Alex Tsakiris: Today we welcome Jay Dyer to Skeptiko. Jay is the creator of Jay’s Analysis, a fascinating website [and] YouTube channel that tackles film analysis and philosophy, geopolitics, metaphysics and also really cool stuff that has a lot of overlap with the topics we’ve talked about on Skeptiko. He’s also the author of Esoteric Hollywood: Sex, Cults and Symbols in Film. A great book for anyone interested in looking at film from a deeper, esoteric, occulted perspective. It’s a book that became quite popular, actually hit number one on one of the Amazon lists, so big congrats to Jay for that.

Jay, it’s great to have you on Skeptiko; thanks so much for joining me.

Jay Dyer: Thank you, a pleasure to be here, I’m looking forward to talking to you.

…I mean, you can very, very easily show the incoherency and the inconsistency and the contradictions involved in their naive scientism.

Alex Tsakiris: Well especially when you introduce scientific materialism, which is something we’ve talked a lot about on this show. When you really break it down and look at the proposition behind that and also the links to atheism, which are just stark, I mean, you can’t really separate the two because the philosophical agenda is the same, materialism is telling us, this is all there is, we are just what we see, we are nothing more as human beings, there’s no meaning to anything, and then that is part and parcel with the idea of atheism, it just goes hand in hand I should say, it’s hand in hand of the idea of atheism and I think that that’s been engineered in from the beginning. I mean, if you look at Darwinism, which there’s some debate about whether Darwinism really implied the social Darwinistic survival of the fittest, and I think we’ve gone back and forth on that, but I think ultimately the answer is, yes, that was the design from the beginning to kind of promote this idea.

Jay Dyer: Of course it was, and the title of the book.

Alex Tsakiris: Go ahead.

Jay Dyer: Well, I’m just agreeing with you, I’m saying it obviously does, it’s in the title of the book, The Favorite Races. It’s the product of Malthusian, Victorian England, it’s the idea that the Anglo-American establishment, the British Empire was the apex of history and that there’s really no other model by which the world should be governed and you can’t really, I don’t think, understand Darwin. Darwin is outside of the ethos from which it comes.

Alex Tsakiris: Right.

Jay Dyer: This is another error that a lot of people involved in scientism make, is that they assume that there’s a neutrality that science somehow has magical access to neutrality and, you know, there’s no cognitive dissonance, there’s no bias involved in ‘science’, in that there’s just brute factuality and it doesn’t require interpretation and that the scientist, when he dons the lab coat, just magically obtains objectivity to a degree that no human being in any other field has, which is curious because, in my view, the real science, I would say, happens most of the time in fields like engineering and where you have real development based on actual principles that occur in the world. Now, that’s not to say that nobody’s successful in biology or anything like that, I’m not saying that, I’m just saying that what most people think science is, isn’t really science, it’s more of, again a propaganda tool of, really, older worldviews that are kind of dead.

Alex Tsakiris: But, if I could return one minute, one of the things I think is fascinating about the Charles Darwin thing is, you know, you can sit down and you can explain to anyone in less than a minute, how the Darwinism breaks down because, this survival of the fittest thing; we all know that’s not true, it’s really the non-survival of the least fit, right? So, if you’re a pack of gazelles, you don’t have to be the fastest one, just don’t be the slowest one. I mean, even if you accept Darwinism for what it is, that’s all he was saying.

Then the second thing he was saying is it’s not about survival of the individual, it’s about survival of the group, because if you just survive as an individual, that doesn’t do you much good, but if your pack survives, if your group survives, if you accept Darwinism, even basically what it is, you have to understand that it’s the survival and perpetuation of that gene set of the group.

Jay Dyer: Yeah and there are a host of problems with that worldview. I have a bunch of talks and articles and essays that I’ve written about it, where I deconstruct it on many levels. I do, in a few essays, deal with extensive, kind of, scientific type argumentation, but I don’t usually focus on that because my training was more so as a philosopher, so I’m usually interested in the metaphysical and philosophical critiques of Darwinism and one thing I would say is that, if you start at the philosophical level and you look at it and you say, “Okay, what do most people who have this worldview tend to say about man and about the external world and about history and the process of objects and phenomenon and so forth?” What you tend to find is a lot of people kind of spouting the same stuff.

So, I think I can safely group most people in that type of worldview under the categories of reductionism and materialism and naturalistic process and so forth, process philosophy maybe, and what you find is you can kind of group all of those views together under a lot of the same basic presuppositions. So when I approach things in my work philosophically, I do what’s called a presuppositional critique and I do that because I believe that the way that humans and human psychology functions…

Alex Tsakiris: If I can let me shift the focus a little bit because one of the links that I think is really interesting that you cover in many, many ways and it’s hard to pin down where exactly you’ve kind of homed in on this, but that is the link between atheism and the occulted, secret worlds of, you know, Luciferianism, Satanism, all of that stuff, because there’s a link there that I think hasn’t been adequately explored. Because again, it’s a case where these guys are kind of saying two things, on one hand they’re saying, “Hey, with this atheist, there’s nothing out there,” and on the other hand they’re kind of embracing a lot of that occult practices that are very steeped in a whole spiritual realm, extended consciousness realm. Do you have any thoughts on that Jay?

Jay Dyer: Yeah absolutely. I’ve been meaning eventually to get to this but I just haven’t had really the time to approach it properly and do it justice and that is precisely what you’re getting at, that I don’t really think the new atheist and atheism in this last few decades that’s really been popularized, I don’t think that’s intended to be the final destination. I think it’s a halfway house that’s kind of been put out there to lead people down a pied piper’s path basically and I see that as a kind of alchemical progression.

So, if you read the works of, say Michael Hoffman, he’ll talk about how the alchemical process involves taking a thing and then kind of breaking it down, disintegrating it, calcifying it and so forth, and then you recreate it into a new form, transmutation basically. I think that the phase or fad of atheism comes at the late stage of societal breakdown and religious breakdown, philosophical breakdown and I don’t believe that these breakdowns are natural or are organic, I think they’re, for the most part, kind of imposed from a top down, oligarchic, social engineering type perspective, technocratic perspective basically.

So, what I think had to happen is that they had to gradually sort of break down traditional notions of family and morals and you get Bertrand Russell and H.G. Wells actually talking about this, they talk about how they would have to, sort of, break down man, stamp him out. You know, Bertrand Russell talks about stamping out free will, stamping out man’s spirit. Which by the way, why would you have to stamp it out if the spirit doesn’t exist?

Alex Tsakiris: Right.

Jay Dyer: Which is an interesting question for Russell. Aldous Huxley says the same thing, he said the will would have to be broken and that man would have to be removed from his pedestal and made to seem meaningless in the midst of a chaotic meaningless universe.

So, I think once you see through this façade that’s really been sold to everyone through pop culture, through pop music and all this kind of stuff, you can begin to see how…

Alex Tsakiris: And through science right?

Jay Dyer: Exactly and that actually comes up, as I point out in the book, there’s a great section in Brave New World where Huxley admits this, because some of the characters in the novel realize that the scientism that dominates the world socialist government in the novel, they realize that it’s fraudulent and they come to the world socialist ruler, one of ten, Mustapha Mond, and they say, “Hey, there are discoveries that actually disprove your materialism and your scientism,” and he says, “Oh yeah, we know that, we’ve known that for a long time,” and they’re like, “Why are you suppressing this?” and he’s like, “Well because that’s what it has to be, you know, the people are never going to accept this, they’re never going to be raised beyond their basic animalistic state, you’re wasting your time trying to get people to understand things about metaphysics or things about the spirit or free will or any of that stuff, or arts or…” So John the Savage says, “So, you’re saying that scientism that you promote is religion?” and he says, “Absolutely, there’s a scientific orthodoxy that’s promoted top-down.” That’s what the guy, the controller in the novel literally says.

So here’s one of the most formative thinkers — brains, I guess you could say — of the 20thcentury, you know, intimately connected to the world society, to the creation of the UN and UNESCO, and he’s basically saying what I’m saying. He’s saying that it’s a fraud, scientism is a fraud, but it can be promoted as the new religion and that’s why in the novel, that you have this sort of Auguste Comte-style fake religion that’s created a civic religion based around scientism.

So, I mean everything is in Brave New World by the way, if you want to just see the whole plan laid out, that’s where they’re going and science is their religion in the novel; not science strictly speaking and truly speaking, but scientism.

Alex Tsakiris: And Jay, you’re really saying a couple of things there that I want to pick up on, because you’re saying scientism and science and materialism is religion, we get that, but the other thing you’re saying and you’re open to at least, is this idea that it’s really a way station to something different to Luciferianism, Satanism, occultism, and let me just tell you a little story that I ran across.

There’s this guy, Dr. Richard Wiseman, extremely popular British psychologist, at some point he had some phony baloney title of The Guy: the point person for psychology education for the UK or something like that, he’s been on the show a couple of times, he’s an outspoken skeptic in the face of all these people who are interested in parapsychology or near-death experience or anything in this extended consciousness realm, and he’s also an outspoken atheist of course. But here’s the twist, here’s what I found when I looked into this guy, and I think it hits exactly on your point, he’s also one of the founders of The Edinburgh [Secret] Society, and if you go to the website, I want to read this for you because it’s so telling.

We stage events for those of a curious disposition. Our past evenings have involved the performance of magic, optical illusions, experiments into fear, investigations into death, attempts to contact spirits, and summoning the devil.

So here it is, and if you go to the website there’s this big picture, prominently displayed, of this guy completely outfitted in this satanic kind of thing, right? So it’s the thing, “Hey man, it’s cool, we’re all atheists, you know, you want to sign this little pact with Satan, it doesn’t mean anything, right, go ahead, sign it. You want to perform these rituals, hey we’re all atheists, it doesn’t mean anything, right?” I mean there’s a real mismatch here that, I don’t think has drawn enough attention.

Jay Dyer: Yeah, I’m not familiar with the person that you’re talking about, but that is a trend and that’s kind of what I’m getting at, is that from the technocrat controller perspective, I mean, they’re very aware of the fact that atheism and materialism and reductionism, they don’t have the power to hold human belief for very long because they’re not fulfilling, they’re empty and so humans are always going to be moving towards the transcendent.

Now, from their vantage point, whether they acknowledge the belief in the transcendent, you know, whether they’re just still rank atheists or materialists or agnostic or actual Luciferians or some form of occultists, regardless I think, from their vantage point pragmatically speaking, they view human psychology that way, that humans are just going to be worshiping something.

So you get, amongst a lot of them that kind of Auguste Comte type perspective, where I think they generally think that they can erect and concoct a new religion for the future.

Now, this is of course what the UN’s been involved in with a lot of the ecumenical projects over the last hundred years back to the first one in like 1893 or 1894 in Chicago, that kind of kicked off the ecumenical movement and then you understand that, when you look into who funded that and who was behind all that, that it’s these big families, it’s the Rockefellers, it’s others who had a big stake in the UN, UNESCO and that’s why you see that push for this sort of creation of a new global religion.

What I’m getting at is just that the popularization of atheism is really just one of those phases or stages on the process towards that, and you actually have masonic authors kind of writing about this at times, kind of giving away a little bit of the game and saying, “We can actually, kind of maybe wreck Christian religion and Islamic religion and then on the long haul we can get everybody towards a technocracy where you have this kind of a Luciferian approach.”

So, in my view, I think there are probably testing out different possibilities. I don’t think that the alien mythology has really gone as well as maybe they thought it would. I’ve looked into a lot of really solid academic approaches to the UFO phenomenon and you’ll find Brookings Institute papers from a few decades ago that will actually say that the UFO phenomenon was intended to basically break down traditional western theology. Now, they mention basically all the religions, Islam, Judaism, Christianity, but they really see Christianity as the one that they… I guess because it’s the most prominent in western civilization, as the one that really needed to be broken down. So, back in the 60s and 70s, you know, Brookings Institute was saying that maybe the UFO phenomenon could do that.

Now, I don’t know that it’s been that successful, but there’s other possibilities of what could be done, that they might try to do.

Alex Tsakiris: And we don’t know, to be fair, whether that’s a co-opting of a real phenomenon or if it’s a completely manufactured phenomenon, and there’s just a rats’ nest of stuff to pull apart there.

Jay Dyer: Right, right, I’m not trying to say that I know everything about the UFO phenomenon, I think there are anomalies in certain phenomena that we don’t explain or we can’t explain or don’t know about. I’m just saying what that paper says that they might try to do and I could give you the book if you want to reference that, the book is The Lure of the Edge: Scientific Passions, Religious Beliefs, and the Pursuit of UFOs by Denzler and she’s kind of an academic just looking at this phenomenon and she… again, the reason I bring that book up is just that she notes many times in there how useful this is for religions.

So, I think you can look at the CIA’s involvement in UFO Cults [has] been pretty well documented for many years now; I don’t think there’s a lot of dispute over that, but I think that you can probably surmise — and again I haven’t taken the time to dig into this — but if I recall there is some connection to funding for skeptical movements.

Alex Tsakiris: Oh yeah, oh definitely.

Jay Dyer: And I think these entities have a lot of, you know, probably foundation money and that kind of stuff. So they’re not actually skeptics and I think that one of my friends accurately stated that they’re pathological skeptics, so the irony here is that those worldviews are actually preset and preprogrammed to — again — interpret the data according to the ‘skeptic’ worldview.

Alex Tsakiris: And that’s one manifestation of it. The other is that it’s pure PSYOP.

Jay Dyer: Yeah.

Alex Tsakiris: I mean, just step back, they’re status quo supporters up and down, you know. So you get to something like climate change, if you will, where you say, “Okay, well let’s look at the skeptical perspective,” and they answer, “No!” Now, all of a sudden, the skeptical perspective switches over to the other side, because what it’s really about is promoting, defending the status quo. It’s the dog on a chain, you know, it’s the barking dog that they can put out there and what I’ve found, through kind of the investigation of parapsychology, psi and consciousness is that, what scientists do is they hide behind that, right? So they can be the barking dog out front and then scientists can kind of come in and say, “Well you know, we’re trying to be reasonable about this,” and all the rest, and meanwhile you have the barking dog out there that you can’t get past.

But I think that’s past, I mean, I think the skeptical thing, if you will, is over and I think people are on to the pseudo-skeptical reality that’s really there.

Jay Dyer: I hope so and I think that one of the clearest proofs of it being a PSYOP and social engineering is this sort of caving of many of these new atheists to promoting the alien idea. Now, regardless of what you believe about aliens or UFOs, the fact that, you know, something that was laughed at and sneered at by the skeptic community 20 years ago, you know, you can go back and find old magazine copies of Skeptic Magazine with Michael Shermer and his guys and they’ll just debunk UFOs and aliens. Oh, but now Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins can talk about that panspermia and the idea of an emergent just repackaged pantheism as the new approach.