#2878: Foster Gamble

Foster Gamble is the bank heir to the multinational and pharmaceutical company Procter & Gamble, a deranged conspiracy theorist, and a sovereign citizen-adjacent libertarian. Foster and his wife Kimberly laid out their worldview, to the extent that such a chaotic mess of delusions can be deemed a view of anything, in their 2011 pseudo-documentary Thrive, which basically put a good selection of conspiracy theories of the kind featured at whale and Red Ice Creations (up until that time) in a blender, including but certainly not limited to free energy suppression, UFO nonsense, New World Order conspiracies, anti-vaccine delusions and 9/11 trutherism, together with a lot of feel-good-style political critique, to produce what Gamble deems to be a “Global Domination Agenda” that the Gambles think control most of the world; then they topped it all with some self-help ramblings. According to its own tagline, “THRIVE is an unconventional documentary that lifts the veil on what’s REALLY going on in our world by following the money upstream – uncovering the global consolidation of power in nearly every aspect of our lives. Weaving together breakthroughs in science, consciousness and activism, THRIVE offers real solutions, empowering us with unprecedented and bold strategies for reclaiming our lives and our future.” (The solutions, as expected, consist mostly standard paranoid libertarian-moronic nonsense like eliminating the Federal Reserve, public schools, and taxes.) In real life, THRIVE is one of the most obvious reference points for discussions about the emergence of the conspirituality movement.

 

One key to Gamble’s rubbish is his take on crop circles. So, yes: according to Gamble, crop circles are indeed made by extraterrestrials visiting Earth (they are not), and the circles do contain mathematical, engineering and New Age-style waffly spiritual messages from the aliens. In particular, as Gamble sees it, aliens are trying to inform us about the “torus” shape, which is apparently the key to everything because it will give us free energy – we just have to defeat the evil Global Domination Agenda, who for some reason is opposed to free energy, first. Among the tools used by the Global Domination Agenda are, of course, vaccines, which are used “to hide toxins and endocrine disruptors, like mercury, squalene and more, and used to sicken and sterilize covertly”; climate change, which is a cover for introducing global taxation; and HAARP, which is used to cause earthquakes e.g. in Haiti or Chile for somewhat unclear reasons.

 

The movie also featured a number of celebrities from the New Age conspirituality and pseudoscience circuit such as David Icke, Steven Greer, Nassim Haramein and Vandana Shiva. In fact, several of the people interviewed for the film distanced themselves from the ideas it ended up pushing (here is John Robbins’s take) – even Deepak Chopra, no less, agreed that the ideas were “dangerously misguided”, and it is difficult to imagine a more damning condemnation of bullshit than Deepak Chopra recognizing it as bullshit.

 

The product has been summarized as “basically Zeitgeist 2.0 ... when you align all of the claims that this movie purports to be true, it is hard not to think it is some kind of joke.” Foster Gamble himself defended his views (and expanded upon them) in his paper Solutions / Liberty, which leaned heavily on quotes from Stefan Molyneux, supplemented with some quotes from Ayn Rand and Ron Paul. For more information and discussion of the ludicrous nonsense that is THRIVE, this is a decent resource.

 

Diagnosis: Lunatic nonsense, and yes it matters – superficially, THRIVE may look like it is genuinely motivated to address real-world problems, but it isn’t: Gamble’s focus isn’t the real world, but to battle the windmills of imaginary conspiracies he has deluded himself into thinking are the real sources of those problems. As such, nonsense like THRIVE doesn’t merely not help but actively harm any real effort to solve any of the issues facing us by diverting attention. Gamble is accordingly not only a moron, but a somewhat dangerous one.

 

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki