Tuesday Brunch: Christmas is a psyop

Plus the drones of New Jersey, the cult of Luigi, and a shamanic pump-n-dump

There’s a sort of post-psychedelic difficulty that CPEP hears about occasionally, quite rare, but nonetheless I’ve seen a handful of cases of it, and experienced it myself as well.

People sometimes emerge from psychedelic experiences wondering if they have got stuck in a different reality – an alternate timeline maybe, or a different world, or a dream, or perhaps they’re still tripping, or possibly they’re dead and they’re in the afterlife.

They are plagued by this persistent nagging feeling – I’m not in normal reality. This is some sort of artificial construct.

Someone just emailed CPEP about this – they asked ‘am I still tripping?’

And of course, the philosophical paradox of this question is no one can tell you ‘no, this is real’ because they could be part of the dream as well.

This sort of Truman Show / Matrix experience is called derealization – ordinary reality seems unreal, uncanny, fake, artificial, staged.

Derealization and how to treat it is not completely understood but it’s thought to be a defensive trauma response to life-threatening or ego-threatening situations. The limbic or emotional system gets switched off, affect gets flattened, and consciousness dissociates from what is happening. This can be adaptive in the moment, but then people get stuck in this dissociative response and reality continually takes on this weird unreal vibe.

I experienced it myself for two weeks after an ayahuasca retreat and wrote about it in Breaking Open and Holiday from the Self – I had moments where I was really convinced I was in a dream or in the afterlife.

It didn’t help, of course, that I spent the entire week before the retreat binge-watching the final series of Twin Peaks – which is all about people being lost in alternate realities.

Some people are more prone to this sort of derealized / paranoid / quasi-psychotic state in ordinary life – particularly a certain sort of conspiracy theorist who thinks everything is fake / staged / a psy-op.

People like a well-known psychelic researcher I once met who told me the figure called Vladimir Putin was actually a double of a double…

Back in the 1990s, it used to be only fringe figures like Alex Jones who claimed that major global events were staged or world leaders were actually doubles.

Jones, you recall, was sued and bankrupted for claiming the Sandy Hook school shooting was staged and all the grieving parents were actors – a truly psychotic take on the tragedy.

Well, that Truman Show cultural vibe is much more mainstream now, on left and right.

Have you noticed? Everything is staged now. Hurricane Otis? Psyop. The Trump assassination attempt? Staged. Taylor Swift’s relationship with Travis Kelce? Fake. January 6? An FBI plot (that last one was re-tweeted by the incoming vice-president…)

And the freaky thing is, sometimes, just occasionally, stuff does turn out to be staged and completely fake. We live in a world where it’s harder and harder to tell the fake from the real, the authentic from the AI-generated.

I like many others watched and retweeted the extraordinary footage of a Syrian prisoner being found by a CNN reporter in a cell. He had been in solitary for months, he said, and wasn’t aware that Assad had fallen. He blinked up at the sky and thanked Allah. Wow what a moment!

Fake.

It wasn’t staged by CNN – though it certainly made them look stupid - it was staged by the ‘prisoner’ himself. It turns out he was a notorious interrogator and torturer at the prison, who worked out the best way to escape when the rebels liberated the prison was to pretend to be a prisoner.

Truly, one of the performances of the year.

If you’re a liberal centrist normie like me, these are tough times. The experience is one of constant bewilderment and defeat.

There was a sense during the pandemic of liberals manning the barricades for ‘evidence-based reality’, fighting off the barbarian extremists and conspiracy-theorists looking to widen the Overton Window and mainstream their fringe ideas.

Well, that battle is over. Reality has been breached. The Overton Window has been smashed. The cathedral lies in ruins. There is no consensus reality anymore.

On LinkedIn, I saw someone from the NHS post a BBC story about Steven Bartlett, host of ‘Diary of a CEO’ podcast (one of the top podcasts in the UK). The article criticized Bartlett for spreading false health theories, and the NHS person said ‘Bartlett needs to save his credibility’.

Save his credibility??

The top media figure in the world, Joe Rogan, puts out whatever content he wants, promoting ivermectim, criticizing vaccines, suggesting aliens built the pyramids, and his ratings only go up. Liberal normies tried to cancel him a while back. Didn’t work at all.

No one cares what liberal normies think any more, or Hollywood liberal celebrities, or academic experts. The days when an academic could pompously tweet something like ‘molecular biologist here, let me just clear this up’ are over.

The liberal cathedral is in ruins and the supplement-peddling alternative media carnival barker is king. RFK is the next secretary of health in the US. It’s over.

I try to understand the new timeline or multiverse I find myself in. And one of the concepts I find useful is kayfabe, a carnival term used in wrestling, meaning something the audience knows is fake but enjoys and goes along with anyway.

Dominic Cummings, the architect of Brexit, often uses this term to describe the old liberal model of reality. He thinks it’s all staged, it’s all fake, it’s dangerously out of touch with reality.

But the populist revolution – isn’t that kayfabe as well? I mean, Donald Trump is a figure straight out of WWE, he’s appeared in WWE fights several times, he’s a larger-than-life, trash-talking cartoon just like a WWE character, his secretary of education nominee is the wife of the founder of WWE – she’s played a WWE character multiple times as well…Hulk Hogan ripped his shirt off at the Republican convention….Elon Musk challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a cage fight…In five years the presidential debate will be replaced by WWE Smackdown.

Is everything kayfabe now? Isn’t that the kind of uncertainty that oligarchs and autocrats thrive on, what Vladislav Surkov calls ‘managed democracy’, where you’re pretty sure everything is staged, but you go along with it because it’s a dazzling show?

Ah who cares, I’m a liberal centrist normie. I’m a refugee from the ancien regime, staggering through the streets of Paris in a daze, my bloodied wig askew.

After the paywall, a brilliant documentary on WWE and kayfabe, the drones of New Jersey (psyop?), the cult of Luigi, a shamanic pump-n-dump, and are non-verbal autists telepathic?

A very freaky Christmas, one and all.