Who is behind QAnon? The Reply All podcast investigates

boing
43

I appreciate your perspectives as your own. But I’m going to reiterate that not actually having any background in the subject or any wider knowledge than what you’ve personally encountered is extremely limited, and absolutely puts your perspectives into 100% personal belief category.

Which strikes me as more than a little ironic, given what you claim are the universal problems of religion — something you keep drawing mostly contemporary (in relative terms) references to.

Humans have been around for a few hundred thousand years in our form at least. We have signs of belief systems going back tens and tens of thousands of years. I’d strongly encourage you to investigate, say, non-Western belief systems. They are quite different, or at least can be, than what you describe. Their origins are different than what you describe. But it doesn’t sound like you know much about it. There’s some great stuff there, maybe start with The Buddha, he was a pretty cool dude IMHO.

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Yes, some of them. But again people keep referring to the last 150 years in the USA. There is a much wider context for religion than that.

I notice all the “religions” being discussed are very, well, white.

What about Vedanta? What about Buddhism? What about indigenous belief systems that are centered on nature and our place in it? What about much of Western philosophy, much of which would be seen as “religious” or “spiritual” or “esoteric” by most — and btw that includes contemporary metaphysics at Oxford and such.

It does suck that good belief systems often tend to go bad, and many are pretty bad from the get-go. But if that’s all a person is willing to explore, I’d say it’s not a scientific approach, but rather one of intentionally avoiding evidence that may lead to a shift in perspective.

I would much rather people consider that some religions start with genuine mystical epiphany, and then often go bad, at least partially, over the course of decades, centuries, and even millennia.

Also, “religion” etc. is such a broad thing. To paint them all with such a wide brush is about as worthless as any other type of “ism” IMHO.

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I totally agree. When I hear people slag religion in general, I get the impression their arguments are being made about a specific kind of religion but their conclusions are being painted on all belief systems with a broad brush. It would be hard for me to believe that traditional indigenous belief systems I’ve been exposed were made up by a huckster selling snake oil. It seems pretty clear they emerged out of countless generations of cultural practices and oral history.

The source of the disagreement appears to be confusing: a) artificial ideologies created by individuals to serve specific ends; with b) layered wisdom of generations; by calling them both “religion”.

Still, I think that the characterization of “religion starts when some con artist starts a cult and it gets out of hand” has an important lesson in it even if it’s not true, and I think one reason we see that happening a lot recently is because we have really good records of what happened recently. I make a confident guess that cults have been around forever in all parts of the world. The vast majority flame out and a very occasional one takes root.

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46

While you’re at it, could you also sneak in the idea that Donald J. Trump is hiding a previous felony conviction that would have prevented him from being eligible to be elected in the first place?

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47

I’m not sure they have graduated to “normal” religion yet.

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I tried getting into podcasts a few years ago when I was walking to work regularly. But the information density is so low that I might as well watch one of the popular kids read the news at a TV camera. *shudder*

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So… a religion then.

Snark aside, I have heard QAnon described as a “political religion” which I think sums it up pretty well.

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Yeah- your reply was not only expected, but exactly as I expected.

It’s quite clear you’re religious, or leaning towards it.

The concept that I need dome sort of “professional qualifications” to have the concept of what I’m discussing taken seriously is just a false qualifier.

Normally people who make that argument do so in a place where they are a minority view because they feel their views are threatened, and since noone else is chiming in to create a religious validation arguement when this is a thread directly about QAnon, I guess you have different focus in mind.

I’m not here to tell you you’re wrong if you are indeed religious. I said above it helps a lot of people.

But for someone taking your approach, it wouldn’t matter if I did have experienced involvement in religious matters- it’s a subjective approach you’re taking, in that there is no direct answer that satisfies your open ended validation seeking.

So I answered the way I did, because inevitably allowing you to “qualify” or “disqualify” the validity of my comparison logically to something wholly unconnected in meaning or bearing on the comparison, based on objective observations, is bullshit.

People don’t need a theology background to be qualified to spot general illogical patterns in human behavior similar to other things.

This is true to so many people here that people are actively discussing, mostly without insult, what these QAnon people actually represent.

For the record, I’m actually very familiar with eastern religions and philosophy- I lived in Japan for 3 years, and studied the history and religious culture there in a Japanese college, with field trips to stay with Buddhist monks, as part of a degree in Japanese Language & Literature, though I’m now an unemployed machinist.

None of that matters here in the way you’d like it to. The people commenting are probably not rabbis, yogis, Shinto priests or anything else.

My comparisons and the paralells others are drawing are clear to anyone who can see the results of cognitive dissonance, not religious training.

You don’t need to believe in gods to see the bullshit their followers get up to, or notice similar behavior grouping in other movements.

It’s called objective reasoning.

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51

my usual practice when confronted by an opinion which offends some peculiarly idiosyncratic opinion of mine which may be shared by less than one in a billion people is to let it go, just let it go. unless the bearer of the offensive opinion seems intent on forcing all listeners to convert to their opinion i try fairly hard to just keep quiet and walk away.

ymmv

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But that rather begs the question that any religion is “normal,” especially to those outside it.

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Someone tried to warn them back in 2018.

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I think plenty see conspiracy theories as modern day equivalent of religious beliefs… I don’t know if I’m convinced of that, though, given the historical diversity of religious practices. Let me see if I can tease out why that’s so.

It seems like religion has filled in a need in humanity, which is probably two fold, creating community and giving a coherent narrative of human existence. As such, it’s not inherently bad, I’d argue. And of course, religion has been used both as a means of control and oppression and as a means of liberation and rebellion. That’s just a historical reality. But I can’t think of many conspiracy theories that haven’t been tools of disinformation and control, at their very heart. Mainly, because they are primarily put out by those wishing to control a population in a more effective way. The canonical example (and the root of all modern conspiracy theories) is the Protocols, which were forgeries meant to pin the blame on the Jewish community in Tsarist Russia for problems caused by bad governance. Even seemingly “harmless” conspiracy theories that seem to come from the left work to spread disinformation about what’s really happening.

We have other ways today of doing the two things religion has historical done, of course. We have nationalism, race theory, consumerist subcultures, mass media/culture to help us fulfill no. 1. Science and history especially fulfill no. 2 (using these two in their broadest meaning). But we also have a social/economic system (capitalism, especially the current neo-liberalist hardline variant) that has a heavy emphasis on individualism to the near total exclusion of community in any form, which is completely at odds with the reality of us as people, that we need each other to make any sort of viable living that isn’t literally some sort of hand to mouth existence. So, that seems to be our current historical contradiction that we’re struggling to get through. People feel that contradiction and this is part of what folks into conspiracy theories are reacting to, that contradiction.

Conspiracy theories can fill no. 1, but they tend to function to reinforce one set of alternatives to religious communities (nationalism, race theory mainly), while rejecting and/or creating something along the other kinds (mass mediated subcultures). They also fulfill no. 2, by bringing an orderly narrative that seem to be scientifically and historically informed. Both science and history are fields that no one individual can explain all of (which is why we have specializations in both history and sciences, because it’s about building up an understanding of the world in a community). But conspiracy theories can do that, while also reinforcing a kind of community. So, kind of religious like, but more of the oppressive type, but on the surface it SEEMS like the more liberated type…

As for not entirely being the modern day equivalent… I don’t think it really shapes any kind of morality in it’s followers, which religion can do, in the sense of asking them to work to improve themselves in some way or another (which many religions do). If it’s a religion, it’s more of a top-down cult than a traditional faith of any kind (and of course some religions can turn into cults).

I don’t know if that made any sense… :grin:

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I think you make great points and they are very well-articulated. Thank you!

I spent most of my life studying belief systems of many types – including physics, computing, philosophy, cultures, etc.

When it comes to “spiritual belief systems” you know what strikes me as interesting? Despite their differences, I think those are more like rounding errors. Almost every, and I mean EVERY, belief system says the same thing.

How those beliefs evolved and in many cases have grown corrupted is real, and worthy of deep investigation and criticism.

But to miss the central teaching of these systems is to miss that they are all saying essentially the same thing.

I’ll give just one example. Many Vedantic lineages fully accept Jesus and his teachings as an extension of Vedanta. Directly. And it’s not pulled out of thin air – Yogananda and many others have explored and written about this in extraordinary detail. It’s all out there for those who wish to explore it.

These connections would be extremely difficult to see, if all one looked at was the past 150 years of American Christian groups, and I would argue would also be missed unless one went straight to Jesus’ own (supposed) words, including ancillary materials like the Gospel of Thomas, which I and many others consider to be as “legitimate” a take on Jesus’ belief systems as anything else (I’d submit that Thomas is much closer to the source – it’s all supposedly direct Jesus quotes, unlike the books of the New Testament that made it into Christian canon post a few hundred AD).

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That’s part of the problem isn’t it? That the faith people are raised in seem normal to them, but not to outsiders? This explains why people of one faith are so easily scapegoated by elites to be seen as outsiders that cause the problems in society. This is happening right now with people who aren’t white, evangelical Christians, especially people of other faiths.

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I gotta say, for a bunch of facist pricks the formation of their religious text is fairly egalitarian. Of course it’s not perfect, but at least they decode the messiah via community effort.

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I pretty much only do podcasts that are interviews and I listen to them at 1.5 to 1.75x. Can’t stand modern popular podcast production with the background music, cuts between speakers, creaky-voiced hosts, and, like, you know, linguistic fillers.

Use to listen to them on my bike ride to work, but not so much these days.

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59

Yeah, I wonder, at this point, how many of its adherents are getting this stuff second or third (etc.) hand, the source not mattering at all.

Some of those would be in the same category of non-theories. Unlike the traditional conspiracy theories like, say, JFK assassination conspiracy theories, Templar conspiracy theories, etc. where it all began with an event that had ambiguities/inconsistencies that cried out for some explanation, with conspiracy theories filling the explanatory void. (Even Majestic-12 and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories have a basis in evidence - even if that “evidence” is entirely falsified.) The closest QAnon gets to an evidentiary basis is to ask people to believe that banal documents - that don’t require any interpretation - have a crazy interpretation thrust upon them, such that X suddenly means Y.

It reminds me of nothing as much as what’s known in art theory as “destructive criticism” (e.g. in Freudian analysis, a cigar in a “text” is replaced by a phallus for interpretive purposes), but made totally insane.

Well, on some level, yes. I’ve always said that conspiracy theories, with their explanatory function about some aspect of the world, function as religion. And apparently QAnon is converting new believers from the ranks of conservative evangelicals. Which makes sense as QAnon is primarily serving that function of a religion that already is so appealing to the religious right - serving as a justification for their political beliefs. (In this case, that their political opponents are evil.) But religions tend to be more rooted in reality than QAnon is (not at all), and serve more explanatory functions (e.g. “why do bad things happen?”), where QAnon doesn’t really explain anything, it’s just a reality-replacement.

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This is a very astute take. The way I read what you said is that conspiracies and religion both fill a lot of the same human needs, but the former does so in a purely negative way, and the latter is more value neutral- often positive and sometimes negative. I think I agree with that.

As a Standard Cranky Atheist, my default position is that all religion is probably bad and I’ll tend to lump it together with conspiracies and all other forms of irrational thought. I have to constantly remind myself that religion is more than just an irrational set of explanations for how the world works.

I do find it interesting how, from a layperson view at 100 yards away, religions and conspiracies have a lot of superficial properties in common. They both have prophets, canonical texts, exclusion of non-believers, resistance to new information, etc. However my understanding of the history of religion and the role it plays in human culture is weak at best, so my take is pretty cold.

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I do agree with that. I think the best strategy is to look at outcomes in the lives of real people? Like, it’s clear that something like Jim Jones’ people’s church (which started out with a strong egalitarian sense of faith in action, and turned into a murderous death cult) had incredibly bad effects. We can say the opposite of something like the Quakers, who played a significant role in organizing on behalf of abolitionism and civil rights over its history in America. This is why I find “all religions are the same” arguments to be pretty superficial and entirely unhelpful. Historical specificity matters a great deal, I’d argue.

And I struggle to find a case where conspiracy theories (that aren’t attached to actual conspiracies, such as something like COINTELPRO) are anything BUT destructive, as they are not based on anything that we can factually pin down, but they make that claim anyway. It’s true religion makes truth-claims as well, but they are often dealing with the ineffable (things that aren’t so easy to answer, such as our purpose for existing). Conspiracy theories are dealing with the very real world they claim (Qanon is all about Donald Trump taking down the deep state, which is a laughable claim on it’s face - yet they believe it despite no real evidence for it).

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Okay, honest question here- not trying to be argumentative, and forgive me if I’m putting words in your mouth:

Do you group things like physics and philosophy of science together with religions as equal-but-different systems of belief?

If so, I have to express a difference of opinion there. Science is deducing conclusions from observations and is all about building a structure that compensates for the weakness in human biases and cognition. I do not consider science a “belief system” because it describes reality and reality doesn’t care if you believe in it or not. To me, a belief system is something more like religion that starts with a desired conclusion and builds backwards from there. The former is all about falsifiability, whereas the latter is totally unconcerned with falsifiability. That’s a really key difference, and the word “belief” when applied to science will raise the hairs on my neck every time.

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