Piousbox

“Existential Vertigo”
(A Beginner’s Guide to Miles Mathis)
by Colin Stayton
[Miles: to mark 25 years on the web, this week I am publishing several testimonials from
readers. I started with a small Geocities site at Yahoo I built myself with their HTML
editor, learning to write that simple code. Which is why my site later looked like it did.
Yahoo shut that down a couple of years later without warning, I still don't know why.
They never responded to questions. And yes, that was before Geocities closed down. I
then took the next step, transferring the site to a private host, where it grew pretty
quickly. I had been publishing my science papers at Walter Babin's General Science
Journal, leading with the Relativity papers. They were very popular there, getting a
fantastic number of hits, more than he was used to. But once I built my own site, I
transferred my science papers over there. At about the same time (2004) I was writing
art counter-criticism for the Art Renewal Center, attacking Modernism on that site
devoted to realism. Those papers were also very popular, drawing an outsize audience.
After a couple of years I got crossways with the owner there, who didn't like that I said
something nice about Van Gogh. So I transferred those papers over to my own site as
well.
Pretty soon I could see I needed to separate the science and art papers, so I split the site
into two independent URLs, with just front page links. That has worked pretty well over
the years, though it has led to some confusion. My early content was all art and science,
so there was no reason not to publish under my own name. Once I later began blowing
the cover of fake events, I figured why hide? I would have had to build a third unlinked
site and didn't really want to. The only time I considered it was with the first big
Kennedy paper. I actually sat on that one for a couple of years, putting it up but not
linking to it from my homepage. I only gave the link to specific people. But when
Hopper and the usual suspects destroyed the Taos art scene while I was living there in
2009, I was so enraged I wanted them to know exactly who was attacking them. My
writing accelerated at that time and has been in overdrive since then, as I realized art
wasn't the only thing I loved that they had destroyed on purpose.]
So, you’ve discovered Miles Mathis. Firstly, I congratulate you. In a digital world
designed to confuddle, bamboozle, and disempower you, you’ve managed to find one of
the last sane corners of the internet. Well done. Secondly, I offer my condolences.
Discovering Miles Mathis is like discovering the exit to Plato’s cave. All your life you
have been fettered and forced to watch the deformed shapes of shadow puppets
parading across the Jumbotron. Now that you are beginning to breathe the fresh air and
behold the bright sunlight of truth, you will, I am afraid, suffer what I can only describe
as existential vertigo. Nearly everything you were taught about the world up to this
point has been a lie. You yourself have been hung upside-down by your ankles since
childhood by teachers, actors, politicians, religious leaders, and—yes—even your own
parents (don’t blame them too much, they probably didn’t know any better). Now Miles
is attempting to set you right-side-up, to move you further up the mountain, but for a
while everything will look wrong. You’ve been a deckhand on the Phoenician naval
cruiser for too long, and now that you’re on solid ground you still feel the pitch and sway
of the ocean in your legs. At this point you may feel a bit like an escaped hostage
wandering around in a chloroformed stupor.
What now?
My advice is simple: stick it out. Most of the people I’ve turned on to Miles Mathis have
not had the courage for it. They are like the prisoners in the cave being dragged out into
the real world above ground. The sun is so bright, and the true shapes of things so
disorienting, that they rush back to the comfort of the cave. There at least they had a
system, and everything they saw made sense in that system. It is not so much that they
don’t believe what Miles has to say, but that they can’t believe it. To believe it would
require scrapping everything and starting from scratch. It is not a question of truth but a
question of grit. They simply cannot stomach the existential vertigo. This gets to the
heart of why Miles is as beloved by some as he is ignored by others. His analysis is
totalizing. It demands that we abandon every last one of our neat little systems and
armchair theories that lull us into the false sense that we know what’s really going on.
“Others may be duped,” we say, “but not me.”
There are two bad types of conspiracy theorists. The first are what I call the dabblers.
They enjoy the fleeting thrill of a good conspiracy but don’t want to be bothered with
any major disruptions to their way of thinking. It is a purely fun diversion, which is why
they gravitate toward theories that don’t upset the overall scheme of things. They might
believe the CIA was really behind the JFK assassination, or that the moon landing was
just a Hollywood production directed by Stanley Kubrick. To believe something
unorthodox about these isolated events is easy because they remain neatly self-
contained. They don’t demand anything of the dabblers themselves.
The second are what I call the idealogues. They come at conspiracy theories from a
predetermined worldview and will only accept theories that support their worldview.
The worldview is often political (the democrats are behind it!) or spiritual (the satanists
are behind it!) or racial (the Jews are behind it!). Conservative Christians often fall into
this trap. Many of their theories are correct as far as they go. Radical as the ideology may
appear, the problem is that it never goes quite far enough. It stops at “democrats are
evil” and doesn’t make it to “republicans are evil”, much less “all politics is vaudeville”.
It indicts the swamp but can’t see the slimy moss dangling from Trump’s hair plugs. It
believes the monetary system has been corrupted by bad actors but refuses to consider
that bitcoin was cooked up by those very same actors. It points the finger at the deep
state but doesn’t realize there’s nothing but the deep state.
What may be ultimately disappointing to some is that Miles’s theories just aren’t sexy or
disturbing enough. It’s far more thrilling to suppose the CIA is mind-controlling serial
killers than that there are no serial killers at all. The possibility that the government is
shooting DEW lasers down from the sky to incinerate entire towns sends a chill down
the spine; the thought of it being faked with CGI does not. Our society has grown too
addicted to fear. A coworker of mine once lit up at the mention of serial killers, to which
she announced gleefully, “I LOVE serial killers!” We can’t get enough murder mystery
podcasts and Law & Order: SVU rape stories and satanic pedophilia rings. We inundate
ourselves with these things and wonder why we need to take pills to sleep at night.
To give Miles Mathis a fair shake requires that we cease to consume conspiracy theories
for their shock value. Such an approach will keep you from really getting anywhere. In
fact, it’s just another form of obeisance. It makes the rulers out to be far more
fascinating than they really are. If you ever met one of these shadowy elites, you would
find neither a bloodthirsty diabolist in a velvet cape, nor a humanoid lizard, nor a
brilliant but sordid trickster. Instead, you’d find a short little self-absorbed businessman
with a cardboard personality. He wouldn’t be half as interesting as the Wizard of Oz.
Their power is all a show, which is why they concocted the fear-porn variety of
conspiracy theories to begin with. They don’t want you to know how little power they
really possess or how dull they really are.
So, as disorienting as his papers can be, in the long run they are far more empowering
than anything else out there. Their power lies in their truth, and truth is the only potent
medicine for the peculiar malady of our modern age. That’s the thing about Miles: he’s
no mere peddler of conspiracy theories. He presents a whole way of seeing the world
that extends to science, art, religion, health, and even relationships, elucidating every
subject he lays eyes on. He’s a mad prophet, a barefoot philosopher, a blind bard, and a
sword-wielding hippie all rolled into one. His multifaceted personality shines through in
everything he writes. But most importantly, he’s real flesh and bone. Having
corresponded with and written for him for many years now, I can attest to this much:
he’s everything he claims to be, warts and all.
One way to judge the merits of a theory is what effect, if any, it has on those who
subscribe to it. I am not exaggerating when I say Miles Mathis’s writings have changed
my life. I am not the same person I was when I first discovered Miles in 2017. Since that
time, I have quit a soul-crushing corporate career and taken up homeschool tutoring.
I’ve started writing poetry again. My wife and I moved out to the countryside and are
trying (in our very amateurish way) to live a more agrarian lifestyle. We ditched our TV
and smartphones. We stopped going to church but became much more devoted to
Christ. We opted out of health insurance. We stopped worrying about money. We
stopped living in fear. Much of this I attribute to reading Miles Mathis.
So don’t worry, that initial wave of vertigo will subside. Stick with him. I promise it’s
worth it.