Talk:Francis E. Dec

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Dec rant themes

Speculation: Variation on alien abduction theme?

I've read the Dec Fanclub website in the past. I've also looked into other fringe stuff. And the following in the Containment Policy rant brings to mind the usual descriptions of alien abduction:

“”Worldwide as a Frankenstein slave, usually at night, you go to the nearby hospital or camouflaged miniature-hospital van trucks. You strip naked, lay on the operating table, which slides into the sealed Computer God Robot Operating Cabinet. Intravenous tubes are connected. The slimy, vicious Jew doctor simply pushes the starting button. Based upon your Computer God brain on the moon, which records progress in your systematic butchery, your butchery is continued. Exactly. Systematically. [...]

Was Dec experiencing some version of finding himself abducted by the Computer God and its agents – like a nightmare of being forced to walk to sci-fi surgery being done on him? Difficult to tell. If he did, however, then it would be a variation on "alien abduction", which can be more or less sci-fi themed and involve a variety of beings depending on what people believe. (In older times, demonic abduction or other supernatural beings was more common, and airships or other things were seen instead of modern UFOs before cultural symbols changed with the times.) Dec's description is the same kind of stuff, simply with non-alien human and sci-fi elements. But I don't know of anything by Dec claiming he had such experiences. He may or may not have simply believed that it happened to people without having strange states of consciousness tied to it. --ApooftGnegiol (talk) 17:06, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

As it happens, delusions of being oppressed, persecuted or tortured by an omnipotent machine is a common delusion among paranoid schizophrenics. I think the resemblance to alien abductions are entirely coincidental–Dec's delusions were just that grandiose and elaborate. Uncle Mark (talk) 17:17, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

It's not easy to know what did and did not go on in his consciousness, and I just thought of it as a possible smaller detail/added speculation that could perhaps be interesting. As for Dec's grandiosity, I was most struck by how he simultaneously thought that everyone in the world was a remote-controlled puppet, so that there's no hope, and yet at the same time tried to reach people and also ask them for donations, presenting himself as "the only hope for a future". Hopelessness vs. hope, or no one to hear him vs. at least someone? Those seem like systematic contradictions in Dec's worldview. --ApooftGnegiol (talk) 17:33, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

It is possible (and I do agree that it does bring up the usual alien abduction imagery) but I don't think Dec had alien abductions in mind when he described the Instant Plastic Surgery kidnappings. I think his mind was simply so addled to the point he couldn't even parse the simple process of aging without filtering it through the Gangster Computer God framework and coming up with a ludicrously complex explanation for it. But then again, I'm just taking a guess at what he could have been thinking.

And yeah, Dec isn't known for his lack of contradictions (e.g. agnostic religion, thinking that an agrarian society can build a supercomputer). But that's part of Dec's charm, ain't it? Uncle Mark (talk) 18:45, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

Hope vs. hopelessness

To follow up on the earlier comments, and the seeming contradiction between Dec finding the whole world hopelessly controlled and corrupt, and Dec thinking he's "the hope" and can do something...

With his "To All Judges" rant, I added a possible explanation, the point of it all may at least in part be a simple temper tantrum where he expected the recipients to be legally forced to pay attention and end up inconvenienced. Of course, if Dec does that, it may read, ehh, a bit more interesting than would usually be the case. His motivations may also generally be very mixed up, so that depending on the rant in question, there may be various things pointing to what may have been driving him more at that particular time. --ApooftGnegiol (talk) 20:36, 30 April 2021 (UTC)