Operation Mindfuck: The origins of the Illuminati conspiracy fraud and how it became popular in our times

From the new documentary Can't Get You Out of My Head by Adam Curtis

 

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The first settlers had come from Europe to America to flee from the corruption of power in the Old World. But although they had got away from the old power, they hadn't got away from their suspicious minds, and alone, out in the vast wilderness of the new America, that led them to imagining dark, hidden conspiracies in their own government, far away in Washington. 

 

One of the first of these, in the early 19th century, said that a secret group from Europe, called the Bavarian Illuminati, were running a giant conspiracy in America to destroy the new democracy. In reality, the Illuminati had been a utopian movement who wanted to replace religion with reason. But instead, they now became the first of a series of frightening suspicions that fed off the isolation of the settlers in the New World. 

 

One night (in 1958, somewhere in the vicinity of Whittier, California), Kerry Thornley went with his friend Greg Hill to a bowling alley. They started to discuss reality. Thornley insisted that there was a fixed order to the Universe, but Greg said that the Universe was chaos and it was human thought that projected an order onto the chaos.

Thornley was inspired by this, and together he and Greg Hill decided to set up a movement dedicated to the idea of chaos. They called it Discordianism. Underlying it was the belief that individuals had the power inside themselves to bring order and meaning to the chaos, not the old systems of power that created the fear and suspicion. Discordianism was beginning to grow, spreading by word of mouth. Like much of the new counterculture, it was against all politics. It distrusted all the old systems of power (left and right), because they were just trying to force you into their version of reality.

 

Some members of Discordianism were working at Playboy magazine, and Thornley decided that he was going to use Playboy magazine to start an experiment that would make people see how absurd all conspiracy theories really were. He called it Operation Mindfuck. In 1969, he and Greg Hill began Operation Mindfuck by placing a false letter in the Playboy letters page. They put it between another letter asking if gun fanatics had small penises and one from a man asking about the physical danger to his testicles from heavy petting. 

Thornley's fake letter asked whether all the political assassinations in America were really being masterminded by a single secret society. And the society it named was the Illuminati. It said that the Illuminati were behind all the chaos and the fear that was now gripping America. 

He and the other Discordians then proceeded to spread this idea all across America through the counterculture, in magazines and books and even in plays. Thornley's aim was to try and break the spell of conspiracy theories by making people see the absurdity of believing them. And he had chosen the Illuminati for the experiment because no-one could possibly believe that an 18th-century organisation from Bavaria was really, in the second half of the 20th century, the secret rulers of the modern world. It was clearly ridiculous.

In the political and economic chaos of the early 1970s, conspiracy theories were going to spread like wildfire through the counterculture. As they did, the fake conspiracies about the Illuminati and the secret rulers of the world that Kerry Thornley thought that no-one could ever believe, began to get mixed up with the true conspiracies like MKUltra.

And more and more people began to follow Jim Garrison's theory of time and propinquity, looking for patterns of a hidden power in America, not for logic or meaning any longer.

And when the Internet was created, almost immediately, those patterns of suspicion would move into the data and multiply endlessly across the system. And that dark paranoia, that 200 years before had spread across the prairies and the mountains among isolated settlers, now spread across the virtual world, among isolated individuals sitting alone in front of their screens.

And suspicion and distrust crept back into what was going to be the new system of power.