Umberto Eco Doesn't Waste Time
Here's Umberto Eco not wasting time.
Eco proves his thesis, which is that you shouldn't "put your faith in the extravagant claims of madmen", but you might notice that the quacks that he refers to aren't worth talking about.
He skips over the theories handed down to us by madmen that still resonate today with millions of idiots, and that have had actual consequences for living breathing people throughout history, and in recent times.
Like say ideas about so-called race. Heredity. Inferiority. Purity. Or say ideas about God. Piety. Infidelity.
There are systems of thought stemming from those ideas that many people get exterminated over, or enslaved over. Or subjugated over. Or brutalized over.
For example he could have written about the madman theory that a verifiable homo sapien is actually not a human being at all and can be eliminated without any fuss.
Eco would never write that article, maybe because so many people would say, "Well wot's so crazy bout that? It's TRUE!" He knows not to waste his time.
~I Am Dali 8:50 PM
2 Rebuttals
2 Rebuttals:
He completely skips over the theories handed down to us by madmen that still resonate today with millions of idiots, and that have had actual consequences for living breathing people throughout history, and in recent times.
He does mention the Hitler/Nazi (talking specifically about Hollow Earth theories here) connection. A guy named ernst Ernst Zundel (for instance) wrote a book proposing (so the theory goes) that the Aryan master race had originated from inside the center of the hollow earth. And that following WW2 Hitler and others had escaped to the South Pole (the entrance to the hollow earth) and built a Nazi UFO secret weapons base etc... and on and on the nutty story goes. Thats one of the crazy theories Eco mentions although he didn't go into details. But that one - that particular Hollow Earth theory - certainly leads back down the path to race, purity, subjugation, genocide and all that entailed. You will find elements of that exact story in the ravings of some Christian Identity (neo-Nazi) literature and preachings of guys like Wesley Swift for instance - woven into theories of the Fall and Pre-Adamite theories and so on. Where notions of heredity, purity, God, piety ... all get tossed into the stew.
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Yeah I saw that when I originally skimmed. The mention of nazis raised my hopes for the piece as a whole as I was going through it (I think after first reading his conclusions because of some browsing errors that jumped me to the end of the article which was a weird whacky embedded applet junk heap) but he didn't specifically address the least arcane and most common madman theories of all even in light of nazi planetism.
Anyway I lost faith right in my post right after I made it because maybe Umberto Eco doesn't relate to or know about anything I was talking about since he's not an american citizen so on and so forth and for all I know his country is a utopia since I've never been there (plus the only book I've actually read by him was a kind of [euro] history & biography of [euro] constructed languages). In any case I thought that in terms of simple scholastic effort expended the article was misdirected.
Cult geology has that nerdy gee-whiz aura that racism and bloodthirsty nation-state dogma don't allow because they're disturbing at least to anyone not in denial.
To sort of put it another way the most common kind of stupefied self-denying racism/homophobia/misogyny/warhawkery doesn't really make reference to anything like the privileged peoples emerging from the center of the earth.
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