Quacks, Conspiracy Theories, And Wacko DIY Cures - Why Is America So Full Of Them?

Blanton Phelps knew exactly where COVID came from, and it certainly was not from the Wuhan lab.  Phelps had been a longtime believer in strange and unusual phenomenon - 'Alternate Explanatory Theory' (AET) it was called in the psychiatric community, described in a recent special edition of the Journal of Advanced Psychiatry devoted entirely to cockamamie beliefs, why they occurred and why they persisted so long.

 

Another in the same journal focused on immunizations  There are immunizations against all childhood illnesses and yet parents are refusing them on the grounds that they cause all kinds of worse problems like autism, brain cancer, and worse.  The author wrote:

The government places minuscule tracking devices in these vaccinations. These tracking devices act as beacons for various satellites. In this way, similar to the technology found in controlling airplane traffic, the government knows where we are at all times. Indeed, it is unclear how much information is provided in these beacon devices. These beacons may, for example, provide rudimentary data, such as age, heart rate, blood pressure, or speed. They may also provide more detailed information, such as what we are saying at any given time.

All of which leads to the flimflammery of anti-vaxxers.  With no proof whatsoever, and basing their conclusions on hearsay, discredited research, and a wild, collective fear of government perversity and secretive manipulation, these 'alternate realists' refuse to get vaccinated thus slowing herd immunity, putting their families and neighbors at risk, and adding to their subscription to conspiracy theories.

This is not surprising because an online journalist writing on the alternative website Scam! recently wrote a series of articles on fluoridation and said that he wanted to warn people because more and more jurisdictions were adding the chemical to drinking water.  However he was not so much worried about the usual issues – cancer, mental retardation, early Alzheimer’s autism, and monkey tics – but about an even more pernicious effect. 

The Soviets had learned from captured Nazi scientists that fluoridation had unique properties of mind control – it made people more compliant and particularly responsive to political persuasion.  The Nazis had successfully fluoridated German water and that was why so many millions of otherwise normal people had become such rabid Nazis.  The Soviets wanted to accomplish the same thing, except this time to promote Communism; and had surreptitiously fluoridated water systems in the United States.



At the same time spies and Soviet propagandists spread information about Communism.  The result was a whole decade of pro-Soviet American Communism. 

‘Tracking’, therefore, is not that weird.

The number and type of conspiracy theories increases geometrically.  We have always been a loony, unhinged, and crazy society, but now all bets are off and absolutely anything goes. All this academic airing about conspiracy theorists is all well and good, but the question still remains – who are they? What world do they inhabit?   Have they abandoned logic altogether and their theories based simply on a disassociation from traditional rationality? Or have is their world a complex one of sylphs, druids, and spirits on the one hand, and unimaginable Tantric powers on the other?

Socio-political theorists have suggested that everything in American culture has been tending towards this disassembly of reason and rationality for decades.  There is no longer any received wisdom but collective wisdom.  The judgment of tens of millions of ‘bettors’ always produces more relevant conclusions than any one or group of intellectuals.   Both considered and frivolous bets are all placed in the pot, mixed and turned, sorted and analyzed. 

It isn't so much about unhinged conspiracy theories per se, but about the nature of conspiratorial belief itself.  Is there some of the unhinged in all of us? Why is America particularly infected with the conspiracy virus? Why are we not content with rationality?  Why do we turn so quickly to the paranormal, supernatural, and implausible?

Now Blanton Phelps would never have considered himself a conspiracy theorist or even a believer - a true believer in impossibilities. He admitted that there might be some truth to US government complicity in the attacks of 9/11 - why was it so far-fetched when Roosevelt had let the Jap bomb Pearl Harbor so that he finally had a compelling argument to enter the War against the Nazis, when Lyndon Johnson concocted a story about American warships being fired on in the Gulf of Tonkin so that he could finally go to the American people with his Southeast Asia domino theory? -  but he never deep down actually believed it.  He considered himself a logical person but one openminded enough to consider all possibilities. 

So COVID might well have been part of the International Jewish conspiracy to weaken the United States to the point of lockdown so that they could buy cheap, keep their properties in escrow until the epidemic passed, and then sell them at fabulous prices. Once a Jew, always a Jew, Blanton considered, so when you got all of them together to plan such an ingenious idea, why not?  HIV/AIDS could very well have been a conservative plot to decimate black and gay populations,

Of course, he didn't really believe the Jew COVID theory entirely, but he didn't believe either that someone coughed somewhere in the world and lit it up with hacking and coughing.  The Wuhan lab story was a good cover for something far more insidious.  There was a very good chance that the US military, after failed attempts to isolate and weaponize bird flus, SARS, Ebola, and other viruses, finally succeeded in capturing some errant COVID genes, got them to multiply like molecular rabbits in a lab far beneath the Utah desert, and then someone dropped a beaker and even from 1000 feet below the little buggers were able to find their way up and out.  

To be fair Blanton Phelps was as consistent as could be.  He trusted modern medicine as far as that goes, but doctors as a whole couldn't be trusted.  There wasn't much difference between wars fought on principle (democracy, sovereignty, the rule of law) but really to line the pockets of the poohbahs in the military-industrial complex and the medical establishment in cahoots with the pharmaceutical industry to rob Americans blind. 

So when he had some ailment, rather than go to a board-certified physician, he turned to alternative medicine.  When homeopathy, a crackpot theory described in the Hindi version of the Indian Homeopathic Journal of Medicine as  'Likes producing likes reduces likes' - or give a patient something to give him a fever and the disease-caused fever will disappear - had no effect, he tried ayurveda another wacko theory where roots and berries are thought to cure cancer, and women's psychopathological hysteria among other lesser disease.  And after that, hot yoga, water cures, nature therapy, and sleep deprivation. 

Sleep deprivation was an interesting possibility, derived from homeopathy.  Rather than considering sleep as a restorative agent, it was thought in the alternative medical community to be just the opposite - i.e. the more the patient was kept awake, the more his bodily functions kept attacking disease and truly restorative bodily fluids increased. 

Finally Blanton tried DIY home remedies, and these of course were in the thousands for every ailment.  The former Indian Prime Minister Morarji Desai was convinced that drinking his own urine was essential for cleansing his bodily system and lived to a ripe old age.  Idi Amin was reported to have used a ‘witches’ brew’, a concoction like that of Macbeth’s weird sisters to cure his persistent venereal diseases which of course never worked, and he became more and more demented from syphilis as he days wore on.

Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

 

A Harvard academic writing in Conspiracy Today noted this: 

A more persuasive argument is that “conspiracy theories afford adherents a means of maintaining self-esteem, coping with persecution, reasserting individualism, or expressing negative feelings”; and an even more persuasive one suggests that “conspiracy theories emerged because of ‘an irrational need to explain big and important events with proportionately big and important causes'. 

Academia aside, Blanton Phelps with his crypto-conspiracy theories, wacko medicine, and cockamamie home remedies was just plain nuts; and he wasn't alone. America is loaded with these wingnuts, ready to believe anything that sounds reasonable.