Choose Your Illusion

The radical therapist David Smail argues that Margaret Thatcher’s view that there’s no such thing as society, only individuals and their families, finds `an unacknowledged echo in almost all approaches to therapy’. Therapies such as Cognitive Behaviour Therapy combine a focus on early life (a kind of psychoanalysis-lite) with the self-help doctrine that individuals can become masters of their own destiny. Smail gives the immensely suggestive name magical voluntarism to the view that `with the expert help of your therapist or counsellor, you can change the world you are in the last analysis responsible for, so that it no longer cause you distress’. (source)

This is vital to the point of being a "missing link" in the Chaos Marxist argument. We are against magical voluntarism (related to "magical thinking" in the negative sense of the term) and for magick in the sense of "creating change in accordance with will" (or Intention, to use our preferred nomenclature). The latter encourages responsibility - the former encourages victim-blaming, a "just so" attitude to the status quo (the people in charge made the right wishes), and quietism on behalf of the oppressed (if you fail it's because you deserved it, you thought bad thoughts etc.)

Interesting that Buddhist meditation is vulgarly described as a mechanism of thought control, when the point is that one does quite the opposite - abdicates the attempt to control thought, but also prevents thought from controlling action.

The neoliberal abolition of the public sphere and its replacement with privatised exclusive fora - shopping malls, gated communities, internet forums where you can talk only with people who share your prejudices or fixed ideas - is in itself the abolition of scientific objectivity and its replacement with "buy your own insane delusionary reality on the Free Market place of Opiates of the Masses". We have watched with hilarity as the Republican Party in the US have crashed on the electoral rocks after making a collective decision over the last thirty years that "perception = reality". They really thought they could make themselves beat Obama by telling themselves over and over again that they were going to. It's not just a cynical lie they tell to control the people - this is what our ruling classes actually believe.

Of course, this is another argument for exogamy, in that You Can't Hide From Reality if you have any interest in affecting it, but I think OtL has covered that nicely in his recent radio show.

The counterculture be damned!

Attention Discordians, SubGenii, Goths, Greenies, Thelemites, Chaos Magicians and followers of R. A. Wilson! Your image of utopia has already been co-opted and commercialised. The ruling class took all your good ideas and now uses them to perpetuate its rule. The idea that the system can't handle "true individuals" ignoring social conformity, doing drugs and "fucking like dogs in the street", has been proved wrong by the process of late period consumer capitalism. They sold it back to you.

...our notion about what’s wrong with American life and how the figures responsible are to be confronted haven’t changed much in thirty years. Call it, for convenience, the “countercultural idea.”... As this half of the countercultural idea originated during the 1950s, it is appropriate that the evils of conformity are most conveniently summarized with images of 1950s suburban correctness. You know, that land of sedate music, sexual repression, deference to authority, Red Scares, and smiling white people standing politely in line to go to church.... The ways in which this system are to be resisted are equally well understood and agreed-upon. The Establishment demands homogeneity; we revolt by embracing diverse, individual lifestyles. [...]

Go to any poetry reading and you can see a string of junior Kerouacs go through the routine, upsetting cultural hierarchies by pushing themselves to the limit, straining for that gorgeous moment of original vice when Allen Ginsberg first read “Howl” in 1955 and the patriarchs of our fantasies recoiled in shock. ... But one hardly has to go to a poetry reading to see the countercultural idea acted out. Its frenzied ecstasies have long since become an official aesthetic of consumer society, a monotheme of mass as well as adversarial culture. [...]

Corporate America is not an oppressor but a sponsor of fun, provider of lifestyle accoutrements, facilitator of carnival, our slang-speaking partner in the quest for that ever-more apocalyptic orgasm. The countercultural idea has become capitalist orthodoxy, its hunger for transgression upon transgression now perfectly suited to an economic-cultural regime that runs on ever-faster cyclings of the new; its taste for self-fulfillment and its intolerance for the confines of tradition now permitting vast latitude in consuming practices and lifestyle experimentation. Consumerism is no longer about “conformity” but about “difference.” Advertising teaches us not in the ways of puritanical self-denial (a bizarre notion on the face of it), but in orgiastic, never-ending self-fulfillment. It counsels not rigid adherence to the tastes of the herd but vigilant and constantly updated individualism. We consume not to fit in, but to prove, on the surface at least, that we are rock `n’ roll rebels, each one of us as rule-breaking and hierarchy-defying as our heroes of the 60s, who now pitch cars, shoes, and beer.

Thomas Frank wrote the above in 1995 and very, very little has changed. Capitalism can make a profit from people fucking like dogs in the street, and use those profits to oppress people, just as long as those people keep going to work (or running their small businesses) once the hangovers wear off. This is what you get from dismissing the labour theory of value, and the consecutive belief that consumption choices are political. And that's why all those great "majickians" got jobs as advertising copywriters, why Grant Morrison now writes superhero comics, and they probably think that that's liberation.

Sorry if I seem too combative, but I was always an "outsider" to the great counterculture of the 90's and early Aughties. I didn't get invited to those parties, I couldn't afford those clothes or books, I wasn't offered those good drugs. I was the person who got rejected by the cool mainstream kids AND the cool alternative kids. So it's a little bit schadenfreudlich to see what happened.

Oh.

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.

One face says terrorise, the other benevolise

The Murdoch media empire, despite the usual right-wing bias of its news outlets, has not leant the use of its powerful ideological cannons to the anti-Avatar campaign for a very sound commercial reason. 20th Century Fox, which is part of the Murdoch mega-corporation News Corp, is raking in hundreds of millions of dollars in profits from the film, and envisages that it will derive hundreds of millions more from the inevitable sequel. Further, the astounding success of Avatar is a commercial vindication of the advances in technology which were gained by means of the many millions of dollars invested in its production, opening up the prospect of a revival in the profits of the US-dominated global entertainment industry.

(source)

The corporate egregore is capable of saying contradictory things at the same time. It can do this because its constituent parts are independent from, even hermetically sealed from, one another. Thus it can maximise profit, by marketing two opposite "flavours" of ideology at the same time, at the long-term expense of exacerbating the contradictions in its own noosphere. As Michael Moore says, the capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with. The main difference is of course people are encouraged to act on the memes of terror, fear and hatred (in voting and protesting), and to channel the anti-imperialist, liberatory memes into buying consumer goods, going to see movies, and in extreme cases, new lifestyles/religions. (WARNING: link contains massive stupidity and point-missing.) So if you're sold the rope, you won't think of actually using it - probably you'll just take it home, stroke it and imagine using it.

Some leftists have suggested leafleting screenings of Avatar along the lines of "This movie is REAL! Except that the Na'vi are really called "Iraqis" and they're sitting on oil, not Unobtanium!" I'm really not sure this will work, mainly because the Na'vi belief system is fluffy, friendly neo-paganism, exactly the opposite from the Western media image of Islam. But it really won't work because the mass media consciousness doesn't really work with analogy - it can accept things literally, or not at all. Rendering people incapable of understanding analogies was one of the principles of Newspeak, remember.