Chaos Marxism Manifesto 3.0

(or, What We Have Learned So Far)

All right. This is an insane mash-up of Sufism, Gurdjieff/Bennett/Fripp psychology, Robert Anton Wilson, CBT, and Marxist theories of ideology including Gramsci, Althusser and Eagleton. There's even a bit of Dianetics, the abreaction therapy which got real results before its rummed-out sci-fi-writing developer decided to turn it into a mind control cult. You ready for this?

Right.
 
I.

You have a body, you have a nafs (ego), you have an intellect, and what is "you" past all that we call "heart" or "spirit".

The nafs is the part of the mind which lives in the here-and-now and adapts to it as best it can. The nafs is like a cat: with many admirable qualities and not "bad" in any way, but utterly and completely selfish and forgetful about anything which isn't about fulfilling its needs. That's just its nature.

The intellect is a tool, a list of rules of logic. The Arabic word for intellect is 'aql which literally means "hobble". If your nafs is a camel or a donkey, your intellect is what prevents it running amok and eating all the dates, smashing up the tent, or just running to the hashish plantation and eating itself silly.

The spirit, Sufis say, is a "guest" in this $2.99 Real World Of Horrible Jobs, which lives in the house of the nafs. It comes from "elsewhere". It's an emergent phenomenon, not amenable to rules of logic.

II.

The primary way that the nafs negotiates Life-As-It-Is is to build at least one IDENTITY: a "character", a script, a bunch of rules, set up to negotiate the challenges, games and rules of the Real World of Horrible Jobs successfully. "I am this - I am NOT that".

The nafs' needs are therefore those which will make the identity stronger - build up the "I" and its defences against the "not-I". Althusser put it this way, that the identity is interpellated by social structure - society provides the rules and the nafs "rolls up" a character to play them.

But let us also note that most people have more than one Identity, and we're not just talking about DID/MPD people here. You are not the same person when talking to your boss, your best friend, your aunty, your lover or to the cop who's trying to arrest you on a demo. The question is of course whether these Identities are part of a unified complex, whether they're at cross-purposes, or whether sometimes they're unaware of each other, or at least pretend to be.

The example of what I'm talking about is the senior Buddhist monk I read about in Thailand, who was in the habit of sneaking out of the monastery late at night, putting on a wig and a fake general's uniform, and cruising the casinos and whorehouses. Similar of course to all those homophobic politicians in the USA found hiring rent boys to "lift their luggage" and similar. Such people are not necessarily conscious hypocrites, but might have two or more Identities, each attempting to get a piece of "the good stuff" that a particular society has to offer, even if one is doing all kinds of things that the other is shocked and appalled by. Someone who splits up their Identity enough can have their cake and eat it too, until someone else notices the bookkeeping errors.

When we say "selfish", though, we may mean enlightened or benighted, depending on how far out from the body the nafs draws its boundaries. The nafs is there to provide for the body's needs but it also has needs of its own. Sometimes the nafs puts its own needs ahead of the body's needs, tending to ill health. Or other times the nafs will put the needs of others ahead of its own immediate needs, in order to build up its chosen identity (e.g. sacrificing lots of time, energy and resources on an organisation, family members, etc).

Being a good provider for one's family or a community volunteer might be the nafs' way of getting its needs met, especially if it has a good relationship with the intellect. This is why following "rules", as in dogmatic religion or politics, does not defeat the nafs - it just creates the new "Good Person" identity, but it's just another identity, perhaps weaker and stronger in different parts than the old one, but no more creative. And we keep saying, "revolutionary" can be a pretty constricting identity as well - just another set of rules to follow. In fact, as we will explore below, a revolutionary, like a master musician or a darvish, is called up to serve creativity above all.

III.

CBT analyses an identity as composed of a Bottom Line and Rules of Behaviour. We teach our children them various rules which will enable them to play social games effectively, and to use their intellect to work out ways in which the nafs can get what it wants without evoking the wrath or opposition of others. And also, all through our lives, we develop further and secondary Rules based on our experience.

Bottom Lines might be seen as being composed of various mental "film clips"  - either memories or fantasies with the label THIS MUST HAPPEN or THIS MUST NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN. These pictures are so painful they are shoved into the "unconscious" (the "id", the part of the mind which is "not-me" according to the Identity and thus actively ignored) and keep running on automatic without the identity having any conscious clue about why things keep going wrong. ("Why do I keep doing stupid / self-destructive things like that?")

So: therefore, much "unnecessary suffering" is caused by the nafs running one or more Identity "programmes" based on childlike, faulty, incomplete or obsolete Bottom Lines / Rules of Behaviour.  It is difficult to underestimate the power of habit. People will keep on with Rules of Behaviour which solved one problem a long time ago but never got shut off, and therefore become the new, hidden problem.

It becomes even more complicated because the Identity will try to deliberately keep the mental film-clips running, because to switch them off will deprive the Identity of its raison d'être. An Identity will defend its own existence at all costs. Mindfulness practice will allow one to individually monitor these processes, find the Rules of Behaviour they embody. But it's very hard. All the nafs wants to do is to go back to running on automatic, which is so much easier (less effort).

We've already mentioned CBT, which deals with these thought/emotion complexes by questioning them - using the intellect as a tool to erase them gradually. Abreactive therapy (eg. Hubbard's Dianetics) aimed to erase these mental pictures (engrams) by consciously recalling them and feeling the pain which went along with them, to relieve the need to keep them running consciously. I've got good results from solo abreactive therapy like the Universal Conscious Process, but it only works if there's a safe space in which you can feel these feelings without pulling the emergency stop button.

Which brings me to the most important question of why psychotherapy is so difficult: the nafs will fight stubbornly protect itself and the Identities it creates. The counsellor will be in a therapeutic alliance with the intellect, but the nafs will be scheming to try to figure out how to keep its own little games going. So trained counsellors who can provide such a safe space are generally worth the expense - for exactly the same reason that in Sufism one must have a spiritual master (someone who has actually learned to submit nafs to spirit) to make any progress.

But really, all psychology is a subset of the tools of reality tunnel hacking, for which see below...

IV.

We want to minimise or eliminate "unnecessary suffering" to leave as much emotional and physical energy necessary to (a) meet the being's own real as opposed to imaginary needs to survive in this world; (b) undergo the necessary suffering of creating something new in this world.

Creativity - i.e. introducing something into the world which wasn't there before - comes from the spirit. What else comes from the spirit is last-ditch holding operations when the nafs has lost control of a situation and can't help itself. (Hence mothers ripping car doors off their hinges to save the kids, people's "fairy godmothers" coming to them in a dream and telling them not to kill themselves, and all other "I never realised I had it in me" moments.)

So each act of creativity is "fighting against gravity" - a guest in the house persuading her host to change how she does things and also her friends and neighbours. It is inherently unlikely. Fighting against gravity spends time, energy and resources to merely stand still - it is suffering. It is also worthwhile.

If we (intellectually) decide we want more creativity in our life, then our task is to make our house welcoming for the spirit. An Arabic proverb is that "the nafs is fed from the mouth, the spirit is fed from the ear". I'm sure you can think of various ways that you can declutter your life a bit so you can have more room for creativity.

V.

A REALITY TUNNEL is the subset of the whole sensory experience of life as coloured by the Identity's need to divide the universe into "me" and "not-me".
The broad mass majority of people forget that they built their identity and believe that they ARE their identity, and that their reality-tunnel IS reality. In fact, particularly in "intellectuals" (people who use their intellect as their primary tool for dealing with reality), quite often they'll adopt the reality tunnel first, and then "naturally" assume the Identity which goes with it.

As Althusser put it, if you kneel in the same place and pray for long enough you WILL believe in God, sooner or later. Wise people know, therefore, that their own reality tunnel limits them, and strive towards objectivity. Any idiot knows that someone else's reality tunnel is limiting them, and set themselves the goal of changing their minds through brute force, trickery or simple drudging repetition.

To use Gramsci's terminology, "common sense" is the rules that your nafs has learned about how to hold its Identity together in the World-As-Is. "Good sense" is what you learn from your own practice. "Common sense" is much easier to follow.

This is where "magick", variously defined as "folk parapsychology" or "the art and science of changing consciousness in accordance with will", comes in. All the magickal rituals boil down to is an individual attempting to "hack" their own reality tunnel, in an attempt to make possible what appeared to be impossible, or at least to make melt into air what appeared to be solid - to expand their own personal universe and self-perceived qualities. What they all have in common is an attempt by someone to break down and rebuild an identity which has become limiting.

Actually, it's only "magick" when one person or a group do it to themselves. If one person or a group do it to someone else, it's called "public relations", "propaganda", "psychology" or "brainwashing" - and the skills are precisely the same. Repetition, association, attention-grabbing, all that stuff they teach you in marketing textbooks. The technology is identical. (As R. A. Wilson pointed out, another name for building a new Identity from scratch and learning to live in it is "method acting".)

The reason magick has such a low success rate, though is the same reason that self-therapy is hard - if you don't have an objective therapist (or Master) overseeing the process, fooling or even brainwashing yourself is just too goddamned easy. Changing yourself is easy once you've become objective - but that is possibly the hardest thing imaginable, on your own. As Esmeralda Weatherwax put it, you need to know three things to be a Witch - what's real, what's not real, and what the difference is.

This is the hidden way in which "if you want to change the world, start with yourself" is actually good advice rather than sappy moralism. Another word for reality tunnel hacking, which would include all the methods above, might be parallax practice - "an apparent change in reality brought about by a change in the observation-position of the observer".

You'd hope that this could add to real-world activities in order to make them easier, to deal with obstacles which might actually just be optical illusions if you shift your perspective.But vice-versa - the more you bring yourself into contact with reality outside your personal reality tunnel (in particular, things that are hard or painful, people who are mean or just disagree with you), the more you can your own personal reality.

Which may be an answer to the question: "why is life hard?" and also provide an answer to "why are people on the internet / in small socialist groups crazy?" (Because they spent far too much time talking only to people like them and they've totally lost any objectivity.)
 
VI.

Given the "reality tunnel" model, most people are looking at the world with sunglasses stapled to their foreheads and wondering why everything's so dark. They built their identity to survive and thrive in the World-As-Given, but their identity - their class position as well as all the other parts of their "habitus" - prevents them from understanding what's really going on without a lot of work. And this problem has only spread over the last 150 years or so.

Marx said that the workers have nothing to lose but their chains, that they were the revolutionary class not only because they held the whole system up but that they had no selfish interest in doing so. But that was perhaps more true when the proletariat were only useful as labour and breeders of more labour.

Since the early 20th century, when the proletariat became first political subjects then consumers, and therefore the objects of propaganda, no matter how objectively immiserated we are, we now have our very IDENTITIES (previously moulded by family, church and immediate society) moulded by mass propaganda. No wonder we can no longer see the wood for the thousand miles of billboards. Losing one's identity as a consumer of goods and media narratives is freakin' terrifying if that's all that been keeping you from existential dread and killing your family.

Of course middle-class snobs look down on the workers "wasting their money" on consumer goods, even though that - even more than religion - is now "the soul of a soulless condition". Not that prosperity gospels and fundamentalist religions - which offer you "suffering with a point", i.e. both the earthly and heavenly paradises - are getting any less popular in the current economic slump. But even just "opting out" of consumer society, like the lifestyle anarchists and the Situationists wanted to do, can be just another trap. The middle class just have a different set of identities to escape into.

A Sufi sheikh once said to me: "some people lose their ego when they start coming here, and then they just grow another ego". The political equivalent of this is to become a lifestyle revolutionary - where revolutionary activism is not an attempt to change the world, but an "entrepreneurial" attempt by the alienated subject to create a new place in the world. Fighting the cops then having a few home brews and vegan biryanis with your mates can be a lot of fun.

A similar problem is when the revolutionary group, or the revolutionary analysis becomes the Identity which can't be relinquished. If you "are" your party, or you "are" your analysis, and that "defending" either of those is what your political activity is about, then you are not changing the world. You are just building a little bunker to hide from it. Political capital is not like financial capital, you can't keep it in the bank and earn interest. It's instead like seed corn, if you don't get it out there it goes rotten.

So perhaps in that sense, those of us who never got on with anyone, not even the other misfits, have some kind of advantage... although of course being the "stone which was rejected and is now the cornerstone" can be another addictive Identity. Identities are necessary for survival, but they are also limiting and become obstacles to creativity and objectivity if they can't be taken off, amended or discarded, by whatever means you find useful. And I have tried dozens of ways to do so. At the moment, my practice is a combination of revolutionary eco-socialism with Sufism, CBT and UCP.

The workers ceased to become a class-for-themselves when they accepted their interpellated identities as consumers. This process must be reversed before we will have a mass revolutionary movement. Revolution is therefore a matter of the whole working class performing collective magick / self-therapy.

VII.

Hazrat-e-Pir Dr Javad Nurbakhsh was Professor of Psychiatry at Tehran University as well as the Master of the Ni'matullahi Sufi Order. So he was ideally placed to sum up this blog's attempt to reconcile psychology and spirituality (although the politics and memetics are our own addition to the mix).

The way he put it, there were "superficial similarities" between Sufi practice and psychotherapy; the difference being that psychotherapy was about making the nafs healthy and strong, a necessary prerequisite to the Sufi goal of transcending the nafs altogether.

Gurdjieff talked about the goal of his practice being to "awake the conscience". This is identical with "heart" or "spirit" in the schema we've been using - a place of action which is independent from all the (rightly or wrongly) selfish and self-serving considerations of the nafs. (This "true conscience" we separate from the super-ego or "false conscience", that part of the Identity which enforces the rules on itself by nagging in a voice that the Identity is used to obeying.)

Essentially, most of the mystic traditions like Sufism or Zen work on a "subtractive logic" to achieve this - if you are mindful of all the thoughts and feelings that the nafs stirs up, and you stand back from them and watch them settle through a meditative practice, then whatever is left is spirit. The goal then is not to abolish or wipe out the nafs - which would mean physical death or being unable to look after yourself - but to develop the spirit, heart, or true conscience as an alternative source of action. 

This is necessary because only the "spirit" has any hope of being objective. Mysticism is an attempt to solve the observer-experimenter problem identified by Heisenberg by making the observer "nothing".

Like the Sufis, our equivalent for God must be The Ultimate Truth And Reality - al-Haqq. We should seek dissolution in the Truth - be prepared to sacrifice everything we ever wanted for ourselves to be able to serve that Truth. But we can only find that Truth by political, psychological, cultural and spiritual action. Through action we change our awareness; through changed awareness we discern right action. Trial, and error.

Tradition vs. Modernity

The thing about tradition, and this might shock and appall some of you neophiles out there, is that a tradition (as opposed to a new revelation) has passed the test of memetic natural selection. The longer a tradition has survived, the more evidence that it has been fit for purpose for actual human beings living in the real world of horrible jobs. Capitalist society has speeded up the process of evolution, but it's still a process of evolution. "Revolution" is simply the punctuation in punctuated equilibrium.

Hence, Chaos Marxism opposes any "Year Zero" nonsense or claims that things can appear out of nowhere with no connection to their predecessors and thus replace them. Which is why - for example - it's important to remember that Marx wasn't the first Marxist, he was the last of the great classical economists, working in the tradition forged by Adam Smith and David Ricardo. And conversely, we 100% oppose "fundamentalism" in the sense of the belief that "the original, pure message of [FILL IN BELIEF SYSTEM HERE] has been lost under useless tradition and we must restore it!" Thence comes nonsense like Wahhabism and all that "Forward to the Rebirth of the Fourth International" stuff.

... which is why Chaos Marxism opposes the efforts to "revive" traditions, or "return to the good stuff", but instead prefers to adapt existing traditions of the here-and-now to new phenomena and occurrences. You've got to build the new world with the building blocks of the old, because, as the history of colonialism tells us, simply attempting to shove a new civilisation down people's throats leads to Bad Mental Health on a mass scale.

Drama!

You know, I've been interested in Scientology for more than 20 years now, even while knowing that it's an abject failure and probably a 100% scam from start to finish, because part of me - a rather childish part - wishes it were otherwise. Who wouldn't want a precisely mapped-out set of procedures and rules which, if followed, give you awesome superpowers? Even Catholic priests can only turn a biscuit and a goblet of wine into the living presence of the Godhead. Operating Thetans can top that any day of the week, according to popular report. (Some of the Thelemites I've known have seriously been pushing towards getting similar powers, but with the same kind of results as far as I can tell.)

Interestingly enough, that's also why I've been interested in the Spartacist League and its daughter organisations. If "building the revolutionary party" was as simple as holding inflexibly to a programme last updated in 1938, then there would be far less heartbreak and brainwork involved, and you could have all the fun of the fair exchanging polemics with the OROs (the Spart equivalent of the Scientology "squirrels"). There's a darker side to that, of course - being the Chosen Ones gives you not only the duty, but the right, and more importantly the pleasure to be assholes to other people. "Error has no rights", as the traditional Catholics say.

Which brings me to the point that sometimes I find "Scientologese" jargon quite useful as shorthand. Like "ARC break" for pissing someone off, because it emphasises that such things happen when two people come to a serious disagreement on how they see the world and thus can't talk to each other properly. Here I am going to use the phrase "dramatization of case". I'm sure there's an equivalent for that in proper psychological language, though I can't think of it right now. The Marxist definition of "ideology" is "an imaginary solution to a real problem"; "dramatization of case" means "acting out past trauma or conflict in a completely different present situation". Like yelling at your girlfriend because she did something, quite innocently, which reminded you of your horrible mother.

So someone suggested on Tony Ortega's blog that Scientology is the dramatization of L. Ron Hubbard's case. This is not an original insight, but it is a good one. To give just one example, the insane bureaucratic internal structure of the Co$ is a "dramatization" of the US Navy of World War II, an organisation which Elron pretty much flunked out of. So he mocked up a facsimile of it in which he could be Commodore.

Could we also say that the Fourth International was the dramatization of Trotsky's case? After the trauma of going from Leader of the Revolution to Worst Scumbag on the Planet as far as the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was concerned, was he only trying to mock up a facsimile of the old-school Bolsheviks, this time one where he was on the winning side instead? Because let's face it, and sorry to the Trots out there because I have great love and sympathy for Lev Davidovitch, but the 4Int was always kind of a Potemkin village - the great guru, one mass party (the American SWP) and a bunch of loonies, sects, and Stalinist secret agents. Not in any way the same kind of mass forces as the first 3. And of course without Lev around the whole thing kind of crashed and burned.

Hmmm. Hubbard and Trotsky were both called "The Old Man" by their followers towards the end of their lives. I don't want to push this analogy too far because the former was a conman whose only skill was lying and he wasn't even good at that, and the other was a real revolutionary and hero howsoever flawed, but you get what I mean. In any group with an unchallenged, universally acknowledged leader, the group will more and more become a dramatization of the internal psychological conflicts of that leader. And in any group, no matter how democratic, which isolates itself from "the real world", the real fuel of the group will become its own internal conflicts.

A fallow period

Quite often in my daily meditative practice I suddenly have a "cognition" or a "bright idea" and I think "HOLY CRAP must remember to post this to CM when I'm done", but then afterwards I either can't remember it or it just seems silly. It is possible that "less is more" at this stage in my publication - or, at least, an aspect of quality control enters in.

It makes sense, I suppose, to reformulate the aim and mission of this blog: to harmonise the languages of transpersonal psychology and revolutionary socialism, with non-dualist spirituality thrown in there for anyone who might be interested in such a thing. As I said to Sage Kiesel what seems an aeon ago, Chaos Marxism is interested in practicality above all else, and we want to develop practical insights and techniques that YOU the occupier or stirrer or picketer or NGO volunteer or political candidate or author out there at the coalface can apply to your own practice, and that of your group, to attempt to shed light on previously insoluble problems.

In many previous periods, I have suggested "audience participation" for readers of this blog, none of which have been taken up, but how about this? Go through The Aphorisms on the sidebar (or any other sufficiently wacky thing from this blog) and ask me to expand on it in depth. I'll start with the following aphorism which just came to me:

Yearning is healthy; despair is unhealthy.

This assumes that we know how to tell the difference. The Sufis have the famous tale of Layla and Majnun, where hopeless, unfulfillable love is celebrated as the love of God. I suppose we can call that love of "the unknown ideal", "the Unborn Goddess" (to resurrect a stillborn meme from my back pages), or "the unfolding future of creativity". We are motivated by the drive to utopia, not by the defence of what we already have. The latter turns into the siege mentality found in all good totalitarian dictatorships and mind-control cults. It is in fact the "lesser of two evils" logic - justifying Obama's warmongering or Castro's heavy-handed suppression of dissidents because "they're not as bad as THE OTHER GUYS". Acts of suppression are always forgivable; quite often excusable; never acceptable.

 On the contrary, a certain bigoted strand of atheism/skepticism/rationalism seeks to pathologise yearning for anything more than creature comforts and seeking status within the World-As-Is, the Black Iron Prison. On the contrary, the Sufis call on the disciple to "reject both worlds", i.e. both here and the Hereafter. The answer is to "seek pain" as Rumi puts it - learn to be content with the yearning, with the knowledge that reality is imperfect and always will be because it is our human nature that makes it so.

But to accept that perfection will never be ours is not an excuse to give up, but an injunction to serve perfection by trying to get there. Who knows? When we give up what Crowley called "lust of result" and abandon ourselves to the process, perhaps the Inexpressible Benevolence of the Creative Impulse will have mercy on us.

 Anyway, some hilarious recent links:

•  documentation of L. Ron Hubbard's large intellectual debt to, or outright plagiarism of, Aleister Crowley; 
• documentation of the ongoing war of conservative-radical-modernist exoteric Islam against Sufism; 
•  ... and the first ever practical application of Chaos Marxist principles to actually-existing small group revolutionary socialist politics.

Anon calls out the Black Bloc

A psychological aphorism

Further to the below on the subject of "giving oneself permission to be evil..."

Generally what we hate to see others doing most is what we want to do ourselves but don't allow ourselves to, or think we can get away with.

So at the point where we recognize the antisocial impulses implanted in us by genetics and environment, we can "forgive" those of others - which, in a political sense, means rejecting moralism, the idea that there are good and bad people, and instead adopting the Bobby Sands dictum that "everyone has their own part to play".

My middle name is misery

There are two primary motivations for declaring someone or something else evil:

• Enhancing the cohesion of your own group;
• Giving yourself permission to be evil "in retaliation".

We might therefore say that declaring others to be evil is the source of all evil. Because factually there is no such thing as someone beyond the reach of goodness. Hitler loved his dog. Margaret Thatcher was on the research team that invented soft-serve ice-cream.

Chaos Marxism in comic form

Didn't Aleister Crowley get instantly given the IX degree in the OTO when the Outer Head decided from his writings that he already knew the secret of that degree? If so, then the author of this webcomic probably needs a Chaos Marxist Heroic Seal of Approval in the mail:

"... the secret is to make wanting the truth your whole identity."

"...nobody really gets to anything the way they think they will, because it takes so long to get anywhere. "

"...gradually go forward and be receptive to whatever you might encounter."

The last two should be interpreted, I think, as injunctions against preconceived schemas and unchallengeable theoretical shibboleths. Also, BONUS! Freddie Mercury.

Great Leader and Dear Leader

Don Corleone needs his consigliere; "Pops" Jong-Il needed da 4 Star G just like his dad needed him; and all the great dictatorships and gangster bosses throughout history have needed a Number 2 to act as chief sycophant, hatchet-person and heir presumptive. As an Irish comrade of mine mentions, a Power Couple is generally a force to be reckoned with. Conversely, a Great Leader who doesn't have an "offsider" will generally have all the underlings busy jockeying for the job. "Every heavenly body gotta have its moons", as Riki Nadir put it.

So watch out for that dynamic happening in your group or organisation.

A bouquet of Martian fire flowers to my comrade G. B. for his insight here.

Dear Lord, we paid for this food ourselves, so thanks for nothing.

I have trouble with the concept of grace, and its close cousin, forgiveness. I am, as most of you will know, a control freak. To quote the board of the Very Big Corporation from Monty Python's Meaning of Life, I am continuously disturbed by how much of the universe doesn't recognize me as its overlord yet.

*ahem* Yeah, it sounds hilarious now, but for most of my life I was bedeviled with the idea that a) becoming such an important person in the world that I could change it by my own efforts of will was not only possible, but indeed the only hope for a future; b) that if I didn't do so the world was doomed and I personally would probably end up on a street corner with a sign saying WILL DROP PANTS FOR FOOD, if not dead or behind bars. Todd Rundgren appears to have hit this stage by the time of his Initiation album - "I can't let the world die / because no-one would try". This of course was the outcome of growing up as something of a "child prodigy" in a very chaotic and emotionally unsafe environment, of being told that just about everything bad that happened was my fault and that it would stop happening if I could just be good. Of course, I could never be good enough. (Todd Rundgren was of course also a prodigy.)

For a long time I preferred to believe that I was "bad" inside, because the idea of being a good person who sometimes did things which hurt others was intolerable. I would have to ask for forgiveness, an unforgivable weakness which would never be forthcoming. Far better to have a fantasy of control, where I could always make my life worse whereas making my life better required risk. "You know where you stand in a hellhole", indeed.  

Grace and forgiveness are both concepts which are based on a fundamental relinquishing of control. They are based on the idea that you just can't make the world, or even your portion of it, "right" by your own efforts. If you've done something wrong, and you know it (and who hasn't?), and you can't personally put it right, all you can hope is that the person you've wronged, or God, or the credit card company or the District Attorney, will decide that you don't have to pay the debt you ran up. Otherwise, you will have to deal with the consequences forever and there ain't nothing you can do about it.

But believing in things like grace or forgiveness are the only things which make what we would know as revolutionary action possible. Believing that you are not necessarily to blame if things go wrong makes it tolerable for things to go wrong. Being able to handle the fact that you ballsed things up and possibly made things worse is the only thing that makes it possible to handle ballsing things up. And it's the only way that one can handle love.

Control issues in relationships kill the heart-opening bliss quicker than anything. If you understand that you can't change your partner, that's one step; the next is understanding that you can't change yourself any more than you can lift yourself up by your bootstraps. Of course you can always change your behaviour, but that's not the same thing.

It's always better to act than not to act, because acting at least allows the possibility that Grace might enter the world, that we might actually be forgiven our debts as we forgive our debtors. Here's what Robert Fripp has to say on the subject (scroll down to where he starts talking about the Chief Rabbi).

And it's a warm Festivus welcome...

... for our new readers from 4chan /lit/.

Why the emancipation of the workers has to be the act of the workers

If we are not free to say no, we are not free to say yes. Any authentic change, ie transformative and transforming change, comes from the inside; and moves outwards to direct and shape our behavior. If behavior is compulsory, if we are compelled by an external force or authority, there may well be “good” repercussions, but not transformations: it’s just more-of-the-same. 

Emphasis added, thank you Boppin' Bobby. A "good" government or leadership may open up possibilities for social revolution and the self-transformation of the masses, please note this cousin Hugo (and get well soon), but will never substitute for it. More of the same = "meet the new boss, same as the old boss"; revolution from above may improve things but will not open the door into the Better World.

Damn, am I becoming an anarchist (or at least a council communist / Left Communist) as I get older? Perhaps not because I do still see that participation in bourgeois electoral politics can be a useful first step towards self-liberation. But I am certainly not a Leninist, while still finding much of value in Lenin's work.

Great King Rat died today

... because you can't go wrong with a bit of Queen. I have a large stash of DPRK propaganda in hard-copy, sent to me in the mail by an acquaintance ages ago to attempt to troll me as a self-described socialist. It's good reading material for the lavatory.

But to more serious business: this on the DPRK as a theocracy is very interesting, although I dispute his belief that a "religion" necessary has to posit a supernatural realm - it only has to posit anti-materialist explanations for natural phenomena, and "Marxism-Leninism" can certainly do that if it starts believing in things like "there is no truth outside the Party" or "a strong will can conquer anything". (In contrast, Deism for example can believe in a God without believing that the scientific laws of nature are ever violated.)

And to less serious business: I think this illustrates what I said before about how totalitarian "compulsory fun" has its own analogies in the compulsory fun of administered monopoly capitalism. (How many of you proles out there were made to wear Santa hats by your bosses this week?) And dear Allpowerful Atheismo, I hope this hilarious blog is soon updated.

How cults start

So anyway, first you have someone who sets themselves up as a "master" (leader, guide, activist, organiser) and establishes what you might call a "Freudian transference relationship" with their followers - i.e. the followers, feeling a great lack in themselves caused by alienation, oppress and exploitation, assume that the Great Man (and it is usually a man) can bring wholeness to them, like an idealised father figure. Let Hazrat-e-Pir Dr. Javad Nurbaksh take it from here: 

The mentally ill become the morids [disciples]  of this kind of 'master' and establish a transference relationship with him. Then, by claiming that miracles have taken place, which were, in fact the result of the strong emotions established by transference, and by acting as missionaries for their master, they make converts. The so-called master, in turn, unaware of his own egoism, benefits from people's ignorance. Hence, by calling himself a saint he establishes a parasitic livelihood for himself. Sometimes due to a miracle reported by a morid, he comes to think that all the while he has really been a man of God, but has not realized it. In short, this type of 'master' is pulled along by the crowd because of his need to make a living, and in turn he becomes more and more convinced of his own claims. This causes a vicious circle between the morid and the morãd, both of them firm in their own egoism.

In every era this vicious circle stimulates a certain number of people to become 'masters', and then morids become enchanted with them and start telling extraordinary stories about them. ... In reality, people thus, create their own idols and then start worshipping them. This type of master is, in fact, subject to his own morids. As a matter of fact, a morid likes to have a certain man as his master, namely, a master who due to his defects and imperfections, always enjoys having a crowd of followers to support him.

Emphases added. It's a good living (or, if you can't do it professionally, a good source of ego boosting) to be Great Leader for a howsoever tiny group of people who are willing to let you run their minds. And then you start to believe your own publicity (like L. Ron Hubbard apparently did, or some say Joseph Smith did).

And the root of all this is hypocrisy - some half-baked yahoo, either sincerely or cynically, thinks that God or the Class Struggle speaks through them and mistakes their own ego gratification for the Good Work. Which is a lesson I should have learned ages ago. I count myself luckly that, even though most of the earlier ravings on this blog are egomaniacal and intolerant in the extreme, I always wanted collaborators rather than Zombies and therefore I never actually attracted any "followers", praised be the sweet name of Almighty Atheismo.

And in the end...

... after all the questions like who am I?,  what am I doing here?, did I really deserve what happened to me?, why is the world like it is?, etc etc etc, are answered, the only question left is... how can I help?
 

Even the Republicans know about the serious business

David Frum, former adviser to Cowboy Dubya, now understands what the evolution of mass politics from actual debate to simple faction-fighting (similar to the Blues and the Greens in 6th century Constantinople) has wrought. "Conservatism has evolved from a political philosophy into a market segment." It's no longer a means to understand the world, but an ideological identity-tribe which will buy anything, no matter how noxious, that will help them hide from reality. He might have also said "same goes for fundamentalist Christianity".


"Be careful what you wish for, because you will get it and then the Gods will laugh at your dumb ass". Frum points out that the Republicans got what they wanted in the Bush era (i.e. unbridled power), but then after reality didn't turn out the way they imperially/imperiously ordered it to do so, they went to the happy land of Cognitive Dissonance. Frum challenges what a lot of we lefties think, that Bush/Cheney/Blair etc. would have told any lie to get what they wanted:

...conscious cynicism is much rarer than you might suppose. Few of us have the self-knowledge and emotional discipline to say one thing while meaning another. If we say something often enough, we come to believe it. We don’t usually delude others until after we have first deluded ourselves.

That could be a Chaos Marxist aphorism right there. Poor bastards really believed that if the Imperial Masters said something would happen, it would happen, or at least everyone would pretend it had happened. Praise the Iraqi and Afghan insurgencies for busting that little bubble.

Let's never let OCCUPY evolve into a market segment. "Socialism" evolved into a market segment, or even a minor religion, a long time ago, but it seems to be recovering during the current brush with reality.

Chaos Marxism is monist

As previously explored, as a young radical/misfit I was massively drawn to neo-paganism, particularly to the anarcho-socialistic / "California head-shrinking" variety of the same described by Starhawk. I swallowed whole the line that "monotheism is imperialism in religion", and was attracted to the utopia she offered in her novel The Fifth Sacred Thing of a patchwork "confederacy of tribes" model of a post-capitalist future.

(ETA: Great Goddess on an electric motorbike, they're making a movie of it!)

But over the last few years I have rejected most of that as an essentially idealist, dare we say even "petty-bourgeois" vision of the future. Let's put it this way - Starhawk argues that "if we see the ocean as the womb of the Goddess Mother, we are less likely to fill Her with poisons". But symbolism and reality are distinct in all but the most childish of minds. The Prophet Muhammad put it on the line to the pagan Arabs, who worshipped Goddesses and yet buried the girl babies alive. The Olympian cults of Greece and Rome were hardly those of "respect for the feminine", no matter what Robert Graves might argue - the Athenian attitude to woman was not dissimilar to that of present-day Saudi Arabia. The Catholic faith, that branch of Christianity which happens to have more female objects of veneration, also has what might be considered a quite barbaric doctrine when it comes to fertility and the control thereof.

Polytheism is the theology of tribalism, and even worse, it is the theology of Empire. To understand this we have to understand that an empire is dissimilar to a nation state. The Roman Empire when it was healthy was not an autocratic monolithic state, but a sprawling multinational mess only united by a devotion to the Pax Romana personified in the Imperial cult. Apart from that, all the various ethnicities were allowed whatever insane tribal religions they wanted, as long as human sacrifice or actual rebellion weren't involved, and some of them even got popular in the metropolis. Pretty much the same went for the Holy Roman Empire of the Middle Ages, and the Ottoman Empire in its pomp. And that is precisely the logic of late, "post-modernism / consumerist" capitalism under the Pax Americana. Every minority group has its own "middle class", its own idols and languages respected. Potentially revolutionary groups are co-opted by giving them a piece of the pie, or in other words, employment for a middle class (gay bar owners, people who translate government diktats into indigenous languages, etc).

On the contrary, UNITY is a sweet and beautiful world in both the revolutionary socialist tradition and the mystical traditions of Islam and Buddhism. And Chaos Marxism is all about that. "Unify the forces". "We are the 99%". There is no room for "their truth" and ours to co-exist, because harsh reality in the form of the interlinked crises of accumulated capital / ecological degradation / mass alienation and anger intervenes. The goal is to overthrow the repressive tolerance of Empire into a new unifying way of seeing the world (although not a monolithic one). All great Reforms of history have had that same kind of paradoxical "intolerance".

All saints revile her, and all sober men

Currently rereading one of my favourite books in the world when I was 16 years old, Robert Graves' The White Goddess. The historical argument is of course completely risible, and as for the poetic logic, the guy is basing his argument on close analysis of Old Irish and Welsh texts, two languages which he admits up front he doesn't speak a word of and is relying on dodgy-tastic translations. Still, his essential argument that "poetry" (and all other forms of true art) is the same thing as religio-mystical devotion is still one of the axioms of Chaos Marxism. We just attempt to bring revolutionary socialism and psychology into the mix.

Welcome to the future.

It's like all the dreams of Chaos Marxism are coming to rampaging life, in city squares across the planet. And just my luck to have been ill in bed all week. Definitely getting down there this afternoon. Socialists thought I was nuts when I was talking about how Project Chanology was the wave of the future, but who's laughing now, oldthinkers? Tell me that, who's laughing now?

The obvious question

Who out there has got fun tales to tell about #Occupy?

FIVE YEARS OF CHAOS MARXISM

Thank you from the bottom of my heart, all you readers and commenters, for making it possible. I'm also pleased to note that we have hewed rather closely to our original intentions, although I no longer am a bigoted anti-postmodernism, and my concerns have shifted more to mysticism than to magick, more to "transpersonal psychology" than "folk parapsychology". Open thread, if anyone wants to mouth off in the comments.

Once again on the purpose of Chaos Marxism

For the mystics: We all know that the world that we experience is a Black Iron Prison, a malign illusion, the Matrix. We can experience the world where God exists and magic is afoot when we "wake up", that is become properly conscious, cease to rely on preprogrammed scripts and what we "expect" to see, to actually look reality squarely in the face. But survival in the world that it is means that it's much, much easier (and actually more fun) to stay asleep. The purpose of revolutionary ecosocialism is to build a world where it would be easier to stay awake than to fall asleep. But for that to happen the broad majority of people have to "wake up". We don't have time to do this one-by-one. We need to seize the reins of the Frankenstein's Monster that the mass media has become to get to everywhere in the world at once. Liberation has to be as ubiquitous as Coca-Cola.

For the revolutionaries: we're trying to understand about how "coming to consciousness" actually works. Once you realise that most self-described revolutionaries are not conscious, but are instead following a Book of Rules for Living Your Life as restrictive and soul-deadening as any peddled by a church or a self-help guru, you realise why everything that they say they want (to unite with the masses to spread consciousness) never actually happens. Also, actually-existing Marxists and anarchists seem to have a distressing lack of practical compassion towards each other (as opposed to "abstract compassion" to the "working class" or "the oppressed peoples of the earth"), and seem not to be conscious of their own reactionary attitudes when it comes to dealing with their own privilege. Non-dualist spirituality and transpersonal psychology have a lot to teach us here. And no, just participating in the struggle doesn't make you all better psychologically.

I love it when people agree with us

I've been an admirer of Terry Eagleton's work for ages, but this is... wow.

In the European world bus drivers, florists and dental assistants are not usually expected to hold complex ideas about the origins of the world, the purpose of life, or what it means to live a rich, fulfilled, fully human existence. They are simply expected to get on with their everyday lives and leave these more fundamental questions to scholars and clerics. This is not so in the case of Islam. [...] Antonio Gramsci maintained that all ordinary people were at a certain level philosophers, but this is a lot more obvious in the Islamic world than it is elsewhere. Islamists are also natural-born internationalists. [...] Western societies deal with belief primarily by reducing it to a private affair. It becomes a kind of hobby or personal eccentricity, rather like collecting Javanese parrots or engaging in sado-masochistic pursuits [...] It is not a force for the transformation of reality but a refuge from it, like Madonna's Kabbalah or Tom Cruise's Scientology. [...] The capitalist West's problem is that it can neither kick belief nor get along with it. It can do neither with it nor without it. It needs some show of faith, not least in times of political crisis, to declare to the world what it stands for. In reality, however, capitalism is an inherently faithless system. As long as you roll into work, pay your taxes and refrain from beating up police officers, you can believe more or less what you like. Too much conviction smacks of fanaticism, and is bad for business. [...] Socialists may not agree with the content of Islamic faith, but they are well acquainted by their own history with the idea of millions of ordinary men and women living lives of conviction rather than of pragmatic self-interest. In this, at least, we share a precious tradition with those hounded by the Islamophobes.

Chaos Marxism stands 4-square behind the democratisation of philosophy; of the necessity of faith to break out of the utilitarian/entropic straitjacket of bourgeois ideology; for mystics and dialectical materialists to take each other seriously. Such ideas - as well as ecosocialism, and the understanding of the pivotal role of information workers in the senile capitalist countries (aka "the West") - have to be at the centre of any new International.

For everyone who's given up hope

If “tomorrow” is the first lie of the Devil, perhaps the second lie might be that our own contribution has no value; that we are powerless to make a difference in the world. It is very easy to believe that this is so, seeing clearly our frailties & weaknesses. But this is a lie, nevertheless.

- Thanks, Vicious Bob. I post this in response to the overwhelming negativity, bitterness and nihilism which have become the common sense of the liberal-leftist Internet in this day and age, this era of accelerating capitalist crisis, ecological collapse, the collapse of hopes that an imperialist war machine led by an intelligent black lawyer/academic would somehow be qualitatively different from one led by a borderline imbecile white fratboy, etc., etc...

But of course the ruling ideas of our epoch, like any other, are those of the ruling class. The ruling class want us to believe that "the war is over and the good guys lost" (L. Cohen), that their rule might be an obvious disaster but There Is No Alternative. But let's put it this way - okay, let's just assume for the sake of argument that we live at the beginning of a civilisational Dark Age like, I dunno, the European Middle Ages or the Chinese Warring States period. There's nothing that any individual can do about it, not even Noam Chomsky, John Lennon and Black Dynamite all put together. So what is your motivation for remaining alive?

Should we all load stones in our pockets and go down to the local river like Virginia Woolf? Or get drunk all the time, which is the slow-motion version of the same thing? Or give up and join the rat race to get our piece of the pie before it's too late? (Don't worry if that means selling our soul - it's not as if our soul was worth anything, and if the world is fucked whatever we do, we might as well be actively evil as long as it feels good, right?!?)

Credo quid absurdum. The only noble thing that it is still possible to do is to act as if what you did actually mattered. That is, act according to principle, as opposed to automatic ideas based on what you picked up from the TV or social chatter. Even if you're wrong, you make it possible for others to do so.

Barbarians at the gate

I've quoted approvingly from Jordan Stratford, the Gnostic Monsignor and author, a couple of times which you might remember. I finally got around to buying his exposition of his modern faith-culture, Living Gnosticism. Now I've criticised Msgr. Stratford once before as being a representative of "the occultism of small businessmen" ("unorthodox faith" movements which don't break with the underlying material base of the secular and/or institutionalised faith culture they live in). In that regard I was particularly struck by parts of the closing essay of his small and worthy book, in which he foresees a quasi-apocalyptic clash between the Apollonian (rationalist and liberal) culture of the metropolis and the Dionysian (irrational, ecstatic, fundamentalist) culture of the periphery. Although I don't think that's really the clash he's talking about:

The barefoot glossolalians are emerging from the desert once again. Only whereas in the second century, these cultures met one another on a fairly equal footing, this time the North is vastly outnumbered... What happens when a generation of hip, aware, tattooed, multilingual, educated, environmentally-responsible Episcopalian urbanites who stopped at one child (if any) is overcome by a majority of dozen-siblinged fundamentalists who think being gay is caused by demonic possession? The North has been outbred by the South, and the fundamentalists are basically just waiting for us - and our egalitarian, feminist, green, tolerant, "reasonable" Apollonian culture - to die out.

The ignorant unwashed masses are outbreeding our liberal aristocracy?!? Holy crap, stop right there, Pim Fortuyn. This is how quickly urban, tolerant liberalism can flip into out sheer imperialism, close to racism. Because they are the left wing of globalised imperialism, of course they're going to be terrified by the end of globalised imperialism and therefore their privileges as the systems' internal, polite, critics.

But seriously, in the immortal words of Tonto, "what do you mean our culture, paleface"? Is the dominant culture of the West really feminist and green and egalitarian? You know, with all the rape and sexual objectification and extractive industry and consumeristic waste and people begging on the streets? No it bloody isn't. A very small privileged layer - among whom Msgr. Stratford lives and for whom he speaks - gets to live that way, because they're the middle class professionals and skilled workers who benefit from the real underpinning of "their culture" - the continued pillaging of natural resources and super-exploitation of the global proletariat in the name of glorious profit. You are not more environmentally aware because you breed less, especially if you on your own have a bigger environmental footprint than Reverend Kiswahili or Mullah Omar and their dozen kids whom you're having paranoid dreams about.

Jordan Stratford goes on about Athenian culture, and the later culture of the Roman Empire, being swamped by primitive backwards Christianity, and within "two generations... the plumbing stopped working". Uh-huh. Now this is where middle-class idealism gets you. Athenian society was based on slavery (and oppression of women of a Saudi Arabia level, or perhaps worse). The Roman Empire was based on slavery and conquering as much of the known world as they could hold. And Christianity was the overwhelmingly popular religion of those slaves by the time of the fourth century CE. The social system had run out of steam. The Lombards, Goths, Vandals and other barbarian hordes were relatively more vigorous than decadent, senile Rome, no matter whether they were sacrificing to Zeus or celebrating the Eucharist.

Yes, it's true. Neoliberal, globalised, financialised capitalism makes a very sweet lifestyle possible for a middle-class layer who - precisely because they're not struggling for a crust, and because they don't have to directly exploit anyone - can make consumer choices which they interpret as a life of virtue. That's not the culture I have any interest in protecting. To paraphrase Catharine MacKinnon, and that's something I thought I'd never do: "if your genteel culture requires having a global slave class, you have no right to your genteel culture."

To be fair, though, Msgr. Stratford isn't precisely defending the Empire against the barbarians at the gates. What he's suggesting is that Gnosticism is an example of a compromise. But the real compromise can't be a new faith or an old faith or a culture or a creed, it has to be a material way of existing. The fundamentalist hordes don't have a solution - when the kind of people he's worried about took over in Iran in 1979, nothing really changed except some industry got nationalised and the regime stopped grovelling to American foreign policy.

If your culture of "Lulu Lemon yoga gear and $200 Nikes... "Tradition" starbucks cups... [and] Bang & Olufsen speakers" has nothing to say to people who live in grinding poverty and whose faith is all they have and do not really take kindly to being told not to reproduce themselves by corpulent, privileged white folks, then you need to think a bit more clearly. The only people who can change the world and create a new culture on a new material base are the globalised proletariat - the people who actually make all those things that Jordan Stratford's people consume. Isn't it such a pity that the United States spent so long wiping out communist movements among that class of people in the 70's and 80's and instead building the credentials of the religious fundamentalists that are now the Great Satan?

(As an aside, by "global proletariat" we have to include the information workers, and this is where those of us with plenty of Western cultural capital can intervene. I more and more think that Anonymous has become the modern equivalent of 1870's Russian Narodnik terrorists. I wonder what form a "Cyber-Bolshevik" party might take. Just as the tiny but vital industrial proletariat in Russia had to make an alliance with the peasant masses to win power, the vanguard of modern information workers who keep globalised capitalism and consumerism functioning have to line up with the inhabitants of the sweatshops of China and the coffee plantations of Colombia.)

Chaos Marxism stands against both fundamentalist obscurantism, and a defence of "liberalism and Western culture" which is nothing more but an appeal for the perpetuation of the privileges of the middle class.

Once again on commodification

In March I wrote:

Mass production means that nothing gets lost forever. Everything can be replaced - and, in the era of the Internet, if it can be digitised, these days nothing need be lost at all. [...] So that's what's behind "vintage culture", steampunk, Goth, SCA, whatever - the attempt to create a culture of objects which are totally individual and therefore meaningful, even sacred.

But someone else got there before me:

Hence steampunk, for what is steam punk if not a romanticized do-over, a setting of the clock back, a time of craftsmanship and real (fetishized) objects, remaking the world, not in the mode of the ceaseless slow sprawl of cheap oil but in the Victorian self-aware world making spirit?

So maybe Chaos Marxism is salvagepunk. And taqwacore.

(Doloras entered nirvana, parenthetically.)

Holy crap, for about five minutes there I didn't exist. It was COOL.

And when I came back to existing I found myself at the centre of a synchronicity storm which proved to my satisfaction that I'm doing something right.

===

All the great works of mystical literature (eg. Irina Tweedie) say that the path to ego-loss is rapid-cycling-bipolar to the Nth degree. One minute God doesn't exist and you're full of crap, the next moment you're in Paradise eating from the fruits of the tree of Knowledge of Good And Evil and Endless Free Sex, and then God doesn't exist any more, and so on. Probably enlightenment comes when you realise that both are illusions, or as Hazrat-e-Pir Dr. Nurbakhsh would say, you give up on both this world and the Hereafter.

Because God doesn't exist in the world of blind matter and inescapable natural law. In contrast, the world of Love and Meaning and Compassion and really really good orgasms and cuddles and niceness and warm milk is nothing but God. We live in the hologram caused by the overlapping of the two worlds, to use Grant Morrison's terminology which I think he took from Philip K Dick.

Aphorism time:

He who tries to defend or describe or dismiss God with Logic is committing a foul sin against Logic as well as one against God.

I notice this in the similarity of the style of arguments made by both Catholic and Salafist theologians. Religion is just rules, which is a form of cause and effect and therefore of the hard, nasty world not the sweet, gentle world. I read a website by some heretical Muslims who argue that God has actually set Satan up as temporary ruler of the planet. That might be a pretty good metaphor for describing what happens in revolutionary events... when the Black Iron Prison springs a leak and suddenly the impossible becomes possible (almost a definition of the presence of God).

Because that never lasts, and what happens afterwards is that the sweet spring of flowing nectar which existed for maybe a year or two maximum gets damned and polluted and set to drive the waterwheels of the dark satanic mills. The ekklesia, majlis or soviets of workers and soldiers' deputies become new engines of oppression. The institutions founded to guard the message end up destroying the message. And that's the price of success - having to cut a deal with the Prince of This World. Compare the umma after the death of the Prophet to the Soviet Union after the Civil War and see what I mean.

(A Persian fellow once said to me: "I'm a Muslim, but that means I submit to God, not to Muhammad." Similarly, the only real revolutionaries are the ones who refuse to argue in terms of the hadiths of Lenin and Trotsky, instead trying to emulate their spirit and daring and avoid their dumb mistakes, and whose only wish for that mausoleum on Red Square is that they should give Vlad a decent burial and stop propping him up like a grinning scarecrow.)

To be true to the spirit of the Revolution, which is precisely identical to the Holy Spirit and to what makes cats scream in the night and poets howl at the moon, we have to refuse rules, schemas, hierarchies and brain death - while at the same time refusing the opposite trap, of going back to worshipping our own egos. As Ayn Rand put it (and screw her, by the way) - "in the name of the best within all of us".

We don't need any more Prophets or idols, but we will always need idolsmashers and the Enlightened Masters who come to wake us up. But they get taken from us too early, so let's appreciate them while we have them.

Rumi Was A Homo

Progressive Islam is purely an academic exercise. It’s not creating a culture. It’s professors talking to each other.

Thank you, Michael Muhammad Knight. You can only create a culture out of practice, not out of ideology or ideas. If you try to create a culture out of ideas, then the culture will be based on what practice you're actually doing and trying not to think about.

Brother Michael is referring to "Progressive Islam" meaning smug liberal upper-middle-class Westernised academics who happen to be from a Muslim background or culture trying to package upper-middle-class liberalism (the lifestyle they actually follow, being the consumer lifestyle plus libertarian sexual/gender ethics) in a pseudo-Islamic flavouring. Funnily enough, it has exactly the same content as the "socialism" or "Marxism" which comes out of academia or out of the lumpen-academia known as "the activist communities" - nothing but pieties, symbols and rituals over the top of a content of the privileged behaviour of those who have cultural capital recognized by the Black Iron Prison. Nothing more than native informants, or the left-wing of Empire.

"Progressive Islam" of this sort, and "socialism" which means nothing more than the ritualised behaviour of a lumpen-intelligensia subculture, offers absolutely nothing to your average person living in an Islamabad slum or under a pile of rubble in Gaza, or even in the working-class area of London or Paris or [FILL IN WHERE YOU LIVE RIGHT NOW]. The people are already creating the New World on the ashes of the old, and the honest intellectuals are those who can be like Orwell in Barcelona in 1936, and realise that just because you don't really like what is happening doesn't mean it's not something worth fighting for. If you don't like it the answer is to create your own new culture where you are right now, and then seek to become allies.

Actually, I think Brother Michael might have something in common with Chaos Marxism, since he certainly takes a historical-materialist approach to faith:

Once you recognize how much of your tradition is a product of historical forces, it empowers you to be an historical force yourself.

Too many Marxists, for example, seem to believe that they are the Chosen Ones on account of the unblemished ideology passed down to them from the Holy Prophet Karl and His Noble Imams Fred, Vlad, and (Josef and Mao if you're a Sunni, Leon if you're a Shi'ite). They don't look at the historical reality of where they are, where they came from and where they might go, they only act as if they had abstracted their egos from reality and were nothing less than the living incarnation of The Most Holy Tradition. And of course in that situation the ego is left free to run rampant and ruin everything in support of its own continued existence.

If more Marxist groups honestly socially looked at themselves, they might see how their own actions continually sabotage what they claim to want. Hell, substitute "Marxist groups" with "human beings". The only people who really think ideology matters in and of itself are those trained to be ideological technicians under capitalism, and that's why they either sell out or create little "toy" versions of the churches and universities which they would be running if they'd made it in the big wide world.

I love historical analogies

If, as previously discussed, the relationship between the ruling class and the media today is analogous to that between the feudal aristocracy and the priesthood in Europe of 1000 years ago, then Rupert Murdoch would be a Borgia pope. Alexander VI?

Riot! The unbeatable high!

Tomorrow you're homeless... tonight it's a blast. Still, sometimes it has to be done.

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

Of course implacable opposition, rioting, etc are fun and all. But what does it accomplish, if not tempered with a positive?

We commented on riots in Tonga in 2006, and in Greece last year, and the same rules still apply. My favourite Trot gives a good analysis - interesting how the American media are far enough away from the action that they can actually see what it's about, as opposed to the British media demanding troops on the streets, mass floggings, etc.

The forest fire burns everything down. Then possibly new growth can happen.

Rule #1 of Cult Leadership

Try to talk in the same voice as the super-ego of your gullible stooges. Generally people are so used to doing what the programmed voices in their head tell them, that if you can work out what that programmed voice is telling them and make it come out of your own mouth, they will become your devoted zombies and you can exploit them to live quite comfortably without actually contributing any value to the real world.

No lie. Mediocre cult leaders like Deepak Chopra or whoever tell people what they want to hear about themselves. Hard-core cult leaders like L. Ron Hubbard, Gary Chicoine or Jim Robertson will abuse the hell out of their followers, triggering all their class society-implanted self-abasement circuits.

In contrast, real Masters are distinguished by their loving-kindness.

premature emaculation

...as T.H.Meyer has suggested in relation to the channelling of `messages from the
Masters‘ by Madame Blavatsky and other members of the Theosophical Society, it is possible for a `transmission‘ of genuine Higher Wisdom to be distorted by the psyche of an `underdeveloped receiver‘. Translated into Gurdjieffian terms this would refer to someone who had achieved a degree of premature connection to the higher centres.

(source: Thompson, W. J. J. G. Bennett's Interpretations of the Teachings of Gurdjieff, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Lancaster, 1995.)

Hmmm. As a former "gifted child" (*shudder*) that seems very plausible to me. I was certainly having "spiritual experiences" left and right from the ages of about 13-15 (puberty, according to tradition, being closely associated with the opening of the more complicated bits of the brain), but due to very difficult psychological circumstances in my upbringing and being born very far from anyone who could have actually helped, it took me two decades or so of repeated head/brick-wall interface, bad choices, wild goose chases, following half-baked ideologies made up by dodgy people, and following my own half-baked ideologies, before I actually got in a position where it made any sense.

This fits in with Robert Fripp's analysis of Music as an expression of something which comes from somewhere "more real than life itself" (i.e. from the parts of consciousness beyond language), and that's why all those great musicians just get burned out, like a 2 amp fuse trying to contain a lightning strike. Just because someone's got a particular skill, or is really smart, or has spooky powers, doesn't mean that they are egoless Perfect Masters and you should let them take your life, is the take-away message from this.

...individuals who search after greater meaning are especially vulnerable to abuse because they feel themselves to be ‘unworthy’. ‘Seekers’ are greatly at risk. They look towards unseen worlds without having the confidence of gaining access to them, so that they come to look towards personalities who claim such access to guide them and interpret reality for them. This is of course exactly the same structure which is found in religions, the only difference being one of scale. All the remarkable men I have met who are truly remarkable embody a willingness to speak ‘on the level’ with others and not as authorities.

Thank you, Anthony Blake; it only remains to me to point out that seekers can be political as well as spiritual ones. Whether your guru spouts bullshit with a vague family relationship to Marxist political economy or to the Rig Veda, cult dynamics are cult dynamics. True Perfect Masters (by which we mean people who have gotten out of the way of their own ego and are capable of actually behaving like all humans will in the Better World To Come) are known by their massive humility, wicked sense of humour, and willingness to get their hands dirty in the Real World of Horrible Jobs.

I would certainly put myself in the position of "imperfect receiver", and this is why this blog should be taken as the efforts of a mind trying to work out what the hell happened to it and suggestions for your own experimentation, much like Philip K. Dick's Exegesis.

So simple it probably doesn't need to be said, but...

We don't need any more Prophets, any more religions, or any more rules. The ones we have right now will do nicely, thank you. What we want is more praxis; theory put to at the service of Love, and at the service of Right Action.

Anon v Monsanto, IN A STEEL CAGE

Words like violence break the silence

... yeah, so I'm coming very close to understanding that, as far as understanding goes, Cramulus is probably right and I wrote everything I needed to write on these subjects a couple of years ago, when I first found the books which provide the "missing link" to my ideas. But the issue was that I have spent the last almost-five years on this blog attempting to give a rational justification for the embrace of the irrational. A worthwhile project, but one which I realised with a jolt yesterday I have not actually been practicing in my own life.

I've talked about, if you are serious about introducing "light from the Better World" into the closed system of entropy which is the Real World of Horrible Jobs, the need to "give up your identity" to the Higher Power that you've devoted yourself to. I suppose I underestimated how difficult that is because giving up your identity means giving up your mind, and giving up your little world. (Or at least be prepared to give those things up... if you do it right you will get them back later, all cleaned and tuned up. As Crowley put it, you put yourself together again on the other side of the Abyss.)

The last one is a concept which has just congealed for me. Just as one of those insects that lives on the bottom of ponds glues rocks and shells and sticks to itself to defend itself, your nafs / mind / ego / identity creates a little world around itself. This world is made out of possessions, habits and social relations - but only the most very important ones, the ones which shield you from the vertiginous abyss. You know - your drinking buddies, your favourite intarwebz sites, your favourite albums and books, your family, your loved ones, your local sports team. All the things that "tell you who you are" (at least in terms of the Matrix, which as we know, cannot really do such a thing).

But it also makes you blind to the real world. It's a hermetic seal, if you'll pardon the pun. You can't know Reality, and therefore what you are really supposed to be doing in order to bring Light into the world, unless you are prepared to step out of your little world and leave it behind, like a hermit crab does when it grows too big.

And the only thing that can induce you to do that - as the 12-Step programmers know perfectly well - is an act of faith, the mind / ego / nafs / identity just giving up and letting a Higher Power (call it God, an Angel, a praeternatural intelligence, the Spirit of the Age, your own right brain / Higher Self / atman) do it. To get back to politics, one of the reason the Leninist sects (possibly the anarchists as well) have put themselves into a dead end is that they built a party to change the world, but the party has become the extended ego of the participants - they have all the fuel they need but they refuse to burn it, and if anyone else burns their own fuel they're mocked for "liquidationism".

The Sufis say that this is generally not possible without a Master - as a focus for the great power of Love that you need to be able to make this happen. I have one of those now, so we'll see what happens.

I realise now that my pride is my shame - I really did think my mind could do everything itself. "What a sucker I had been. What a fool. The answer was there all the time," to quote Dr Frank'n'Furter. Everything I've really achieved, I haven't achieved myself - Higher Self did so acting through me. (You can tell that because I didn't think about it, it just "came to me", and I could barely remember it afterwards.)

So, that's my job next - building the faith to leave the mind behind. In politics, building the intellectual and activist strength to leave organisational forms behind. And hopefully in music I can leave a few holes in my solos so maybe some Music will fall through.

===

A very important warning: because books work on the level of the mind, they can't really teach you jack-shit about anything important in the real world. They can help your mind make sense of your experiences in the real world, but you need those real world experiences first. I've certainly had experiences reading books which seemed impenetrable garbage the first time, and the second time (after a few years doing it hard), they answer all my questions in retrospect. Probably the same goes for blogs, hint hint.

A nice syllogism

We help beyond any help ever available anywhere. We are a near ultimate in help.

- L. Ron Hubbard

Helpful people are a nuisance.

- Guitar Craft aphorism

I need someone to hold me while I wait for something more

Faith is necessary. The object of faith is irrelevant. It is the power of the faith itself - the overriding of all the "what ifs" thrown up by the intellect and the ego - which makes the impossible possible. The idol is made by the genuflector, not the craftsman. This is why all initiatory paths which have real power call for total devotion to the Ideal or to a particular Master who embodies the ideal. (The truly enlightened never claim to have spooky powers, but sometimes the disciples will tell stories about the Master's spooky powers. This is a sign of their faith which is not discouraged by a true Master.)

(ETA: There's a wonderful piece in the Doctor Who story The Curse of Fenris. For those who haven't seen it: it's World War Two and the Doctor et al are fighting vampires, for some reason, and of course a traditional way to fight off vamps is with a crucifix. A Red Army soldier who happens to be with them protests that he doesn't believe in Christianity; the Doctor asks him: "What do you believe in?" and he answers "I believe in the Revolution". So - get this - he takes the hammer-and-sickle badge off his cap and fights the vampires off with that. Even faith in the cynical bureaucratic murderer Joe Stalin can move mountains.)

For all we have criticised the Leninist sects, you must admit that their belief system gives them incredible powers to face ridicule, to stand on street corners selling badly-xeroxed papers, etc., for an entire lifetime. The problem with some of them is that they don't teach "loving-kindness", or in other words, integrity - instead they have a half-assed belief in "Bolshevik ethics" which, in practice, boils down to the same kind of Might = Right nonsense that we rightly despise when we hear it coming from the fascists (and would make Trotsky spin in his grave). The problem with others is that they've given up actually changing things in the Big World and have become nothing but a substitute religion.

But are we to say that they have no right to exist or to participate in the movement - that they would be better off individually giving up and getting some bourgeois job? Surely they can be annoying, but is that a problem with them or a problem with us? I'm reminded of secular atheists who curse religious believers for "relying on a crutch". The implication is that secular atheists are both ethically and psychologically superior. But what do they do with that superiority? (Can someone point me to hospitals, schools, charity drives etc. started by humanist organisations? I'm sure there are some.)

"Atheism" and "secularism" are both negatives - no religion - but why do you stay alive in the absence of any metaphysical meaning? Is the answer nothing but "pure hedonism" - or, more likely, "live the capitalist dream, earn money to buy leisure commodities, have a good time, then die?" Many people would rather stay in a cult than accept a lifetime of nothing more than psychic masturbation. As Seven of Nine put it before she was reverse-assimilated, "WE DO NOT WANT TO BE LIKE YOU".

The point is: don't be so quick to tear down someone else's faith before examining your own. And yes, you have one, even if it's not in God. I am increasingly thinking Fripp was right when he said "any act based on principle is a good one".

Physician, heal thyself

I'm embarrassed to have to admit how much of everything I've done in this lifetime - up to and including writing this blog - has been in the service of a story I was telling myself in which I had to train to become a PERFECT GENIUS SUPERHERO - Noam Chomsky crossed with Frank Zappa crossed with Xena Warrior Princess - or my life would be a complete waste of time. That the world was doomed if I didn't hone my gifts and skills to be able to save it.

Wow, it sounds far less convincing outside my head. And then I come on here and rant about "don't get trapped by identities" and "don't let fantasy be the enemy of making something happen right here right now". I think the word we're looking for is "facepalm". Robert Fripp says that the course he was on at Sherborne House in 1975 was full of people who thought something very similar, and the purpose of the course was to beat that out of them.

Anonymous: CM prophecy confirmed accurate

"Was Project Chanology for the Intarwebz what May 1968 was for French students?" I asked almost precisely two years ago. The answer appears to be "yes". We now live in an era where Anon is taking on governments, the FBI and major corporations, appears to be actively thriving on persecutions and arrests, and is reported as serious news in the mainstream press. This article from around the same time, suggesting that Anonymous had reached its limits because it could not possibly find a more ideal target than Scientology, is laughable in retrospect - obviously the author couldn't imagine them actually going after the Pentagon or the FBI. (But perhaps it was only the intervention of Bradley Manning and Julian Assange which made that possible.)

Also of note is that Anonymous is a "meme", like al-Qaeda or radical right-wing resistance, so nailing individual participants can't stop the signal. The media have never gotten this - they keep going on about "members of Anonymous" being arrested. Newsflash, guys, a "member of Anonymous" is anyone who does anything under the Anon or associated banners. The Clams' "tech" for dealing with enemies is to nail their leaders personally, but Anon has gone past the individual. This is of course what all radical movements should be doing; however, I think we're still addicted to the "leader / Central Committee" structure, which evolved in the case of a Tsarist police state when the telegraph was the cutting edge of information technology. Networked resistance is the next step. Don't let the 4chan crowd or the fascists out-innovate us.

In other death news...

... so what do you think of the argument that "the price of genius is a tortured mind, and more often than not an early death"? I don't 100% buy it. It makes as much sense as arguing that being gay is unhealthy because it makes you want to kill yourself. No, homophobic culture makes you want to kill yourself, and I suggest we live in a creativity-phobic culture.

What is happening is we live in a culture where inspiration is either bullied out of you or commodified. They'll try to destroy you unless you become useful for their agenda, in which case they'll turn you into a brand and a cash cow, which will also destroy you, just with a higher budget. The article also lets off the hook the fact that the music industry has been known to actively encourage drug addiction among its artists because that's a very effect mechanism of control. It used to be quite common in the 80's for club owners in the USA to offer to pay musicians in cocaine.

Robert Fripp knows all about this because he's one of the few people who have been successful enough to be tempted by the Great Deceiver and lived to tell the tale. Of course, he also suggests that truly great artists are channeling a source of power which just burns their human personality away. Was Ms Winehouse a truly great artist? Even a pivotal figure for her generation like Courtney Love's husband? I don't know, never actually heard her work, perhaps you can fill me in in the comments.

Solidarity

No to fascism.
No to race-hatred.
No to Islamophobia and other religion-hatred.
No to the belief that "words don't have consequences" and that therefore free speech comes with no responsibilities.
No to allowing memes of hatred to survive unchallenged in our media and in our conversation.

If there's one thing that you yes YOU can do without getting out from in front of your internet connection, it's to slap down anyone who tries to make Muslims, non-whites, queers or leftists "the Other" who have no rights. (But try to do that without just unleashing hatred against Christians, atheists, conservatives or people who haven't read as many books as you. The "arty queers vs. rednecks" thing is a false dichotomy to stop us embracing the true diversity of our culture and forging unity in that diversity. Ideas are the enemy, not those who hold them.)

ETA: Amanda Knudsen in Norway writes: "I understand that people just want to show solidarity with those killed in the fascist massacre on utøya and in oslo, but please, understand that using the norwegian flag is not an appropriate symbol for this. Our response to the nationalist nazi violence must be openness and internationalism, not to support the nation borders that divide us."

I was asked to tell you this:

You can't achieve holiness, enlightenment, transcendence, self-actualisation or become a Good Person by following a set of rules. (So screw religious fundamentalism and its political equivalent, "programme fetishism".) Religions, codes of ethics and ready-made schemas are, at best, good for keeping you out of trouble, or baking a fine cake. But everything that's actually valuable about being a human being on this planet comes from pure, inner inspiration - "the disciple's infidelity is the master's faith". And to be able to bring that into the real world requires (a) TRUST that what comes out of "the real you" not only can be unleashed on the world but should be, because it comes from God / The Better Place / Universe A; (b) DISCIPLINE to stop your learned habits of behaviour, your ego, all the little things you to do to fit in and survive in the World-As-Is interfering what what can be done to make The World-As-Could-Be a real thing, here and now.

And, of course, "you" don't really exist. You are a crystallisation of Humanity, which is a crystalisation of Nature, which is a crystallisation of the Universe, which the theists among us would argue is an emanation of God. You can only realise that when you get to the point where the survival of your biological entity and its privileges among the particular primate troop you belong to are no longer the only motivating forces behind your behaviour. Screw Ayn Rand - altruism is what brings light into the world, the compulsion to give, the sheer joy of "I was a hidden treasure and desired to be known" - although selfishness is necessary in the World-As-Is to be able to promote that light against the conservatism of the primate mind. Acting from the communal interest of the society you live in in the first step, and - as Marx put it - only when we overcome the contradiction between the self's desires and the needs of the species and of the society the species has created for itself will we be truly free.

Let us be clear, though - as the "true self" grows and strengthens, so does the ego / nafs. It's not a zero-sum game. As previously mentioned, the nafs is a booster rocket, and you cannot get rid of it and survive in this world, nor should you try to. But, if your goal is to bring light into the world, you do need to (a) get in touch with your "higher nature", the part of you which does act from somewhere other than selfishness and inertia, heredity and environment; (b) resolve the contradiction between that and your nafs, so that the donkey ends up pulling the cart rather than just kicking you all the time. The really tricky thing is that the nafs is so excellent at fooling you that you are acting from a higher spiritual goal, when really you're just reiterating stupid primate dominance games or acting from scripts your parents or teachers implanted in you. (This is easily observable by the presence of hypocrisy - manipulative, cruel, grasping religious preachers, or political activists who'd rather keep control of a cult than lose control of a mass movement.) Learning to tell the difference really is a thousand miles of broken glass on your hands and knees.

And in the meantime it means that you do miss out on the Valuable Cash Prizes that the culture or your particular subculture offer you - you will not be popular if you're doing something right, let's put it that way. So very very many of us who set out to change the world or do magick end up just settling for a well-paid gig in the heart of the beast, the kind of gig in which we get a longer leash than the other wage slaves so we can pretend we're free, in return for closing our eyes to the misery and blindness we've bought into. Failing that, being a cult leader is at least some kind of identity. But the need to "have an identity", have a social role, is as much a trap as the need for money. Always best, I think, to have an active social life which has nothing to do with your political or religious or social mission, so you don't turn your mission into your social life, which means your nafs just ruining everything.

Chaos Marxism is anti-fascist

... to the point where we have been traduced by name in the pamphlets of the extreme Right. However, since fascism / conservative revolutionism / radical traditionalism / radical Rightism is self-confessedly in love with the irrational, they often have a strong appeal to those who have become disgusted with the instrumental rationalism (coupled with gross superstition) of late capitalism. This blog is a damn fine attempt to track exactly how they attempt to normalise their foul politics in artistic subcultures which do take the subconscious, the subaltern, the Other seriously. What we are trying to do is to recuperate the unconscious and the irrational for a political project of liberation; to mutually strengthen the rational, not destroy it.

I am an authoritative source!

Fresh from one of our regularly scheduled autogooglestalks: first came Cramulus' Primer, and now this blog is being discussed as source material for an e-course and referenced in academic essays in Austria. A bit surprising, a lot flattering, and perhaps a satisfactory return for going on five years of thinking outloud.

Slowly, slowly

Insight on how the financial question is not only a political question, but a spiritual one (emphases added):

Fashioning coin banks out of bamboo, she asked her lay followers to drop a NT 50 cent coin into the bamboo bank everyday before going to the market. "Why not simply donate NT$15 each month?" one follower asked. The amount was the same in dollars, Dharma Master Cheng Yen replied, but very different in spirit. Dharma Master Cheng Yen wanted each person to think of helping others every day, not just one day each month.

I was also urged to get with the programme, learn how to use the internet, and sign up to alternatives to Paypal. In part, this was to facilitate regular small payments - which I have to admit would be extremely useful - and in part to allow Paypal boycotters to spare me a dime. One of the systems I was urged to try out was Flattr.

...with this alchemy change the copper of the heart into gold, slowly, slowly.

And there came a certain poor widow, and she cast in two mites, which make a farthing. And calling his disciples together, he saith to them: Amen I say to you, this poor widow hath cast in more than all they who have cast into the treasury.

A vital question for those on a mission

Would you rather be a hero, and everyone think you're a villain; or be a villain, and everyone think you're a hero?

Ooh, this is good.

Some of my best friends are Gnostics, and this, mutatis mutandis, works for any initiatory path, I think. I think I'm personally still working through stage 3. You do have to make compromises with the Prince of This World to be able to survive in this world long enough to change this world. Perhaps the most important thing - which I don't think I ever truly understood until a couple of days ago - is that the game cannot corrupt you if you remember that it's a game.

I, personally, a long time ago (perhaps age 6) started playing a game called PRIDE/SHAME. The object of the game is to see whether you can get everyone in the world to give you uncritically positive attention. This is a game that any human is designed to lose, but playing the game is a way to be able to participate in the world if you're convinced that what you really are is worthless and rejected by God and everything on the earth. And I played the game for so long I thought it was my personality. I still do if I don't keep up my work of "remembering". It's an addiction and it's like sleepwalking at the same time. It's so much easier.