Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

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I find Qanon fascinating in the abstract. It combines elements of conspiracy culture, the new age, and New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) Christianity.

These are three things that historically didn't go together, with the new age in particular being not entirely incorrectly associated with the occult. Of course new age is itself an odd hodge podge of occultism, spiritualism, new thought / "the secret" / prosperity gospel, appropriated native beliefs, and hippie counterculture stuff.

I also find Qanon deeply disturbing for its totalitarian tendencies, such as cheerleading for mass arrests and martial law. The combination of fringe Christianity with the new age has a not so great history with groups like Heaven's Gate and The Solar Temple. It's a combination that seems to self destruct as the new age and occult/magic(k)al influence brings out a strong tendency to try to immanentize the eschaton.

> cheerleading for mass arrests and martial law

One of the darkly hilarious parts of the latest "Q" drops was that the entire cast of Friends had been arrested and executed. (Why? One can only imagine it had something to do with laugh tracks.)

It feels like "Q" predicts "marshall" law (his acolytes can never get the spelling right), executions of public figures, or impending power grabs/coups every month or so. None of them pan out, but his followers will usually call those predictions "intentional disinfo."

I imagine the only way this kind of hysteria ends is with a new conspiracy theory. And that gets uprooted by yet another conspiracy theory. And so on until the heat death of the universe.

Someone I was close to was a former Seventh Day Adventist and I remember riding in a car with their father listening to an audio book retelling of the story of the beginnings of the religion, which consisted of a series of wild predictions of the date of rapture followed by disappointments and a new "corrected" date. I couldn't understand how the modern church could so openly embrace an origin story that seemed to me to undermine the legitimacy of the entire religion, paint it as founded by charlatans. But for believers the same facts seemed to have the opposite effect. I still don't really understand it but I think about it often in situations like this Q stuff.

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