One of the most ironic and revealing things about Carr’s version of Illuminoid history is that if you take such thinking far enough to the right you’ll find far leftwingers coming to meet you on common ground: it’s a conspiracy! And indeed it is a conspiracy, an unending secret war between rich and poor, haves and have-nots, ins and outs. Carr’s inheritors such as Dan Smoot, Gary Allen and Phoebe Courtney may seem ludicrous in their attack on the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) as the brains of the conspiracy, yet what they’re saying is essentially the same as scholarly leftwingers such as C. Wright Mills and other trackers of the infamous Power Elite, more recently known as the Military-Industrial Complex or The Establishment. The argument is not whether there’s a conspiracy, but what to do about it.

I know now that Bobby’s parents were evil. I did not know it then. I felt their evil but had no name for it. My supervisors were not able to help me name what I was facing. The name did not exist in our professional vocabulary. As scientists rather than priests, we were not supposed to think in such terms.

To name something correctly gives us a certain amount of power over it.

The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly - you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over.