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An Interview with David G. Robertson
33 Plays2 years ago
M interviews Dr. David G. Robertson, Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at the Open University, and a fellow conspiracy theory theorist!
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
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Transcript
From Lonely Street to Easy Street
00:00:00
Speaker
Right, it's time for another interview. Now, this time I'm going to be talking to David Robertson, but I thought you might like to- No, no, no, no, no, no, it's all good. I've come to terms with the fact that I won't be in your interviews, and I've actually realised that all I really mean is that I get to sit out of the main episode recording them and put my feet up. I'm living on Easy Street. Easy Street? Have you moved?
00:00:20
Speaker
Yeah, well, I was in that hotel down at the end of Lonely Street, forget its name, but it seemed a bit depressing, so I checked out and moved in somewhere more pleasing. On Easy Street. Well, not at first. After that, I got a place on Fascination Street. Sounds fascinating. Yeah, more goth-y than you'd expect. Everyone kept trying to pull on my hair, pull on my face, pull on my feet. Your feet? Yes, and I wasn't going to stand for that. So I looked for another place and happened to stumble on quite a nice flat on Kelly Street. It was funny, I was only there accidentally after I took a wrong turn looking for another place.
00:00:49
Speaker
accidentally Kelly Street. Exactly, and that was a good flat. Sleeping in wasn't a sin, all the housework was done by tea time, but it didn't last. Investigators are going with insurance fraud, but I know spontaneous combustion when I see it. Anyway, long story short, I ended up on Easy Street not caring about whether or not I participate in interviews.
00:01:06
Speaker
Nice for some. Now I'm currently high on a desert plain. Weird streets have no name. Hmm, thought you would have gone with Penny Lane. Damn it, you're right. Let's start again. Never. The podcast's guide to the conspiracy featuring Josh Edison and Em Dent.
Introducing David G. Robertson: A Deep Dive into Conspiracy Theories
00:01:33
Speaker
Our guest this week is David G. Robertson, Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at The Open University. His PhD looked at the role of conspiracy theories in the New Age movement, and he's the author, amongst other things, of The Hidden Hand, Why Religious Studies Need to Take Conspiracy Theories Seriously, and Crippled Epistemologies, Conspiracy Theories, Religion, and Knowledge.
00:01:55
Speaker
With words like epistemology and taking conspiracy theories seriously, David is in great danger of being classified as an epistemologist, although maybe one with a few different modalities at hand. David, welcome to the podcast.
00:02:09
Speaker
Thanks for having me. I'm very kind of you to at least include me in a broad group of epistemologists. I'm definitely, what sort? I'm dabbling. I wouldn't go so far as to describe myself as one yet. I'll be caught out quickly. So you're kind of epistemology curious.
00:02:30
Speaker
Yeah, epistemology adjacent. Now my first question for you is really a classificatory one because everybody asks me what's so normal about Beijing normal university and I suspect there'll be some people going what's so open about the open university? So what is the open university and why is it open rather than closed? It's open to anyone regardless of academic background and
00:03:00
Speaker
you know, and class, everything else that that entails.
The Open University's Educational Revolution
00:03:03
Speaker
So anyone can enroll for our for our degree courses, regardless of their qualifications, which means we have a much wider range of of people and backgrounds at the university. It's don't have the facts and figures in front of me, but I think it's the largest university in Britain.
00:03:26
Speaker
It was really the first of its kind. It's not a distant learning university in the sense that we tend to think of now. We have a full university charter, but it's decentralized and we were doing distant and blended learning, mixing distance learning and face-to-face teaching.
00:03:49
Speaker
since 1968. Yeah, it's a really great place to work. For somebody who came from a working class background, worked all the way through university as a mature student, it's very dear to my heart that we have so many, you know, people from working class backgrounds, people who are older, retired people, people in prisons, people with disabilities, it's great. What isn't open about the Open University, however,
00:04:17
Speaker
is the many levels of bureaucratic systems that you have to have in an organisation that's not only this large, but based online, that can be a little opaque. Yes, my former HOD, Rosalind Hirst House at the University of Auckland used to lecture at the Open University before she became HOD at Auckland. So she spent, I think, almost a decade working for the Open University before she got the siren call.
00:04:46
Speaker
returned back to her omamasa back in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and she was always extolling the virtues of teaching at the Open University, and that was well before we even had the inkling in our eyes about the idea of teaching things online, online learning,
00:05:05
Speaker
So yes, the Open University has been quite a trailblazer, as far as I'm aware, for doing learning across a country at a period of time, which must have been incredibly difficult because you're relying on a postal system to transfer course materials from one part of the country to the other.
00:05:24
Speaker
that's right that's where they started but then by I think they used to have there was tv programs on the bbc when i was a kid my dad did a politics degree with the orphan university and so this would have been the early
00:05:42
Speaker
80s, no, the mid to late 80s. So they would show the TV programs or like the material for the course were shown as TV programs on BBC Two at like two in the morning. So you had to set your video recorder to record it. And then that was part of your coursework. Now, of course, the students would just access it online. But we were we were doing that before the Internet even existed.
00:06:07
Speaker
The idea of having a TV programme devoted to tertiary study kind of boggles the mind. It's the kind of thing you wouldn't expect to occur now, although I guess we would do it all on YouTube or some other video sharing website instead.
The Lure of Late-Night Educational TV
00:06:20
Speaker
Yeah, but there was a particular joy in every so often you would stumble across these TV shows in the middle of the night, you know, like after a long night with your pals or something and you're crashing out and you put it on and it's Philosophy 101. Quite wonderful experience too.
00:06:38
Speaker
come across one in the wild without any preparation. It's like the idea of a night out with your pals, of course, drinking coffee and other sensible food. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. No, no rum doings going on. In effect, no rum at all. All right, we should get on, we should get on to the business of big conspiracy theory. And the usual question I always ask my guests is who or what got you into conspiracy theories?
00:07:05
Speaker
Yes, it's a long. It's potentially a long answer because I every time I think about this, I go slightly further back so I can. We can't start from the big bag. We need we need
David's Conspiracy Theory Journey
00:07:18
Speaker
at least we need human civilization at the very least to be OK. I'll jump forward. I'll jump forward a couple of steps. And I when I was young, there was some sort of anniversary of the JFK assassination. I think it was maybe the 25th anniversary. There was a lot of documentaries in the TV.
00:07:35
Speaker
with various alternative theories being presented. And around the same time, we had the famous David Icke interview on The Wogan Show. The one where he came out is the Messiah.
00:07:55
Speaker
kind of yeah that one and he made a bunch of predictions about the end of the world and some various other things um that was an enormous media storm at the time in Britain like to the like Diana's death sized right it was huge it was all of the papers for days
00:08:14
Speaker
But in those days, there were only, I think channel four existed then. So there was four channels. The Wogan show was the biggest show in the country. It was sort of seven o'clock in the evening and pretty much everybody watched it. So like I saw it live at the time and it
00:08:32
Speaker
had a big effect on me because whilst what he was saying was kind of bonkers it was the reaction of the audience and Terry Wogan and then the press after was just like angry ridicule it wasn't just that there was a bit of mockery it was like how angry people were really sort of surprised me and even by that age I was already sort of
00:08:58
Speaker
thinking well like if this was an if this was like an Indian guru figure there wouldn't have been the same response or if it was the archbishop of Canterbury or something um so yeah so i'd have vaguely interested in that kind of stuff from then and then but it didn't really occur to me again until years years later and was
00:09:20
Speaker
at Edinburgh University, I'd started doing a religious studies degree. Initially, I was sort of more thinking about doing something around biblical studies, something quite sort of traditional. And I took Stephen Sutcliffe's course on the New Age. And there was just a mention of David Icke in one of the additional readings. I was talking about the history of New Age and its connection to the Green Movement.
00:09:52
Speaker
And I went off and I got, I think it was the biggest secret or tales from the time loop or one of these sort of mid period books of his from the library and read it.
The Evolving Narrative of David Icke
00:10:02
Speaker
And I was, and I just couldn't believe that nobody was sort of writing about this stuff. It was so rich and there was this long history and all these interesting, you know, green party politics and the football and TV career. It was just like a really interesting
00:10:14
Speaker
and there was David Aik's name and I thought,
00:10:18
Speaker
story and stuff that nobody else was saying. I mean this is pre, it's not pre-internet but it's pre, you know, the way that the internet dominates media now. So you didn't come across this stuff
00:10:33
Speaker
on a regular basis. And it was just, it was such an interesting and completely different worldview that I just decided I was going to spend some time exploring it. And the rest flows from there, really. You've seen day ever like live on stage, haven't you?
00:10:50
Speaker
Yeah, I was at the big Wembley show in, I think it was 2012. So there was about 6,000 people there. It was one of the long events. It was when the actual talk was about seven or eight hours. And I think he had his son's band doing sort of entertainment as well. So in between each, there was like three sections and in between Gareth would come on and do a couple of songs. It was a big day. It was a grand day out.
00:11:20
Speaker
I've been to two of his talks, he's been to Aotearoa at least three times and I've been to two of the talks he's given and yes they are eight hour long extravaganzas and we haven't had quite the crowd of 6,000 people, we've had around about a thousand people attend each so there's he's a fairly big draw even back home
00:11:44
Speaker
And it's kind of astounding because you and I have both, both lectured. We've probably lectured in lecture slots that we think are overly long. But I don't know about you, but I've never given an eight hour lecture and I certainly have never been able to keep my energy up the way that David like seems to be performing for eight hours straight without slowing down.
00:12:07
Speaker
Yeah, it is quite remarkable. And he's such a natural orator as well. He's a very entertaining figure. He's not doing the eight hour ones anymore. He
00:12:24
Speaker
sort of has slowed down quite a lot since that period there was there was a few the 2012 and then there was a few in the couple of years after that but he's sort of slowing down to a more he does these shorter events where it's like um an evening with where it's less of him presenting for eight hours and more conversational but he's i mean he's late 60s early 70s now so i mean he was
00:12:50
Speaker
He was in his fifties, at least, when I saw him, you know? So, I mean, as you say, I would be struggling after a couple of hours, so it was quite remarkable. Yeah, he did admit the second time that I saw him live that some of the energy does come from the occasional gin and tonic in the brakes. So a little bit of revitalizing alcohol to kind of wet his whistle. Yes, a revitalizing tonic.
00:13:17
Speaker
Yes, with a good bit of gin to stave off what might ale someone, and probably keep the Archontoc virus from invading his system unexpectedly. Well, you know, if I have his energy in tenure's time, I'll be quite
The Academic Struggle: Conspiracy Theories vs. Religious Studies
00:13:34
Speaker
glad. So maybe it's worth me having the word with the Archons. I'll have some of what he's in. Or maybe it's just the gin and tonic, that's all it is.
00:13:44
Speaker
Well, I mean, it probably does help with a few flats of fantasy. You probably need to find a conspiracy theory you feel that you are comfortable espousing to crowds of thousands of people at a time. And then you can tour the world just like a younger David Icke. The presentation that
00:14:02
Speaker
sort of the talk the history of it's really really interesting um because there are still slides in the eight hour talk from his very first presentation like way back um i think 92
00:14:18
Speaker
or 91 was the first of the sort of yeah because they would be the robots rebellion period wouldn't it that's the second period the first period is the uh the truth vibrations and love changes everything yeah and it
00:14:33
Speaker
it's very, it's all channeled through a medium and it's all very theosophical language. So it's all earth changes and Edgar Cayce and root races and the different themes, like the different colours of energy and all that stuff. And he sort of, he doesn't talk too much about that stuff anymore. But
00:15:00
Speaker
So you get, I think, five books like that. They're progressively slimmer. You get the sort of five books. And then the Robot's Rebellion is when he changes into an overtly sort of conspiratorial narrative. But the Robot's Rebellion is still very new age and very millennial in its outlook. And it's not really until into the 2000s when you wouldn't obviously pick out any kind of new age ideas in there.
00:15:29
Speaker
Although there are still elements within, I mean, the last talk I saw of his was in 2016. There's still elements of the new age, you should say, persisting, given the reuse of slides. And I think what is, and this is a weird thing for people who are probably skeptical of David Icke. One of the refreshing things about David Icke as a conspiracy theorist
00:15:54
Speaker
is the fact that he will admit his views have changed over time and he's evolved in his views. So he'll quite happily make fun of his messianic moment on TV. I've seen him play the clip on stage and laugh at himself, go, look, what a wanker that guy appeared to be. Look at the weird, look at what, look at the shell suit he's wearing. What a
00:16:19
Speaker
weirdo, he's willing to go, look, I've changed my views over time, I'm in a learning process. And often that goes against the kind of stereotype that we associate with conspiracy theorists having this rigid, monolithic, unchanging view. And David Icke is a great example of someone who we might think is wrong. But he's willing to admit that some of his wrong views were wrong in the past.
00:16:47
Speaker
He's also still got an overall positive view of things. I mean, there is no hint of violence or anything being espoused. And there's still that ultimate, the ultimate message is that all of us are part of the same being experiencing itself subjectively. And, you know, and the message is still about, you know, love being the answer and love being the only thing that's real or the only truth.
00:17:15
Speaker
which, you know, I'm often asked about Ike being an anti-Semite and the answer is complicated and probably not for the start of this podcast, but I'm always reminding people that in terms of the overall message is certainly not one of hatred or of violence.
00:17:36
Speaker
despite some bumps along the way. And that's not something you can say for a lot of other people. Alex Jones, for instance, or somebody like that. So I do think that needs to be borne in mind with Ike. He's not
00:17:52
Speaker
He's certainly not a hateful figure overall. Yes, he's not expressing a kind of virulent, violent, hateful rhetoric, even if we think that some elements of his rhetoric come from earlier virulent strains of conspiratorial thought. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I'm not making excuses for his use of anti-Semitic material at all.
00:18:20
Speaker
just from the impression you got from him from certain press reports you would imagine a sort of rabid and angry sort of hate-filled person and that's not the impression that I've got after 20 years of
00:18:37
Speaker
being completely absorbed in his work. Yeah and we might come back to Ike towards things. I think there's actually quite a lot to say about Ike's worldview and the kind of spirituality he espouses versus say people like Alex Jones and kind of the contemporary focus on conspiracy theories. But the fact you've mentioned 20 years of study of this
00:18:58
Speaker
brings me to I think the other interesting issue because we're kind of part of the old guard of people who've been engaging in conspiracy theory theory. We started our work on conspiracy theory theory well before it ever became popular.
00:19:15
Speaker
And of course, I know I faced resistance when I was first proposing doing work of this kind back in the days before conspiracy theories were of pith and moment. Did you face much resistance to pursuing this kind of work in your early days?
00:19:31
Speaker
a little, but I suspect not as much as you did. I mean, I think of us as like, we're like those, we were like the 14 year olds at the first Sex Pistols gig. You know what I mean? We just made it, we just made it into the old guard. Um, but as you say, you know, the amount of work that's been published since like 2016 or something is, uh, or, you know, it seemed like the, the run up to Trump was when it all, you know,
00:19:59
Speaker
It became an acceptable thing to write about. Actually, religious studies is pretty open-minded and pretty keen to get new ideas in. So actually, from most of my academic colleagues, I didn't get too much resistance
Society's View on Conspiracy Theories
00:20:19
Speaker
to the idea of doing it.
00:20:21
Speaker
There was a bit of pushback from some more sort of conservative colleagues. The problem with religious studies is in the UK, it's always bound up with it's always religious studies and theology. So any department, you're always going to come into contact with people who are doing sort of theological, confessional, identity based stuff.
00:20:48
Speaker
um which I don't regard as being the same subject at all it's got a completely different set of epistemological assumptions and methodologies but uh there you are so they were less keen so I think if you're a person for whom being in this field is about justifying and or shoring up religion then you can see why you might be unhappy with someone who appears to be saying
00:21:19
Speaker
conspiracy theory is a religion, which is the, you know, the reductive version of, of what I might even seem to be doing. I had the first thing I wrote on it as I wrote a sort of 10,000 word essay, which was like my undergraduate
00:21:36
Speaker
final assessment from the first degree from the MA. So it had an internal marker, it didn't go to external academics, it went to an academic within, in this case, New College in Edinburgh. And one of the examiners was absolutely furious with the piece. I mean, it wasn't a great piece, it was an undergraduate piece, but they weren't
00:22:03
Speaker
critiquing it for those reasons, they just were furious at the idea of this thing. They said, should a student even be justified, even be looking at these things? Doesn't this just justify this nonsense in a university? And then they also bizarrely said, this is all just American nonsense, despite the fact that the two case studies were
00:22:30
Speaker
Nexus magazine which is from New Zealand and David Icke who's British but I think for some reason I think they had a third person adjudicate it and they thought it was fine so it passed and I got away with it but there was always a sort of lingering sense of
00:22:52
Speaker
There were a certain section of the university who just saw me as the UFO guy and never engaged with me in any way whatsoever. And, you know, when it came to graduating, I don't have a job there. So you can. But I mean, you you certainly weaken your job chances when you decide to do something that isn't seen as respectable. And the way that the study of religion has gone in Britain,
00:23:22
Speaker
Again, as I said, it's very connected to a sense of identity. The university's departments now seem to be largely set up where they want a person who's an expert in each of the five big religions. So you want a Christian guy, Judaism, you want Islam, you want Hinduism, and what did I miss out? Anyway, you get the idea. And I'm none of those.
00:23:50
Speaker
So that's not an example of open hostility or people say you can't be a good scholar doing this stuff, but it does mean you can't. Getting a job was considerably harder as a result of the decision to study. Everybody goes, this is great, this is really innovative material, but you can't feed your children off such comments.
00:24:16
Speaker
Yes, people end up going, look, your work is great. We just don't know how you would fit into our department. So I've had that. Yeah. Like, how would you do a course on this? So I think there's always been an assumption as well that this is all that you're going to talk about. Right. So people go, how can you how could you do a course on on conspiracy theories for first years?
00:24:40
Speaker
and you know one answer is to tell them how you could but um the most obvious thing is like it's not the only thing i've ever read you know i mean i can teach basic on anything it's fine don't worry about it i'm not going to come in and start making every course about conspiracy theories well then you could i could yeah and it always comes in somewhere
00:25:00
Speaker
Yeah, I mean I find even when I'm giving academic talks which don't touch on conspiracy theories at all, I end up going, but of course this is a kind of side issue, but there's a conspiratorial issue here which also is quite interesting as you end up going, even I find myself kind of sliding back into my primary research when I'm doing other
Conspiracy Theories and Religion: A Legal Perspective
00:25:21
Speaker
work.
00:25:21
Speaker
It's great for me, I can speak to scholars in other disciplines much more easily perhaps than some of my other colleagues can, because it's always been work that's in this sort of slightly ambiguous position, you know, where
00:25:39
Speaker
There's a strong philosophical aspect to it. There's a strong sort of, you know, the sort of political history aspect of it. So I can have, you know, like when we talk, for instance, we're very seldom talking about overtly religious ideas or terminology. So I might have
00:26:02
Speaker
I might have had more luck getting a job in a different department, perhaps. I don't know. They didn't come to that. I mean, there's only a handful of folk doing sort of religion and conspiracy theory.
00:26:16
Speaker
in any sort of committed and systematic way and I'm probably, well there's, I mean, Asbjorn, Asbjorn, Dyrrondale in Norway and me are probably the two people who were doing it first. There's some other good folk coming up now. Yes, and it's encouraging that second generation to kind of establish
00:26:38
Speaker
the kind of groundwork for future work which I think is quite an important thing to do. So you do the establishing work yourself and then you need there to be people who are going to be your natural successors of some kind to show that the work has legs going forward.
00:26:55
Speaker
That's a terrible minute for legs going forward. Legs going forward. I think of it as like, I'm the guy with the machete hacking through the jungle and they'll come and lay paving slabs behind me. You're the intrepid colonial person and they're the ones who bring civilization to the Sabbath land. Oh, no. Wait, wait, wait. Can I take it back? Nope, nope. It's too far gone. Too far gone.
00:27:23
Speaker
Now, we're talking about conspiracy theories. We should probably get your definition of what actually counts as a conspiracy theory, especially since you state in the hidden hand the following. To be blunt, a conspiracy theory cannot be defined simply as a theory that posits a conspiracy as is often suggested. Now, as I'm one of those people who's often suggesting a conspiracy theory is simply a theory about a conspiracy,
00:27:51
Speaker
What is a conspiracy theory in your theoretical framework? Okay, I don't really define conspiracy theories. I don't think I've ever published a definition.
00:28:06
Speaker
My approach is much more based on critical theory, where I don't see conspiracy theory as a substantive category. I don't think there's a thing at the centre of it. And maybe this is easier for me to say coming from a background in the critical study of religion.
00:28:27
Speaker
Because religion is the same, right? We talk about it like it's a thing. It has a legal existence and it has an existence in discourse. People use the term. The usage of the term precedes any academic work. I don't really see our job as to really try and come up with the definition because it's pretty clear when you start poking and pulling at it.
00:28:56
Speaker
that it's doing a lot of different things, right? It's constantly shifting. Anytime you define it in one way, you're going to find an example of how it's used and it doesn't fit. Or there's, you know, logical inconsistencies. So my understanding of conspiracy theory then is much more to do with the social organization of knowledge.
Psychology and the Stigmatization of Conspiracy Theories
00:29:17
Speaker
And I think this comes from constantly looking at it in tandem with religion. So I think religion and conspiracy theories are terms that we use to describe certain kinds of accessing knowledge that aren't
00:29:36
Speaker
that usually accepted avenues for so doing and that can be like kind of metaphysical or supernatural or spiritual things you know so where there's actually different modalities of knowledge but it can also be things like um
00:29:52
Speaker
you know that there were no planes that hit the World Trade Tower or something you know something like that where it's it's not necessarily sort of supernatural but I think that the two terms are tied up in different ways of just the way that the progress of knowledge has gone over the last few hundred years you know religion comes in as a way of managing
00:30:15
Speaker
the former regime of truth right before the enlightenment and modernity as we think of it now so rationality and capitalism and liberalism and imperialism but the older order of truth that came before that that was based in the teachings of the church gets sort of
00:30:38
Speaker
shunted off into this thing we now talk about as religion. And there's a similar thing happening with conspiracy theories, but we're a lot earlier in the process. It's starting to happen after the Second World War, definitely. And it's a combination of fear about totalitarianism and the ideas about mindlessness and brainwashing and things that go along with that.
00:31:07
Speaker
and security secret services right so the idea of intelligence services that vast mechanism that existed in the wars carrying on without the war so they are looking for other threats and then and you have this emerging global order right
00:31:24
Speaker
And one of the things that's very different about the world now than 100 years ago is how global our ideas of truth and liberalism and rationalism and capitalism. So that way of seeing the world and a particular set of norms
00:31:43
Speaker
is now almost universal and so conspiracy theory is a way of managing things which don't quite fit into religion but are part of this that don't fit comfortably with this global world order.
00:32:00
Speaker
And that's the way that I understand them. Okay, so they're a category of the other. They go against what is used in scare quotes. It's an audio podcast, but we can pretend I'm putting scare quotes around the mainstream views. In that same respect, we used to talk about religious views as being different in some way, shape, or form.
00:32:24
Speaker
we now see conspiracy theories as being different in some way, shape or form. And that's kind of a product of the modernist project where we go, well, religion is something which is apart from the political order now. It exists in its own little sphere of influence, even though actually even only a few decades ago, it was playing a much bigger role in the public sphere than it is now. But now it exists in a separate space.
00:32:52
Speaker
It's to do with giving it its own category, you sort of remove it out of ordinary political talk and you place it to one side. So it still has
00:33:07
Speaker
it's still capable of affecting things. There's still a lot of connections and effects and entanglements happening all the time, but you can separate it in discourse and you can separate it in law and you can separate religious aspects out from economic aspects or other things that you wish to manage. And that's starting to happen with
00:33:32
Speaker
conspiracy theories are another example of the same thing starting to happen, I think. You will often hear things along the lines of, there's a boom in conspiracy theories because of this post-truth age and nobody knows what's true anymore. And I actually think the exact opposite is the case. I think we have an increasingly obvious category of
00:33:58
Speaker
conspiracy theories, stigmatized or non acceptable ideas, because actually far more of us on a global scale and far more of the institutions governing various states in the world actually agree on more things. There's very few states in the world where they're going to stand up and say,
00:34:20
Speaker
We reject science, right, or, or whatever. There, there's almost universal agreement on the idea of human rights, even if there are certain of those human rights that are still up for debate.
00:34:38
Speaker
representative democracy of capitalism in some form as the dominant economic
David Icke: A Modern Religious Figure?
00:34:44
Speaker
organizational model, of science as a way of finding out objective knowledge, of science as the top
00:34:57
Speaker
most reliable and basic level of attaining knowledge. So the conspiracy theories are a result of that hegemony. The more we all know what the truth is, the more something that isn't that truth sticks out. And that's why I think we have this new category emerged.
00:35:19
Speaker
Yeah, so the more that people disagree with the orthodoxy, the more people are going, oh, that's a strange view. What's causing this? Oh, well, that must be a conspiracy theory of some kind, because if you're disagreeing with the orthodoxy, there must be something askew with your kind of epistemic modality you subscribe to. And these days, we think of those people as being conspiracy theorists.
00:35:45
Speaker
Yeah, they're the new primitives in the midst, right? So we've moved where the boundary of knowledge, of legitimate knowledge, is into our own societies now. It's no longer out on the colonial periphery.
00:36:04
Speaker
We conquered all of that already and incorporated all of those territories are now part of the same capitalist liberal order. So now we can start focusing on these people among us who haven't got with the program. They have these primitive conspiratorial ideas. But that's okay. It's just because they're ignorant if we can sort them out.
00:36:30
Speaker
And yet there's kind of a weird aspect of this, particularly in Western cultures, in that the old other religious belief somehow is a kind of respectable state within the societies in which we live, although that being said, I work and live in China. China very much eschews any kind of notion of there being a religious background
00:36:55
Speaker
to the kind of Chinese cultural state. I have a sinologist friend who works here at Beishida who goes well that's just because they work with a bad definition of what counts as a religion. Actually a lot of Chinese cultural practices would appear to be religion according to some definitions but they've gone look
00:37:14
Speaker
Religion isn't part of our culture, it is a kind of irrational other belief that some people in the West have. And yet in many Western cultures, it's okay to have religious belief, but it's definitely not okay to have belief in conspiracy theories.
00:37:31
Speaker
Yes, exactly right. Not only is it okay to have religious beliefs, the idea of the protection of religious freedom, the right to religious belief is enshrined in law actually in most countries. And so you have weird situations where
00:37:53
Speaker
it is perfectly acceptable to object to, say, vaccination for religious beliefs, but it's illegal to do so if your belief is defined as conspiratorial, right? If you think that doctors have made up the disease, for instance,
00:38:14
Speaker
Yeah. And there are there's nothing inherently more rational about a religious belief. And, you know, with I'm using it in a white sense, don't need to get into defining it. Then there are, you know, some of the more metaphysical kind of conspiracy theories.
00:38:35
Speaker
from a philosophical point of view, there is no, if something is coming from a supernatural source, it doesn't make any difference whether that comes from an angel or from a.
00:38:47
Speaker
you know, an extraterrestrial intelligence or whatever. And yet, you know, religious institutions are deeply embroiled in modern states. I mean, in the UK, we still have the bishops of the Church of England in our upper house with a veto over legislation. I mean, the situation in China is really interesting.
00:39:12
Speaker
The comment about they don't have a very good definition of religion is really interesting because religion was part of that order that was exported around the world by force as part of colonialism that you brought real religion
00:39:31
Speaker
to the colonies, right? And you don't think about the way that Hinduism was essentially sort of invented by the British in order that they could tick a box as to what religion these people had. Japan's surrender at the end of the Second World War was also
00:39:54
Speaker
predicated on Shinto being adopted as a state religion. Cold War wasn't only an ideological war, it was very closely tied to ideas about religion. So the USSR being not only a secular state but an atheist state,
00:40:15
Speaker
That meant that the American side of it ramped up the Christian aspect, right? And all of the in God we trust and one nation under God, all of that was added to the American civil liturgy, if you want to put it that way, in the 1950s. These weren't original parts of it. They were added during the height of the Cold War.
00:40:40
Speaker
as that sort of ideological battle became a battle of good and evil, and that meant, you know, religion and atheism. So yeah, that idea of religion as being something which is inherently part of the colonial order, but also
00:40:59
Speaker
always positive, right? It's almost always positive. And indeed, when you get a religion which oversteps its bounds, right? So when you get a religion that starts trying to take the states right over violence, for instance, then it gets, there are moves to distance it from religion. They'll start talking about instead of, well, a famous example is when Barack Obama
00:41:29
Speaker
gave that speech where he said we shouldn't refer to ISIS as ISIS because they're not really Muslim, right? They're not real Islam because no religion, no real religion would ever be violent. Ah, so he engaged in what we call in philosophy the no true Scotsman, fallacy. No true Islamic state would engage in behaviour like that.
00:41:53
Speaker
Yeah and no true Scotsman like myself is going to accept that name for a logical fallacy but that's it. I mean the actual formal name is a fallacy of misrepresentation but
Doctor Who: The Scottish Legacy
00:42:07
Speaker
unfortunately it has this rather colloquial phrase of you know the man from Edinburgh going oh no Scotsman would do that and they hear about the man from Glasgow well no true Scotsman would do that which I think just speaks to the rivalry between Edinburgh and Glasgow.
00:42:23
Speaker
Yes, indeed. So, yeah, or, you know, terrorism, extremism, these, so religion has religions, like, it's like a deal, right, you can, you can engage in certain non empirical beliefs. And you can even act on them in certain circumstances, as long as
00:42:50
Speaker
religion behaves itself and doesn't step into realms which are reserved for the state. And conspiracy theories, you see some of the same dynamic, right? Where if you're just writing about UFOs and you're channeling stuff from the pilots of UFOs or whatever, and it's got a message that there's gonna be volcanoes and earth changes,
00:43:18
Speaker
That's fine, you're a figure of ridicule. But when it starts interfering with state, certain state functions, so, you know, telling people not to get vaccinated or to protest or, you know, or whatever, then suddenly it becomes a problem. And a large part of the recent upsurge in
00:43:44
Speaker
you know, conspiratorial scholarship and government rhetoric is because it's largely revolved around, you know, the elections in the US and the UK and then the COVID, the anti-vaccination stuff, which was clearly a concern for governments.
00:44:04
Speaker
There's a there's a just as a final thought, there's a really interesting example that the American Psychological Association diagnostic book, the most recent version of that. And in the entry for schizophrenia, where it's talking about, if a person's having visions, or like hallucinations, it's, it's a
00:44:31
Speaker
It's treated differently if the content of those visions can be corroborated by a representative of an acknowledged religious tradition.
00:44:43
Speaker
and then if they can't, right? So it's a symptom of schizophrenia, unless a priest says otherwise. So if you can find a priest who says, yes, so this is clearly a vision of Mary, this is all Marian symbolism, then that is no longer a symptom of schizophrenia, whereas if you said it was the archons that you were seeing, then it is.
00:45:10
Speaker
So what you're saying is that if David Icke had gone, so was it Wogan or Esper that he made? It was Wogan, yeah. If when he had said to Terry Wogan, by the way, I'm the reincarnation of the Messiah, and the Archbishop of Canterbury had walked out and went, yep, David's quite right, he is, then you go, oh, well, that's fine then.
00:45:32
Speaker
Thank you Jesus for coming on, on the show tonight. But the fact that the Archbishop of Canterbury didn't come up and endorse David Eyck, that's what actually made him to make a claim which is outside of the ordinary.
00:45:47
Speaker
Yep, correct. Well, I mean, this is from a diagnostic perspective. So if it was a psychologist, you know, a psychiatrist who was watching this and was asked, is he schizophrenic? Then David Dyke bringing out the Archbishop of Canterbury to vouch that he indeed is or not even the Archbishop wouldn't even have to vouch that he was just that those visions were legitimate parts of Christianity.
00:46:15
Speaker
This is giving bishops a lot of power, a lot of power to go, well, look, I mean, you might think that your patient is suffering from psychological delusions there, but I also have those delusions and I'm endorsing them. Yeah, right. Well, I mean, it's like, you know, like Megigori or something like that. You know, there are these visions which are quite important to the Catholic worldview. So yeah, there has to be a way of
00:46:44
Speaker
legitimising some and de-legitimising others. And actually Medjicore is a nice example there because of course the church vacillates quite a lot as to whether those were authentic Marian visions or not. I remember when I was a, when I was a good Roman Catholic back in the days before my atheism, our parish priest was going to lead
00:47:06
Speaker
a cohort of our parishioners to Magigore to the site of the visions, and then it got cancelled because the cardinal of the New Zealand Catholic Church went, words come down from Rome, at the moment we have our suspicions that those visions actually weren't legitimate, so because of that we're cancelling all trips at this time. Well there you go. It's, you know,
00:47:33
Speaker
these categories like religion, conspiracy theories, I mean even UFOs, things like that, they are, I don't think there's any one thing at the core of them, I think they're just their ways of putting things into, right? They're
00:47:50
Speaker
there are phenomena which could be in any of these categories depending on how of how it moves you know and they're they're vague they've got loose boundaries um but they're they're deployed in different ways and there's a really interesting one happening at the moment actually where the the the term cult as it was employed in the sort of 60s and 70s has completely changed it's now almost exclusively used in a political
00:48:17
Speaker
modality. It no longer necessarily means, you know, half a dozen people living on a farm, and one of them is a profit. It now means, like, in the sense of a cult of personality, right? It is a political cult of Trump, for example, is a common phrase we see in the media all the time now.
00:48:37
Speaker
And you see it as well in whoever is the most left-wing politician in the country and whoever is the most right-wing person in the country. They're presented as cult leaders. So it's completely shifted its meaning in what it's referring to.
00:48:56
Speaker
a relatively short time. To the point that actually during the pandemic we've had talks about cults of economists and cults of epidemiologists depending on whether you think the right response to Covid was the economic response of opening borders and resuming trade or the epidemiological response
00:49:16
Speaker
of well actually we need to control the virus and then go back to situation normal once the virus is either eliminated or has transmuted in such a state that it actually just becomes like a common cold. And so we referred to whoever was the rival view at the time as having a cult-like mentality. So the economists are engaging in cult-like thinking or the epidemiologists are engaging in cult-like thinking.
00:49:42
Speaker
Yeah. And it's a very good strategy for delegitimizing the arguments of other people. But it sort of entirely functions on the idea that the majority are correct. I mean, that's maybe a mundane point to make, but you know, all of these are
00:50:02
Speaker
If you're in the minority view, that's a cult and therefore it means you haven't reached a different conclusion to me by rational means and perhaps with a different set of evidence.
00:50:19
Speaker
you're not thinking, right? The only reason you could be thinking something which isn't the same as with the majority of people is if you essentially have been brainwashed, your own volition has been taken away and you've become a sort of mindless, a member of an unthinking group. And I don't know, that seems to me to be kind of an anti-democratic move.
00:50:45
Speaker
I mean, it sounds like in those situations when we start talking about conspiracy theorists in that way, we're engaging in what might be on one level a folk psychological diagnosis of particular traits that make them think differently or
00:51:01
Speaker
you're a social psychologist actually looking for the psychological traits that you think actually lead to this unwarranted belief in conspiracy theories, which is really problematic. And this kind of brings me to the other big topic. So we're both members of the reading group that I run on conspiracy theory. Theory
00:51:24
Speaker
And you made the rather explosive claim about a month ago that you think that maybe the work in social psychology, when it comes to at least to talk about conspiracy theory theory, might be showing some evidence of being a degenerating research program that maybe they're trying to find answers to a problem which actually doesn't exist in the sense that they think it exists.
00:51:51
Speaker
There's been a lot of work in social psychology in the last decade or so. So just before Trump's election, you start to see a lot of work in social psychology start to emerge, trying to define what counts as a conspiracy theory, what are the characteristics that we see associated with conspiracy theorists that lead them to this unjustified or rational belief in these particular conspiracy theories.
00:52:19
Speaker
and we've seen a lot of definitions be raised and then discarded, and a lot of experimental work, which is pointing towards psychological traits, but those traits end up being really inconsistent. Sometimes they explain why people have conspiracy beliefs, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they only explain certain kinds of conspiratorial beliefs, but they don't explain other ones.
00:52:45
Speaker
And so after this end of this really long conversation about a recent forthcoming paper by Karen Douglas and Robbie Sutton, you were making the claim that look, it seems that once again, they're trying to come up with a definition which explains the work that's already being done, rather than actually trying to create a framework for doing work going forward.
00:53:11
Speaker
Right. Yeah. And I may be kind of sensitive to this because this has been an ongoing problem in the study of religion as well, where you have to sort of, there are still scholars who are trying to come up with a definition of religion. And to me, this puts the cart before the horse. You're attempting, you're not really defining something in the
00:53:35
Speaker
the proper sense of drawing a boundary around a set of data that you're then going to use. What you're doing is you're trying to construct a sentence that captures as much of the things you've already decided are part of this category or have already been decided for you. The problem is that things like religion and conspiracy theories
00:53:56
Speaker
start in an undefined popular discourse and are used in multiple and often contradictory ways. I don't know how useful it is for scholars to sort of define terms like that because I think it just, first of all, nobody cares, right? You can define something any way I want. It's not going to change how, you know, Joe Public uses the term or politicians use the term or whatever.
00:54:24
Speaker
But also it's just bound to fail because there's no single thing. But I think the social psychology approach to this is thinking that there is a central thing on two levels. So one is that
00:54:41
Speaker
there's a problem they they always approach it from the this this is a social problem and then secondly they want to define conspiracy theories in a very scientific modality as though conspiracy theories were a natural kind right so that they're like
00:55:02
Speaker
urban or you know oxygen or something as though that there's a simple way that it can be defined rather than a social category which is it doesn't have a single thing at its centre, its centre is in language essentially and so that's why I think you're seeing this you know recent tendency to try and you know summarise that the last 10 years or so of work and to
00:55:31
Speaker
systematize it and really sort of see where they are. What like can they produce a definition? Can they have a standardized approach? But it seems to me more like that it's a
00:55:46
Speaker
a degenerating program in the sense that it is no longer capable of making predictions that are then testable, but it's more attempting to shore up the subject itself. And you see that, I mean, a clear example of that is the definition that Douglas and Sutton put forward, which is just like, it's got about 15 clauses, it's three lines long.
00:56:15
Speaker
There's no sense in which that is what people mean when they say conspiracy theories, right? It's deeply abstracted. And I think maybe psychology has been the victim of its own success here because there is a sense in which the findings of social psychology, I think, are very appealing. They're usually testing a fairly simple hypothesis.
00:56:41
Speaker
and they are very clear in their methodology. The methodology involves numbers and tables, so it's very easily communicable and often presents an answer to a single question. Now, if you're a very busy legislator or you're a journalist or you're a politician and you need this stuff, this information boiled down and accessible very quickly, then this work is perfect.
00:57:11
Speaker
It's got a clear message. It can be described in a few sentences. And that's not always the case with more nuanced and social scientific and critical work.
00:57:24
Speaker
And I think that has meant that they get a lot of attention and they also get a lot of funding to do more work, especially because a lot of the people providing the funding also see the theories as inherently a social problem. And so that approach fits ideally.
00:57:48
Speaker
but it's clear when you start looking into these details that there's quite a lot of
00:57:57
Speaker
massaging, that's maybe too hard. But there's definitely, there is a smoothing off to get to the arguments that's being made a lot of the time. So sometimes there'll be a very clear example, right? So they'll start with, conspiracy theories are a social problem. And so we need to deal with them. To do this, we're going to compare a number of different theories and see how deviant the people who hold them are.
00:58:24
Speaker
how conspiracy theories are not always wrong so we're going to ignore the ones that are wrong and they're not always irrational so we'll ignore any that aren't irrational and so we've got this test to find out whether conspiracy theories are related to irrational and dangerous ideas and so we're and to do that we've only looked at irrational and dangerous ones and we've concluded that they're irrational and dangerous well of course you have yeah so it's the it's the classic case of look
00:58:53
Speaker
I want to diagnose what's wrong with these theories. I'm only going to look at the theories which it's wrong to believe in in the first place. I'm going to show it's wrong to believe in theories. It's wrong to believe in.
00:59:04
Speaker
Yes, exactly. Yeah. And to be fair, this is not only a problem for social psychology or even, you know, any sort of quantitative studies, you see the same thing. And, you know, to take an example from religious studies where people say, where did his power as a speaker come from? Well, it came from his natural charisma. All right, what's charisma? Charisma is where you're a powerful speaker and you can convince people of stuff.
00:59:35
Speaker
These kind of loops happen all the time where you define something in one way and therefore are surprised to find that that's how it functions.
00:59:44
Speaker
But I think it's a particular problem that that process is often obscured in this kind of social psychological work. It's either hidden in footnotes where they're, you know, oh, by the way, we've added a constant to all of the results to make it work, for instance, or we've ignored such and such a paper because if we include that, it's inconclusive or, you know, rejecting a large amount of data because it doesn't fit
01:00:13
Speaker
your idea of the category when you're about to test that category. And conspiracy theories, of course, there's the additional complication of things don't always stay conspiracy theories, right? You get ideas, like, for instance, a few years ago, the idea that these
01:00:32
Speaker
security services were monitoring all telecommunications or the existence of the Bilderberger group. If you go back to 20 years when we started working, that was very much the domain of David Icke and Alex Jones. It's now completely out in the open and no longer regarded as a conspiracy theory.
01:00:52
Speaker
But those things are then, of course, removed from the category. You don't consider them as part of the data, which has the effect of the category of conspiracy theories can never lose the stigma of being irrational because if something becomes rational, it gets taken out of that data set and there's no longer a conspiracy theory. So the conspiracy theory, the way that we use it always has this implication of something being irrational or, you know, inherently just wrong for whatever reason.
01:01:22
Speaker
And there's a nice example of that in the way that some of the social psychological literature on conspiracy theory links talk of conspiracy theory belief with paranormal beliefs. So we take it that typically paranormal beliefs are
01:01:38
Speaker
non-ordinary and weird. So people who believe in ghosts are weird, people who believe in telekinesis are weird, people who believe in astral projection are weird. So they go, look, all these weird paranormal beliefs, and they seem highly similar to conspiracy theory beliefs, but they never talk about the religious beliefs.
01:02:01
Speaker
The religious beliefs, because they're part of acceptable societal beliefs and discourse, which appear to also be paranormal beliefs. I mean, if you believe in a Trinitarian God, you believe in one entity in three parts, one part of which is a literal ghost.
01:02:22
Speaker
And yet somehow that's pushed to one side. That's a Trinitarian belief, which is fairly standard Christian belief, unless you're a Unitarian. No, no, that's normal. That doesn't fall under the rubric of people who believe this also believe other things as well.
01:02:39
Speaker
Right. And there's two really interesting things there. One is that the idea of paranormal or supernatural follows in ideas of religion, right? So something like
01:02:55
Speaker
that there's a thing called a ghost which isn't part of religion, but an angel that is part of religion. That separation comes from what is included in Christianity and what isn't. Because 70 odd percent of people in most countries in the Anglosphere, in the Christian world, believe in ghosts to some degree. And UFO belief is similarly high.
01:03:22
Speaker
So then when you have one of these surveys talking about supernatural and connection between supernatural and conspiracy things, they even have to be cagey about how they define supernatural because there are elements of things that we think of as being supernatural, which are just normal parts of everyday life and or religious belief in other parts of the world. You know, like ghosts, there's nothing marginal about that in China, say, right?
01:03:52
Speaker
other parts of Southeast Asia.
01:03:55
Speaker
But supernatural and paranormal may also include things that are taken from indigenous traditions that are sometimes thought of as religious, right? Something like dream catchers or feng shui or, there's probably a million examples, right? Where do you put something like Reiki, right? Is that a religious practice or is that a paranormal belief? And that's the kind of decision- Is it just an alternative medical modality?
01:04:23
Speaker
Right. Right. And these sort of so even in including anything supernatural or paranormal, you're still making these boundary decisions. Now, I mean, chiropractic is a great example there because chiropractic technically is about subluxations in the spine, which means to spiritual misalignment, which thus causes all your illnesses. And in some parts of the world, chiropractic is taught as part of standard Western medical treatment.
01:04:51
Speaker
in other parts of the world, it's an alternative modality you can take at med school, but it's not part of the core curriculum. And in other parts of the world, it's considered to be superstitious nonsense. Yeah, absolutely. So all of these, all of those, the uses of those categories and the examples that you put into those categories are again, simply reproducing this particular Western order, the order of things, right, where
01:05:19
Speaker
The paranormal's okay because that's like folk, beliefs, religions, that's protected, that's a good thing. Anything which doesn't really fit in any of those is conspiracy theories, but we're free to move anything from any of those three boxes depending on how our positionality changes, how things pan out. The other thing is the question, so why isn't religion included in these?
01:05:47
Speaker
It's such an obvious move and it troubles so many of the models that that are being used, particularly in social psychology, but in a lot of cases as well. And there's there's like three possibilities. One is that they're just so inculcated. The idea of religion is part of the order of things of this is this is just there.
01:06:13
Speaker
that they don't consider something like transubstantiation or virgin birth or whatever to be non-empirical. They just don't know this. The second is that
01:06:29
Speaker
They are aware of it as an issue but they don't want to include it in the analysis because they think it will anger people and possibly mean that they don't get their funding or not be approved by the university or whatever. Certainly I know that there are cases where if you're talking about religion that
01:06:49
Speaker
marketing teams for universities will not include it in their social media campaigns for instance. And the third option is that they don't put it in deliberately because they know it will upset the results. If conspiracy theories are a problem because they are non-empirical or non-rational or what was the term they used in
01:07:15
Speaker
in the Sutton paper we're talking about, empirically warranted, empirically epistemically risky, right? However you choose to put it, they're less likely to be true. They form larger narratives that potentially affect politics, they involve
01:07:42
Speaker
powerful agents working to accept plan but keeping it secret. They often involve supernatural or metaphysical modalities of knowledge or being. Any one of those things
01:08:00
Speaker
applies to religion as well. Now, I'm not saying that the way that we understand conspiracy theories and religions are identical, but every part in constructing a definition of conspiracy theories that in any way includes the data that we always include in conspiracy theories today, every single one of those factors, religion complicates it. So we need to think then about what are the implications
01:08:28
Speaker
where if we are still insisting that conspiracy theories are an inherently dangerous way of thinking, and yet we cannot clearly delineate it from this other set of ideas which we regard as inherently beneficial and ultimately in some cases as an essential aspect of modern society.
01:08:53
Speaker
That is for me the most interesting question and the complete silence from it from social psychology is curious to say the least. And I think that brings us quite nicely back to Ike, because as we said before, if Ike had been endorsed by the Bishop of Canterbury when he came out with his Messianic clones,
01:09:19
Speaker
maybe British society. I actually don't imagine if the Archbishop of Canterbury actually endorsed David Icke, things would have gone any better for him. I think actually the Bishop of Canterbury, the Archbishop, would have been laughed out of his office at the same time. But at the same time, as we said earlier, even though there are virulent views in David Icke's worldview,
01:09:43
Speaker
The kind of worldview he puts forward actually would fit in quite nicely in almost any evangelical Christian church you might come across. As long as we act together, we have the right kind of beliefs. We work together as a society to defeat the systemic evils which are
01:10:02
Speaker
at the heart of what causes human illness, then things are going to get better, which makes them quite different from Alex Jones, who quite regularly at least appears to be asking his listeners to engage in violent revolt against the state. David Icke is simply telling people, look, if we all have the right thought and we believe the right things, things are going to be better. And that makes David Icke a really interesting case.
01:10:29
Speaker
of a conspiracy theorist there, because a lot of what he says is being said by pastors and bishops in churches all over the UK. But because David Icke also believes in alien shapeshifting reptiles, his beliefs are unusual and thus not acceptable, whilst the religious beliefs being expounded from pulpits everywhere in the UK is kind of within the ordinary and is allowed to go ahead.
01:11:00
Speaker
I mean, I think there is a, there's an alternate history where Ike becomes more of a de facto religious figure, you can see
01:11:12
Speaker
immediately after that sort of Wogan fallout where there's a press conference where it's him, his wife, his girlfriend and his daughter and they're giving a sort of press conference and they're all dressed the same and you get the sense
01:11:34
Speaker
you know, at that moment, I could easily have moved into the register of someone like, like Herf Applewhite and Bonnie Lou Nettles, you know, the sort of Heaven's Gate or something like that, of, you know, gathering a group around him and looking more at ways of life and things, right? So more of a client, kind of religious entrepreneur.
01:11:59
Speaker
And that ultimately didn't happen, obviously. But I mean, it's it seems obvious like his predominantly best. He's best viewed as a religious figure. I mean, he's clearly a prophetic kind of figure and a leader figure. And it's as you say, it's a couple of specific kind of things that that mean he's completely excluded from from that
01:12:29
Speaker
And the thing which I find fascinating about Ike is that he's not only well understood, I think, as a religious figure, he's also quite a conservative religious figure who fits in with the general conservative attitudes of most other dominant religious figures in Western society. Because the thing which struck me from sitting through two of David Ike's talks, he actually doesn't want people to do anything. He just wants you to belong to the creed,
01:12:58
Speaker
Pay the tithe, buy his books, believe what he believes, and the world will just naturally become better as long as you have faith. And that does seem to be the kind of standard view of many of the dominant churches. You don't need to do anything, you just need to be a member and that is sufficient to change the world.
01:13:18
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, he does talk about sort of non-compliance and things from time to time. That might be a post 2016 thing. So I think under the Covid thing, he's become very anti Covid and thus doesn't want anyone to wear masks.
01:13:34
Speaker
Well, he just started talking about that stuff when I saw him in 2012 because it ended with the non-complied dance where they had like sort of people banging drums. Oh, that was not part of his tour down, I have to say. So that's interesting.
01:13:51
Speaker
The Wembley show was deliberately the biggest show he ever did. It was quite a conscious thing. It became a bigger aspect of his work later on, particularly under the Covid period.
01:14:08
Speaker
But yeah, I mean, it's essentially, it's a message of love. The future is more or less spelled out. Always with Ike and people like Alex Jones as well, you get this sort of...
01:14:23
Speaker
double, double teleology, where it's, it's, it's almost, it's always the darkest point of night. And that's why you can see the green shoots coming, right? So it's like simultaneously apocalyptic and millennial, right? So there's a better future coming, but to get there, you have to go through this, this dark patch, right? Which of course means you're always at the same point of crossing. You never actually move forward.
01:14:52
Speaker
But but yeah, as you say, so teleological message, message of oneness, all religions are ultimately the same thing. Yeah, it could fit in entirely with any number of sort of interfaith kind of movements. Yes, David Eicher is all things to all all people, at least he tries to be. Yeah, I to be fair, I've fallen off following him.
01:15:20
Speaker
A couple of years ago, the last I was listening to him would have been about 2020 when the lockdown was on. There was a series of YouTube stuff. The Davidite Dot Connector, his series of videos, he explains the last thing he read in five minutes on this.
01:15:42
Speaker
That's right. And how everything that happens somehow demonstrates his overarching kind of argument and worldview. It was basically he was one of the first people to be a public sort of spokesman against lockdowns and vaccination. And so he got a bit of a press for that. But I haven't actually read one of his books for a few years, largely because having read
01:16:10
Speaker
every book up until I think 2016, The Lion Sleeps No More. Oh, yes, yeah. Having read every single one of the books in chronological order up until then, it becomes clear each book rehashes the previous one and then adds a little bit at the end. So I kind of decided to stop reading every one as it came out for a while. But I've got the answers sitting there in my Kindle yet to read.
01:16:39
Speaker
So maybe it's time to revisit. The difference between his talk in 2012 and his talk in 2016 was in 2012 he wasn't talking about the Archons and the Archontic virus, and in 2016 suddenly the virus was the new thing he was adding to his panoply.
01:17:00
Speaker
and thus that now explained all these other things in history that he had found mysterious. It was also quite clear what films he had watched in the interim because David Icke I think really really liked science fiction films and
01:17:15
Speaker
Yes. Seems to want to justify watching them by going, oh, no, there are the secret messages in these films I watch. I watch them for research purposes, not because I enjoy them. No, no, no. I watch them for research purposes. That's the only reason why I watched all of the Hunger Games films. It's the only reason it was research.
01:17:32
Speaker
I like the bit where he becomes a, when he becomes a grandparent and then children's films, they're not, they're Monsters, Inc. being a metaphor for the Archons coming to our world in secret and stealing our energy. That was a big part of the 2012 presentation.
01:17:50
Speaker
And yet at the same time, I have to assume having spent time with parents, he's only actually watched the first 15 minutes of Monsters, Inc. because then the children have got bored, wandered off, and then you have to start the film again from the beginning when they actually want to watch it again. So he's probably only watched 15 minutes of each of these films. I mean, to be fair, there are multiple levels in which the metaphor doesn't hold out, but you know, it did enough. I remembered it.
01:18:16
Speaker
But yes, there's David Icke, interesting character, and possibly not that long for the world. I mean, he's getting on. But Gareth has been set up as the natural successor. So that also, I think, brings you another religious aspect to the David Icke phenomena. There is the next person who's going to take on the mantle of the prophet. Yeah, so it's not institutionalized charisma.
01:18:45
Speaker
there's another word for it where the charisma is passed directly to anointed successor. His other son Jamie is also probably more involved than Gareth actually but tends to be more sort of behind the scenes. Ike transferred ownership of
01:19:08
Speaker
all of his business to the kids about 10 years ago, I think. So Gareth and Jamie and the daughter, whose name I don't remember right now, they own the company. So all the profits from his books, he's not making anything out of it. He's still named as an owner, but it's like with a penny, a share, whatever. So he is quite deliberately sort of
01:19:37
Speaker
using it to set his kids up. I mean Gareth's recording career seems to have more or less come to an end so I suspect that Gareth will be the
01:19:50
Speaker
They want to take it up. Yes, he will take the mantle. Now that actually brings me into my final question, and I think this is the most difficult question I'm going to ask you here. It's linked to succession, it's linked to the nation of Scotland. I want to know who is the best Scottish Doctor Who? Now there is actually a right answer here, but I want to know where you're going to get it.
01:20:14
Speaker
I just, I just want to be, I just want to be clear on our terms, right? So I can think of two, no, there's three, isn't there? Typically there's four because David Tennant's back, but it's a different doctor. Yeah, yeah. No, we'll ignore that because that hasn't, well, it's only been about five seconds.
01:20:35
Speaker
Right, so it's not Capaldi. I like Capaldi. He was great in the thick of it. He's not. I didn't like him. Steven Moffat did not serve him well with stories.
01:20:47
Speaker
No, I don't think so. Which means, I'm going to say it's Sylvester McCoy. That is the correct answer. Yeah. I'm not sure that, whilst David Tennant is Scottish, Tennant's Doctor Who, I think is 11, is that right? Yeah. He was not Scottish.
01:21:05
Speaker
Oh no, he was 10. He was 10, that's right, yeah. 10 and 14. His Doctor Who is not Scottish. Got a London accent. So I think it's arguable whether there are three Scottish Doctor Who's. There are three Scottish actors who've played Doctor Who, but there's only two Scottish Doctor Who's.
01:21:24
Speaker
and Sylvester McCoy is clearly the best one yes having met him as well he's a very funny and nice guy yeah i i met him at a convention in Auckland about 10 years years ago now and he's an absolute delight absolute delight yeah he's a he's a he's a cracking guy so it's it's Sylvester McCoy and i'm glad that we
01:21:46
Speaker
have found this area of common ground to end a podcast. We've got a lot of common ground. It's a terrible thing when friends disagree over Dr. Who. It's the kind of thing that can cause a rift in a relationship.
01:22:02
Speaker
or a space-time continuum for that matter. Well, it's true. Things get very timey-wimey from this particular output. Thank you. David has been a wonderful conversation, wide ranging with a lot of talk about David Icke. A lot of talk about David Icke, but he is hard to escape. He is hard to escape. It's the fountainhead. That is a scary thought. Thanks for inviting me. It's been great.
01:22:33
Speaker
The podcast is Guide to the Conspiracy, stars Josh Addison and myself, associate professor M. R. X. Denton. Our show's cons... sorry, producers are Tom and Philip, plus another mysterious anonymous donor. You can contact Josh and myself at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com, and please do consider joining our Patreon.
01:22:58
Speaker
And remember, the truth is out there, but not quite where you think you left it.