What's the Deal with Ivermectin?
Conspiracy Theories, Cargo Cults, and the Collective Unconscious
I miss those old kitschy Home Remedy books…
When the headline below made it through my wall of wu wei, I knew something was up. Seems like the rednecks of reddit and Bitchute don’t want Bill Gates vaccine and are opting for Round-Up Lite instead. But then I did some digging and which of the following do you think are true?
People have used Ivermectin and died
Ivermectin is a dewormer
Ivermectin is an effective anti-inflammatory
Ivermectin may stop COVID-19 cells from duplicating
Ivermectin's developers won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2015
Ivermectin is also formulated for humans
People have used Ivermectin and gotten better
According to our National Institute of Health, all of the above. And not in a “mythopoetic religious parable” kind of truth either. That comes next.
Conspiracy Theories as Collective Nightmares
If you are at all into Black Mirror, Stranger Things, James Bond, or anything remotely Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror, I don’t know why you aren’t at least a little curious about conspiracy theories. They’ve been compared to new religions, various narratives of the supernatural and legendary that spring up in the wake of the Death of God. As a student of history, I don’t think it’s so simple.
Secret counter-narratives and paranoid rumors have always existed since before religion got organized. The one thing that most gnostics can agree on, for example, is that the Christian God is not the real God but an evil impostor who’s tricked us all into worshipping him. Likewise, the one thing most conspiracy theorists can agree on is that the authorities are hiding something. The thing that’s being hidden? That can tell you a lot about our society’s mental state.
Psychoanalyzing Pizzagate
Here’s an example: I don’t care if it’s true whether Hillary Clinton actually sacrifices children to the owl god Moloch in the basement of a DC pizza parlor. What matters is the semiotics: why would people believe that. With the gnostics, you can kind of understand why the whole “God is actually the devil” story became a widely held belief amongst gnostics as Christianity went mainstream and those practicing in secret had to either join the crowd or find another story which, if made public, would get them crucified. With the “Clinton Kills Kids for Moloch” story, you need to unpack the symbolism a bit more.
Why Hillary Clinton? A female authority figure, emasculating, mother, and most importantly, pushed by the mainstream. For the natural contrarian, that last bit alone is enough to be suspicious.
Why kids? Pedophilia is widely agreed upon to be the most heinous crime. Never mind that the Ancient Greeks turned it into a formal institution, or that certain tribes and billionaires do it, the corruption and killing of children is the exact opposite of our civilization’s pledge to protect innocence. If we aren’t about protecting the weak and vulnerable, then we’re just mechanized savages. I’m convinced this is the main reason why you know of Totoro, Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, and their creator, Hayao Miyazaki, even if you’ve never seen any other anime. The Miyazaki girl is the embodiment of that ideal of purity and innocence which stirs our protective instinct enough to build walls and drill formations and follow laws. At the very least, it’s gotten millions of westerners to overlook an entire genre’s reputation for big eyes, tiny mouths, and tentacle perversion and acknowledge that some anime is art.
Why Moloch? Aside from the name coined for the giant concrete owl at Bohemian Grove, Moloch was traditionally understood to be a god to whom the Biblical Canaanites sacrificed children. The sacrifice of children is itself recognized to be a ritual representation of the destruction of one’s future potential for gains in the present. The fact that we are trillions of dollars in debt with no plan of how to pay any of it off other than to let the future generations take care of it can be seen as a sacrifice to Moloch. The sending off of 19 year-olds to die in pointless wars so that we are distracted from this looming debt is a sacrifice to Moloch.
More recently, Moloch has become an owl, the symbol for Athena, goddess of knowledge and strategy. Why the change when artists more frequently depicted the deity as a bull? Because hooking an entire generation of children on an entertainment network of illusions created by phones, tablets, and computers to mine their behavioral data for advertising and social control is a sacrifice to Moloch.
Put it all together and what do you get?
Hillary sacrifices children to Moloch = The ruling power structure is ruining future generations for arcane knowledge on how to control us.
Even if they aren’t doing so literally, some part of our collective shadow feels this is happening figuratively.
Where the Cargo Cults Come In
While it’s true that people have used Ivermectin and gotten better, studies have yet to show that they’re getting better because they took it. Nonetheless, horse dewormer continues to fly off the shelf because people heard about it from a source they trusted and didn’t actually look deeper. Why? Cargo Cult mentality.
It works like this: You see a plane that brings you food, and you confuse cause and effect. In the future, you attempt to get food by wasting precious resources building model planes. That’s proto-ritual gone wrong.
Likewise, you can’t vet all the info there is on what’s going on in the world, so you outsource it. Most people trust the media, but if you're in power and know how easy it is to co-opt the mainstream media or manipulated them to fit a narrative, then you don't trust it. There used to be an old joke pre-WWI about how wars get started. “Diplomats lie to journalists and then believe what they read in the papers.”
Because the regular news is compromised, you pressure your spy networks and silicon valley bros to find that magic info. If you couldn't fake normal long enough to get into the echelons of power or have zero charisma because of your paranoid (ahem, contrarian) tendencies, then you sign up with the conspiracy theorists.
Either way, very few are actually fact-checking anything or trying to reverse-engineer the algorithm to make sure the A.I. is actually intelligent. Very few are confident enough to know that you don't need to know. Instead, you just have mountains of data and a massive machine that probably isn’t processing it all correctly. And that’s how the surveillance state and the politicians who helped build it are operating off the same magical thinking as the conspiracy theorists and cargo cultists. You stop trying to verify for yourself and go by signs and symbols instead. Irrelevant factors like the plane that brought it to you or the person who said it.
Coming back to Ivermectin, if you’re automatically inclined to believe the opposite of what the media tells you because it’s the media, then every measure to get you to take the vaccine is a reason not to do it. Then some scientists cautiously mention Ivermectin and you remember seeing it at the Tractor Supply (no doctor is prescribing a drug for tropical parasites to COVID patients until the tests say it’s okay). You don't bother to figure out how it does it or what effective doses look like, and end up chugging poison to get well.
The Death of Nuance
It doesn't help that we are surrounded by noise today, from advertising to alternative news, and the only way to get attention is to take the EXTREME STANCE. What sounds better? That people are attempting COVID cures that have yet to be approved by the FDA, or that people are DRINKING HORSE DEWORMERS BECAUSE THEY READ IT ON QANON? What sounds better? The government effectively stimulus-checked future generations into debt slavery, sacrificing our youth to keep the beast we call the economy going. Or the president FEEDS YOUR CHILDREN TO AN ELDRITCH GOD IN EXCHANGE FOR POWER.
Bottom line: conspiracy thinking is happening on both sides, folks. Just because the program that fed it to you is better-funded and more polished doesn’t mean it’s any more true or less harmful. If conspiracy-mongering and clickbait media reportage doesn’t stop, then we’ll lose our common beliefs as a nation and our collective perception of reality will collapse.
It will be societal schizophrenia. All because we refused to make the time to do some actual thinking.
"All because we refused to make the time to do some actual thinking." Thanks for prodding us to do just that! (Even behind your wall of wuwei!)