Four more aphorisms

• The socio-political-territorial-economic games of those higher primates called humans are predictable enough that, given proper scientific examination, the rules can be worked out. It is the contention of Marxism that the necessity of following those rules to survive overrides all considerations in the human consciousness, and thus nothing can fundamentally change on the planetary scale until those rules change at the macro-social level. We aim to work out strategies to do that and to promote them to a mass audience, which will be the only real testing ground.
• Small groups can't do shit except to the extent that they influence large groups.


• On all issues of the macrostructures of nature and the cosmos, Chaos Marxism is totally agnostic. All issues of contention should be appeals to scientific experiment - that is, if you do this, do predictable consequences ensue? That is our only yardstick for the usefulness or otherwise of particular reality models.


• Just because you're Illuminated doesn't mean you're right about anything in particular.

Individualism - it stinks

Overwhelmingly, the people you've heard of writing in the field of metaprogramming, consciousness change, etc, are successful small businessmen* - that is, they've managed to "sell" their books to a publisher, or perhaps started their own publishing house, and are able to live well enough off the proceeds not to work a horrible day job.

What are the social characteristics of a successful small businessman? They are determined, comrades and friends, by what they need to do to survive - sell their goods successfully in a monopolistically competitive market. Generally, this means they end up with a severe animus towards (in no particular order) thieving taxing governments; monopolistic big corporations; lazy, greedy workers and their unions; and other competing small businessmen.

Just look at the works of Frank Zappa and R. A. Wilson to see where this leads you. We are talking about a couple of towering geniuses here. Towering geniuses who tended to have an animus against anyone who wasn't like them, to the point where FZ pretty much had no friends outside his family, and Pope Bob wanted to go live in a space station populated only by other people who liked to listen to Beethoven while stoned out their gourds. And that was just because of how they had to live to survive in order to do their art the way they wanted - the compromise with the market economy.

It's funny that the people who will advise you that all human reality is a chemically-induced illusion tend to take the question of $$$ extremely seriously... as if it were real. Well, they've got no choice - that, or starve. But in what way are they "freer" than if they were doing the same job for wage labour?

In fact, a Marxist would say that the wage labourer is only more obviously a slave to the boss - the small businessman is a slave to the almighty dollar and "market forces". Pope Bob used to say that he didn't believe in anything that didn't have a fore name, a hind name and an address (he stole that one from the fascist poet Ezra Pound, fact fans), but doesn't that contradict the essential insight that individual personalities themselves are socially determined by their need to survive in primate troops with their quaint social customs, in particular in the modern era "money"?

A Marxist would argue that, as a wage labourer, you have an interest in getting together with other wage labourers to improve your condition. For small businessmen, collective action is ridiculous and counterproductive. Which is why the occultism of small businessmen lends itself to individualism, solipsism, fragmentation and powerless, with all the significance in the Real World of Horrible Jobs as a good hand-job. That's the "freedom" of the small businessman - freedom to be an isolated individual, playing your own preferred game in the little enclosure that you can buy with all that glorious money. Congratulations, you managed to paint the walls of your prison cell in psychedelic colours.

All that experimenting with different reality tunnels should surely have taught you all by now that the "individual" (as a consciousness, rather than a physical body) is a socially-induced illusion, or more precisely, that individuality only makes any sense within a collective context. Pick the world you want to create - a world of isolation and solipsism, or a world of shared, collectively-created reality? Chaos Marxism opts for the latter.

* The masculine pronoun is used for poetic effect. Women are just as bad.

We get feedback

Further to the post below about the best-intentioned Western mystics criticising an urban legend about what Marx said and thought, rather than the evidence... I finally got around to finding the thread on theAbrahadabra Forums about this blog. Generally I'm very happy to see you guys are more accepting of the ideas - and of the links between dialectical materialism and metaprogramming - than the Discordians generally were. Just the last post in that thread kind of irked me:

http://forums.abrahadabra.com/showpost.php?p=37912&postcount=27

Marx did NOT mention any such thing as "ownership of production and distribution by the Party" anywhere in his writings. In fact, the goddamned Communist Manifesto its own self said the following:

The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties.

They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.

Lenin conceived the need for a tightly-organised, centralised, quasi-clandestine Marxist party in the conditions of Tsarist autocratic repression. This party ended up assuming the dictatorship of Russia/the USSR in the aftermath of the traumatic Civil War, total economic collapse and the consequent collapse of the working-class democracy of October 1917. It is the fault of idiots (and to some degree even some brilliant people like Trotsky) that some people think now that that's the only way Marxists should organise themselves, ever.

Whether Marxists should have their own party, and how it should be organised, depend on the concrete conditions in which they face themselves. To say that we should always organise as "toy Bolsheviks" is like saying that all Thelemites must get together a hierarchically structured Order like the OTO or the A.A. Mistaking the map for the territory in a big way.

Also, the rigid "stages theory" ascribed to Marx is Stalinist orthodoxy, rather than living Marxism. Check out the idea of the "Asiatic mode of production" to understand that the theory as presented is a caricature of Marx's rich, complex and ever-evolving though. Stages theories don't work.

Poor dear dead old Pope Bob

How could the guy have written a book - a whole series of books - about not taking the map for the territory, about E-Prime, about the importance of the scientific method, defending sheer loonies like Velikovsky and the freak who wrote The Bell Curve, about being skeptical about everything, including skepticism... and then turn around and blithely say that "Karl Marx's theories have failed", without naming a single theory of Marx's or how it had been shown to have failed? Is historical materialism at fault? The labour theory of value? The belief that the industrial workers are the revolutionary class? Which one?

The followers of Marx have often been Stalinist fucktards, certainly, but so (RAW noted) are the followers of Wilhelm Reich, and I didn't read "Reich's theories have failed". But I suppose the prejudices which underly our own treasured place in the world are the hardest to see through, even if you think you've progressed mostly past Cosmic Schmuckhood - virtually every American heterodox thinker got wet and gooey when Stalinism fell over because "their side" had won in the Cold War. Fish can't really help feeling horny when the water temperature goes up.

Not that I want to speak ill of the dead - and I still credit Pope Bob with a major part of my psychic evolution - but little blindspots are often more infuriating in the brilliant than in the mythical average Jo(e).

Addendum to the Aphorisms

(based on reading all three volumes of Cosmic Trigger, Crowley's Magick without Tears and Overcoming Low Self-Esteem Through Cognitive Behavioural Therapy)

• Because humans are higher primates and therefore troop animals, socio-economics are fundamental to our ability to survive. As Marx pointed out long ago, the "Robinson Crusoe" story is simple nonsense. We are not cats, capable of surviving all on our own - how resources and labour are distributed within our primate troop networks is primary to our survival as "individuals".


• Anyone who claims that they're so enlightened as to be "above politics" - who sneers at mere questions of who has to work for whom and who gets the rewards thereof, in favour of talk about spiritual, genetic or subatomic reality - clearly doesn't have to worry about their own biological survival in a capitalist economy and thus is speaking from a position of privilege.


• Conversely, the Belief-Systems that will enable the changing of the rules of the social game - a revolution, in other words - will have to deal with issues of socio-political economy as fundamental to issues of personal enlightenment and/or planetary survival and/or the future of the human species. Individual enlightenment takes too long, and read the climate news to know that the clock is ticking here. We are splashing psychic liberation right across the planet - and we'd die to do it.


• You don't have to believe in Marxism to be a Chaos Marxist. In fact, it's better that you don't. People who "believe" in Marxism are not Marxist or even political, they are religious dogmatists with all the emotional damage, political uselessness and inability to deal with life outside a small group that that entails.


• Properly understood, Marxism (as in the reality-tunnel elaborated by Karl Marx, not his dodgy "acolytes" and "followers") is a cure for all forms of dogmatism and regimentation. The essence and the genius of the materialist dialectic is that at the same time it points out that all forms and concepts and words and labels are provisional and inessential; and insists on the primacy of our nature as higher primates seeking to survive on this small Spaceship Earth. Both New Age claptrap and mechanical materialism - both ideologies common among the corporate culture and the various subcultures which have sprung up as an "opiate" to it - are designed to render you powerless.


• A Stalinist is someone who has turned Marxism into a dogma and used it as an excuse for acting just like the more ruthless variety of capitalist.


• Some of the worst Stalinists are in fact Trotskyists. To put it another way - having a more correct abstract theory in no way insulates yourself from dogmatism and small-group psychosis.


• Conversely, Chaos Marxists hold that holding a Belief-System based on Marxism enables the elaboration of plans for changing the rules of the social game - which is, we hold, the only way to enable enlightenment on a planetary scale. (We may be wrong.) Fuck Ayn Rand - a starving man is not free, and neither is a woman up to her arse in muddy water because the Arctic just melted.


• Marx said "Capital is a social relation" - R. A. Wilson would have said "Capitalism is a reality-tunnel". Same difference - capital and capitalism are not real, are constructs in a particular game. But inherent to this game is that the game must continually expand - to take in more and more players and resources.


• Thus, it is increasingly impossible for an individual to maintain biological integrity (be able to feed oneselves and family) without playing the capitalist game. I don't care how "enlightened" you are - in 99% and growing of the world today, either you participate successfully in the market economy or you're subsidised by people who do so. In the latter case you're probably going to be in the position of "guru" or "court jester" - giving the succesful marketeers a Belief-System which justifies their own privilege. On your deathbed you will say "Oh, how I have wasted my life."


• Given the existence of a single globalised capitalist economy, Individualism - the belief that you can survive comfortably on your own, abstracted from any social network - is a lie, a Tar-Baby, something sold to you by the capitalist egregore to buy your allegiance. Subculturalism - the belief that you and your buddies (or people who share your reality tunnel) can survive comfortably on your own, abstracted from the social network of people you don't get on with - is the same thing. The irony is that capitalism (which sells you these elitist dreams of social fragmentation, to keep you docile) has created a single, networked global economy which means that everyone on the planet (more or less) is now interconnected, and has essentially made it impossible for you to "escape the planet of the apes".


• Whether you like it or not, the unwashed, reality-TV watching, football-loving masses do the work which make it possible for you to eat. Unless you want a life of monastic poverty on a self-sufficient allotment, your only choices are to live off the proceeds of a system which requires that the vast majority of humanity be psychically and socially oppressed - or join with them on a mission of mutual enlightenment.


• O ye Illuminated Ones, make ye a choice right now - are you going to hypnotise yourself into being happy living on a quickly collapsing toxic waste dump, or are you going to hypnotise yourself into waking everyone up so we can clean the dump up together? Are you going to visualise yourself levitating over the bars of the prison, or are you going to lead a prison riot, take the place over and then figure out how to get everyone out?


• "Every politician knows how to induce hypnosis, and very damned few people on the whole planet know how to de-hypnotize themselves." - RAW. Chaos Marxism is about mass dehypnotisation, much like mass immunization. Remember that bit in Illuminatus! where our heroes covertly dose the unwashed masses with a drug that turns them from neophobes into neophiles? Yeah, sort of like that, on the cultural-political-psychological-magickal level.


• You can, in fact, change others. It's called brainwashing and hypnotism. On the other hand, you can persuade others that changing themselves - via becoming part of a mass movement to change the world - is a good idea. But you have to get close enough to the unwashed reality-TV watching masses that you can actually learn what a realistic first step towards this might be.

A new compendium of CM Aphorisms will be posted here in a couple of weeks on the second anniversary of this blog.

Sad but oh so true

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

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

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

STILL ATEN'T DEAD

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

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

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

Chanology: The Evolution of a Movement

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

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

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

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

Idealism = elitism = just another treehouse club

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

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

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

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

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

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

And is martyrdom all bad, anyway? Jesus was nailed up, yes, Ché was pumped full of bullets and displayed, but they are now bad-ass memes of various levels of immortality, and you won't be if you stay in hiding. What do you want - to change material reality or just give yourself a new identity, a new lifestyle, a new religion which says it's not a religion?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back from the brink

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

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

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

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

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

Our old buddy Ben Watson...

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

I'll explain later

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

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

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

Our rulers think they're Yankees

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If so, get a new one.

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

(from Bob Penny's Social Control in Scientology)

Aphorism #83

Comrades and friends:

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

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

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

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

Three brief notes

1) Chaos Marxism Aphorism #48 states:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dolorasnetics: The Chaos Marxist Science of Mental Health

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

What is sanity?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The process therefore runs:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do UCP and see!

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

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

An aphorism on cults

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

Discuss.

100th post special!: A unified theory of cults

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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