Archontism

The classy word in the title is coined by one Tommy P. Cowan in an article on the works of famous Scientologist, junkie and wife-killer William S. Burroughs, and he defines it thus:

Archontism is a current of thought grounded in a sort of “negative epistemology” that sees human existence as controlled by ‘archons,’ or agentified barriers built into the natural world in order to block the paths to psychic transcendence.

This is a step up above normal "conspiracy theory" - that your life is fucked up by a hidden cabal of bad guys - in that the archons are, in the glorious phrasing of the Church of the SubGenius, "not even human [but] shambling, unbelievable, unmentionable, unthinkable THINGS". In the Western tradition, this is most commonly associated with Gnosticism, and certainly that's the main vibe which comes out of all those great "modern gnostic" artworks that came out of the late 90s: Dark City, The Matrix, The Invisibles.

An earlier example of this kind of fiction is The Mind Parasites by Colin 
Wilson. Much like many of the works of one of Wilson's sources, Mr Racist Recluse of Providence, Mind Parasites is not well written, far from it, but interesting and fun because of the ideas it includes. Brief plot: a scientist discovers that some immaterial alien beasties are holding humanity's psychic evolution back and causing mass suicides. He defeats the beasties using only Husserl's phenomenology (!!!) which gives him spooky superpowers - telepathy, telekenesis and all-round super-geniusdom, which he can then teach to others.

It is not a coincidence that this book came out in 1967 at about the time the hippies started getting into Scientology, and those are about the kind of powers that LRH promised his fan club. Scientology is not strictly "archontic", because (to very briefly summarise) in their mythology, we weren't fucked up by monsters, we fucked ourselves up. But it appealed to people who read stories like The Mind Parasites and wanted to believe that kind of thing could actually happen.

This reminds me very strongly that JRR Tolkien converted CS Lewis back to Christianity (which he had rejected in reaction to his tight-ass Ulster Protestant upbringing) by telling him that the life of Jesus Christ was just like all those stories of sacrifice and redemption that he loved in mythology and legendry, only it really happened. The point of the story is that people will believe anything, and just because we want to believe doesn't make it true. That way lies a huge waste of time or becoming someone's puppet or slave. "We preferred to live in Ron's fantasy than boring reality" - some Sea Org veteran

As it happens, my working reality-tunnel is that the superstructure of the capitalist mode of production (or, indeed, all class societies) is the closest thing you can get to an actual "archontic system". I suppose it's fine to believe that all those stories are just metaphors for what you really believe in, like CS Lewis would argue that those dying-and-rising-god stories were planted by YHWH to get people ready for Jesus. So maybe all those people who think Marxism is Gnosticism with the serial numbers filed off were right. Only in practice can it be worked out which is the map, and which is the territory, because the people who confuse the two will probably end up believing something really stupid, like a shitposter on 8chan is a timetraveller.

Reiteration, or: Back to politics

Principle number one of Chaos Marxism is that, when understood properly, revolutionary Marxism proposes a reform of consciousness on a collective, social and planetary scale that transpersonal psychology / mysticism / magick proposes on the individual or small-group scale; and that a way of understanding that makes these two horses run as a team is a vital step in the struggle for the liberation of this species. But don't take my word for it; read a couple of recent articles by people on the cutting end of Marxist thought:

Instead of putting emphasis on introducing theory into the workers’ movement, in worrying especially about theoretical formation, we ought to be very creative in taking advantage of or creating situations that allow people to learn through practice. - Marta Harnecker

Real, liberatory reform of consciousness can't happen on an intellectual, book-learning level alone - generations of Gnostics and Sufis would agree with Rosa Luxemburg, who said "You cannot learn everything from pamphlets, it is necessary to carry out a process of learning through practice." The reason Marxism has been slowly dying for seventy years or more is that the cutting intellectual wave was Trotskyism, a tradition which made up for practical impotence by building ever more elaborate fantasy theoretical structures. (Absolutely no disrespect to Lev Davidovitch intended, only to his idiotic acolytes.)

Marxists have to learn that a rationalist, scientific thought structure cannot understand, let alone resolve, deep psychological barriers based on a lifetime of living in the heart of the MACHINE. Sure, people change for the better during revolutions, but Petrograd 1917 didn't make the entire working class enlightened overnight - and it would be even worse now that corporate propaganda is so much more efficient and persuasive, as Michael Löwy understands:

How to distinguish the authentic from the artificial, false and makeshift needs? The last ones are induced by mental manipulation, i.e. advertisement. The advertisement system has invaded all spheres of human life in modern capitalist societies : not only nourishment and clothing, but sports, culture, religion and politics are shaped according to its rules. It has invaded our streets, mail boxes, TV-screens, newspapers, landscapes, in a permanent, aggressive and insidious way, and it decisively contributes to habits of conspicuous and compulsive consumption. Moreover, it wastes an astronomic amount of oil, electricity, labor time, paper, chemicals, and other raw materials - all paid by the consumers - in a branch of "production" which is not only useless, from a human viewpoint, but directly in contradiction with real social needs. While advertisement is an indispensable dimension of the capitalist market economy, it would have no place in a society in transition to socialism, where it would be replaced by information on goods and services provided by consumer associations.

Again - any Sufi could tell you the difference between the needs, wants and compulsive desires of the false self, the Ego, the "special and unique snowflake" which is in fact an extension of THE MACHINE, of the memetic apparatus of control and manipulation; and the real longings of the body and soul, which are an extension of God-However-Defined. Imagine what might be possible in a world where the social forces of culture and persuasion were under the democratic control of enlightened beings, as the spiritual master brings his/her ego under the control of the more holy parts of the personal. Imagine if the Demiurge repented and learned to serve Sophia. As below, so above, in spades.

But conversely, the faithful and the psychonauts have to understand that capitalism as a concrete set of social relations, and the ideology/mythology/culture/meme complex associated therewith, pretty much ensures that most of the planet will remain in ignorance, squalor and self-hatred when they don't have to. Elitism is dead. In previous eras there might have been an argument that only a minority could achieve enlightenment or altered states. And that was because there was a limit to how many people could have that much leisure time and freedom from the needs of biological existence. Spiritual elitism is no longer needed for exactly the same reason that poverty, disease and lack of education are no longer needed. Anyone who tells you that "the True Path" is only open to a special minority of people, and most people can only hope for being happy, well-fed animals or slaves at best, is not your friend, or the friend of humanity, no matter how much else they might have going for them.

The great paradox, or contradiction of modern capitalism, is that it has memetically enslaved us at precisely the same time that it has created all the physical requirements for our total liberation as a species, or even as a biosphere. There is really nothing holding us back now but "the subjective factor" - our mental chains. One huge problem is that existing radical groups, at least in the Western quasi-democracies, are treating their politics as a religion or a lifestyle. The absolute last thing they would want was to leave their identity as "rebels and outcasts" behind, and join hands with a victorious mass movement.

I am not sure that I have anything original to add to this theoretical mix. My job is probably just to point out the connections, and then see what people (including me) can make of them in practice. Is there even anything that CM can offer to actual political practice? Or is it just "transpersonal psychology and spirituality for dialectical materialists", or an argument for gnostics to take Marxism seriously?

A shout-out to Bishop Langley

I've been reading some good Gnostic-Christian material recently, which seems to complement the insights of my recent work in the Sufi tradition quite well. Especially good is this thing from a Gnostic Monsignor in Canada, which replicates the CM insight that if people don't believe in Gods, they might believe in anything:

1) The God you grew up with doesn't exist. 2) God exists. Duh. You just need to think bigger. 3) If you don't have stories with God in them, you go crazy.

I should note that the author also makes his living from coaching creatives, and if you have $1500 to throw around perhaps you should try it. However, I must say that one of my usual rants about "the occultism of small businessmen" is on the tip of my tongue - especially since, if you look at the material with knowledge of the author's vocation, you can see that this coaching is very like a mystical initiation into the Greater Work as we have defined it here. Does "The Work" automatically lose its value when you try to make a living from it? The work of Robert Fripp would suggest the answer is "no, but suddenly 99.9% of your time and energy gets tied up with bullshit, so best to be an amateur unless you have no choice". (As the Threshold Society says: "give freely".)