We’re Undermining Our Shared Reality and It’s Driving Us Nuts
Matthew Coleman killed his children in an effort to save the world. He was tragically mistaken, and we helped him stay that way.
The tragedy of the latest QAnon killing is that we are bound to keep making them the heroes of their own stories
Although we can knock on tables all we want and predict the motion of an object in space, reality is a lot more fragile than we’d like to believe. While there are bad actors who manipulate the facts that underpin our shared reality for their own ends, that doesn’t necessarily make us the victims.
As someone who writes pretty extensively about conspiracy enthusiasts and the cults their participation engenders, my constant refrain is that these people aren’t joking (and they are in no way a joke).
They are people responding to the same events and threats as everyone else. They are acting the exact same way you would if you knew what they did. They pity the rest of us in our blind acceptance of the status quo.
And they’re not necessarily wrong.
Our leaders (at best) hold us in paternal contempt. Our churches have lost their moral centers. The very notion of intellectual and moral authority has crumbled before our eyes.
In a black and white, Good versus Evil culture like ours, it doesn’t make sense to blame our woes on cultural atrophy. There has to be a grand obstacle to overcome. Reptilian Overlords are as good a foil as any.
A Holy Killer
Michael Coleman, who killed his children to save the world, was not, is not, a crazy person. If it were a movie instead of real life, we would all watch the hell out of it and recommend it to our friends. In fact, we probably already have.
Think Gregory Peck at the end of “The Omen.”
Think Christopher Walken at the end of “The Dead Zone.”
Think of any of the hundreds of books and movies that we love, and the tragic heroes who are understood only by the audience and themselves.
Think of the Holy Man Lot offering up his daughters to be gang-raped.
We come from a tradition of madmen being justified by the endurance of their faith. It is one of the things we prize most as a species, someone willing to do the right thing no matter the cost.
If you haven’t seen the story yet, Coleman discovered that his ex-wife had Reptilian DNA she had passed on to their children, guaranteeing that they would grow up to be minions of Satan, part of the Serpent Seedline.
California dad killed his kids over QAnon and 'serpent DNA' conspiracy theories, feds allege
A California surfing school owner who was charged with killing his two children in Mexico is a follower of QAnon and…www.nbcnews.com
He picked his children up under the guise of taking them fishing, drove them to Mexico and executed them with a spear gun. I can’t dwell on the children’s final minutes too long without feeling a wave of nausea pass over me that threatens to drag me down into utter despair.
While I’m down there, I see Coleman’s despair as well. By his own admission, he knew he was killing his children.
He understood that he was committing a murder for which the world couldn’t forgive him now, but for which history may commend him once the Reptilian Overlords are revealed and defeated.
He knows people will say he is crazy, but he also knows that he isn’t. Coleman made the ultimate sacrifice in an attempt to sway the battle between Good and Evil.
A “New” Kind of Belief
Contrary to its depiction in its latest rise to prominence, Reptilian possession is one of the oldest Christian beliefs, one the Catholic Church is still trying to explain away.
The best they’ve been able to do since distancing themselves from Bible literalism is by extending the metaphor. The Serpent Seedline for them now (as far as I can tell) is the will-to-Evil that God’s children are challenged to suppress.
Most Abrahamic religions have a version of this. The idea of Evil and Divine natures permeates religious texts and commentary across cultures. Reptiles nearly always represent the bad guys.
Everyone who believes that there was a literal or metaphorical Garden of Eden believes in some form of the reptilian conspiracy. It is a question of degree, not of kind.
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If Evil in the world comes from Satan, if it is part of the devil’s mandate to undermine the Good that God wants for the world, there are no bounds for how that battle plays out in our everyday lives.
It’s hard to write about this without sounding like some smarmy know-it-all, and I want to assure people of belief that I’m not writing with hate in my heart.
That said, all stories of murder in the name of religion, from Catholics and Protestants to Israelis and Palestinians to Christians and Muslims, look the same from the outside.
I’ve wondered in the past whether the moral certainty that comes with true belief isn’t what attracts violent people to religious practice.
I guess I ought to assure everyone at this point that I don’t think it is necessary to stand in Coleman’s shoes and try to understand him. I do not believe for a second that there is a Serpent Seedline, let alone that some surfer dude was able to discern its presence in his children.
Further, I do not have the imagination to concoct a scenario where any being, physical or metaphysical, could convince me to do violence to any child (let alone my own) as a way of saving the world.
I do want to ask us to overcome our revulsion at the person and act and imagine our part in creating a world where we all live comfortably in competing realities.
The Battle Between Big “E” Evil and Big “G” Good
When we read Coleman’s horror story, it feels good to throw a capital letter on the Evil he committed. It is so much easier to take. But the very instinct by which we want to call his actions Evil supports his claim that they were Good.
By his own admission, Coleman did evil in the service of Good, so it might make sense to worry more about the capital letters because that’s where things get a little sticky.
Challenging the Good versus Evil worldview jeopardizes the moral outrage that gives us comfort and allows us to condemn without mercy. We have to chance entering a morally gray area where we participate with no small level of enthusiasm in a culture that generates acts of Evil.
As Jonathan Gottschall puts it in his fantastic The Story Paradox, we all are the protagonists of our own stories, and good guys need bad guys.
What To Do When the Disease Is the Cure
Solving competing realities in ‘The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears Them Down’medium.com
Conflict drives stories that we care about, true or not. The stories that stick, the ones that enter the cultural conscience the easiest, are clear-cut Good versus Evil tales.
The fact that life is nothing like that means we have to reimagine our experiences in terms they don’t have. We don’t live in a black and white world, but our enemies do. We are a culture looking for and finding the easiest villains, and this moral laziness finally has driven us all over the edge.
I would love us to see these conspiracy-driven crimes recognized less for their outrageousness and more for their prescience. These are canaries in coal mines (I’ve said elsewhere that they’re the lump in our breast).
We’re in a cultural crisis that I believe has already fractured reality. We occupy multiple worlds with multiple truths, and I don’t know how much longer we can take it.
If I don’t know for certain that you are part of my “We” then I have to see you as a potential threat until proven otherwise.
Gottschall argues that historically, the only kind of government that works is totalitarian. He doesn’t love the idea or even hint at endorsing it, but how many of us would vote to silence the Covid-deniers (and the anti-vaxxers generally)?
Accepted logic says that if we don’t want people to believe bad stories we have to tell them better ones. The problem is we’re always going to need a plausible bad guy.
In the case of Covid, there really aren’t any. “Them” already has been taken by the conspiracy crowd. In a balanced, well-structured story, that just leaves “Us” as the new bad guys.
In the End ‘We’ Really Is the Villain
I argued in my own story about Reptilian-based killings that the rise of QAnon and the proliferation of conspiracy cults is a symptom of the Old Time religions dying and the realization that if professional politics was ever about civic service, it certainly hasn’t been in a long time.
Human beings are a species that needs to connect socially. We have to know our friends from our enemies, the fact that this is left over from a primitive tribal past notwithstanding.
If I don’t know for certain that you are part of my “We” then I have to see you as a potential threat until proven otherwise.
Flirting With Insanity Is Dangerous
“Even the most well-adjusted person is holding on to his or her sanity by a greased rope”bytonyrusso.medium.com
Worse, we all seem to demand perfect conformity, no matter how much we protest to the contrary. We describe people as (for example) Trumpers, as if by saying that we can reduce everything about them and thereby render their entire worldview meaningless, evil, wrongheaded, or all three.
What’s tragicomic is that, while we have the power to understand and connect with the most people in the most subtle ways, we still choose a thumbs up or down, black and white interpretation of our multifaceted human experience. Everyone is always either with us or against us in ways we find repugnant when the same standard is applied to us.
A new perspective, where evil is the villain and we work together to identify it and root it out, seems like it might be worth adopting, but it is goddamn hard and certainly not as memeable as it needs to be.
Worse, it would not only require us to give up on Good and Evil but also to collectively define what “evil” is.
In a world where evil is subjective and currently includes eating shellfish, blasphemy, racism, and child murder, that is a depressingly tall order.
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Tony Russo is a journalist and author of “Dragged Into the Light: Truthers, Reptilians, Super Soldiers, and Death Inside an Online Cult.” Subscribe to his Bagel Manifesto here.