where did Irvin and Atwill come up with this horrific vision of the near future? In fact, their view is not so different from other absolutist conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones and especially the very articulate Alan Watt. If there is a "mainstream" of absolutist conspiracy theorizing Irvin and Atwill fall firmly within it. If anything, though, it is their emphasis that makes them unique. To bring about this New Word Order of shit-kicking peasant stinkards and their transhuman lords and masters, they conclude, the psychedelic movement was absolutely essential.

As evidence for this Agenda the authors cite the work of Terence McKenna. Didn't McKenna, the indefatigable psychedelic evangelist, constantly promote the idea of an Archaic Revival? Isn't the Archaic Revival entirely synonymous with the Dark Age? Didn't McKenna admit in an interview, published in The Archaic Revival and quoted by Atwill and Irvin, that he was a "soft Dark Ager"?

I guess I'm a soft Dark Ager. I think there will be a mild dark age. I don’t think it will be anything like the dark ages that lasted a thousand years...  

This certainly appears to condemn McKenna. He is clearly advocating neo-feudalism! He must be an agent of the Agenda! It is worthwhile, though, to look up McKenna's entire quote. Jan Irvin, to his credit, constantly exhorts his readers to check his facts. I'll take his advice. McKenna is asked if he thought, in agreement with certain futurists, that humanity would have to pass through a new dark age in order to attain a higher state of collective consciousness. Here's his full response:

I guess I'm a soft Dark Ager. I think there will be a mild Dark Age. I don't think it will be anything like the Dark Ages which lasted a thousand years -- I think it will last more like five years -- and will be a time of economic retraction, religious fundamentalism, retreat into closed communities by certain segments of the society, feudal warfare among minor states, and this sort of thing. I think it will give way in the late '90s to the actual global future that we're all yearning for. Then there will be basically a 15-year period where all these things are drawn together with progressively greater and greater sophistication, much in the way that modern science, and philosophy has grown with greater and greater sophistication in a single direction since the Renaissance. Sometime around the end of 2012, all of this will be boiled down into a kind of alchemical distillation of the historical experience that will be a doorway into the life of the imagination.    

Terence is obviously quite off in his timing but there is no indication that he is in any way advocating a new Dark Age as a positive end for social control -- quite the contrary. He is saying that there may unfortunately be a wholly undesirable and unnecessary, yet extremely brief, period of reaction before the real goal emerges: the "doorway into the life of the imagination."

It is readily apparent to anyone spends any amount of time listening to or reading Terence McKenna that he is in no way an advocate for a Dark Age as he defines it -- economic retraction, fundamentalism, closed communities, feudal warfare, etc. His advocacy of the Archaic Revival, on the other hand, is completely antithetical to this. And, once again, McKenna is very lucid in what he means by this term.
 

Terence argues that in a time of general crisis a society will naturally look back to a time in its history when possible solutions or the means of resolving the current crisis might be found. Thus, during the dissolution of the medieval worldview individual Europeans turned to the classical age of Rome and Greece to find new inspiration, resulting in the Renaissance.

McKenna, an admirer of both the Renaissance and classical Greece, concludes that the combined crises of modernity are so dire that we must look back even further to a time before the State, before organized religion, before the hierarchical stratification of society, before the severing of humanity's link with the rest of nature -- all key features of both the Dark Age and today.

This time is found in the long archaic (not ancient and definitely not medieval or feudal) age of the paleolithic. And, to anticipate a stupid objection, McKenna is not advocating a return to the Old Stone Age. He is saying that there are many things that we urgently need to learn from our "primitive" ancestors and still existing hunter-gatherer tribes. 

Fortunately, movements in art and in the wider culture and counterculture have from the late-19th century onward attempted to learn these lessons. Anyone who would equate the terms "Archaic Revival" with "Dark Age" in McKenna is either completely missing the point or is consciously misrepresenting his message.

The Fungal Bureau of Intoxication

Could it be, though, that McKenna is being devious in his presentation? If, as Irvin and Atwill assert, McKenna is an agent of the nefarious Agenda then isn't it very possible that he is seducing people with his highly-cultivated charm and elocution to accept a vision of the Archaic Revival which is actually something completely opposite to what he says it is, namely a new Dark Age? If this is the case, Irvin and Atwill present no evidence of it. Irvin does claim, however, to have caught McKenna admitting that he is just this sort of agent.



Irvin presents this evidence, "an explosive audio clip," in an article from August of last year explosively entitled, "NEW MKULTRA DISCOVERY: Terence McKenna admited that he was a “deep background” and “PR” agent (CIA or FBI)." The clip can be listened to here, but this is the damning quotation:

And certainly when I reached La Chorerra in 1971 I had a price on my head by the FBI, I was running out of money, I was at the end of my rope. And then THEY recruited me [laughter from his audience] and said, “you know, with a mouth like yours there’s a place for you in our organization." And I’ve worked in deep background positions about which the less said the better. And then about 15 years ago THEY shifted me into public relations and I’ve been there to the present.

What is conspicuously absent from Jan Irvin's account of this is the laughter. McKenna's audience during the talk and nearly all of his subsequent listeners have realized that Terence is making a joke about being recruited by the Mushroom. Absolutist conspiracy theorists, in contrast, are notorious for not having a sense of humour. In objection to this fairly basic interpretation of McKenna's words Jan Irvin reveals that he is definitely well within the absolutist camp:

1) Do mushrooms have organizations, deep background and public relations (propaganda)? Or does a spy agency?
2) What would mushrooms need with a public relations or propaganda department? Or is that something a spy agency would have?
3) Would mushrooms tell him the less said the better: “deep background positions about which the less said the better”, or is that something an agency would do?
4) Do mushrooms have “positions”? Or does an agency?
5) Are the mushrooms able to pay him because he’s out of money? Or is that something an agency could do? (remember he’s in trouble for smuggling)
6) Are mushrooms able to get him out of trouble with Interpol and the FBI for DRUG SMUGGLING? Or is that something an agency like the CIA or FBI could do?
7) Do mushrooms answer the story of what happened to him after his arrest? Or is that something that his employment as an agent would do?

Wow. Irvin does seem to have a point (or seven!) here. All those who laughed will surely not laugh last. The evidence is in! If there is anything, though, to take seriously I think it is McKenna's confession that he was recruited by the Mushroom. He is admitting to a conspiracy here, and it is one that is far vaster in scope than anything the CIA and the FBI combined could think up. Irvin, unfortunately, does not appear to take this sort of conspiracy seriously.

The less interesting, more banal story of McKenna as FBI/CIA agent has been thoroughly "debunked" elsewhere on the web so there is no reason to go over the boring business again here. It is interesting (and funny) to hear Terence's brother Dennis' take on the whole thing. Here is Dennis in an interview from May, 2013 (at 35 minutes in):

I just feel kind of sorry for Jan, actually. He seems to have this need to see conspiracies where none exist.... This is the web of delusion that you can fall into if you're not careful and I think he has. ... It looks like pathology to me, and a lot of people see that. But then Jan will say, well, you won't go through these 20 databases that I've sent you and these 200 links. And you've got to understand, no Jan I won't, because for one thing I don't have time and the fact there are connections does not necessarily a conspiracy make. I mean, yeah, Terence talked at Esalen and Aldous Huxley talked at Esalen that doesn't mean that Esalen is involved in some plot for world domination. ... I just don't buy it.  It just seems like a waste of time. ... I would think I would know that [Terence was an agent]. I would think he would have said something. You know, we were close. But then maybe he was but he didn't even know he was. I don't think so. I don't know if you've seen Jan's website? What is that? This is... like the [Terence's] Timewave in a way -- this elaborate model that you come up with that explains all and everything if you could just see it. I'm not seeing it, Jan, sorry.

Pathology or not (and, to be fair, Dennis is calling his brother similarly nuts), the obvious response for an absolutist conspiracy theorist would be to claim that Dennis is also a part of the conspiracy. This is essentially Jan's response. A big deal will be made out the fact that Dennis didn't directly deny that his brother was an agent. This, according to absolutist logic, is tantamount to admitting that he was an agent.

If this was all Irvin and Atwill had on Terence McKenna it would seem like pretty flimsy stuff. Yet of course this is not their full argument. As Dennis explains, Terence is condemned for connections, real or illusory, that he had with institutions and people like Esalen, Huxley, Teilhard de Chardin, Marshall McLuhan, etc. As a lover of synchronicity I will accept all of these connections and more. I just doubt that any of these prove that McKenna was, consciously or not, working for an Agenda to enslave humanity.

For me to try to refute these assertions would involve plunging into the "20 databases" and "200 links" and that is not really my purpose here. McKenna himself is only one small facet of Atwill and Irvin's mega-thesis and even to definitively prove that McKenna was a saint, which he by no means was, would not really shake the core of their claim. It is a good idea to look into some of this research, though, just to see if it stands up to scrutiny.

A Dose Of Disinfo

Another key player in the conspiracy, according to Atwill and Irvin, is Albert Hofmann, the inventor of LSD. If a psychedelic conspiracy really exists then Hofmann has got to be in the thick of it, right? Atwill and Irvin present their most damning evidence against Hofmann:

Though like many of those associated with the origins of the psychedelic movement, Albert Hofmann is called “divine,” evidence has come to light which exposes him as both a CIA and French Intelligence operative. Hoffman helped the agency dose the French village Pont Saint Esprit with LSD. As a result five people died and Hofmann helped to cover up the crime. The LSD event at Pont Saint Esprit led to the famous murder of Frank Olson by the CIA because he had threatened to go public.

A footnote informs us that this "evidence" is taken from journalist Hank Albarelli's 2009 book, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments. If we look into the mass poisoning event in Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951, we quickly find that Albarelli is about the only person claiming that the CIA dosed the village with LSD. Steven Kaplan, a professor of history at Cornell University who also wrote a book about the events of the French village, has described Albarelli's theory as "absurd."

I have numerous objections to this paltry evidence against the CIA. First of all, it’s clinically incoherent: LSD takes effects in just a few hours, whereas the inhabitants showed symptoms only after 36 hours or more. Furthermore, LSD does not cause the digestive ailments or the vegetative effects described by the townspeople...

Now it could be that Kaplan is himself a conspirator assigned the task to whitewash the odious deeds of the CIA, but oddly it is not Kaplan that Irvin and Atwill place under suspicion. It is Albarelli. Apparently it was Albarelli who attempted to thwart Irvin's research into Gordon Wasson's ties to the CIA:

An example of how Wasson’s activities for the CIA have been kept hidden is the work of MK-ULTRA “expert” and author Hank Albarelli, a former lawyer for the Carter administration and Whitehouse who also worked for the Treasury Department. Though Albarelli presents himself to the public as a MK-ULTRA ‘whistleblower’, he apparently attempted to derail Irvin’s investigation into Gordon Wasson.

But wait a minute. If Albarelli has been outed by Irvin and Atwill as a disinfo agent then why is he cited as the sole source of "evidence" that Albert Hofmann assisted the CIA in dosing a French village with LSD? Might not this also be disinformation? At the very least this is an example of extremely sloppy research by Irvin and Atwill. To use a source which these authors themselves go on to discredit in order to attempt to slag Hofmann is really scraping the bottom of the barrel. One wonders how much more of Irvin and Atwill's research, if one was feeling particularly masochistic and had a ton of time to sift through it, would similarly transmute into shit.  

Leveling The Playing Field For Everyone

Fortunately, though, Jan Irvin has education on his side. Real education -- not the kind we plebs get from ordinary public schools and universities. Jan has rediscovered the Trivium -- the ancient arts of Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric, which along with the Quadrivium make up the Seven Liberal Arts. On his website we can listen to a genuinely fascinating series of podcasts on the Trivium, largely presented by Gene Odening.

In the first interview with Odening we are told that the Trivium is the educational method, ancient in origin, which is even now taught at the boarding schools of the elite. The purpose of the Trivium is to develop critical thinking. It essentially is a tool to see through the bullshit, to expose the conditioning, propaganda and manipulation that we all face. So far so good. A foolproof methodology of critical thinking is definitely desired. The three arts are conveniently broken down as follows:

[1] General Grammar
(Answers the question of the Who, What, Where, and the When of a subject.) Discovering and ordering facts of reality comprises basic, systematic Knowledge

[2] Formal Logic
(Answers the Why of a subject.) Developing the faculty of reason in establishing valid [i.e., non-contradictory] relationships among facts, systematic Understanding

[3] Classical Rhetoric
(Provides the How of a subject.) Applying knowledge and understanding expressively comprises Wisdom or, in other words, it is systematically useable knowledge and understanding

Sounds great. Comprehensive and handily applicable. It actually sounds strangely familiar. Oh, I remember where I heard something like this -- in a talk by Terence McKenna:

The world is so tricky that without rules and razors you are as lambs led to the slaughter. And I'm speaking of the world as we have always found it. Add onto that the world based on techniques of mass psychology, advertising, political propaganda, image manipulation...There are many forces that seek to victimize us. And the only way through this is rational analysis of what is being presented. It amazes me that this is considered a radical position. I mean, this is what used to be called a good liberal education. And then somewhere after the sixties when the government decided that universal public education only created mobs milling in the streets calling for human rights, education ceased to serve the goal of producing an informed citizenry. And instead we took an authoritarian model: the purpose of education is to produce unquestioning consumers with an alcoholic obsession for work. And so it is. [at 12:55 minutes]

Here McKenna almost sounds as if he listened to Jan Irvin's podcast -- except that this was recorded way back in 1994. The similarities between the two, though, are striking. By "a good liberal education" Terence is undoubtedly referring to the Seven Liberal Arts which includes the Trivium. His concerns are also identical to Irvin and Odening. He is advocating a "rational analysis of what is being presented," a system of  "rules and razors," in order to deflect the "many forces that seek to victimize us."



The one glaring difference between Irvin and McKenna on this point is their view of the sixties. According to McKenna students and other protesters gained their critical view of the establishment through a public liberal education and the use of psychedelics. According to Irvin and Atwill it was the use of psychedelics and the lack of a proper liberal education that so definitely duped the sixties generation. How could such divergent opinions be both generated by two seemingly sincere advocates of critical thinking and the Trivium?

But beyond this how could McKenna, that outed agent and psychedelic snake-oil salesman, be an advocate for the Trivium at all? Is he just lying? Are we to assume that every time he tells his audience to "question authority -- even my own" and "try it for yourself" that he actually means "do exactly what I say"?



There may be a solution to this puzzle. As we progress through Irvin's "Trivium Education" podcasts we come to a very fascinating interview with Kevin Cole, a Trivium Method student of Odening and Irvin. Cole relates how in his own research he discovered that the Classical Trivium and the Seven Liberal Arts were actually used as a complete system of control by the elite for centuries.

The Classical Trivium, we finally learn, is entirely different from the Trivium Method (perhaps we should start to call it the Trivium Method™?) which was developed by Odening and interpreted by Irvin in order to free minds rather than to enslave them.



It's obvious, therefore, that McKenna is only an advocate of the Classical Trivium and not the liberating Trivium Method™. The similarity of language and purported methodology is only there to deceive. That clears up that. But hold on a sec -- weren't we told on the first of these podcasts that the Trivium Method™ was ancient and that it is still taught to the children of the elite? A confused commenter to the Cole episode, and a now distraught former acolyte, expresses similar concerns:

To be honest, this upset me quite a bit. This shed light on the enormous amount of bullshit about the classical trivium that was spewed for a few years by Gnostic Media and Tragedy And Hope.
Here are some questions I have for you:
What form of education, if not the classical trivium, is taught to the “elite?” It seems that all of your previous claims about the trivium being taught to the “elite” was pure conjecture.
If we are inherently free, why do we need a “liberating” education?
Why was Gene Odening so misinformed about this? Why should I, after watching this video, continue to use the “trivium method” which is now so clearly a misunderstanding of the true classical trivium on the part of a “self-taught scholar?”
These are only some of MANY questions that need to be answered. I’m sure I’m speaking on the behalf of many others who feel the same about this issue. There’s been a lot of conjecture and bullshit, and we demand answers.

Jan Irvin, master of Rhetoric, responds with his usual balance of wisdom, subtlety and eloquence:

We have ALWAYS explained that the trivium was used for mind control. If you haven’t caught on to that, you weren’t paying attention. There was 3 years of grammar alone that had to be done to flush all of the misapplication of the trivium out. Gene has always explained from day one that it was used for control. He never said it wasn’t. That was the ENTIRE PURPOSE of releasing it! To level the playing field for EVERYONE! If you want to be controlled by those who misuse it, then don’t study it and live in ignorance. It seems you weren’t even paying attention to what this video had to say, as the video explained that what Gene has put forth is the first time it’s been used for FREEDOM. Can you show us were we haven’t said it was used for control by the elites?

Ah... so the trivium is not the trivium. There is no contradiction here. The trivium can be used to both liberate and ensnare. Kind of like a good trip and a bad trip? If we accept, though, that Odening's new Trivium Method™ is a way to liberate the masses while the old Classical Trivium is used for mind control there is no need to additionally accept that the TM™ is ancient and therefore well-tested. Like any new system of thought, or any ancient system, every aspect of it must be held up to full scrutiny.

Quisquidquandoubicur 

Irvin is fond of saying, for example, "do not put your Logic before your Grammar." By this he means to not approach a situation with a ready-made theory of why it is like it is. Instead we must first compile and examine all of the available facts of who, what, where, and when (the Grammar) and only then can we attempt an explanation (the Logic). A valid explanation can only arise if the basic facts do not contradict one another.

A problem emerges, however, with determining these "facts." If we say, for example, that who Aldous Huxley is, is an evil promoter of eugenics and world government then we already have reasons why we have concluded this. We have already put our Logic before our Grammar. Each fact is at first a theory. But a supporter of the TM™ might say that this is acceptable because our reasons for concluding that Huxley is a supporter of eugenics and world government are also based on facts -- Huxley's family ties to the Eugenics movement etc.



This might all be valid. These facts might in turn be very sound, but we still would have reasons for accepting them as facts. A pure fact though, pure Grammar, the whats and whos and wheres, may be impossible to separate from why. This may seem like nitpicking, but over and over I've seen the no-logic-before-grammar clause being used by Irvin in an attempt to out argue his opponents. It doesn't hold water.

As an example, if we accept as fact, as Grammar, that Aldous Huxley is a tireless advocate for totalitarian rule then the letter he wrote to George Orwell, cited by Irvin and Atwill, discussing which of their dystopic visions is more accurate, will strike us as being very sinister. If in contrast we view both Brave New World and 1984  as novels intending to warn people against creeping totalitarianism then our reading of this letter will be very different.

Within the next generation I believe that the world's rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World. The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency. Meanwhile, of course, there may be a large scale biological and atomic war — in which case we shall have nightmares of other and scarcely imaginable kinds. 

If we have already concluded as fact, as Grammar, that Albert Hofmann is a CIA agent then it is easy to believe that he helped poison a French village with LSD, even though our only source for this "fact" is from a writer that we have already discredited.

Like every other human theory, Irvin and Atwill's theory on the manufacture of the counterculture is supported with cherry-picked "facts." This is not so much a condemnation of their theory as it is to state that they are, like anyone else, all too human. The application of the Trivium Method™ no more guarantees the truth of their theory than does the application of the apologetics of Thomas Aquinas.

What happens when "facts" are encountered that don't appear to fit this theory? What do we do, for instance, with Mae Brussell's well-reasoned theory that the Manson murders were an Establishment psyop designed to disorientate and discredit the growing counterculture which directly threatened elite control?



If, as according to Irvin and Atwill, the hippies were "manufactured" in order to transform culture then why would TPTB try to bring down their own creation just a couple of years after it gained mainstream attention? Was Mae simply wrong? Was she also an agent?

And what about the conservative reaction in the Reagan eighties against all vestiges of the former counterculture? What about the "Moral Majority"? What about the promotion of "family values"? What about the "culture wars"?



Are Reagan and Pat Robertson the good guys here? Did the CIA's program fail or did another phase of their manipulation kick in -- the clichéd and misunderstood Hegelian dialectic, perhaps? And then there were the nineties when the psychedelic pied pipers like McKenna and others were once again set loose to dose the imaginations of a whole new generation. Did the Agenda move back on track or did it even more come off the rails?

I'm not saying that these facts cannot be worked into the theory of Irvin and Atwill. Absolutist conspiracy theories can usually absorb any fact that is thrown at them. As far as I know, however, they have not yet been shoehorned into the mix, and when they are the resulting mess is not necessarily going to be logical.

Uncertain and Incomplete

And yet increasingly in recent years logic is equated with certainty. Debunkers and "skeptics" of every stripe are on the march. "Pseudoscience," claims of the paranormal, conspiracy theories, spirituality, alternative medicine -- the whole ball of "woo" is in the crosshairs. In the face of this, into the viper's den of pop-up fallacies and rational wikis, steps fearless researcher and podcaster extraordinaire, James Corbett.

In a largely overlooked Aug. 2012 podcast entitled "Logic Is Not Enough," Corbett dares to present a bit of heresy -- humans are really not all that logical and logic itself can only take you so far. He illustrates this by simply showing how even the most logically sound argument can reach a false conclusion if its premises are wrong.

Beyond the scope of formal logic, Corbett explains that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in physics and Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems in mathematics both demonstrate that even within these hardboiled fields of study unpredictability and indeterminacy rear their ugly heads. With or without logic, certainty is elusive.

Buckminster Fuller, in a conversation from 1967, takes this all much further than Heisenberg (or Corbett!):

Heisenberg said that observation alters the phenomenon observed. T.S. Eliot said that studying history alters history. Ezra Pound said that thinking in general alters what is thought about. Pound's formulation is the most general, and I think it's the earliest. [quoted in Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era]

By studying the history of the sixties counterculture, Atwill and Irvin are altering history. By thinking and writing about their theory, I am altering it. Both alterations are fine and should be expected. The problem arises when we think that we have captured the history or the idea.

To tie a living thing down, to analyse it and to categorize it, is to change it. And by attempting to do so it changes us. It should not take a physicist or a mathematician to "prove" this. And it is, of course, the poets who would realize this first. (I'll discuss in depth the wisdom and folly of Ezra Pound in the second part of this essay.)

In his podcast, Corbett reminds us that much of the "Agenda" aims to refashion irrational individuals into logical machines. Elite control freaks like George Bush Sr. avow that ''The enemy is unpredictability. The enemy is instability.'' To be truly logical is to be entirely predictable, entirely stable. A logical person, a person well-trained in the Trivium Method let's say, can be counted on to say and do the logical thing at every step. He or she is not overly emotional, not contradictory in his or her actions and thoughts, and is entirely stable. A clockwork orange.

The usual argument on why the CIA gave up its research on LSD and other psychedelics is precisely because they have unpredictable effects. They can be used to decondition people but they are very poor at reliably reconditioning people. Who in the world has ever had a predictable psychedelic trip?

Irvin and Atwill are correct to warn us about how post-Freudian sorcerers of schlock like Edward Bernays use advertising and propaganda to target us emotionally, scramble our logic, and to direct the course of culture. Irvin and Atwill's attack on the state education system and the entertainment industry as instruments to "dumb down" is indispensable. Critical thinking and reason, more than ever, are required.

There is a broader way to look at all of this, however. In Corbett's podcast episode we briefly hear a clip from an interview with cognitive scientist, George Lackoff. Lackoff explains that reason, contrary to what was thought in the 18th century and what is still accepted by political and social institutions even now, is not fully conscious, unemotional or subject to formal logic. Instead it is embodied, it is driven by empathy for others over "enlightened self-interest", and it frequently perceives metaphorically not logically.

An individual human is by no means a logical machine, nor is he or she entirely driven by irrational emotions. We are complex even contradictory creatures. It may be that there is no possible way, in disagreement with Huxley and Orwell, for our psyches to be fully bridled. On the other hand, it may be equally impossible to develop a foolproof method for preventing attempts to bridle them.

All methods fail for some and succeed for others. Psychedelics aren't the whole answer, neither is the Trivium Method™. Contradictions are out there and in here always. As Walt Whitman wrote:

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

The conspiracy, the conspiracies, are also contradictory. They are also embodied, emotional, metaphoric, fluid, unpredictable, multitudinous. So is the counterculture. So is a psychedelic trip. So is Jan Irvin. So is this post. The pop-up fallacy machine would likely blow a gasket processing what I've written here. I really don't care.

Corbett mentions one last fallacy that might help me out: the fallacy fallacy. This is the false presumption that just because a claim is poorly argued, and/or it contains many fallacies, that the claim itself is wrong. It may just be, though, that I'm making a fallacy fallacy fallacy: the equally false presumption that the fallacy fallacy somehow excuses poor argumentation and/or the use of fallacies. There's a conspiracy theory for you. Here's another:

Conspiracy theory, in my humble opinion, is a kind of epistemological cartoon about reality. Isn't it so simple to believe that things are run by the greys, and that all we have to do is trade sufficient fetal tissue to them and then we can solve our technological problems, or isn't it comforting to believe that the Jews are behind everything, or the Communist Party, or the Catholic Church, or the Masons. Well, these are epistemological cartoons, it is kindergarten in the art of amateur historiography.

I believe that the truth of the matter is far more terrifying, that the real truth that dare not speak itself is that no one is in control, absolutely no one. This stuff is ruled by the equations of dynamics and chaos. There may be entities seeking control, but to seek control is to take enormous aggravation upon yourself. It's like trying to control a dream.

The dream or nightmare may not be controllable, but it does have a certain structure, a patterned energy, a flux of phosphenal filaments. And it is both bound and sent spinning by spaghetti.