Revisiting Anton LaVey's Invisible War in 2015

Anton LaVey’s Invisible War

My 1990 copy of Apocalypse Culture contains an essay by Anton LaVey titled “The Invisible War.” LaVey wrote many things in his life, some of them false, some of them true, some of them plagiarized. Some readers find the scholarship behind his writings somewhat wanting. Sources may be fudged, translations may be wrong, stories may be slightly embellished.

LaVey might not be the go-to source if you’re looking for documented, quantifiable information. But perhaps his value today lies in other dimensions, perhaps in his ability to inspire new ways of looking at things. In “The Invisible War,” LaVey muses on a psychological war meant to demoralize the population. “Invisible warfare,” he writes, “allows its victims to wallow in their sense of choice and freedom while actually feeling weak and ineffectual.” He does not specify who is waging this war, and at first read, the essay comes across as a vague conspiracy theory outline. Yet, it haunts me over the years, and I’d like to look at its elements and reflect on whether there isn’t something to all this, and how these notions play out 25 years later.

The essay presents nine weapons intended to demoralize. What would be the purpose of such a campaign? Government control? Perhaps, but would such a plan not leak out at some point? Corporate/business manipulation? Maybe, but it seems rather abstract given the financial goals of most organizations. One world government? Religious domination? The Deros? One may speculate endlessly, but I sometimes imagine the following: what if an intelligence manifested within a population, an entity with a, from our perspective, malevolent intent? Or, what if this intelligence arose as a product of our society’s unconscious, a poisonous influence bent on our destruction? Or, what if nothing so metaphysical occurred but a combination of factors that appeared to have a malignant design, an illusion, but one that for all intents and purposes could be considered real? Perhaps multiple organizations each pursue their own nefarious plan, each plot a thread in the toxic weave.

I don’t know what LaVey intended to mean exactly, but I wanted to create this document as a means of considering the topic. I wish to keep this as a living document, updating it if I am so motivated, and inviting others to do the same. Lest I appear to preach, allow me to disclose that I frequently use some of the below weapons against myself.

So what is this list of weapons? I’d love to include LaVey’s text on each one, but probably should not. Some I find fanciful, others more plausible. Hopefully, some readers have a copy of the expanded & revised Apocalypse Culture for reference. At any rate, he lists the following:

(1) Weather Control-

LaVey states that protracted periods of sunshine allow viral and bacterial agents to incubate, and also encourage large groups of people to gather recreationally, the masses generating a creativity-deadening wavelength.

Is there anything to this? The climate does appear to be warming, or if you like, polar ice is mysteriously shrinking. Are large groups of people less creative? Well, such an environment reduces time for introspection. Is there a correlation between a warm climate and increased noise and distraction? Greater interaction increases disease transmission. A warmer climate generates more crops and facilitates larger populations to inhabit a given area, developing the land, creating more and more buildings, highways, gas stations, shopping centers, moving the human animal further and further from nature.

(2) Viral and Bacterial Agents-

Here, LaVey speculates on the introduction of agents meant to exacerbate pre-existing conditions, perhaps generating odd pains or cold-like symptoms. This item I find somewhat interesting in light of developments since 1990. When I was a kid, I knew not a single classmate with peanut allergies. Some kids may have had certain food allergies, but I wasn’t aware of them enough to remember, even going into high school. Now, in a pharmacy, one finds a rack at the pharmacy, containing color-coded bracelets indicating to which foods your child is allergic. It’s becoming less a question of whether you have allergies and more a questions of which allergies you have.

Granted, many of these allergies may be misdiagnosed. Some researchers claim that we would see far more ER visits, were peanut allergies as widespread as alleged. Still, I do know a number of people (or parents whose children) who have apparently real allergies. Why? How do we go from rare to common in the space of a few decades? Is it because parents are too clean now, interfering with the building of a natural immune system? Perhaps. But we didn’t all grow up in barns in the 1970s and 80s either. It seems like something else may be happening.

And it isn’t just children anymore. Adults are allergic to sunlight, smoke, wheat, perfume, and anything imaginable. Everything is now an allergen, an irritant.

Also suspicious yet under-discussed remains the explosion of autism diagnoses. Again, this may be a question of overdiagnosis, yet I seem to recall research suggesting otherwise. And when did these autism-spectrum diagnoses begin to appear in vast quantities? Well, the increase correlates with the introduction of Prozac in 1988. Some research, rarely discussed, suggests that maternal use of SSRI’s and perhaps other antidepressants may significantly increase the odds of a male child being on the autism spectrum. Oddly, the anti-vaccine movement, despite its suspicion of pharmaceuticals, and despite the suspicious timeline, generally prefers to ignore the possibility of antidepressant-autism correlation being meaningful. Perhaps the correlation between the vast increase in the use of antidepressants and the vast increase in autism rates means nothing, but I find it odd that no one wants to know. And one may wonder, even if these drugs do not render a child autistic, do they push them in that direction? Will we see a slow (or rapid) drift towards a new type of personality? Is Aspergers the expressionless new face of mankind?

Speaking of antidepressants, how many people take them or another psychopharmaceutical? Well, 400% more since 1988. Granted, these medications have enabled many people to lead normal lives. But how many children take medication for various attention disorders? How many adults take the same drugs as a form of legal speed? How many people take benzodiazepines in order to not panic? How many people have to take meds just to not want to exterminate themselves or to stop washing their hands? How many people have obsessive-compulsive disorder? OCD seems to be the new normal, a new standard of socially approved behavior in order to demonstrate one’s own cleanliness. People now brag about being OCD, at least in terms of hygiene.

Drug manufacturers now directly market medication to consumers, who typically receive a prescription from a family doctor with minimal pharmaceutical training. In many cases, the companies have been able to cut therapists and psychiatrists completely out of the loop. Why change your lifestyle when you can simply take pills? Hate your job? Take pills. Hate your family? Take pills, or get them to take them. No self-reflection needed, just get your prescription filled. Dose yourself. Dose your spouse. Dose the kids, the dog, the cat. Just keep dosing until everything seems OK. Let’s review that quote again from the beginning:

“Invisible warfare allows its victims to wallow in their sense of choice and freedom while actually feeling weak and ineffectual.”

To what extent do psych meds provide an illusion of choice and freedom, while leaving the patient feeling weak and ineffectual? Rather than meeting a life challenge, rather than improving or changing our lives, we simply take a pill. Does that leave us feeling more or less empowered? What if our modern lifestyle desperately needs to be changed? What if the way we live is making us sick? Will we ignore our environment by simply changing our chemical balance? Aren’t some things supposed to make us sad or anxious or distracted? Aren’t these emotions sometimes appropriate and necessary for survival? Despite the quantity of psych meds flooding the market, the suicide rate seems to remain fairly consistent in the U.S., and the numbers also do not reflect the significant amount of suicides falsely listed as accidents, in order to not shame the family of the victim.

It now seems only healthy to have some sort of diagnosis, and some kind of prescription. Maybe, if society uses enough mood-stabilizing drugs, a powerful entity could reconfigure our culture into any shape desired. And if this new configuration makes people depressed, anxious, or suicidal, who cares? Just market more drugs.

Is this all part of the Invisible War? It certainly seems to be demoralizing.

(3) Ultrasonic Targeting or Saturation (White Noise):

Like (2) above, this weapon seems even more relevant now than in 1990. Under this header, LaVey writes, “Ultrasonic sound jams volitional thought, immobilizes the individual, induces mental confusion and increases suggestibility.” He discusses how the absence of a TV or a radio feels unnatural to people, who now experience “hyper-pacing and overstimulation of the senses” as normal. In 1990, no one I knew had a cell phone. There were no tablets, PDAs, laptops (like the one I now use, anyway) to speak of. No MP3 players. No Google glass. We have become far more immersed in relationships with electronic devices than ever before.

Now, if LaVey was addressing only ultrasonic sound, we could discuss the extent to which the consciously inaudible electronic signatures of all our devices affects our thinking. It’s an interesting point that bears consideration. But since 1990, we now even have a device for use by property owners specifically to repel loitering teenagers and young people. The Mosquito Anti-Loitering Device works by emitting a very high frequency sound. One setting produces a sound enough to annoy anyone. The other produces a sound that most people over age 25 can no longer perceive.

One might conceive of ways to manipulate such a device. The Mosquito could serve as a negative reinforcer. Does a shopper experience a sense of relief when, upon entering a store, the annoying sound disappears? And does that encourage a desire to stay within the store? Does it feel bad to leave the store, and does the consumer unconsciously remember that feeling? Could the Mosquito, or other sources of ultrasound less obviously intended to be aversive, be used to influence pedestrian traffic and human activity? What sources of ultrasound do we not recognize, sources that continue to affect us? Maybe people over 25 don’t consciously notice the Mosquito, but does that mean that it has no effect on them?

Now, If LaVey was also including noise in general, the point becomes even more significant. It seems as though the impact may be expanded to include not just our addiction to noise, but to electronic interaction in general. For the purpose of this essay, maybe we can also consider the other senses affected by electronic stimulation.

The average American watches over four hours of television daily. How does that influence the mind, to receive that constant stream of stimulation, all requiring no viewer interaction, save to select a button? Ah, but we have so many choices now, so many channels, and On Demand options. We may watch virtually any movie we like, at any time. If you have a smart TV, you can watch any YouTube video, flipping from clip to clip as the attention span shrinks.

Want music? Listen to almost anything you wish for free online.

Wait, did you lose your phone? Where’s your phone? Does it give you anxiety when I ask that question? How long do you go without checking your phone? Did someone just text you. Better text them back. You haven’t interacted in minutes. Your spouse may not like that.

Did I say “like?” Do people Like your Facebook postings? Or should you alter them in order to gain more approval? Social media amplifies this psychological white noise into our lives. People purposely do activities in order to have something to photograph and document on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. Our identities form around the electronic facsimile we create of ourselves. And when we tire of our own fake identities, we can turn to the fakeness of reality shows on television.

Constant chatter. Constant noise. Constant stimulation. All of this interferes with quiet self-reflection, and maybe that’s the point. People don’t want to reflect. They want to consume entertainment. And all of this prevents deep thought from ever happening. We become a product of what we consume. Commercial and political campaigns have permanent inroads into our unconscious through electronic media, always there, always whispering, sometimes shouting.

I forget who first said that we become like the tools that we use. If this is true, how will this revolution in consumer electronics change us? Do these tools in fact grant us “choice and freedom?” Or do they leave us “weak and ineffectual?”

(4) Subsonic Targeting or Saturation (Black Sound)

LaVey writes that “subsonics can be used to drive people together,” and that “black sound creates anxiety, hyperactive behavior, agitation, and increased stress.” Research appears to support the notion that infrasound does indeed affect perception. According to Sarah Angliss, an experiment found that,

“During our concert, infrasound boosted the number of strange experiences reported among the audience, even among those who were unaware of its presence. Unusual reports included a sense of coldness, anxiety and shivers down the spine. During our concert, infrasound boosted the number of strange experiences reported among the audience, even among those who were unaware of its presence. Unusual reports included a sense of coldness, anxiety and shivers down the spine.”

Information, both good and bad, abounds regarding sonic weaponry at both ends of the spectrum. But what about non-obvious sources? Infrasound emanates from many items- aircraft, boats, land vehicles, air conditioning, ventilation, compressors, trains, and so on. How do these sources affect us? Perhaps we don’t think about them because we are never away from them. But could the constant unconscious irritation eat away at us? Perhaps the comfort of climate controlled environments, the perceived freedom granted by cars, and the conveniences of public transportation all leave us feeling, again, with a “sense of choice and freedom while actually feeling weak and ineffectual.”

(5) Microwave Radiation

I’m drawing a blank on this one. I see a number of conspiracy sites discussing microwave radiation, but I don’t know what to make of them. Is anyone familiar with a legitimate source on this topic? LaVey does mention the concept of using natural or man-made structures- “areas between hills, valleys between skyscrapers, sports arenas, etc.” for the purpose of exposing people to the deleterious effects of radiation.

(6) Food and Beverage Dispersal

In this section, LaVey discusses chemical additives in mass-produced foodstuffs, elements that may “induce and sustain lassitude, and foster mental incapacity and insensitivity.” Has the situation changed since 1990? In the U.S., the average self-reported weight has increased by almost 20 pounds. Diabetes rates increased well over 100% from 1980 to 2011. I do not know if fast food restaurants increased relative to the population since 1990, but if you are in the U.S., and you had to get to the nearest food outlet, how likely would it not be a fast food outlet? Traveling in different parts of the country, one may be dismayed (or perhaps pleased) to find an endlessly repeating series of the same chain restaurants in every town. In most supermarkets, the customer has to walk past stack after stack of junk food in order to reach more essential items. And it’s often difficult to find food without some form of sweetener added to it.

Taking in food and drink can tranquilize us. Many people have nothing to discuss besides which bar or restaurant they favor. Children receive high-calorie sodas and sugar drinks. We really don’t know what to do with ourselves if we aren’t consuming something. We have the choice to consume an endless variety of foods, but we are left feeling sick and tired at the end of the day. Unplanned (or is it?) development leaves many people spending hours each week commuting in cars, since highways and various barriers cut off the option to walk. Service economy jobs involve more and more sedentary activity. People of all ages spend more and more time sitting in front of screens and monitors. We sit and we eat and we wonder why we feel bad.

(7)Psychological Smokescreens

This item struck a chord with me, and involves diversions meant to draw one’s attention away from the powers responsible for the invisible war. LaVey writes:

“Some of the more obvious misdirections are: threat of nuclear attack, political ‘causes,’ scandal and campaign hysteria, concern over ‘real’ or conventional warfare, contrived revolts and shooting wars in far-away areas of the world, fear of contamination of water supplies by parties unknown (ensuring increased sales of chemical-laden beverages), poisoning or experiments by the CIA or other convenient groups, fear of the Appointed Enemy, i.e., Christian-defined “Satanic” influences, UFOs, neo-Nazis (until they’re absorbed to make room for a new common enemy).”

So what of all this? Well, Google these topics in the news and see what has changed. We have been told to fear a nuclear Iran, a new nuclear standoff between the U.S. and Russia, and North Korea’s arsenal. Political causes abound, especially on social media, where people can experience the sense of being part of something, of recreating and reliving historical causes from the old news footage. Scandals involving sex, drugs, and political cover-ups remain perennial favorites, often as a way to prove the correctness of one’s own party. Conventional war seems to be taking a back seat, but revolts and shooting wars have certainly taken the spotlight, especially when people can tweet fashionable hashtags in reaction. Intentional water contamination is mostly out, although bottled water sales have increased (and in this point LaVey’s essay becomes a bit circular). Nefarious CIA news seems to mostly involve torture.

While the worship of victimhood and grievances in general inundates our culture, racism steals the show as Appointed Enemy. Everything in the news eventually returns to accusations of racism. If you ever want to manipulate public attention, use the topic of racism. Journalists attacked by terrorists are racists. Professors and scientists with unpopular statements are now racists. Racism is portrayed as the great dragon to be slain. Indeed racism is the new great Satan for a secular age. The Satanic Panic is out, the Race Chase is in. Police are racists. The Internet is racist. Your parents are racist. Corporations are racist. Actors are racist. Directors are racist. Essayists questioning racism most certainly are racist. Calling someone a racist elevates the accuser to a higher moral level, serving a similar function to identifying witches in other eras. At the moment, nothing provides a more effective diversion. When you identify a racist, you become free of restraint. You may be as aggressive as you wish towards this most foul of all criminals. In short, the witch/racist/heretic grants the accuser a free pass to attack someone while remaining a hero and/or victim. In his Nine Satanic Statements, LaVey writes, “Satan has been the best friend the Church has ever had, as he has kept it in business all these years.” We may perhaps add that racism has been the best friend the media has ever had, for it indeed provides endless fuel for the news.

Encouraging people to feel like victims may serve another function by demotivating them. Instead of feeling powerful, one feels beaten down, craving pity. The individual learns that strength comes not from within, not from the will, but from whether or not people speak and write without cruelty. The quality of your life becomes entirely dependent upon how pleasantly people regard you, or at least, how they say they regard you. Selling the victim identity works quite nicely at making people feel “weak and ineffectual.”

Psychological smokescreens may also serve a more practical purpose. The pharmaceutical industry, for example, may benefit from the anti-vaccine movement, in that the trend diverts attention from investigating more plausible causes of autism, such as SSRIs.

(8) The Extended Weekend

LaVey writes that “Long weekends are necessary to allow spending and recreational time while maintaining the illusion of productivity.” I am not sure what to make of this item. I find most jobs to be tedious and unmotivating, and don’t see how less of them would demoralize me. But this subject brings to mind a number of people I know of who do not seem to have to work. In all of these cases, the individuals do not have to work, because someone else in their home does, or because parents did, or because the person received a trust fund. I often think that, given an income to prevent hardship, and not having to punch a clock 40 hours a week, one would have the opportunity to be truly productive. Arthur Machen, for example, upon receiving a windfall, found himself able to write some of his best work, without having to worry about the marketability of the stories. Yet, of those I know to be comfortably unemployed, none produces much of anything. They watch TV, they read the news, they play online, but none of them are writing a novel, improving their homes, or creating much of anything.

Free time grants us the choice to create or consume, and most people will probably only consume. It isn’t their fault; it is their nature. Everyone knows of people who decline upon retirement, or whose spouses demand that they return to work, finding the retired partner intolerable when at home all day. Many people cannot cope with free time, but must be given busy work. For such humans, leisure becomes toxic.

And yet, many people have never and will never work. I often, half-jokingly, say that I want to receive lessons from these people on surviving without working. But, such teaching would be a form of work, and so cannot take place.

Living without goals may indeed be demoralizing. But others do maintain employment, and do all of them find enlightenment through leisure? Consider the successful people who consume vacation after vacation, traveling to site after site, only to snap some photos to put on Facebook. For many people, leisure seems to be something to fill up with as many itemizable activities as possible, never feeling real excitement at any of the expensive trips or activities. The peril of leisure, for many people, is that free time grants an opportunity for introspection, a dangerous habit for those afraid of confronting the Self.

(9) Urban Warfare

In this section, LaVey mentions drug wars, mass murderers, and serial killers. “By allowing heavy drug use to increase, and an underground network of sales and distribution to exist, people can be kept malleable and satisfied, while the drugs induce mental retardation,” he writes, and on this point I agree. How much does the U.S. military spend on remote foreign conflicts, without perceptible gains? Am I to believe that the U.S. lacks the force and resources to instead spend that money in attacking the drug market? Sure, we hear about a war on drugs from time to time, a kingpin here or there gets busted, law enforcement temporarily cuts off a supply now and then. But the underground sales network largely operates out in the open. Look at your nearest city. You may or may not know where to buy a particular drug, but even if you use no illegal substances, you have a general idea where the drugs in your city are sold.

I’m not saying the government has to do anything to make people take drugs, but it seems as if an effort exists to keep drugs both illegal and available, just contained in certain neighborhoods. And many drugs do serve the function of offering “choice and freedom” while letting people remain “weak and ineffectual.” Many people can handle them, but many others cannot, and will require lifelong babysitting. Even with cannabis, one sees a number of young men who remain little boys well into middle age, hanging out with the same friends, getting high, and playing video games year after year.

As for the heavier drugs, keeping them both illegal and available ensures a perpetual state of mini-war in many neighborhoods and cities. Cities serve as centers of culture, government, and industry. Yet, a great many cities contain horrific badlands. You visit the city to enjoy your favorite performers as they tour or to see museums, but must avoid the danger zones in order to do so. Baltimore features the Inner Harbor as a popular destination, but at night, tourists and police both vacate the area, which becomes almost as unsafe as the surrounding city. How demoralizing is it to see these symbols of culture turn into wastelands? People love to talk about what restaurants they visit in the city, but many of these businesses exist in a small safe-zone. People play make believe that the safe-zone is the city, while ignoring the reality of all those places they avoid. What is the psychological impact of constantly knowing that one may be attacked? Detroit and New Orleans feature murder rates more commonly seen in more violent Central and South American countries. Many convention centers and other facilities will now use a big city in their name, but will actually be located far from the actual city. Development sprawls out around cities-more highways, more pavement, more parking lots, more traffic jams, more chain stores, more generic townhomes, all clustering like scabs around a diseased center.

LaVey also mentions mass murderers and serial killers under this ninth heading. Dealing first with mass murderers, (I confess my essay to be content-biased towards Western culture, particularly the U.S., mainly because I am more familiar with my own country)I’m torn between whether we should just look at individual killers, or if we should include teams. Getting into teams involves a greater discussion of terrorism and war, and probably exceeds the scope of this piece. I am uncertain and may revisit it; for now, we will stick to individuals who have murdered since 1990. In 2011, Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people, despite Norway’s gun control laws. Brevik may have Asperger’s syndrome (though his pre-Prozac birth year of 1979 does not support my hypothesis in [2] above). In 1996, Martin Bryant killed 35 people in Tasmania. Like Breivik, Bryant has been diagnosed with Asperger’s (and like Breivik, he was born well before 1988). In 2007, Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. Cho does not seem to have been diagnosed as autistic, but rather afflicted with selective mutism and a host of behavioral problems. I do not see any information as to what medications he was taking.

Mass murder receives massive attention in the news, but accounts for less than one tenth of 1% of homicides. But let us return to the point of LaVey’s essay, that the goal of the Invisible War is one of psychological demoralization. And these mass murders certainly demoralize the public, who typically seek single-factor solutions, blaming guns, medications, autism-spectrum disorders (for brief moments until autism advocates get this topic yanked from the news), video games, or violent movies.

But what about serial killers? These were all the rage in the 180s and 1990s, but now seem to have fallen by the media wayside. Has the phenomenon disappeared? Here, the worst killers seem to be outside the U.S., but again, I will remain focused on the U.S. for the sake of the essay’s scope. Gary Ridgway continued to kill throughout the 1990s. Ronald Dominique killed in Louisiana up until 2006. Killer nurse Charles Cullen killed an uncertain number of patients, perhaps as many as 400 until 2003. So no, serial murder has not disappeared, but may thrive in more chaotic regions. In the U.S., like mass murder, the crime accounts for less than 1% of homicides.

Returning to the original essay, if we view the various violent phenomena above as the product of a willful intelligence, what would be the goal? LaVey mentions population reduction, but homicides account for far too few deaths to serve such a function. The U.S. suicide rate was 12.5 in 2012. The U.S. homicide rate was 4.7 in 2013. Curiously, the media tends to amplify homicides while ignoring suicides.

No, I don’t see violence as a significant population reducer, at least, not directly. If you want to reduce the population, you don’t kill people. You get them to stop reproducing. Depression and obesity lower testosterone in males. And if you can create a general sense of hopelessness and despair, you can convince those with the ability to care for children, to simply not wish to “bring children into such a world.”