The Normal Times

Manly P. Hall, 1944

“Experiences are the chemicals of life with which the philosopher experiments”

I have read a lot of conspiracy theories and books about them. I read these the way I read a good pulp novel, but with a twist of remorse. The people who pour their hearts out crafting over formatted presentations of these things on what is now the typical conspiracy forums are bordering on being brilliant writers. If nothing else, brilliant world builders, these people could be the New Voices of sci fi and fantasy, but they bog themselves down fighting the windmills that are corporatized, IPO-lusting forums, (can I just say Reddit?).

What Americans have officially been told in the past has been proven sometimes untrue. What Americans will be told in the future will be sometimes be untrue. Conspiracy theorists aren’t bottom feeders, but it’s very difficult to put effort into that world and not come to see it all in a persecuted and paranoid lens. Thing is, it is persecuted to a degree. I found the book I’m writing about while on invoiced time with my day job.  Every year, around the same time, the great king rat of a search engine conglomerate I work for makes a big push to eradicate unseemly or otherwise sordid things from its search index. Likely to save on server cost, from what I’ve seen slip through their AI assistant’s RightThink filters. Usually, it means nullifying the chance of a suicide forum being found easily by verbatim search queries, or clearing out shady pharmacy websites from India. The time I bought this book was the only time I experienced Dear Employer lashing out at an Amazon entry. For all the fauxery they sell, this book published and reprinted by Penguin Ltd. was the target.

Manly P. Hall was dead well before Amazon developed its bookstore UI. I’d call him a philosopher, sincerely, despite the sneer that seems to be invited by that term when one isn’t dressed in a sheet in the year 500. I ordered the book because it was cheap and I recognized the reviews to be the type written by conspiracy consumers. The wholesale believers. The people that will ruin their car death gripping a sharpie to quote the copy of a viral enough anti-THAT movement.  The people that grifters twist their symbolic mustache at. I thought I was getting the standard fare. The Turkey and Havarti David Icke. The Ham and Swiss John Coleman.

Nah. Nay. Naw. I got a taste of the last utopian. A true believer or someone who writes well enough to come off as one. A man who believed that Thomas Paine came to America to help the cause of a couple of men before they knew it, and not the Paine hiding out from the threat of legal troubles. It was refreshing as hell because it was so positive. Instead of something like: These people, of infinite resources you will never know, control you and everything that bothers you in life comes from this Club of Rome/Fuckpark in California, what is immediately given is: There were big idealistic dreams for America, as the Great Experiment, and they can still flourish.

I’d be more surprised to find out Hall wasn’t a Mason or something similar. I have no delusions about masons, I was raised by one and had to carry his silly hat during parades. My biggest irk is that there’s this Great Society mentioned throughout the book, an Order of the Quest. Sounds like the rough draft placeholder names of a Kickstarter game. He never names them, not really. The Royal Society is named, and Francis Bacon very much so. The whole premise is that America, to such as the Royal Society and Bacon; as well as some more all-encompassing but unnamed shadowy guilds, saw America as the New Atlantis. The place to build Plato’s Critias story of the philosopher kingdom. And he painstakingly lays out his cause. Several essays devoted to establishing some sense of America as Atlantis all the way back in near-naked Greece, when a bunch of builders formed a guild that incorporated a little bit of weird. He tries to sincerely make cause for Quetzalcoatl to have been a Western visitor, enlightened in the Great Quest and equipping the most visibly advanced people of the Americas to understand and defend their roost from the devils to come. There are legitimate points made about Columbus, whose identity is much harder to trace than I thought before reading this book. I tried Wikipedia and Brittanica when I was reading, and found the same shrugs: believed to be, assumed to have been, records may demonstrate…

There are parts that get a bit National Treasure-ish. Pop history, unbacked stories of the singular old man who forced through the signing of the declaration with a grand speech before disappearing anonymously into the ether. Another one about a guile Professor, who happened to be at some house George Washington was showing off his wife’s needlework to. They were making a flag, caught up in the spirit of the blood, and some sage old man came along to properly temper Washington to berate his wife into making the better flag.

Thing is, there’s not quite nothing here. Maybe I’m only huffing the backdraft of the long dead Hall’s hopes, but there were things stated here that were so fantastical I had to look into them, and I found myself unable to dispute them. Not even for lack of time, all of the most outrageous seemed to have some shitty old scan to be pulled up on the Internet Archive. But ultimately, I think Hall was maybe a latecomer. I get it. My late teens would have been entirely devoted to my city’s punk scene if I didn’t have other obligations. It was fun, it was hopeful where few things in 2008 elsewise were.  I’m able to look back now and see how silly, how useless to assume a Punk Scene was worth reviving when it had already been commodified to the point where the bands I stood around watching were intentionally awful noise because there was nothing left to do. I faded out, but Hall built and funded a whole institution out of it. An institution still in operation today, the Philosophical Research Society, still in Los Angeles. So who the fuck am I to say.

Ultimately I can’t call his thesis malarky. Partially unprovable, but not entirely even with our modern marvels. Clearly well drunk in the sauce of a particular punch bowl, but try as I might to find murky citation, it just isn’t there. I proved him more right than wrong in my 2023 attempts to question his statements. All of it leaves me thinking about how sad it is, were this really something men spent the better part of their lives trying to build, that it came to this. Whatever your political flavor preference, this isn’t the world where intellectual cultivation is the top interest. This is a landscape that allows for such musings without fear of imprisonment, but one that is much more friendly the those with the gumption to steer it into a marketable pool. I won’t join his cause or donate to his school, but Manly P. Hall wrote the only conspiracy oriented book that didn’t tell me the world is doomed and I’m fucked for it. He didn’t even write the book telling me that Europe was doomed, and his temporal nostalgia-spot was the only Eden of America. He was a conspiracy theorist, a well-read one, and his conspiracy to theorize was that there was a dream for this country to be arena of all and that what good was gotten would be shared and contributed to freely among brethren. I didn’t even like the book that much, I was bored by it in several places, but I didn’t realized until I held it in my own face how refreshing it was to see someone dreaming big. Any attempts of mine to recall the last time I witnessed someone in such fervors over a pursuit, it was a always something like a coworker’s dropshipping business that’s going to get them out of this place. Or my niece, a month away from graduating high school, asking me for some startup cash to open a supernatural bookstore that was going to rock the socks off of whatever city she’d never known but would somehow decide to settle on. I can’t remember the last time I saw a friend trail off about the inherent good still stowed away in the world. I can’t remember the last time I did. I guess this book is like “fine wine” or whatever token allegory. Sounded great, kinda sucked to get through til I got used to it, ended on a flat note, and then only fully appreciated long after.

Buy a copy here.