Chaos Marxism

My middle name is misery

2012-01-19T17:28:00.000+13:00

There are two primary motivations for declaring someone or something else evil:

Enhancing the cohesion of your own group;
Giving yourself permission to be evil "in retaliation".

We might therefore say that declaring others to be evil is the source of all evil. Because factually there is no such thing as someone beyond the reach of goodness. Hitler loved his dog. Margaret Thatcher was on the research team that invented soft-serve ice-cream.

Chaos Marxism in comic form

2012-01-19T10:54:00.001+13:00

Didn't Aleister Crowley get instantly given the IX degree in the OTO when the Outer Head decided from his writings that he already knew the secret of that degree? If so, then the author of this webcomic probably needs a Chaos Marxist Heroic Seal of Approval in the mail:

"... the secret is to make wanting the truth your whole identity."

"...nobody really gets to anything the way they think they will, because it takes so long to get anywhere. "

"...gradually go forward and be receptive to whatever you might encounter."

The last two should be interpreted, I think, as injunctions against preconceived schemas and unchallengeable theoretical shibboleths. Also, BONUS! Freddie Mercury.

Great Leader and Dear Leader

2012-01-13T09:32:00.000+13:00

Don Corleone needs his consigliere; "Pops" Jong-Il needed da 4 Star G just like his dad needed him; and all the great dictatorships and gangster bosses throughout history have needed a Number 2 to act as chief sycophant, hatchet-person and heir presumptive. As an Irish comrade of mine mentions, a Power Couple is generally a force to be reckoned with. Conversely, a Great Leader who doesn't have an "offsider" will generally have all the underlings busy jockeying for the job. "Every heavenly body gotta have its moons", as Riki Nadir put it.

So watch out for that dynamic happening in your group or organisation.

A bouquet of Martian fire flowers to my comrade G. B. for his insight here.

Dear Lord, we paid for this food ourselves, so thanks for nothing.

2012-01-02T12:19:00.001+13:00

I have trouble with the concept of grace, and its close cousin, forgiveness. I am, as most of you will know, a control freak. To quote the board of the Very Big Corporation from Monty Python's Meaning of Life, I am continuously disturbed by how much of the universe doesn't recognize me as its overlord yet.

*ahem* Yeah, it sounds hilarious now, but for most of my life I was bedeviled with the idea that a) becoming such an important person in the world that I could change it by my own efforts of will was not only possible, but indeed the only hope for a future; b) that if I didn't do so the world was doomed and I personally would probably end up on a street corner with a sign saying WILL DROP PANTS FOR FOOD, if not dead or behind bars. Todd Rundgren appears to have hit this stage by the time of his Initiation album - "I can't let the world die / because no-one would try". This of course was the outcome of growing up as something of a "child prodigy" in a very chaotic and emotionally unsafe environment, of being told that just about everything bad that happened was my fault and that it would stop happening if I could just be good. Of course, I could never be good enough. (Todd Rundgren was of course also a prodigy.)

For a long time I preferred to believe that I was "bad" inside, because the idea of being a good person who sometimes did things which hurt others was intolerable. I would have to ask for forgiveness, an unforgivable weakness which would never be forthcoming. Far better to have a fantasy of control, where I could always make my life worse whereas making my life better required risk. "You know where you stand in a hellhole", indeed.

Grace and forgiveness are both concepts which are based on a fundamental relinquishing of control. They are based on the idea that you just can't make the world, or even your portion of it, "right" by your own efforts. If you've done something wrong, and you know it (and who hasn't?), and you can't personally put it right, all you can hope is that the person you've wronged, or God, or the credit card company or the District Attorney, will decide that you don't have to pay the debt you ran up. Otherwise, you will have to deal with the consequences forever and there ain't nothing you can do about it.

But believing in things like grace or forgiveness are the only things which make what we would know as revolutionary action possible. Believing that you are not necessarily to blame if things go wrong makes it tolerable for things to go wrong. Being able to handle the fact that you ballsed things up and possibly made things worse is the only thing that makes it possible to handle ballsing things up. And it's the only way that one can handle love.

Control issues in relationships kill the heart-opening bliss quicker than anything. If you understand that you can't change your partner, that's one step; the next is understanding that you can't change yourself any more than you can lift yourself up by your bootstraps. Of course you can always change your behaviour, but that's not the same thing.

It's always better to act than not to act, because acting at least allows the possibility that Grace might enter the world, that we might actually be forgiven our debts as we forgive our debtors.Here's what Robert Fripp has to say on the subject (scroll down to where he starts talking about the Chief Rabbi).

And it's a warm Festivus welcome...

2011-12-23T09:50:00.001+13:00

... for our new readers from 4chan /lit/.

Why the emancipation of the workers has to be the act of the workers

2011-12-21T14:16:00.002+13:00

If we are not free to say no, we are not free to say yes. Any authentic change, ie transformative and transforming change, comes from the inside; and moves outwards to direct and shape our behavior. If behavior is compulsory, if we are compelled by an external force or authority, there may well be “good” repercussions, but not transformations: it’s just more-of-the-same.

Emphasis added, thank you Boppin' Bobby. A "good" government or leadership may open up possibilities for social revolution and the self-transformation of the masses, please note this cousin Hugo (and get well soon), but will never substitute for it. More of the same = "meet the new boss, same as the old boss"; revolution from above may improve things but will not open the door into the Better World.

Damn, am I becoming an anarchist (or at least a council communist / Left Communist) as I get older? Perhaps not because I do still see that participation in bourgeois electoral politics can be a useful first step towards self-liberation. But I am certainly not a Leninist, while still finding much of value in Lenin's work.

Great King Rat died today

2011-12-19T18:42:00.001+13:00

... because you can't go wrong with a bit of Queen. I have a large stash of DPRK propaganda in hard-copy, sent to me in the mail by an acquaintance ages ago to attempt to troll me as a self-described socialist. It's good reading material for the lavatory.

But to more serious business: this on the DPRK as a theocracy is very interesting, although I dispute his belief that a "religion" necessary has to posit a supernatural realm - it only has to posit anti-materialist explanations for natural phenomena, and "Marxism-Leninism" can certainly do that if it starts believing in things like "there is no truth outside the Party" or "a strong will can conquer anything". (In contrast, Deism for example can believe in a God without believing that the scientific laws of nature are ever violated.)

And to less serious business: I think this illustrates what I said before about how totalitarian "compulsory fun" has its own analogies in the compulsory fun of administered monopoly capitalism. (How many of you proles out there were made to wear Santa hats by your bosses this week?) And dear Allpowerful Atheismo, I hope this hilarious blog is soon updated.

How cults start

2011-12-11T17:50:00.001+13:00

So anyway, first you have someone who sets themselves up as a "master" (leader, guide, activist, organiser) and establishes what you might call a "Freudian transference relationship" with their followers - i.e. the followers, feeling a great lack in themselves caused by alienation, oppress and exploitation, assume that the Great Man (and it is usually a man) can bring wholeness to them, like an idealised father figure. Let Hazrat-e-Pir Dr. Javad Nurbaksh take it from here:

The mentally ill become the morids [disciples] of this kind of 'master' and establish a transference relationship with him. Then, by claiming that miracles have taken place, which were, in fact the result of the strong emotions established by transference, and by acting as missionaries for their master, they make converts. The so-called master, in turn, unaware of his own egoism, benefits from people's ignorance. Hence, by calling himself a saint he establishes a parasitic livelihood for himself. Sometimes due to a miracle reported by a morid, he comes to think that all the while he has really been a man of God, but has not realized it. In short, this type of 'master' is pulled along by the crowd because of his need to make a living, and in turn he becomes more and more convinced of his own claims. This causes a vicious circle between the morid and the morãd, both of them firm in their own egoism.
In every era this vicious circle stimulates a certain number of people to become 'masters', and then morids become enchanted with them and start telling extraordinary stories about them. ... In reality, people thus, create their own idols and then start worshipping them. This type of master is, in fact, subject to his own morids. As a matter of fact, a morid likes to have a certain man as his master, namely, a master who due to his defects and imperfections, always enjoys having a crowd of followers to support him.

Emphases added. It's a good living (or, if you can't do it professionally, a good source of ego boosting) to be Great Leader for a howsoever tiny group of people who are willing to let you run their minds. And then you start to believe your own publicity (like L. Ron Hubbard apparently did, or some say Joseph Smith did).

And the root of all this is hypocrisy - some half-baked yahoo, either sincerely or cynically, thinks that God or the Class Struggle speaks through them and mistakes their own ego gratification for the Good Work. Which is a lesson I should have learned ages ago. I count myself luckly that, even though most of the earlier ravings on this blog are egomaniacal and intolerant in the extreme, I always wanted collaborators rather than Zombies and therefore I never actually attracted any "followers", praised be the sweet name of Almighty Atheismo.

And in the end...

2011-12-09T09:40:00.001+13:00

... after all the questions like who am I?, what am I doing here?, did I really deserve what happened to me?, why is the world like it is?, etc etc etc, are answered, the only question left is... how can I help?

Even the Republicans know about the serious business

2011-11-23T09:34:00.001+13:00

David Frum, former adviser to Cowboy Dubya, now understands what the evolution of mass politics from actual debate to simple faction-fighting (similar to the Blues and the Greens in 6th century Constantinople) has wrought. "Conservatism has evolved from a political philosophy into a market segment." It's no longer a means to understand the world, but an ideological identity-tribe which will buy anything, no matter how noxious, that will help them hide from reality. He might have also said "same goes for fundamentalist Christianity".

"Be careful what you wish for, because you will get it and then the Gods will laugh at your dumb ass". Frum points out that the Republicans got what they wanted in the Bush era (i.e. unbridled power), but then after reality didn't turn out the way they imperially/imperiously ordered it to do so, they went to the happy land of Cognitive Dissonance. Frum challenges what a lot of we lefties think, that Bush/Cheney/Blair etc. would have told any lie to get what they wanted:

...conscious cynicism is much rarer than you might suppose. Few of us have the self-knowledge and emotional discipline to say one thing while meaning another. If we say something often enough, we come to believe it. We don’t usually delude others until after we have first deluded ourselves.

That could be a Chaos Marxist aphorism right there. Poor bastards really believed that if the Imperial Masters said something would happen, it would happen, or at least everyone would pretend it had happened. Praise the Iraqi and Afghan insurgencies for busting that little bubble.

Let's never let OCCUPY evolve into a market segment. "Socialism" evolved into a market segment, or even a minor religion, a long time ago, but it seems to be recovering during the current brush with reality.

Chaos Marxism is monist

2011-10-31T12:03:00.000+13:00

As previously explored, as a young radical/misfit I was massively drawn to neo-paganism, particularly to the anarcho-socialistic / "California head-shrinking" variety of the same described by Starhawk. I swallowed whole the line that "monotheism is imperialism in religion", and was attracted to the utopia she offered in her novel The Fifth Sacred Thing of a patchwork "confederacy of tribes" model of a post-capitalist future.

(ETA: Great Goddess on an electric motorbike, they're making a movie of it!)

But over the last few years I have rejected most of that as an essentially idealist, dare we say even "petty-bourgeois" vision of the future. Let's put it this way - Starhawk argues that "if we see the ocean as the womb of the Goddess Mother, we are less likely to fill Her with poisons". But symbolism and reality are distinct in all but the most childish of minds. The Prophet Muhammad put it on the line to the pagan Arabs, who worshipped Goddesses and yet buried the girl babies alive. The Olympian cults of Greece and Rome were hardly those of "respect for the feminine", no matter what Robert Graves might argue - the Athenian attitude to woman was not dissimilar to that of present-day Saudi Arabia. The Catholic faith, that branch of Christianity which happens to have more female objects of veneration, also has what might be considered a quite barbaric doctrine when it comes to fertility and the control thereof.

Polytheism is the theology of tribalism, and even worse, it is the theology of Empire. To understand this we have to understand that an empire is dissimilar to a nation state. The Roman Empire when it was healthy was not an autocratic monolithic state, but a sprawling multinational mess only united by a devotion to the Pax Romana personified in the Imperial cult. Apart from that, all the various ethnicities were allowed whatever insane tribal religions they wanted, as long as human sacrifice or actual rebellion weren't involved, and some of them even got popular in the metropolis. Pretty much the same went for the Holy Roman Empire of the Middle Ages, and the Ottoman Empire in its pomp. And that is precisely the logic of late, "post-modernism / consumerist" capitalism under the Pax Americana. Every minority group has its own "middle class", its own idols and languages respected. Potentially revolutionary groups are co-opted by giving them a piece of the pie, or in other words, employment for a middle class (gay bar owners, people who translate government diktats into indigenous languages, etc).

On the contrary, UNITY is a sweet and beautiful world in both the revolutionary socialist tradition and the mystical traditions of Islam and Buddhism. And Chaos Marxism is all about that. "Unify the forces". "We are the 99%". There is no room for "their truth" and ours to co-exist, because harsh reality in the form of the interlinked crises of accumulated capital / ecological degradation / mass alienation and anger intervenes. The goal is to overthrow the repressive tolerance of Empire into a new unifying way of seeing the world (although not a monolithic one). All great Reforms of history have had that same kind of paradoxical "intolerance".

All saints revile her, and all sober men

2011-10-27T11:16:00.002+13:00

Currently rereading one of my favourite books in the world when I was 16 years old, Robert Graves' The White Goddess. The historical argument is of course completely risible, and as for the poetic logic, the guy is basing his argument on close analysis of Old Irish and Welsh texts, two languages which he admits up front he doesn't speak a word of and is relying on dodgy-tastic translations. Still, his essential argument that "poetry" (and all other forms of true art) is the same thing as religio-mystical devotion is still one of the axioms of Chaos Marxism. We just attempt to bring revolutionary socialism and psychology into the mix.

Welcome to the future.

2011-10-21T09:56:00.001+13:00

It's like all the dreams of Chaos Marxism are coming to rampaging life, in city squares across the planet. And just my luck to have been ill in bed all week. Definitely getting down there this afternoon. Socialists thought I was nuts when I was talking about how Project Chanology was the wave of the future, but who's laughing now, oldthinkers? Tell me that, who's laughing now?

The obvious question

2011-10-17T22:10:00.003+13:00

Who out there has got fun tales to tell about #Occupy?

FIVE YEARS OF CHAOS MARXISM

2011-09-26T11:31:00.001+13:00

Thank you from the bottom of my heart, all you readers and commenters, for making it possible. I'm also pleased to note that we have hewed rather closely to our original intentions, although I no longer am a bigoted anti-postmodernism, and my concerns have shifted more to mysticism than to magick, more to "transpersonal psychology" than "folk parapsychology".Open thread, if anyone wants to mouth off in the comments.

Once again on the purpose of Chaos Marxism

2011-09-13T19:08:00.000+12:00

For the mystics: We all know that the world that we experience is a Black Iron Prison, a malign illusion, the Matrix. We can experience the world where God exists and magic is afoot when we "wake up", that is become properly conscious, cease to rely on preprogrammed scripts and what we "expect" to see, to actually look reality squarely in the face. But survival in the world that it is means that it's much, much easier (and actually more fun) to stay asleep. The purpose of revolutionary ecosocialism is to build a world where it would be easier to stay awake than to fall asleep. But for that to happen the broad majority of people have to "wake up". We don't have time to do this one-by-one. We need to seize the reins of the Frankenstein's Monster that the mass media has become to get to everywhere in the world at once. Liberation has to be as ubiquitous as Coca-Cola.

For the revolutionaries: we're trying to understand about how "coming to consciousness" actually works. Once you realise that most self-described revolutionaries are not conscious, but are instead following a Book of Rules for Living Your Life as restrictive and soul-deadening as any peddled by a church or a self-help guru, you realise why everything that they say they want (to unite with the masses to spread consciousness) never actually happens. Also, actually-existing Marxists and anarchists seem to have a distressing lack of practical compassion towards each other (as opposed to "abstract compassion" to the "working class" or "the oppressed peoples of the earth"), and seem not to be conscious of their own reactionary attitudes when it comes to dealing with their own privilege. Non-dualist spirituality and transpersonal psychology have a lot to teach us here. And no, just participating in the struggle doesn't make you all better psychologically.

I love it when people agree with us

2011-09-03T15:35:00.001+12:00

I've been an admirer of Terry Eagleton's work for ages, but this is... wow.

In the European world bus drivers, florists and dental assistants are not usually expected to hold complex ideas about the origins of the world, the purpose of life, or what it means to live a rich, fulfilled, fully human existence. They are simply expected to get on with their everyday lives and leave these more fundamental questions to scholars and clerics. This is not so in the case of Islam. [...] Antonio Gramsci maintained that all ordinary people were at a certain level philosophers, but this is a lot more obvious in the Islamic world than it is elsewhere. Islamists are also natural-born internationalists.[...] Western societies deal with belief primarily by reducing it to a private affair. It becomes a kind of hobby or personal eccentricity, rather like collecting Javanese parrots or engaging in sado-masochistic pursuits [...] It is not a force for the transformation of reality but a refuge from it, like Madonna's Kabbalah or Tom Cruise's Scientology.[...] The capitalist West's problem is that it can neither kick belief nor get along with it. It can do neither with it nor without it. It needs some show of faith, not least in times of political crisis, to declare to the world what it stands for. In reality, however, capitalism is an inherently faithless system. As long as you roll into work, pay your taxes and refrain from beating up police officers, you can believe more or less what you like. Too much conviction smacks of fanaticism, and is bad for business. [...] Socialists may not agree with the content of Islamic faith, but they are well acquainted by their own history with the idea of millions of ordinary men and women living lives of conviction rather than of pragmatic self-interest. In this, at least, we share a precious tradition with those hounded by the Islamophobes.

Chaos Marxism stands 4-square behind the democratisation of philosophy; of the necessity of faith to break out of the utilitarian/entropic straitjacket of bourgeois ideology; for mystics and dialectical materialists to take each other seriously. Such ideas - as well as ecosocialism, and the understanding of the pivotal role of information workers in the senile capitalist countries (aka "the West") - have to be at the centre of any new International.

For everyone who's given up hope

2011-08-31T12:46:00.000+12:00

If “tomorrow” is the first lie of the Devil, perhaps the second lie might be that our own contribution has no value; that we are powerless to make a difference in the world. It is very easy to believe that this is so, seeing clearly our frailties & weaknesses. But this is a lie, nevertheless.

- Thanks, Vicious Bob. I post this in response to the overwhelming negativity, bitterness and nihilism which have become the common sense of the liberal-leftist Internet in this day and age, this era of accelerating capitalist crisis, ecological collapse, the collapse of hopes that an imperialist war machine led by an intelligent black lawyer/academic would somehow be qualitatively different from one led by a borderline imbecile white fratboy, etc., etc...

But of course the ruling ideas of our epoch, like any other, are those of the ruling class. The ruling class want us to believe that "the war is over and the good guys lost" (L. Cohen), that their rule might be an obvious disaster but There Is No Alternative. But let's put it this way - okay, let's just assume for the sake of argument that we live at the beginning of a civilisational Dark Age like, I dunno, the European Middle Ages or the Chinese Warring States period. There's nothing that any individual can do about it, not even Noam Chomsky, John Lennon and Black Dynamite all put together. So what is your motivation for remaining alive?

Should we all load stones in our pockets and go down to the local river like Virginia Woolf? Or get drunk all the time, which is the slow-motion version of the same thing? Or give up and join the rat race to get our piece of the pie before it's too late? (Don't worry if that means selling our soul - it's not as if our soul was worth anything, and if the world is fucked whatever we do, we might as well be actively evil as long as it feels good, right?!?)

Credo quid absurdum. The only noble thing that it is still possible to do is to act as if what you did actually mattered. That is, act according to principle, as opposed to automatic ideas based on what you picked up from the TV or social chatter. Even if you're wrong, you make it possible for others to do so.

Barbarians at the gate

2011-08-22T09:15:00.001+12:00

I've quoted approvingly from Jordan Stratford, the Gnostic Monsignor and author, a couple of times which you might remember. I finally got around to buying his exposition of his modern faith-culture, Living Gnosticism. Now I've criticised Msgr. Stratford once before as being a representative of "the occultism of small businessmen" ("unorthodox faith" movements which don't break with the underlying material base of the secular and/or institutionalised faith culture they live in). In that regard I was particularly struck by parts of the closing essay of his small and worthy book, in which he foresees a quasi-apocalyptic clash between the Apollonian (rationalist and liberal) culture of the metropolis and the Dionysian (irrational, ecstatic, fundamentalist) culture of the periphery. Although I don't think that's really the clash he's talking about:

The barefoot glossolalians are emerging from the desert once again. Only whereas in the second century, these cultures met one another on a fairly equal footing, this time the North is vastly outnumbered... What happens when a generation of hip, aware, tattooed, multilingual, educated, environmentally-responsible Episcopalian urbanites who stopped at one child (if any) is overcome by a majority of dozen-siblinged fundamentalists who think being gay is caused by demonic possession? The North has been outbred by the South, and the fundamentalists are basically just waiting for us - and our egalitarian, feminist, green, tolerant, "reasonable" Apollonian culture - to die out.

The ignorant unwashed masses are outbreeding our liberal aristocracy?!? Holy crap, stop right there, Pim Fortuyn. This is how quickly urban, tolerant liberalism can flip into out sheer imperialism, close to racism. Because they are the left wing of globalised imperialism, of course they're going to be terrified by the end of globalised imperialism and therefore their privileges as the systems' internal, polite, critics.

But seriously, in the immortal words of Tonto, "what do you mean our culture, paleface"? Is the dominant culture of the West really feminist and green and egalitarian? You know, with all the rape and sexual objectification and extractive industry and consumeristic waste and people begging on the streets? No it bloody isn't. A very small privileged layer - among whom Msgr. Stratford lives and for whom he speaks - gets to live that way, because they're the middle class professionals and skilled workers who benefit from the real underpinning of "their culture" - the continued pillaging of natural resources and super-exploitation of the global proletariat in the name of glorious profit. You are not more environmentally aware because you breed less, especially if you on your own have a bigger environmental footprint than Reverend Kiswahili or Mullah Omar and their dozen kids whom you're having paranoid dreams about.

Jordan Stratford goes on about Athenian culture, and the later culture of the Roman Empire, being swamped by primitive backwards Christianity, and within "two generations... the plumbing stopped working". Uh-huh. Now this is where middle-class idealism gets you. Athenian society was based on slavery (and oppression of women of a Saudi Arabia level, or perhaps worse). The Roman Empire was based on slavery and conquering as much of the known world as they could hold. And Christianity was the overwhelmingly popular religion of those slaves by the time of the fourth century CE. The social system had run out of steam. The Lombards, Goths, Vandals and other barbarian hordes were relatively more vigorous than decadent, senile Rome, no matter whether they were sacrificing to Zeus or celebrating the Eucharist.

Yes, it's true. Neoliberal, globalised, financialised capitalism makes a very sweet lifestyle possible for a middle-class layer who - precisely because they're not struggling for a crust, and because they don't have to directly exploit anyone - can make consumer choices which they interpret as a life of virtue. That's not the culture I have any interest in protecting. To paraphrase Catharine MacKinnon, and that's something I thought I'd never do: "if your genteel culture requires having a global slave class, you have no right to your genteel culture."

To be fair, though, Msgr. Stratford isn't precisely defending the Empire against the barbarians at the gates. What he's suggesting is that Gnosticism is an example of a compromise. But the real compromise can't be a new faith or an old faith or a culture or a creed, it has to be a material way of existing. The fundamentalist hordes don't have a solution - when the kind of people he's worried about took over in Iran in 1979, nothing really changed except some industry got nationalised and the regime stopped grovelling to American foreign policy.

If your culture of "Lulu Lemon yoga gear and $200 Nikes... "Tradition" starbucks cups... [and] Bang & Olufsen speakers" has nothing to say to people who live in grinding poverty and whose faith is all they have and do not really take kindly to being told not to reproduce themselves by corpulent, privileged white folks, then you need to think a bit more clearly. The only people who can change the world and create a new culture on a new material base are the globalised proletariat - the people who actually make all those things that Jordan Stratford's people consume. Isn't it such a pity that the United States spent so long wiping out communist movements among that class of people in the 70's and 80's and instead building the credentials of the religious fundamentalists that are now the Great Satan?

(As an aside, by "global proletariat" we have to include the information workers, and this is where those of us with plenty of Western cultural capital can intervene. I more and more think that Anonymous has become the modern equivalent of 1870's Russian Narodnik terrorists. I wonder what form a "Cyber-Bolshevik" party might take. Just as the tiny but vital industrial proletariat in Russia had to make an alliance with the peasant masses to win power, the vanguard of modern information workers who keep globalised capitalism and consumerism functioning have to line up with the inhabitants of the sweatshops of China and the coffee plantations of Colombia.)

Chaos Marxism stands against both fundamentalist obscurantism, and a defence of "liberalism and Western culture" which is nothing more but an appeal for the perpetuation of the privileges of the middle class.

Once again on commodification

2011-08-20T19:17:00.000+12:00

In March I wrote:

Mass production means that nothing gets lost forever. Everything can be replaced - and, in the era of the Internet, if it can be digitised, these days nothing need be lost at all. [...] So that's what's behind "vintage culture", steampunk, Goth, SCA, whatever - the attempt to create a culture of objects which are totally individual and therefore meaningful, even sacred.

But someone else got there before me:

Hence steampunk, for what is steam punk if not a romanticized do-over, a setting of the clock back, a time of craftsmanship and real (fetishized) objects, remaking the world, not in the mode of the ceaseless slow sprawl of cheap oil but in the Victorian self-aware world making spirit?

So maybe Chaos Marxism is salvagepunk. And taqwacore.

(Doloras entered nirvana, parenthetically.)

2011-08-18T21:34:00.003+12:00

Holy crap, for about five minutes there I didn't exist. It was COOL.

And when I came back to existing I found myself at the centre of a synchronicity storm which proved to my satisfaction that I'm doing something right.

===

All the great works of mystical literature (eg. Irina Tweedie) say that the path to ego-loss is rapid-cycling-bipolar to the Nth degree. One minute God doesn't exist and you're full of crap, the next moment you're in Paradise eating from the fruits of the tree of Knowledge of Good And Evil and Endless Free Sex, and then God doesn't exist any more, and so on. Probably enlightenment comes when you realise that both are illusions, or as Hazrat-e-Pir Dr. Nurbakhsh would say, you give up on both this world and the Hereafter.

Because God doesn't exist in the world of blind matter and inescapable natural law. In contrast, the world of Love and Meaning and Compassion and really really good orgasms and cuddles and niceness and warm milk is nothing but God. We live in the hologram caused by the overlapping of the two worlds, to use Grant Morrison's terminology which I think he took from Philip K Dick.

Aphorism time:

He who tries to defend or describe or dismiss God with Logic is committing a foul sin against Logic as well as one against God.

I notice this in the similarity of the style of arguments made by both Catholic and Salafist theologians. Religion is just rules, which is a form of cause and effect and therefore of the hard, nasty world not the sweet, gentle world. I read a website by some heretical Muslims who argue that God has actually set Satan up as temporary ruler of the planet. That might be a pretty good metaphor for describing what happens in revolutionary events... when the Black Iron Prison springs a leak and suddenly the impossible becomes possible (almost a definition of the presence of God).

Because that never lasts, and what happens afterwards is that the sweet spring of flowing nectar which existed for maybe a year or two maximum gets damned and polluted and set to drive the waterwheels of the dark satanic mills. The ekklesia, majlis or soviets of workers and soldiers' deputies become new engines of oppression. The institutions founded to guard the message end up destroying the message. And that's the price of success - having to cut a deal with the Prince of This World. Compare the umma after the death of the Prophet to the Soviet Union after the Civil War and see what I mean.

(A Persian fellow once said to me: "I'm a Muslim, but that means I submit to God, not to Muhammad." Similarly, the only real revolutionaries are the ones who refuse to argue in terms of the hadiths of Lenin and Trotsky, instead trying to emulate their spirit and daring and avoid their dumb mistakes, and whose only wish for that mausoleum on Red Square is that they should give Vlad a decent burial and stop propping him up like a grinning scarecrow.)

To be true to the spirit of the Revolution, which is precisely identical to the Holy Spirit and to what makes cats scream in the night and poets howl at the moon, we have to refuse rules, schemas, hierarchies and brain death - while at the same time refusing the opposite trap, of going back to worshipping our own egos. As Ayn Rand put it (and screw her, by the way) - "in the name of the best within all of us".

We don't need any more Prophets or idols, but we will always need idolsmashers and the Enlightened Masters who come to wake us up. But they get taken from us too early, so let's appreciate them while we have them.

Rumi Was A Homo

2011-08-16T12:55:00.002+12:00

Progressive Islam is purely an academic exercise. It’s not creating a culture. It’s professors talking to each other.

Thank you, Michael Muhammad Knight. You can only create a culture out of practice, not out of ideology or ideas. If you try to create a culture out of ideas, then the culture will be based on what practice you're actually doing and trying not to think about.

Brother Michael is referring to "Progressive Islam" meaning smug liberal upper-middle-class Westernised academics who happen to be from a Muslim background or culture trying to package upper-middle-class liberalism (the lifestyle they actually follow, being the consumer lifestyle plus libertarian sexual/gender ethics) in a pseudo-Islamic flavouring. Funnily enough, it has exactly the same content as the "socialism" or "Marxism" which comes out of academia or out of the lumpen-academia known as "the activist communities" - nothing but pieties, symbols and rituals over the top of a content of the privileged behaviour of those who have cultural capital recognized by the Black Iron Prison. Nothing more than native informants, or the left-wing of Empire.

"Progressive Islam" of this sort, and "socialism" which means nothing more than the ritualised behaviour of a lumpen-intelligensia subculture, offers absolutely nothing to your average person living in an Islamabad slum or under a pile of rubble in Gaza, or even in the working-class area of London or Paris or [FILL IN WHERE YOU LIVE RIGHT NOW]. The people are already creating the New World on the ashes of the old, and the honest intellectuals are those who can be like Orwell in Barcelona in 1936, and realise that just because you don't really like what is happening doesn't mean it's not something worth fighting for. If you don't like it the answer is to create your own new culture where you are right now, and then seek to become allies.

Actually, I think Brother Michael might have something in common with Chaos Marxism, since he certainly takes a historical-materialist approach to faith:

Once you recognize how much of your tradition is a product of historical forces, it empowers you to be an historical force yourself.

Too many Marxists, for example, seem to believe that they are the Chosen Ones on account of the unblemished ideology passed down to them from the Holy Prophet Karl and His Noble Imams Fred, Vlad, and (Josef and Mao if you're a Sunni, Leon if you're a Shi'ite). They don't look at the historical reality of where they are, where they came from and where they might go, they only act as if they had abstracted their egos from reality and were nothing less than the living incarnation of The Most Holy Tradition. And of course in that situation the ego is left free to run rampant and ruin everything in support of its own continued existence.

If more Marxist groups honestly socially looked at themselves, they might see how their own actions continually sabotage what they claim to want. Hell, substitute "Marxist groups" with "human beings". The only people who really think ideology matters in and of itself are those trained to be ideological technicians under capitalism, and that's why they either sell out or create little "toy" versions of the churches and universities which they would be running if they'd made it in the big wide world.

I love historical analogies

2011-08-15T08:55:00.002+12:00

If, as previously discussed, the relationship between the ruling class and the media today is analogous to that between the feudal aristocracy and the priesthood in Europe of 1000 years ago, then Rupert Murdoch would be a Borgia pope. Alexander VI?

Riot! The unbeatable high!

2011-08-09T13:55:00.000+12:00

Tomorrow you're homeless... tonight it's a blast. Still, sometimes it has to be done.

The energy has been released - now is it going to be a firework or a laser beam? Only the people on the ground in [England] can tell, and so far we're only hearing all the voices yelling "SIT BACK DOWN AND SHUT THE HELL UP".

Of course implacable opposition, rioting, etc are fun and all. But what does it accomplish, if not tempered with a positive?

We commented on riots in Tonga in 2006, and in Greece last year, and the same rules still apply. My favourite Trot gives a good analysis - interesting how the American media are far enough away from the action that they can actually see what it's about, as opposed to the British media demanding troops on the streets, mass floggings, etc.

The forest fire burns everything down. Then possibly new growth can happen.

Rule #1 of Cult Leadership

2011-08-08T22:09:00.000+12:00

Try to talk in the same voice as the super-ego of your gullible stooges. Generally people are so used to doing what the programmed voices in their head tell them, that if you can work out what that programmed voice is telling them and make it come out of your own mouth, they will become your devoted zombies and you can exploit them to live quite comfortably without actually contributing any value to the real world.

No lie. Mediocre cult leaders like Deepak Chopra or whoever tell people what they want to hear about themselves. Hard-core cult leaders like L. Ron Hubbard, Gary Chicoine or Jim Robertson will abuse the hell out of their followers, triggering all their class society-implanted self-abasement circuits.

In contrast, real Masters are distinguished by their loving-kindness.

premature emaculation

2011-08-08T21:48:00.001+12:00

...as T.H.Meyer has suggested in relation to the channelling of `messages from the
Masters‘ by Madame Blavatsky and other members of the Theosophical Society, it is possible for a `transmission‘ of genuine Higher Wisdom to be distorted by the psyche of an `underdeveloped receiver‘. Translated into Gurdjieffian terms this would refer to someone who had achieved a degree of premature connection to the higher centres.

(source: Thompson, W. J. J. G. Bennett's Interpretations of the Teachings of Gurdjieff, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Lancaster, 1995.)

Hmmm. As a former "gifted child" (*shudder*) that seems very plausible to me. I was certainly having "spiritual experiences" left and right from the ages of about 13-15 (puberty, according to tradition, being closely associated with the opening of the more complicated bits of the brain), but due to very difficult psychological circumstances in my upbringing and being born very far from anyone who could have actually helped, it took me two decades or so of repeated head/brick-wall interface, bad choices, wild goose chases, following half-baked ideologies made up by dodgy people, and following my own half-baked ideologies, before I actually got in a position where it made any sense.

This fits in with Robert Fripp's analysis of Music as an expression of something which comes from somewhere "more real than life itself" (i.e. from the parts of consciousness beyond language), and that's why all those great musicians just get burned out, like a 2 amp fuse trying to contain a lightning strike. Just because someone's got a particular skill, or is really smart, or has spooky powers, doesn't mean that they are egoless Perfect Masters and you should let them take your life, is the take-away message from this.

...individuals who search after greater meaning are especially vulnerable to abuse because they feel themselves to be ‘unworthy’. ‘Seekers’ are greatly at risk. They look towards unseen worlds without having the confidence of gaining access to them, so that they come to look towards personalities who claim such access to guide them and interpret reality for them. This is of course exactly the same structure which is found in religions, the only difference being one of scale. All the remarkable men I have met who are truly remarkable embody a willingness to speak ‘on the level’ with others and not as authorities.

Thank you, Anthony Blake; it only remains to me to point out that seekers can be political as well as spiritual ones. Whether your guru spouts bullshit with a vague family relationship to Marxist political economy or to the Rig Veda, cult dynamics are cult dynamics. True Perfect Masters (by which we mean people who have gotten out of the way of their own ego and are capable of actually behaving like all humans will in the Better World To Come) are known by their massive humility, wicked sense of humour, and willingness to get their hands dirty in the Real World of Horrible Jobs.

I would certainly put myself in the position of "imperfect receiver", and this is why this blog should be taken as the efforts of a mind trying to work out what the hell happened to it and suggestions for your own experimentation, much like Philip K. Dick's Exegesis.

So simple it probably doesn't need to be said, but...

2011-08-05T16:17:00.002+12:00

We don't need any more Prophets, any more religions, or any more rules. The ones we have right now will do nicely, thank you. What we want is more praxis; theory put to at the service of Love, and at the service of Right Action.

Anon v Monsanto, IN A STEEL CAGE

2011-08-03T12:16:00.001+12:00

Words like violence break the silence

2011-08-02T09:47:00.001+12:00

... yeah, so I'm coming very close to understanding that, as far as understanding goes, Cramulus is probably right and I wrote everything I needed to write on these subjects a couple of years ago, when I first found the books which provide the "missing link" to my ideas. But the issue was that I have spent the last almost-five years on this blog attempting to give a rational justification for the embrace of the irrational. A worthwhile project, but one which I realised with a jolt yesterday I have not actually been practicing in my own life.

I've talked about, if you are serious about introducing "light from the Better World" into the closed system of entropy which is the Real World of Horrible Jobs, the need to "give up your identity" to the Higher Power that you've devoted yourself to. I suppose I underestimated how difficult that is because giving up your identity means giving up your mind, and giving up your little world. (Or at least be prepared to give those things up... if you do it right you will get them back later, all cleaned and tuned up. As Crowley put it, you put yourself together again on the other side of the Abyss.)

The last one is a concept which has just congealed for me. Just as one of those insects that lives on the bottom of ponds glues rocks and shells and sticks to itself to defend itself, your nafs / mind / ego / identity creates a little world around itself. This world is made out of possessions, habits and social relations - but only the most very important ones, the ones which shield you from the vertiginous abyss. You know - your drinking buddies, your favourite intarwebz sites, your favourite albums and books, your family, your loved ones, your local sports team. All the things that "tell you who you are" (at least in terms of the Matrix, which as we know, cannot really do such a thing).

But it also makes you blind to the real world. It's a hermetic seal, if you'll pardon the pun. You can't know Reality, and therefore what you are really supposed to be doing in order to bring Light into the world, unless you are prepared to step out of your little world and leave it behind, like a hermit crab does when it grows too big.

And the only thing that can induce you to do that - as the 12-Step programmers know perfectly well - is an act of faith, the mind / ego / nafs / identity just giving up and letting a Higher Power (call it God, an Angel, a praeternatural intelligence, the Spirit of the Age, your own right brain / Higher Self / atman) do it. To get back to politics, one of the reason the Leninist sects (possibly the anarchists as well) have put themselves into a dead end is that they built a party to change the world, but the party has become the extended ego of the participants - they have all the fuel they need but they refuse to burn it, and if anyone else burns their own fuel they're mocked for "liquidationism".

The Sufis say that this is generally not possible without a Master - as a focus for the great power of Love that you need to be able to make this happen. I have one of those now, so we'll see what happens.

I realise now that my pride is my shame - I really did think my mind could do everything itself. "What a sucker I had been. What a fool. The answer was there all the time," to quote Dr Frank'n'Furter. Everything I've really achieved, I haven't achieved myself - Higher Self did so acting through me. (You can tell that because I didn't think about it, it just "came to me", and I could barely remember it afterwards.)

So, that's my job next - building the faith to leave the mind behind. In politics, building the intellectual and activist strength to leave organisational forms behind. And hopefully in music I can leave a few holes in my solos so maybe some Music will fall through.

===

A very important warning: because books work on the level of the mind, they can't really teach you jack-shit about anything important in the real world. They can help your mind make sense of your experiences in the real world, but you need those real world experiences first. I've certainly had experiences reading books which seemed impenetrable garbage the first time, and the second time (after a few years doing it hard), they answer all my questions in retrospect. Probably the same goes for blogs, hint hint.

A nice syllogism

2011-08-01T19:05:00.000+12:00

We help beyond any help ever available anywhere. We are a near ultimate in help.

- L. Ron Hubbard

Helpful people are a nuisance.

- Guitar Craft aphorism

I need someone to hold me while I wait for something more

2011-07-29T10:54:00.001+12:00

Faith is necessary. The object of faith is irrelevant. It is the power of the faith itself - the overriding of all the "what ifs" thrown up by the intellect and the ego - which makes the impossible possible. The idol is made by the genuflector, not the craftsman. This is why all initiatory paths which have real power call for total devotion to the Ideal or to a particular Master who embodies the ideal. (The truly enlightened never claim to have spooky powers, but sometimes the disciples will tell stories about the Master's spooky powers. This is a sign of their faith which is not discouraged by a true Master.)

(ETA: There's a wonderful piece in the Doctor Who story The Curse of Fenris. For those who haven't seen it: it's World War Two and the Doctor et al are fighting vampires, for some reason, and of course a traditional way to fight off vamps is with a crucifix. A Red Army soldier who happens to be with them protests that he doesn't believe in Christianity; the Doctor asks him: "What do you believe in?" and he answers "I believe in the Revolution". So - get this - he takes the hammer-and-sickle badge off his cap and fights the vampires off with that. Even faith in the cynical bureaucratic murderer Joe Stalin can move mountains.)

For all we have criticised the Leninist sects, you must admit that their belief system gives them incredible powers to face ridicule, to stand on street corners selling badly-xeroxed papers, etc., for an entire lifetime. The problem with some of them is that they don't teach "loving-kindness", or in other words, integrity - instead they have a half-assed belief in "Bolshevik ethics" which, in practice, boils down to the same kind of Might = Right nonsense that we rightly despise when we hear it coming from the fascists (and would make Trotsky spin in his grave). The problem with others is that they've given up actually changing things in the Big World and have become nothing but a substitute religion.

But are we to say that they have no right to exist or to participate in the movement - that they would be better off individually giving up and getting some bourgeois job? Surely they can be annoying, but is that a problem with them or a problem with us? I'm reminded of secular atheists who curse religious believers for "relying on a crutch". The implication is that secular atheists are both ethically and psychologically superior. But what do they do with that superiority? (Can someone point me to hospitals, schools, charity drives etc. started by humanist organisations? I'm sure there are some.)

"Atheism" and "secularism" are both negatives - no religion - but why do you stay alive in the absence of any metaphysical meaning? Is the answer nothing but "pure hedonism" - or, more likely, "live the capitalist dream, earn money to buy leisure commodities, have a good time, then die?" Many people would rather stay in a cult than accept a lifetime of nothing more than psychic masturbation. As Seven of Nine put it before she was reverse-assimilated, "WE DO NOT WANT TO BE LIKE YOU".

The point is: don't be so quick to tear down someone else's faith before examining your own. And yes, you have one, even if it's not in God. I am increasingly thinking Fripp was right when he said "any act based on principle is a good one".

Physician, heal thyself

2011-07-28T11:06:00.000+12:00

I'm embarrassed to have to admit how much of everything I've done in this lifetime - up to and including writing this blog - has been in the service of a story I was telling myself in which I had to train to become a PERFECT GENIUS SUPERHERO - Noam Chomsky crossed with Frank Zappa crossed with Xena Warrior Princess - or my life would be a complete waste of time. That the world was doomed if I didn't hone my gifts and skills to be able to save it.

Wow, it sounds far less convincing outside my head. And then I come on here and rant about "don't get trapped by identities" and "don't let fantasy be the enemy of making something happen right here right now". I think the word we're looking for is "facepalm". Robert Fripp says that the course he was on at Sherborne House in 1975 was full of people who thought something very similar, and the purpose of the course was to beat that out of them.

Anonymous: CM prophecy confirmed accurate

2011-07-25T12:45:00.000+12:00

"Was Project Chanology for the Intarwebz what May 1968 was for French students?" I asked almost precisely two years ago. The answer appears to be "yes". We now live in an era where Anon is taking on governments, the FBI and major corporations, appears to be actively thriving on persecutions and arrests, and is reported as serious news in the mainstream press. This article from around the same time, suggesting that Anonymous had reached its limits because it could not possibly find a more ideal target than Scientology, is laughable in retrospect - obviously the author couldn't imagine them actually going after the Pentagon or the FBI. (But perhaps it was only the intervention of Bradley Manning and Julian Assange which made that possible.)

Also of note is that Anonymous is a "meme", like al-Qaeda or radical right-wing resistance, so nailing individual participants can't stop the signal. The media have never gotten this - they keep going on about "members of Anonymous" being arrested. Newsflash, guys, a "member of Anonymous" is anyone who does anything under the Anon or associated banners. The Clams' "tech" for dealing with enemies is to nail their leaders personally, but Anon has gone past the individual. This is of course what all radical movements should be doing; however, I think we're still addicted to the "leader / Central Committee" structure, which evolved in the case of a Tsarist police state when the telegraph was the cutting edge of information technology. Networked resistance is the next step. Don't let the 4chan crowd or the fascists out-innovate us.

In other death news...

2011-07-25T11:27:00.001+12:00

... so what do you think of the argument that "the price of genius is a tortured mind, and more often than not an early death"? I don't 100% buy it. It makes as much sense as arguing that being gay is unhealthy because it makes you want to kill yourself. No, homophobic culture makes you want to kill yourself, and I suggest we live in a creativity-phobic culture.

What is happening is we live in a culture where inspiration is either bullied out of you or commodified. They'll try to destroy you unless you become useful for their agenda, in which case they'll turn you into a brand and a cash cow, which will also destroy you, just with a higher budget. The article also lets off the hook the fact that the music industry has been known to actively encourage drug addiction among its artists because that's a very effect mechanism of control. It used to be quite common in the 80's for club owners in the USA to offer to pay musicians in cocaine.

Robert Fripp knows all about this because he's one of the few people who have been successful enough to be tempted by the Great Deceiver and lived to tell the tale. Of course, he also suggests that truly great artists are channeling a source of power which just burns their human personality away. Was Ms Winehouse a truly great artist? Even a pivotal figure for her generation like Courtney Love's husband? I don't know, never actually heard her work, perhaps you can fill me in in the comments.

Solidarity

2011-07-25T11:08:00.001+12:00

No to fascism.
No to race-hatred.
No to Islamophobia and other religion-hatred.
No to the belief that "words don't have consequences" and that therefore free speech comes with no responsibilities.
No to allowing memes of hatred to survive unchallenged in our media and in our conversation.

If there's one thing that you yes YOU can do without getting out from in front of your internet connection, it's to slap down anyone who tries to make Muslims, non-whites, queers or leftists "the Other" who have no rights. (But try to do that without just unleashing hatred against Christians, atheists, conservatives or people who haven't read as many books as you. The "arty queers vs. rednecks" thing is a false dichotomy to stop us embracing the true diversity of our culture and forging unity in that diversity. Ideas are the enemy, not those who hold them.)

ETA: Amanda Knudsen in Norway writes: "I understand that people just want to show solidarity with those killed in the fascist massacre on utøya and in oslo, but please, understand that using the norwegian flag is not an appropriate symbol for this. Our response to the nationalist nazi violence must be openness and internationalism, not to support the nation borders that divide us."

I was asked to tell you this:

2011-07-24T21:38:00.003+12:00

You can't achieve holiness, enlightenment, transcendence, self-actualisation or become a Good Person by following a set of rules. (So screw religious fundamentalism and its political equivalent, "programme fetishism".) Religions, codes of ethics and ready-made schemas are, at best, good for keeping you out of trouble, or baking a fine cake. But everything that's actually valuable about being a human being on this planet comes from pure, inner inspiration - "the disciple's infidelity is the master's faith". And to be able to bring that into the real world requires (a) TRUST that what comes out of "the real you" not only can be unleashed on the world but should be, because it comes from God / The Better Place / Universe A; (b) DISCIPLINE to stop your learned habits of behaviour, your ego, all the little things you to do to fit in and survive in the World-As-Is interfering what what can be done to make The World-As-Could-Be a real thing, here and now.

And, of course, "you" don't really exist. You are a crystallisation of Humanity, which is a crystalisation of Nature, which is a crystallisation of the Universe, which the theists among us would argue is an emanation of God. You can only realise that when you get to the point where the survival of your biological entity and its privileges among the particular primate troop you belong to are no longer the only motivating forces behind your behaviour. Screw Ayn Rand - altruism is what brings light into the world, the compulsion to give, the sheer joy of "I was a hidden treasure and desired to be known" - although selfishness is necessary in the World-As-Is to be able to promote that light against the conservatism of the primate mind. Acting from the communal interest of the society you live in in the first step, and - as Marx put it - only when we overcome the contradiction between the self's desires and the needs of the species and of the society the species has created for itself will we be truly free.

Let us be clear, though - as the "true self" grows and strengthens, so does the ego / nafs. It's not a zero-sum game. As previously mentioned, the nafs is a booster rocket, and you cannot get rid of it and survive in this world, nor should you try to. But, if your goal is to bring light into the world, you do need to (a) get in touch with your "higher nature", the part of you which does act from somewhere other than selfishness and inertia, heredity and environment; (b) resolve the contradiction between that and your nafs, so that the donkey ends up pulling the cart rather than just kicking you all the time. The really tricky thing is that the nafs is so excellent at fooling you that you are acting from a higher spiritual goal, when really you're just reiterating stupid primate dominance games or acting from scripts your parents or teachers implanted in you. (This is easily observable by the presence of hypocrisy - manipulative, cruel, grasping religious preachers, or political activists who'd rather keep control of a cult than lose control of a mass movement.) Learning to tell the difference really is a thousand miles of broken glass on your hands and knees.

And in the meantime it means that you do miss out on the Valuable Cash Prizes that the culture or your particular subculture offer you - you will not be popular if you're doing something right, let's put it that way. So very very many of us who set out to change the world or do magick end up just settling for a well-paid gig in the heart of the beast, the kind of gig in which we get a longer leash than the other wage slaves so we can pretend we're free, in return for closing our eyes to the misery and blindness we've bought into. Failing that, being a cult leader is at least some kind of identity. But the need to "have an identity", have a social role, is as much a trap as the need for money. Always best, I think, to have an active social life which has nothing to do with your political or religious or social mission, so you don't turn your mission into your social life, which means your nafs just ruining everything.

Chaos Marxism is anti-fascist

2011-07-24T09:22:00.002+12:00

... to the point where we have been traduced by name in the pamphlets of the extreme Right. However, since fascism / conservative revolutionism / radical traditionalism / radical Rightism is self-confessedly in love with the irrational, they often have a strong appeal to those who have become disgusted with the instrumental rationalism (coupled with gross superstition) of late capitalism. This blog is a damn fine attempt to track exactly how they attempt to normalise their foul politics in artistic subcultures which do take the subconscious, the subaltern, the Other seriously. What we are trying to do is to recuperate the unconscious and the irrational for a political project of liberation; to mutually strengthen the rational, not destroy it.

I am an authoritative source!

2011-07-21T14:38:00.000+12:00

Fresh from one of our regularly scheduled autogooglestalks: first came Cramulus' Primer, and now this blog is being discussed as source material for an e-course and referenced in academic essays in Austria. A bit surprising, a lot flattering, and perhaps a satisfactory return for going on five years of thinking outloud.

Slowly, slowly

2011-07-20T12:00:00.002+12:00

Insight on how the financial question is not only a political question, but a spiritual one (emphases added):

Fashioning coin banks out of bamboo, she asked her lay followers to drop a NT 50 cent coin into the bamboo bank everyday before going to the market. "Why not simply donate NT$15 each month?" one follower asked. The amount was the same in dollars, Dharma Master Cheng Yen replied, but very different in spirit. Dharma Master Cheng Yen wanted each person to think of helping others every day, not just one day each month.

I was also urged to get with the programme, learn how to use the internet, and sign up to alternatives to Paypal. In part, this was to facilitate regular small payments - which I have to admit would be extremely useful - and in part to allow Paypal boycotters to spare me a dime. One of the systems I was urged to try out was Flattr.

...with this alchemy change the copper of the heart into gold, slowly, slowly.

And there came a certain poor widow, and she cast in two mites, which make a farthing. And calling his disciples together, he saith to them: Amen I say to you, this poor widow hath cast in more than all they who have cast into the treasury.

A vital question for those on a mission

2011-07-18T17:07:00.002+12:00

Would you rather be a hero, and everyone think you're a villain; or be a villain, and everyone think you're a hero?

Ooh, this is good.

2011-07-01T12:53:00.001+12:00

Some of my best friends are Gnostics, and this, mutatis mutandis, works for any initiatory path, I think. I think I'm personally still working through stage 3. You do have to make compromises with the Prince of This World to be able to survive in this world long enough to change this world. Perhaps the most important thing - which I don't think I ever truly understood until a couple of days ago - is that the game cannot corrupt you if you remember that it's a game.

I, personally, a long time ago (perhaps age 6) started playing a game called PRIDE/SHAME. The object of the game is to see whether you can get everyone in the world to give you uncritically positive attention. This is a game that any human is designed to lose, but playing the game is a way to be able to participate in the world if you're convinced that what you really are is worthless and rejected by God and everything on the earth. And I played the game for so long I thought it was my personality. I still do if I don't keep up my work of "remembering". It's an addiction and it's like sleepwalking at the same time. It's so much easier.

A dancing, nascent insight

2011-06-30T21:55:00.001+12:00

As Stewart Home put it, the essential fallacy of liberalism and lifestylism is that it is impossible to live differently under capitalism. But it is possible to live ethically - i.e., with integrity. And part of that integrity must surely involve putting something into training ourselves and others to live differently. "Starting with the Man in the Mirror" is a cheesy way to put it, so maybe "live as if you were in the early days of a better nation"? Or even - this horrible world of advertising agencies and mechanised death is a university in which we train ourselves to live in the better world. The Kingdom of God, in Reality as it is in the Nice Place We Made Up Inside Our Heads. A world where Love In Action becomes easy, or at least easier.

"It's steam-engines when it's steam-engines time", as a wise man once said, and while you can't stop playing the capitalist game (there is no longer any outside to the money and capital system, which, as Rosa Luxemburg said in 1903, means it's coming near to TILT), if you play the game with integrity - which means accepting that you're not going to win the Fabulous Prizes, and that you wouldn't want to anyway - you will keep enough "soul" (energy + free time + financial spending money) to give you a chance at contributing to building a better world.

At the right time, that is. You can't be a revolutionary in a non-revolutionary time for the same reason you can't be a saint or a prophet by your own volition. The time is not right for most of the world, but - for example - in Greece I think it's getting close. If you and your mates keep doing your exercises and your eyes on the prize, one day the Black Iron Prison might show a chink and you might be able to declare a jailbreak or even an occupation.

Further to the below...

2011-06-25T16:54:00.001+12:00

... being good, bringing Light into the world, making the Solid World more like Universe A and less like Universe B, is unnatural. It's fighting against gravity, as Robert Fripp puts it. It's contradicting our animal nature, and it contradicts every rational, logical scheme for living and surviving in the World-As-Is. This planet would have gotten along perfectly fine without sentience, hence the Eden myth. Consciousness=the Knowledge of (and therefor responsibility for) Good and Evil, to be better or worse than animals, the ability to make Heaven or Hell real right here right now.

Which is why utilitarianism (in liberal democratic, social democratic or Stalinist flavours) doesn't work - it assumes that good=logical, when in reality all the words and abstract concepts on paper - if not backed up with an effort of Love In Action - just lead to the same primate games, with higher technology. As R. A. Wilson pointed out, most people use words in the same way that a chimp will use a handful of its own shit.

One of the things that appeals to me about the Islamic tradition is that there's no original sin - people are not naturally sinful, but they are naturally forgetful and weak. Bad things happen because it's easier to let them happen, and it's extremely easy to forget about God or Universe A or the Inexpressible Benevolence of the Creative Impulse or whatever.

The power of capitalism is of course that it feeds on our animal nature - greed and territoriality, in particular. But the tragedy of capitalism is that it has trapped us in one of those tiny universes I was talking about in the last post - we have, in other worlds, all entered into playing a game which we can't win and is running down the planet and poisoning us body and soul, but if everyone thinks that The Game is the entire universe, then ceasing to play it and acting like adults is unthinkable. And if thinkable, then too damn hard.

If we can look after our animal selves without giving into every single prompting - if, in other words, we can stay awake, act according with Will (=Love In Action) - in little things, then perhaps we can do so in big things as well. We are what we do, and our political activism will not be worth a damn if we act in our private life like we are entitled to everything we want, that Those Guys Over There have no rights because they're wrong, that our actions have no consequences, etc.

If there's a shortcut, I'd have found it, but there's no easy way around it

2011-06-23T10:35:00.003+12:00

Light of the world, shine on me.

One thing that's very interesting in the Abrahamic religious tradition is this idea of the tragedy of prophecy. The idea that when Universe Central taps you on the shoulder and says "oi! pass on this message!", you are not in for a good time. Prophets are always getting stoned to death, crucified, shot with arrows, betrayed by their nearest and dearest, cursed and slandered, etc, and Universe Central doesn't do anything to help. Even the religious experience itself is portrayed in disturbing terms. The Holy Spirit, in the Christian tradition, is said to descend "like a dove". Have you ever had a pigeon land on your head? It's nothing but feathers and shit. And in this case it's DIVINE feathers and shit.

That's why these modern "You Are The Chosen One" myths fail somewhat because they don't point out that being the hero in the World-As-Is - to be technically accurate, making a commitment to act from somewhere else than your own immediately perceived selfish interests - is not going to end up with you being King and getting the Girl (or whatever gender). Actually, the best modern account of the tragedy of prophecy is Terry Pratchett's Small Gods, which gets it just right despite the fact that Pterry was an atheist until he got sick. And as for our secular prophets of revolution - MLK and Malcolm X were shot, Karl Marx died in poverty and 11 people came to his funeral, Ché Guevara ended up dead in a jungle. Fighting the good fight is not a pleasant lifestyle choice.

===

The more I think about it, the more I think that perhaps my real "religion" (in Sufi terms, my shari`a as opposed to my tariqah) is still the Church of the SubGenius. Yeah. I am sure that Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley would be kind of shocked to know that people are reading this who really, truly are Discordians - but I think Ivan Stang kind of accepts that there are people who really, truly are SubGenii (as long as they keep buying swag). And - let's face it, people - J. R. "Bob" Dobbs is a pretty damn good folk-hero for the lumpen intelligensia and the petty-creatives. Congratulations, Stang, you and Philo created something that works.

A hundred years ago, the freed slaves and children of freed African-American slaves sat around on the porch and told hilarious lies about John the Conqueror, which is pretty much what SubGenii do today WRT "Bob". Big John wouldn't pick cotton, he wouldn't bale hay, he wouldn't take a licking and he wouldn't run away; whereas every time "Bob" screws up, he makes a million dollars. (The Polynesian people's stories of Maui fulfill a similar social function.) Every era and culture and subculture creates its own mythology, its own way of being, its own gods and demigods and folk heroes, its own working religion - practical code of ethics, plus rituals to make sense of the world we live in.

You see, that's the problem for those of us out on the edge - we want to change the world we live in, change the community we came from, but we're not individuals, we live our lives in the matrix of community. But the problem comes when we turn the organisations we build to try to change our world into new communities - that's the basis of sectarianism, a turning away from the Real World of Horrible Jobs into an exciting "pocket universe" where we get to be Big Cheeses and heroes of our own narratives of Great Revolutionary Heroes. (I'm always impressed by how thoroughly the Spartacists and offshoots manage this - obsessively taping all their internal meetings, memorising the history of every ridiculous faction fight in their tradition, and in all other ways behaving as if what happened inside their group was the important thing. But it's common in pretty much all radical groups.)

That's where "small group psychosis" comes from - voluntarily withdrawing into a tiny universe that we created ourselves, and forgetting that it's all just something we made up and that it doesn't really mean a damn thing in real terms. In contrast, a real revolutionary or saint lives in the real communities where they are at and then brings Love In Action to bear in that community. ("Love in Action" is here identical to what Crowley would have called "True Will".)

I think perhaps the Sufi distinction between shari`a and tariqah is useful here. Shari`a, in our own sense, is "how we live our real day-to-day lives in the Real World of Horrible Jobs, how we take care of our needs, have fun, deal with other beings and the real physical world - our Rules for Living". Tariqah would then be "the discipline we accept in order to bring about change in ourselves and in the Real World of Horrible Jobs". The two are orthogonal to one another - they function by incompatible rules. Which is why Hazrat-e-Pir, Dr Nurbakhsh, was fond of saying "the master's faith is the disciple's infidelity" - what you have to do to bring Light or Revolution or whatever into the World-As-Is is completely a separate matter to the rules we follow for surviving and thriving in the World-As-Is.

God or "Bob" or whoever doesn't need you to do rituals - you need you to do rituals, preferably within the matrix of community, otherwise you will never have a solid and healthy basis to work from when "Bob" or God or whoever lands on your head like a big smelly pigeon and asks you to do something impossible. I don't think it matters what rituals you do in your community, as long as your community's practice is for Love and Quality and against braindeath. And I think you also need to have "escapism" - little private worlds where you do get to play pretend and tell stories where you are a hero, like sci-fi fandom or following a football team or whatever. Just as long as you don't start mistaking them for real life, for your tariqah.

As for practical ethics, Frank Zappa never joined the Church of the SubGenius, but he did approve of them, and I think his moral code works well:

Do what you want, do what you will,
Just don't mess up your neighbour's thrill
And when you pay the bill, kindly leave a little tip
To help the next poor sucker on his one-way trip.

And a quote from Grant Morrison, whose work is proving suprisingly helpful to me at the moment: "The Solid World is the only place where an ugly caterpillar can become a beautiful butterfly." Things change into other things. That is the central secret of life in this world - the materialist dialectic, but also the essential spiritual insight of Heraclitus, Gautama Buddha, and virtually every mystic who was worth a shit. All that exists only exists in one time and in one place; only in the depths of consciousness is there anything pure and eternal (or foul and sinful). The question is whether we can overcome the contradiction between the shari`a of daily survival and the tariqah of becoming something more than heredity and environment programmed us for, so we can eventually end up at the haqiqah of... I dunno.

A new aphorism

2011-06-09T11:52:00.001+12:00

If we can forgive without accepting, a lot more becomes possible.

"To forgive", in this context, should be understand in the same word as "debt forgiveness" - which means, nothing will change that you ran up a debt, but I waive my right to collect on that debt. It is not right that you ran the debt up, but I have decided that it's in everyone's best interest not to pursue it.

Note that we can forgive, not that we must or should. We have a choice of actions, we can pursue debts or forgive them. Which ties into the broader mystical frame that "God is both just and merciful". "Just" might mean: "everyone gets what they deserve". Mercy means: "everyone gets more than they deserve". Since we are all sinners and black sinners (or to put in secular language, we are all weak and forgetful and make mistakes), then we had better hope that others practice mercy; and indeed, an eye for an eye leaves the whole planet blind.

"Forgiving without accepting" means "exercising mercy while recognizing that it contradicts justice". In the outcome of that contradiction lies an ethical framework for a free humanity. The whole concept of restorative justice relies on precisely this question of giving the victims of a crime their own free choice as to what blend of mercy and justice should be pursued.

"Pump Up The Volume" vs. "What Is To Be Done?"

2011-05-26T18:21:00.001+12:00

An edited transcription of a rant given by Doloras LaPicho live on transmissionFM, Auckland, New Zealand, 2011/05/24.

...yeah, so, my interview guest of last week was kind of impressed by the transmissionFM setup. "Real Pump Up The Volume" stuff, he said. Now he was not referring to the great acid house hit by MARRS, but to the 1990 movie starring Christian Slater as a high school kid with his own rabble-rousing pirate radio broadcast. I actually just watched that movie the other week, and in honour of it I am, myself, sitting her wearing nothing but a cock ring. And believe me, that's an interesting experience when you're a woman.

But that movie is really, really prescient in a way that only the great artists can be. Leonardo da Vinci designed a helicopter centuries before the technology existed to build one. Frank Zappa, in the 1980s, thought of selling music down the phone lines, long before the MP3 or broadband internet were invented. Similarly, in "Pump Up The Volume", what you see is: Dude gets on the air, rants, does interactive content, leaks embarrassing information that The Man don't want you to know about, foments a social uprising, gets thrown in the jail but not before everyone and their cousin are doing exactly what he did. So what you have there is a pop culture depiction of blogs, podcasts, Twitter, Facebook, flash mobs, Anonymous, crowdsourcing, Wikileaks, and the recent revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, ages before social media made it possible.

Because it is all possible now! And legal! You don't need a shortwave transmitter and you don't need to dodge the cops - at least until the point when you actually HAVE fomented an entire revolution and the state has to shut down the whole Intarwebz to get you. And that's when they get in trouble, because then the really big guns are after them. I've been watching Anonymous as a social movement grow and develop, since the very early days of just taking down people's websites for shits and giggles, to attempting slightly bigger game in the Church of Scientology, to now actually attempting to wreck entire national governments who dare get in the way of the Freedom of the Intarwebz. Because that's Anon's entire political programme. It's not the same as mine, it's libertarian bordering on anarchistic in that it thinks that information is the key to the struggle, when, as I will go on about at length in our second "rant" section, as far as I'm concerned, it's PRODUCTION. But THEY ARE DOING STUFF. People like Julian Assange, no matter whether he might have also done something pretty horrible to a woman, have been doing that kind of stuff as well. Why aren't you doing stuff?

All the technology is there! Technology that pirate radio broadcasters 20 years ago would have shit their pants to get their hands on! When transmissionFM goes on the internet, THEN you will see whether what we are doing here has real memetic potential. But there's always a downside, isn't it? There is SO MUCH information out there these days that it becomes very, very difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff, which is why even the most anarchic online community needs moderation and Wikipedia needs a battalion of unemployed PhDs to keep the bullshit off the system. Getting the information out is no longer the problem - gatekeeping and editing is the problem. Will YOU be a gatekeeper and editor? Will you start your own "channel" which broadcasts NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH as far as you can see it? Because it's not enough to just do something, you have to do something that actively, as T. S. Eliot put it, "purifies the dialect of the tribe".

So the question remains just the same as it was in 1903 in Russia, ladies and gentlemen, comrades and friends. What Is To Be Done?

Back in the old days of political punk, there were two answers to that question, which you could call the anarchist answer and the communist answer. What does a political band, or a radical cultural initiative of any stribe, do when the forces of Big Money come a knockin' and making an offer? Because they will if you're doing it right and getting a response from The People, because YOUR PEOPLE will be ipso facto a "market" which Big Money hasn't managed to sell to yet.

The anarchists would say - tell them to get lost, do everything DIY, for the people, non-commerical, under the radar, subversive. One keeps one's independence that way. One also runs the risk of being trapped into an intellectually inbred little group, becoming the house music of a lifestyle choice rather than becoming a VIRUS which could infect the wider civilisation. Imagine if Neo and Morpheus and that just stayed in Zion all day and went to raves and let the machines alone. I don't think the machines would have had a problem. The other issue is that - sadly, in this $2.99 material world run by capitalism - if it doesn't make a living (in money or goods and services) it's dependent on the good will and energy of whatever you are doing to make a living. People burn out. People decide to sell out individually if they can't sell out together. If you're not commercial, you had better hope that your people are extremely generous, or extremely devoted. You wonder why all those hippies punks and anarchists are now making good money as "creatives", or are Green Party MPs or something even more pathetic. Because they COULD. Because they got a good offer.

Now the communist answer is, take the money! Dumbfuck capitalists want to give us big money and sell our records and our gigs full of communist agitprop, then more stupidity to them! The capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with, as Michael Moore put it. Now that's a higher risk venture. You find yourself in the logic of The Machine that way. It's trying to change the system from within, which, as Unca Lenny could tell you, sentences you to 20 years of boredom if you're lucky. If you're unlucky, you begin to forget you were going in to drain the swamp and you end up making friends with the alligators. These people will be NICE to you if you play nice. Striking a pose and yelling slogans, yeah, they get that, it's a good "branding" exercise. The thing is that you can yell SMASH THE STATE and it doesn't change anything unless the people you're yelling it at actually decide that's a good idea.

The most vital thing to remember is that no-one but no-one ever changed anything, a damn thing, one iota, by making a consumer choice, by buying product X or not buying product Y or buying product Z instead. CONSUMPTION IS NOT A MORAL CHOICE. It is handing over dollars in return for goods and services and it is what the system is all about. You will remember a while ago that the British record buying public were sick and tired of some manufactured bullshit star from their Idol programme, I think it's called X-Factor, being Christmas #1. So they started a meme to get Rage Against The Machine's "Killing In The Name Of" to the top of the charts. Yeah, "fuck you, I won't do what you told me". The band full of actual communists. But guess what? RATM's record company was the same as the record company which made the X-Factor single. So Sony Music made BIG BIG MEGABUCKS EITHER WAY. And some people got to feel cool. But was the market model shaking in its boots? Was it bollocks.

And if IS THIS THE FUTURE? has a point or a purpose, it's to remind you of this. CONSUMPTION IS NOT REAL. It is neither good nor evil. It means absolutely nothing what you buy, or what you believe, or what you say, IT MATTERS WHAT YOU DO. When I'm performing with Vostok Lake or promoting the Electric Salon, it would be nice if people paid money because that means those ventures become sustainable in the material world of capitalism. But it will really only mean something every if people decide THEMSELVES to start an insane electropop band or host a weird performance night or an anarchic radio show. PRODUCTION IS REAL. Only what you do, and what you make, and what you bring into the world matters. Do it the communist way, or the anarchist way, or some other way - they're both choices with pluses and minuses, risks and potential rewards. Maybe you'll succeed, or maybe you will serve humanity for being the grisly warning of what could go wrong. Like Bono. But remember that only when we can do and make free of the Law of Value and the cash economy, only then will we be ready for the next great adventure in what it means to be human.

Against anarcho-narcissism

2011-04-28T10:11:00.007+12:00

One of the things that strikes me from reading The Invisibles - particularly the later, less interesting issues - is how incredibly naive and short-sighted the argument that the essential conflict is between "order and chaos" is. See, the thing about capitalism and imperialism - the current face of The Black Iron Prison - is that it's always combined the two. As Marx put it, the hierarchical order of the firm is balanced by the anarchy of the free market. And in modern consumer capitalism, the dominance/submission model of the workplace is replaced by the GO HOG WILD mentality encouraged by the advertising industry for after work hours. This is why capitalism is so dynamic (or, to put it in another way, unstable) - that very tension between order and chaos.

Which is, I think, why those of us lucky to have the cultural and social capital and productive skills necessary to join the professional or creative middle classes end up selling out the movement for a better world. Because once they get to be their own bosses - or get a boss who encourages them to be creative - they think they've cracked it. Oh! The current system is wrecking the planet and causing poverty and misery and violence and death and torture on a global scale, but since I get to slack off and still get fed well and buy consumer products which tell me I'm a cool person and bitch and moan and make offensive jokes on the intarwebz, it can't be the same as that evil Black Iron Prison thing I read about in all my favourite books, can it?

Yes it freakin' can. The true rulers and archons of this world want a world where some people are free to go to raves and have kinky sex and to write sarcastic blogs, just as long as they think they've earned that privilege by being superior to the slave classes. The current system not only gives "creatives" a special privileged place, it tells them that the class system is just and meritocratic. So that's why anarcho-capitalism always appeals to SubGeniuses and the other lumpen-intelligensia, because it's a consistent system of individualism and chaos, where the Evil Bad Corporate Monsters are vanquished but you get to keep your precious ego and your illusion that you somehow have a separate existence out of the matrix of your neighbourhood, your bioregion, the human species and the wider ecosystem.

But the sad twist is that anarcho-capitalism is the only social system which is actually impossible. The "free market" can't exist without some sovereign to enforce the sanctity of property rights and contracts. Wilson and Shea's contention that there would be such a thing as "property-2", i.e. property rights that everyone would just agree to respect in an anarcho-capitalist system, is bringing in The Cop Inside Your Head through the back door, to reconcile the irreconcilable contradiction of "individualism without hierarchy and punishment". The sovereign individual of liberal/libertarian theory is just as gross and unreal a chimera as the "New Socialist Man" of North Korean totalitarianism, because it dissolves actually existing social bonds and mutual obligations in favour of an administered totality, either that of the almighty dollar or the almighty bureaucracy (or combination thereof).

Any social system worth a damn has to start from human civilisation as it actually exists - a dynamic tension between individualism and community/cultural matrices. A society of yeoman farmers can't exist in the modern era any more than a society of altruistic, collectivised tree-huggers. We revolutionaries are ourselves similarly for both order and chaos at the same time - just in different places than the current system would have it. Of course "Worker's State" is a contradiction in terms, but then so is "Capitalist State". The next era won't abolish all our problems, it will just - hopefully - give us new ones to solve while safeguarding the individual from oppression and commodification, the species from extinction and the biosphere from devastation.

Out of traction, back in action

2011-04-25T21:48:00.001+12:00

I returned to active political service over the weekend. Soon you will get to see the kind of wild-assed, cultural-political ranting you've come to love on this blog on a real live website of a political tendency. Here's a meme for you to chew on: terminal 5.

As to the Greater Jihad, I'm currently up to vol 3 of The Invisibles, and damned if it's not totally synchronistically relevant to my life. I feel like I'm going toe-to-toe with The King Of All Tears at the moment. I'm in a major life transition which, if it succeeds, will pretty much mean my death and rebirth as the human being that I was supposed to be before the personality implants kicked in in my childhood. (And if it fails, I'll end up living in a gutter and standing on a street corner with a sign saying WILL DROP PANTS FOR FOOD.)

In any case, I will not be who I am for much longer. Will keep you posted.

Disregard the below, I give fellatio

2011-04-05T07:58:00.000+12:00

Q. Why do things hurt?
A. Because if they didn't you'd walk around like a benumbed zombie all the time. Because you don't really allow yourself pleasure or even real feelings unless they're forced on you, we gotta force them on you until you decide to wake the fuck up on a semi-permanent basis.

However did it come to this?

2011-04-01T08:31:00.000+13:00

"A failed initiation doesn't mean the end of all things, but it means that any future attempts will be even less likely to succeed." - Lawrence Miles

"No god accepted me; no power spoke through me; no-one came to get me out. The suffering was meaningless." - from my personal diary

KING FELIX was here.

2011-03-31T16:42:00.000+13:00

"So you can encounter God while you're alive," he said.

"Under exceptional circumstances. Originally God and Moses talked together as a man talks with his friend."

"What went wrong?"

"Wrong in what way?"

"Nobody hears God's voice anymore."

Rybys said, "You do."

"My audio and video systems do."

"That's better than nothing." She eyed him, "You don't seem to enjoy it."

"It's interfering with my life."

She said, "So am I."

To that he could think of no response; it was true.

I think PKD was totally onto something when he had his dystopia in The Divine Invasion ruled by a fusion between the Stalinists and the Catholic Church. Mechanical materialism has always depended on brain-dead idealism as its flipside and counterpart, like two drunks propping each other up. The equivalent in the World-As-Is is free-market consumerism's alliance with the most backwards-assed superstition.

No-one likes me, and I do care.

2011-03-23T00:18:00.001+13:00

A while back, a kindly contributor to our comments blog - Noisysphinx, I believe it was - suggested that instead of writing mopey articles on here, why I didn't just go out and spraypaint some slogans on some walls with some friends. I was too ashamed, at the time, to respond "Because I don't have any friends".

I was reminded of this by this article on a friendly allied blog, which led to me giving a flick through of the first volume of The Invisibles. I was of course struck by the great similarities of the general conceit of the work - and of course to a whole series of literature running from Illuminatus! to Join My Cult and beyond - to my own recurring fantasy...

I have a recurring dream where I have finally been accepted into the S00per-Sekrit Society of Cool People Who Are The Only Hope For The World. Their headquarters is up a set of clammy and portentous stone steps, and they have the damndest best parties up there. Everyone is extremely pretty and wants to have sex with me once we get back from our vital, world-changing missions.

Yeah, the issue there is that there are plenty of people who at least act like they're The Invisibles, or Hagbard Celine's crew, or the living continuity of the OTO or the Fourth International or whoever. And they would never have anything to do with me because I'm not socially skilled.

I am serious. You've seen Futurama, right? I have always been slightly more popular than Dr Zoidberg. Slightly. I had literally no friends in high school. Even the weird kids avoided or bullied me. The kid with Asperger's Syndrome looked down on me, for heaven's sake. At university I made a few "friends", by which I meant people who liked to have me around as the butt of their jokes. The kind of people who read The Invisibles back in the 1990s, to be dreadfully precise, would have never wanted anything to do with me because I was the kind of person people emigrated to avoid.

To some degree I also get that feeling reading principiadiscordia.net. That I can't actually take part in changing the world because I wouldn't be welcome at the parties of those other people who would have that agenda. All these articles about "affinity groups" etc. assume a basic level of "being able to fit in" which some of us just don't have.

Just as liberation theology tried to bring to Catholic Christianity "an option for the poor", I suppose Chaos Marxism wants to bring to revolutionary cultural politics "an option for the uncool".

Commodification ain't all bad

2011-03-21T21:24:00.005+13:00

There's one good thing about, as Uncle Charlie said, money under capitalism making everything equal to everything else; and, as Walter Benjamin put it, mass reproduction removing the "aura" from previously meaningful individual objects, like works of art. Mass production means that nothing gets lost forever. Everything can be replaced - and, in the era of the Internet, if it can be digitised, these days nothing need be lost at all.

That's a good thing, in some ways. I'm a music nerd, myself, and I remember 15 years ago having to desperately hunt through the used bins of record stores, trying to fine rare and beautiful music from past decades which hadn't made it to CD yet, and hoping the vinyl wouldn't be too scratched up. Sometimes I'd hunt years for a particular album. Now, I can generally find anything I want with a thirty-second Google; and, perversely, the greater the rarity and obscurity of something, the more likely that someone will have slapped it up on some dodgy blog somewhere. (Less obscure stuff will have been commercially re-released and I'll have to pay for it.)

But it's a bad thing in that, as Walter B. put it, it has put an end to the category of the sacred. The individual as created by late capitalist society no longer has a "homeland", in the way we would have understood it when your average human never ventured more than thirty miles from their place of birth. They no longer have sacred traditions handed down from generation to generation - they have professional gurus who earn an honest capitalist living from their work, who will teach you any practice from any culture you can name, and a few they made up on the spot. And they certainly no longer have sacred objects.

Even thirty years ago, in my childhood, even mass consumer objects were sacred, because mass consumption hadn't gotten to the point where everything was replaceable, or at least, easily replaceable. People would still take their toasters to be fixed or sew buttons on their jeans, when these days it's much more convenient and easy to buy new ones. In a previous era, before deliberate obsolescence, even consumer items could have some whiff of "the sacred", if they were looked after and cared for and had the precious labour of their owners poured into them. A basic principle of Chaos Marxism might be expressed: labour is not only the source of value, it is the source of meaning. If I rip a $50 jacket I got at K Mart, no biggie, any $50 bill will get me one that's identical. If I rip a really cool jacket I got for 10 euros at a second-hand store in some obscure country, I might never be able to replace it. If something bad happens to my computer system with all my finely coded information on it, that's a disaster coupled with a nightmare.

So that's what's behind "vintage culture", steampunk, Goth, SCA, whatever - the attempt to create a culture of objects which are totally individual and therefore meaningful, even sacred. To some extent, my musical project - which is dependent on low-budget equipment linked together in idiosyncratic, customised ways - epitomises this connection. What is commodified or "weightless" can never be lost (as long as the means of information reproduction are intact - someone's brain, a piece of paper, a computer, whatever). But physical things which are individually customised and individualised cannot be gotten off a shelf for mere money. It may be lost forever, and is therefore precious, even sacred. So is my music essentially reactionary, attempting to return to an era of "artisanship" rather than glorifying in what is truly weightless, truly disposable? Or is it just an attempt to turn the essence of "me" into something that can't be imitated, that isn't a commodity?

In the current era, nothing is permanent except information artefacts and the Culture. In some weird way, the current era (of relative abundance of mass-produced STUFF) is less materialistic than it ever has been. As communists have said for hundreds of year, morality will come naturally to human beings when the struggle to accumulate "stuff" comes to its end. Of course, this current "false liberation" (for the well-off in "the West", including places like Bangalore and the Green Zone in Baghdad) will all come crashing to a halt when the current economic system reaches its end point, 20-40 years from now. (The information artefacts are only permanent as long as there are freely available storage devices on which they can be copied, and power to run those storage devices on.)

So, we'll have to find a way to make abundance not only generalised, but long-term sustainable. The answer will surely have something to do with "expanding the public" - i.e. minimising how much "stuff" any human needs to own to be a fully participating member of the Culture. Other socialists have pointed out that community daycare and socialised housework would lead to the liberation of women - surely, for example, high-quality public transport and free car share on demand would liberate us from the twin demons of Oil and Suburbia.

But it might explain the big boom in "magick" of the late 90's and why that seems to have petered out now. "Magick" is to the current era of hacktivism, culture-from-below, the Pirate Bay, Anonymous etc. what alchemy is to chemistry - the former being people who know in theory something should be possible (which the rise of mass media and the dawn of infotech made obvious from the late 60's onwards), but going at it with ridiculous "cargo-cult" style tools that don't work. Now, we have something that works.

What others say

2011-03-18T10:39:00.003+13:00

Herewith an interesting thread on the project to make a compendium of CM postings. The posters here have several comments and criticisms to give on CM. I was advised not to jump into the debate (advice that I ignored, but only the once), but if you want some arguments about whether what we're doing here is of any value, of varying quality, there's the place to get them.

This blog has been quiet lately because I've been (a) gearing up for a political writing project; (b) cleaning my room. There's a hell of a lot of penguins in there, for some reason.

ETA: These are also great. Thanks, Cram, I've put one of them next to my computer terminal at work. See if you can guess which one.

Chaos Marxism Manifesto #2 - Electric Boogaloo

2011-02-11T09:52:00.000+13:00

There is only one physical reality, and only one real scientific understanding of why the world of human beings is the way it is.
Almost all human beings live according to "consensus realities" - the totems of their particular tribe. (This is because we are social animals and have never been able to exist as isolated individuals.) They act as if these totems are real, and therefore they are real for them, even though in any objective sense they are fictional.
Therefore, almost all of what humans collectively believe to be real - and act accordingly - is an illusion created by repetition. You are what you do; therefore, if you act in accordance with the tribal totems you help make them real, even though you might "intellectually" realise they're not.
The ego - that is, the individual consciousness - is born to help the individual survive in consensus reality. Therefore it is irretrievably and mechanically tied to its particular tribal totems and cannot step outside them.
Psychic disturbance comes from the ego squishing down the other parts of the psyche in response to its own survival objectives, including service to the tribal totems.
Creativity does not come from the ego, but from some other part of the psyche outside consensus reality. We might as well say that creativity - and, in fact, everything that makes us "human" in the best sense, rather than robots or apes - comes from another, better world existing concurrently with that of consensus reality.
Mental illness we can say comes from another, worse world existing concurrently with that of consensus reality.
It is for this reason that even the more rigorously scientific, materialist analysis of human culture will be incomplete, because it cannot understand art, creativity, religion, madness etc. by its very nature.
Those who really want to bring goodness into this world have to fuse science and spirituality, as Aleister Crowley said. "Science" in the sense of we have to understand on a physical, rational basis how humanity really works; "spirituality" because we have to accept that humans are not and can never be 100% rational, and indeed so much of what is truly glorious about our species-being works by non-rational rules.
"New Atheism" is particularly pernicious because it seeks to demolish belief in "God" (i.e. a supra-human consciousness), but by default leaves all the totems of the currently dominant tribe (Consume Mass Quantities, Have A Good Time All Of The Time, We Are The Superior Culture And Deserve To Own The Planet And Tell Everyone Else What To Do) alone, because they're not "God" in the way that they understand it.
Chaos Marxism says: God is the part of your own consciousness that comes from the better, creative universe. It existed prior to your ego and therefore it really did create your world. So have some respect.
Our practice is to build, with actual concrete deeds, a new way of being, a new way of living together in this world, which will be sustainable, just. This will include: concrete ways of producing all those things we need to survive and thrive in a better way; practical loving-kindness towards all living beings; healthy ways to tap into the Better Reality and come back to Normal Reality safely (art, spirituality, etc); and political/cultural/memetic activism against the current world order in the service of the Great God Mammon who quite literally wants to eat the planet.
The totems of the old tribe - of Western capitalist civilisation - are causing us to quite literally eat the planet and shit in our own nest. They can only be defeated by a combination of (a) rational debunking; (b) creating new totems for the new way of being. Humans cannot live without irrationality and totemic thought, at least right now.

The death of individuality

2011-02-09T10:01:00.000+13:00

By happily accepting a description of themselves as "THE HIVE" (or "hivemind"), the massed ranks of Anonymous show that capitalist normality's privileging of individuality as the highest good is a trap. Remember all those TV shows and stories in which the hero realises that being part of some movement that might change the world - or some old-fashioned "community" - is impinging on his precious individuality, and therefore he gives up and retires to private life, and that's a good thing? Remember how Billy Elliot's dreams of being a dancer (and thus getting all the privileges of the middle classes) lead to his father scabbing on a strike and wrecking the whole way of life of his community, and that's a good thing?

All this of course goes back to 1950's anti-communist sci-fi terror of the evil assimilating aliens who threaten the boundaries of our precious individuality, most recently reinvented as the Borg on Star Trek? Before Seven of Nine was "reverse-assimilated" back into being a (white middle class American) human individual, she yelled at Janeway "WE DO NOT WANT TO BE LIKE YOU". I agreed. I always wondered why my sympathies were always with the bad guys in those cartoons. They hate us because we don't need to be individuals.

Even the BBC knows about the serious business

2011-02-06T11:54:00.001+13:00

Twenty Reasons Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere. Note in particular points 11-14, talking about the class basis of the new worldwide movements.

A few points:

- Point 1 is mistaken. The "graduate with no future" has been an endemic feature of the Middle Eastern client states of the West for decades now. They were the same crowd who overthrew the Shah in '79.

- Point 3 is also mistaken. Truth and lies now move at the same speed. The speed of a narrative meme is not determined by its truth content, but by how much it makes sense given the pre-existent consciousness of those spreading it. "Teabagger" memes in the USA spread plenty fast. But I suppose the point is that sheer memetics have rendered traditional propaganda obsolete, although people like the Chinese Communist Party and the Republican-aligned think-tanks in the US are keeping up with the play.

- Point 4; I'm afraid "radical Islam" works as a meme just like we mentioned above and spreads the same way. In fact - and this vital - Al-Qaeda itself is a meme, rather than an organisation, which spreads via online videos, flash animation games, etc etc. What is becoming obsolete are vertical bureaucracies - as people have said elsewhere, the platonic form of capitalist domination is not the Pentagon or a Central Bank, but it's Wal-Mart, with its networked forms of surveillance and domination.

- Point 18: "young people believe the issues are no longer class and economics but simply power". Hah. We'll see how long that lasts once the econocataclysm starts to bite. And in some cases - the open-source movement - that is simply not true, as the true interconnectedness of power with economics and class ("class" in the sense of "who does the work and who rakes in the money?") becomes obvious.

- Complication (e) - this is vital stuff. The highest ranks of the media priesthood and the ruling class no longer speak the same language as ordinary street humans. This is a contradiction that needs to be heightened.

A CM economic aphorism

2011-01-07T09:02:00.000+13:00

The correct market value of something which doesn't actually exist is zero.

Note also this very convincing materialist explanation of why "decentralisation" and "networking" have become unchallengable dogma, even among the oppressed. Truly the 90's were the high point of pure solipsism among the Western intellectual classes (only in such an era could The Matrix have been such a huge hit). But philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it, and one could equally argue that it's been the failure of dialectical materialists to take culture and psychology seriously which has led to their current marginalisation, at times when the world is calling out for revolutionary ideas and leadership.

Fnord 23, Pen 15

2011-01-04T10:49:00.001+13:00

The latest XKCD clearly understands the appeal of cults and the paranoid lifestyle, as exhaustively discussed here.

A cheery thought for the new year

2011-01-02T13:08:00.000+13:00

There are other "states of awareness" than the one you are currently in. To swipe from the terminology of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, there are heaven dimensions and hell dimensions - not separate "realities", but ways of experiencing That Which Is Really Here Right Now. You can call them "higher" and "lower" energy worlds if you like, and that's quite close to the concept of valence electrons, in the sense that you can "jump" from one to another, given an expenditure of energy.

The fundamental difference can be summed up thus: in "heaven", the impossible becomes possible, and "hell" the possible becomes impossible. Thus, "heaven" is of course a higher energy state than what you're used to, and "hell" is a lower energy state. Given this, it should not surprise you that - although you can suddenly end up in heaven or hell for no good reason - it takes effort to remain in heaven, and it takes effort to get out of hell.

The power of love is a curious thing

2010-12-28T22:06:00.001+13:00

I have experience of fantasy & its power, on the inside & outside. A very small part of it is real, which gives the rest of the illusion/delusion its strength. The Orthodox might call this a strategy of The Great Deceiver, The Tempter, the Prince of Lies, and see fantasy being used as a device to hold us to this earth, and prevent us realising our destiny.

- Robert Fripp (source), emphasis added

Further to the discussion below: the religious might say that there ain't nothing that's completely foul and worthless through and through, because it wouldn't exist. All evil has a kernel of good, that's what gives it its power. And all cults have some real truth and goodness amidst all the bullshit and lies, else no-one would get involved in the first place. Fatso Hubbard was absolutely right that most people hold themselves down with subconscious commands, and Neo is absolutely right that most people live in a prison of their own imagination. But - physician, heal thyself. "Thou art that." The critic gives themselves away in their criticism - which might give you some insight into this Doloras, if you'll note that what she hates more than anything else is hypocrisy, people who say one thing and do another.

To whoever wrote this... thanks.

2010-12-28T13:17:00.000+13:00

Robert Fripp suggests that music comes into the world despite, not because of, the personality of the musician. Reading back on the posts of this blog over the last two years, I am struck by how full of "dancing, nascent insight" (as one commenter put it) many of them are, how many of them accurately depict universal truths which go beyond psychology, mysticism and dialectical-material cultural analysis, and are actually funny and fun to read. And I'm shocked and appalled, because whoever wrote those posts certainly wasn't this Doloras. You see, this Doloras tends to be grouchy, negative and pessimistic. But the voice speaking through these posts is - while justifiably pissed off about a number of these things - also brave, wise, loving and generous. So it's certainly not my ordinary everyday personality.

Which is why I have to re-read this blog, because there's so much good advice here that I don't actually follow in my daily life. This Doloras is the person who gave up active political activity because she is incredibly thin-skinned and terrified of other people's reactions - when faced with an uncomfortable situation, she tends to either run away or get mean and aggressive. If she was half as brave as whoever it was who wrote the good bits of Chaos Marxism, why, she would have done much more good in the world than she already has. (Not that she hasn't done some good. But she hasn't nearly done as much as the writer of the good bits on this blog would be expected to have done.)

Well, at least this Doloras had enough brains to set up Chaos Marxism so something wiser, kinder and braver than her could speak through her. I hope it's helped someone out there. The adventure is ongoing, but I really would like more company, more feedback, more people who would confirm that the message of CM is as "real" as it seems to me. I have no wish to be a cult leader nor to wallow in a fantasy world of my own design. I aspire to live somewhere real, with kind and clean friends who share some basic assumptions but differ enough so we can have productive debates and discussions. But if no-one agrees... well, what the voice of this blog says is useful to this Doloras, at least. I could at least get used to the company of my own inner voice.

And who are you? Are you all slaves?

2010-12-27T21:20:00.002+13:00

Soundtrack for this post: "Slave Trade", Sigue Sigue Sputnik

We mentioned before that being negative and mean is a way of getting some kind of "juice" into your life if you can't get the good stuff. Similarly, narcissism works well. Let's face it, what better way to pack your life full of lulz and drama than to go around acting like you are the Chosen One and all others exist to serve your whims, or are enemies that need wiping out? Sure you'll be ridiculed and hated, and virtually nothing will actually concretely go right in your life, but at least you'll have a nice narrative frame to package that in. Your life, while unpleasant and pointless, will make sense.

Even better, some gormless losers will believe you. And why will they do that? Why do people end up in cults? The easiest answer is - that narcisstic delusions are more fun than stupid reality. I don't have a reference, but at least one person who followed L. Ron Hubbard around on his nautical adventures in the 60s - looking for gold he buried in the Mediterranean in a previous life, I shit you not - said precisely that. That it didn't matter whether it was actually factually true or not, but living in Ron's private reality was far lulzier than anything else they could think to do with their lives. Dude could always spin a yarn.

Problem is that cults are necessarily self-destructive, because narcissism is an addictive drug, and the sufferer requires more and more narcissistic supply. O'Brien in Nineteen Eighty-Four pointed out that the Party had to torture people, because how else could you be sure that you were really imposing your will on them? For this reason, cult leaders have to increasingly ramp up the levels of control and abjection of their followers. If they're doing your will, then you have to make your will more mean and intensive to test how much they really love you. Eventually you get to purple Flavor-Aid with cyanide in it (Jim Jones) - or declaring the entire executive staff of your organisation to be traitors and locking them up (Joe Stalin and David Miscavige).

===

This post is by way of being a bit of a purge and a confessional. I have a "cult leader's personality" - that is, I have suffered from a narcissist streak a mile wide. So I can tell you in plain fact that the belief that YOU ARE THE ONE, THE SON OF MAN, THE KING OF KINGS, THE SHEIKH OF ARABY etc., that you have a destiny and everyone else has to either serve you or get the hell out of your way is a good way to substitute for not actually having a life. I'm trying to get over that, though. To some degree, that disavowed belief sullied the early contributions to this blog. I really thought I was breaking through into a better reality and everything would be better if everyone would just listen to me. *sigh* For that reason, it's good for me to study people who got completely lost in that kind of no-ego ego-trip to remind myself of where that road leads.

But google "codex veritas neo" for an example of the syndrome in full flight (yes, I've mentioned this fellow before, but last time he came and whined at me so I'm not directly linking). For a similar cult based on fiction, check these guys (although I must admit that, unlike these guys, Neo has some very good insights in among the self-aggrandisation and paranoia... but then, the same could be said of Scientology). There's also a lady who goes by the name of Doctress Neutopia who you might be interested in.

Part of having a narcissistic tendency is being fascinated - and just about ready to fall for - other people who do as well. Because don't their private universes look exciting and fun? But examine the cult leaders well. Because none of them are happy. None of them are actually achieving their stated goals. Indeed, the unhappier they are the more delicious, creamy attention they get from their followers. We call this "the downward spiral".

You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.

2010-12-06T10:10:00.002+13:00

(reposted from elsewhere)

I was recently privileged to read Iain Banks' Walking on Glass. One of the major characters is a paranoid schizophrenic fellow, who believes himself to be a superior being who fell captive in some metagalactic conflict and has been exiled on Earth as a punishment. You find out later that he might actually be right, but that's not the point here - the point is that his beliefs, while they give some structure to his reality, actually totally get in the way of being able to function properly on planet Earth. Basically, since he interprets everyone he comes across as either perpetrators of a giant conspiracy to keep him trapped on Earth, or witless dupes of that conspiracy, he can't have any friends or any honest communication, and his life is in a downward spiral (which of course proves that he's a superior being victimised by a conspiracy).

Which brings me to a criticism of that otherwise impeccable Gnostic-revolutionary film, The Matrix. The one thing that always "got" me about that movie was that the people who'd been awakened from the Matrix were licensed to kill as many normal humans as they saw fit (because they might turn into Hugo Weaving at any moment, and really death would be better than their illusory reality while living as batteries). It is said that the nafs (the self-perpetuating ego which has evolved as a defence mechanism to keep you alive and safe in this world but will try to ensure you don't change or grow) will tell you any lie in order to keep you trapped, and "YOU HAVE BEEN ENLIGHTENED, THEREFORE YOU HAVE MORE RIGHTS THAN THE BLINKERED SHEEPLE, INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO UNLEASH VIOLENCE ON THOSE WHO GET IN YOUR WAY" is a pretty effective trap.

In contrast, the legitimately enlightened are known for their kindness, forbearance and wicked sense of humour, although occasionally their kindness manifests in being extremely rude to people to wake them up - giving them what they need rather than what they want, in other words.

Chaos Marxism is non-dualist

2010-11-29T12:51:00.010+13:00

A brief look at our ontology:

1. CM is materialist. Matter led to biological life which led to awareness which led to consciousness which led to spirituality.

2. Spirit / God is a potential in humanity's relationship with itself, the rest of nature and the physical universe, rather than some pre-existing being. That, however, does not make it any less real. Anything which produces real effects in the material world is real, which means that if some conceptual entity in people's heads makes them do something, that entity is real and a force to be reckoned with. This is the sense in which "magick" works.

3. "The World-As-Is" does not refer to the physical world of quantum physics, rocks and bunny rabbits. It refers to what Gnostics call the kosmos - i.e. the system of language and social reality in which humans live and by which they make sense of the physical world. At the moment, the kosmos for a vast majority of the planet is a capitalist or state-capitalist one of wage labour and commodity production.

4. The individual ego is an integral part of the kosmos - the means by which you, as a biological Homo sapiens sapiens, interact with the kosmos. It has several different levels, which vaguely fit into the Freudian scheme of Superego/Ego/Id, or TA's Parent/Adult/Child. A crucial insight - and one of our main intellectual weapons against capitalist individualist/rationalist ideology - is that people very, very rarely act from the rational part of their being, and are generally driven by social pressure or unexamined psychological undercurrents (Parent or Child rather than Adult). In contrast, we use "Spirit" to mean those levels of the human personality which are not part of the kosmos, but come from an essential reality beneath that of language. (Nothing you can put into words is "essential reality".)

5. As materialists, we derive the "Should Be" from the "Is". The World-As-Should-Be is the kosmos as it could be if we made a conscious collective choice to act as if we were free, to maximise the ability of all to exercise their vital powers (which would mean, at the very least, a reorganisation of how we decide what stuff is made, and the very notion of "work for wages" as the fundament of the economy). The big issue is that most people are simply incapable of exercising "will" - i.e. to do something which is "right" even though it contradicts social or psychological taboos. This probably goes back to primitive ape days, when to go against the tribe pretty much meant being eaten by a leopard. But the essence of being human is: we are apes who have the capacity to not act like apes.

6. Therefore, Chaos Marxism promotes - on the rational, "Adult" level - a sophisticated dialectical materialist analysis of how human culture has evolved and where it might go from there, i.e. the best way to plan a map between World-As-Is and World-As-Should-Be. However, we realise that any scheme for changing the kosmos which works only on a rationalistic basis is doomed to self-destructive failure. The "human factor" means Parent and Child levels as well, and even beyond that, a "Spirit" level which is not part of the daily consciousness of the World-As-Is at all. (Schemes for changing the world based only on intellect are shown in the wonderful outcomes of neoliberalism and Stalinism in the 20th century.) One great thing about Lenin, as opposed to useless "Leninists", is that he understood the importance of will, of insurrection as an art, that in the heat of struggle resources are available to you that simply don't exist in normal everyday reality. This is an important psychological insight.

7. So-called "spiritual" groups which don't question the commodity/cash nexus are simply part of the problem. So are so-called "political" groups which are simply the same thing as the above "spiritual" groups only with secular rather than spiritual idols to which the individual is supposed to sacrifice themselves. In Chaos Marxism, the ego is limited and supposed to be prepared to sacrifice itself, but to the Spirit within, a zillion times more trustworthy than any Enlightened Leader. (There are such things as enlightened leaders, but they won't be the ones trying to get you to be cheap labour.)

8. Mindfulness/mind-calming techniques and other forms of "technology of ecstacy" are ways to access the Spirit. The more the Spirit is accessed, the less the ego's tyranny holds - the more that one proves to oneself by experiment that one is not simply a helpless pawn of subconscious or social impulses, the more "will" (see note 5 above) can be exercised. Therefore, real revolutionaries need a trustworthy psychologist and some kind of meditative practice if they want to avoid being wrapped up in the limits of the kosmos.

9. If political activism isn't making you a more loving, happy, creative person, you're doing it wrong. If your spiritual development isn't doing anything to actively spread loving-kindness in your space-time zone, you're doing it wrong.

10. Art is a means of communicating non-verbal, non-rational truths to a wider audience. As Trotsky says, it works by its own rules and should never be put to the service of expressing either political or religious agit-prop.

11. "God is omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient and created the world" is true - if you translate it to mean "the Spirit level of your individual consciousness continually creates your own personal section of the kosmos, and is many times smarter, powerful and nicer than your day-to-day self". In that sense, if we were to get in touch with the Spirit, by the ego sacrificing itself, then we could all be "fully human and fully divine", co-creators of everyday reality instead of just actors in its drama.

12. The main problem with so many "magickians" is a lack of ambition. So many of them just seem to want to get the best deal they can for themselves out of the kosmos, which means descending to grubby stage tricks and dominance rituals to improve their market value, or "cred" within some tiny clique. Chaos Marxism, like the original Surrealists, aim at nothing less than the total transformation of everyday life.

Negativity is a buzz

2010-11-29T12:31:00.000+13:00

Adrenaline/endorphins are a buzz. You can get that buzz from exercising your animal spirits (exercise, sex, good food, fighting, BDSM, deliberate exposure to danger). You can get it in a less stable sense from trendy chemical amusement; in a more stable sense from mindfulness/mind-calming practices, both which shut down the "Circuit III" babbling that runs around and around your head on a continuous loop for a little while. The thing about the healthier ways of getting the buzz is that they also put you into The Zone - i.e. enable a brief moment of unfiltered awareness, of just being and therefore being able to do according to the needs of the moment, not according to your automatic reflexes/"monkey mind".

On the other hand, a cheap and nasty way to get the buzz is to be negative about everything. Because if you live in a world full of mean and nasty people who are out to get you and everything's shitty and everyone's doing it wrong except for you and we're all doomed, then you get a nasty, low-grade boost of adrenaline. And it's easier than doing it the good way, which takes effort. Which is enough for many of us to develop an addiction to it. I know I have. Negativity is a habit-forming drug just like booze or smokes or white powders, and everyone is in danger of succumbing to it.

This is of course supremely applicable to politics. Addiction to conspiracy theory is one example of compulsive negativity. A brief tangent: by "conspiracy theory" I don't mean the belief that our rulers are lying to us, which isn't a theory, it's a pretty safe assumption. By "conspiracy theory" I mean a moralistic/idealistic discourse which puts the blame for the way the world is in the deliberate machinations of a hidden clique who made it all shitty like this on purpose. That's not politics, it's religion in the bad sense, because it's a good-evil narrative - the narrative that the only problem with the Machine of domination and oppression is that "lizard people" are in control of it. It also suggests that, in RAW's terms, "everything is under control" - control by the bad guys, but that's still more comforting than suggesting that the bad guys are not in control, that the more they try to exert control the worst it gets for them as for the rest of us, that things are getting worse because people make continuous choices to carry out the logic of the insane system because it's easier / it's of short-term benefit / it's what they've always done.

A materialistic explanation, which suggests that the system of generalised community production and capital accumulation itself creates incentives and externalities which inevitably create evil, conflict, waste, etc. not only avoids moralism, but also avoids determinism. I've always found ridiculous, for example, the idea that the Lizard People have a systematic programme to rape children to brainwash them into being mindless zombies. Just living in a capitalist system and being exposed to capitalist incentives does that already. It also encourages the kind of world in which we can tell ourselves that it's acceptable to rape children. The Machine doesn't require conscious evil as fuel - it feeds on its own waste products of alienation, reification and egotism.

Another way that politics becomes an addiction to negativity is simply the luxury of permanent opposition. Picking fights with The Man is a fun lifestyle, but it's not politics. Leisure activities are very rarely disruptive to the system. (Riot! the unbeatable high! tomorrow you're homeless, tonight it's a blast! - Dead Kennedys) The only sustainable disruption to the system is at the point of production. Smashing the windows of a Starbucks is just fucking up some other worker's day. Now organising a sit-down strike in your own workplace, that shows a little of what we need. It's also more difficult and places your precious self at risk.

A true revolutionary, like a true mystic, is motivated by great feelings of love, as Ché Guevara and the Sufis agree. Love which transcends the individual, that you are prepared to give up all the nice things that you have for your precious self (that you've found under the rocks and stones of the Fallen World-As-Is) as a sacrifice to the great Love for the World-As-Should Be. If you're motivated by negativity, you've drawn a line between yourself and the rest of the Universe which can only end in a selfish determination to screw the other guy and get what's yours, even though you might couch it in terms of communistic altruism.

The important point...

2010-10-27T13:10:00.002+13:00

... is that people are not monadic subjects. Your average human being consists of:

- a physical body;
- a consciousness (or awareness);
- various instinctual drives arising from the intersection of that body and consciousness;
- various subconscious "programmes" arising from the intersection of the instinctual drives and the Real World of Physical Laws and Other Humans;
- a rational mind;
- a self-image (created by the rational mind from on the basis of the subconscious processes - the purpose of this is to allow the individual to survive in the World-As-Is, and is the ego or at least what the individual thinks he or she is);
- and, in potential but only if worked on, a will capable of independent action, produced by the rational mind by the application of consciousness, which is capable of standing apart from all the above mental processes and making decisions based on principle.

Above that there's probably a Higher Self / True Will / Soul / God, accessible if all the above are working in co-operation, but about this it is not permissible to speak (because anything I could say would be asinine at best).

The essential crime of capitalism is that its ideology is based on the idea that the individual is nothing but a rational mind and instinctual drives (ignoring the deep interface between the two); and keeping the individual docile by deliberately trying to induce a gap between them. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, indeed.

The essential failure of leftist ideology is to believe that you can change this solely by an appeal to the rational mind. When rationality comes up against tasty treats offered to the animal brain, in all but those cases where an independent will has been developed, the rational mind loses every time.

Political radicalism must truly understand cultural theory, psychology, memetics, magick and mysticism if it has a chance of defeating the status quo this side of a total collapse of human civilisation. Because our enemies get it. They've turned it into an art, if not quite a science.

γνῶθι σεαυτόν

2010-10-20T10:45:00.000+13:00

There are two reasons anyone does anything, a good reason and the real reason; or, more precisely, a rationalisation and a subconscious motivation.

You can't stop unnecessary suffering unless you actually understand why you do things - i.e. what you really want, what your actual psychology and physiology needs but won't admit, and what prompted you to a course of action that led to suffering. The problem tends to be that if you don't get your subconscious needs met by your actions (and you almost certainly won't because the subconscious doesn't behave rationally), your subconscious will declare that the whole thing was a disaster and make you miserable. In contrast, if you admit to yourself what you were subconsciously trying to do, and that it was never going to work so no point beating yourself up over it, then you can actually rationally estimate the concrete advantages and the disadvantages of the action, and then try to turn the disadvantages to your advantage (even if the advantage is "now I know not to do that again").

In this way, you can minimise unnecessary suffering, to leave more time, space, energy and resources for necessary suffering. (Because, as the Buddha correctly said, life in this world is suffering, you might as well pick the most effective and useful form of suffering.) And part of that wisdom is learning that real fulfilment means acting in accordance with your own inner nature, and can't be found in any possession or symbolic capital. Aleister Crowley said "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law"; Karl Marx said that the essential nature of humanity was in labour (i.e. productive, creative work) rather than consumption.

So we keep saying!

2010-10-12T13:55:00.001+13:00

Instead of performing a rational cost-benefit analysis, we accept information which confirms our identity and values, and reject information that conflicts with them. We mould our thinking around our social identity, protecting it from serious challenge. Confronting people with inconvenient facts is likely only to harden their resistance to change.

- George Monbiot

What do you want - to change material reality or just give yourself a new identity, a new lifestyle, a new religion which says it's not a religion?

- Chaos Marxist Aphorisms II,43

An apology

2010-10-11T08:32:00.001+13:00

To date, this blog has pretty much been the equivalent of a person who's lived in the trackless desert her whole life, telling wayfarers: "Oh yeah, I totally know the way to the Silver City. Of course, I've never been there myself. But I've talked to people who know people who have! And based on that and on my own experience of the trackless desert, it shouldn't be too hard for us to put our heads together and draw a map..."

Yeah. The ego (including the intellect) is a booster rocket. You'll never get off the ground without it, but you'll never get into orbit with it.

Arirang

2010-10-10T22:06:00.003+13:00

Chaos Marxism aims to be a technology of ecstacy - or, more importantly, integration of ecstacy into the Real World of Horrible Jobs, of inner and outer worlds - which has always been the goal of mystical paths and dialectical materialist praxis. Capitalism generalises alienation, in which work is turned against the self; and, in the modern era, a "Chinese Wall" is erected between production and consumption, with the ideological apparatus of society actively encouraging a "split personality" (the dutiful worker always pushing for greater productivity suddenly transforms into a raging, impulse-buying party animal and sexual tyrannosaurus after 5 pm and on weekends).

In this sense, you could even make an argument that the Stalinist and fascist party-states had a slight edge, whereby officially promoted ecstatic states (generally in the form of leader worship, eg North Korean "mass games", or "compulsory social solidarity" events) were closely integrated into the daily grind of routine labour. "It's very chaste, but everyone has a good time," as James Church's Inspector O put it. Recent advances in the "creative workplace" in the capitalist countries are catching up, though - they're trying to integrate fun into work, but in such a way as to subordinate fun to work.

But Stalinist, fascist and capitalist technologies are simply safety valves - imposition of order leads to escalation of chaos, so there are clearly defined limits to "official ecstacy". When Saturnalia is over, the slaves go back to being slaves. So much "revolutionary" practice, unfortunately, fits into this remarkably well - political activism is something you do in your leisure time and lunch breaks, which is 100% compatible with the perpetuation of capitalist normality, as it's just another leisure activity. Assertion of workers' power and self-management on the job breaks the cycle, but of course that can't be done by isolated individuals - it needs social organisation, which capitalist normality does everything in its power to prevent.

So our problem is: how do we achieve ecstacy in a way in which something is disrupted in the system of the Black Iron Prison, rather than just letting off steam? Probably the answer lies in personality integration - that we should strive to become the same person on the job, in the sack, and communing with the Gods, rather than building barriers and compartments between experiences. They actually enforce something like this in Stalinist countries, but in the service of a closed, static, self-perpetuating social order - the people who talk about North Korea as "neo-feudal" are close to the mark, although I'd say it's much more like the Byzantine emperor+bureaucracy system than European feudalism, which if nothing else was radically decentralised.

Reactionary systems: workaday self and ecstatic self merged in a static loop.
Capitalism: workaday self divorced from ecstatic self.
Revolutionary systems: workaday self and ecstatic self merged in a dynamic loop.

A chilling thought

2010-09-18T15:53:00.001+12:00

Has anyone noticed that, these days, the fundamentalist Protestant churches market themselves as self-help, positive-thinking seminars? The local scary Elim crowd have big billboards by the side of the motorway saying "LIVE LIFE", complete with a white middle-class looking woman looking ecstatically fulfilled on a beach. You know, this kind of unnerves me because I always though that their message was "REPENT". But you tell people what they want to hear.

I was reminded of this, browsing in the Self-Help section of my favourite secondhand book store and seeing how many of the titles ("Be yourself! Allow yourself to succeed!" etc) were surplus from the library of some fundamentalist Protestant church or other. I knew already about the "prosperity gospel", but it kind of woke me up a bit to realise that these people are marketing The Lord And Saviour Jesus Christ as something that can motivate you to success in love and business. The Church of the SubGenius without the sense of humour. Or Scientology with all the really loopy personality cult stuff shaved off.

But of course, it will work. You go in there, you raise the Holy Spirit through pentecostalist measures, and of course that energy will be yours to use for whatever you think is important at the time. I must admit being unnerved that the sheikh of my local Sufi congregation also enthusiastically espouses "Think And Grow Rich" mantras. But if the technology is given to the middle classes, they will use it for middle-class purposes, no matter the flavour of the wrapping of the tasty treat of "raising the Spirit". All that energy goes into increasing one's acquiesence to the dogmas of the market economy. We need to do the opposite.

I don't approve of charity.

2010-09-16T12:54:00.001+12:00

Let me rephrase that. I 100% totally approve of donating your time, energy and labour. But donating money? The thing about money is that it's "made round to go round", and that it's totally fungible - which is the basis of the market economy - so whoever gets their hands on it can do whatever they like with it. The problem with giving money to an established charity is, to become an established anything in the World-As-Is, an organisation must do some kind of deal with The Prince Of This World (schmoozing big corporates and governments, etc). No matter its mission statements and "good works" on the ground, the larger the organisation, the more embedded it is in the very thing that the act of charity is supposed to be dissolving.

Of course, I'm not discounting the "metaphysical principle" that freely donating something which does have value to the individual is an act of selflessness which is good in itself - but as a consequentialist good, I would really recommend you get into volunteer labour. (And if you have more money than time and energy? Quit your job, schmuck.)

Funny, had a feeling he was on his way

2010-09-15T11:34:00.002+12:00

There are two struggles—inner-world struggle and outer-world struggle, but never can these two make contact, to make data for the third world. Not even God gives this possibility for contact between your inner- and outer-world struggles; not even your heredity. Only one thing—you must make intentional contact between outer-world struggle and inner-world struggle; only then can you make data for the Third World of Man, sometimes called World of the Soul.

Thank you, G (emphasis added). That serves as a mission statement for this blog better than anything I've written.

I think Michael Lebowitz is a pretty cool guy.

2010-09-14T12:11:00.001+12:00

eh upsets right-wing factions in the PSUV and doesn't afraid of anything:

The revolutionary intellectual must be subject to discipline by the revolutionary party, a party dedicated to building socialism for the 21st century. The revolutionary intellectual must take guidance from that revolutionary party.

However, before my statement generates a hailstorm of shoes thrown at me, let me make one thing quite clear. We need to distinguish clearly between the revolutionary party and the party of the moment. [...] the distinction that I am making is between the revolutionary party, the party of the socialist future, and the party of the moment. It is the former to which revolutionary intellectuals must be disciplined.

I concur, heartily. Note also, my libertarian or anarcho colleagues, that Prof. Lebowitz's vision of socialism is horizontal and "protagonistic", rather than a 20th century centralised Leviathan model. He doesn't say so, but I think it's implicit that that's what the "party of the socialist future" must look like as well.

I was privileged to meet Prof. Lebowitz at a conference last year. I think I had a brief disagreement with him on whether a healthy socialist country could be a one-party state (me: "no", him: "maybe"), but he's definitely one of the good guys. And I definitely agree with him that Venezuela is crucially important right now. (So, probably, is Nepal.)

Note that the form of organisation of a political party, which must be based on science and the observable fact, must be rigorously democratic; whereas a spiritual order must be top-down in that the students are learning from the example of the Master, rather than by experiment. In this, I think I resile from early CM statements that one organisation could be both things at once.

And this is why we need to learn psychology.

2010-09-13T10:19:00.000+12:00

In the absence of strong political movements on the left, the response [to the current crisis] in the United States in particular and in other advanced capitalist countries is likely to be one best analyzed by psychologists.

(source) The only thing I would add to this is it had better be psychologists like the young Wilhelm Reich.

The macro/micro problem

2010-09-10T08:35:00.000+12:00

This blog has been in semi-retirement for a while for the simple reason that I've been in semi-retirement... from politics. When practice dries up, so should the theory, if you're any kind of a materialist. The idea is that sometime in the New Year I will reassess whether I want to get back to the front line of the class struggle and the social justice movements, or whether I want to, for example, go join a Zen nunnery for a few years.

But seriously, if there's any aphorism that I think sums up the Chaos-Marxist approach, it's from the novel Crime Story by Maurice Gee - There's not two places with a bridge between, there's only one place.. And I'm pretty sure he meant by it exactly what I mean by this whole blog, this whole way of looking at the world. In bourgeois economics, the "macro/micro" problem refers to the fact that in the neo-classical model, and the neo-classical/Keynesian synthesis which is a slightly more sophisticated version of it, the microeconomic model (of how people behave) totally contradicts the macroeconomic model (how economies and global flows behave), even though they both work in their own particular "zones".

You can argue - like you can for Marx's transformation problem - about whether this is a contradiction in the model or a contradiction in reality. (Since general relativity contradicts quantum mechanics, perhaps we should be used to "contradictions in reality" by now.) But radical politics has exactly the same macro-micro problem. Marxian economics and cultural theory, I feel, explains why the world is as it is very, very well. But it doesn't, and I don't think it can, behave why individual people behave as they do, or indeed give the individual guidance on how to live their life in the way the world is now. Various psychoanalytic and spiritual theories can do that - but because the question of "meaning" is a non-material one, they tend to contradict materialism. John Molyneux has come out and said that if you're a consistent Marxist, you have to be an atheist, period. Which only begs the question of whether, by throwing the bathwater out of God as a personal entity, you've also lost the baby of God as a component part of the human psyche essential to self-actualisation and good health. (Call it the Holy Guardian Angel, Circuit VII, the Jungian Self, whatever.)

It's always been my contention that this is the reason for the pathology of small radical groups - because the politics become a nauseating "communal dogma" when they're applied to the everyday lives of the political activists outside of political/industrial activism. Why, you might ask, should they be expected to? Because there's a "common sense" that being a Marxist / anarchist / deep green etc. is a lifestyle choice as well as a political strategy. We are all expected, really, to be sexually permissive atheists, who find meaning for their lives in "the struggle". This has not worked for me. And if it doesn't work for me, it won't work for other people, and perhaps this kind of Year Zero attitude to the warm and squishy parts of human existence is what has lead to the ghettoisation of social activism. If you insist that politics must become the driving force, the objet petit a of a political activist's life, then politics is exclusive to those who have that kind of monkish devotion.

The traditional way in which Marxists who're aware of this problem have tried to fill the gap is with Freudian psychology (Reich, Fromme, Marcuse etc.) The best that can be said for Chaos-Marxism is that I've tried something different.

Narrative

2010-08-14T17:09:00.001+12:00

A childish mind believes that the world acts like a story.

An adult mind knows better, and believes that stories are "just stories".

An enlightened mind knows that stories, narratives and myths don't describe how the world works, but precisely and accurately describe psychological processes - and therefore explain how people work.

The commies out there will have noted that this is a pretty neat Hegelian dialectic, with the last step being the negation of the negation (also in the sense that an enlightened being will have to have both adult and child minds operating in complementary fashion). The story world is a refraction of the Real World of Horrible Jobs. The menu is not just words on paper, even though you can't eat it; if you can use it properly, you can gain delicious things to eat.

Why we are here...

2010-08-07T15:22:00.000+12:00

... because mass media, and all the other ideological apparatuses of capitalist hegemony, deliberately induce bad mental health in the entire population - narcissism, anxiety disorders, Freudian projection and paranoia are the preferred implants of the day - to keep workers working, consumers spending, and the inevitable explosions of hatred and violence confined to what used to be called "the dark parts of town". The real problem is that revolutionary socialism doesn't have an answer to this - apparently your mental health problems are cured "in the struggle", but that is surely disproved by the incredible narcissistic feuding and tribalistic dominance rituals which cripple the actually existing radical left. Nondualist spirituality and Jungian psychology have answers, which work... for individuals who can be disciplined for long periods of time. The thing is that this planet doesn't really have that long.

New aphorism

2010-07-27T09:35:00.000+12:00

In my experience, this simple rule of thumb is invaluable in politics, psychology, and anywhere else which involves dialectical discourse:

Criticism always says more about the critic than the criticised.

(Ref: previous post on psychological projection.) If you read person Y saying "X sucks", then they may be right or they may be wrong, but what is 100% certain is that you can see clearly what person Y means by "sucks", and from there speculate about their inner life, or at least what life experiences might have led to them to adopt the reality tunnel where object X conforms to the category of "sucks".

Well. Don't I feel stupid.

2010-07-24T18:45:00.000+12:00

So it seems that - whereas I stand by all the analysis that's come onto this blog in almost four years, and some of it actually seems to come from Somewhere in my psyche much smarter than my regular self - especially this, it's pretty hard-core - it's a case of physician, heal thyself.

So tell me, who do you think I was really talking to when I kept yelling over and over again: "You are what you do! You're keeping yourself stuck in oppression, pointlessness and miser! You have to give up your favourite identity otherwise all your schemes and dreams will turn out useless! A revolution / enlightenment means unpredictability, the return of the repressed, all kinds of drama, and if you fear things getting out of control then you, sirmaam, are part of the problem!!!"

Go on. Take a wild guess. Humility is endless, and I'd much rather see all this done than hear about it.

HOLY CRAP IT'S TRUE

2010-07-22T21:11:00.001+12:00

God really is everywhere and in everything.

Okay, to be more precise: every meaning that I experience, every mental box into which I slot my sensory perceptions of the objective physical world, was created by a process in my psyche (logical or subconscious), and those processes form a unified-but-contradictory whole - the Higher Self of mysticism, Jung's Self-as-opposed-to-ego. Which means Fred Engels was right too about the Dialectics of Nature - if by "Nature" we mean our experiences of the real world, rather than that world's ontological reality. Actually, every school of philosophy or psychology worth a shit recognizes this one. Even that scoundrel and fraud Fatso Hubbard got the gist: "the thetan is mocking up the reactive mind", in his repulsive jargon.

(Parenthetically, I would agree with Jung that orthodox Christianity - with its all-nice-and-cuddly Christ balanced by his evil cousin with the horns and the pitchfork - is a psychological step back from Judaism (or Islam's) purely monotheistic deity who is responsible for everything good and bad that happens, or even the polytheistic nature gods.)

Now. How does one go about behaving as if this were true? Because when you're up to your ass in alligators it's hard to remember that your Higher Self created the swamp; even more so to believe that the swamp might be there for some good reason; and triply so to believe that it might be the right thing for this time/space junction that alligators should be surrounding your ass.

Work is work is work

2010-07-19T09:45:00.000+12:00

In every era of class society, there has been a mystique woven around certain kinds of work - the idea that only a Special Chosen Few can do it, and therefore they have the right to own slaves / dispose of serfs / order common gutter proles around. In ancient Egyptian times, it was reading and writing (actually, that was pretty much the case in mediaeval Europe as well). In the early capitalist era, it was abstract, scientific thought and the ability to make arguments - you might remember in particular there were all kinds of "scientific" (by the lights of the age) studies made proven that women just could not think abstractly very much before their brains overheated or their wombs shrivelled up or something.

The modern capitalist era, based on increasing automation of production and outsourcing of manual labour to countries outside the noosphere of "Western media culture", has swept this all aside, because it has to teach higher order thinking skills to the vast majority of the working class or else live with the consequences of a permanent unemployable underclass. (Actually, they do a bit of both). Now, the mystique of labour inheres in two kinds of work:

- leadership skills (i.e. the cult of the CEO, management voodoo, etc).
- creative work;

Both these kinds of work are presented as if they needed a certain genius not available to common gutter proles. The first category carries with it the ideology that "the ruling class deserve to be where they are"; the second category carries with it the ideology that "middle-class occupations deserve a certain status in our society". As explored before, since the creative classes now provide the mass indoctrination/hypnosis necessary to keep the proles accustomed to their lot, via the media, it is vital that the ruling class cut them a significant slice of the pie.

A real revolution would have to spread not only Lenin's idea that "every cook can and will govern", but that - for example - every garbageman is capable of artistic expression, creative thought, and even religious ectasy. (As to the latter, remember that in every country the mass-market forms of religion are employed to give the gutter proles a metaphysical "high" every Sunday or Friday or whatever, in return for making shyster-clerics rich. R. A. Wilson was right that there'll be hell to pay when the proles work out that everyone can do this for themselves.)

So: any revolutionary organisation where leadership and/or creative thinking are reserved to a minority is simply reproducing the norms of class society and needs a shakeup. This is easier said than done, of course.

A new magickal motto...

2010-07-15T21:30:00.002+12:00

...once again, in the Latin of democracy: Amo Venku Timon.

Now I understand what you tried to say to me

2010-07-14T11:35:00.000+12:00

A while back, I said the following:

Robert Fripp has said that "any act based on principle is a good one". Dr Javad Nurbaksh has said that hooking up with even an inferior, selfish, not-properly-enlightened Master is better than letting your ego continue to run rampant. I find it very difficult to accept these propositions, because they're very similar to L. Ron Hubbard's dictum that "you must let others control you before you can learn to control yourself", which is clearly a cynical command to induce people to sign themselves up as slaves.

My main counterexample to Fripp's quote above was: "what if the principle is 'no niggers'?" Well, thinking about it, we can disentangle racist violence from - theoretically - making a principled stand on a racist basis which actually causes you personal disadvantage. (Like: setting up a barber shop in Soweto and only catering to white people? Do that and I'll give you serious points for style.)

It's like, the Catholic Church has a principle: "only celibate men can do the magic trick which turns a wafer and some grape juice into the Living Presence of the Lord Jesus Christ". I think this principle leads the Church to be (at least in part) a force for repression and negativity in the world. But what is the alternative? Ordaining women because... why? Because that's what everyone else does? The whole point of the Church - any Church - is being something other than The Real World Of Horrible Jobs, and if the aims of religion coincide with the policy aims of the State and the price signals of the competitive market, then it is surely a complete waste of time and a con-job.

Only by making a stand on principle - even a reactionary one - can you pry open some space for a different reality. It might be a shittier reality than the mainstream one, but it at least proves that different realities are possible. (I personally think that any Catholics who really object to the Church's teachings on gender and sexuality should just walk and join the Anglicans or many of the independent or schismatic Catholic congregations. Hell, become a Gnostic, they've got all the bells and smells. Attempting to change Church doctrine because it conflicts with common sense or even basic human dignity is missing the whole point of what the Church is there for.)

First noble truth: pain don't hurt.

2010-07-14T11:08:00.004+12:00

Pain is good. Pain is a sign that you're alive and awake and there's a clear direction in which you should go. If there were no pain, you'd probably just sit and drool, or at least lead a totally selfish existence, like a cat. Not that there's anything wrong with that... but it's not a lifestyle choice for everyone.

I know for a fact that almost all my problems in this existence have been caused by trying to avoid or (as the Clams put it) "not-is" pain. You only make something go away by "as-is"ing it. This isn't instantaneous and requires patience, but the way out is the way through.

I'm currently in a process of re-evaluating and cutting loose my allegiances and commitments to everything in my life which isn't necessary for biological survival, because I'm trying to... well, some call it "find yourself". Others say "find God". Still others say "achieve Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel". Robert Anton Wilson would have said "activate Brain Circuit VII". It's surprising how much avoiding and trying not to feel pain makes this totally impossible.

The thing that really frustrating me is that I keep remembering The Truth... then forgetting it, going back to sleep, slipping into bad habits, backing away from the Dark Night of the Soul. Only if I feel the pain can that stop happening.

You might also be interested to note that - given all the ranting I do here about "addiction to identities" being what stops us bringing the Magickal Kingdom to life in the here-and-now - that I think I've identified the identity which anchors me in the filth. In one phrase: I am a weirdo whom everybody hates. It's not much of an identity, but it ... well, I wouldn't say it "works", but I'm still alive and still capable of effort, which you wouldn't have bet on a few years ago. Time to say goodbye.

Always good to note...

2010-07-12T20:47:00.001+12:00

... that someone is taking seriously the whole point of this blog - that materialist dialectics are not only not incompatible with some traditions of mysticism, but emininently complementary.

From a Marxist viewpoint, Buddha was an early materialist who touched on dialectics. Buddha would have been aware of the debate about the relationship of “absolute” to “relative” but not any dialectical resolution of that debate.

Whereas Hinduism embraced the absolute, the rebellious Buddha taught about the relative world, the real world. His teachings are anchored in everyday life and all living things.

(source) For an opposing viewpoint, see here. ETA: And more on the absolute and relative here...

Chaos Marxism's satanic verses

2010-06-18T14:41:00.002+12:00

Banned aphorisms, not for internal consumption. Written by my evil twin in the dead of night.

Virtually everyone in the world is either a deluded zombie working under remote control; or a sociopathic sadist glorying in the debasement and humiliation of others. A monster, or a willing or unwilling collaborator with monsters.

Small achievements count for nothing.

Success on the terms of this world is simultaneously an imperative; AND requires unacceptable compromises with the forces of evil.

Happiness = selling out, unacceptable compromises. If happiness is possible in this world, this means that this world is acceptable, which it clearly is not. Choosing to be happy means choosing to give up the fight and thus becoming a collaborator with those forces of evil.

Oh, this is excellent.

2010-06-15T11:00:00.000+12:00

I just found this blog, and serependitiously its author comments on one of our major themes:

The ego tries to remake the world according to its own self-perceptions. The ego will expect others to be friends with the same people we perceive as good and stay away from folks we see as bad. The ego will try to convince others of religious, political or other viewpoints. The arrogant ego will try to force others to be complimentary. The negative ego will see every bump in life's road as proof of their unworthiness.

Perhaps killing the ego is more along the lines of killing the desire to create 'proof' of personal perceptions. Perhaps it is closer to killing the need to force the world to fit within our parameters.

I know, for example, that my own ego - or nafs - is intent on being the greatest genius in the room, and spends its existence in bitter, ranting anger that the Real World of Horrible Jobs doesn't conform to its desires, bowing down to acknowledge its mistress.

Parable (after Idries Shah)

2010-06-15T07:27:00.002+12:00

There was a certain potentate who had taken to stockpiling chemical weapons - mustard gas, sarin, you name it - in the cellars under his city.

This took up a lot of the city's budget, and in consequence the city was kind of run down and unattractive. Also, over time these chemical nasties had begun seeping into the water supply, causing all manner of health issues for the citizens.

All of this, thought the potentate, was worth it, in that now any enemy who tried to attack the city would get an extremely nasty surprise. For the potentate kept this stockpile secret - if anyone knew of his weapons cache, he thought, they would instantly retaliate with deadly, possibly nuclear force. So it didn't even have the deterrent effect that such WMDs often do.

All that the city's neighbours knew was that this city was run-down and dirty, and the people who lived there seemed suspicious and unwell. This, as you can imagine, did nothing for the tourist industry or for inwards investment, so things in general did not get better.

The potentate would wake up screaming in the night, occasionally, with terrible nightmares of his city being destroyed for lack of WMDs. Or because his neighbours found out about the WMDs. As he saw it, he was damned if he did and damned if he didn't change strategies.

The moral of the story is: You know where you stand in a hell hole.

Things are not hopeless...

2010-06-11T16:09:00.000+12:00

... but if anything is hopeless, it's the media priesthood's endless masturbating to its own coolness. An incredible exposé of the culture of addiction to crisis, not only all over the mass media but over the professional blogosphere.

Also of note, from the author of the above, including the following:

I renounce this statement: "The use of the term 'revolution' should not imply that this well be a class-based effort." What was I thinking? I was trying too hard to recruit the already existing members of the Media into the project. Venezuela has proved this original premise to be wrong: I now believe that only a class struggle can beat the Media. This is the most vital change in strategy and thinking since 1997. And it changes much about the project as it begins anew in the Summer of 2002.

A very good point too. April 13 2002 should be the final proof that - despite all the magick spells weaved by the media priesthood and the creative class, who think themselves not only enlightened but all-powerful - filthy, unwashed, uneducated cleaners, busdrivers, street vendors and stay-at-home mums are not only the only ones who can really change anything, but who indeed have any interest in doing so.

We educated specimens are so unbelievably addicted to our self-image as the enlightened élite that we become part of the problem. An unrecognized genius is still a genius; a fallen angel is still an angel. Anyone who really hopes to speak for the voice of The Masses has to stop thinking of themselves as anything but The Masses.

I hate being right all the time.

2010-06-09T15:59:00.000+12:00

And I thought I was the only one crazy enough to use the metaphor of the media priesthood:

The cultic aspects of corporate consumerism have been evident as far back as the Ford
Sociological Department, but recently there has been an shameless and enthusiastic commercial promotion of cultic psychology because “the smartest marketers have realized that it is possible for communities to be formed around brands” as Atkin argues in his 2004 marketing manifesto The Culting of Brands where he tells our future business leaders “You are a priest, not a brand manager.”

(Our culture MAY BE in trouble when we’ve lost the ability to create community out of relationships with other people, and instead respond primarily to commercial priests who gather us around their mass-produced sacred objects – in safely gated communities no doubt. (can anyone say “pass the Kool-Aid?”see “don’t drink the punch”)

(source) Elsewhere, the author says:

Though The Church of the SubGenius is rarely explicitly political nor aligned with a discernible single politics, it is in synch with a creative power that is alive and well in the global anti-capitalist movement, according to we are everywhere edited by Notes from Nowhere where a return to the invitingly joyful subversions possible in
embodiment and “Carnival” are replacing the dull outdated revolutionary paradigms of grim, sober service to a duplicate disciplinary cause – “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

If only I shared his optimism. The Church of the SubGenius put a banner on the top of their website in March 2003 saying "BOB" SUPPORTS THE COALITION TROOPS. I don't blame Stang for doing that - doing anything else would have alienated many dues-paying SubGenius Troo Warriors For Freedom, who - all joking aside - recognized the need to stop goofing around and support brave President Bush and his mission to kill thousands of Iraqis as an act of primitive primate dominance. But it shows exactly the limits of the One True Church - as those Discordian readers of this blog keep telling me, Discordianism isn't supposed to be a revolutionary party, and neither is SubG. SubG is supposed to be a means for Stang to make a living so he can promote mutant networking fulltime, and it's very good in that respect.

As for "grim sober service" - that's all that works. Churchill and Roosevelt didn't defeat Hitler and Tojo because they were the good guys, but because they could mobilise brute force better over the medium term. If you don't mobilise your forces, you lose. If you don't become symmetrical to an enemy, you can't defeat them. You can't win in this world except on the terms of the Prince Of This World. Gandhi and MLK were brutally assassinated, while Joe Stalin lived to a ripe old age. If you don't take on the Black Iron Prison in its own terms, it will tolerate you living in your little clubhouse and playing at being cowboys, anarchists and witches... as long as you are no real threat. I am increasingly convinced that being miserable is the only sign that you're actually making a change in the real world. It is impossible to achieve the aim without suffering, but you can choose your own suffering.

No, not Disneyland

2010-05-18T08:23:00.005+12:00

During my early adolescence - 13 to 15 - I started having what you might consider "mystical experiences". I can explain this no better than to say that the veil of reality would slip aside occasionally, and I would see - or thought I was - glimpses of another, better world, where everything really was all right. It was this kind of thing that led me to a short dalliance with a Baptist youth group, and a long one with neo-Paganism. More importantly, since they happened at about the same time I was discovering rock music and electronic pop, the Gates of Paradise have always been associated for me with certain artists (one particular artist who mentioned Gurdjieff and the Sufis quite a lot in her early work), and my career path as a musician was more or less settled. Is it also a coincidence that I first became politically active around this time?

It's often said that the "psychic centres", or whatever, kick in at around adolesence (something to do with hormones, I suppose) - which is why poltergeist activity is associated with teenagers. But to a large extent, these brief "openings" were more trouble than they were worth. The Gates of Paradise had closed by the time I was about 16, and I spent ten years blundering about in the dark wondering how the devil I was going to get back there. One might also say that it might have been better never to have a glimpse of the garden, if I was going to be satisfied with life in the basement. It was only after some major life changes that I began to experience anything like that again - about 2001, I think it must have been. Coincidence, that it was at this time that I became politically active again, and made the first steps towards a practical musical career?

As a wise mystic said, when you're up to your ass in alligators it's difficult to remember that you went in to drain the swamp, and I've been up to my ass in alligators much of my life, due to Harrowing Childhood issues which I won't bore you with. My Daily Self - or nafs - endlessly replays the terrible things that happened to me in my childhood and adolescence, trying to give the story a better ending this time. This Doloras is almost pathologically determined not to live in the here-and-now, where actions have consequences and what's done can't be undone. But if I can't do that, I won't be ready the next time the Gates of Paradise open.

I like the idea that "nothing is ever forgotten", that I never lost anything in growing up, that the Magickal Kingdom is here and now always hiding behind every molecule if you know what to look for, that I had to grow up and suffer to learn how to integrate that world with this one of Horrible Jobs. That the magick becomes real when I get my music right; that if I "remember myself" I can finally cease my eternal battle with imaginary things; and that by acting in the name of solidarity and compassion in this $2.99 material world - through socialist activism, spiritual psychology and radical cultural-materialist praxis - I can be part of a current which will change the world to one where people are less lost and afraid and hurt and cold and angry and mean. And then I forget it again, and that's how I get lost and depressed.

"We shall not cease from exploration / And at the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know it for the first time" - T S Eliot.

Typical left-wing hate-trips

2010-05-13T10:38:00.001+12:00

Sorry I haven't posted in a while. I've been depressed.

Those in the know will recognize the subject line of this post as coming from Illuminatus! Now, I thought it was unfair when I read it, because we all know that both the libertarian and the fascistic Right can get some pretty impressive hate-trips on. But the question is: exactly how far does hate and anger get us, politically speaking? (I am inspired to write this by watching all the British Liberal Democrat communities being filled with angry ragequitting posts.)

Anger and hate are, simply, like fire. Fire is very very good for clearing out what needs to be destroyed. But if you don't build something in its place, then what are you doing? Just opening the space for someone with a clearer vision to take advantage of your good work.

Now, I have no tolerance for "lesser evilism", "the left-wing of the possible", all that sell-out nonsense - the political equivalent of "if I can't be a rockstar or a cowboy, I'll be a damn fine junior ad exec". It was kind of lame watching apparent leftists meekly troop in behind Al Gore in 2000, and even lamer watching them do the same for Gordon Brown in the last month or so. (Disclaimer: I was kind of hoping for a hung parliament because it would be funny to watch, and I think I was proved right.) I don't care how much hatred you have for Tories (or how justified it is), you can't fight a negative with a negative, and giving your energy to the acceptable face of the enemy is self-defeating.

But if that's the downfall of the liberal left, I'm no more in favour of the accepted consensus on the radical left - to build forces around nothing more than opposition to "whatever those bourgeois pig-dogs are proposing this week". Of course implacable opposition, rioting, etc are fun and all. But what does it accomplish, if not tempered with a positive? An organisation or movement which is all NO and no YES isn't a political organisation. It's an excuse for having a good time, for letting off steam... no threat to the existing order at all. Easily recuperated. Scenes in Greece are uncomfortably similar to those in Tonga in late 2006, and that didn't end well.

This is why you need a political programme, rather than just a huge list of "Fight Back! Against! No! Overthrow!" - or a "put a clothespeg on your nose and vote Labor/(Social or Liberal) Democrat". But not just any programme - a transitional programme which can be enacted in the here and now, under the current rules of the game, and at the same time undermines the very rules of the game.

(Psychologically, it should barely need explaining that indulging the purely negative parts of the psyche is not healthy. At the risk of sounding ridiculous, revolutionaries - just like Sufis or radical Christians - are motivated by great feelings of love, which is the ultimate positive in the psychic level. We need to get over the feeling of being addicted to "the struggle" - of not actually wanting the Revolution, or the immanentization of the Eschaton, because fighting The Man is a fun lifestyle and we wouldn't know what to do with ourselves if we had whatever we wanted.)

If we as political radicals, gnostics/mystics/magickians and whatever are in it to actually change the rules of the game - rather than just win the game by whatever means necessary - then the question of the deep interaction of means and ends comes to mind, which means what Robert Anton Wilson meant by "bisociation" or T. S. Eliot meant by "the timeless intersecting with time". In our political practice we have to bring the Revolution / Eschaton into active existence in the Real World of Horrible Jobs. That doesn't mean pretending you can live in a different world here and now - but opening a door to that different world while still living in the here and now.

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The ongoing mission of this blog is to find a form of words in which the Greater Jihad of struggle over the Ego can be expressed in exactly the same terms as the Lesser Jihad over ignorance, injustice and oppression in the material world.

It seems like ages since I quoted Mad Larry

2010-04-16T10:31:00.000+12:00

... there's a difference between "left-wing" and "liberal". To be a liberal means to believe that tolerance is good and global warming is bad, but also to believe that you can save the world simply by not using the word "poof". S/he may have good intentions, but doesn't seem to appreciate that all the things s/he considers to be civilised - democracy, universal suffrage, the right to exist without having the shit kicked out of you for having long hair or skin that's a bit on the dark side - were achieved through the effort of rather more pro-active people, who fought and occasionally died in order to create a less appalling version of humanity. To be a liberal means to shield yourself from the full horror of your society, to have a veneer of civic responsibility while still approving of a system that's wholly founded on exploitation.

And this is why political activism is still necessary - because what freedoms the vast majority have were only ever won by active rebellion. I fear that an increasing proportion of liberals - among which I count most of the people who read blogs like this - are all for a global system of slave-labour and oppression, as long as they're part of the 15% privileged slaves who live in fancy cages with internet access and don't get physically whipped.

Oh.

2010-04-14T10:30:00.000+12:00

In a dream last night, I suddenly understood what is meant by the saying "The Kingdom of God is within you". For our atheist readers: a better reality is right here, right now, wherever and whenever you are only waiting for you to realise and pay attention to it. Sadly, the last part is so very difficult - the elevator is waiting to take you to the penthouse for a visit, but it doesn't come all the way to the basement, and if you have lived all your life in the basement and you don't even realise that there's a way out, you'll find it difficult to get there.

The civilisation we live in is determined to keep all of us in the basement, because at least in that way we're predictable. This is a civilisation which prioritises the collection of imaginary "points" in a trading system (aka $$$) over all else. Some would tell you that power and oppression of a tiny elite are the reason for the warped system, but money is more powerful than any elite whims. Military force, oppression and control tactics are in the service of money in an advanced capitalist economy, not the other way around.

This is why magic and narrative thinking are so important in the modern era, because we are already in a trans-personal era. This is what conspiracy theorists don't get - "anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools", because it assumes that money itself doesn't have a will of its own, that its evil doings must be traced to an evil group of people, i.e. tha j00s. Of course people and how they live their lives are the final, fundamental reality. But if people act as if they are forced to by some evil idol, then the evil idol is a real thing that can't be banished just by pointing out that it doesn't exist. Things that don't exist often have more power than things that do.

Our social system is deeply devoted to a hideous idol / egregore / false God / master meme, which unlike previous Gods doesn't demand blood and grovelling, it just demands that you devote every single part of your life to its needs.

Gets you jumping like a real live wire

2010-04-11T08:54:00.001+12:00

"[T]his revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew."

- Marx, The German Ideology

"So, you see, the whole key to liberation is magic. Anarchism remains tied to politics, and remains a form of death like all other politics, until it breaks free from the defined 'reality' of a capitalist society and creates its own reality....Reality is thermoplastic, not thermosetting you know: I mean you can reprogram it much more than people realize."

- Wilson and Shea, Illuminatus!

"[P]ractitioners of the shock doctrine tend to seek a blank slate on which to create their ideal free market economies, which inevitably requires a usually violent destruction of the existing economic order."

- Wikipedia on Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine

"[A]ssuming daily life provides us with sufficient opportunities for appropriate & necessary learning, daily life does not provide the conditions for us to amplify & intensify educative arising-incidents, enabling us to better refine who & what we are. This refining only takes place intentionally and, usually, in carefully-designed environments. [...]
But, even were enough educative-opportunities to accidentally occur, ordinary life does not provide suitable environments for amplifying & intensifying our process, necessary & sufficient to cook us to the required degree. Different traditions & ways refer to this cooking & refining in various ways, one of which is transformation, whatever we may understand by that."

- Robert Fripp, diary of 2009/7/21.

You know something's true when not only do people keep saying it over and over again, but the ruling class manage to use it for their own effort. Simply put: when people's realities and identities are put under pressure, the impossible becomes possible. Real change only happens in transformative "leaps", which only happen under great strain and stress, or at least under artifically-induced "crucible" environments. I know, this is terrifying, heartless and illiberal. It also happens to be true.

ETA: But never let us forget the distinction that Sufis make between a state and a station. Robert Fripp's metaphor is: it is possible to take the elevator from the ground floor to the penthouse; but you probably can't afford the rent to live there. Making a change is one thing, making that change permanent is another thing altogether. My feeling is that shock and trauma and other "initiatory" experiences play a part in turning a state into a station.

Come on the beach with the nouveau-riche!

2010-04-09T15:29:00.001+12:00

The traditional Marxist attitude to occult movements is that they're petty-bourgeois self-delusion, desperately searching for individual solutions to the accelerating collapse of individualist subjectivity brought on by the inexorable growth of corporate capitalism (and the forces of commodification and reification that go along with it). I, being young and impulsive, demurred, believing that perhaps art, cultural studies and psychology might be a missing link between the social liberation promised by Marxist revolutionary practice, and the personal liberation sought by the occultists and psychonauts.

This attitude is a little difficult to keep up, however, when I realise that so many of the authors of the mystical texts I've dug over the last few years make their living by being very efficient servants of the "corporate egregore" - the Globalised Free Market. One is a copywriter, whose website brags of (to put it in occultist terms) his efficient use of verbal and graphic "spells" to garner more attention and financial energy for the biggest, most bloated, most dehumanized corporate entities on the planet. Another is a "creative coach" - someone who will teach you how to get yourself noticed by corporate scumbags, and how to get them to make you an offer of big buck$$$ on your immortal soul. Another is... oh, hang on, this guy's website is not nearly as offensive as I remember it being, so forget I mentioned him (and read Join My Cult!, it's funny.)

But is that all it is? Is that their True Will? Is the end point of consciousness warrioring to be able to peddle your metaphorical ass to corporate pimps for the biggest $$$? And then do what with those $$$? Engage in leisure pursuits to build up your market-based ego, of course, because then how else will you get more $$$? Money, as conceived in the capitalist marketplace, is an addictive drug, and is getting a sustainable supply the best we can hope for?

The Sufis teach that the nafs (aka ego, aka "false self") is the trickiest little bugger, and will continually disguise itself as something else (God, the Greater Good, ascended Space Brothers, the Muse) in order to continue your slavery and addiction to it. Actually - connect the two paragraphs above. The individual ego is very, very much like money, in that (a) neither of them have any objective reality; (b) the capitalist system is defined by its elevation of both to the fundamental principle of life.

Karl Marx defined the glorious future day of communism as that day when "the condition for the free development of all is the free development of each"; or, to put it another way, when there is no more contradiction between the personal, the social, and the global. Is it just coincidence that this is how Aleister Crowley described the consequences of every man and woman following their True Will?

I'm going to spend, er, the next year and a day (how's about that?) attempting to cut meaningless bullshit out of my life so I have more time and energy to dismantle my ego and find my True Will. I gamble that this will go along 100% with being a more effective political activist, cultural theorist/propagandist, and artist. If this proves not to be true, it proves that Chaos Marxism is pretty useless and you should ignore it. Stick around.

ETA: ...what was I doing a year ago? Oh, that's the time when I first discovered the Islamic/Sufi traditions... and started talking big about writing a CM book. Huh. Every time I think I've got it All Sorted Out and I can start preaching to the masses, it's drawn to my attention that my personal practice doesn't really back up the Big Ideas I'm peddling. Perhaps there's an important lesson in that.

The mysteries of the organism

2010-04-09T12:11:00.000+12:00

This perception is 100% in accord with my own experience:

I'd like to look at a model of Reich's which I find has much explanatory power. He broke out character down into three "layers". The first of these is a "social" layer, a veneer of good behaviour and politeness with which we interact in the social world. If we see this layer as partially a product of armouring and learnt restraint, we can see that underneath it might lie a second layer — of frustration, anti-social impulses, rage and so on. Where Reich really showed his insight was that he posited another layer beneath this, a part of us which is open, loving and vulnerable. Reich argued that this "core" is naturally decent and moral. It is the suppression and suffocation of this layer, through the events of our birth and childhood that produces armouring. I only have to think about which emotions I have easiest "access" to, to see the validity of these ideas - real openness and tenderness seem much more affecting and come from a much more guarded place.

The rest of the article is well worth reading, keeping in mind at all times that Wilhelm Reich was a revolutionary socialist until the Stalinized Comintern hung him out to dry.

===

The central conceit of this blog is that revolutionary politics, psychology, occultism, cultural studies and artistic endeavour are all going to fail as long as they are isolated from each other. But I fear I may have ignored Rule One of the mystical mindset - as above, so below - in that I have elevated abstract theorising on these issues above actual practice in my daily life. (Which in itself violates one of CM's basic ground rules, viz. you are what you do - or as Karl Marx himself put it, "it's not sensible to evaluate someone based on their self-opinion".)

There will never be enough books for me to read or articles to write to create a Silver Bullet Theory, and it has been a species of intellectual arrogance for me to believe that it could be - and also a species of intellectual cowardice to decide that "nothing could be done" to test the theories in the here and now. (Which is of course precisely what I castigate the sectarian Marxists and anarchists for, opening me to the charge of hypocrisy.)

The middle of the middle

2010-03-30T12:31:00.000+13:00

The essence of any thought-reform process is:

1) break down the existing identity of the subject. "Identity" is defined here as "the list of things that the subject feels that they have to do, or like doing, and will become anxious if prevented from doing."
2) replace that list with one you made up.

I've noticed this before with Marxist political groups. They will go into great detail explaining that CBT won't make you happy, drugs won't make you happy, TV or sports or beating up black people won't make you happy, because capitalism is a stinking memetic shitpile which makes everyone unhappy as the basis of its existence. True, that.

But they leave unspoken what the next step of the process is. The next step is, you should join the Marxist group and learn to identify your own happiness with political activism. This isn't necessarily a problem - this is how all groups which actually have life-changing effects (eg Weight Watchers) work. And heavens knows we need political activists, and Leninists and Platformists agree that having them properly organised is a necessity.

But the problem is that, in small groups which aren't properly democratic (which is virtually all of them in the advanced Western countries), "political activism" means "conformity with the goals and priorities of the self-perpetuating leadership and the group culture it promotes". Simply put: "You must give up your ego! So we can replace it with one we prepared earlier!"

So beware - be very aware - of any guru, political, spiritual or psychological, who's telling you "what you're doing isn't going to make you happy", but who isn't going into detail about what they recommend you do instead. Chances are it will be "giving me money", or "selling the ridiculous, badly-produced paper we edit on street corners", or "working for pennies on our agricultural plantation until the day we tell you to drink the Flavor-Aid", or something similar.

Robert Fripp has said that "any act based on principle is a good one". Dr Javad Nurbaksh has said that hooking up with even an inferior, selfish, not-properly-enlightened Master is better than letting your ego continue to run rampant. I find it very difficult to accept these propositions, because they're very similar to L. Ron Hubbard's dictum that "you must let others control you before you can learn to control yourself", which is clearly a cynical command to induce people to sign themselves up as slaves.

But I am having great trouble figuring out what the alternative might be.