> “Can I see it for what it portends?”

Yeah, but … I have to preface with a few examples. If you look at how the hard sciences were born, in the 17th century, you can see a SOCI coming into form. Assorted individuals, temporarily freed of the constraint of hand-to-mouth survival, came together to explore, elaborate and uncover the true structure of nature (which also had some shallowly-hidden secrets, easily uncovered, and some deeper, darker ones, hidden even today.). OK, so modern academia has mutated into some malignant form: Sociologists and humanities departments get more credit for publishing in obscure journals, than they do from participating in the great public debate. Its a tragedy.

We can find great SOCI’s earlier: 12th century medieval universities were SOCI’s discovering, uncovering, parsing, analyzing, picking apart lost and forgotten and hidden Greek and Roman texts, and being utterly, totally shocked and bowled over by what they found, very nearly tearing apart the very fabric of being. It was heady times, when the breeze blowing through your brain was more of a hurricane. Today’s legal system, the rule of law, was created and refined by medieval scholastics, and stands, to this day, unscathed, unchanged, unaltered by the passage of time, of what … eight centuries of time? This is one of the great creations of a quite astounding SOCI.

But let’s look at more modern, but pre-internet examples. After the 1970’s, the American counter-culture fragmented into a thousand small groups. Some hippies built A-frame houses in the woods. Electronic synth enthusiasts put together a club scene. Motorheads have been chopping hot-rods for decades earlier, uncovering and verifying and sharing obscure and arcane knowledge (did you know that cars can run on water? Its a big scandalous cover-up by the oil industry.) All of these were SOCI’s. And the internet has ... atomized them into even finer divisions … and I now, personally belong to a dozen different, mostly non-intersecting ones. As does everyone else.

So now, we have to talk about IQ. The music club scene seems mostly harmless, and mostly admits anyone who can spin a record, run a light show, dance for hours, and moderate their drug intake. But in the 1970s’s and the 1980’s we had the exploration of arcane knowledge about … health food. Vitamins. Flying saucers. Secret govt. cover-ups. Spontaneous combustion. ESP and precognition and remote viewing. The Bermuda triangle. Pyramid power. I was immersed in this, and I loved it. And I knew it was 100% fake, while secretly hoping maybe, just maybe, it was real. And so when the X-Files aired on TV, I was hooked. I loved it.

So here’s the rub. Apparently some people thought it was real. I mean, I have talked to people who think that ghosts really are really real. And chem trails, and whatever. And all that I can rationally conclude is that, for the most part, they lack the intellectual foundations to distinguish reality from hallucination. I mean, I still really do want to believe that the Bermuda triangle is real, and, if pressed, I will admit that there is a 0.00001% chance that maybe it is. It gives me shivers down my spine.

And so it is with QAnon. They seem to be rooting around in the arcane details of political cover-ups, mass-media lies. But they’re down there, in the muck, with flying saucers and the Bermuda triangle. Pre-internet, one could also read about political cover-ups and mainstream-media lies and distortions, but all of that was being published in arcane, obscure **left-wing** journals, which no one ever heard of or bothered to read. It was out there, and it was way out there, and I found it to be a lot more trust-worthy and accurate than the political conspiracy theories today. When left-wing academics supplied the small details of what Ollie North actually did, as opposed to what television showed you, well, I believed, and I was scandalized. But if QAnon told me that Ollie North was part of a plan to XYZ, well, my knee-jerk reaction would be to dismiss it as just another Bermuda Triangle factoid. What I take to be truth strongly depends on … the text.

Those of us who vaguely know about post-modern textual analysis know that much of what is set into words is a lie, a distortion, an approximate version of the truth. Post-modern literary theory gives you the tools to detect a lie when you read it, to distinguish mostly-accurate from mostly-hallucinated. So when the alt-right attacks post-modernism, I take it to be an attack on the very useful tools for telling apart truth from craziness. If they take this away from you, then they can feed you bullshit and propaganda, and you’ll be too stupid, too powerless, too clueless, too defenseless, too mentally soft and muddle-headed to detect and reject the lies, the hallucinations, the craziness.

So, yeah, in the medieval times, people were having their minds blown up by earth-shattering revelations extracted and uncovered from written memory of times past. And something very good came of that. But in the medieval times, there were only thousands, tens-of-thousands that were part of the process. Now there are millions, tens of millions, and more, doing it. And I fondly hope that good will come of this. And maybe the biggest good will be sense-making tools. Better sense-making tools, better than the best that the post-modernists have ever created. Because understanding the interplay between the real and the imagined is perhaps the biggest task in front of us.