I have had a fetishistic preoccupation with the group of thinkers known as the “Intellectual Dark Web” for, I don’t know, around ten years now. A lot of people believe Douglas Murray or Jordan Peterson to be the cornerstone of that movement, but it is in fact disgraced physicist Eric Weinstein, disciple of Peter Theil, whose sole work is this self-published “Theory of Everything”.

Each member of the movement self-styles as an intellectual, but they are really just cranks. There is a delicious aesthetic to this paper, which almost imitates actual thought. Like everything from this circle it comes down to an attempt to justify fascism, though I genuinely don’t think they know that.

Is this a short story? Yes, a kind of narrative: see the concluding passage “Isolation”. I believe the crank is a strange and strangely contemporary figure. I teach at a University and often independent researchers send me their work unsolicited. Some are interesting but most are insane, and almost always claim to be the victim of a conspiracy (Weinstein’s is the ‘Distributed Ideas Suppression Complex’ or ‘DISC’).

I believe we can learn a great deal from them. Here’s Freud:

“Dreams, then, are often most profound when they seem most crazy. In every epoch of history those who have had something to say but could not say it without peril have eagerly assumed a fool’s cap. The audience at whom their forbidden speech was aimed tolerated it more easily if they could at the same time laugh and flatter themselves with the reflection that the unwelcome words were clearly nonsensical”.

Unlike Freud’s nonsense philosopher there is no abstract wisdom to be taken from the crank, but there is a kind of photonegative of learning and aspirational politics. I think Joyce used the term ‘Gnomon’ — a theory of everything that was never suppressed.

Published April 1 2021, available to read online here