Is Christopher Langan A Fraud?

Just as television eventually gave way to mass adoption and lowest common denominator programming, the Internet, once niche, has given a means for narcissists, sciolists, and other bad actors to carve out an unsuspecting audience. Taken from the Latin “scius” (knowing) and its diminutive “sciolus” (little knower), the word “sciolist” refers to a pretender towards knowledge – conscious or not. Of course, this is a cross-cultural, cross-political phenomenon, for there is a basic, simian drive to not only “know”, but to pretend to know when one does not.

Perhaps the most notable example of sciolism of the 1990s was Christopher Langan, who has since leveraged the Internet to gain a new following. Most famous for having an alleged 200+ IQ, he has also written the CTMU as a “Theory of Everything”, and became controversial on social media for advocating race science, spreading vaccine disinformation, and encouraging cult-like behavior in his followers. Yet Langan arrives at most of his conclusions by playing word games, starting from the wrong premises or questions, or seemingly not understanding (or refusing to define) many other terms.

Excerpted from ArtiFact #23, which can be found here: https://youtu.be/9e0sb886l1Y

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Timestamps:

0:00 – introduction; Dan Schneider’s experiences with Mensa & IQ tests, Alex Sheremet’s experiences with school, the SATs, graduating Valedictorian in college; emotional insecurities generating a wish to ‘succeed’; why don’t high IQ individuals produce things of value?; intelligence vs. accomplishment

29:12 – assessing Erroll Morris’s film on Christopher Langan; assessing Langan’s style of communication, obfuscation tactics, & extremist ideas

01:29:00 – Christopher Langan’s incoherent concept of “evil”; the CTMU & its language games; why non-artists try to use artistic language to cover up more “boring” ideas

01:37:35 – Christopher Langan’s totally insane social media presence; how can “the smartest man in the America” have such terrible ideas?; Langan’s incoherent quotes are poorly written, trite, and without a deeper purpose

Dan Schneider’s YT channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCN5k...

Read Dan Schneider’s essay on early 2000s Internet sciolism: http://www.cosmoetica.com/B184-DES128...

Read the latest from the automachination universe: https://www.automachination.com

Read Alex’s (archived) essays: https://alexsheremet.com

Tags: #ChristopherLangan, #IQ, #ArtiFactPodcast