Mind Control, World Government & Gnosis: The Prophetic Legacy of The Prisoner Part II w/ Robert Guffey & Recluse
Added 2025-12-15 08:00:05 +0000 UTCThe Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan, The Prisoner as a model for world government, Robert Maxwell, PROMIS, Propaganda Due (P2), world government as directed by intelligence services, PROMIS as a means of ensuring compliance, the stark differences between The Prisoner's perception of world government and conspiracy theories, scientific espionage, advanced technology as the foundation of world government, moon-landing conspiracy theories, 2001, the connection between 2001 & The Prisoner, AI, mind control, augmented/virtual reality, Freemasonry, the "Mystic Tie" of the British Establishment, the Masonic allusions in The Prisoner, how McGoohan's Catholicism influenced his perception of Masonry, Masonic references in McGoohan's other work, the Gnostic themes of The Prisoner, Demiurge, Orphism, memory and remembering one's true self, The Prisoner as a precursor to Gnostic cinema, the influence of The Prisoner, the conspiracy theories that shaped The Prisoner, how the Irish struggle influenced McGoohan, the use of secret societies in Ireland
Music by: Keith Allen Dennis
https://keithallendennis.bandcamp.com/
Comments
There was also the new reflexivity between media (broadly defined) and consumers, which subtly confuses cause with effect. The X-Files famously brought online chatter into the writer’s room, to the detriment of both the show and culture. Being enshrouded in a homogenized new world with no sharp edges is one thing; being tracked by it is another. Most of later Bush era conspiracytainment (twilight language, predictive programming) was a neurotic reaction to this sort of reflexivity. Finally, the triumphalism of the Reagan Great Leap Forward was never replaced. It was powerful medicine when there was an enemy on the field, but without one, its utopian visions no longer described a future, but a present which belied the whole program.
Jason Matthews
2025-12-16 01:16:34 +0000 UTCThe Man Who Was Thursday’s anarcho-Catholicism seems to be a better fit for McGoohan than for Chesterton himself, who was otherwise a prig. He closes the novel with an allegorical masque that harkens forward in the direction of ‘90s Gnostic Cinema: it is as much an influence on Fincher’s The Game as it was on The Prisoner. As to the impetus for this trend in film, I would cautiously point to Frederic Jameson (or rather, his duller students), the Disney Store on 42nd Street, and the 1996 Telecom Act. Postmodernism became a word to conjure with in the ‘90s, and the scholarship went from critique to description to the corporate cheerleading one found in ‘Cultural/Contemporary Studies.’ ‘No master narratives’ only sounds liberating from the open concept adult romper rooms of Madison Avenue. This shift in scholarship coincided with a corporate reconquest of urban and suburban spaces, and a massive expansion in the dial. A new behaviourism is discernible in the advertising, architecture, political campaigning and programming from that era. It would have been even more obvious then.
Jason Matthews
2025-12-16 00:38:35 +0000 UTC
