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We feel it’s important to recognize these terms and their relationships to each other as they’re part of a growing language. Studying how this language is used will help increase awareness of conversations listing toward conspirituality in terms of content and emotional impact. Understanding this newly-formed vernacular also helps people recognize when they’ve left the land of information.

Parallel to high-emotional impact, these terms share low-definitional precision. Red pill, 5D, and starseed mean many poignant things to a spectrum of passionate users. This allows for the power of poetic suggestiveness. But it also lets speakers constantly move goalposts and express plausible deniability (i.e.: “No, I’m not talking about that. How dare you suggest I’m using anti-semitic / anti-vaxx / pro-Q language!”).

Jargon is not meant to convey data, share perspectives, or persuade. Its function is to establish a symbolic or ritual order where certain questions can no longer be asked and to provide a threshold test for admittance to an in-group. Users bond over these terms, but not necessarily because they share consistent definitions of them. The bonding happens because the terms signal the sharing of emotional contagion.

Robert Jay Lifton’s famous analysis of “totalist” language is useful here. Lifton’s work has been used for 60 years to describe language that protects itself from scrutiny or analysis as it builds social and political power.

The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed.

Totalist language, then, is repetitiously centered on all-encompassing jargon, prematurely abstract, highly categorical, relentlessly judging, and to anyone but its most devoted advocate, deadly dull.

Lifton, Robert Jay. Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: a Study of “Brainwashing” in China. W.W. Norton, 1961. pp. 429-30.

Reading these terms is one thing, but it’s also worth noting that Lifton’s descriptions of “thought-terminating” repetitions that are “easily memorized and easily expressed” attain new intensity when the influencer deploys them in video format. Combined with hypnotic rhythms and intrusive eye contact, the pre-cognitive impact of the terms ramps up.

When the influencers we’ve studied on this podcast use these terms, they usually also deploy techniques that emphasize relational power over verbal meaning. Altogether, the vaguely-defined but powerful terms can combine with high-def video and sonorous, prayer-like sermonizing to create an immersive and bonding experience.

Finally, it’s prudent to pay special attention to those influencers who can seem to turn this on and off at will. Some of the most powerful and seemingly credible communicators of CS-to-Q are “renegade” medical doctors that are able to flip into sermon mode and use this jargon as a kind of release valve in the midst of their more boring and complicated health ideas.

Part of what they’re doing is weaponizing the complexity of medicine against an anxious public. Their sermons are calibrated to soothe the very anxiety they provoke.