Widely accepted fringe knowledge must constantly be replenished by darker claims.

Evidence

Whichever path becomes dominant, it seems unlikely that the domain of stigmatized-knowledge claims will disappear. Some will, no doubt, become the victims of their own success; that is, they will become so widely accepted that they will lose their stigma and become indistinguishable from the mainstream ideas they challenged. To a great extent, that has already happened to alternative medicine, now the benefi ciary of government funding, with at least some access to conventional medical journals. Notwithstanding the increased permeability of boundaries, however, a domain of stigmatized knowledge seems likely to remain stigmatized, if only because it refl ects the alienation and suspicions that some continue to direct toward government, science, higher education, and mainstream religion. As long as those suspicions remain, so too will the belief in a realm of hidden or forbidden knowledge. As ideas pass across the border that separates the world of the stigmatized from the world of the accepted, the world of the stigmatized must be reinforced with new additions. If the past is any guide, the cultic milieu provides a seemingly bottomless reservoir from which new knowledge claims can be drawn. Thus the attractions of the taboo and proscribed can always be met by visions of ever darker plots and ever more shocking revelations. — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy, 236

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘cultic milieu’ concept echoes Colin Campbell’s term, foundational to conspiracy theory studies; connects to Barkun’s broader framework and the scarcity loop dynamics in conspiracy recruitment.
• SEED: Angle: ‘the half-life of heresy’ — how normalized fringe claims (alt-med, vaccines once attacked) force the innovation frontier of taboo further out, an arms race of shock value.