David Icke is weird. Let’s just get that straight up front. He’s the guy who all but single-handedly brought the concept of reptilian shape-shifters into otherwise “sensible” conspiracy theory. In doing this, there are many people who claim that he’s done the field a disservice by obscuring real and tangible problems and grievances with basically nonsensical claims about non-human entities posing as humans.

People in the anti-Icke camp seem to frequently put forward the theory that he is actually a disinformation agent in the employ of “the bad guys” whose sole purpose is to infiltrate and implode conspiracy circles by completely discrediting them in the eyes of the public. These same people tend to forget, of course, that it takes pretty much NOTHING to discredit conspiracy theories for your average schmoe. They already have been enculturated to basically ignore any and everything which doesn’t fit with the prevailing worldview. That’s not to say of course that Icke definitively is not one of the bad guys; I mean, who the hell knows? What I’m more curious about is his tactics from a symbolic standpoint.

In my estimation, David Icke is one of those people who seems to thrive on this whole “Prophet, or MADMAN?” brand identity. Like there’s an aspect about him which is totally serious, and then another that it almost seems like he’s issuing a (commonly missed) challenge to realize that even he is full of bullshit. Robert Anton Wilson is another person who really identifies with this image. The problem with treading a line like this though is that it’s easy to fall into the abyss below. To me, both Icke and RAW tend to do that, sometimes more and sometimes less.

The interesting thing with Icke, I think, is that he’s become virtual synonymous with this “reptilian shape-shifter” idea. There’s just about no separating it from him. RAW always tried to stay much more nimble, never pinning himself down to one specific methodology (which in and of itself eventually becomes a methodology, of course). Anyway, in the many discussion of Icke’s reptilians, I’ve never once seen anybody even suggest for the briefest moment that maybe Icke is using a mythological symbol, rather than a hard fact.

What I’m saying is that maybe he’s not a madman or a nincompoop. Maybe he’s playing a very clever game with archetypes. Either consciously or not, maybe he realized we already have a really deeply ingrained symbol of evil in Western culture: the serpent and the dragon. And maybe by tapping into this deep deep well of imagery and legend, he’s able to make a semiotic short-hand connection between this idea of “ultimate evil” and the crooked men and women who are running the affairs of the world into the ground.

Just like I don’t see the gnostic idea of “archons” necessarily as being these physically real beings, maybe what Icke is trying to do is grab hold of the idea of “inhumanity”. Maybe he just figured out a way to sort of give it a “brand name.” So this way when some ruler is exposed for doing something totally fucked up, people can think “Oh, what reptilian behavior! A real person could never behave like that.” Maybe what he’s trying to highlight is the fundamental difference between what each of us knows as the value of human life, and the current strain of sociopathic leaders.

The obvious counter-argument is: If he’s just playing a sort of trick to make people realize something, wouldn’t it just be more effective to come out and actually just say all that? If you’ve ever read any of his writing, he pretty much does say all that, and much more. I’ve never seen him tip his hand about whether he invented the reptilian angle as sort of a “useful fiction” or not though. I don’t expect I will see it. The point I’m trying to make though is perhaps Icke has released what Douglas Rushkoff calls a “media virus“: essentially an idea which itself would never get replicated in the media because it was counter-cultural or had some other kind of agenda. By wrapping this message in a “viral shell” - in this case “Leaders are reptilian aliens” - the message gets picked up and replicated precisely because it doesn’t fit right. It seems stupid or crazy or naive. But once that message then does get replicated, it “injects it’s DNA” into the cultural dialogue.

Here’s a site that has a great quote from Rushkoff on the topic:

Media viruses exploit our repressed thoughts and energies … They are the hidden agendas of our popular culture–the closeted issues we have become too oppressive (or too politically correct?) to discuss in the light of day. If we are afraid to face spousal brutality, we get John Bobbit. Afraid of interracial marriage? O.J. An absolute monarchy? Camilla-gate. Child abuse? Michael Jackson. Disillusion of motherhood? Susan Smith. Media viruses [such as Heaven’s Gate] present us, in cartoonish simplicity and amplification, with the unspoken issues of our cultural present. They crystallize for us our diffused ambiguities so that we may discuss them in the safety of the ‘third person.’ They are like dreams and … tend to present us with the most pressing issues of our collective psychic shadow.

Ufologist Jacques Vallee also has a great quote on how things that are “absurd” have a way of getting past the rational mind and affecting deeper layers directly. Talking about the phenomenon of UFO encounters, he says:

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.

It’s basically a fancy way of saying “trojan horse”. But in this case, instead of soldiers coming out of a wooden horse, we have a bunch of ideas about the inhumanity and unworthiness of our rulers coming out of a giant wooden reptilian alien.