Improvisational millennialism needs accessible motifs and weakened authority

Evidence

It might be supposed that such improvisation would produce only chaos, but oddly enough, the result tends to be the opposite of incoherence. The components keep reappearing from one structure to another, albeit in different roles—Vatican inner circles, malevolent aliens, secret councils of plutocrats, subterranean installations, and so on. In effect, as New World Order ideas have spread and have attached themselves to ufology, the result has been the development of a common millenarian vocabulary—a set of ideas held jointly by a large if ill-defi ned subculture. The individual combinations may be idiosyncratic, but the components are shared and understood. Ideas about the New World Order have consequently become the ideological glue binding together an ever more disparate array of elements, some political, some spiritual, some pseudoscientifi c. — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy, 1111

Second, this combination provides a striking example of a new and growing form of millennialism, which I call improvisational millennialism. Unlike earlier forms, which elaborated themes from individual religious or secular traditions, improvisational millennialism is wildly eclectic. Its undisciplined borrowings from unrelated sources allow its proponents to build novel systems of belief. — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy, 54

Categorization

• XREF: Pays off chapter 2’s claim that conspiracy worldviews rest on design principles excluding randomness; the shared vocabulary IS the structure. — connects to: Post-1960s millennialism freely blends traditions into conspiracist bricolage — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic…, 110; Open communications plus weakened authority favor improvisational millenarian entrepreneurs — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic…, 151
• DEEPTHINKING: Contradicting the intuition that free-form bricolage fragments belief, Barkun shows component-sharing converges it into a coherent subculture — a subtle systems claim.
• DEFINE: Defines the coined term ‘improvisational millennialism’ as eclectic borrowing across unrelated traditions.
• SEED: Framework for an essay on how belief systems get built by collage across unconnected sources in the internet era.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic…, 1111; Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic…, 54