Where did David Icke get this idea about Reptilians?

Great Debates
121

A little of both and a lot more of a third element: isolation.

As humans, we interact with the world around us and our minds draw conclusions, we build up models of understanding of what we experience…and then we compare notes with other people. We expect others to comprehend our observations and validate them, and they expect us to make sense to them when we do so. And our validated understandings feel more solid and reliable to us.

Even if the thoughts and understandings and etc in one’s head are meaningful and lucid (and not meaningless garbled static), if they are difficult to share, confusing to others to listen to, do not match up with other folks’ thinking, and therefore seldom if ever validated, then you end up building and living in an increasingly rickety structure, a tower away from where other folks’ heads are at. And even if, despite the high risk of you holding onto and building on a thought or perspective you might have discarded if you did have someone to compare notes with, you manage to retain a pretty meaningful and lucid head, the LONELINESS of it is a huge problem.

And that doesn’t change merely if people stop stigmatizing us and making fun of us or thinking of us all as Staten Island Ferry Boad slashers and cannibals and maniacs and stuff.

Self-help user-run communities (by us, for us) seem to be the best way of addressing the problem. We need community. Even though there is not a single “mental channel” so that all schizophrenics make instant sense to each other, we do get some useful “reality checking” from each other that helps with the validation and the isolation.

I have seen different statistics, including some that say we’re less violent than the average person, and many that say we are more likely to be attacked by “normal” people than we are to attack “normal” people. But also some that do indeed indicate we’re a bit more dangerous than a non-schizzy all other things being equal, so which stats do you believe? What I believe is that when communication is impaired so that people do not easily understand each other’s actions and intentions, there’s a heightened risk of violence. In particular, I think we scare people because we are less predictable to folks than other people.

Well, THAT’S a huge factor, of course. Think of the last 10 schizophrenics you read about in the newspaper or heard about on the TV. How many of those stories was about someone doing well, having a success story of some sort, and the fact of being a schiz is just mentioned in passing the same way that being female or being an Irishman or being in a wheelchair might be noted, just as a little “human interest” color to the story? Almost none of them, right? They were all about some mishap, some bad thing that happened and the reason the bad thing happened is attached to the schizophrenia. IN TODAY’S NEWS rush hour traffic was disrupted while a man hopped up on the roofs of cars and ran from car to car shoulting, because he was a schizophrenic. Or MAN FIRED GUN INTO CROWD, THEN JUMPS TO DEATH and he was a schizophrenic which is why he did those things. Well, the CEO of a company announcing a successful merger that puts his company in the Fortune 500 may be a schizophrenic, but the newspapers aren’t likely to say so. Even if they know about it, which mostly they will not.

I’m not saying we don’t do some fucked-up things. I am saying not every fucked-up thing once of us does is BECAUSE we have this or that mental illness label on our chart. And that you only hear about our psychiatric classification when we’ve done something that causes major trouble. And they flat-out TELL you that that’s the reason we did the thing, whatever it was that we did.

Once again with my envy of the gay rights movement, but really, seriously, we need to be OUT. So that people know someone who is a schizophrenic and experience one as somebody or something other than an out-of-control incoherent maniac dangerous person. Maybe some folks in here think of schizzies a little bit different just from being on a message board with me for a few years. (Although a few seem to take the approach “He doesn’t foam at the mouth and have meltdowns and he seems stable so he’s obviously an outlier and an exception and does not count”)

122

Hey so I got a question for Ahunter.

When I was in high school, one of the students was Schizophrenic.* One of the ways this manifested was in the fact that she would often refer to the demons she could see whispering things in people’s ears. She believed her mom had an especially serious case of the demon-on-the-back.

This student disappeared between Junior and Senior year and no one ever knew officially what happened. (I’m sure she was “taken away” as they say.)

But during Junior year, the school’s counselor actually asked me to try to make an effort to befriend this student. (He picked me out because, for some reason neither he nor I understood, I was basically the only student in our school who she didn’t think had one of these demons on their back. For reasons having to do with this, she often tried to be friendly to me, and the counsellor was asking me to reciprocate.) It was then (and generally continues to be) my general inclination to try to understand people and be good to them. So I did try to be as “friends”-y as I could with this girl.

The thing is, every single sentence that came out of her mouth made some reference to her hallucinations.

And my question is, what do you think a non-Schizophrenic is supposed to do about that? As far as I could tell, to her, there was no sense in which these demons were metaphors or fictions or anything like that. She saw demons, and she talked about them all the time, and she talked about how they were behind everything her mom did, and so on and so on.

Here were my choices, as they seemed to present themselves to me at the time: Talk as though the demons are real, or talk as though the demons are not real, or try to change the subject. But talking as though they are real is lying. Talking as though they are not real isolates the Schizophrenic. And changing the subject similarly fails to engage her on her own terms in any meaningful way–another way to isolate her.

I had no idea what to do, and failed miserably at developing any kind of meaningful relationship with this girl. Our conversations ended up consisting simply in her going on about things I didn’t believe existed, and me alternately smiling and grimacing, nodding non-comittally all the while.

(I have to say, by the way, that at the time I was all into gnosticism and occult-y stuff, though without actually believing any of it, and I was seriously tempted to just sort of pretend to take her completely seriously and develop a kind of Horselover Fats/Phillip Dick deal with her. But I recognized that this would be tantamount to making fun of her, so I didn’t do it.)

As far as I could tell, and it still seems this way, there was no way for me to meaningfully interact with this girl, if only because we had basic, unavoidable discrepancies between our ways of thinking and our fundamental beliefs.

So anyway, the question is, What I sposedta do? Just brace myself for constant arguments? Change the subject? What?

(Let’s set aside the question of the wisdom of the counsellor’s having saddled this kind of responsibility on a sixteen year old. The guy thought I was special, what can I say?)

*I had no access to any official information about this, I’ve just assumed she was Schizophrenic based on the impression I have about what that means. Maybe I’m wrong about though. Does hallucination plus paranoia over a sustained period of time generally mean probably one is Schizophrenic?

123

While being interviewed by Jon Ronson for the book Them and a TV documentary, he said the idea came from carvings and artwork produced by primitive cultures which show reptilian creatures coming from the sky.

Basically, the whole thing started when he quit his job as host of Grandstand, a Sunday sports wrap-up show/magazine on the BBC. Shortly afterwards, he told a British prime-time TV audience (who he appeared in front of at his own request) that he was the son of God and that Britain would be ravaged or destroyed by hurricanes in the next couple of years.

Of course, everybody agreed he was nutso, except other crazy people, and they agreed too once the hurricanes failed to show up.

He then began claiming that the media had orchestrated some grand conspiracy to make him look silly- or even sillier, at any rate. He began researching secret societies and decided the Illuminati must be behind it all.

Then, when researching the origins of the Illuminati, he happened across carvings and cave drawings and the like showing lizard creatures that appeared to be coming from the heavens, and “put two and two together” - he decided that the reptilians were the Illuminati, and that the leaders of the world were lizard shapeshifters who interbred with each other.

Unfortunately, a lot of people interpret Icke’s lizard theories as a metaphor - like SmashTheState, for example. They variously think he’s talking about the executives of multinational corporations, Jews, liberals, etc., and think Icke is some kind of brilliant thinker railing against whoever it is they dislike by using analogy.

The truth is he’s completely fucking nuts and when he says he’s talking about secret lizard people he really is talking about secret lizard people.

124

The rest of your post benefits none from any comment that I could make but this bit I must add to. When I first read your posts on this subject it took me a while to realize that I fell into a “True Scotsman” fallacy about you: No true schizophrenic could be so functional, rational and lucid, therefore you could not be a true schizophrenic. Obviously I’ve come around since then. My perception of schizophrenia may indeed be a result of a selection bias: other than you my experience with known identified schizophrenics is with an in-patient non-functional population; I do not have experience with a functional group, do not see them, and therefore they are not part of my previous schizophrenia template. So I appreciate your efforts and have been educated by them, even if I still wonder how many schizophrenics are as functional as you are.

Frylock, my guess is that it would be reasonable to deal with it by admitting that you do not see what she sees, that you do not believe that they exist, but that you understand that she experiences them as real, that they are real to her. It would open up a conversation about how difficult it must be to have a different experience of reality than those around her - although I have no idea how open to that conversation she might have been. And to also request that as friends she try to engage in some conversations about things that both of you experienced as reality as well. I am of course also curious to hear AHunter’s take.

125

I doubt I could have done better than you did, Frylock.

Earlier I wrote about the shaky tower, the “model-of reality” construction that we build in our head, each piece of it built on top of stuff we built previously. When you no longer get confirmations and validations from other people, it’s spectacularlly difficult to realize when you’ve laid down a total klunker, a radically unviable premise in your mental edifice.

Example from my own head, circa 1980: I was figuring out things about my sexual identity (the best & keepable portions of which not only continue to shape my self-image but also became the basis for [an articlei/URL] that was printed in Feminism & Psychology and reprinted in their reader [URL=“http://www.amazon.co.uk/Heterosexuality-Feminism-Psychology-Reader/dp/toc/0803988222”]Heterosexuality](http://home.earthlink.net/~ahunter/Same_Closet_Diff_Door/hpsissy.html) and again reprinted in Sexual Lives; and I was figuring out a lot of political stuff about social organization despite never having taken a single course in sociology or social theory, ideas that eventually gelled into this paper which was printed in Readings in Feminist Thought, and also many of the spiritual and metaphysical ideas that I have aired from time to time in Great Debates here on this message board. Sound like a productive and fertile state of mind I was in, doesn’t it?

Well, I also at times seriously entertained the notion that “destiny” or “fate” would under select circumstances bend around the force of ideas the way light bends around a concentration of gravity, and thus a person with a sufficiently important understanding or idea (such as the contents of my head at the time) would end up being “fated”, yea even anticipated with all kinds of things said prevously in various contexts suddenly “obviously to everyone” actually being (ahem) all about me, me and what was in my head. Including that old legend-thingie about the second coming of Jesus. Not that I thought I was Jesus but that insofar as my ideas were going to change the world and thereby fulfill prophecy, and in all kind of little unimportant ancillary ways (if you were only looking for those and not looking for any NON-fitting things of course)… oh it gets worse… when you build upon klunkers that would have topped had there been anyone to serve as a sounding board, the silly things you can build, oh man yeesh… I did at one point have a pile of pennies in a 9 pointed star arrangement and I was tapping cigarette ashes onto them and they were the (don’t wince) J C Pennies, i.e., the Jesus Christ Pennies, and putting ashes on them was somehow “doing something”, exactly what it was that this was doing, I forget. Now, in my case I had a challenge that slammed be back into questioning everything and most of the crap tumbled while leaving a formidably still-awesome structure of thought that did seem to make sense even as I held belief in abeyance about it… but it was damn scary to contemplate the possibility that the entire thing was bullshit and that I was a babbling lunatic through and through.

Generally by the time someone has strongly held ideas that make no freaking sense at all, that are all interwoven with demons and angels and stuff, and the person holding them is clearly not being metaphorical, they’ve built one of those shaky towers over a lot of klunkers. They’re going to be terrified of the possibility that it might all be unmitigated bullshit, and they’re out of the habit of seeking validation from people (such as you) or they wouldn’t be in that situation in the first place.

SOMETIMES they will turn out to have a sense of humor, which is a marvelous thing, a powerful incredible wonderful thing that may let them laugh at themselves and hold it together long enough to entertain very noncomplimentary self-images long enough to let you help them poke their tower.

126

You are late on this, hes already said some people show up for his lectures in lizard costume.

127

Well, its hardly secret now, is it?:dubious:

128

I don’t really have anything to add to the debate except to say that I found this article, about a former spy and MI5 whistleblower, in today’s paper and a couple of paragraphs seemed relevant - bolding mine.

129

I’m not sure what to conclude from that except that Simon Gelsthorpe is nuts too.

130

Better to come wearing a human costume over your lizard costume.

131

AHunter3, ever consider the fact that you’re just a whackjob?

Your brain functions differently, because your brain is defective. You are walking a dangerous line by flaunting your illness as a “lifestyle choice”, and your comparison of schizophrenia to deafness or homosexuality is downright reprehensible.

Hunter, you should heed Miller’s tale as a fair warning – by staying off meds and pretending that you just “think differently” you not only put yourself at risk, you risk the lives and feelings of your loved ones. You are not the only person who matters in your world, no matter what the voices tell you.

Seriously, Hunter. I’ve de-lurked just to caution you that you are playing with fire.

132

“Just a whackjob”?

Really?

You de-lurked for that?

AHunter3 is quite capable of defending himself in GD, but I’m astonished that anyone would consider such commentary useful or helpful in any way.

I suppose it serves as an example of how people let the stigma of mental illness cloud their reasoning. But we already have plenty of examples of that in several current threads.

133

Reprehensible? That’s a bit strong, isn’t it?

For the record, I posted that story because I wanted to rebut the idea that schizophrenia is not, in and of itself, harmful and debilitating. It was not my intention to argue that schizophrenics have some sort of duty or responsibility to medicate themselves, or to argue that a medicated schizophrenic state is in all circumstances superior to an unmedicated schizophrenic state. I’m honestly unsure of where I stand on that particular issue. AHunter, I think, makes an excellent case for his position, and you do him a pretty big disservice by dismissing him as “just a whackjob.”

134

Absolutely.

Yo mamma.
I said I had considered it. I did not say that after consideration I had concluded that I was indeed just a whackjob.

No, actually. the ones who play with fire are pyromaniacs. It’s a different one.

135

Well, not necessarily. Homosexuals were thought of as diseased for years, and it wasn’t until the DSM-IV came out in… 1994 (I think)… that they were able to get away from that stigma a bit in the US.

Thus, to compare schizophrenia with homosexuality reinforces the no-longer-accurate message that homosexuality is a disease.

136

… or the no-longer-accurate message that schizophrenia is.

137

If schizophrenia causes one to believe one is the son of God or that shapeshifting alien lizards run the world, then schizophrenia still belongs in the DSM.

138

I don’t have much to add here, but I am glad AHunter3 has come on to talk about this. It’s been a while, but he and I talked about this once before, because I have a family member who is schizophrenic and his advice and thoughts on the subject… they pretty much changed my life. My outlook since has been completely different, and things between myself and my family member have been changed. I think anyone who is dealing with this could do themselves a favor and just try to accept the person as they are. So much of the pain ends there.

I know this is rambling, but its a subject close to my heart. Also, I’m not sure I ever thanked you, AHunter, so, thank you. You’ve brought a lot of peace to my family.

139

First of all, homosexuality was removed from the DSM in 1973.

Secondly, if you’re trying to argue that something that’s currently considered a disease, should be considered not a disease, homosexuality is pretty much your go-to comparison. It’s the best example out there of something that was widely and incorrectly stigmatized as a mental illness, which has since gained enormous ground in being recognized as a normal and functional expression of the human psyche. Calling the comparison “reprehensible” is ridiculous, because the basis of the comparison rests on the idea that homosexuality is completely natural and acceptable. There’s nothing at all reprehensible about that.

140

My dear silly child, I do not believe I am the son of God in error. I really am.

So is everyone who is not a daughter of God instead. Unless you reject the entire metaphor. At which point we’re arguing semantics. You are not authorized to categorize as non compos mentis anyone who utilizes terms that you yourself have no use for.