By Jordan Carroll
Methods of truth and madness
Of all the beliefs to surface in the 20th century, the Richard Shaver mythology is my favorite. Richard Shaver, though undoubtedly a paranoid schizophrenic, shaped the course of the UFO mythos. Just after World War II, he began sending letters to the editor of Amazing Stories, Ray Palmer, describing a pre-Babel language embedded in our own and, more importantly, a subterranean world just beneath our own. The stories fascinated Palmer and filled his magazine for some time afterward. Our world, Shaver claimed, is hollow. The organisms and robots that dwell beneath the surface are refuges from a Golden Age when men were immortal and grew to be hundreds of feet tall. All was well in the world until the sun’s energies turned malignant, bringing death and evil into this paradise. Many of Earth’s inhabitants fled for other stars, but a few remained. Among these were the Dero, or “Detrimental Robots,” who were corrupted by the degenerating light. The Dero enjoy toying with us through malevolent psychic transmissions. Sometimes they lure women down to the depths and use them as shrieking wall-art. It is rumored that they still have starship technology and, perhaps, their scouts skip about the world in saucer-like vehicles.
All of this is, of course, complete and utter nonsense, but it’s nothing new. The patterns can be seen throughout history. Before little gray men stealing sperm, there were succubae to molest good Christians in their sleep and little fairy men stealing babies to replenish their race. Instead of seeing saucers and con-trails in the sky, they saw angelic wheels-within-wheels and heavenly battles. Whereas we have mind control and recovered memories, they had black sabbaths and witchcraft crazes. Our science and technology have done little to sweep away superstitious beliefs. We’ve simply given these bogeymen spacesuits, psychic hotlines and a misunderstanding of physics. If these beliefs do not reside entirely in ignorance, then why do they still exist?
Since mankind has been wrenched from the center of the solar system, from the center of the universe, and from the center of biological history, we feel this pressure to re-align our cosmology again. To do this, we examine the unrelated events of the world, tie them together, and organize them into a semi-coherent system. Like a Rorschach test or animals in the clouds, we impose our own anxieties, yearnings and prejudices on everything that we see. By ignoring the information to the contrary and emphasizing anything that supports our system, we substantiate it. I believe that such systems are an atrophied form of paranoia. Just as the paranoiac relates every detail of the world to him or herself, the believer relates all information to his or her cosmology.
Why do these systems exist in the first place? Why does mankind need a systematic universe? Peter Brugger, a neurologist of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, believes that the answer lies in the neurotransmitter dopamine. Brugger did an experiment in which twenty believers and twenty skeptics were asked to identify patterns. The believers tended to see patterns that weren’t there; the skeptics often ignored actual patterns. Then, Brugger administered doses of the drug L-Dopa, which increased the levels of dopamine in the subject’s brains. Though both skeptics and believers made more mistakes while on the drug, skeptics tended to notice more actual patterns. Dopamine, involved with several critical brain functions, seems to be involved with superstition, or lack thereof.
Some sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists believe that irrational belief evolved because of our need to see actual patterns. Evolution has given us too much of a good thing. The same faculties that allowed us to find medicinal herbs sent us off on our quest for mandrakes and alchemical mysteries. Though we might have learned the seasons from the stars, we also began to chart our lives with them. Ultimately, the very science that condemns myth sprang forth from myth’s source. The methods of truth and madness are separated only by discernment. Even in this article, I have bound the world in an imprecise system. Perhaps, I have seen faces in what is actually chaos.
