the timboucher experience

I just wanted to remind myself to come back to this awesome Jacques Vallee quote from Fantastic Planet a couple days ago, in reference to the UFO phenomena:

Its characteristic feature is a constant factor of absurdity that leads to a rejection of the story by the upper layers of the target society and an absorbtion at a deep unconscious level of the symbols conveyed by the encounter.

To me, this seems like some sort of handbook on how to introduce symbolic content into a group of people - especially in the modern age. We have this problem of extremist literalism, where everything can only have one meaning. And if it does not match the meaning we already have, then we’re thrown into a state of cognitive dissonance, or else our cultural immune system is triggered to nullify the foreign body.

So to me, this quote from Vallee talks about using a sort of trojan horse attack. That is, you set up an exterior shell for an idea which will almost certainly be dissonant, which will trigger the systemic defenses. But once it is attacked and destroyed, thats when the real symbolic content leaks out into the non-rational part of the mind.

Also reminds me of this older post I did on a similar topic:

Culturally, its better to be labelled as an entertainer (better yet, a hack) than to be considered an artist (or an activist). Because an artist is understood to be somebody who creates culturally important, meaning-laden artifacts, which deserve to be critically examined and taken apart. Whereas an entertainer is considered just to be basically feeding people candy, and nobody really takes the cultural significance of it as being anything more than a whisper, if anything at all. And in that wise, an entertainer can slip in all kinds of subversive messages, right in plain sight. And they will easily slip by the cultural immune system, because they are just labelled as harmless “entertainment”.

Douglas Rushkoff sort of talked about this several years ago in his book Media Virus. Although, that book was much more targeted to using the media to surreptitiously launch messages. I think Vallee here is talking instead about not just the media portrayal of UFO and aliens, but the whole phenomena of actual sightings & abductions - which he refers to most frequently as some kind of control system.

Anyway, I was thinking that gnostic theology operates in something of a similarly absurd manner, although I’ve not yet formulated a complete thought on the subject. I think it centers around this whole idea that reality is a forgery. If you are somebody who is in power, you’re going to think this is absurd, because you are essentially in control of certain aspects of reality. If you adopt this notion too deeply, it might erode your confidence in your own power. But if you’re at the bottom of the totem pole, the notion that reality isn’t real would sink very deeply into you, infusing itself into your being.

Also somehow relevant is this quote from PKD’s A Scanner Darkly:

One of the most effective forms of industrial or military sabotage limits itself to damage that can never be thoroughly proven - or even proven at all - to be anything deliberate. It is like an invisible political movement; perhaps it isn’t there at all. If a bomb is wired to a car’s ignition, then obviously there is an enemy. But if an accident, or a series of accidents, occurs, if equipment merely fails to function, if it appears faulty, especially in a slow fashion, over a period of time, with numerous small failures and misfirings - then the victim, whether a person or a party or a country, can never marshal itself to defend itself.

If you were to read that quote as being about the UFO phenomena, you might be able to find some further insights into it, although I’ve yet to see just what. But yeah, like I said, still not a fully-formed thought, but that’s what I’ve got swimming around on it so far.

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