Why Scienos are nuts

Dianetics - the basis of Scientology and associated thoughtsystems - is at base an abreactive therapy. I quote from Wikipedia on "abreaction":

Abreaction is a psychoanalytical term for reliving an experience in order to purge it of its emotional excesses; a type of catharsis. Sometimes it is a method of becoming conscious of repressed traumatic events.

Early in his career, psychoanalyst Carl Jung expressed interest in abreaction, or what he referred to as "trauma theory", but later found it had limitations concerning the treatment of neurosis. Jung stated that: "though traumata of clearly aetiological significance were occasionally present, the majority of them appeared very improbable. Many traumata were so unimportant, even so normal, that they could be regarded at most as a pretext for the neurosis. But what especially aroused my criticism was the fact that not a few traumata were simply inventions of fantasy and had never happened at all".

Emphasis added above. The real problem with Dianetic therapy (apart from the fact that the E-meter is bullshit) is that the "pre-clear" (subject) is specifically told that any thought pictures which come into their mind during the therapy are "real for them". There is no attempt to distinguish something that actually happened from something they made up. It is absolutely unsurprising at that point that Dianetic patients started "remembering" insane shit from past lives in "space-opera" civilisations. I believe that Hubbard did this to himself. Through misuse of a reasonably valid psychic process (which he knocked off from Crowley via Jack Parsons) he actually started believing, for example, that he could remember his mother engramming him up by badmouthing him in the womb, or attempting to abort him with knitting needles. Eventually, it seems he quite serionsly believed in Xenu.

The sad thing is that even the "Freezone" Scientologists, some of whom are good, sincere people, have convinced themselves of cosmologies which look very much like schizophrenic ravings, because they started treating weird things they saw in their mind as real - just as Elron told them too. Case in point: one of the more famous Freezoners teaches in his "Scientology 101" book to reconstruct past lives by just making something up and then assuming that it's true. Witness where this leads - the same writer's advanced textbook contains a cosmology which reads like a combination of schizophrenic fugue and childhood nightmares. It's worth reading for the sheer "WTF?" factor - that someone who appears to be a calm, rational and pleasant person has programmed himself into believing this stuff. (A representative sample.)

In short: Dianetics and thence Scientology implants its practitioners, by repetition, with a solipsistic worldview, where images in the head are always real. If you take it far enough you do end up in a schizophrenic-style cosmology, where increasingly bizarre images are run together in a pattern which doesn't make any real-world sense. This reminds me of that scene in Voyage of the Dawn Treader with "the land where dreams come true". Not somewhere I'd want to go.

Perhaps the greatest irony is that perhaps mainstream Scientology actually *protects* its poor enslaved dupes from total insanity, by imposing an exterior limit on where someone's "research" into crazy internal universes can go. The Freezoners have no limit and often end up in places which make the Xenu story look plausible. This would of course explain why the Freezone is so schismatic - on one hand each individual is doing "research" into completely fraudulent internal universes, while on the other hand pretending to be part of a community of scientific researchers seeking reproducible results. Of course no two schizoid delusions are going to be congruent.

Hey, there's a political message in that - solipsism, and other "ideas are real" thought systems, lead to either total anarchic fragmentation of the community, or imposition from above of a True Way. No place for democracy and collective reality-tunnel-formation except in a materialist thoughtsystem.

One point where I believe UCP has kicked off its Scieno heritage is that it asks you to imagine things that *might* be real, rather than telling you they necessarily are. It probably won't cure false memories but it shouldn't impose any that weren't already there.

UCP: A basic banishing process

The "Universal Conscious Process" was invented by a former Scientologist attempting to turn what he found of value on that deplorable mind-control cult into a useful, free self analysis / meditation tool. I have used it myself on and off for approximately five years and have found it extremely effective in breaking down mental inhibitions in certain areas.

The process as originally conceived is described in full (and slightly batshit) detail by its founder here. A stripped down version for those with no tolerance for residual LRonisms:

0) Visualise, in as full detail as possible, your current situation.
1) Visualise, in as full detail as possible, a different possible (or impossible) situation.
2) Compare 1) to 0).
3) Visualise, in as full detail as possible, a situation from your memory.
4) Compare 3) to 0).
5) Repeat from step 1, until you perceive "your current situation" as something different than when you started.
6) If at any stage the process begins to bring up unpleasant associations, visualise, in as full detail as possible, when you felt like that before. Compare that to your starting point. Then start again from 1).

I would be intrigued by what kind of results anyone else out there gets with this.

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My schedule of "psychic exercise" for the next little while: alternate use of this ritual with a stripped down version of the Holy Guardian Angel ritual from Crowley's Liber Samekh. In other words: rooting through the garbage at the base of my existing personality, alternating with trying to short-circuit that personality altogether. I won't give details on the latter as yet until I can give some results.

As with all exercises, you get the most benefit if you do it regularly. Taking a tip from this highly successful behaviour-modification ritual society, I've created a token system to reward myself for regular effort.

A personal pop-psych manifesto

To focus my own thoughts for the next little while, and also to give some suggestions to some of our readers who feel the need to step up to the level of tinkering with their own psyche - aka "metaprogramming"...

I am a conscious body existing in a physical world.

The only sources of information which my consciousness gets about that world are electrochemical sensations produced by my body. Filters and conditioned processes in my subconscious mediate the information which comes from my five senses before it gets to my conscious mind.

My body's emotional reactions and inhibitions are in turn produced by electrochemical reactions based on these mediated signals. If I feel pain, or fear, or sorrow, it is because my subconscious mind has instructed my body to release the appropriate chemicals. (I'm pretty sure that once, in a very stressful situation, I actually physically felt my adrenal gland release the appropriate fight-or-flight chemicals.)

To survive in this world, I have developed automatic psychic processes to keep me safe and functional. Some of these are simply those which develop naturally as a result of having to live under capitalism (aka "bourgeois ideology"). Others I came up with myself in order to deal with specific problems which affected me growing up.

Mistaking the signals fed through my subconscious filters for objective reality limits my effectiveness and damages my psychic health. I can not tell what's really going on (and make appropriate plans) if my subconscious demands that I do X or Y without thinking, or insists on telling me that something in the real world is actually something else entirely, or that certain helpful kinds of behaviour are impossible or "too much work". It is very difficult to tell the difference, precisely because these functions are automatic, and are to some degree necessary for the "ego" and rational thought to be possible. (In particular, fear/avoidance procedures restrict my freedom of action and choice something terrible.)

I want to only have those automatic processes which benefit me. I want to fuse my reason and my physical instincts to eliminate conditioning which no longer benefits me. I want my subconscious filters to give me input which enables me to change physical reality, not hide from it. I want to eliminate all subconscious programming that impedes or blocks rational thought and conscious action on any level.

The big problem is that in this culture unconsciousness is more or less demanded - simply because life becomes much more difficult if you actually have to think about things, if your consciousness is not rigorously compressed into immediate questions of obeying orders, earning money, consuming, fucking, etc. In this sense, this kind of mental reprogramming is in itself a political act - or at least the precondition of effective political action.

The only way you can bring the subconscious processes into view is analysis (although many also trumpet the effectiveness of psychotropics). Rational analysis, comparing your image of the present with images of past and present. If they look too much like one another, or too different, you may well be coming up against conditioning. You can generally tell an insane idea because it doesn't change depending on circumstances.

Therefore, the process consists of taking the time to examine all my conditioned reflexes; and if they seem counterproductive, to disestablish them by counter-conditioning. This is what we call a "banishing" or an "exorcism" in magical jargon - and it will take practice, not just symbolic actions. Only by action is the subconscious reprogrammed.

The other side of the coin is to create a reality tunnel which is more appropriate for my purposes. I think you can pretty much choose to live in whatever ideology you feel like - *given that* it can cope with whatever input from the real world it comes across, either by reacting to it or censoring it out of existence. (When the real world breaks your reality tunnel, I think that's what's called a "psychotic break".) The reality tunnel I'm looking for it for myself will be one that maximises my effectiveness in causing change-in-accordance-with-will in the real, physical, material world.

(Note: I will rewrite this as and when necessary.)

Mad Larry sometimes gets it right

It was, incidentally, S Club Seven who made it clear what's wrong with engineered pop: it works like Stalinism, which means it's dull by definition.

(Who's Mad Larry, I hear you ask?)

Memetics 101

Consciousness is changed via practice - you are what you do. "Brainwashing" the passive brain is impossible. The most effective advertising does not say "Brand X has qualities Y and Z"; instead, it presents a meme which associates X with Y and Z and leaves it up to the recipients to connect the dots. All the best "cult" literature, art and popular narrative - the most virally infective memes, to use another metaphor - require that the readers/viewers/listeners do some work to make some sense of what they are given.

For some years I have practiced - on and off - a meditative/cognitive-self-help practice known as UCP. It can be boiled down to systematically comparing present reality to places in your memory and your imagination. Once again, the crucial part is to compare and contrast - do some mental work - rather than to just passively observe.

So, Rule One for wannabe memetic engineers: leave some holes in your propaganda. Leave it to the recipients to make the connections that you are pointing towards. This opens the possibility of misinterpretation, but it ensures that it will actually get a hook into the cognitive processes of the target audience.

Rule Two would, of course, be leave it open source - "proprietary" belief systems only work in a capitalist system where their propagators have a truckload of money to replicate their ideas via brute force. On the other hand, if you've got no money, you have to attract collaborators, not employees. Example: Lovecraft not only incorporated other's ideas (Carcosa, Hastur etc.) into his mythos, but actively encouraged others to join in - hence the Cthulhu Mythos has grown virally. (I think perhaps Larry Miles is trying to do something similar with Faction Paradox.)

Rule Three, as Uncle Al knew, is of course invoke often.

More on the relation between ethics and reality

James Curcio, meet Chris Harman:

Moral concepts are not arbitrary concepts made up by or imposed on individuals. They are social products. They assert a view of what human beings should do if a society is to continue functioning so as to satisfy the needs of its members. To be ‘good’ is to behave socially in certain ways (or at least not to ‘misbehave’).In a stable, cohesive society which provides clear benefits to all its participants, what is involved is unproblematic. [...]

But things change with the move from such primitive communist societies to class societies. Then contradictory notions of what is ‘good’ arise. People are torn between contradictory moral codes. This, for instance, is where the power of the ancient Greek tragedy comes from—to abide by an old code is to infringe a new one. In the process moral codes of any sort can come to seem arbitrary as different social groups counterpose their codes to each other. Yet the very fact that they can argue over what is ‘good’ means that they all recognise, implicitly, that some code is necessary for social living to continue. Arguments over what is ‘good’ rest on arguments about reality, even if they seem not too. ‘Ought’ does rely on arguments about what ‘is’.

The central parameters within which these arguments take place are class ones. A class which fights to preserve existing society has one set of notions about what is necessary to keep society going, and attempts to impose on people the moral notions that correspond to this. It has to portray the values it propagates as the values necessary for society as a whole, what is good for itself as absolutely ‘good’. By contrast, a class which feels its needs are not met and presses for society to be reconstituted on a different basis necessarily begins to advance different interpretations of moral notions. The contradictory interpretations become most intense when society enters deep economic and social crises, in which ‘things cannot continue in the old way.’

The Iraqi resistance show us how it's done

The corporate media of the Empire have no clue what to do about a fantastic display of concrete media-shamanism by (some sections of) the Iraqi resistance. The most interesting bit:

Most large-scale attacks on U.S. forces are now filmed, often from multiple camera angles, and with high-resolution cameras. The footage is slickly edited into dramatic narratives: quick-cut images of Humvees exploding or U.S. soldiers being felled by snipers are set to inspiring religious soundtracks or chanting, which lends them a triumphal feel. In some cases, U.S. officials believe, insurgents attack American forces primarily to generate fresh footage.

“Don't blame the media - become the media". Quite. No disrespect to that guy in GenHex who conducted the lovewar against Fox News, but this shit is actually working. Everyone learn - especially the bit about how they are moving from action to memetics, from the Real to the Imaginary/Symbolic. So many of we pampered western decadents seem to think that you go the other way, and - to quote Yoda - THAT IS WHY YOU FAIL.

Back from a holiday on a subtropical island with all kinds of big ideas. A reasonably mainstream academic article, applying Chomsky's "propaganda model" to popular novels of the turn of the 19th century. Also: serious thoughts about how historical shamanistic practices relate to modern media-cults. Case in point: is there really much difference between wearing the mask of Dionysus for a religious drama, or dressing up as Frank'N'Furter for a Rocky Horry Picture Show audience-participation ritual? Perhaps I show my age with that example and should have been referencing Full Metal Alchemist cosplay. Actually, that's a very good point - the cult of Dionysus lasted a thousand years and more. RHPS is considered a Methuselah among modern media cults and it's only just gone thirty. Only freakin' Star Trek is older, and don't get me going on that. (Mental note: punch Shatner.)

She is a new fascination, the cold face of love

"Now, what I've yet to puzzle out, myself, is if there is any connection at all between ethics and reality...” - Agent 139. Trotsky had an answer to that one, guys.

Yes, I got Join my cult! for Christmas. I believe that this book is after me. The number of synchronicities in the first five chapters alone just about blew my brains out (after the reference to ELP I was looking over my shoulder wondering whether someone had "customised" my copy). It certainly solidified a lot of the ideas that I've been having previously, but have been too busy writing-for-publication to put in this blog.

I sometimes feel, however, like Robert Putney Drake in Illuminatus! - wondering when the All-Seeing Eye will look in my direction. Maybe I have to lob a grenade into a fast-food outlet or something. (Note to the secret services: no, I have no actual intention of doing this.)

In any case, a little teaser for you: where I'm coming from, magic has to be concrete to work. Truth is always concrete. Ideas and memes are only useful at all when they lead to action which changes the concrete. Gematria doesn't work for me, since letters are not concrete. Sound is concrete. As I am a musician, this is very convenient. As mentioned below, I'm trying to rewrite Crowley's Augeoides ritual accordingly.

The mental health industry: a Marxist critique

I know that this is generally more my co-blogger's speed, but this article takes a good, critical Marxist look at Cognitive Behaviour Therapy - a practice which I consider just another kind of "corporate magic", a metaprogramming technique designed by our masters which makes us functional but doesn't make us well.

A teaser

What I really want to do is create a network of cultural activists. Not cultural analysts, but people who apply theory to practice and make things happen in the memetic sphere. This would have websites, publications, and structures for debate and co-ordinating action.

The Situationist International with better politics and less expulsion-happy, perhaps.

I will write much more on this when I get back from this conference.

just popping in

Something that my coblogger talkingabouttrees (almost wrote "talking to trees" there - no, I am not working with Charles Windsor) might find interesting - the Church of the SubGenius describes the "differently saned" in ways which replicate marxist insights about how ideology is all-persuasive but nigh-invisible in this culture.

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Posting delayed for a while - I have an academic paper to write from scratch in eight days. Current research centres around Crowley's Liber Samekh and whether it can be boiled down for reliable use by people who don't have an emotional attachment to the pseudo-Egyptian stuff.

The mashup and the filk

As materialist cultural analysts and activists, we start from the following principles:

- culture and ideas are real physical things. They can influence the physical world in the sense that they provoke certain kinds of behaviour.
- influential cultural artefacts, ideas, memes, etc. will often start with something familiar to the audience, but offer a "new twist" on it.

I suggest that the mashup (two or more recorded pieces of music mixed together to form a new variation), and the filk (new words of humorous commentary set to a popular tune) are quintessential memetic devices in this regard. The filk is probably as old as song itself, and simply involves "piggybacking" original content onto an existing widely-spread meme. The mashup, on the other hand, is a specifically modern form - layering two widely-spread memes on top of one another, revealing something brand new. The classical composer Charles Ives was doing this in the 1930s, before recording technology had evolved to the point where such things can be done effortlessly, and digitally.

The vital point about about filks and mashups: they're both illegal, and therefore free. Here's the paradox: in modern information technology, production and distribution is totally free. The only reason why all music, computer programmes, stories and other information goods aren't free in our modern age is that copyright law "encloses" them so that they remain profitable for the corporates. The mashup laughs in the face of copyright law - therefore, there is no problem with finding as many of them as you like online, free of charge. (I can particularly recommend two really badass ones: Enya's "Orinoco Flow" vs. Prodigy's "Smack my Bitch Up", and Van Halen's "Jump" vs. The Supreme's "Stop in The Name Of Love".) The filk is a greyer area, legally - probably more analogous to fan-fiction. It's not illegal, but you can't profit from it. Therefore there are no artificial barriers to its expansion.

I wonder how many powerful memetic technologies can be described metaphorically as "mashups" or "filks". I also note that, if you really want to use these forms, you have to give up pretensions to "original creativity" - a concept which actually only evolved at the same time as "intellectual property rights" and for the same, outmoded reason (private profit).

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In other news: another nail in the coffin of techno-utopianism. Holy shit we need a revolution to stop these pieces of crap enclosing any commons that we carve out, on any plane of reality whatsoever. New inventions will not do the job for us. And no, staying home and beating off over scribbles does not count as a revolution (although it can certainly be part of a complete breakfast, as the saying goes).

Spoiling the surprise

Hyperstition: a fiction that makes itself real. Example: H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos - after the ideas had been popularised in fiction, people decided to bring the Necronomicon (crappy Mysticism 101 versions of it, anyway) into existence and start worshipping the slimy, tentacular Elder Gods, for what reason I'm sure I'll never understand. Another example: Karl Marx's proletariat as a class-for-itself - the idea that industrial workers were capable of actually taking over the world - came into glorious life for just a few years in Russia. (Born 1917, certainly dead by 1928.)

I think it's one of the errors of vulgar magicians to just believe you can pick a meme, any meme, at random and use psyche-fixing technology to just bring it into existence. Doesn't work like that. It has to have resonance in the actually existing real world, physical and political. (To use an IT metaphor: you can screw around with the software all the time but it won't change the hardware - although it can put it to different uses.) People started worshipping Cthulhu et al - as far as I can tell - who would have been Satanists before Satan stopped being scary and devolved to a mere symbol of having a good time all of the time. The content of the Cthulhu meme is pure alien terror - and when it gets worn out through overuse, something worse will come along. (I sometimes wonder when nerds will legitimately start summoning Sadako from Ringu. That would be at least funny.)

A successful memetic operation will work backwards in time - in other words, pick a possible future, and attempt to make it a real present. Dialectical materialism is the process of seeing which futures are possible, based on the contradictions of the present, and what kind of pressure on what kind of points right now will bring about which future. Believing that there is change, that the future will be more than the present with faster cars and smellier air, is in fact a revolutionary act in itself.

Engels said that the struggle had to be carried on on three levels at once: industrial, political and ideological. This seems intriguingly similar to - although predating! - Freud's schema of id, ego and super-ego; or perhaps even Lacan's three "registers", the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic. In modern capitalism, industry (not just metalbashing, but mass-production on the basis of wage labour in all its forms) is a dirty, grotty, disavowed area which we are encouraged not to think about at all, but nonetheless is what keeps the whole system physically running. Like the id or the Real. The ideological level is the level of the abstract, of concepts, of memes; the political level is where reality and will interface. Since the industrial in the last instance determines everything, any real fundamental change must lead to real fundamental change in that very area which society - and pretty much every schema of magic I know of - doesn't want you to look at.

For we Chaos Marxists, we are carrying on a kind of "alchemy" on the ideological plane. But to be powerful and real, the thought-forms and concepts we are playing with must original on one of the "lower levels", and return to it. The most powerful magic of all is what causes change on the level of the subconscious mind; on the level of Industry; on the level of the reality which doesn't go away when we stop believing in it.

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Speaking of Ringu - I think that mythos is so powerful because it is based on what would happen if the first rule of our culture's control techniques - that perception = reality - were actually true. I watched the American version (The Ring) first, and for me the first legitimately terrifying thing in that movie - prefiguring the grand finale - was when Naomi Watts plucks a fly off the TV screen and thus smashes the division between image and reality.

We are reassured from our childhood that image is *not* reality - "it's just a story, it's not real", etc. But then the ideology which rules modern capitalism is precisely that perception is the same thing as reality. So much of the ideological effect on this culture relies on what Slavoj Zizek calls that "...and yet..." effect. I know on an intellectual level that X is bullshit, but I act like it's real and therefore it becomes real for me at least. The control techniques of modern capitalism are based on making people react to what they "see" in the media as if it were real. Watch Ringu and realise what it would mean if that were actually true.

Conversely - this formula is behind what Antonio Gramsci said about "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will". I know that it's very unlikely that we will smash the capitalist order in my lifetime, but if I damn well act like it is going to happen, then I could make it happen.

If I can't jump and dance to loud music, it's not my revolution

From a memetic point of view, extremely interesting that the images in the media coverage of the uprising/riots in Tonga focus on the property damage - and give coded hints that the rioters are OMG racists - but we don't see these people "jumping and dancing to loud music". Probably because the latter is what these people are really scared of.

The mass media like us to think that a "revolution" is when a bunch of intellectuals get a big budget from the CIA to hire Black Memetic Engineers (aka a PR firm) to summon the masses into huge, orderly and docile mass rallies, until a government which the USA doesn't like quits and goes into exile. You can tell these "astroturf revolutions" by the way that they are memetically branded with a cute, non-threatening aromatic-plant coded name (Orange, Cedar, Rose, Tulip etc). The last thing that they want is an actual godsdammed Festival of the Oppressed. People don't wear nice colour coded symbols in a real revolution. They get drunk and smash shit up and in all other ways go over the top. A real uprising-that-might-turn-into-a-revolution is nasty, messy and immensely liberating - a Mass of Chaos on a truly mass scale.

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

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In other news, for those who don't know, the comics writer Grant Morrison is something of a guru for the pop-occultist crowd, and he definitely has some challenging ideas (google "hyperstition" and see what happens). But I'm afraid that for someone who talks about changing the world, this is a pretty shitting thing to say:

Asked about the current state of the world, particularly the war in Iraq, Mr. Morrison offered, “perhaps it’s just an essential part of the system, as horrible as that may seem.” He wasn’t particularly interested in being part of any active anti-war movement, and noted that in his previous experience, a number of those people only seemed to be “interested in meeting up with the police.”

Well, of course it's an essential part of the system, dingbat. That's why I'm in the business of changing the system - and I thought you were too. Or does the idea of changing the world seem less important when you're earning big money? The Occultism of Small Businessmen raises its head again - fifth-dimensional aliens, yes, threatening my stock option? Well that's just going a little too far. I wonder whether he's changed his mind in the last few years since the anti-war movement became "safe" for the establishment.

Belief follows practice

See, I remember Discordianism, so I predict that the ultimate irony is going to be in 15 years when, given the resilience of the religious impluse in the human mind, many of the people who use the Flying Spaghetti Monster as purely a giddy way of scoffing at traditional religionists will find, to their surprise, that they have become *sincere* Pastafarians.

- isntitironic@journalfen.net

The above comment encapsulates the central secret of all politics, magic, psychology, mass-marketing, etc. I am reminded in this context of the history of my personal favourite mindcontrol cult. SubGenius started as a mockery of batshit religion, in particular fundamentalist Christianity and Scientology. It took self-evidently ridiculous dogma and proceeded to sell it successfully (to a niche market) using exactly the same "sales techniques" (i.e. applied metapsychology / magic) as the aforementioned cults - preaching as performance art, "artwork" which reused and "subverted" powerful commercial memes, etc. Remember that "Bob" was originally clipart from that most powerful of commercial grimoires, the Liber Paginarum Fulvarum.

The niche market, as Ivan Stang said himself was the kind of person who "catches themselves starting to fall for smooth-sounding lies all the time" - i.e. exactly the kind of open-minded and unconventional person who would have joined a cult if their native intelligence didn't get in the way. Now, twenty-six years later, the founders of SubGenius are disturbed that they were too successful and people ended up believing the "self-evident garbage" - to the point where people were actually upset when the Saucers of the Sex Goddesses didn't put an end to the world on 5 July 1998.

This just goes to show that you can't wake people up with the technology used to put people to sleep. The technology does not short-circuit itself just because what it's conveying has nothing to do with reality. Some fundamentalist Christians in the US, for example, seem to believe that Hezbollah now has Saddam's WMD - even long after their masters had given up on trying to push the lie that the WMD ever existed. To use Situationist jargon, détournement which remains on the symbolic can always be recuperated. The only thing which really can dissolve all magic spells whatsoever is the self-activity of the masses.

(Another secret is: the main indication that the future will be different from the present is that the present is different from the past. Be extremely suspicious of anyone who uses the word "always" or "naturally" in this context.)

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A question. Have these guys ever heard of this?? Or vice-versa?

The occultism of small businessmen

A kindly contributor known as "thistle" has made an extremely intelligent comment to Liber MCMXVII, that you really should all check out. I want to deal with one point s/he made here so that it doesn't get missed. Among other things, s/he states:

There is nothing in the libertarian philosophy which inherently guards against the fascist impulse except for wishful thinking.

There is a very fucked-up place where anarchism, libertarianism and fascism combine. That sounds weird to someone who doesn't understand what Marxism means by "petty-bourgeois ideology" - or, to put it another way, the reality-tunnel of the small businessman (and I use the masculine form advisedly). This is the idealisation of the status of the self-employed craftsman or producer, making a modest profit, answering to no master, hating the evil corporates who wish to enslave him as much as he hates the majority of people for being part of that very corporate collective.

Some of these bold memetic warriors and whatnot out there talk a good game about having lost their ego or destabilised their own reality tunnel or whatever, but that very basic view of the world - that the life of the small independent artisan or trader is the ideal - is never challenged. This would probably be due to the fact that most of them are artists, writers or other kinds of creative types, and the only model provided for success in this culture is the small business model. It is a regrettable species of blindness that so many of these people don't see that this is part of the problem. For a start, it writes off as "part of the problem" the vast majority of the population of the western world who are wage-slaves to these corporates.

The problem is that the utopia desired by these people - a world of tiny independent petty capitalists trading with each other on terms of equality - is about as possible as unscrambling an egg is possible. That phase of history has already gone. The corporates ate it. You can't play the film of history backwards. How are you going to break up Microsoft, Exxon, the IMF etc. to fit your mutualist fantasies? Our modern technological/industrial culture only works on the basis of worldwide co-operation and division of labour. I don't share the nostalgia for the early 19th century - what our friend "thistle" calls "romantic occultism" - that so many of these people seem to have. I want to jump-cut direct to the nasty, fun-loving remote future.

There is no future for small, independent capitalism. The only way to defeat the corporates is to go through them. A self-conscious worldwide working class could use the structures of co-operation built by globalised capitalism for good, rather than evil. But that means giving up on methodological individualism. It means accepting that the path to greater human power and liberation lies in co-operation and building community, not in an autistic retreat to an ego-ideal that has been out of date since at least 1848.

As much as I love Robert Anton Wilson as an iconoclast and a good bloke, his politics as contained in his late 70's early 80's books show a disturbing love for the same kind of "third way", petty-bourgeois, Social-Credit-meets-techno-utopian politics which have been adopted these days by "soft fascists" like Troy Southgate (do a websearch on "rosenoire"). Mutualism, distributism, "guild socialism"... all these ideas based on tiny affinity groups negotiating with each other from a difference would require giving up on the world-wide networking and potential co-operation which is the main redeeming feature of modern capitalism. And it all stems from the fact that the people in this culture who are capable of thinking outside the square have been "recuperated" by not even questioning, for a moment, that the capitalist epoch's idea of "individuality" is real.

The future lies in collectives and co-operation, not in "free trade". The only question now is - will the corporations collectivise humanity? Or will humanity collectivise the corporates?

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As to Situationism: my comrade Ben Watson has some pretty good things to say.

Down the rabbit hole

The problem with this project is that one becomes almost too successful at finding the people who're working in similar areas. A Wikipedia article on Situationalism leads to these guys. Who lead somewhere I heard about on Lenin's Tomb. (Also courtesy of Lenin's Tomb: this.) Which in turn turns up this.

So much information, and yet not much closer to deciding on a programme of action.

I ATEN'T DEAD

My enthusiasm for working things out in public on this blog seems to go through phases. So if you don't see any update for weeks, don't fret that the process has ended - it's generally that I'm carrying it out somewhere else. Demonstrations, picket lines, writing polemic articles, composing songs, getting healthy exercise and voraciously reading are all part of the process.

Next project: a hard look at the Situationists. I would also like to call upon any of our readers who think they understand Deleuze/Guittari, and can explain it in terms a factory worker would not only understand but would be interested in, to write an article. I must confess that even their Wikipedia entry did my head in a bit. We also hope to have something on a chaosmarxist approach to the institutions of "mental health" under capitalistm sometime soon.

Glossary

A Kindly Contributor to our comments boxes thinks a continually updated glossary of jargon or technical terms would be a good idea for this blog. I agree. Anyone interested in having any term that I or commentors have used in this blog, please tell me via the comments box. I will give my best to give my own definition, which can of course be contested.

In the immortal words of Chairman Miaow: Burn down the edifices of capitalism then have a long nap in a warm spot.

New friends

The signal has been run up and the connections are being made in the infosphere. I would like to introduce you all to razorsmile, "a chaotic journey of majik, philosophy, politics and lives". I am currently deeply absorbing their response to Liber MCMXVII, and wondering whether their name might have anything to do with a viciously political early Sisters of Mercy song. Perhaps one day I will write an article here on the relation between the compression and overlaying of concepts inherent in poetry and other wordcraft, and the similar process which appears in creating a magical symbol.

Also: the Icarus Project, an attempt to create a bottom-up community network of mental health. Some have commented on the similarity of the magical worldview to some species of what witchdoctors call "mental illness". Perhaps we are only trying to get to a place where some people live all the time - and, of course, get out again in one piece. I am reminded of the story of James Joyce, who went and saw Carl Jung for help with his daughter's schizophrenia. Joyce said something like "she speaks pretty weird, but then, I write pretty weird". Jung replied "You are diving; she is sinking".

Magic in general - and Chaos Marxism in particular - is all about being able to dive, swim, and get back on dry land safely. Eventually, I think we should be able to become psychic and cultural surf-lifesavers.