A tin foil hat has become a mocking meme for those who are paranoid or are conspiracy theories. Belief in the fact that everything has a material nature is one of the tenets of the modern “scientific” picture of the world, so it is not surprising that those who suspect that “there is something wrong with reality” also explain this with the help of materialistic hallucinations. World government (black helicopters, HAARP, Swamp, deep state, etc.) controls society not only from the outside, but also from the inside, penetrating through - through chemtrails or "radiation."
At Apocalypse Culture, the recently deceased American nonconformist philosopher Adam Parfrey described the story of how “aliens” penetrated inside the paranoid in a more brutal way — through holes in the body and then the victim of the invasion looked for signs of a similar attack from their colleagues, trying to investigate first of all their bodies - will there be any wiring there? The topic of alien implantation of any foreign objects in the abductee (the victim, stolen by a UFO) is so common that from time to time in the US Congress complaints are heard with the demonstration of a lot of "evidence."
The foil cap rightfully refers to this paraphernalia of suspicion and is also justified by the feeling that the influence of the external world powerfully penetrates deep into a human being, intruding into the brain and forcing it to do something that under other circumstances a person (as he thinks) would not do. And since a person today, both normal and mentally ill, is thought of as a fundamentally material creature, the nature of external penetration into the inner is interpreted in material terms - as rays, waves, vibrations, etc. From such "rays" by analogy with a cell Faraday, stopping the magnetic radiation, and is designed to protect the magic foil cap.
In principle, we are dealing with the ancient archetype of the invisible cap, only in its archeo-modernist version. Of course, it is rather unusual to observe adults in ridiculous headdresses resembling a children's matinee, and it is precisely this contrast between the serious faces of the foil cap holders and the objects themselves that produce an acute sense of idiocy, causing laughter and contempt (for those who have such a hat would never wear it), and also some fear (you never know what psychos can decide on).
But if we make an amendment to materialism, which is the common denominator of both the sick and the healthy in the modern world, then tin foil hat carriers can be (partly) rehabilitated.
The fact is that the consciousness of man does not belong and never belonged to himself as a kind of property. If only we think about where our thoughts come from and how our ideas about ourselves and the world are formed, we will have to admit that practically everything that we consider to be ours has been received from outside - in the process of education, training social interactions, from culture, language, history, science, from communications and media.
The founder of sociology, E. Durkheim, coined the term “collective consciousness” to emphasize the social nature of thinking as such. The individual consciousness only reflects the collective. But here there is a mirror effect, which, being divided into parts, still in each of them continues to reflect the whole. This is where the illusion of the property of consciousness is born - that we are dealing with a mind that belongs only to us on an individual basis. We too seriously and uncritically use the stable formulas “I think that ...”, “I think that ...”, “I am sure that ..”, etc., sincerely believing that this is a deeply individual act. But if we move a little away from the hypnotic illusion, from the affect with which we pronounce the personal pronoun of the first person, we cannot fail to notice that any of our statements are based on methods, knowledge and procedures drawn from the outside, and that it is most often typical. and serial (quoting), that is, with the same pathos spoken by many other individuals.
Truly creative and original is only a system failure, when we begin to say something unusual, unpredictable and unintelligible, but then we risk switching to a completely incomprehensible surrounding individual language spoken by oracles or schizophrenics (and sometimes poets). In any case, our individual thoughts (as well as desires) are basically universal, but that in whose body and in whose brain they crawl does not matter in principle. If we continue this observation, we can, together with Heidegger, come to the conclusion that almost always the one who thinks in us is not ourselves, but an impersonal beginning, which Heidegger called das Man, starting from the German grammatical construction man denkt, man will ( literally: “think”, etc., English, they think, French on pense, etc.). In other words, we are not really thinking, but das Man is thinking through us, laying in us the trajectories of conventional wisdom (conventional wisdom) or deviations from it.
This is where the foil cap comes into action. It must be understood not clinically, but philosophically. When does a person make a radical decision to put this misunderstanding on his head? When the suspicion that his thoughts and states are not his own, do not belong to him, but are induced from the outside, it becomes so strong that a person, not paying attention to what others think of him, agrees to look like an idiot, just to protect himself from the influence of das Man. Hence the tin foil hat acquires a philosophical and symbolic meaning: it is a sign that suspicion has overcome suspicion in a person, seems ridiculous, that he is no longer able to remain a technical detail in recycling alienated thoughts, desires and feelings and seeks to find himself, his true "I" , of his “inner person”, having taken refuge in the “Faraday cage” from the all-penetrating rays of das Man.
Obviously, people wearing a tin foil hat on their head are not too healthy. But it is clearly better than those who do not wear these foil hats. Of course, other caps and, moreover, hats in general, have a similar origin, associated with symbolic sacral anatomy. The headdresses of the ancient priests, the hoods of the priests or the fox caps of the Hasids are traces of the symbolic decoration of the head, emphasizing its dignity and its proximity to the sky (Plato believed that the straightness of man is connected with the attraction of his highest center - the brain - to the celestial ancestral homeland, where the souls come from ).
A crazy foil cap is, of course, not a miter or tiara, but its modern, even somewhat postmodern, surrogate. This is not just a disease - it is the first step to recovery. I agree that it looks extremely stupid and ridiculous and, naturally, this skull wrapper, which causes associations with the dough prepared for the oven, will not protect you from das Man. Rays das Man'a too powerful. But the very suspicion of the unfortunate owners of foil hats is worthy of respect. They guessed it. It hurts them. They feel that something has gone wrong in the world. And in this they are absolutely right. Their suspicion has every reason. Yes, something went wrong. And continues to go. And this is extremely serious. Therefore, do not offend those who have already made a tin foil hat. They, albeit half a step, but ahead of us ...
The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.