Qanon Myths Interpreted
QAnon is a conspiracy theory movement that has been growing around a supposed insider whistleblower of the global power elite who goes by “Q”. They believe that Sars-Cov2 was made in a lab, released intentionally as a planned pandemic to corral the masses in fear in order to control them. They believe in a shadowy elite of wealthy families who have secretly run the world for centuries if not millennia, who are expertly pulling the strings in this grand manipulation, and that they are all pedophiles. They also believe that these elites, including much of Hollywood, take the blood of children and synthesize adrenochrome to drink to make them artificially young.
You immediately think of vampires, right?
Who are these evil people pulling the strings? The Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Builderburgs. Q combines many of history’s conspiracy theories into one amalgamation. Many of the same scapegoats from Nazi Germany still apply, including the Jewish bankers. The pedophilia accusation isn’t even all that new, although since prominent and connected Jeffrey Epstein was revealed to actually be at the head of a sex-trafficking ring, it is now what they use to label everyone they don’t like as evil.
Pizzagate, the theory that surfaced in 2016 claiming that Hillary Clinton was involved in an underground pedophile ring out of a pizza parlor in Ohio, apparently grew out of some strange emails leaked from Anthony Weiner’s laptop that people claim must be using common food terms as references for children they plan to have sex with. Based on these stories, a lone gunman entered this pizza parlor looking for the children trapped in the basement only to discover that there was in fact no basement.
Now, there is some reason to believe that Russian disinformation was behind Pizzagate and other anti-Clinton ads intended to help Trump win the 2016 election. US intelligence and Facebook discovered that indeed Russian fake news outlets were making up stories and buying targeted Facebook ads to influence US citizens. Perhaps Q is really a Russian disinformation agent.
Some speculate that the owner of 8-chan, an alt-right conservative living in Indonesia, is behind it since much of it grew on his network. Qanoners claim it isn’t one individual but many. In any case, lately, anyone who up publicly goes against Trump quickly gets lumped in with the other supposed pedophiles. Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, any Hollywood celebrities who are against Trump (which is most of them). Some of the ideas these people claim to be true are so far from reality that it makes their friends think they have lost their minds.
They believe all the news organizations are controlled by the deep state, despite the fact that the culture of journalism is completely centered around exposing corruption and conspiracy. Dismissing mainstream media makes it easy to believe whatever you find on the internet instead. They believe most democrats are in bed with the deep state, that communism is their agenda, that Bill Gates is going to implant microchips in all of us when they force vaccines on us, that 5G networks will be used to then control us through these nanobots in our blood, that this is all the work of Luciferians, and that somehow getting us to wear masks will soften us up to be controlled without questioning.
Oh, and did I mention that Donald Trump is the hero of this story, the rogue rebel fighting for our freedom? Yes, that couldn’t have anything to do with propaganda being spun during an election year, could it? What is particularly sad is that some politicians would be willing accomplices to this grand delusion in order to win an election — the ultimate gas-lighting of their own electorate.
Now, this isn’t new. This kind of conspiracy thinking has been going on for all of human history. Every town had its eccentric storytellers rambling on about their dark intricate theories of corruption and evil. Most people ignored them. But the internet is giving a global reach to particular preachers of the conspiracy gospel, and those fringe people who are prone to believe these ideas can more easily find each other and group up. That is why it is so intense.
Social media accurately pinpoints people with a susceptible mindset to these theories, people who are spiritually minded, anti-establishment, less educated, conspiracy-oriented. Just like those children vulnerable to sex trafficking — those lonely, in need of community, who want to be told they are “special” — many people can be particularly vulnerable to Q-propaganda luring them into the rabbit hole to join a special community of “good” “woke” people at war with evil.
Of course, they have no solutions to the world’s problems. This is because a war with evil can’t be won. Only a war with a specific enemy can. So instead of addressing the systemic problems we have in medicine, education, politics, corruption, and the ongoing industry of sex-trafficking, they label specific individuals to blame. This is when you get dangerous vigilantes killing politicians. This is when you get genocides and holocausts. This religious fervor can dwindle when not being fueled, but when a leader spurs them on, the war machine goes into action and people get hurt.
In every good lie, there is a thread of truth. In these theories, we see elements that intuitively seem to fit — ideas of corruption, wealthy elites, fake news feeding us propaganda… we do have corruption, wealthy people are influencing our government while the middle-class shrinks, the notion of truth has been all but destroyed — facts replaced with opinions — in the political circus that has evolved over the last 20 years. All of these stories are pointing to real problems, just not when taken literally.
If we look at these stories as religious myths and interpret them metaphorically, we can recognize why people might be drawn to them.
Why villainize the Clintons? A long-term political family who bend their words to win power, who question the definition of the word “is” to defend their deceptive perjury? They may not be running a pedophile ring out of a pizza parlor, but they are the symbol of politics as usual, manipulating public opinion to get what they are after — power. In some ways, aren’t they taking advantage of our children by continuing to push a system forward that doesn’t solve our problems, perpetual war, an economy that gives us less of the pie, and a planet that gives us more disease? This sounds a lot like the Deep State the Qanoners reference.
Bill Gates is not likely a pedophile drinking the adrenochrome of children. But what does he represent? Capitalism, big business, monopoly, tech, computers, vaccines — in other words, greed, oligarchy dominating the little people, technology turning us into slaves, and for-profit big pharma driving our medical culture into treating symptoms instead of root causes. Capitalism is promising us wealth, teasing us with greed while we get poor; big businesses are influencing our government thousands of times more than we can as individuals; technology is being used to harvest our data, reverse-engineer our psychology, and manipulate us to control our attention; and our healthcare system is failing us largely because greed is driving it to be so inefficient. The only way to solve these big systemic problems is to wake up from the hedonic treadmill of the capitalist culture keeping us asleep by constantly feeding us more needless things. “Wake up, sheeple!” they often say, while telling us the British royals were all fathered by the Rothschilds.
Now, pedophilia and sex-trafficking is real, and we can all agree to attack that problem together. But the Qanoners aren’t really working on that… they are actually disrupting the work of professional investigators tracking down sex-traffickers. Qanoners, like religious fundamentalists, aren’t interested in solving real problems but ending the eternal struggle of good against evil in a glorious final battle that allows their overworked minds to finally rest. In our very left-brained culture, that is probably a common urge.
Christian fundamentalists waiting for the rapture are loving this — they are looking forward to the end. They will vote for Trump especially if they see him as an instrument of chaos — an imperfect vessel carrying out God’s work. But if we interpret those scriptures metaphorically, we find a morality tale, a map to living a moral life, a message that following the straight and narrow way leads to greater fulfillment, and not to get lost in the empty path of pleasure and status-seeking. That isn’t so crazy after all when you look for the inner meaning.
Joseph Campbell once said that the greatest problem in American culture is the inability to grasp metaphor. Our dreams, our stories, our movies all tell us what is going on at a deep subconscious level, and by examining these myths, we make the unconscious conscious. The Qanon conspiracies are taken straight from our movies and our deepest fears about the future of humanity. These people spreading these theories aren’t intentionally creating chaos; they are doing what they are internally driven to do — sound the alarm to wake us up from the dream culture we are living in. Treat their stories not as alternative realities but as Zen Koans teasing the mind to question the most fundamental aspects of our lives. They are myths that reveal our subconscious needs bubbling up from the surface. Don’t let these people kill anyone, but don’t shame them for doing what they are programmed to do. This is a moment of reckoning, and we need to take notice and reassess our direction.
Much of the right has been thinking religiously for quite some time. They believe capitalism will make us rich when it has been bleeding the middle class dry for 50 years. They believe the free-market magically creates efficiency when it inherently leads to monopolies and poor workers. They believe socialism is evil and inevitably turns into communism and robs us of our freedoms, even though human beings have been organized in tribal societies for most of human history, consisting of a blend of meritocracy and socialism. They may have some very good points of contention with certain welfare programs that don’t empower people or give them the help they really need, that entitlements are difficult to get rid of once people expect them, and that more laws make us less free. But their faith in American exceptionalism prevents them from questioning our imperial foreign policy which has likely led to the terrorism we face in the world abroad.
And the right aren’t the only ones thinking religiously. The progressive left worships the idea of protecting us from pain even though pain is necessary for growth and for compassion to develop; everything is focused through the lens of the victim-abuser construct which inherently keeps us divided and triggers our defense mechanisms; emphasizing fragility over resilience keeps us weak, equality of outcome over equality of opportunity prevents fairness. Systemic racism, sexism, xenophobia, corporate greed abusing the worker… all very complex systemic problems that require the awareness and the will of an entire people to overcome. But what does the brain do? It anthropomorphizes the real problems into symbols of evil: rich people, police, male bosses who hit on female employees, Donald Trump. And the quick solution is to cancel these people because symbolically that will destroy the evil. It’s just like a conspiracy theory blaming all our problems on a few bad apples lurking in the shadows. But as you know, scapegoating doesn’t work. Shaming and canceling people has not stopped racism, sexism, or the power-imbalance at the root of these problems. They continue while we are distracted by the myth.
How many cops are we going to fire before we deal with the socio-economic disparity and culturally self-segregated communities of white and black families in America? How many men are we going to cancel before we deal with power relations between men and women in our culture?
And in the meantime, our zealous agenda to solve these problems by blunt force has created side-effects: a resurgence of white nationalists and traditionalists showing up to Black Lives Matter protests with weapons; the election of a deeply flawed narcissist to the presidency in order to fight the PC Police and its fascist ways. We now have to heal wounded white men so that we don’t create a civil war around these sloppy approaches to our problems. Lazy religious thinking has cost us dearly.
The QAnon conspiracy theory essentially says the world is run by evil people and there is one savior here to fight them: Donald Trump. And that is ridiculous. Even Steve Bannon believes Trump is merely a wrecking ball to the current establishment. But this is a messiah myth, like the story of Jesus, well seeded in our subconscious, and we want to believe it. Who wouldn’t want all the problems in society to be taken care of by someone else? The brain loves to let go. But we know that this is just a myth, and by interpreting it that way, we have abdicated our responsibility to each other and the world. The real wakeup call is for all of us to stand up and take responsibility, to learn how systems work, to dig down to the bedrock so that we can explain to others how systems work, to rise in our awareness to a level at which we can solve the very complex problems we face. Yes, it is you and I who will be rising to the occasion to be heroes of this story. The only messiah coming to save the world is us.