Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from HowStuffWorks dot com. Hey,
Speaker 1: welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Speaker 1: Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And Robert, I have
Speaker 1: some very exciting news for you. Did you know that
Speaker 1: at this very moment in the studio with us is
Speaker 1: a minotaur that breathes rad on gas. Oh well, uh,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna have to call your bluff on that one, Joe,
Speaker 1: because I do not see a single minotaur in this
Speaker 1: recording studio. No bluff, I speak the truth. There is
Speaker 1: a minotaur in here. Now you can't see it because
Speaker 1: it is invisible to the mall. But there is a
Speaker 1: raid on gas breathing minotaur and he's right behind you.
Speaker 1: Oh well, so all I need to do is bring
Speaker 1: in say radon gas detector and then we can confirm
Speaker 1: the existence of this fantastic beast. Well, unfortunately that that
Speaker 1: would be a good id. But the rate on gas
Speaker 1: that this minataar breathes out is not detectable by normal
Speaker 1: chemical equipment. It's it's a different kind of chemical. It's
Speaker 1: not it's not a physical chemical. Okay, Well, in that case,
Speaker 1: let's bring in some sort of infrared camera, so we
Speaker 1: can we can see this creature. Well, a funny thing
Speaker 1: about this invisible mintaur is that its body is completely
Speaker 1: consistent with the ambient room temperature, so it emits no
Speaker 1: infrared radiation at all. Okay, well, let me get some
Speaker 1: spray paint and we can sort of coat the general
Speaker 1: part of the room that it is in. Then we'll
Speaker 1: see its physical body. No, no, no, no no, you are
Speaker 1: imposing an unfair materialistic bias on my minotaur. This minotaur
Speaker 1: doesn't need to have paint stick to it. It has
Speaker 1: a different kind of body. It has a kind of
Speaker 1: ethereal body that paint goes right through. I'm beginning to
Speaker 1: think that this minotaur has the magical ability to conveniently
Speaker 1: weasel out of any practical experiment that I can devise.
Speaker 1: Thou shalt not test the Lord thy Minotaur. No, no,
Speaker 1: no, no no, actually I can. I can prove it to you. Okay,
Speaker 1: I have a friend, you know, my friend Jeffrey. Have
Speaker 1: you met Jeffrey? Is this another imaginary friend? No? No, no no,
Speaker 1: Jeffrey's real. Jeffrey's got a buddy who met a guy
Speaker 1: in Florida who saw the minotar and the minotar bit
Speaker 1: him on the shoulder. Oh, so you're bringing Florida man
Speaker 1: into this, but it bit him like you can even
Speaker 1: I've seen the marks on his shoulder. I saw a
Speaker 1: picture of them. I got it in an email forward. Well,
Speaker 1: clearly the most likely explanation for these bite marks is
Speaker 1: an imaginative beast. Thank you for finally acknowledging this, Robert,
Speaker 1: Thank you. Now, I've been trying to get people on
Speaker 1: board with my minotaur for a while, and it seems
Speaker 1: like like people just don't want to go along with me.
Speaker 1: But occasionally you meet the right kind of person, the
Speaker 1: person who's willing to go the extra mile with you
Speaker 1: and say, yes, I'll follow you down that minatar road.
Speaker 1: Let's talk to you about your minotaur. Let's maybe we
Speaker 1: can spin it off into a podcast or a multi
Speaker 1: series TV show. Now, if you have already read the
Speaker 1: books we recommended in our summer reading episodes this year,
Speaker 1: you will be recognized what we just talked about is
Speaker 1: quite similar to a chapter in the non fiction book
Speaker 1: that Robert recommended this summer, which was The Demon Haunted
Speaker 1: World Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan.
Speaker 1: This was a nineteen ninety five book, and as I
Speaker 1: discussed in that episode, it still speaks to us today.
Speaker 1: There is most of it is not dated at all,
Speaker 1: but there is this chapter where he begins by describing
Speaker 1: a scenario where he's bringing somebody in and like our
Speaker 1: minotaur saying, oh, well, there's a dragon in this garage.
Speaker 1: And when tests are proposed to examine the possible existence
Speaker 1: of this dragon, the same sort of excuses are made. Right, Well,
Speaker 1: maybe we can put some flour on the floor and
Speaker 1: see if it leaves tracks when it walks around. Oh
Speaker 1: no, no no, no, this dragon levitates. Oh maybe we can
Speaker 1: check to see if it breathes fire with thermal detectors
Speaker 1: like you suggested, Robert, Well, no, no, no, the fire
Speaker 1: it breathes as cold fire. And so Sagan in this chapter,
Speaker 1: I think it presents a very clean, clear, positive vision
Speaker 1: of what the skeptical minds mindset should be. And you
Speaker 1: know I've said on the show before that I think
Speaker 1: sometimes I have mixed feelings sometimes about like the skeptic identity,
Speaker 1: because like I think it's a good thing to be skeptical,
Speaker 1: and it's a good thing to be a skeptic, but
Speaker 1: sometimes I see it becoming a community on the Internet
Speaker 1: that seems to sometimes pat itself on the back a
Speaker 1: little bit too much. Yeah, it becomes I think the
Speaker 1: way I've discussed before, it's kind of like this party
Speaker 1: pooper mentality, you know, whereas ultimately what Sagan proposes this
Speaker 1: chapter is kind of it's more like, Oh, this dragon
Speaker 1: sounds amazing, let me help you prove it. Let me
Speaker 1: help you look at the actual evidence for this. Now,
Speaker 1: unfortunately we do have to arrive at the conclusion that
Speaker 1: there probably is not a dragon in the garage, and
Speaker 1: there probably is not a rat on breathing minotaur in
Speaker 1: the studio with us. And one of the lessons that
Speaker 1: Segan draws from this is to be wary about claims
Speaker 1: that seem to be extremely elastic, where there's always a
Speaker 1: new excuse or why this one reason you want to
Speaker 1: help investigate the claim wouldn't actually work. This often comes
Speaker 1: up in say, investigations of psychic phenomena, where people will say, no,
Speaker 1: I'm really a psychic, Yeah, I really do have dowsing
Speaker 1: powers or something like that. So you try to set up, well, okay,
Speaker 1: let's do a test. Let's do a controlled test to
Speaker 1: see if you really can find water, and they're like,
Speaker 1: oh no, no no, no, I can't do it right now
Speaker 1: because there's static electricity in the air. No matter what,
Speaker 1: there's always some excuse for why this test, in particular
Speaker 1: this day doesn't work. But in today's episode, we wanted
Speaker 1: to get to a particular story that Carl Sagan tells
Speaker 1: in this chapter of The demon Haunted World. That is
Speaker 1: a really fascinating development on this scenario where normally you'd
Speaker 1: have a person who's presenting something that's probably not evidence based,
Speaker 1: and then you've got an interlocutor who, in our original
Speaker 1: example is somebody who's skeptical who's pushing back. But what
Speaker 1: happens when say, social forces or biases or beliefs begin
Speaker 1: to work on the interlock hut or too well? Yeah?
Speaker 1: For instance, what if you had been sorry, Joe, But
Speaker 1: what if you had been really convincing about that minute
Speaker 1: tar you know, what if you were just so passionate
Speaker 1: about it, give me another chance, like a try harder
Speaker 1: where I will you know, maybe I started off just
Speaker 1: kind of humoring you, and then I'm find myself actually
Speaker 1: believing that it's here. Well, Sagan tells a story very
Speaker 1: much like this, and it concerns author and psychoanalyst Robert Lindner,
Speaker 1: who is called in by Los Alamos National Laboratory to
Speaker 1: treat a gifted nuclear physicist referred to by the pseudonym
Speaker 1: Kirk Allen. Now, this story is as it is presented
Speaker 1: by Lindner himself, right, So he is obviously changing some
Speaker 1: details to protect the identity of his patient, and so
Speaker 1: it's not verifiable which elements of the story are fictionalized, right,
Speaker 1: But he presents this as a sort of fictionalized version
Speaker 1: of a true clinical encounter he had. Right. It's also
Speaker 1: worth noting that most of the individuals in this story,
Speaker 1: perhaps all of the individuals are now segan sadly passed away.
Speaker 1: Linder lived nineteen fourteen through nineteen fifty six, and some
Speaker 1: of the individuals that were later presumed to be or
Speaker 1: suspected to possibly be Kirk Allen have also passed. So
Speaker 1: there's not a lot of new information out there about
Speaker 1: who who was actually being referred to, and to what
Speaker 1: degree things were fictionalized to protect the individual's identity, and
Speaker 1: also what could potentially have been tweaked just to make
Speaker 1: a better story. Because Lindner wrote about this in his
Speaker 1: book The Fifty Minute Hour, which is published in nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty four, and also in a couple of articles for
Speaker 1: Harper's Magazine. Both of those articles, Part one and Part
Speaker 1: two Part two are available online right now. Are those
Speaker 1: the ones called the Jet Propelled Couch? Yes, the jet
Speaker 1: Propelled Couch, which is a fabulous, fabulous title. We'll try
Speaker 1: to have links to those articles on the landing page
Speaker 1: for this episode. It's stuffed toblermind dot com. Now, Robert,
Speaker 1: I was unfamiliar with the story of Kirk Allen before
Speaker 1: you suggested this topic for an episode, and I am
Speaker 1: so glad you did, because this is really really interesting stuff.
Speaker 1: I had never come across this story before it all,
Speaker 1: and it really got my gears turning. Indeed, I was
Speaker 1: not familiar with it until I read The Demon Haunted World.
Speaker 1: Though this story has been around for a while obviously,
Speaker 1: so I imagine some of you out there have heard
Speaker 1: about it, so hopefully you'll enjoy revisiting it with us today.
Speaker 1: So one thing we should probably point out is who
Speaker 1: is Robert Lindner. Again, he was a practitioner of psychoanalysis, right,
Speaker 1: which is somewhat controversial. Indeed, now he actually has some
Speaker 1: pretty impressive things on his resume. Though. He wrote Rebel
Speaker 1: without a Cause, The hypno Analysis of a Criminal Psychopath,
Speaker 1: which is published in nineteen forty four, and it's the
Speaker 1: book that inspired the title, and I should say the
Speaker 1: title alone of the famous nineteen fifty five film starring
Speaker 1: James Dean, not the story, not the story, just the title,
Speaker 1: because there's a in the book where he says, quote,
Speaker 1: the psychopath is a rebel without a cause, an agitator
Speaker 1: without a slogan, a revolutionary without a program. You're harsh
Speaker 1: and my buzz man. And he seems to have made
Speaker 1: some legitimate contributions to understandings of gambling psychology, and Rebel
Speaker 1: is also well regarded. It seems as just an early
Speaker 1: work of psychoanalysis. He had an m A and a
Speaker 1: PhD in psychology from Cornell. He served as chief psychologist
Speaker 1: at a US penitentiary in Lewisbourg, Pennsylvania, and he later
Speaker 1: operated a private practice in Baltimore, and through Rebel and
Speaker 1: other works, he helped expand popular understanding and perceptions of psychoanalysis. Now,
Speaker 1: obviously there are lots of reasons people have for being
Speaker 1: skeptical of the psychoanalysis tradition in therapy. But he at
Speaker 1: least was a person who had real legitimate clinical practice
Speaker 1: with all these experiences, and we can learn from the
Speaker 1: experiences even if you don't necessarily say, agree with his
Speaker 1: framework for how to treat people. Correct. Now, this brings
Speaker 1: us to Alan kirk Allen, again a pseudonym. Based on
Speaker 1: Linder's writing, we can say Alan was something of a
Speaker 1: science fiction fan a little bit. Yeah. He enjoyed a
Speaker 1: rich in her world that was just full of spacefaring adventure,
Speaker 1: and he was especially a fan of a specific sci
Speaker 1: fi book series in which the main character shared his name,
Speaker 1: according to Lindner. So you know, we'll get into how
Speaker 1: some people have interpreted this, But obviously there are a
Speaker 1: few different, very notable science fiction heroes from literature of
Speaker 1: the time that that you know, John Carter is often
Speaker 1: brought up as a possibility, but at any rate, he had.
Speaker 1: He has an obsession, and this obsession seems to eventually
Speaker 1: cross over into delusion or near delusion, with Alan believing
Speaker 1: that he actually pilots a spaceship in the future and
Speaker 1: that he's a lord of many worlds, and then he
Speaker 1: can think about it in just the right way and
Speaker 1: transport himself centuries into the future. Reportedly, Alan was fairly balanced.
Speaker 1: He had a reasonable work life imagination balance, but his
Speaker 1: employers eventually became concerned that he was growing too distracted
Speaker 1: and dreamy. He was writing about everything some He apparently
Speaker 1: wrote some twelve thousand words on every aspect of this
Speaker 1: future world of his so history, genealogy, biology, etc. Sagan
Speaker 1: points out that one of these volumes had the title
Speaker 1: the Application of Unified Field Theory in the Mechanics of
Speaker 1: the Star Drive to Space Travel, which he says actually
Speaker 1: sounded fairly interesting. Given this idea that Allan's alleged background
Speaker 1: is insist is physics and he's a gifted physicist, it
Speaker 1: would be interesting to see what sort of sci fi
Speaker 1: propulsion system an obsessed physicist came up with. That is interesting.
Speaker 1: But if that's the way we actually discover some sort
Speaker 1: of warp drive is in the science fiction works of
Speaker 1: a day dreaming nuclear physicist, well, you know, it's always
Speaker 1: important to note the importance of sci fi in the
Speaker 1: inspiration of actual scientists. I mean, you look, for instance,
Speaker 1: just at some of the notable rocket scientists of the
Speaker 1: twentieth century, and so many of them were especially as children,
Speaker 1: just very in young people, you know, very inspired by
Speaker 1: the sci fi of the time, and I think that
Speaker 1: has continued to hold up with the scientists today. Absolutely.
Speaker 1: But okay, so we've set this up where Kirk Allen,
Speaker 1: this pseudonym for this physicist. He's doing his work, but
Speaker 1: he's spending a lot of time daydreaming about this other
Speaker 1: world and apparently is somehow convinced that it's to some
Speaker 1: extent real and he can actually go there. He can
Speaker 1: travel through time into the future and be a space lord,
Speaker 1: flying from planet to planet and having adventures in the cosmos. Right,
Speaker 1: So it reaches some sort of a tipping point and
Speaker 1: his employers say, hey, you should go talk to somebody
Speaker 1: about this. Why don't you talk to our friend Robert
Speaker 1: here and and he will, you know, he'll work this
Speaker 1: out with you. So that's pretty much what happened. Lynner
Speaker 1: engages with Alan, talks to him at length about his
Speaker 1: imagined world, and he realizes quote, in order to separate
Speaker 1: Kirk from his madness, it was necessary for me to
Speaker 1: enter his fantasy and from that position to pry him
Speaker 1: loose from the psychosis. This sounds like a bad road,
Speaker 1: I feel like, I feel like the guy in pet cemetery.
Speaker 1: You don't want to go down that road. Yeah, he's said,
Speaker 1: let me, let me go out on the ledge, let
Speaker 1: me go walk into the flaming house. I don't know
Speaker 1: where we were going at. We're discussing it, knowing what's
Speaker 1: about to happen. Though, Well, I guess on the other hand,
Speaker 1: we should be humble. I mean, this guy had clinical
Speaker 1: experience and we don't exactly yes, but in retrospect it
Speaker 1: ended up being perhaps a question will move because what
Speaker 1: happened next is that, in discussions about Kirk's rich imagined
Speaker 1: delusion became something more. He became, in Sagan's words quote
Speaker 1: the psychoanalyst became a co conspirator in his patient's delusion. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He describes, or Lindner describes how he would go through
Speaker 1: all of these materials that kirk Allen provided for him,
Speaker 1: and he would like get into the world and he
Speaker 1: would start trying to find internal inconsistencies with like the
Speaker 1: treatises that kirk Allen was writing about these space civilizations
Speaker 1: and all that, and try to help him work out
Speaker 1: the inconsistencies, and that this eventually led to him sort
Speaker 1: of getting into that mindset of like, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: how do I know this isn't true? How do you
Speaker 1: know that somebody else isn't mentally traveling into the future
Speaker 1: and becoming a space lord? That's right in the jet
Speaker 1: propelled couch, Lindner writes, quote, the materials of Kirk's psychosis
Speaker 1: and the Achilles heel of my personality met and meshed
Speaker 1: like the gears of a clock. Quote. The transformation of
Speaker 1: fascination into psychic distress alarmed me sufficiently to make me
Speaker 1: take the necessary steps for extracting myself from my predicament.
Speaker 1: It acted first as a spur to self analysis. Gradually,
Speaker 1: by the use of this accustomed tool, I was able
Speaker 1: to allay the more acute symptoms and to initiate those
Speaker 1: insightful processes that lead to recovery. But before I had
Speaker 1: completed this task, an amazing event occurred which, in the
Speaker 1: space of one hour, not only broke what remained of
Speaker 1: my spell, but marked the successful conclusion of Kirk's treatment. Well,
Speaker 1: what broke the spell? So basically what's happening is that
Speaker 1: that Allan is just sucking him into this world. Lindner
Speaker 1: is falling into this delusion. According to Lindner. This is
Speaker 1: Lenner's home take on the scenario. And then finally, Allan
Speaker 1: just comes up to him and says, I'm sorry, it's
Speaker 1: all fiction. I made it up. Stop believing in all
Speaker 1: of this, because id it? So he's he admits that
Speaker 1: I don't actually believe I travel into the future and
Speaker 1: I'm a space lord and all that. I'm just daydreaming.
Speaker 1: I'm just making up stories. Right. The patient ends up
Speaker 1: being the one to say, I think this is because of,
Speaker 1: you know, my loneliness as a child and my difficulties
Speaker 1: with women. He broke the spell of his own purported
Speaker 1: delusion in order to save his psychoanalyst, or at least
Speaker 1: that's how Lindner framed it in his writings. Right, I
Speaker 1: guess all we have is Lindner's story to go on,
Speaker 1: so we don't know, but it I mean, assuming this
Speaker 1: is true, that's a heck of a story. Yeah, And that's,
Speaker 1: of course one of the things about anything that is
Speaker 1: a heck of a story. We also have to engage
Speaker 1: a certain amount of skepticism. To what extent did one
Speaker 1: perhaps tweak the truth to make it a better story.
Speaker 1: That remains an open and unanswered question. Well, it does
Speaker 1: make me think about how so the pillars supporting a
Speaker 1: propositional belief like Kirk can travel into the future and
Speaker 1: be a space lord and all that, and he goes
Speaker 1: to all these galactic civilizations. The pillars supporting a belief
Speaker 1: like that are not just the contents of the belief
Speaker 1: itself and the evidence for it, but it's also social, right.
Speaker 1: I mean, we believe all kinds of things for essentially
Speaker 1: social reasons, because, like, it would be really socially problematic
Speaker 1: to be skeptical in some scenarios, right, Like, you may
Speaker 1: have plenty of scenarios where somebody you love tells you
Speaker 1: something that you don't think is likely true, but you
Speaker 1: kind of believe them because of your relationship with them, right, Right,
Speaker 1: And sometimes, especially if emotions are heightened, you kind of
Speaker 1: have to play along. Right. If you're at someone else's
Speaker 1: funeral and someone tells the bereaved everything happens for a reason,
Speaker 1: you know, it's not my place to come in and
Speaker 1: start dismantling that nonsense, you know, Right, I'm more inclined
Speaker 1: to just simply nod and you know, pretend I didn't
Speaker 1: hear it, right, I mean, yeah, the relationship sort of
Speaker 1: govern what gets said. And also we know that leaving
Speaker 1: is not always such a I don't know, such a
Speaker 1: clear transactional process, like like Sagan depicts in his chapter
Speaker 1: where he's like, well, somebody comes to you and says
Speaker 1: I've got a dragon in my garage, and you know,
Speaker 1: you get to have this dialogue with them. Well, do
Speaker 1: you really what if somebody comes to you and says
Speaker 1: I have a dragon in my garage. But there's somebody
Speaker 1: in your family and it's somebody you care about, you
Speaker 1: don't really believe them. But also you've had this conversation before,
Speaker 1: and trying to argue with them is really difficult, and
Speaker 1: so you just kind of go along with it for
Speaker 1: a bit. And then by going along with it you
Speaker 1: start to kind of wear down your own defenses and
Speaker 1: you're like, well, how would I know if they didn't
Speaker 1: have a dragon? Yeah, I mean one of the things
Speaker 1: Sagan ends up comparing it to is is a magic trick. Yeah.
Speaker 1: You know, when you have a magic trick, you have
Speaker 1: two sides. You have the magician, you have the audience,
Speaker 1: and there is a contract between the two. It takes
Speaker 1: both for that magic trick to happen and there's this.
Speaker 1: You know, obviously there's a with the magic trick, there's
Speaker 1: a suspicion of disbelief, but there is this relationship that's
Speaker 1: going on, and in this relationship between Alan and Lindner,
Speaker 1: we see what can happen when the energy kind of shifts.
Speaker 1: According to to Linder himself, and when Linder asked him
Speaker 1: why he kept going on with it, Alan replied, quote,
Speaker 1: because I felt I had to, because I felt you
Speaker 1: wanted me to. That's got to be a hard blow
Speaker 1: to a therapist. Well, I mean he got part of
Speaker 1: a book in two Harper's Magazine articles out of it,
Speaker 1: so you know, it made for a great story. Like
Speaker 1: we said, I mean, this certainly makes me think about
Speaker 1: what we've covered when we talked about the Satanic panic
Speaker 1: before the idea that children were often coming up with
Speaker 1: children or even adults were coming up with elaborate stories
Speaker 1: of Satanic ritual abuse, basically in sessions where it seemed
Speaker 1: like in retrospect, they were being led by the people
Speaker 1: who were talking to them. You know, there was sort
Speaker 1: of a meme among some police investigators and some therapists
Speaker 1: that this kind of stuff was going on, and so
Speaker 1: they were they were almost encouraging people to hit the
Speaker 1: hit the tropes over and over again. And was there
Speaker 1: a pentagram on the floor. You know, Well, it reminds
Speaker 1: me of Walter Stevens's book Demon Lovers about witchcraft persecution. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he pointed out was quoting some particular individual or
Speaker 1: another who pointed out that that the the story that
Speaker 1: was extracted from suspect suspected witches were always the same
Speaker 1: because there was a particular story they wanted to extract. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can't. You can't imagine that all of these suspected
Speaker 1: witches came up with the same story. Yeah, it had
Speaker 1: to be there in the people who were extracting it, right, right,
Speaker 1: and they and it had to be a story that
Speaker 1: fit existing motifs and and sort of supported existing arguments. Now,
Speaker 1: I guess that's not exactly analogous to hear because Alan
Speaker 1: had his own mythology. But it seems like Lindner once
Speaker 1: he got into it, as saying he was coaxing it.
Speaker 1: He was asking, you know, keep it coming. All right. Well,
Speaker 1: on that note, we're going to take a quick break.
Speaker 1: Can we come back. We'll discuss some ideas about who
Speaker 1: Kirk Allen might have actually been all right, we're back,
Speaker 1: all right, So Robert, you've got some theories to present
Speaker 1: on who Kirk Allen might have been. I assume it
Speaker 1: was not William Shatner. No, I think the shad is
Speaker 1: in the clear on this one. But yeah, so we've
Speaker 1: had a few suspects pop up over the decades since
Speaker 1: this case first came up. What were the possibly fictionalized,
Speaker 1: possibly true clues that Lindner gave that he had the
Speaker 1: same name as the hero of a science fiction story, right,
Speaker 1: so we have that to go on. And of course
Speaker 1: Lynner said that he was a nuclear physicist, which some
Speaker 1: theories like stick to that and say, all right, let's
Speaker 1: look for a physicist. Others say, well, that could be
Speaker 1: the fictionalized element. Let's look for other individuals who say,
Speaker 1: may have worked somewhere where they had a particularly high
Speaker 1: security clearance or in other or were engaged in something
Speaker 1: simil but not identical to the work described in the
Speaker 1: jet propelled couch. I wonder if it was the pivotal
Speaker 1: Manhattan Project researcher Flash Gordon's. Well, see, that's the kind
Speaker 1: of thing that would be a red flag. Of course,
Speaker 1: the other aspect being the idea that kirk Allen wrote
Speaker 1: a lot, and therefore it makes sense to look at
Speaker 1: writers individuals who were highly published in sci fi of
Speaker 1: the time. And so for this reason, one of the
Speaker 1: key candidates that's been brought up over the years was
Speaker 1: a man by the name of Paul Line Barger aka
Speaker 1: Cordwainer Smith. That was his pseudonym his writing name. Oh
Speaker 1: and by the way, Line Barger was born in nineteen
Speaker 1: thirteen died in nineteen sixty six. He was a prolific
Speaker 1: sci fi writer of stories all set within a single,
Speaker 1: expansive and interconnected universe. And in his day job he
Speaker 1: wasn't a nuclear physicist, but he was an East Asia
Speaker 1: scholar and a psychological warfare expert. Now not quite a physicist, obviously,
Speaker 1: but one could see where the kirk Allen story might
Speaker 1: well have hit the same key points without exposing his identity. Plus,
Speaker 1: who better to dupe a psycho analyst into borderline delusion
Speaker 1: than an expert in psychological warfare? Right. However, there's no
Speaker 1: real solid proof to back this idea up. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: I had never heard of this guy, and I looked
Speaker 1: up his stories to see what kind of stuff he
Speaker 1: wrote about. If he kind of went along with the
Speaker 1: Linener story, and a lot of Cordwainer Smith's sci fi
Speaker 1: stories were set in a future earth after a nuclear war,
Speaker 1: where humanity is ruled by a system of government almost
Speaker 1: like a kind of priesthood known as the instrumentality of mankind.
Speaker 1: Huh interesting. You know, I've never read any of his work,
Speaker 1: but I would be very interested to because another author
Speaker 1: of note with a background as an East Asian scholar
Speaker 1: was Mr Barker, who I've mentioned on the show before
Speaker 1: I lived nineteen twenty nine through twenty twelve, who wrote
Speaker 1: The Man of Gold and created the early RP world
Speaker 1: of Tekumel. So I would I would just be very
Speaker 1: interested to see, like how he incorporates East Asian motifs
Speaker 1: into this sci fi universe potentially. Oh, that's kind of interesting. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Cord Wayner Smith sometimes is said to have had an
Speaker 1: unusual writing style, where some of his stories are almost
Speaker 1: more like Chinese folk tales. Oh. Oh, interesting, Now, I
Speaker 1: was really interested in this idea of the instrumentality of mankind.
Speaker 1: If this is too much of a horrible tangent, we
Speaker 1: can cut this out. But I looked it up and
Speaker 1: I was like, what does he write about the instrumentality
Speaker 1: of mankind. I've got to know more about that. So
Speaker 1: this is from a story called drunk Boat, where Cordwayner
Speaker 1: Smith writes, quote, the instrumentality was a self perpetuating body
Speaker 1: of men with enormous powers and a strict code. Each
Speaker 1: was a plenium of the low, the middle, and the
Speaker 1: high justice. Each could do anything he found necessary or
Speaker 1: proper to maintain the instrumentality and keep the peace between
Speaker 1: the worlds. But if he made a mistake or committed
Speaker 1: a wrong ah, then it was suddenly different. Any lord
Speaker 1: could put another lord to death in an emergency, but
Speaker 1: he was assured of a death and disgrace himself if
Speaker 1: he assumed this responsibility. The only difference between ratification and
Speaker 1: repudiation came in the fact that lords who killed in
Speaker 1: an emergency and were proved wrong were marked down on
Speaker 1: a very shameful list, while those who killed other lords rightly,
Speaker 1: as later examination might prove, were listed on a very
Speaker 1: honorable list, but still killed. With three lords, the situation
Speaker 1: was different. Three lords made an emergency court. If they
Speaker 1: acted together, acted in good faith, and reported to the
Speaker 1: computers of the Instrumentality, they were exempt from punishment, though
Speaker 1: not from blame or even reduction to civilian status. Seven lords,
Speaker 1: or all the lords on a given planet at a
Speaker 1: given moment, were beyond any criticism except that of a
Speaker 1: dignified reversal of their actions should a later ruling prove
Speaker 1: them wrong. So my two thoughts on this are that one,
Speaker 1: this sounds like complex and very interesting, but on the other,
Speaker 1: I am afraid that this is what I sound like
Speaker 1: when I explained my fiction to someone. You know that
Speaker 1: they're just going to set there saying what the three
Speaker 1: lords run? All this by me? Again, it's so many rules,
Speaker 1: but also it's like, I don't know, I was wondering.
Speaker 1: It's almost like a weird combination of what you've described
Speaker 1: of Ian m Banks the culture, but also with elements
Speaker 1: of like honor culture and bearing individual responsibility for the
Speaker 1: action for one's actions. Now, again, without having read into
Speaker 1: his work, I also have to assume that this is
Speaker 1: just a bit of exposition and that most of a
Speaker 1: lot of the rest of the text is going to
Speaker 1: be more of a like an old fashioned sci fi
Speaker 1: adventure swashbuckling kind of thing. Yeah, I think, well, there
Speaker 1: are obviously characters. I think some of the Lords of
Speaker 1: the Instrumentality are characters in this But but I haven't
Speaker 1: read it yet, so I'm interested to check it out.
Speaker 1: Might be worth a look. One more quick excerpt here
Speaker 1: from the same passage. This was all the business of
Speaker 1: the Instrumentality. The Instrumentality had the perpetual slogan watch but
Speaker 1: do not govern, stop war but do not wage it,
Speaker 1: protect but do not control, and first survive exclamation point.
Speaker 1: I like that. Yeah. So much sci fi of the
Speaker 1: present is very pessimistic, especially about the power of governments.
Speaker 1: I mean, with quite good reason. I understand that pessimism,
Speaker 1: but sometimes it's kind of refreshing to see somebody engaging
Speaker 1: in at least some moderate utopianism about future governing systems.
Speaker 1: I think of, like, what's an example, Oh, the culture
Speaker 1: is kind of like that, isn't it. Yeah, And Star
Speaker 1: Trek has always been a classic example of that, especially
Speaker 1: you know, original Trek was very much an optimistic, almost
Speaker 1: a religious idea of where science could take us. Just
Speaker 1: don't think too hard about the teleportation right of where
Speaker 1: science could take somebody, ain't quite you, Yes, Now, there
Speaker 1: are a couple of other potential candidates that have been
Speaker 1: brought up over the years. For instance, some amateur detectives
Speaker 1: point to an actual physicist who had the name John Carter,
Speaker 1: as in John Carter of Mars. So obviously, when you
Speaker 1: have that name as common as it is, one might say, hey,
Speaker 1: maybe that's our kirk Allen. And then there's another possibility
Speaker 1: that has been brought up, a man by the name
Speaker 1: of Francis Burton Harrison the Second aka Kiko, who worked
Speaker 1: at Los Almost National Laboratory, much like kirk Allen supposedly
Speaker 1: did from fifty two to ninety two. And this idea
Speaker 1: was proposed by Saul Paul Seirig in The New York
Speaker 1: Review of Science Fiction. But of course, in all this
Speaker 1: we have to recognize that the real kirk Allen could
Speaker 1: have been none of these men, and we don't know
Speaker 1: to what degree the details were changed in the writing
Speaker 1: to either protect the patient's identity and also perhaps make
Speaker 1: the story a little more engaging for some reason or another. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's true that we don't really know. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: hard to know to what extent Lindener's story is true,
Speaker 1: which elements are fictionalized, how much he may have embellished.
Speaker 1: Sagan takes it as an instructive lesson, even if we
Speaker 1: can't know for sure which parts have been embellished and
Speaker 1: all that. But I do think we can go to
Speaker 1: other examples of relationships between patients and therapists that have
Speaker 1: been two way in this kind of way, where in
Speaker 1: some sense there's a cooperative lack of skepticism. And maybe
Speaker 1: we should follow Sagan toward another one of those examples,
Speaker 1: right because in the book, and in relation to this example,
Speaker 1: he mentions UFO sidings, the alien abduction experiences, and of
Speaker 1: course satanic ritualized abuse allegations. UFO abductions seem to be
Speaker 1: the main context of this coinac that's the wh he
Speaker 1: spends the most time with that. He does deal with
Speaker 1: the this satanic ritualized abuse a fair amount as well.
Speaker 1: But in all these cases, you know, he says that
Speaker 1: the encouraging individuals are you know, they're often mere teachers, counselors,
Speaker 1: or other authority figures, and they may be deep within
Speaker 1: the altered reality of UFO theory or you know, satanic
Speaker 1: cult theory. For instance, u f U UFO therapist who
Speaker 1: advertised in the back of publications about UFO sidings. Oh no, yeah,
Speaker 1: so obviously that's probably not the that's it's probably you
Speaker 1: know what you're going to get when you when you
Speaker 1: seek someone out like that, and especially if they give
Speaker 1: you material about UFO sidings for you to then read well.
Speaker 1: By recruiting from the pages of UFO citing publications, essentially
Speaker 1: you are almost guaranteeing that your patient already has things
Speaker 1: to draw from. Right. So the same can be true
Speaker 1: if if you had an individual and there was some
Speaker 1: question of possible abuse, and then the person who weighed
Speaker 1: in on it was, say, a social worker given to
Speaker 1: religious fundamentalist ideas. Still Second points out to the idea
Speaker 1: that some psychiatrists and others with some degree of scientific
Speaker 1: training that they could find them so they could give
Speaker 1: themselves over to This kind of nonsense is startling. You
Speaker 1: know that you have people who do have some training
Speaker 1: in skeptical thinking, perhaps a lot of training in skeptical thinking,
Speaker 1: and they can still slide down the slippery slope. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it's a good reminder that people of scientific training
Speaker 1: are not superhumans. You know that they're not rationality machines.
Speaker 1: Scientific training is just it is an aid to proper
Speaker 1: critical thinking, but it's not something that makes you invincible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a reminder that there's a challenge in thinking critically
Speaker 1: and not simply chasing after the explanation that feels best,
Speaker 1: or is more emotionally transferred or appeals to something deep
Speaker 1: inside us. No, we have to ask which explanation stands
Speaker 1: the test of critical evaluation, in which one requires the
Speaker 1: fewest leaps of faith. Segan says. Quote A friend of
Speaker 1: mine claims that the only interesting question in the alien
Speaker 1: abduction paradigm is who's conning. Who is the client deceiving
Speaker 1: the therapist, or vice versa. I disagree. For one thing,
Speaker 1: there are many other interesting questions about claims of alien abduction.
Speaker 1: For another, those two alternatives aren't mutually exclusive. And again,
Speaker 1: this comes back to that idea I mentioned earlier about
Speaker 1: the magic trick, the fact that you need the magician
Speaker 1: and the audience for the trick to exist. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, in a way, the audience is also, in
Speaker 1: a kind of limited sense, tricking the magician, because the
Speaker 1: audience is playing along. The audience doesn't really think magic
Speaker 1: is happening on the stage, but they're pretending to think
Speaker 1: that magic is happening on the stage in order to
Speaker 1: allow the magician to continue doing the magic without embarrassment.
Speaker 1: Like if the audience was all just scoffing the entire time,
Speaker 1: the magician would not feel like continuing. Right, And in
Speaker 1: the context of a magic show, that type of audience
Speaker 1: member sucks. No, nobody wants to sit next to that person, right,
Speaker 1: because you've entered a social contract when you go to
Speaker 1: a magic show. You there's an unspoken agreement between everyone
Speaker 1: that says, we'll all just pretend we're seeing magic here.
Speaker 1: You know, you don't have to be like, that's not real,
Speaker 1: he made that up. I know. When't suck if the
Speaker 1: person to your left at a magic show was just
Speaker 1: a total you know, just pointing out how every trick
Speaker 1: is done and just telling you how fake it is
Speaker 1: at every second, and then the person to you're right
Speaker 1: thinks that it is real and is blasphemous and is
Speaker 1: just screaming witchcraft at the stage. Well, both of those
Speaker 1: are the wrong way to experience a magic show. Right.
Speaker 1: You go to a magic show knowing it's all fake,
Speaker 1: but pretending it's real for fun, And a magic show
Speaker 1: is a safe environment. I think that the problem in
Speaker 1: real life is you don't want to slide into another category,
Speaker 1: you know, and I actually encountered this a lot. We
Speaker 1: encountered this with some listeners writing in about conspiracy theories
Speaker 1: and and you know, wacky or more fringe idea that
Speaker 1: come up sometimes, and how they and how it's safe
Speaker 1: when they engage with them, and they can say, oh,
Speaker 1: I can read about this and it's it's interesting, it's wacky,
Speaker 1: et cetera. But we all want to be able to
Speaker 1: stay in that place, right, to stay in the center
Speaker 1: of the middle of those three seats in the theater.
Speaker 1: And I don't know if it is always safe, because
Speaker 1: I think you know, the media we consume and the
Speaker 1: things we expose ourselves to work on us. They work
Speaker 1: on us in ways that we're not always aware of.
Speaker 1: It's the same way that people think advertising doesn't work
Speaker 1: on me, it works on other people. It doesn't work
Speaker 1: on me. I'm immune to it. I can watch a
Speaker 1: million commercials and it will never change my purchasing behaviors.
Speaker 1: You are not immune to advertising. It works on you.
Speaker 1: And also, by that same token, I think people need
Speaker 1: to be careful what kinds of say, conspiracy media they
Speaker 1: expose themselves to, because I know exactly what you're talking about.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of people who are skeptics who
Speaker 1: do not they're not conspiracy theorists, they're not buying into
Speaker 1: the flat earth. But they might say, watch conspiracy theory
Speaker 1: videos on YouTube because they think it's funny. But when
Speaker 1: you expose yourself to that kind of thing a lot,
Speaker 1: I think, I think sometimes it can start to make
Speaker 1: gears turn in your mind. It can start to kind
Speaker 1: of work on you. Even if you try to practice
Speaker 1: a certain level of detachment, there are there are ways
Speaker 1: in which we start just kind of succumbing to what
Speaker 1: we're exposed to. Yeah, I've seen it argued that one
Speaker 1: of the problems with conspiracy theories, uh is that there
Speaker 1: is an underlying, uh, teleological explanation for the world. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so even if you're if you're just not for
Speaker 1: a second one over by the idea that that there
Speaker 1: are lizard men living in the center of the hollow
Speaker 1: Worth or what have you, or that there's some sort
Speaker 1: of massive uh you know, conspiracy you know, doing something
Speaker 1: to or a watter and whatever the conspiracy theory happens
Speaker 1: to be, you might not be one over by the details.
Speaker 1: But but what if they underlying teleological explanation for reality
Speaker 1: takes hold the idea that things are happening for a reason. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then how might that make you more susceptible to
Speaker 1: other teleological concepts that are not actually healthy for an
Speaker 1: objective understanding of the world. Well, I think a huge
Speaker 1: part of the appeal of conspiracy theory, literature and videos
Speaker 1: and all that, not just conspiracy theories, but alien abduction
Speaker 1: stuff and all that is the conspiracy part. It's not
Speaker 1: just it's not just that I believe the Earth is
Speaker 1: actually flat and people say it's a ball, but actually
Speaker 1: it's flat. It's that the government is lying to us
Speaker 1: about the shape of the Earth and scientists are lying
Speaker 1: like That's the crucial part, because to believe in a
Speaker 1: conspiracy like that that's being perpetuated by all these people
Speaker 1: with power does give you a sense of Okay, there
Speaker 1: is a meaningful conflict, and I can understand who the
Speaker 1: villains are and that they're doing something like it gives
Speaker 1: you a sense of purpose, the same way that war
Speaker 1: gives people a sense of purpose. Exactly. That's a very
Speaker 1: good point, though I've never quite figured out why exactly
Speaker 1: the scientists want people to believe that it's a ball
Speaker 1: instead of well, was this ever explored on the X Files.
Speaker 1: Did they ever get into I don't think they ever
Speaker 1: did Hollow Earth? But hey, speaking of the X Files,
Speaker 1: maybe we should come back to Carl Sagan and the
Speaker 1: idea of insufficiently critical therapists dealing with people who have
Speaker 1: a delusion like that. So let's take a break and
Speaker 1: then when we come back, we can get into John E. Mac.
Speaker 1: All Right, we're back, all right. So part of the
Speaker 1: context for Sagan's discussion of the whole Linener and kirk
Speaker 1: Allen phenomenon is the Harvard psychiatrist John E. Mack, and
Speaker 1: Sagan talks about Mac a lot, right, Yes, Yeah, he
Speaker 1: spends a fair amount of time with him, Like he
Speaker 1: initially brings him up in the book, because he is
Speaker 1: he's talking about dreams. He brings up Max's nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: book Nightmares and Human Conflict, in which Mac writes that
Speaker 1: there's a period in childhood development in which there's a
Speaker 1: little distinction regarding the difference between dreams and reality, and
Speaker 1: the establishment of this distinction is quote hard one. Now,
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's necessarily true, but it seems plausible.
Speaker 1: The main point that Sagan makes is like this passage.
Speaker 1: This book even would would indicate that Mac is a
Speaker 1: professional capable of realizing that dream hallucinations, that these can
Speaker 1: have a huge influence on how we perceive reality. And
Speaker 1: Mac did start as a respectable mainstream psychiatrist. Yes, Sagan
Speaker 1: mentions that he'd known him for many years. They were
Speaker 1: both involved in the Nobel Peace Prize winning Physicians for
Speaker 1: Social Responsibility movement. I think they were both, didn't They
Speaker 1: both campaign against nuclear weapons. Yes, that was a part
Speaker 1: of this. Yeah. It's also be mentioned that Mac won
Speaker 1: a Pulitzer for his biography of T. E. Lawrence, a
Speaker 1: Prince of our Disorder, Oh, of Lawrence of Arabia. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: So yeah, he didn't just climb out of the woodwork
Speaker 1: and start advertising ufology courses in the back of a
Speaker 1: magazine or anything like this. This guy had credentials. Now,
Speaker 1: earlier I mentioned the connection between John Mack and the
Speaker 1: X Files. Why Mac in the X Files? How do
Speaker 1: those things go together? Well, because he was a big
Speaker 1: proponent of the reality of alien abduction experiences at some level,
Speaker 1: at some kind of mysterious level. But also because in
Speaker 1: the X Files, Robert, I'm sure you remember this from
Speaker 1: some point or have you not watched The X Files, Like,
Speaker 1: I've seen two episodes, Remember I've seen I've seen the
Speaker 1: creature that lives in the porta potty. Oh, that's a
Speaker 1: good one. Yeah, and the one about the invisible elephant
Speaker 1: the twoisdes Oh, that's the worst one ever. You've seen
Speaker 1: one of the best ones in one of the worst ones. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the complete experience. Well, you have missed out on one
Speaker 1: of my favorite running themes in the show, which is
Speaker 1: deep regression hypnosis. So whenever Moulder and Scully come across
Speaker 1: somebody who's experiencing missing time, they can't figure out what's
Speaker 1: going on, Where did all that? Where did that night go?
Speaker 1: Mulder recommends deep regression hypnosis. And this, of course is
Speaker 1: a great you know, it leads to jokes in our
Speaker 1: house like I can't remember where I put the gardening gloves. Well,
Speaker 1: let's try deep regression hypnosis. And so Christian and I
Speaker 1: actually talked about John Mack back when we did our
Speaker 1: two parter on the Science of The X Files a
Speaker 1: few years ago, because we were talking about deep regression
Speaker 1: hypnosis in that episode. But so, what does that have
Speaker 1: to do with John Mack. Well, apparently in the nineteen
Speaker 1: nineties when Chris Carter was developing the idea of the
Speaker 1: X files. Part of what got him going, part of
Speaker 1: what got him into the all of the intellectual fodder
Speaker 1: and territory that would become the X Files, was the
Speaker 1: work of John Mack. And as we were saying, Mack
Speaker 1: was originally a respected psychiatrist. He was Harvard Medical faculty,
Speaker 1: but he became very interesting in alien abduction experience, not
Speaker 1: just in the subjective experiences of his patients, but increasingly
Speaker 1: in the underlying reality of alien abductions. And he worked
Speaker 1: with more than two hundred people who claimed to have
Speaker 1: been abducted by aliens, and so he appears to have
Speaker 1: believed them, But then again, sometimes it's hard to tell.
Speaker 1: He would say things that sounded kind of waffly, like
Speaker 1: he would seem to say he believed, but then he
Speaker 1: would also hedge. Here's one quote when he was talking
Speaker 1: to the BBC quote, I would never say, yes, there
Speaker 1: are aliens taking people, but I would say, there is
Speaker 1: a compelling, powerful phenomenon here that I can't account for
Speaker 1: in any other way. That's mysterious. Yet I can't know
Speaker 1: what it is. But it seems to me that it
Speaker 1: invites a deeper further inquiry. And to me, this kind
Speaker 1: of statement, it comes back to Sagan's fire breathing dragon,
Speaker 1: the invisible dragon in the garage. What specifically is it
Speaker 1: that's so mysterious, Like you should always be cautious. I
Speaker 1: think when somebody in that there something is real and
Speaker 1: highly significant, But when you ask them for further clarifying questions,
Speaker 1: they sort of retreat to the defensive battlements of vagueness
Speaker 1: and mystery and must be something and can't be explained. Like,
Speaker 1: let's not let's not be too quick to judge here
Speaker 1: about this, about this idea that there's a dragon in
Speaker 1: the garage, because clearly we're talking about it. Something's going
Speaker 1: on here, Yeah, exactly. I mean, maybe maybe it's not
Speaker 1: a dragon, maybe it is, maybe it's not. Who's to say,
Speaker 1: But clearly something very significant is in the garage. But yeah,
Speaker 1: when people talk like that, you very often will hear
Speaker 1: them in a different context with a different audience talk
Speaker 1: more like so when I encountered the dragon in the
Speaker 1: garage and when he blessed me with his holy cold fire.
Speaker 1: But anyway, back to John Max, So, one of the
Speaker 1: things that Mac did in his sessions with people who
Speaker 1: claim to have had UFO abduction experiences. Is he would
Speaker 1: sometimes use something like him hypnos. I think he referred
Speaker 1: to it more often as relaxation techniques, but he would
Speaker 1: he would put people in a hypnotized state and say, Okay,
Speaker 1: let's draw out details of your experience with alien abduction
Speaker 1: and flesh out all of the vague parts that way,
Speaker 1: which just I mean, we know lots of reasons now
Speaker 1: why that's not a good strategy for getting accurate information
Speaker 1: about what happened to people. And you think you would
Speaker 1: have thought more people would have would have been inclued
Speaker 1: into that, just by the fact that to think about
Speaker 1: hypnosis something that is sort of stereotypically about putting someone
Speaker 1: in a heightened state of suggestibility, and that's the state
Speaker 1: you're going to, you know, use to to define the
Speaker 1: truth of what happened. Well, yeah, I mean, so Mac
Speaker 1: defends he defends his practices by saying, hey, you know,
Speaker 1: I think there's some criteria that make the information I
Speaker 1: get through these types of sessions more reliable than normal
Speaker 1: face to face interviews. And so his criteria include the
Speaker 1: fact that he says this testimony was often against the
Speaker 1: self interest of the person giving it, So people in
Speaker 1: this relaxation state or this hypnosis state would admit things
Speaker 1: that were more embarrassing or something like that. He also
Speaker 1: says that the memories recovered through this regression technique would
Speaker 1: be more consistent with the independent reports of other abductees.
Speaker 1: That's another red flag, because then again, you could be
Speaker 1: drawing from elements in the culture, right Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: everybody is watching the same TV shows, They're potentially watching
Speaker 1: the same films, they're reading the same accounts. And he
Speaker 1: also says that memories, the details of which are drawn
Speaker 1: through regression or hypnosis tend to cause stronger emotional reactions
Speaker 1: in the patient. That also sounds not surprising and not
Speaker 1: like a true advertisement for their validity as factual. There's
Speaker 1: actually a great piece in aon magazine by the writer
Speaker 1: Alexa Clay, who grew up around John. She was John
Speaker 1: Mack was her mother's partner, and in this article Clay writes, quote,
Speaker 1: I remember one summer evening in a beach house on
Speaker 1: Martha's Vineyard, when I was about eleven. We all watched
Speaker 1: as John regressed my aunt back into a past life.
Speaker 1: She lay on the couch recalling an incident in which
Speaker 1: she was a forest ranger who witnessed the death of
Speaker 1: a few people during some kind of avalanche. My aunt
Speaker 1: later told me that she was fully conscious of the
Speaker 1: experience but couldn't control what she was saying. It was
Speaker 1: like she was watching herself tell a story. John later
Speaker 1: tried to hypnotize my brother so that he wouldn't be
Speaker 1: afraid of spiders and listening to this kind of story
Speaker 1: that Clay tells. I don't know. This was the conclusion
Speaker 1: I came to back when Christian and I talked about this,
Speaker 1: and I feel the same way now you hear these
Speaker 1: overt signs that it sounds like John Mack was somebody
Speaker 1: who was kind of chasing something, right. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: hard to diagnose from afar, but it really seems like
Speaker 1: this is somebody who's looking for ways to believe. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and again, it reminds me of this idea of that
Speaker 1: while Steven's presented in Demon Lovers, the idea that the
Speaker 1: the witchcraft theorist in the Witchcraft, essentially the persecutors we're
Speaker 1: asking these questions because they wanted they wanted proof, They
Speaker 1: wanted proof of, ultimately of the divine. But if you
Speaker 1: can't have direct proof of the divine, at least you
Speaker 1: can have direct proof of the demonic. And maybe he wasn't,
Speaker 1: maybe Mac wasn't looking for something quite so specific, but
Speaker 1: I mean, we can all relate to the the you know,
Speaker 1: the desire for something wondrous in our lives. I mean,
Speaker 1: even Carl Sagan admits that, you know, he says many times,
Speaker 1: you know that he would really love for there to
Speaker 1: be aliens like that would be tremendous, even Carl Sagan
Speaker 1: emotionally as a malder. Emotionally he also wants to believe.
Speaker 1: He puts unsatisfying Scully constraints on himself to prevent him
Speaker 1: from coming to false beliefs. So Sagan in The Demon
Speaker 1: Hunted World he writes that Mac had once asked him
Speaker 1: if there was anything to all the UFO stuff, and
Speaker 1: Sagan's answer was not much, except on the psychiatric side.
Speaker 1: And Mac then, of course proceeds to interview all these
Speaker 1: self identifying abductees like we've been discussing here, and he
Speaker 1: finds them quote completely persuasive because of the emotional power
Speaker 1: of these experiences quote, and he proposes in his book
Speaker 1: Abductions that quote, the power or intensity with which something
Speaker 1: is felt should inform us if something is true. And
Speaker 1: this is something that Sagan rightfully calls a quote dangerous doctrine.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that's a terrible way to judge what's true. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, because for my own part, I can think
Speaker 1: of a number of ideas or concepts that I feel
Speaker 1: intensely about, and I can make them meaningful, you know,
Speaker 1: life changing parts of my existence. But it doesn't mean
Speaker 1: that they should inform one's objective understanding of reality. I
Speaker 1: cry more often about fiction than I do about the
Speaker 1: real world. I suspect I'm not alone in this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, fiction is tweaked in a way to maximize
Speaker 1: these reactions, right, but Sagan he says that he finds
Speaker 1: it perplexing. Then an expert like Mac who recognized the
Speaker 1: power of dreams and hallucinations would jump to this conclusion.
Speaker 1: Alien should be an explanation of last refuge, and Sagan
Speaker 1: also writes that if the Kirk Allen story is one
Speaker 1: of a patient saving the therapist, then Maac was perhaps
Speaker 1: not so lucky. Well, the question I have is the
Speaker 1: question I have about the comparison between the two is
Speaker 1: one that's earlier. Just based on these quotes you've read
Speaker 1: so far, do you think do you think mac already
Speaker 1: had a predisposition to believe in alien abduction before he
Speaker 1: got into interviewing these patients or do you think like Lindner,
Speaker 1: he got wrapped up in a relationship with the patient
Speaker 1: and that emotional relationship of trying to treat the patient
Speaker 1: infected him with the alien abduction belief. Do you see
Speaker 1: what I'm saying is if you more like the Kirk
Speaker 1: Allen story or did he already believe going in? Well,
Speaker 1: I wonder if you have if the connecting thread here
Speaker 1: is that is perhaps one of empathy, like the just
Speaker 1: the ability to just really feel what someone is telling you.
Speaker 1: And and certainly this is something that Christian and I
Speaker 1: talked about when we did a two parter an alien
Speaker 1: abduction Experiences, is that that even though we deny the
Speaker 1: the uh you know, the reality of alien abduction experiences,
Speaker 1: the objective reality of them, certainly there can be a
Speaker 1: subjective reality. There can still be there is something there
Speaker 1: that that can be a trauma or an experience, no
Speaker 1: matter how warped it has become through manipulation of memory
Speaker 1: or some other factor like that that there there can
Speaker 1: still be this emotional thing that is raw and real.
Speaker 1: And then ultimately, if you have someone who is very
Speaker 1: receptive to those kind of, you know, emotional experiences, then yeah,
Speaker 1: I could see where that could have an impact on
Speaker 1: what you believe. I think you're absolutely right. But then again,
Speaker 1: we also don't want to accidentally make it seem like,
Speaker 1: you know, oh, if you care about somebody, if you
Speaker 1: have an empathetic connection with them, then you just want
Speaker 1: to validate all the things they believe that clearly aren't true.
Speaker 1: Because you don't want to do that either. I mean
Speaker 1: that that's harmful to people. You don't want to validate
Speaker 1: people's delusions. So I guess the trouble is finding ways to,
Speaker 1: you know, to to relate to people in a positive way,
Speaker 1: to show you care, but without telling them, hey, you're
Speaker 1: right about being abducted by an alien. That really did happen, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, it really underlies the immense responsibility that is
Speaker 1: that is undertaken by professional psychologists and therapists. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: have to be able to to in a sense, walk
Speaker 1: that line and not fall into some of the pitfalls
Speaker 1: on either side. Now, of course, I have to be.
Speaker 1: I have to point out too that in both max
Speaker 1: case and Linener's case, they both were able to get
Speaker 1: some books out of this and probably get some you know,
Speaker 1: some book advances. So so what if you have a
Speaker 1: cynical approach to well, I mean, if there's I mean,
Speaker 1: we're all on this to make money. So I you know,
Speaker 1: I understand the inclination, but I don't know. I mean,
Speaker 1: I admit, I you know, I'm not like his biographer
Speaker 1: or anything, but I've read a decent amount of mac
Speaker 1: and it it seems to me like he is genuinely
Speaker 1: mistaken about things. I don't get a very cynical vibe
Speaker 1: from him. Yeah, I get the feeling that he's somebody
Speaker 1: who was smart, who was even wise in a way,
Speaker 1: but who just got led down a really unfortunate path
Speaker 1: of credulity about you know, kind of vague beliefs that
Speaker 1: he couldn't back up with evidence. Yeah, I mean it
Speaker 1: comes down to just all those interviews that he would did,
Speaker 1: hundreds of interviews, Like how often is he interacting with
Speaker 1: this worldview that is, uh, that doesn't actually represent reality?
Speaker 1: And I can see where that could take a toll
Speaker 1: After a while, all right, So there you have it.
Speaker 1: This is the first of two episodes that we're going
Speaker 1: to do. So we're not done with kirk Allen just yet. No.
Speaker 1: One of the things we haven't even explored yet is
Speaker 1: the whole science of daydreaming and what it means when,
Speaker 1: because so at the resolution of the story, we hear
Speaker 1: that kirk Allen in fact does not necessarily believe he's
Speaker 1: traveling to the future and all that he was just
Speaker 1: keeping it going in order to satisfy Lendner's curiosity. But
Speaker 1: still supposedly he was. According to the Lindner's account, something
Speaker 1: was bad enough that his employers called in a psychoanalyst. Right,
Speaker 1: he was clearly spending a lot of time daydreaming about
Speaker 1: these science fiction worlds. So what's going on there when
Speaker 1: people are not necessarily deluded about what's real and what's not,
Speaker 1: but they're spending lots of time in an internal fantasy
Speaker 1: to the detriment of their work life and their relationships.
Speaker 1: Well we'll discuss it on the next episode of Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow Your Mind, And in the meantime, you can
Speaker 1: head on over to Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1: That's the mothership, that's where you'll find everything that we're
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Speaker 1: Big thanks as always to our wonderful audio producers Alex
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