About twenty years ago, at a family gathering, my cousin Jesse and I discovered that the Chinese-made Kermit the Frog doll recently given to one of our younger cousins had two left hands. We amused ourselves by spinning a tale in which “Commie Kermie” was the first probing tentacle of a plot to weaken America by disordering our children’s comprehension of reality. Sheer silliness, of course.
In 2020's live-action Mulan remake, Disney officially praised the government of Xinjiang Province, home to 60,000 Uighur women forcibly sterilized by that same government—home to well over a million detainees in “political re-education” camps where Muslims and other religious minorities are forcibly indoctrinated with government ideology—home to Party Secretary Chen Quanguo, placed in control of Xinjiang in 2016 after his highly successful tenure in the Tibet Autonomous Region, where the nightmarish practice of political protest via self-immolation went from a single incident in 2009-2010 to eighty-six incidents in 2011, the year Chen assumed power there. Such is the government which receives two sinister thumbs up from Walt Disney & Co.
In ages when the rational principle is, if not ascendant, at least extant, a useful distinction can be drawn between a crazy conspiracy theory and, simply, a theory. I propose to take it as axiomatic that ours is not such an age, and please note the reason for this: because that very axiom could itself be labeled a crazy conspiracy theory, meaning any defense of it would automatically beg the question. There is certainly a mordant irony there, but I don’t say it as a joke; I say it to illustrate the immediacy with which logic is flipped against itself when confronting, not the non-, but the anti-rational. It’s like a baseball game where the umpire is openly batting for the other team.
In his book Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, Russian priest Fr. Seraphim Rose examines a number of spiritual deceptions that have planted deep roots in modern culture. One such phenomenon is the ever-prevalent, ever-persistent narrative of the Close Encounter—a definitive go-to topic for those who yearn to be dismissed as psychotics or charlatans—but Fr. Rose revivifies this subject with the fascinating theory that the putative extraterrestrials encountered by otherwise ordinary folk are in fact nothing other than demons, adapting to the “scientific” superstitions of our age. (Consider, for instance, the ostensible materialist Neil deGrasse Tyson’s oddly strident insistence that we’re all living in a simulation, or the late Carl Sagan’s desperate search for alien life. Any potential transcendence will do, as long as it can still scoff at Christianity.) Fr. Rose analyzes multiple accounts of ETs and UFOs, isolating a key commonality: the bizarre and nonsensical behavior of the “aliens.” In 1961, for example, a Wisconsin farmer reported being approached by small, floating humanoid entities who handed him four pancakes.
Fr. Rose suggests three reasons for this type of behavior. 1: Even the most credible witness will inevitably meet skepticism when reporting an event that seems whimsical and absurd. If the “aliens” wish to sow harmful uncertainty, then it makes perfect sense to be nonsensical. 2: Sudden exposure to extreme irrationality or strangeness can temporarily disorder the victim’s sense of reality, thus rendering a subject more susceptible to various forms of hypnotic suggestion. This kind of behavior could therefore be a precursor to attempted mental conditioning, brainwashing, or even possession. And 3: Such entities, supposing they exist, might not be feigning the lunacy they exhibit. Perhaps whatever mode of existence they now endure has quite simply shattered whatever mode of intellect they once enjoyed. Remember the Un-man from C.S. Lewis’ Perelandra. And if that seems implausible, consider that German euthanasia clinics are now denying “service” to suicidal would-be Werthers who test positive for COVID-19 ("Come back when you are healthy and we kill you then, guten tag!”): is that sane?
Now let’s revisit Commie Kermie in the light of this third conjecture from Fr. Rose. Is it so far-fetched that a global heathen empire might have demonic intelligences sitting in key positions? Is it far-fetched that such creatures might hatch plans which appear neither good nor evil but simply nuts, at right angles to all coherent goal-seeking comportment? I really don't think so. In short, just because a theory is insane, that doesn't mean it's inaccurate.
From all this, I take away two things. Firstly, we are in danger from even more directions than we expect: when your enemy is genuinely mad, there’s no way to predict his movements logically. We have to lose the tendency to scoff at potential attacks that might seem utterly ludicrous. Vigilance is key. But, secondly, we are also protected by the fact that when the enemy’s plan is truly mad, then—well—it’s probably not going to work. Consider once again the German euthanasia clinics: two insanities, colliding, produce an actual good! We can’t merely sit back and wait for evil to destroy itself, because it would unfortunately devour many good things along the way; but it’s good to be reminded that, one way or another, it will be destroyed in the end.
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