The Weaver in the Web That He Made: preliminary notes towards a workable model

1. Stephen Hawking's model of the universe as "infinite but bounded" (i.e. spherical) in 4-dimensional space-time sounds good to me, forgetting the pesky little curled-up dimensions required by string theory for a moment. It is always-already complete. "Time" as we know it is an artifact of travelling through this area. The Time Lords in Doctor Who fiction are said to create "4-dimensional statues", i.e. things which have decay and change-through-time built into them. Some Muslims say that the Qu'ran is like this. But in any case, if Hawking is correct everything is like this. Every physical "thing" is a 4-dimension tunnel through space-time, and they intersect with each other.

2. Buddha, Heraclitus and Karl Marx all came to the same conclusion. The mental 3-dimensional "snapshots" we take of this reality and call it "the Real World" are illusory. πάντα ρει: everything is always slipping down its own 4D tunnel. Nothing is solid. Materialist dialectics is the philosophy of how things journey down the tunnel, conceived as a process of the resolution of internal contradictions.

3. The argument among Marxists of whether there is a "dialectics of nature" is therefore a complete waste of time. "Nature" as we perceived it and describe it in laws is a 3D snapshot (or, at best, a limited 4D "videoclip") of... okay, we will refer to the Universe as it really is under all that crap, the "emic reality" as R. A. Wilson and anthropologists put it, by the Arabic term al-Haqq. Yeah. Therefore anything that we can understand and put into words is an artifact of our viewpoint and understanding; therefore it is a creation of consciousness; therefore, what the hell, we can say it follows a dialectic process if it helps us. The "dialectics of nature" is thus a heuristic rather than an ontological truth, and much like Charlie Brown, I'm always certain when it comes to matters of opinion.

4. Anything we can actually conceptualise and put into words is a map, not the territory. Some maps are more useful than others. "Etic reality" is the world that we actually experience based on our interactions as primates blessed with rational minds on an M-class planet. We interact with thought-forms in our brains which provide a workable model for dealing with everyday reality.  By interaction with the others around us who are already totally plugged into the existing system by which humans create the necessities of life and of meaning, we create a Ego (called the Little Self or the nafs by Sufis) as our "counter" on the playing-board of life. We can refer to this as the Matrix, to use a Gnostic/Buddhist metaphor which everyone gets now.

5. So the Matrix is being continually and collectively constructed - a game of existence worked out by its players over the course of millennia. And as Marx correctly noted, its fundament is the struggle for material existence - keep these primate bodies alive, reproducing, and happy. But past that we go up Maslow's hierarchy of needs - safety, love/belonging, esteem and self-actualisation. And all of these are things which are drives as Freud would have recognized them - real physical needs, filtered through the logic-making systems of the Ego.

6. So: the basis for the evolution of human society (and therefore class society) is the production and reproduction of the hierarchically-organised needs of the Ego. And of course modern consumer capitalism has busied itself, in the era of possible abundance, of creating artificial scarcity and implanted needs so as to keep the system running. The Matrix is self-perpetuating - it has no 4D perspective, it sees no end to itself, although its continuous efforts to keep the status quo dialectically mean it continually changes and progresses.

7. The Matrix is holographic in the sense that "as above, so below" - all of the "tokens" or "counters" in its system depend upon and bear the imprint of the whole system, just as in the structuralist view of language. Your Ego (what you almost always think of as "you") means absolutely nothing outside the context of your particular socio-economic Matrix. In fact, what you've come to think of as "you" evolved specifically to aid your survival and success within that particular system or game. Fish have no word for water. The ideas of the ruling class are generally the ideas of society.

8. The existence of a crappy watch proves the existence of a Blind Watchmaker. A system which evolves in response to a particular need will continue on that evolutionary trajectory (4D tunnel) even if that need no longer exist, because all systems become self-perpetuating once the Egos which partake in them become dependent on the system. Systems only become obsolete when the Egos making them up no longer find their needs met by the system. The main reason why capitalism (the human System based on generalised wage-labour and commodity production) has endured long-past its use-by date is that they've used the advanced sciences of Psychology over the last 100 years or so to perfect the art of consciously reprogramming Egos to become more useful to, and thus more dependent on, the System. They call that "neoliberal self-fashioning".

9. All subsidiary systems are holographic representations of the overarching System. That's right. There is no "outside" to capitalist domination. There is no "counter-culture", except in the sense that you have to have a Devil if you have a God - any Ego and any organisation of Egos in the world of capitalism will follow the rules of capitalism. In fact, the sick and sad thing is that the more an organisation which seeks to change the System actually adapts to the rules of the system - that is, the extent to which it "sells out" its own ideas and reproduces the oppression, repression, commodification, reification and concepts of its environment - the better of a chance it has of surviving. Revolutionary socialists understand this extremely well when it comes to worker-cooperative firms; until recently, they didn't seem to "get it" about their own groups (except for those French libertarian communists who wrote "Militancy: The Highest Form of Alienation").

10. The Ego - in the absence of some "fixed point" of reference already outside the System - cannot get outside the System for the same reason a fish cannot get outside water. All attempts at magick (the art of changing consciousness at will, i.e. the Ego editing its own programming) can only make the individual more successful in (and thus less dangerous to) the System - thus, the "occultism of small businessmen". At worst, it might lead to a collapse of the Ego, i.e. psychosis. Rational analysis can show where the exit doors are in the system - as Marx and Freud did - but they can't go through them.

11. Mysticism is about attempting to give the individual Ego exactly that kind of "fixed point" outside the system - in the form of al-Haqq, the absolute. The fundamental practice of mysticism is meditation - a kind of mental "neutral gear" in which the mind disconnects from the body and allows the automatic thoughts of the Ego to flood past without any sequelae in the physical world. Eventually, the discipline develops of forming a subset of the Ego which not only observes the ego but is capable of making decisions contrary to the Ego's likes, dislikes and preferences - we can call this the Will.

12. But the fundamental principle of mysticism is love - defined as the Ego's willing submission of its own needs and desires to another's, or at least, for the Other's needs and desires to be put on a higher plane. That is, love is a voluntary surrender of the Ego's usually rock-firm boundaries between I and You and It. It is therefore a way out of the System to which the Ego owes its very existence. Love is a key out of the Matrix and into al-Haqq. And it takes all the forms the Greeks recognized - eros, philos, agape. Marxists might add solidarity - because the proletariat can only see reality collectively, as a class acting for itself in struggle, rather than the isolated Egos produced by capitalism.

13. The Ego lives in the world. The rational intellect explains the world. Will changes the world. Love creates the world.

Neoliberalism as magick

 “Government of the self ” becomes the taproot of all social order, even though the identity of the self evanesces under the pressure of continual prosthetic tinkering; this is one possible way to understand the concept of “biopower.” Under this regime, the individual displays no necessary continuity from one “decision” to the next. The manager of You becomes the new ghost in the machine.

Thank you, Philip Mirowski. Classical liberalism - or we might way paleoliberalism - was all about the freedom of the (monadic) individual, continuing the Western tradition of believing in a unique "soul" or core to the human personality. However, classic liberalism also understood the labour theory of value, labour being defined as socially useful activity under the guidance of the monadic intellect.

Neoliberalism is what happened when post-war capitalism took Freud seriously, and understood his insight that the "individual" is pretty much a pattern of habits and behaviours adopted so one particular human-shaped body can fit into its society, layered over a bubbling cauldron of half-formed dreams, nightmares, drives, repressions etc.

Neoliberalism blew apart the whole rationale for traditional class society by making it clear that potentially everyone could be a self-actualising Superhuman. But the flipside of that is that classical liberalism at least felt sorry for the poor and had an idea of charity - "there but for the grace of God, or upbringing, go I". But under neoliberalism, everyone is responsible for their own self-fashioning, so no-one ends up in a gutter without - at some point - making some choice to become a "waste of social space." Kein Mitgleid für den Mehrheit, indeed. There is no charity or pity under neoliberalism.

Is it any wonder that "magick" in the Aleister Crowley sense became big among the petty-bourgeois radical underground at the same time that psychology became an industrial science? Radical libertarianism - anarcho-cap or anarcho-commie flavours - hooked onto Crowley's insights (or the bastardised versions served up by Gerald Gardner, R. A. Wilson, Werner Erhardt or, God help us all, Foul Ole Ron) to beat the ruling class at their own "self-fashioning game". They called it self-liberation, but in fact it turned into neo-liberal self-fashioning, because the goal was to create for the (generally white male) individual the most comfortable life possible. Success meant being a celebrity, selling books, having a fan club, and otherwise score big in the market economy which of course the Big Names were too cool to really care about.

More than one scary mind-control cult claiming to be socialist - Fred Newman's International Workers' Party, or the LaRouche mob - attempted to do this on a collective basis. The Newmanites called it "breaking down the bourgeois ego to create a proletarian ego". What nonsense. We don't need a proletarian ego for the same reason that Trotsky argued in 1923 that we don't need a "proletarian culture". What this process meant was really to brainwash followers into being extensions of the Great Leader's Ego. R. A. Wilson pointed out, for example, the technology by which the SLA did this to Patty Hearst.

Meanwhile the revolutionary groups got left behind because the tradition of revolutionary psychology had petered out after Voloshinov disappeared in the gulags and Reich fled to the US and went a bit nutso. So back in the 1970s - and still today to a lesser degree - Marxists have been stuck with a theory of the individual which is just like that of an Adam Smith classical liberal - "the individual" as a monadic whole as opposed to "the collective" or the community. A dialectic between the two in the more sophisticated groups, but no overcoming of the contradiction at a higher level.

So what Chaos Marxism suggests is that we need to leapfrog the neoliberal enemy, which has destroyed the idea of the classical "individual subject" in the name of some kind of "individualism". The ideal neoliberal subject is nothing but a tool allowing capitalism to reproduce itself more effectively, continually refining itself as "human capital" to make more profit to its exploiters. To this extent, the next step for revolutionaries must be an ethic of community which transcends the individual/collective duality altogether. A community which offers a respite from the neoliberal urge to continually "consume more" and to "improve oneself".

What I am suggesting is that we need a revolutionary party whose cadre are appreciated as they are and as they feel comfortable being. If "the Party" wants us to become someone or something else to accomplish its own needs, exactly where lies its superiority to the corporation which brainwashes us with positive thinking and company loyalty? We await the day that the working class transforms itself into a class-for-itself; expecting to do that with socialists who have transformed themselves into activists-for-the-Great-Leader, fighting workers who have transformed themselves into good-corporate-drones, is really expecting the new era to come out of Bad Versus Worse.

Hope that makes sense. What I'm getting at is that the classical-liberal individual is indeed an illusion - we can all transform ourselves - but neoliberalism wants us to transform ourselves into its own tools - whereas we need to transform ourselves into the tools of the Future - and we can only do that in mutually respectful community and in revolutionary praxis.

The metaphysical dialectic

I'm too stressed and my brain is too close to a homogenous mush to work this out much further, but I want to extend the point I made in a post below that a dialectic approach to the thought/object, subjective/objective, spirit/matter, machine/soul dichotomy is the only alternative to either mechanical materialism (which lets stupid idealism in through the back door via voluntarism or "positive thinking" bullshit), or stupid idealism (which lets mechanical materialism in through the back door with the idea of cause -> effect between thought and action, eg. the Catholic Church attempting to draw up a scientific analysis of miracles).

And that addition is the question of quality turning into quantity. The way you can tell that Stalinism is a form of capitalism as opposed to a form of socialism is its belief in pursuing quantity above all else, in the blind assurance that this is automatically the same thing as quality. Whether this is measured in $$$ of profit or millions of surplus tons of pig-iron or kitty litter, no-one actually thinks of acting like Marx suggested and seeing what the use value to actual human beings is of all this piled up "stuff", and what its non-quantifiable costs are. A sure sign that a "revolutionary" group has succumbed to capitalist/state capitalist logic is that it measures its success using quantitative tools - X papers sold, Y people at this demo or that meeting, Z extra members. A real revolutionary group would measure itself by its use-value - i.e. what it actually makes happen.

Robert Fripp, who is one of those "intelligent idealists" whom Lenin liked better than the stupid materialists and so do I, talks about "quality" as if it came from a Higher Realm and intersected with quantity. That's at least a bit closer to a materialist dialectic and is a sign of taking the question seriously.

A blessing

"May we wish for each other what we wish most deeply for ourselves." - Robert Fripp. Thus:

May every friend and reader of Chaos Marxism be recognized for who they are and what they can do, and may they be given work which embodies that recognition.

In other words: may you all be delivered from alienation. Or rather, may we all deliver ourselves.

[UPDATED!: Great bonus Subgenius vs SubGenius fistfight in the comments.]

I won't be what I am now

written at the low point of a vicious depressive episode

There is no heaven, no hell, no afterlife... at least of the kind which traditional religion teaches us to expect. You (i.e. your ego) will not survive this body, for exactly the same reason that your clock radio starts blinking 12:00 after being unplugged, or you have to back-up your hard drive. Data gets lost. Your body might be resurrected at the End of Time, but it might be like those heads in a jar in Futurama. The great Prophets weren't lying, as such, as much as trying to terrorise the simple folk into being good.

But you don't exist in this world, either. You - as an individual - are interpellated (as Althusser would have it) - called into existence - by the structures of this world. The twin traps of You are getting all wound up as to whether you win and lose the game of Who Dies With The Most Toys Wins; or the equal and opposite one, Who Dies With The Most Brownie Points Lives Forever In A Nice Place (And Whoever Gets A Negative Score Gets Fried Alive).

There's not much in Scientology that's worth it, but one exception is the concept of Eight Dynamics of the Self. That is: "self-interest" as defined by your personal biological unit is the smallest and lowest level of consciousness and responsibility. The next step up from that is your family and your domestic unit; up from that, the group (nation, class) you belong to; then humanity; then Life On Earth; then the physical universe; then as a Viewpoint detached from the physical universe (meta-consciousness, or as the vulgar would have it "the soul" or "spirit"); and past that, al-Haqq, the Absolute. The point being that anyone who puts their own personal identity at the top of their list of priorities is a really, really small creature, and due to be among the losers as everything they care about will cease to exist in less than 100 years.

The famous woman Sufi Rabi'a was seen running through the streets with a bucket of water to quench Hell, and a torch to burn down Heaven. Anyone who was motivated by Heaven or Hell, according to her, was as deluded and lost as anyone motivated by the riches of the Real World of Horrible Jobs (or, in her day, Goat Farming). The Absolute - the God's-eye view, or the view of the hardest of hard science - is the only thing worth worshipping. But all eight dynamics of the Self are worth living and dying for... in balance and moderation.

Whatever is really worth it about "you" is part of the Absolute, and is therefore eternal and immortal. Sadly, that doesn't mean what you call "yourself".

Consciousness / Unconsciousness

Apologies for the break in service. All of a sudden, to our amazement, people have started taking CM seriously, and so I've been talking about this issues with people actually in political movements and making some excellent contacts. And some of them are with us now.

So, anyway: the goal of CM is still the marriage of Marxism and mysticism/magick, and another way into this is the problem of subjectivity. Changing consciousness at will, Starhawk's definition of magick, is one way to look at it - but why would you want to do that anyway? Answer: because your normal everyday self (i.e. the ego) can simply not see certain things. You have a blind spot, because of where you are and what you are doing and more importantly who you are.

Upton Sinclair said: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" More recently, Richard Seymour (he of the Sino-Seymourite Deviationists) has had this to say on intersectionality and the status of black female domestic workers in feminism:

Being insider-outsiders, they could perceive the routines and patterns, the assumptions, of an existing body of social theory that had been largely dominated by white men.  Importantly, this meant that their challenge would be aimed not just at inclusion in the sense of expanding the existing paradigms to 'include black women in', but at fundamentally subverting the existing paradigms by virtue of the particular forms of knowledge they were able to contribute.  But if that's true, it also has implications for intersectionality.  Insofar as postcolonial feminisms have sought to challenge a blindspot in existing feminisms, they have sought to qualitatively transform them.  

To spell it out, one's ego, or nafs, or class consciousness, or Bourdieuan habitus, means you simply don't, can't, won't look in a particular direction. The point of both revolutionary socialism and mysticism is to attempt to assume a universal viewpoint: the viewpoint of the proletariat as the "subject-object" of future history, or the viewpoint of God. Traditionally described, the point of magick is to be able to cast off one ego and put on another, which amounts to the same thing. The danger of course is that if you simply cast off your ego that's what ordinary people call "going insane", and they tend to lock you up and not give you the good pills.

The difference between revolutionary socialism and Stalinism/social democracy, as the difference between mysticism and religion, is the emphasis on agency and the subjective factor. If it's just a matter of doing the right things to achieve salvation, that leads to authoritarian conclusions, if there's only One Way and, as the traditionalist Catholics put it, "error has no rights". But if the point is to unite the objective with the subjective, then the question of will (defined in Gurdjieffian terms as the ability to do things that "you" don't like and don't want to do) is the question of the ability to create a revolutionary rupture with existing reality.

All parties, labels, dogmas, religions, and fixed identities get in the way of this, except insofar as they are supposed to be means to an end and to be burned as fuel in the struggle. Because if the workers don't burn the party as fuel, the party will burn the workers as fuel. That's what we call Stalinism, or fundamentalism. You have to be a soul and a class for yourself.

New directions for the New Year

Language is a virus. The ego is a meme*. "The world flows through us." Most of what we do starts long before the left-brain language centres decided to make up a good excuse for it. The "unconscious" is that left-brain inventing someone else to blame for actions which don't fit within its own self-image, which have their sources in the Real World of Horrible Jobs. When the left-brain shuts down or is bypassed (stroke, dreams, drugs, spiritual/psychic practices, brainwashing, art), then you begin to see how "thermoplastic" your personal reality is. But corporate psychotherapy / self-help is all about you paying to adjust your reality so it's closer to theirs.

David Smail got there first. Hello, comrade.

* I picked this up from a book on post-Kantian philosophy, and it was so obvious and confounding that I was amazed to find out that only those wacky Grant Morrison fanboys at Barbelith had got there first. But it is here that social-materialist psychology agrees 100% with non-dualist spirituality. "YOU ARE NOT REAL". You cannot fix your world from a position of "I". In Truth and Love, there is no I and thou.

Choose Your Illusion

The radical therapist David Smail argues that Margaret Thatcher’s view that there’s no such thing as society, only individuals and their families, finds `an unacknowledged echo in almost all approaches to therapy’. Therapies such as Cognitive Behaviour Therapy combine a focus on early life (a kind of psychoanalysis-lite) with the self-help doctrine that individuals can become masters of their own destiny. Smail gives the immensely suggestive name magical voluntarism to the view that `with the expert help of your therapist or counsellor, you can change the world you are in the last analysis responsible for, so that it no longer cause you distress’. (source)

This is vital to the point of being a "missing link" in the Chaos Marxist argument. We are against magical voluntarism (related to "magical thinking" in the negative sense of the term) and for magick in the sense of "creating change in accordance with will" (or Intention, to use our preferred nomenclature). The latter encourages responsibility - the former encourages victim-blaming, a "just so" attitude to the status quo (the people in charge made the right wishes), and quietism on behalf of the oppressed (if you fail it's because you deserved it, you thought bad thoughts etc.)

Interesting that Buddhist meditation is vulgarly described as a mechanism of thought control, when the point is that one does quite the opposite - abdicates the attempt to control thought, but also prevents thought from controlling action.

The neoliberal abolition of the public sphere and its replacement with privatised exclusive fora - shopping malls, gated communities, internet forums where you can talk only with people who share your prejudices or fixed ideas - is in itself the abolition of scientific objectivity and its replacement with "buy your own insane delusionary reality on the Free Market place of Opiates of the Masses". We have watched with hilarity as the Republican Party in the US have crashed on the electoral rocks after making a collective decision over the last thirty years that "perception = reality". They really thought they could make themselves beat Obama by telling themselves over and over again that they were going to. It's not just a cynical lie they tell to control the people - this is what our ruling classes actually believe.

Of course, this is another argument for exogamy, in that You Can't Hide From Reality if you have any interest in affecting it, but I think OtL has covered that nicely in his recent radio show.

Love and Anger

Love and Anger are both forms of Intention - preserving and destroying, respectively, whereas Creativity is a third form. If you have to believe in a Trinity, believe in that one. Blessed St Ernesto said that revolutionaries were motivated by love, but surely we can all see that the good ones are motivated by anger and creativity as well.

Intention is sovereign, in that it burns through Habit (automatic action, without intention, alienation, reification, Unreality). If we can speak of God as something which is not real but makes reality possible, then God is Intention, and a "divine" or "perfected" human being is one who acts entirely in accordance with Intention, rather than in accordance with habit or reaction.

Queen of the sciences

If theology can be described as "the understanding of the stories that really matter in a particular culture", then perhaps what Chaos Marxism is attempting is materialist theology. (God / The Other World exist to the extent that we behave as if they exist.) This goes beyond "literary criticism", "film studies" or "cultural studies" in that we want to examine how ideology is produced and reproduced at all levels of our society, what factors in society contribute to the acceptance and thriving of various memes/ideologemes... and thus how to create a countermovement to the current productive system through the unity of workers and art / psychology / practical spirituality (to supplement the unity of workers and science which Rosa Luxemburg defined as the purpose of a revolutionary party).

Perhaps what I really want is a discipline of ideology in the sense of psychology, sociology, etc. And memetics, then, becomes to ideology what genetics is to evolutionary biology.

He who smelt it, dealt it

... or less crudely, The Tar-Baby Principle ("you are attached to what you attack"); or simply "criticism says more about the critic than the criticised". Case in point - the iron rule is that someone who angrily accuses someone else of a crime is quite obviously guilty of that precise thing and projecting, no matter whether the accusation is valid or not. Watch the Israeli Defence Force happily tweeting about how many civilians they've killed to make sure that civilians won't be killed. This is the Jungian "shadow effect" - what anyone hates and fears most is their own disavowed, repressed self.

Amazingly enough, the Sparts said something sensible once. When Stalin killed all those Polish offiers in the Katyn Forest, the Nazis went running to the Red Cross and anyone else who would listen yelling "OMG BARBARIC ATROCITY!" And they were right. But the crucial point is that this shows that the Nazis knew right from wrong, they knew perfectly well what a barbaric atrocity was, it was just all right when they did it themselves. I believe there is an acronym in American politics called IOKIYAR  that you might want to google.

The IDF might want to check our Chanology archives to find out what happens when you piss off the internet.

Tribal Love (trigger warning: rapist scumbags)

You can't hide from God because he's bigger than you, and you can't hide from kyriarchical class-society because it's inside you and me. A vital insight shared by Chaos Marxism and Materialist Esthetix (and all decent mystical/artistic currents) is that the ego itself is a material product of class society, and "you" are what you are because you grew up where you were with the genes from your biological parents.

Therefore, the fundamentalist commandment to "come ye out from among them" - to "shield" the True Believers from the wicked wicked world - is totally counterproductive. Liberal secularists seem to think that Catholic priests rape children because of their tradition of celibacy or because of their religion. Hardly. They rape children because they can get away with it, and that applies to non-religious organisations such as the Scouting movement, the BBC, and... you guessed it, small socialist groups, especially the kind which (for example) insist that their members all live together and maintain party discipline at, er, parties.

This is the natural outcome of tribalism - the idea that we have to "have the back" of Our Fellow In-Group Members, no matter what scumbucket behaviours they get up to. Are your tendency-mates in another country doing something really dumb? To say so in public makes YOU the bad guy. Has your comrade in your own country been doing something really nasty? The correct thing to do is to ignore the allegations as politically motivated lies and smear the accusers. (EDIT:  until they're involved in a split or a faction fight which you're on the other side of. Then you trot out the blackmail material.)

I've said before that the only cure for this is exogamy - deliberately socialising and forming relationships with non-members of your particular Saved Sect - as a corrective to the fact that ten people in a room can talk themselves into anything. You can't live differently in this world - there is no such thing as an island of liberation in a sea of capitalism/wickedness. And I'm sorry to my Cuban solidarity friends, but "our enemies make us do it" is not an adequate excuse.

On rejoining the reality-based community

But Obama really won, Maddow said. “And he really was born in Hawaii, and he really is legitimately President of the United States, again, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not make up a fake unemployment rate last month, and the Congressional Research Service really can find no evidence that cutting taxes on rich people grows the economy, and the polls were not screwed to oversample Democrats, and Nate Silver was not making up fake projections about the election to make conservatives feel bad, Nate Silver was doing math, and climate change is real, and rape really does cause pregnancy sometimes, and evolution is a thing, and benghazi was an attack on us, it was not a scandal by us, and nobody is taking away anyone’s guns, and taxes have not gone up, and the deficit is dropping, actually, and saddam hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, and the moon landing was real, and FEMA is not building concentration camps, and you UN election observers are not taking over Texas, and moderate reforms of the regulations on the insurance industry and the financial services industry in this country are not the same thing as communism.”

(Yet before liberals, socialists or anyone to the left of Genghis Khan get too smug... before you pop someone else's own reality-tunnel, make sure your own isn't leading you in the wrong direction. There's some pretty impressive reality-denying going on on our side of the fence as well.)

TESTING...

... a new and friendlier comments system, thank you OTL for your suggestion.

Two new aphorisms

1. The essence of being human is yearning for what is not; from this stems our ability to labour, i.e. to make images in our minds real things in the real world. To be satisfied with the World-As-Is (the Black Iron Prison), therefore, is to be no longer human;  while to despairing of our ability to change the World-As-Is, to bring a little of the Palm Tree Garden into it (to accept alienation, in other words) is to be subhuman. As Rumi put it, "Seek pain* and unfulfilment!"
2. As religion is the opiate of the masses, seeking to alter-is and not-is reality is the opiate of just about everyone. "Humankind cannot bear very much reality", as T. S. Eliot put it - the outcome of reification and alienation is (for both elites and subalterns) to escape into a wish-fulfilment, magical-thinking fantasy world. As some Satanist I once read said, "magical thinking is the antithesis of magick" - denying reality (science, etc) or pretending it doesn't exist never changed it. To quote the Church of the SubGenius once again (the real one, not the unfunny plagiarist Bob Dean's cheap knockoff): "You can believe you're not going to hell, but you must first face the truth that you are in hell now."

(* The Moorcock quote in the graphic is quite accurate: the question is whether "destroying yourself" is the goal or something to be avoided. CM would suggest that the answer lies in the definition of "self".)

How to create an alternate reality

1) Find actors who're willing to play the Good Guy and the Black Hat respectively.
2) Find an audience desperately searching for a narrative to explain stuff that their previous ideology can't comprehend.

Good directors/showrunners/scriptwriters can keep this going indefinitely, and will be able to get their audience to buy the advertised products (or vote) in order to keep the show going on. The BBC's Adam Curtis explains how it's done in shocking but unsurprising detail.

In defence of cult leaders

So does anyone start a mind-control cult on purpose? It is rumoured that a certain rummed-out science fiction writer started his "applied religious philosophy" solely and purely as a money-making scheme. It is certainly tempting - and much much easier - to assume that all the televangelists, half-baked jihadi imams, crooked Buddhist monks and leaders of tiny socialist sects out there do so in conscious and pure selfishness, seeking nothing more than to make a living without having to produce anything of value, and giggling at their success in pilfering funds from the sheeplike Pinks.

One thing I'm slowly but surely learning is that anything that's easy is probably dead wrong. James Cannon, the American Trotskyist leader, said that anyone does anything for two reasons: "a good reason, and the real reason". Let us start from a principle that Marxism, Islam and Scientology all hold clear - people are basically good, although forgetful and easily confused. Indeed, LRH himself - in a moment of interesting personal insight - suggested that if people get trapped in a spiral of evil behaviour, they end up "doing themselves in" to save the world from themselves.

The Alexander Technicians and the followers of Gurdjieff all agree that "it is difficult to overestimate the power of habit" - that people start doing counterproductive things and they keep doing them because they come to accept that as the "new normal". A Marxist description of ideology is that it's an "imaginary solution to a real problem" - we could connect all these with Bourdieu's concept of habitus, that your habitual patterns of behaviour becomes your identity and that to give them up just because they're counterproductive is the equivalent of death. And the Sufis take seriously the Prophet's injunction to "die before you die" (equivalent of Jesus's "be born again", I suppose).

So the argument I'm making is that perhaps all these cult leaders begin by actually believing that their methods are what's best for them, their disciples and the world. Nothing survives which is purely evil - the important thing to remember is that all lies with staying power are based on an element of truth, or that all ideologies are false extrapolations from real data. So any cult leader's practice will be a combination of real "juice" and ego-gratifying bullshit. A good reason - and a real reason - for ordering people around.

But the time comes when the cult's practice comes up against obstacles in the real world. At that point, the guru has two choices - the hard one, which would be to give up his/her ego-gratification, or the easy one, to give up the confrontation with reality (and remember that Reality is the Sufi name for God), and to turn the cult inward and to play God over their own little world. Jim Jones, in other words. God can destroy the world if he wants to. Take it away, Wikipedia:

One goal in the study of Thelema within the magical Order of the A∴A∴ is for the magician to obtain the knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel: conscious communication with their own personal daimon, thus gaining knowledge of their True Will.^[66] The chief task for one who has achieved this goes by the name of "crossing the abyss";^[67] completely relinquishing the ego. If the aspirant is unprepared, he will cling to the ego instead, becoming a Black Brother. Rather than becoming one with God, the Black Brother considers his ego to be god.^[68] According to Crowley, the Black Brother slowly disintegrates, while preying on others for his own self-aggrandisement.^[69]

And that's where cult leaders come from. But the important thing to realise is they wouldn't have gotten there if they hadn't been trying to do something useful (as well as gratify their egos). It's just that they failed the final test, or decided it was too hard.

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By the way, we're coming up to the 6th anniversary of Chaos Marxism, and I should explain that the reason I don't contribute that often is that I'm starting to become aware of how much nonsense my own ego spouts in an effort to make itself important. Thanks for your continued interest.

A Chaos Marxist essay assignment...

Compare and contrast Crowley's admonition on "lust of result" with the Alexander Technique's criticism of "end-gaining", and describe how a similar attitude might be built into political strategy, with special reference to the means-end relationship set out in Their Morals and Ours.

The saddest thing Ï ever read

“I’m no longer on world-changing missions. Because once I let go of the fantasy, once I said no more, I realized I hadn’t been changing the world. I was playing pretend with someone who was using me to perpetuate his own imaginary world.”

The feeling of abused trust from someone who honestly wanted to make a difference should be familiar to the vast majority of those who have been in a Leninist or anarchist group over the last thirty years. I even wrote a song (and a pretty good one) on the subject. Here's the world of small-group psychosis, once again, with relevance to two of our favourite subjects - corporate Scientology and otherkin.

(Reading about the FFVII cult was one of my inspirations for starting this blog, although I'm disappointed that they didn't mention the guy who thinks he's Neo from The Matrix. He was one of my favourites and commented here once, although truthofthespoon.net seems to have gone down.)

Habit kills.

Habit kills the Holy Spirit, the revolutionary élan. Habit makes life easier at the expense of making creativity impossible - of becoming a slave to cause and effect. The mere fact that Leninist sects put "establishing a routine" (of paper sales, branch discussions, etc.) at the top of their priorities shows that they'll never be any use in an actual revolution. And then you get "reformist leaders" who tell everyone else to change their habits, while their own go unexamined.

Every form of psychology, revolutionary politics, true poetry or magic is about editing and deleting Habit. And that's probably all that Chaos Marxism has ever had to say.