Now I myself must admit to having a a hard time fully wrapping my head around these ideas. My basic conception of RAW's hypothesis is that all thinking is really just an exercise in naval-gazing, but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. My interest, however, is not in the totality of the hypothesis itself (which in many ways I doubt) but it's interest in the idea of metaphors. Since becoming aware of this idea that "everything is metaphor" I have begun viewing various conspiracy narratives as metaphors for something else entirely and have found it very helpful. For example, the popular conspiracy theory among my fellow 20 something's right now is the viral phenomenon spread through Youtube videos and 'underground' hip-hop artists asserting that major stars in the music industry like Lady Gaga, Beyonce, and Jay-Z are being manufactured and promoted by the Illuminati as a way of social engineering the masses. While I personally find this theory preposterous I have found it a useful metaphor for how America's "cult of celebrity" distracts the population from more pertinent issues and how the music industry doesn't push politically-conscious artists.
This leads me to the most popular fad in the conspiracy community today: viewing current and historical events as psyops (psychological operations). Of course, this has always been a rather popular trend within the CC (conspiracy community) tracing back to the mysterious, possibly even fictitious James Shelby Downard and his colleague the revisionist historian Michael A. Hoffman II. Their most notable contribution to the field is infamous essay "King Kill 33°" in which the writers posit that the JFK assassination was a Masonic ritual known as the "Killing of the King" in order to not only achieve the US moon landing but also "as a mass-trauma, mind-control assault against the national body-politic of the United States." Hoffman would go onto to further develop this narrative of conspiracies as occult mind control psyops with his ideas of predictive programming and "The Revelation of the Method" in his 1992 book Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare. Although there exists prior examples of this narrative, such as in Stephen Knight's 1976 Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution which claims the unsolved Victorian murder case was orchestrate by Freemasons protecting the royal family while simultaneously committing the Ripper murders as ritual murders designed to invoke terror into the populace and reassert Masonic power, the publication of "King Kill 33°" in Adam Parfrey/Feral House's 1987 collection of paranoid awareness, Apocalypse Culture, has had perhaps the most far-reaching influence on perpetuating the current CC craze of viewing present and past events as psychological operations designed to control and influence the population at large.
TrineDay Publishing, headed by CC legend Anthony C. Sutton's protégé Kris Millegan, recently hearkened back to the Downard/Hoffman narrative with the release of The Most Dangerous Book in the World: 9/11 as Mass Ritual by S.K. Bain in 2012. Christian fundamentalists such as Fritz Springmeier and Texe Marrs have also latched onto the Downardian tradition of perceving major media events as occult psyops ritual being performed by secret societies, as have their more New Age counterparts like David Icke, Michael Tsarion, and Freeman Fly. That being said there are now similarly-themed narratives cropping up that leave out the occult ritual perspective.
An early post-9/11 example of this came in the form of the 9/11 Truth Movement's "No-Planers" contingent popularized by the likes of Nico Haupt, former George H.W. Bush aide Dr. Morgan Reynolds, and "The Webfairy" Rosalee Grable. According to this camps belief there were no planes hitting the Twin Towers on the day of 9/11 and that either black-op Holographic technology (see Stefan Grossman's rundown of this theory) or media-complicit "TV Fakery" (exemplified by the website/documentary September Clues) in which news networks deliberately altered the video evidence of the day. This latter group within the Truth movement has been promoted by Dr. James Fetzer, political assassination researcher and founder of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, who is noted for his claims of "video fakery" being utilized in the Zapruder Film showing the JFK assassination. Central to the "TV Fakery" hypothesis is the idea that the rogue elements of the government with the help of the nation's major media outlets pulled a massive psyop off on the American people. Some within the milieu are so enamored with this concept that they themselves have engaged in psyops against the 9/11 Truth Movement itself, as in the faked suicide of Ace Baker during a live, on-air episode of Fetzer's defunct Dynamic Duo broadcast. Baker claims he did this as "performance art" and described it as "the climactic ending to The Great American Psy-Opera". In other words, he was trying to show how audio-visual "fakery" psyops could happen by creating a real one for the 9/11 Truth Movement. He was so obsessed with 9/11 psyop theories that he actually pulled a real psyop off on the very movement he was a part of.
Conspiracy theories concerning psyops have only continued to grow in the aftermath of this peculiar affair. The rash of mass shootings in the past few years from Tucson to Sandy Hook have all been met with accusations by many in the CC that these are psyops designed to rally the public into supporting anti-gun legislation. The media fakery narrative has often been applied to these events with some new elements added in this time. The most noticeable of these new aspects to the media fakery angle have come mainly from one Ed Chiarini, more commonly-known by his internet nom de plume DallasGoldBug. Adding a new twist to the fakery psyops trend, Chiarini suggests that events like the Sandy Hook Massacre and the Boston Marathon Bombing weren't just "false flags" but wholesale staged spectacles using professional actors.
Meanwhile, many are tackling the issue of psyops fakery with historical events now too. As mentioned prior Dr. James Fetzer did just this in The Great Zapruder Film Hoax. Dr. John Coleman, who claims (w/o any documentation to my knowledge) to be a former British MI6 agent, has popularized the idea in conspiracy circles that The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations created The Beatles as a way of corrupting the morality of British youth. These examples, of course, came before the particular brand of psyops theories that exploded in the wake of the 9/11 "TV Fakery" movement. Within the past 7 years there has been an even greater abundance of psyops theories concerning the historical past than ever before. A key example of this is Joseph Atwill's Caesar's Messiah. Conspiracy theories and alternate histories of Jesus Christ have existed since at least Hugh J. Schonfield's The Passover Plot, continued with John M. Allegro's The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, and culminated with The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln and be immortalized as the inspiration for Dan Brown's best-selling The Da Vinci Code two decades after its initial release. Atwill himself falls in the roughly the same camp as D.M. Murdock (better known as Acharya S., author of The Christ Conspiracy) and Kenneth Humphreys (author of Jesus Never Existed) in questioing the historicity of Christ as an actual person. The twist on Atwill's theory, however, is that the Roman's invented the character of Jesus as a direct psychological operation against its populace to keep them from rebelling against the oppressive hierarchical system in which they lived.
Alongside Jan Irvin, Atwil recently co-authored the paper, "Manufacturing the Deadhead: A Product of Social Engineering'. In this piece Irvin and Atwill contend that the entirety of the psychedelic/hippie counterculture was a carefully planned psyop. Theories of this ilk have existed prior, but Atwill and particularly Irvin have laid out a more comprehensive theory than any others before them have ever managed to churn out. According to their thesis Timothy Leary's proclamation to "Turn On, Tune In, and Drop Out" and Terence McKenna's promotion of an "Archaic Revival" were designed to make the plebs desire a return to the primitive past instead of looking forward to the future, which according to the authors is used by the elite class to maintain control over them. Irvin has devoted even greater time to this with his Gnostic Media Podcast and his downloadable Brain Database that claims connection between MK-ULTRA and the creations of both the environmental and psychedelic movements. Although his work remains individual to Irvin and Atwill's research, it may be noted that independent researcher Dave McGowan has gone down a similar avenue with his Inside the LC: The Strange but Mostly True Story Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation". Interestingly, McGowan has also dipped his toes into the Boston Bombing psyop controversy, albeit in a much more refined, reserved, and level-headed approach than others in the CC.
Perhaps I am being naive in my opinion that psyop-related conspiracy theories have exploded more greatly than ever in recent years. After all the Paul Bennewitz Case (although, to be fair, that's more conspiracy reality than theory at this point) happened long before the "TV Fakery" buzz. As did the rumors of Project Blue Beam and MILABS. And then their's the academic research into proven psyops as documented in The Phoenix Program by Douglas Valentine and The Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945-1960. What thought does this rather overlong examination of psyops conspiracy theories have to do with my original discussion of metaphors?
Let me get back on track. Although I consider most of these theories preposterous they nonetheless all contain a greater truth. They serve to remind me of Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey's concept of "The Invisible War" as he explained it in an essay contained within the aforementioned Apocalypse Culture. This particular quote from the article, which I admittedly had to glean from another website as I do not have my copy of the book on hand, does well summing up this concept:
Anton LaVey wrote:“We are engulfed in war. Not simply a war fought with guns and bombs 'somewhere out there.' The skirmishes take place in the region of one’s own mind. The less one is aware of the invisible war, the more receptive one is to its ongoing process of demoralization, for the insensate human is vulnerable, malleable, weak, and ripe for control.”
What LaVey is implying here is that psyops aren't just found in particular events but are an all-encompassing part of our lives. The greatest psyops are happening right under our noses, when we turn on the TV and are bombarded with commercials telling us to "keep up with the Joneses" lest we want to become unpopular social outcasts. Everyone's an advertiser trying to sell you a product, even news and commentary outlets like Fox and MSNBC or alternative media like Infowars, RT, and Counterpunch. The difference between Billy Mays and Glenn Greenwald is that one is trying to sell you a physical product while the other is hawking an idea or a belief. Every book you read, every movie you watch, etc. is trying to sell you something whether it be a few hours of cheap entertainment or a political message. All the interactions you have in a day are psychological operation whether your'e trying to make someone laugh, smile, cry, buy something, give you something, convince someone of your ideas, and on and on it goes. Viewing conspiracy theories as a metaphor for this "Invisible War" of unending psyops I've managed to learn a great deal, be more careful about what I consume, recognize my own cognitive biases, and be a bit more cautious about the things I do, say, and promote. Talk about paranoid awareness!