Sad but oh so true

The Internet is often thought an egalitarian blessing by those who would hold high criminals accountable, yet the only accounting rendered is online. I don't think the guilty regard this as an unfortunate development. I think we've been corralled into cyberspace, taken as freedom its "free speech zones," and adopted its virtual and vulnerable bantustans as our "domains." (Appropriately so called, since its mastery entered mass culture as a euphemism for masturbaton.) We can win the blog wars, but we may as well have been playing World of Warcraft for all the difference it will make when the power goes out and we lose our connection. The connection for which we may have forsaken many others of much higher worth.

Rigorous Intuition (why didn't I start reading this a long time ago?) replicates the Chaos Marxist aphorisms' stance on niche markets and subcultures. Of course, this crap happened long before the internet, it's just now it's far easy for weirdos to form cliques (note that the whole furry/otherkin/otakukin would have never got going in a pre-internet ages).

Thanks for recent comments. I'm afraid I'm not going to change the comments policy - anyone who wants to partake in the discussion had better have a name, although of course feel free to make one up. My point about "science rather than art or magick" should be seen in the context of the above comments - my problem with the latter two at the moment is that the audience is too small and generally irrelevant.

STILL ATEN'T DEAD

Is there any work out there which makes a serious attempt at reconciling practical individual psychology with the insights of Marxist/Situationist/Frankfurt School materialist cultural theory? It's not really enough to say that individual consciousness is "interpolated" in the structures of late capitalist mass culture. Until we understand exactly how it happens, through what processes, and how to reverse-engineer the effect, the marketing geniuses and media priests will be able to defeat or recuperate any grassroots movement before it properly gets going.

To some degree, I'm fed up with art and magick and I want to start going at this on a proper scientific basis. The urgency of the project is such that dilettante methods are no longer adequate.

ETA: I'm gratified to note that, for something I knocked off in five minutes and wrote for effect rather than meaning, the Chaos Marxist Manifesto (see sidebar) is still being read and linked to by the most interesting people. Welcome, new people.

Chanology: The Evolution of a Movement

A recent drama-bomb dropped on enturbulation.org (ably summarised for the confused here) proves the aphorism that a "leaderless group" in fact means "a group where leadership is secret or not acknowledged". However, this isn't in the crude manner that the OSA goons seem to believe - they would go from this to believing that all you would have to do is destroy #marblecake and the whole thing collapses. On the contrary, that would just mean a new leadership or wannabe-leadership-faction would grow. Best to see #marblecake as a "political party" or "faction" within Chanology. It's a good thing, by the way, that Anonymous has grown its own leadership groups, rather than continuing to take the advice of the "Old Guard" (who, in general, are a little bit off the pace of what constitutes vibrant cultural activism in the 21st century).

Actually, Chanology is having to deal with the question which plagues every movement which goes on long enough to be somewhat institutionalised and have to work out a long term strategy - factions will always exist. The question is how to deal with factions - the belief in the "self-regulating hivemind" is revealed as the utopian/anarchoid dreaming it always was, which did nothing but simply encourage #marblecake and the various other factions which no doubt exist to be in private. The traditional solution in the Leninist tradition is to allow factions (or at least platforms), but to restrict their activities to "internal consumption". But that simply won't work in a totally decentralised movement like Chanology.

Seriously, this flap is not really going to derail the movement. One or two talented individuals and/or groups thereof may be lost to the movement, temporarily or permanently, but it has shown its ability to continually replace them.

To sum up our lesson here: every mass movement must have leadership otherwise nothing will ever happen. But the movement creates the leadership, not the other way around.

Idealism = elitism = just another treehouse club

ETA: The post below is currently being subjected to sharp but generally friendly criticism at the PD.com forums. Readers of this blog who have no idea what Discordianism is are encouraged to join in so that we may all enlighten each other. See you there.

The people at PrincipiaDiscordia.com (and if you haven't read the Principia yet, you are made of lose and fail) have an interesting new manifesto called Black Iron Prison (taking a phrase from P. K. Dick, to describe the chains of ideology, pretence identities and bad habits which prop up existing exploitative power strucutres.). It's a fun read, but annoyingly it has pretty much the same failing as virtually any "radical cultural product" in this day and age - it is generally spot on about the problem, but falls down on the solutions. While it makes a clarion call for people to throw out their useless and self-limiting identities, it never challenges its own presuppositions - idealism coupled with elitism, the self-justifying ideology (what a Scientologist would call a "service facsimile") of the modern "cultural technician" classes. I quote:

What you have to remember is that if the grazing sheep can see you then so can the bad guys. If you've found a loophole then you've shown them it and you can bet your sorry ass that they'll be busy sealing it up just as you're busy decomposing in an unmarked grave, all the while fertilising the grass that the sheep are fed.

The more obvious you become the more attention you will draw so burn the Che Guevara teeshirt and buy something with Hugo Boss written on it. Tear down the burning buddhist posters and get rid of the CND bumper stickers. Keep your books under the bed. If you really want to accomplish something then your best bet is to work undercover. Jumping on a soapbox and spreading the gospel is not how you get the message across, it's how you end up in jail. Do not subscribe to subversive magazines. Do not turn up at demos and rallys, all their operatives mugshots are on federal databases an, even worse, they achieve approximately nothing. Make no mistake, now that you've slipped your chain they're looking for you. Don't make it easy for them.

So the revolutionaries of the new era will concentrate on keeping their heads down? Interestingly from a manifesto which approvingly discussed shucking off pretence identities a few pages earlier, the personal safety and integrity of the Newly Enlightened Discordian seems to be the main priority here, rather than an attempt to use this enlightenment to affect the material world. "Yes, YOU are now the Newly Enlightened and are much better than pathetic mewling sheep! So for Eris's sake don't actually do anything except find a new peer group to swap recipes!!!"

In fact, the use of the word "sheep" shows a contempt for the huge majority of people in the material world - that is, directly the opposite of Orwell's and Chaos Marxism's dictum that "if there is hope, it lies in the proles". Note the historically inaccurate assertion (repeated by the corporate media so often that it's become common sense) that "demos never changed anything". The fact is that the mass demonstration is the only actual real political/memetic activism that your average working stiff has any chance to get involved with. It's not as useful as the mass strike, but it's something rather than nothing. Letting the ideal be the enemy of the possible is a sure road to impotence - and as for the attitude that anything that ordinary people can do is ipso facto a useless waste of time, well, I don't think I need to even comment further.

And is martyrdom all bad, anyway? Jesus was nailed up, yes, Ché was pumped full of bullets and displayed, but they are now bad-ass memes of various levels of immortality, and you won't be if you stay in hiding. 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?

But of course the writer of these words specifically says that doing mass work is a waste of time:

You CAN NOT bring the MACHINE™ down. You can't even slow it down. What you can do is very slowly and unobtrusively begin to rearrange the basic components. We will refer to these as "widgets" and "sprockets". If widget A and sprocket B combine to exert societal influence C on the stinking morass known collectively as "humanity", then it stands to reason that the MACHINE™ can be reprogrammed at a very basic level and in very small increments. You waste your time dreaming of how to effect such a change on a global, national, or regional scale (the impossibility of which, I might add, keeps you in your perpetual state of blissful apathy), dreaming of assembling a group of like-minded fellows who will march with you to the very gates of the ivory tower whereupon those who have misled and exploited you will be cast down upon the parapets.

This is a counsel of despair, impotence, and magical thinking (directly the opposite of MAGICKAL thinking). To defeat the Black Iron Prison, then, the important thing is to hide, form a secret, quasi-conspiratorial network of people who think like you... and do your cultural activism / memetics / magic so that the big guns of Corporate Brainwashing will slowly but surely start to put out the message you like. Or, in summary: we are the tiny enlightened elite who are going to save the world, by hiding and doing our superhero stuff behind the scenes, by manipulating the structures of oppression rather than trying to throw them down. What, really, is the difference between this and getting a job in academia, advertising or the entertainment multinationals - i.e giving up altogether?

I get angry at so-called "Marxists" who act like that, and I'm not going to take it from Discordians either. It's also the same nonsense that that guy who reckons he's Neo from the Matrix peddles - don't destroy the Matrix, but make it kindlier for the pathetic sheep who will never be real individuals, like us. It's a counsel of despair, of making the best of things for yourself, of believing that you are better and deserve better than people who haven't had the same experiences you have. It's not an antidote to apathy, it's a set of ideas which will make you feel justified in smug apathy, in working the system for whatever material privileges you can get, and then getting together with your cool buddies on evenings and weekends to be cowboys, anarchists, Zen archers, whatever.

A basic axiom of Marxism (which should go in the CM aphorisms) is that only the conscious mass action of the huge worldwide majority will change anything. Not a secret elite of memetic superheroes. We can't make that happen by hiding and manipulating. Nor can we do that by clowning and phrasemongering, by going on demos just for the sake of going on demos - that's just another fake identity, and the BIP writers are right to point that out. (My criticism of most Marxist and anarchist sects is that they act according to the same principles for which I criticse the BIP writers - they use ritualised and useless forms of "political activism" as attempts to shore up their self-image and give them acceptable social and leisure opportunities, rather than actually trying to change the world, i.e. change mass consciousness.)

Ben Watson says, and CM agrees, that a revolution will mean the people who don't have to lie to make their living taking over. The cultural technician class (99% of the people you'll see writing blogs or websites, in other words) overwhelmingly make their living by using memetic tools to spread someone else's toxic ideology. It's precisely because of that that your bus driver is far, FAR more likely to make an effective revolutionary memetician and political activist than the cool guy you met on the internet who reads all the same cool books as you do.

One final point: the MACHINE™ (I may have to start using this shorthand) has only existed for about 100 years now, only in the time of universal suffrage and a mass consumer economy. Before then, there was no point in controlling working people's minds because no-one cared what they thought, just whether they worked. What's more, the MACHINE™ only exists because people go to work every day and make it work. To an enquiring mind, this should point out that the MACHINE™ is not the omnipresent mechanism of control that the BIP writers make it out to be - sadly, that's exactly the "common sense" that thirty years of the postmodernism academy has imposed on virtually the entire culturally-trained class. If you're going to challenge all the mind-forg'd manacles, how about starting with the assumption that capitalist structures of domination and oppression which have existed in their modern form for only 150 maximum are somehow eternal and essential features of human nature? The main proof that the future can be different is that the past was different. Of course individuals can't change it. So you'd better either think of some way of getting past your monadic, bourgeois, individualist identity - or just give up and find a good drug/religion/sports team to follow.

NOTE: The last time I wrote something like this I got hate-mail. I often sound more harsh and nasty than I mean to, so any Discordians reading this, please be assured that this is supposed to be friendly criticism and the opening of a dialogue.

Back from the brink

Some of them make me uneasy, but I'm intrigued nonetheless.

- a kindly Discordian responds to the Aphorisms. That is possibly the biggest compliment I've ever been given for my work. Thank you. :-)

A couple of other points - since, as I explained, only a few of the Aphorisms are my original work, so please feel free to repost and reuse, the only provision being that you include a link to the original list, as above. Also note that on the second anniversary of this blog, the Aphorisms will be updated with new ideas from the second year of posting.

Seriously, how come I have to googlestalk my own blog to find out that people are finding my work useful? It could be argued that I need to be more involved in webforums etc, but as I think I've explained before, I've never found one where I can actually get a hearing. The Marxists think I'm a mystical loony, and your average memetician/magickian/whatever reacts to kneejerk caricatures of Marxism they half-remember from primary school, rather than the actual living intellectual tradition. If a kindly commenter to this blog could point out a webforum or wherever where Chaos Marxist concepts would get a friendly, skeptical but open-minded reaction - or even better, where people want to take action in accordance with them - I'd be most grateful.

I'm not a serious Wiccan any more, but it's interesting to note that I appear to be posting here on a lunar cycle. :) The more I look over the older posts, the more I'm amazed that I wrote them. They sound more convincing than I've ever felt. I am worried by the idea that to actually make the ideas work would require someone with a completely different personality than I have - a pretty cool guy who networks and makes connections with people and doesn't afraid of anything. I have realised that, for all my big (and accurate) talk about how ego loss is necessary for becoming a vehicle for a current that can change reality, I kind of like my ego and the comfortable-though-dull sphere I've carved out for myself in horrible capitalist reality, and I am ashamed to admit that right now I don't actually feel like risking it. So do as I say, not as I do. Please, somebody.

Our old buddy Ben Watson...

... with some more interesting speculations on how capitalist psychology works, or rather doesn't.

I'll explain later

Now that I have the CM unified theory of cults, the next step is a unified theory of subcultures. I am inspired to this by an examination of hard-core Italian football supporters and their (to my mind) thought-provoking cultural similarities to "old Anonymous"* of Ebaumsworld and similar online forums. The connecting link seems to be what in Dungeons and Dragons jargon would be called a "chaotic neutral alignment" - the determination to do anything, anywhere, to anyone for a good time / the lulz - and deliberate embrace of racist, sexist, homophobic and generally offensive humour just because it gets such a satisfyingly outraged response from the cultural elite. It's carnivalesque, on other words - which leads us on to its connection to the Faction Paradox mythos and some brands of modern occultism, neopaganism or even Satanism - hell, back to the figure of Loki in the Norse mythology.

Every taboo needs its relaxation. Every cultural construct needs a "joker in the pack", someone who is going to break all the rules for the hell of it. It's a safety valve. It is not - sadly - something that destabilises the cultural systems, but on the contrary reinforces and preserves them. But on the other hand, the smug liberal social theorists who think of football fandom or Pedobear fandom as havens of social evils that need to be ostracised and if possible abolished have got it totally wrong themselves. The idea that some taboos can never, ever be relaxed is born out of the hubris of the cultural-administrator class that they can control everyone's thoughts all the time. If it worked, it would lead to totalitarianism, aka cultural stasis, the "Ghost Point". Thankfully it doesn't work.

*Not to be confused with "new Anonymous", the anti-Scientology protest movement, although there are various levels of overlap.

Our rulers think they're Yankees

More than in most current Latin American societies, the Venezuelan ruling and middle classes have demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice their immediate economic interests, current remunerative opportunities, lucrative profits and income in pursuit of the high risk political interests of the US . How else can one explain their backing of the US-orchestrated coup of April 2002 at a time when Chavez was following fairly orthodox fiscal and monetary policies, and had adopted a strict constitutionalist approach to institutional reform? How else can one explain engaging in an executive and bosses 2-month lockout of industry and oil production, leading to the loss of billions in private revenues, profits and salaries and ultimately the bankruptcy of hundreds of private firms and the firing of over 15,000 well-paid senior and middle level oil executives?

Clearly the ‘ultra-hegemony’ of the US over the Venezuelan elite and middle class has a strong component of ideological-psychological self-delusion: a deep, almost pathological identification with the powerful, superior white producer-consumer society and state and a profound hostility and disparagement of ‘deep Venezuela ’ – its Afro-Indian-mestizo masses.

An extract from a very good article by James Petras on Venezuela. The only thing I have to add to this is that in virtually every advanced capitalist country in the world today the ruling class thinks of itself as junior partners of the Yankee capitalist class, not just Venezuela or Latin America. In those countries (as well as Canada) it's "biggest tough guy on the block". In most of Western Europe, it's attachment to "Big Brother who saved us from Hitler". In Eastern Europe, it's attachment to "Big Brother who saved us from Stalinism". In Australia and New Zealand, the previous colonial attachment to England was just shifted to the US sometime in the 1980s.

The only partial exceptions to this in the 'First World' I can think of are France and Japan, two countries with their own imperial histories whose gratitude at being "liberated" is tempered with contempt for the cultural mores of the liberators. In those countries, as in Russia and China, there are pro- and anti-American factions in the ruling classes. Elsewhere, a "nationalist" component to the local elite is so tiny as to be negligible - nationalism is left to the posturing of the middle class.

Petras suggests that this happens in Venezuela because the local elite aren't actually capitalists (in the sense that they actually live off the proceeds of productive enterprises), but rentier-bureaucrats who skim the top off oil revenue, and so their "heartland" is where they consume (i.e. Miami) rather than where they produce. I think this is increasingly the case everywhere, as actual capitalist production shifts out of the advanced First World, and the local economies are bound up increasingly with administration, media production and servicing the consumption needs of the elite - Marx's "Department IIb", for those who get the reference. Soon, virtually all "First World" countries will be controlled by rentiers, living off the profits of their investments in China, India, wherever.

Whatever the case - the ideology of the ruling classes becomes the ideology of all of society, and any resistance to the idea of American media culture as being the superior product is stigmatised as backwards and barbaric, just as in the 19th century resistance to Christianization was portrayed. Note the recent scoffing and outrage at the (actually lying) story that The Simpsons was being banned in Venezuela. (If they meant any episodes produced after 1999, I'd be 100% in favour of it.)

Popular media culture is the unifying and justifying narrative of world imperialism today, just like Christianity was in the 19th century. The TVs are the churches of the 21st century in the "opiate of the masses" sense, and idiots who think that harrassing Muslims is somehow "progressive" should realise that they're facing the wrong enemy.

A note to our American readers - you can possibly not understand what it's like living in a cultural colony, a country where 90% of the programmes on TV are about a foreign country, where people talk in your language but not in your accent. It encourages a feeling that nothing that happens in your actual world is really as "real" as what you see on the TV or the internet. You find, for example, in my country, people who have zero interest in the politics of our nation but will huddle around at each other's houses discussing how Clinton and Obama are doing in the primaries. This feeling is particularly strong among the middle classes, whose entire lives are bound up with media representations - for working people, I doubt it matters whether the people on TV talk in foreign or local intonations, they're smug elitists who look down on you in any case.

Does this sound like YOUR coven / political party / affinity group?

If so, get a new one.

The means replace the end; loyalty substitutes for result; the group replaces life. That is no accident: the only true product of a cult is group members, desperately telling each other that they are an elite with the only answers to life’s questions. It becomes normal and commonplace to substitute certainty in place of truth, group loyalty in place of informed decision. As time goes on, one needs to believe in the group agreements in order to justify what he or she has done, the trashed families and so on.In such an environment, one is prevented from developing realistic understandings of self and the world.

(from Bob Penny's Social Control in Scientology)

Aphorism #83

Comrades and friends:

1. If I'm not posting here in a while, it's not that I've given up on the project, it's just that I tend to be trying to actually do stuff in the real world to make it a real thing. So don't panic.

2. I'm currently working out a major article to be published in real dead tree format on the issue of how cultural disposession is something that happened to working class "whites" as well as indigenous people, which will of course be full of CM methodology and insights. Also, doing a lot of artwork, getting healthy exercise, and helping out Project Chanology. (In case you didn't get the memo, the theme for the May 10 raid is Battletoad Earth. Check Encyclopedia Dramatica if you don't get the joke.)

3. I'm fed up of all this one-way communication. It makes me think that no-one's listening. However, I do a google search occasionally which shows that people are actually listening and creatively engaging with the concepts - by which I mean critiquing them rationally, not just having pre-programmed "COMMIES ARE STUPID LET'S THROW ROCKS AT THEM" kneejerk reactions like those idiot Bobbies (and sadly Rev. Stang) did in May last year. This warms the cockles of my black little heart.

4. Aphorism #83 says: if you don't have a scene, make one (from Tony James via Malcolm McLaren). So... how can we turn the Chaos Marxist meme into a conversation rather than an audience listening to a monologue from an easily distracted stand-up guru? I have no interest in being "Source". Will you guys start making comments, or sign up as contributors to the blog, or do we need an actual webforum or something?

Three brief notes

1) Chaos Marxism Aphorism #48 states:

If you start saying that people are not individuals - that they are created by their upbringing and the role they play in real, nasty, going-to-work-in-traffic society - then you open the door to the idea that only a social revolution can actually solve the real problems with humanity.

Interestingly enough, I wrote that without knowing what Marx's Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach said:

The human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.

The "human individual" is determined by their place in the social networks which form the "true" nature of our species. As Aphorism #3 puts it, you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake - or, at least, you're part of a huge drift of snow from which you can't be disentangled. I am only following in the rather large footsteps of giants, but at least I'm going in the right direction.

2) This Fandom Wank thread, on an interesting young wymyn who has declared that she can tell that Joss Whedon rapes his wife from watching his TV programmes, really does sum up every single problem with academic "radical feminism" in particular and bourgeois identity politics in general. Simply put, the equation is: identity politics = voluntary ghettoisation = the cultural logic of consumerism in late capitalism. This nonsense can only exist because little havens exist for the priesthood of the media culture to train their successors and to think up strategies to sell identities/goods/services to new niche markets. In this case, we are talking about Women's Studies departments as the factories where the identity-commodity of "radical lesbian wymyn" or whatever is produced and sold. Those who buy such an identity will not only buy the appropriate clothes, books, memorabilia etc to make sure no-one forgets their Special Unique identity for a moment. They will also hide in their little communes or staff common rooms or book circles or other voluntary ghettos, and never venture out to bother the real world again - except perhaps to go on the occasional abortion-rights or anti-rape demo and act like sectarian imbeciles just like their Marxist, anarchist etc. counterparts.

3) For those following Chanology - a schism has arisen. Some of the more hard-core anonymous are angry at the movement's turn towards "respectable" protest politics, and wish to return to (quite simply) trolling and pranks, of anti-Scilons as well as Scilons. Those on the other side, however, point out that if "respectable" protest politics can actually dismantle Scientology in its current form, how much lulz would then be produced?!? As I keep saying, even those who don't consider Scamintology any kind of real priority or threat must keep an eye on Chanology, because it is going through all the major dilemmas and turning points that any serious mass movement does.

Dolorasnetics: The Chaos Marxist Science of Mental Health

Starting from a basic Marxist view of the world: Matter comes first. Then comes life. Then comes social consciousness. Then comes individual consciousness.
Individual consciousness can be "in control" over small areas of matter, but can only affect social consciousness in proportion to common understanding and action with other social consciousnesses. Only widespread agreement within the social consciousness can be "at cause" over large areas and systems of matter.

What is sanity?

Sanity is defined as the ability of an individual or group consciousness to understand:

- the rules of operation of material reality (both inorganic matter and life);
- the rules of operation of social consciousness;
- the rules of operation of individual consciousness;
- the relationships between each sphere - what concrete actions by individuals and groups can bring about desired changes in social and physical material reality.

For an individual consciousness, being "more sane" means "having a greater understanding of the rules of these three spheres, and thus being more able to affect change in individual, social and material reality in accordance with desire, in proportion to how many options for individual action are allowed by current social and material circumstances."

(Yes, after writing this I realised that my definition of "sanity" seems to be an expanded version of Crowley's definition of "magick". How bizarre, how bizarre.)

What can prevent an individual from being able to affect social and material reality?
- real social or material impediments (lack of options for individual action)
- a lack of correct understanding of the rules of the social or material world - this can be solved by study and experiment.
- problems in the individual consciousness which cause the rational centres of the mind to not be able to comprehend aspects of reality or the correct relationship between them. This is the domain of psychology.

In turn, these may be "hardware" or "software" problems - caused by physical or chemical imbalances in the body, or by assumptions and habits held in the subconscious mind and thus not amenable to rational analysis under normal circumstances, or by a combination of the two. (It could even be possible that humans are "hardwired" to not be able to properly understand reality, but I'm not going to believe that unless I see evidence for it.)

Sanity (defined as "correct perception of material reality") is distinguished from happiness. Unhappiness and other negative emotions are the natural and healthy reactions of a consciousness deprived wholly or partially of control over its circumstances of life - i.e. everyone everywhere at some time. Some crazy people are happy as hell, but we don't want to be crazy because it would mean total powerlessness. You couldn't be 100% sane and miserable all the time, because if you were 100% sane you would know predictably what could be done to make you happier, even temporarily (something that would temporarily restore your sense of being able to make things happen in your world).

Roughly: sanity = a correct perception of where an individual or group has power and where they do not. Happiness = perception of relative power. Unhappiness = perception of relative powerlessness. (This is a generalisation. Sorry, masochists. DOn't write me any nasty letters.)

Increasing sanity will therefore not directly increase happiness - it might decrease it, in the short term, as comfortable illusions are dispelled. However, it will increase an individual's ability to evoke positive emotions and dispel negative ones, by restoring the correct mental connections between emotions and the events that evoke them, and snapping incorrect connections between emotions and thoughts, concepts, people and objections, which become "self-sustaining". For example: something bad happened to you and you have an incorrect idea of why. You build habits of behaviour to try to avoid that ever happening again, but these are based on an incorrect assumption and thus don't work. Also, the pain is so bad that even remembering it hurts so you can't even look at the bad thing in order to correct your assumptions.

The process therefore runs:

Perception of the correct rules of consciousness and matter + perception of the correct relationship between emotion and action or outside events => increased ability to take effective action to affect consciousness and matter => increased ability to invoke positive emotion and dispel negative emotion (and to take effective corrective action in the case of external events reducing personal power and thus inflicting negative emotion.)

In brief, my essential problem with "self-help" therapy is that it embodies pre-existing social norms that the individual is finally and totally responsible for their personal reality, which I see as oppressive and an ideological tool of those who hold power (and of bullies, who all survive on the principle that their victims have the responsibility for their actions). Institutional psychology, on the other hand, seems to embody the idea that "sanity" means adapting smoothly to existing reality rather than an increased ability to affect it in accordance with desire - also an ideological tool of that which holds power.

I like UCP because it's simply a process of comparing memory, current perception and images of other possible or impossible realities, to understand the differences and connections between them all, and hence the correct relationship between individual consciousness and social and physical reality. This seems a good, basic way of increasing sanity, by the definition above. It's totally up to the individual to work out the connections between these for themselves - which could, of course, be a pitfall. The assumption is that the practitioner (absent organic damage which would impede a rational understanding of reality) will inevitably and eventually work out the correct patterns and connections between them, by experiment and by testing against reality, and this could be a false assumption. Only experiment and testing against reality will solve this!

We must also remember that "sane" doesn't mean "good". I would expand the concept to include "socially sane" - someone who not only has correct perceptions of power and powerlessness, but increases those correct perceptions among other people. I suppose you could be "individually sane" and methodically attempt to deprive others of sanity so you could rule and exploit them - I think many of the real leaders of our society fall into that category. Is a dictator or cult leader necessary crazy? I'm not sure. Hitler was mad as a mongoose, but Stalin seemed almost scarily, coldly rational. Stories vary over whether "LRH" actually believed his own lies or not.

But still, I would like to see scientific study of UCP and its beneficial effects and problems, in comparison with other "self-help" therapy, and with conventional, institutional psychology.

One final hint: I realise that by the above defnition, if you hold an idealist view of reality, you are ipso facto not entirely sane. Unless, of course, your ability to cause change in reality oustrips that of we materialists. Then we're the crazy ones. Go on. I dares ya.

Do UCP and see!

I have mentioned the Universal Conscious Practice - a form of meditation/self-analysis/DIY psychotherapy invented by a refugee from Scientology - before. Now a practitioner has invented a programme (written in Gambas for Linux) which will give you all you need to do it yourself. Check it out. I heartily recommend you give it a go if you feel the need for more personal insight - it certainly blew out a few of my psychic cobwebs.

DISCLAIMER: this process bears some family resemblance to things that the followers of Pedobear Hubbard do, but it won't give you Tom Cruise's total psychosis bad-ass telepathic powers.

An aphorism on cults

Cult methods of organisation are nothing more than boiled-down and spiced-up versions of accepted behaviour-control and thought-reform methods used commonly against children and "deviants" in late capitalist society. Nothing that Scientology or the Moonies or the Sparts do is really dissimilar in kind from what ordinary mums and dads, schoolteachers, psychiatric nurses and prison guards are encouraged to do every day - only in degree, and in target.

Discuss.

100th post special!: A unified theory of cults

Scientology, Objectivism, most varieties of "orthodox Trotskyism" (more here) or Maoism... all the same sociological features. A Marxist analysis would locate the foundation of all these political cults (and similar religious organizations) in a social base almost restricted to the middle-class intelligensia, who, in modern capitalism, are the layer devoted to ideological production on which the system depends. 

The essential principle of a cult is an unchallengable ideology and an unchallengable leadership who "bear" or "preserve" the ideology. So the features of all such cults are: 

1. Idealism - the belief that physical reality is "less real" than the words of ideas. Note that the pretend-Marxist cults, although holding to materialism as a dogma, by that very act betray Marxism - any dogmas, any ideas which are untouchable and unamendable, and the associated belief that those who hold the "correct" ideas are the elite, are against anything that Marx or indeed Lenin would have recognized. The belief that the test of practice is not the deciding question is the only thing that means that a single set of ideas can be set up as untouchable. 
2. Elitism - as above. Also - those who produce the correct ideas are not only elite but godlike. Some flavours of Objectivist even claim that only Ayn Rand herself is a valid source for Objectivism (exactly the same opinion that the Scienos have about their dead conman guru). Note that in some cases the mythical godfigure was dead before the cult showed up - all the better, because then s/he's not around to contradict them. Stalinism got going by turning Lenin into an idol before they dared put Stalin in his place.
3. Thought reform. Since ideas are what's important, and the idea-bearers are the elite, they must continually purge their ranks of thought-criminals or those who just aren't up to snuff ideologically (or just different). Sadly, you can see this starting in the Fourth International during Trotsky's time - despite his many achievements and genius insights, Uncle Leon was a middle-class intellectual building a "party" out of middle-class intellectuals. Of course it was going to go wrong. 

A combination of all three of the above expresses themselves in moralism - since ideas are not determined in practice but are in themselves good or bad things, the logical outcome is to seek the origin of the "wrong" ideas in "wrong" personalities. Cults believe in the idea of "evil" - that ideas can be wrong in themselves - and generally lump oppositionists in that bracket. A defining feature of every cult is personal attacks against adversaries and internal critics(as opposed to, say, reasonably pointing out that it was funny for Ayn Rand to talk about the wonders of rationality when she was off her face on speed all the time). If you are wrong and you won't be convinced, the only solution is that you are bad and you should feel bad. (It's tempting to locate the social origin of cults in clever kids with a middle-class education who dream of their internal world of ideas being, not only accepted, but dominating others in the way that they feel that the existing ideas dominate them. Which would explain why I've always dreamed of having my own cult. Never mind.) 

Before the snobs at Infoshop start crowing, let me note that you don't need a formal leader to be a cult. All you need is sufficient peer pressure to "maintain the consensus". Many modern anarchist "communities" fail on the tests of ideology/dogma, elitism and anathematization of contrary opinions - just look at the "uniforms" they wear (patches, t-shirts for "correct bands", body hair on women, etc), the pressure to eat the right (vegan) food and listen to the right music, etc. Also note the pressure on newbies to start anathematising the hated Leninists - identified as "the enemy within". And of course the pseudo-Leninist cults fight straight back. You can be a leaderless cult, no problem. 

In passing, I want to blow away the mystical belief that "the consensus process" is always and everywhere the correct way for a group to make decisions, which in itself is an idealist and therefore potentially cultist idea. A consensus process can be a means by which a "secret" leadership group simply enforces its dominance as nastily as the most Stalinist Central Committee - and with the same level of self-serving hypocrisy. In contrast, a majority-democracy group which fully tolerates dissent in thought and word while requiring unity in action may grow a "group mind" which is always a little unsure of itself and self-reforming, which has to be a good thing. The process of decision-making is less vital than ensuring the total freedom of each individual consciousness to have opinions different from the group ideas, and to have real opportunities to change the group's ideas. 

 Here's a classic description of how cults operate, as opposed to their basic premises as explained above. I was thinking of making "Humour is the one thing cults can't stand" a CM aphorism. However, that's not precisely true - all cults have endless jokes about outsiders. Just not about the leadership or the sacred ideas, at least not in public. Just in passing - "cult" is not an absolute term. But the more a group is idealist, elitist and obsessed with purifying its own dogma, the more "cultish" it is. On the contrary, a real political party - or any social or cultural change organisation - values the test of practice - what people actually do - above all else. Requiring unity in action is not cultish - requiring unity in thought is. 

A true collective consciousness (aka "culture") can only arise where every member of the culture gets to transmit as well as receive. A cult is closed - a culture is open. A cult is simply the prejudices and personality problems of a leadership group written large - a culture might be less of a "strike force", but it will be more flexible, more healthy, and more likely to perpetuate itself.

Their magick and ours, part the umpteenth

Even when we sleep, the web of nervous plexuses emanating from that ancient region of the lower brain remains awake, haunting our bodies with a mysterious presence. Perhaps, long before the day the central nervous system convinced us it was in charge, our way of understanding the world had been purely involuntary and autonomic, fluctuating without subtlety between poles of stimulus and response, contraction and relaxation, excitement and satisfaction. Perhaps the enteric brain remains our last link to the time before we ate the apple of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, the time before we knew death. The primeval brain of the involuntary, the abdominal brain, the brain that controls sympathy and revulsion but not ratiocination, that is the brain of the wow.

When it comes to television, the theory becomes practice: Whether on the Hot Network, E! Entertainment Television, or CBS, the splanchnic response, not the lucubrations of the intellect but the primal gut reaction – that’s what hauls in the ratings. When the new president of CNN/US, Jonathan Klein, took over last November, he introduced himself to the troops with what has become the perennial “it’s about the storytelling” speech. As Van Gordon Sauter preached in the 1980’s, news needs the emo, and executives now understand that the emo comes from the gut, the gut makes the wow, and the wow makes the money. It’s not the content that matters – food, sex, or news – so much as the autonomic form.

Read the whole thing. The tl;dr version of it: the media priesthood have perfected memetics to the point where they can actually bypass the rational brain altogether and provoke, literally and directly, "gut reactions" (or groin reactions, for that matter). HOLY SHIT if we do not learn to do this ourselves and socialise the means of production and distribution of media signals (exchange will not mean anything in a post-itellectual property era), they may well perfect the means to control us with pleasure rather than pain and the species will be doomed. On the other hand, it may well be that, like any media technology, our ability to resist it if necessary will be able to more-or-less keep pace with its advance, but I'm not sure I want to take that risk.

Note that Chaos Marxism is not "luddite" in the pejorative sense, or indeed puritan. We don't oppose the technology of provoking pleasure or pain via media, in fact, we think it's pretty damn neat, but only when under the control of mass, grassroots democracy - like governmental power itself. I don't trust anyone else with the ability to bypass my thinking, conscious brain without explicit permission.

Lesson #4 from Chanology

The relationship between the old-school anti-Scientology battlers and the massed ranks of anonymous shows us precisely what the relationship between a vanguard party and the revolutionary masses should be.

Yes, I know, it doesn't look much like the model we're always being fed by the Leninist sects. Which is of course a problem with those sects and their warped parroting of phrases from Lenin and/or Trotsky that they don't actually understand. Let's examine the model closer:

A long-term, close knit group of activists grow up around a common struggle. They built a tight network, supporting one another, swapping information and intelligence, but lack of mresources and mmanpower prevent them from making any breakthroughs. Suddenly, a "spontaneous" movement from the classes - actually stemming in origin from the vanguard group's propaganda over the years - breaks out. What do the vanguard do?

Some write off the new masses, declare that they're "just kids" or "lumpen elements" or "internet nerds", critique their methods in a negative rather than a comradely way. Some insist on their own right to lead the movement, or point to reasons why it's not the right sort of movement, that some of the memes it regulates by are wrong or even offensive, and how it will have to change before they'll be involved. Some even fret that the new movement is some kind of diabolical enemy plot, or a potentially reactionary force, and find in those a reason to stay away from or even condemn the movement. These people have proved themselves worse than useless.

However, others engage with the new mass forces properly. They give constructive, comradely criticism, giving helpful and practical suggestions, based on long experience rather than book-leraning, how their struggle can be more successful. They seek to give helpful advice to the leadership of the new mass forces, rather than insist on becoming the leadership of the new mass forces.

Why, then, do the mass forces listen to these vanguard activists? Because their advice now makes sense in the context of their own experience in the struggle. Because they don't insist that they have the right to lead just because they've been doing it longer. Because they know things about the enemy that the newly mobilised forces don't know. Certainly not because "we are in the possession of the one true theory and we are going to fight tooth and nail to make sure that we and our comrades are in control of this". That would of course kill any movement stone dead.

All you commies, anarchos, radicals and trots out there, learn from Mark Bunker and Tory Christman how to show actual leadership in a mass struggle. They wouldn't thank me for saying so, but they're acting in the best traditions of people like Lenin or Che Guevara or Malcolm X. Make yourself relevant. Don't lecture, but learn as well as teach. You are only worth anything in your self-proclaimed leadership if you can actually win the trust and confidence of the masses - you don't earn it by being "orthodox", by spouting the right memes. Memes are in fact irrelevant except insofar as they directly influence action.

Their magick, and ours

For the first time in human history, there is a concerted strategy to manipulate global perception. And the mass media are operating as its compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to expose it.

The sheer ease with which this machinery has been able to do its work reflects a creeping structural weakness which now afflicts the production of our news.

This extract from a new book on how the spooks took over the news explains in great detail about how al-Zarqawi had nothing to do with al-Qaeda... until the meme-machines of the Western media made him that way. (Hey, it's a good metaphor to think of a newswire service or a website as a prayer wheel of the modern era.)

And this is exactly why we need Chaos Marxism - or something like it. I think we have an aphorism which points out that the reason why there is a "concerted strategy" of brainwashing and black memetics right now for the first time in history is because the traditional forms of manufacturing consent, brute force and bribery, don't work in an advanced industrial democracy. Constant competition for the advertising dollar has had the same effect as constant competittion for market scare - the means of production of memes are becoming ever more efficient, and yet their equivalent of the "rate of profit" (the rate of effectiveness?)tends to ever diminish. And much like we need to learn from the industrial workers how best to make the revolution in the factories, we need to learn from the cyberworkers and the internet nerds how to build the revolution in the mediasphere.

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ON that subject, for those following Project Chanology at home: February 10 rocked, London and elsewhere. What has the "traditional protest movement" learned from this phenomenon?

1) Just because people follow some weird and offensive memes doesn't mean they're not potent allies.
2) A protest movement is NOT a community - when it becomes a "community", with its own "permanent" power structures and ethos, you're in the realms of small-group psychosis and you by Goddess should be looking to bust out.
3) We haven't yet begun to plumb the depths of what the self-organisation of internet nerds is capable of. There must be cross-fertilisation with the "Traditional" workers' movement, expecially for those of us seeking to organise the cybertariat of the 21st century.

Your reviews are appreciated

A friendly fellow recommends us as

a blog that my friend found very useful in terms of how he thought about the world. It's someone who started out as a Discordian and then became a hardline Trotskyite. As I was telling someone over AIM earlier, it's two components that, individually, are profoundly stupid, but combined at least have some internal consistency and interesting ideas.

Thanks for the pimpage. However, I should make clear that I was never a Discordian, I was a SubGenius, which is many leagues stupider than Discordianism, and proud of it. Also, while I admire and appreciate a lot of Trotsky's work, I'm beginning to think that it's no coincidence that so many of the groups who take his name in vain are scary mind-control cults - Scientology with the Labour/Black Struggle instead of body thetans.

While we're on the subject of cults (subliminal message), The LJ post linked to above also says some things about the Illuminatus! trilogy which are perceptive. I would add, though, that while I loved this book to death when I was 17 (and , indeed, credit it partially for the person I am today), there are more things wrong with it than the sexism. The book itself shows one of what I think was the most disturbing things to come out of the 1960's radical California subculture - the rise of the "self-improvement cult". The plot of the book is that an ascended master with mystic powers (in a yellow submarine) not only converts a disparate bunch of radicals to his own oddball mysticism, but to his anarcho-capitalist political beliefs.

This, I feel, plugs into something which I think was fundamentally wrong with the whole middle-class radical 60's thing. Because it was middle class, and therefore individualist, it's no surprise that it ended up focusing on "personal enlightenment" rather than political change - although the circle kind of closed in the 1980s with the foundation of the Green parties. The middle-class radical mind can't conceive of a mass collective consciousness as anything other than threatening brain death. They say idiotic things like "without private property there is no private life" and never stop to realise that this ais a simple tautology, while paradoxically at the same time start rambling on about the wonders of ego loss!

The middle-class radical can't conceive of a real collective, so their models of organisation are the "affinity group", the commune, the monastery... and, yes, eventually, the cult. If you accept that personal change is far more important than political change, and also accept that some people have achieved Superhumanity in their own life time, then surely your rule from that point onwards it to shut up and listen. And donate. And sell the paper. And if they don't end up in cults, they end up as small capitalists - because that's truly what they believe freedom looks like. It's funny that the middle-class radical's utopia is generally anarcho-capitalism, because that's possibly the only political system which is in itself an oxymoron.

Material and social reality determines consciousness. The only real way to improve one's psychic health is to clean out the psychic toxic waste dump which passes for the mass media nd and popular culture under capitalism.

Help me, Wise Beard Man. You're our only hope.

Further to yesterday's update on the Anonymous/Scientology war - Anonymous seems to have adopted Mark Bunker as their own personal Obi-wan. I think we can declare it a Chaos Marxist aphorism that:

Groups with no ideology will eventually be forced to adopt one under pressure.. Groups with no leader will eventually be forced to adopt one under pressure.