I think it's a woeful part of popular culture now. In the 70s and 80s it was only cranks and subcultural types that namechecked this stuff. Arguably it had the potential to be amusingly subversive then (I think that's what Robert Anton Wilson was trying to get at with his "Illuminatus" trilogy certainly).
Yeah, Wilson and Shea are/were obviously smart guys - I've not read
Illuminatus! but I did read the
Schroedinger's Cat trilogy a long time ago, and I gather it covers a lot of the same themes. It seemed to me that they were using these grand, shadowy, occult conspiracies as metaphors for kind of boring but very real conspiracies, like industry lobbies, think tanks, major religious bodies, the media and so on.
(All of which is not to suggest that groups like the Skull & Bones don't exist and have influential members - of course they do - but, as was depicted rather brilliantly in the most recent series of
House of Cards, they're mostly an excuse for a bunch of rich blokes to dress up, get drunk and generally prat about, and also to fraternize and make contacts in a way that's not really any different from attending trade shows or using LinkedIn.)
But the reality of this in 2017 is just shit stoner culture, really. And some guy holding up a pizza restaurant with a gun, trying to find abused children.
Yeah, it's fucking tragic. And it goes to show that there's no-one more credulous than the man convinced that
he and he alone - or he and a few select others, anyway - has figured it all out
while the rest of us mill around going 'baaa'.