There was once a 60’s rock band named Question Mark and the Mysterians. The famous conspiracy blogger of today known as QAnon, or just Q, is Question Mark, the perfect personification of the contemporary paranoid conspiracy culture. He is the Deep Throat of Cyberspace, Loki, Coyote, the Joker, the Riddler, the omnipotent imp “Q” of the Star Trek: The Next Generation TV series. He is the universal Trickster of our contemporary world of weaponized information. He is in the loop, he is in the know, he is the quintessential Insider, the absolute Whistleblower, the ultimate Mole. He sits at the same table with the Bilderbergers, the Freemasons, the Zionist Conspiracy, the CIA, MI6, Russian Intelligence, the Drug Cartels, the Deep State, the Global Elites, Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump. He has microphones in the Pentagon and bugs in the Vatican. He caters, records and photographs the midnight Luciferian revels of the transnational elites at Bohemian Grove. He is the answer to every mystery, the final secret at the darkest center of every conspiracy, the perfectly-contrived mirror reflecting all our deepest fears and desires, all the secret wishes and terrors of anyone dedicated to beating the Great Cryptocracy at its own game, of anyone who will sell his soul to find out. And his purpose? His purpose is to undermine and destroy valid, objective research by turning everything into suggestion and innuendo and synchronicity and symbolism and secret code. He is the great Misdirector of Attention who sends all us mystery-hounds down 600 blind alleys every week, along with 60 half-valid alleys and 6 actually true ones, just to make sure we keep digging 300 wells and sinking 300 exploratory shafts every seven days, until we are thoroughly inflamed, pulverized and burnt out. Information is not so much hidden by encryption and censorship and threat of abduction and assassination in our time (though all of these tools can still be used whenever the need arises) as by obscuring it with information-overload, by building a haystack around every needle. Did we ever dream that in some imaginary, perfect world the Cryptocracy would finally be forced to come clean and spill the beans, all of them? Q is that very dream seemingly come true, the great inverted psychopomp who is here to steer dedicated researchers in false directions, to convince fools that they are now privy to all the secrets, and to darken the minds of those who become addicted to the drug he offers, the drug by which true qualitative, meaningful knowledge is rendered quantitative, barren and meaningless, the drug called Knowledge-Without-a-Center. If one of the great mind-control techniques is “deferred closure”—the process of endlessly feeding us tantalizing clues, some of them mutually-corroborating and some of them contradictory, to a picture that can never be complete, until we finally break down and settle for a self-created delusion to satisfy our desperate need for closure—then Q is deferred closure on steroids.
When, as a society, we believed in God, when we knew He was omniscient, that not a sparrow falls without His knowledge, then we could rest content in the faith that everything that needed to be known was known—in Him. But the human race has rejected God now, debunked Him, killed Him; we have done this because we have hankered to take His place, to assume every one of His functions and prove that we can fulfill them better than He ever could. We wanted not just His omnipotence but His omniscience—because knowledge is power. We wanted to know everything. And so now Q, who is also the antibody designed to mimic the “hacktivists” of Anonymous and neutralize them, has appeared out of the infernal regions of the intelligence community to feed that delusion, to inflame that obsession, to cater to that need to know. Icarus flew and fell. Prometheus stole fire from Zeus and the eagle ate his liver. A little knowledge may be a dangerous thing, but too much information is infinitely worse. To paraphrase and extend the famous line of T.S. Eliot, “Where is the wisdom lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge lost in information? Where is the information lost in Q?”
If Q was really interested in de-mystifying the Cryptocracy, he would pick one line of research at a time, elucidate it, deepen it, complete it, bring information to bear on it from many different directions, and thereby reach and establish a single conclusion—and he would do it with plenty of footnotes, he would reveal and cite his sources whenever possible. That’s good investigative journalism. Instead, Q appears as the great deconstructor, underminer and saboteur of investigative journalism, pursuing 60 mysteries at the same time, each one of which opens into 60 more. Instead of doing his best to gather information together, order it, establish a single center, articulate a single certainty, he fragments information just like the internet does, he blows it to the four winds. Fake news becomes anti-news. He makes any kind of certainty impossible, until—according to the strict canons of postmodernism—the very belief that certainty could be possible, the ability to grasp what this notion of “certainty” is supposed to be, or might once have been, is totally obliterated. Postmodernism teaches us that nothing can be known for sure, which—of course—creates in us an insatiable desire to know everything, just like starvation creates hunger. Then Q appears to service that desire, thereby not just asserting but exhaustively proving the original premise: that nothing can be known. Just as pornography deconstructs sex, so Q deconstructs knowledge, and does so using precisely the same method: the tease. If everything is true, then nothing is a true. If everything is a lie, then what can the exposé of that lie be but another lie? Think about it: would you describe Q as someone, or some thing, who loves the truth? And if not, then how can we avoid the traps he sets—especially when almost every “truth” we turn up, in our obsession to tear the veil off the mysteries, is hateful and bitter?
We can avoid them by cultivating the love of truth in ourselves.
The distinction between the virtue of wisdom and the vice of curiosity is given in the Book of Proverbs, which advises us to avoid the call of the “foolish woman” and respond instead to the call of Holy Wisdom. Proverbs describes the foolish woman as follows:
She sits at the door of her house, on a seat in the high places of the city
Calling to the travelers who pass by on their way:
“Whoever is a fool, let him pay me a visit”. And to the one who lacks understanding, she says:
“Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret pleasant.”
What he doesn’t understand is that the dead are there, and all her guests are in the deepest
pit of hell.
(Proverbs 9: 14-18)
But Holy Wisdom says something else, something that may sound the same but is in fact an entirely different proposition:
She sends out her maidens, she cries out on the highest places of the city:
“Whoever is foolish, let him come to my house.” And to the one who needs understanding, she says:
“Come, eat my bread, and drink the wine I have prepared;
Abandon fools and live, and walk the paths of understanding….
(Proverbs 9:3-6)
“Hear instruction, get wisdom, and don’t refuse it:
Lucky is the man who hears me, who watches daily at my gates, who waits at my threshold.
Whoever finds me finds life, and will find favor in the eyes of God;
But whoever sins against me wrongs his own soul: all who hate me, love death.”
(Proverbs 8:33-36)
Q is the “foolish woman” of Proverbs—let’s call her “Queenie.” As prostitutes and pornography destroy men’s virility, so Queenie’s endless tease of maybe-false-maybe-true information drains the virility of the Intellect, blinds the Eye of the Heart. If you don’t want to take her bait, then find a knowledge you can love, and love it. If you do, then every lie in the universe, one by one, will do its best to come between you and that single love, thereby making itself vulnerable to exposure. In the simple defense of the truth you love, the “one thing needful” (Luke 10:42), all the lies that assail that truth can, God willing, be unmasked and defeated, because they can be weighed against a true and known value, against “Wisdom more precious than rubies” (Proverbs 8:11).
“And the gates of Hell will not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18); there is no other way to make sense of the ambiguities and illusions of existence. In the words of the Holy Qur’an, Truth has come and falsehood has vanished away; truly falsehood is ever bound to vanish (17:81).
Charles Upton 