A chilling thought

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

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

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

I don't approve of charity.

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

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

Funny, had a feeling he was on his way

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

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

I think Michael Lebowitz is a pretty cool guy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And this is why we need to learn psychology.

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

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

The macro/micro problem

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

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

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

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

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

Narrative

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

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

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

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

Why we are here...

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

New aphorism

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

Criticism always says more about the critic than the criticised.

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

Well. Don't I feel stupid.

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

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

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

HOLY CRAP IT'S TRUE

God really is everywhere and in everything.

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

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

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

Work is work is work

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

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

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

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

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

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

A new magickal motto...

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

Now I understand what you tried to say to me

A while back, I said the following:

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

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

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

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

First noble truth: pain don't hurt.

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

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

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

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

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

Always good to note...

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

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

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

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

Chaos Marxism's satanic verses

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

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

Small achievements count for nothing.

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

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

Oh, this is excellent.

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

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

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

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

Parable (after Idries Shah)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things are not hopeless...

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

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

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

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

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