Disclaimer: The parties who have been quoted in the article have consented to have their statements featured.
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About ten months ago, I found a helpful little YouTube channel that provided helpful guides on modding for a video game I enjoyed. I still had some questions I needed answered about how to tinker with the game files, and I saw that the guy who ran this channel had a Discord server, so I joined it. To protect his identity, we are going to refer to him under the pseudonym “Yuki.” Most interactions I had with Yuki were generally pretty helpful, usually me just asking him how to do some tech/video game thing and him walking me through how to do it every once in a while. I stopped playing that game sometime in the next month and really didn’t speak to him after that. Before I stopped, though, I noticed in his Discord bio and under the descriptions of many of his YouTube videos a link with the caption: “Making our future in Creative Society.” The link led to a webpage with a logo that immediately stuck out to me: |
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Odd. The assortment of shapes along with the eight or infinity symbol in the middle struck me as very strange. Sort of Illuminati-esque in a way, which I found funny. I took a quick glance at their mission statement and the other text on the page; it was uncomfortably vague. I mean, just read some of this: “CREATIVE SOCIETY is an international project that unites people from over 180 countries on a voluntary basis. The goal of the project is to transition, in a legal and peaceful way, within the shortest possible time, to a new creative format of society worldwide, where human life will be of the highest value.” Ok? What exactly does that mean? What does a “creative format of society” entail, and what exactly constitutes placing “human life at the highest value”? I couldn’t be bothered to decipher any of it. I figured perhaps it was some esoteric humanist organization with goals so undefined it was doomed to fail, along with a poor choice of logo.
I didn’t really think much about it for nearly a year. However, very recently, I started to get back into playing that game again. I had an offhand memory of Yuki, and then suddenly remembered the strange group he linked in his socials. I decided to glance quickly again at their website. There was just something off about it that I couldn’t quite place. It almost gave me Scientology vibes in a strange way. I figured I’d google the name to see if I could find a more objective viewpoint. The top results were just pages that belonged to the Creative Society (their official website and a few regional branches), but under these I found something much more interesting: a short BBC article titled “How high-profile scientists felt tricked by a group denying climate change.” Aha! Twas the catch.
What Is The "creative Society"?
The article explains that the Creative Society is an international activist group that denies that carbon dioxide emissions are the primary cause of climate change, instead proposing a conspiracy they call “CO2 Fraud,” where they say scientists are lying about the underlying causes of climate change in return for money. They claim that the world will end in 2036 because of a magma eruption underneath the Earth’s surface. All of this is blatantly untrue, and decades of modern science can back me up here. Not to mention that much of the pseudoscience is contradictory or simply doesn’t make any sense; it doesn’t have to, of course, as long as people are confused enough or pissed off enough to believe it.
I closed the article and decided to message Yuki. “What is creative society?” I asked. “Because it seems to me like it’s a climate change denying group.” He responded a lot quicker than I anticipated: “surely not, just co2 agenda is scam in a way, I recommend studying deeper, not just sruface” [sic]. This immediately confirmed that this guy was pretty deep in the propaganda. I’ll admit, I got a bit confrontational at this point. “Yeah bro you fell for some crazy stuff ngl, hope you find your way out of it,” I replied, in retrospect a bit antagonistically. “Just remember that climate change is like 100% caused by people.” He shot back with “I can just tell you that you now give nothing for our future by your stand,” [sic]. Me and him went back and forth debating, skirmishing with sources, mine mostly from the decades of peer-reviewed research that has established climate change occurs due to human activity, and his mostly from these 11 hour video conferences the Creative Society hosts on their YouTube page that claim to help you find the “truth,” which are mostly nonsensical pseudoscientific philosophical rants interspersed with sensationalist clips of climate disasters with dramatic voice overs intended to fearmonger the viewer.
After a bit of back and forth, I realized that this guy wasn’t going to listen to reason. He still could, however, be a useful first hand source about the beliefs of the organization, since most information about their intentions was misleading or confusing. I decided to glance back at that article to see what else I could find on the organization. Often, the organization would invite prestigious meteorologists and politicians onto their conferences who were unfamiliar with the organization, and selectively edit their input to make it seem as if they seconded their pseudoscientific beliefs.
I closed the article and decided to message Yuki. “What is creative society?” I asked. “Because it seems to me like it’s a climate change denying group.” He responded a lot quicker than I anticipated: “surely not, just co2 agenda is scam in a way, I recommend studying deeper, not just sruface” [sic]. This immediately confirmed that this guy was pretty deep in the propaganda. I’ll admit, I got a bit confrontational at this point. “Yeah bro you fell for some crazy stuff ngl, hope you find your way out of it,” I replied, in retrospect a bit antagonistically. “Just remember that climate change is like 100% caused by people.” He shot back with “I can just tell you that you now give nothing for our future by your stand,” [sic]. Me and him went back and forth debating, skirmishing with sources, mine mostly from the decades of peer-reviewed research that has established climate change occurs due to human activity, and his mostly from these 11 hour video conferences the Creative Society hosts on their YouTube page that claim to help you find the “truth,” which are mostly nonsensical pseudoscientific philosophical rants interspersed with sensationalist clips of climate disasters with dramatic voice overs intended to fearmonger the viewer.
After a bit of back and forth, I realized that this guy wasn’t going to listen to reason. He still could, however, be a useful first hand source about the beliefs of the organization, since most information about their intentions was misleading or confusing. I decided to glance back at that article to see what else I could find on the organization. Often, the organization would invite prestigious meteorologists and politicians onto their conferences who were unfamiliar with the organization, and selectively edit their input to make it seem as if they seconded their pseudoscientific beliefs.
WHo is AllatRA?
Then I came across something in the article that really caught my eye: the article explained that the Creative Society often featured a man who was prominent in a Ukrainian neo-religious movement called AllatRa, an organization infamous for spreading conspiracy theories involving aliens and elites that sacrifice children. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate warned against the cult’s “destructive activities,” denouncing them as an “occult para-religious organization." On top of this, the Creative Society does not publish where they get their funding or their membership counts. All of this was incredibly suspicious…
I confronted Yuki about the funding thing, and he said something strange: “frankly you need to study works of AllatRa at least for 10 hours to get some track.” This hit me like a brick. This really was a cult! Not only had he confirmed the link between AllatRa and the Creative Society, but he had confirmed its cult-like tendencies as well! The parallels to Scientology seemed to draw themselves: Allatra fosters a distrust of climate scientists and politicians, Scientology fosters a distrust of psychiatrists, AllatRa wants its followers to spend hours reading the AllatRa text by Ukrainian author Anastasia Novykh, Scientology wants its followers to spend hours reading Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard.
I read a short summary of the book’s beliefs, and they were nothing short of insane, reminding me of the insane conspiracy theories believed by those who adhere to QAnon. First of all, the book believed that the United States, and the West in general, was controlled by freemasons, whom they call the “archons,” who are prejudiced against Slavs and Eastern Europeans. They alleged that the “archons” forced an “animalike society” upon humanity, and that humanity must break free in what they call the “Revolution of Dignity” by a leader whose description bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Russian president Vladimir Putin. This wasn’t even the most ridiculous of it: there was mention of an alien woman named Zhanna that had somehow come to earth. When I asked Yuki who Zhanna was, he simply said, “Zhanna is a woman with a special blink.” After trying to inquire about this “special blink” (and not really getting anywhere), I asked where Zhanna was from, he said “Zhanna is from space, where else?” He then very quickly tried to steer the conversation back towards climate pseudoscience: “It doesn’t matter if Zhanna is human or alien, what matters is the magmatic eruption that is going to happen at the earth’s core.” I couldn’t tell if this meant he strongly bought into the alien thing and didn’t care much to talk about it, or if this meant he hadn’t strongly bought into the alien thing and didn’t want to be prodded about it.
So what is the Creative Society? And what is AllatRa? What is their motivation for all of this? There’s a few possible answers: this could simply be created by a delusional individual (most likely Novykh) who truly believes everything they have written down. This could also have been created as means to generate a profit, much like Scientology. The AllatRa text is nowhere near as expensive as Scientology, and from what I can tell, the Creative Society does not demand contributions from its members, but this could easily change or be cleverly hidden.
My personal belief is that the cult was deliberately created as a disinformation campaign by the SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation). The SVR has run similar campaigns of “Desinformatsiya” in the past, and along with promoting a pro-Putin ideology and protecting fossil fuel interests (the Russian government makes the vast majority of its money by exporting a fossil fuel, petroleum), the Creative Society is mainly very difficult and confusing to research, a hallmark of many disinformation campaigns, especially those propagated by the Russian state. Putin’s strategy with propaganda seems less to be to convince people into agreeing with carrying out his actions, but rather to confuse people enough that he can carry out his actions without consequence. When people see politics as a confusing field and can’t make out what is happening in the world around them, they’d rather leave it to who they perceive as the “professionals.”
Regardless of who the Creative Society are and their purpose, they have dangerously misled individuals about the world around them, something that cannot continue. Beware of misinformation, because truth is power, and to lose truth is to lose that power.
I confronted Yuki about the funding thing, and he said something strange: “frankly you need to study works of AllatRa at least for 10 hours to get some track.” This hit me like a brick. This really was a cult! Not only had he confirmed the link between AllatRa and the Creative Society, but he had confirmed its cult-like tendencies as well! The parallels to Scientology seemed to draw themselves: Allatra fosters a distrust of climate scientists and politicians, Scientology fosters a distrust of psychiatrists, AllatRa wants its followers to spend hours reading the AllatRa text by Ukrainian author Anastasia Novykh, Scientology wants its followers to spend hours reading Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard.
I read a short summary of the book’s beliefs, and they were nothing short of insane, reminding me of the insane conspiracy theories believed by those who adhere to QAnon. First of all, the book believed that the United States, and the West in general, was controlled by freemasons, whom they call the “archons,” who are prejudiced against Slavs and Eastern Europeans. They alleged that the “archons” forced an “animalike society” upon humanity, and that humanity must break free in what they call the “Revolution of Dignity” by a leader whose description bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Russian president Vladimir Putin. This wasn’t even the most ridiculous of it: there was mention of an alien woman named Zhanna that had somehow come to earth. When I asked Yuki who Zhanna was, he simply said, “Zhanna is a woman with a special blink.” After trying to inquire about this “special blink” (and not really getting anywhere), I asked where Zhanna was from, he said “Zhanna is from space, where else?” He then very quickly tried to steer the conversation back towards climate pseudoscience: “It doesn’t matter if Zhanna is human or alien, what matters is the magmatic eruption that is going to happen at the earth’s core.” I couldn’t tell if this meant he strongly bought into the alien thing and didn’t care much to talk about it, or if this meant he hadn’t strongly bought into the alien thing and didn’t want to be prodded about it.
So what is the Creative Society? And what is AllatRa? What is their motivation for all of this? There’s a few possible answers: this could simply be created by a delusional individual (most likely Novykh) who truly believes everything they have written down. This could also have been created as means to generate a profit, much like Scientology. The AllatRa text is nowhere near as expensive as Scientology, and from what I can tell, the Creative Society does not demand contributions from its members, but this could easily change or be cleverly hidden.
My personal belief is that the cult was deliberately created as a disinformation campaign by the SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation). The SVR has run similar campaigns of “Desinformatsiya” in the past, and along with promoting a pro-Putin ideology and protecting fossil fuel interests (the Russian government makes the vast majority of its money by exporting a fossil fuel, petroleum), the Creative Society is mainly very difficult and confusing to research, a hallmark of many disinformation campaigns, especially those propagated by the Russian state. Putin’s strategy with propaganda seems less to be to convince people into agreeing with carrying out his actions, but rather to confuse people enough that he can carry out his actions without consequence. When people see politics as a confusing field and can’t make out what is happening in the world around them, they’d rather leave it to who they perceive as the “professionals.”
Regardless of who the Creative Society are and their purpose, they have dangerously misled individuals about the world around them, something that cannot continue. Beware of misinformation, because truth is power, and to lose truth is to lose that power.
ERIK WILBERDING
