The Coming Age of Weird

Why authorities hate the paranormal, and why this might not be an option anymore.

Here’s a little known fact: the majority of people in the US and the UK believe in some form of paranormal reality or phenomena—quite independently of their educational backgrounds or whether they believe in God.¹ What’s more, surveys show that many, many people claim to actually have experienced one or more of those phenomena.

This is consistent with at least a century worth of psi research that has shown beyond any reasonable doubt that some of the paranormal stuff is real, whatever the explanation or nature of these things turn out to be.²

73% of Americans have at least one paranormal belief

Why the Hatred?

This leads to the question: if most people across education levels think the paranormal is real, why has “official academia” always been so incredibly hostile towards it? Mind you, many (if not most) important individual scientists and academics were interested in these things and even thought they were real; it’s official science that has been at war with anybody looking into it for a long time.³

Part of the explanation surely comes down to materialist ideology: the idea that everything in the universe is ultimately reducible to dead matter. Although this has nothing to do with science (it’s a philosophical position), it is very handy for establishing scientific authority: materialism turns “official science” into the final judge and authority of ultimate reality. It means that science can, in theory, know everything, and that it’s the best—if not only—way to figure things out. We clearly are dealing here with an incentive structure that leads to the power-hungry among the scientific establishment shouting down any criticism of materialism with venom and violent commitment. And since even the slightest allowance for angels, demons, ghosts, telepathy etc. blows materialism as we know it to pieces, those looking into such ideas become prime targets.

But maybe this explanation goes only so far. What if the phenomenon itself has something to do with it?

In other words, what if it fights back?

In his book, The Trickster and the Paranormal, George P. Hansen shows the many similarities between the Trickster archetype and paranormal phenomena.⁴ The book is partly a warning, directed at naive researchers, that the paranormal is not just like any other thing one might study. We are dealing with forces here that don’t quite fit into our reality, including our ideas about science, logic, causality, and so on. And just as with the trickster archetype, there is a lot of deception going on in these realms: good and evil are often disturbingly close and difficult to discern.

What’s more, it seems that a highly structured modern society is intrinsically hostile toward direct contact with the supernatural. Famous sociologist Max Weber had already thought along those lines, and Michael Winkelman came up with his own theory based on anthropological research.⁵ Basically, the more complex and bureaucratic a society becomes, the less status those who deal directly with the higher realms enjoy.

The more complex a society, the less status for those in direct contact with the higher realms

All of this means that the Catholic stance on these issues has always been somewhat sensible: yes, this stuff is real, but don’t mess with it—you might get consumed by the devil. This skepticism is amplified by a complex society’s need to keep disruptive energies at bay—and there’s little more disruptive than contacting the supernatural realms and coming back with information!

However, this has also led to Christianity’s deep ambivalence towards its own mystics, saints, seers, and prophets: they were often treated with suspicion, if not outright hatred and persecution, during their lifetimes, and were only later seen as saints. Some protestants have gone so far as to declare that the age of miracles simply ended at some point.

Religion, Boundary-crossing and a New Reality

Christianity’s ambivalence about the “supernatural”⁶ is easy to understand when we consider that paranormal phenomena have to do with chaos, uncertainty, the removal of boundaries, the erosion of concepts, and a state of fluidity—everything conservatives hate, in other words. For instance, George P. Hansen talks about how the best results in psi research had often been obtained by labs and teams that were about to be dissolved.

He also uses Victor Turner’s ideas about anti-structure and liminality to illustrate the disturbing nature of those otherworldly happenings.⁷ Basically, the removal of boundaries, while it can be crucial to letting new energies into the system and bringing our understanding of reality to the next level, is also associated with madness and destruction. Countless mystics, shamans, cult leaders, dabblers in the paranormal, and even saints exemplified an erasure of all kinds of conventions about sex, violence, gender roles, and so on in their pursuit of the supernatural. Deception is also very prominent, and often genuine paranormal and spiritual powers are mixed with trickery and make-believe. It seems that this sort of chaos, deviance, and boundary-crossing often goes hand in hand with “manifestations” of supernatural phenomena.

To point out the obvious: today, with all the sexual and gender craziness, with an all-out assault on common-sense and basic reality, with the loss of an overarching narrative and the resulting fragmentation of society into micro-reality-bubbles, we live in a time of extreme chaos, boundary-crossing, and fluidity.

We might be inviting forces we have pretended for a long time don’t exist and that we don’t understand.

All is not lost, however. Let’s remember that not everything is dark and evil about the higher realms. There are forces of good out there, too: where there are demons, there are angels; where there’s the devil, there’s God.

If our reality has become porous, unhinged, chaotic, this means that it might be more open to the good guys too.

Since I’m generally not in favor of chasing angels or supernatural “phenomena,” we could look at it in a more down to earth kind of way: our fractured reality has produced exceptionally crazy and evil developments. And yet, the infamous “vibe shift” is in full swing in a positive direction as well: the sheer explosion of intelligence, wit, and courage in recent years is nothing short of breathtaking. The resulting split, the increasing contrast, surely can help us discern and see through some of the cosmic trickery going on.

However we look at it, chaos, boundary-crossing, and fluidity will only lead to more weirdness.

But weirdness cuts both ways, and the good guys are not done yet. Far from it.

1. For a summary of those surveys, see Jason A. Josphson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences, The University of Chicago Press, 2017, p. 22ff

2. As a good primer about psi research and related surveys I always recommend Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena, HarperOne, 2009. You should defintely read Ruppert Sheldrake’s Science Set Free as well.

3. Although it seems that historically, the primary driver of this hostility was actually the church, and not too long ago, important scientists and researchers were quite open about their beliefs and interest in the paranormal. See also my piece The Forgotten Esoteric Roots of Modernity.

4. George P. Hansen, The Trickster and the Paranormal, Xlibris, 2001

5. Ibid., p. 97 ff.

6. Note that “supernatural” is just a word used to group certain phenomena that don’t fit within the materialist framework; you could just as well call them “natural” if you expand your definition of nature.

7. Hanson, p. 52 ff.