Fringe believers conflate institutional silence with outright rejection of their claims

Evidence

Attractive as the concept of rejected knowledge is, it has limitations, and not only with regard to the place of occultism in earlier periods. A more signifi cant problem is its limited focus. Webb was concerned with mapping the occult in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, based on a conventional understanding of what that term encompassed, including such subjects as spiritualism and Theosophy. But the domain of the occult omits much of both millennialism and conspiracism. Improvisationalists are ideological omnivores. They draw on the “ancient wisdom” claimed by occultism, but they do not necessarily limit themselves to such sources; their reservoir of knowledge claims is partly but not entirely defi ned by the concept of occult-as-rejected-knowledge. Hidden knowledge may suffer not only from overt rejection but merely from lack of attention. That is to say, it may never be addressed, even negatively, by knowledge-validating institutions. Those who accept knowledge claims that stand on the fringes often confuse inattention with rejection. As far as they are concerned, those who do not address their claims have in fact rejected them. — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy, 167

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the conceptual limits of ‘rejected knowledge’ and introduces the substitution of ‘cultic milieu’ as a broader frame.
• XREF: The notion that silence/omission reads as rejection parallels the silence-as-meaning literature in the reader’s existing knowledge base. — connects to: Conspiracy believers abandon specific claims while retaining a core that something must be wrong — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 214; Believers treat absence of evidence as proof of sophisticated concealment — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 243; Conspiracy theories are inherently unfalsifiable because believers dismiss counterevidence as a plot — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic…, 96 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Believers treat absence of evidence as proof of sophisticated concealment #corroborates (0.90) — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 243
• Conspiracy believers abandon specific claims while retaining a core that something must be wrong #expands (0.80) — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 214
• Conspiracy theories are inherently unfalsifiable because believers dismiss counterevidence as a plot #complicates (0.80) — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy, 96
• Antithetical scholars replace methodological silence with politicized explicitness #expands (0.75) — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 341