Sometimes you get subtle body language from people and they don’t even know they are doing it. It is like a subconscious thing. It doesn’t mean it’s threatening or crossing personal boundaries but it can come up.

Also I have been reading some books and one I am enjoying is ‘Conspiracy Nation’. It is a bit of investigative journalism and makes you aware of the founders of some of these movements and as the book progresses you see how disparate ideas coalesce. 

A lot of my own writing covers keywords in some of the notions that are prevalent in some of these conspiracy ideas. Although I feel like I am talking about something else entirely. Yet certain topics can look like crank logic. The book is actually less critical than people would realise, it has a soft touch.

It talks of communities and groups trying to navigate things like law for example. You might have proponents of pseudolaw for example trying to get out of fines or any number of difficult situations. There are personal stories, group interactions and people at times feeling powerless in the face of bureaucracy.

It’s a light read overall and in the first few chapters I was wondering if they were saying anything much at all. Then the crossovers appeared, the ideas built with the help of previous ideas and key people and points become apparent.

I like the way they showed a founder and pulled apart their claims by looking at their key claims. A few claims when held to scrutiny were bogus even though the key ideas live on and in a way morph to keep the story going. Who cares about the key claims anyway right? 

The story logic can always change and move with the times. A lot of these theories are really about fear. Fear for the children for example, which is totally understandable considering the horrors children can be put through.

The fear of the villains waiting to spill blood and take control, which is also totally understandable considering the way blood is spilled and people are controlled. Yet the difference is the urgency to action which mostly is simply the fight against the imagined enemy. 

In reality the enemy isn’t anywhere to be seen, normally some cops turn up to some sovereign rights enclave to be booby trapped and killed when all they were doing was making a welfare check. 

I guess the level of paranoia and delusional logic is the key factor in all of this. If you are operating on fear it can be hard to think of anything else but the creep of an impending armageddon that can’t be stopped. A kind of ‘fear limbo’ until the second coming?