Tolerably often, when I’m reading any of the documents that came out of the original Situationist International, I end up feeling as though the author is caught up in a desperate struggle between his own Marxist presuppositions and the world as it actually exists. That’s common enough in 20th century Marxist literature from outside the Communist bloc—those from inside that bloc rarely even attempt that struggle—and the Situationist documents aren’t even extreme cases of the type.
The supreme example, at least to me, is Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. This collection of essays, which focuses on the awkward way that rationalism paves the way for the rise of irrationalism, comes within a hair’s breadth of realizing that the grand historical narrative of Marxism is as thoroughly mythical as anything in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. What’s more, it does this repeatedly, before backing away awkwardly each time from that shattering discovery at the last possible moment. Yes, this book will doubtless get a post or two of its own in due time, not least because it offers a way back into the discussion of enchantment and disenchantment I began here a while back.
That struggle doesn’t always go so far, admittedly; there are times when the Situationist papers crumple before the challenge with scarcely a whimper. I’m thinking here among other things of the kneejerk insistence, running all through Situationist literature, that since everything else has failed, revolutionary workers’ councils are destined someday to rise up and fulfill all the perfervid fantasies of Marxists. Of course those have also been tried before, many times, and they never get far or accomplish much, but hope springs infernal, or something like that.
In the Situationists’ defense, though, it’s only fair to mention that there were two important reasons why they had to prop up their hopes with so weak a reed. The first, as we saw last month, is that the Situationist International was a fine example of what I call beta-Marxism, the form of Marxism that exists in societies that already have a dominant managerial-bureaucratic caste. Beta-Marxists, as I noted then, exist in a covert marriage of convenience with the system they claim to hate and despise; they are permitted to thrive because they provide a harmless outlet for youthful dissidence, and generate critiques of the system that its future managers can use for course correction. Thus it is an essential part of any beta-Marxist group’s strategy to develop as cogent a critique of the existing order of things as they can manage, while proposing the most harmlessly ineffective and unrealistic means of changing that order that they can think of.
Yet there was another, even more pressing reason why the Situationists had to choose an anchor for their revolutionary daydreams that was as unthreatening as possible. All through the period when the Situationist International still more or less functioned, they and the societies they lived in were confronted with the other form of Marxism, alpha-Marxism, in its most ruthless and tyrannical form. The Soviet Union, Communist China, and their respective satellite nations in Eurasia and the global South were making it brutally clear what the “workers’ paradise” meant in practice, and certainly seemed to be targeting the rest of the planet for inclusion in the same bloodsoaked scheme. That was awkward enough for those who tried to insist, as the Situationists did, that Marxism lit the path to a utopian future for all, but there was another issue as well.
If western Europe had ended up under the control of the bellicose alpha-Marxists from further east, after all, the Situationists themselves could expect to be sent to prison camps or simply lined up against a wall and shot. That was standard practice toward dissident Marxist groups in Communist regimes, which had the zealot’s usual intolerance for doctrinal disagreements. Under the circumstances, it’s not at all surprising that Situationists by and large insisted that all they could possibly do was sit on their hands and wait for the proletariat to get around to rebelling, as Marx’s prophecies said they would, rather than doing anything more active or effective to bring on the utopian world to come.
Yet another consequence of that same necessity opened up some fascinating perspectives. In Marxist moral theology, whatever may have been the case in previous dispensations, in the present stage of the historical dialectic all the powers of evil are and must be capitalist, while all the powers of good are and must be socialist. It therefore followed irrefutably that the Communist societies whose alpha-Marxism loomed so large on the horizon had to be redefined as capitalist. This may seem silly, and to a certain extent it was, but it also allowed the Situationists to notice just how narrow a gap separated the Communist and capitalist states, and to characterize certain crucial features of that gap in a thoughtful way.
That led to some genuine insights. In The Society of the Spectacle, for example, Guy Debord characterized the Communist states as “bureaucratic capitalism,” as contrasted with the more ordinary kind in America and western Europe. In the process, he recognized that the objectionable features of both systems were a function of the industrial mode of production itself, not merely a consequence of which group of people happened to exercise control over the means of production. (To be fair, many midcentury beta-Marxists realized this, and their attempts to evade the catastrophic impact of that realization on Marx’s theories make up an interesting chapter in the history of ideas.)
It was when he set out to characterize bureaucratic capitalism that Debord transcended the limits of his own ideology and said something profoundly useful. He noted that under bureaucratic capitalism, the Spectacle—the system of relationships among people, mediated by images, that defines, enforces and camouflages the power differentials in society—takes on a fascinating and paradoxical form. Power in a bureaucracy is exerted in the name of the bureaucracy as a whole, and each official from the bottom to the top of the bureaucratic hierarchy sees himself or herself not as a person having and exercising power, but as a cog in the great machine, subject to the colossus he or she serves.
Thus power in a bureaucratic society, being impersonal, is at once invisible and omnipresent. In such a society, even the most obviously culpable servants of the bureaucracy—say, torturers who work for the secret police, or for that matter members of the Politburo—can see themselves as powerless, even as victims of the system or rebels against it, while they spend their working hours following its mandates and furthering even the most abusive of its policies. What makes this insight especially trenchant is that it doesn’t just apply to those bureaucratic capitalist states that call themselves Communist.
Any modern society with a sufficiently powerful bureaucracy will display the same features. This is why, for example, so many bureaucrats in today’s America embrace notionally left-wing, even Marxist ideologies, and claim to be fighting against privilege and power, which they identify with those remnants of the old capitalist class that haven’t been wholly supplanted by government, corporate, and nonprofit-sector bureaucrats like them. The considerable power and privilege enjoyed by bureaucrats themselves is completely invisible to them, because they don’t possess or exercises these as individuals. The recent absurdity of millionaire politicians claiming to “fight the oligarchy,” when they themselves are oligarchs by any reasonable definition, has its roots in the way that power and privilege in a bureaucratic society become invisible to the bureaucrats themselves.
The Spectacle, then, can take different modes in different societies, and it can act as much by erasing or blurring images as by spreading them around and putting a spotlight on them. From this standpoint, it’s worth looking beyond the boundaries of modern industrial society to see just how generally the concept of the Spectacle can be applied. Here and there, the Situationists tried to do this, though their ability to make sense of what history showed them was crippled by Marxist theory, and more generally by the mythology of progress Marx borrowed from Hegel and Hegel borrowed from the zeitgeist of his time.
We can start with a single, vivid scene: the formal banquets that Queen Elizabeth I held regularly in the courtyard in front of her London palace, in full view of the Londoners of her time. These were ornate, extravagant affairs in which one lavish course after another was served to the queen and an assortment of her courtiers and ladies-in-waiting by armies of liveried servants. There are many more comfortable and pleasant places to dine than a sixteenth-century palace courtyard, especially with the English weather to contend with, but these banquets continued at regular intervals straight through the reign of “Good Queen Bess,” ending only when she was too old and ill to continue them. Why?
Through a Situationist lens, the question answers itself: in an age without mass media, the only way to make the Spectacle visible to the masses is public pageantry. Public pageantry, in turn, the Middle Ages and Renaissance had in lavish abundance. Consider sumptuary laws, which were on the books and enforced in every European country until widespread literacy and the rise of the daily newspaper (the first form of mass media) supplanted them. Before then, your social class determined very strictly what you were and were not allowed to wear. This had practical advantages, but it also projected the medieval Spectacle into everyday life; each person became an advertisement for the class system of the time, not an individual but a visually labeled member of a class: a serf, a yeoman, a knight, a baron, or what have you.
The sermons that played so important a role in shaping opinion in those days came under similar pressures. Under Elizabeth I, for example, ministers of the Church of England were not generally permitted to write their own sermons. Sermons were written for them by industrious authors who worked for the Church of England, then as now an arm of the English government. Since every English person was legally required to attend Church of England services, this made for a very respectable prefiguration of broadcast media. Those official sermons were complemented by an equally enthusiastic torrent of unofficial sermons from Puritan and Catholic sources, which found plenty of readers despite significant legal penalties—as I noted earlier in this sequence, the Spectacle is always contested, pulled this way and that by influential groups within and outside of the power structure.
You can find the same principles expressed in different ways in other cultures. Pageantry of one kind or another plays a substantial role in every society’s version of the Spectacle, whether it takes the form of feathered headdresses and ritual dances or that of the lavish ceremonies of the Roman, Chinese, or Ottoman imperial courts. Official religious forms are just as important—it’s not accidental, for example, that in Rome the Senate had to formally permit the introduction of any new religious cult. (That was a central reason why Christianity ran into so much legal trouble: “Do you have a license for your god?” was a question that mattered in those days.) Whatever forms of communication are central to the culture are equally central to the Spectacle, and the degree to which those forms of communication are shaped by explicitly political intervention is a good measure of the extent to which formal rather than informal power governs that society.
This distinction between formal and informal power, which we discussed in another context a few months back, is of considerable importance here. Societies less dependent on complex technology—the kind that many people these days are pleased to call “primitive societies”—tend to rely on informal power exclusively; in many Native American tribes, for example, chiefship wasn’t assigned by heredity or any formal process of election, it was simply that experienced, successful, and spiritually gifted people had much more influence on tribal decisions than others. As social and technological complexity increase, formal power becomes more important.
Yet informal power is no less liable to abuse than formal power—anyone who’s watched consensus-based groups crash and burn, as they do quite often, knows this from personal experience—and societies run by informal power have their own forms of Spectacle, their own alienating relationships between people mediated by culturally and emotionally powerful images. Some form of Spectacle is found in every human society, however simple or complex. It really does look as though the Spectacle is rooted in human nature itself.
If you were listening carefully just now, dear reader, you might have heard a soft and distant chuckle. It came from the ethereal lips of Plato, as he leaned back on the archetypal form of the sofa somewhere in the world of Ideas. It might have come from any number of other figures, except that Hindu sages and rishis are generally too deep in meditation to chuckle, Immanuel Kant would at most have lifted one eyebrow, and Arthur Schopenhauer wouldn’t have been satisfied by anything less than a mordant laugh. What all these philosophers have in common, of course, is that they explored the gap between appearance and reality imposed by the very nature of human consciousness.
That is to say, the Situationists found their way, through immense efforts and by an unusually roundabout route, to a basic insight about existence that many thinkers have considered too self-evident to bother proving. This is less dismissive than it sounds, because the systematic analysis of such self-evident concepts quite often leads to remarkable new discoveries: “It is by thinking things that schoolboys know better than to think,” as Charles Fort wrote, “that discoveries are made.” The Spectacle against which the Situationists inveighed is neither more nor less than the political dimension of what the old Hindu thinkers called maya, the all-encompassing illusion that the unawakened mistake for the world. Yet neither the Hindu sages nor the others I mentioned discussed the fact that maya does in fact have a robust political dimension. That was left to the Situationists to point out.
At the heart of maya is the process of figuration—the sequence of mental activities by which each of us assembles the jumbled testimony of the senses into the image of a coherent world. (I have discussed that process here.) We all spent the years of infancy learning how to do this in a very rough way, and then the years of childhood refining the process under the guidance of parents, teachers, peers, and the media. By the time most of us reached adulthood, we made figuration such an automatic habit that we rarely notice that we do it at all. Only in special situations, such as certain optical illusions, do we come to grips with the fact that we construct the world from the raw material of sensation, using a set of genetically, culturally, and personally acquired habits as the framework into which each bit of sense data is fitted. Instead, most of us assume that we are passive observers of the world as it is.
That’s a very problematic assumption in more ways than one. What the Situationists help us to understand is that one of its problems is political. The process by which we learn to assemble the world through figuration is inevitably shaped in a political manner: the ways we figurate the world are either picked up obediently following the guidance of parents, teachers, peers, and the media, or created in one form or another of rebellion against the models offered us by parents, teachers, peers, and the media. Whether we accept what we are told, reject it, or blend the two, we always interact politically with the process of learning.
Nor are the models themselves free from political pressures. In some imaginary utopian setting, maybe, those models would be selected purely because of their benefits to the growing consciousness of the child. In the real world, by contrast, children are taught to figurate their worlds in ways that encourage thoughts and actions that support some interests within society and disempower others. Here again, this process is always contested; different groups of children will be taught competing figurations, depending on who has the most influence over their upbringing and schooling, and each of these figurations will support some power centers and pressure groups while leaving others out in the cold.
This goes all the way down to the most basic act of figuration, the division of the universe into self and not-self. Like all the rest of our figurative acts, this is much less straightforward than it seems. Notice, just to start with, how often people identify ideas they got from the mass media as “my thinking,” or how often they identify their own arbitrary assumptions about the world as “the way the world really is”! Yet it goes much further than this. How we figurate ourselves, and where we draw the line between self and other, are both political acts.
To understand how this works, we’ll need to take an excursion into the jungles of modern thought in search of one of the oddest items of livestock found therein: the human ego. In the process, we’ll have to confront one of the least productive habits of modern thinking—and take another step toward unpacking the potential of Situationist ideas for the liberation of the human individual.
*****
Two notes on unrelated topics. First, there are five Wednesdays in this month, and by longstanding tradition, that means that readers get to nominate and vote on what they want me to write about in the fifth Wednesday post. What do you want to hear about? Inquiring occultists want to know. 😉
Second, I’m delighted to report that a forthcoming book of mine is now available for preorder. The Great Arcanum, my commentary on Eliphas Lévi’s The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic, will be out next April but can be preordered now, and readers of mine can use the code ARCANUM20 for a 20% discount when ordering direct from the publisher here.
Hello JMG and commentariat, I’m glad to see more stuff about Situationism now. I’ll comment it at due time.
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(Off topic). I’ve forgotten to wish you, John, good luck in your intention of dating with women. I’m sorry to have not written this so late in the comments cycle before this one.
A vote for psychic self-defense in the fifth Wednesday post
“Power in a bureaucracy is exerted in the name of the bureaucracy as a whole, and each official from the bottom to the top of the bureaucratic hierarchy sees himself or herself not as a person having and exercising power, but as a cog in the great machine, subject to the colossus he or she serves.”
Is this just the case for bureaucracies in industrial societies or do we see the same thing in agricultural bureaucracies in for example medieval China?
For the 5th Wednesday I’d like to nominate a post on something you mentioned several weeks ago: how downward mobility equates to freedom.
I very much look forward to your upcoming posts. You are again getting into territory that Robert Pirsig traversed.
A 5th Wednesday request, if I may… 🙂 I’d love to read a post about “Blessing, healing and spiritual hygiene as a community service”.
On this week’s Magic Monday, you wrote: “This is also why it was very common, until modern times, for most villages and urban neighborhoods in the Western world to have at least one old person who was known for personal sanctity and who did healings, blessings, and spell-breaking in a quiet way, using the name of Jesus to cast out evil spirits and banish curses as the Gospels prescribe. We have a shortage of them these days, and it shows.” ( https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/343321.html?thread=57409305#cmt57409305 )
Having people in our communities which are willing and capable to offer such services would indeed be a very good thing in the future. And I presume some of your readers might be very well suited to such a role – but then I also presume most of your readers aren’t Christian mainstream believers, but polytheists, unorthodox Christians, or what have you.
In addition, these traditions have largely been broken in the Western world, and thus some wheels will need to be rediscovered or even reinvented if we’d like to get there again. Digging suitable techniques up from old Catholic manuals in Latin might not be feasible for everybody, though, both for reasons of language and of belief. 😉 Thus I would appreciate a post on this topic, with focus on practical advice.
For example, how to find, identify, test and adapt suitable methods, rituals and techniques, both from one’s own tradition and from other traditions (most likely traditional Christianity)? What to look out for, what to avoid in one’s practice? Any pitfalls or potential problems with certain kinds of techniques? What kinds of things should the basic toolkit of such a community service practitioner contain?
Other things which might be covered are:
+ Self care, both as “How to take care of oneself” and “How to avoid hurting/injuring/overtaxing oneself”.
+ Any potential problems, pitfalls, dangers, things to watch out for in general?
+ How to transition into such a role at a time when most people are still firmly rooted in a materialistic worldview?
+ How to avoid being tagged as “bad witch” and suffer the potential consequences?
+ And anything else you might deem important…
Of course, I hope others are interested in this topic as well… 😉
Milkyway
Very interesting insight here: “In the real world, by contrast, children are taught to figurate their worlds in ways that encourage thoughts and actions that support some interests within society and disempower others.”
Surely this is part of why the education system has been falling apart. As society continues to decline, more and more propaganda has to be shoveled into education, because the status quo can’t justify itself by its effectiveness anymore.
My vote for this month’s fifth Wednesday topic is the hypothesis that’s been discussed in recent Magic Monday threads about souls from a higher dimension who have been sojourning in human bodies for the past several thousand years and are now getting ready to leave Earth en masse for their spiritual home.
This topic struck a deep personal note in me when I first stumbled upon it, and it seemed to echo things I’d been hearing in the New Age scene recently but had dismissed up until that point as a spiritual fad.
I’d love to read a summary of your original intuitive hypothesis, any corroborating evidence you’ve found since, and how all of this might tie into the looming potential fallout from Covid policies and general Long-Descent population contraction. I recall that you’ve had intuitions about those last two topics as well, and I appreciate how categorically empirical you are about information acquired from such sources.
Thank you for putting out this call for reader input! This time I timed my request correctly, I think 🙂
Here’s a place to start for those who are hearing about this topic for the first time:
https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/340551.html?thread=56960839#cmt56960839
Awesome application of the Spectacle to Elizabethan times. Well done. Bravo. I’d be one to read your response to Adorno btw, mentioned in a comment sometime in the past few weeks. Looking forward to how this all circles back to reenchantment.
Enjoying this series 🙂 Taken as one intellectual tool among many, Marxist analysis can be useful as long as you separate it from the theory and doctrine.
Very good point on the mindset of the bureaucracies as well. I’ll add that in my experience bureaucrats are often not capable of perceiving of the world in a way that doesn’t rely on strict hierarchy and are unwilling to believe that people actually need a lot less governance that they think. Its 100% part of their own *maya*.
First off, I’ve got everyone’s votes for the Fifth Wednesday post tabulated.
Chuaquin, thank you!
Anonymous, to the best of my knowledge, it’s a universal feature of bureaucracies, present (for example) in the priestly bureaucracies of ancient Egypt.
JH, I should probably give Pirsig another read one of these days.
Milkyway, since you clearly have some definite ideas of how this ought to be approached, I’m going to ask you to follow up on those, and write and post an essay along the lines you’ve sketched out here. If I do an essay on this topic, it’s going to follow my outline, not yours!
Nephite, it’s a little more complex than that. All systems of education are necessarily political — they all embody somebody’s point of view, that is, and so uphold that point of view in place of rivals. Ours is failing not because it’s more political than others, but because the politics it supports have become so obviously dysfunctional.
Flaneur, thank you. I’m rereading Adorno and Horkheimer right now, with that in mind.
Allie001, an excellent point. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail; if all you have are managerial skills, the whole world really does look as though it needs to be managed.
@JMG Ha! I have a new quote for my cubicle wall.
JMG, fair enough. My vote is still for this topic, whatever your outline might be.
(As an aside, if I felt capable enough about these things to write this essay, I’d have started already… 😉 )
JMG, I vote for psychic self-defense as a fifth Wednesday post. Very necessary thing these days.
Thanks.
I’d like to second Milkyway’s vote—following your own outline, of course.
—David P.
My vote is for how to be downwardly mobile in style. It might be its own mode of psychic self defense after all!
“the ways we figurate the world are either picked up obediently following the guidance of parents, teachers, peers, and the media, or created in one form or another of rebellion against the models offered us by parents, teachers, peers, and the media.”
Consider the example of taboos, specifically taboos on discussion.
If there’s a taboo on talking about a certain topic or using certain words, by definition it’s not supposed to ever come up, so how could a child ever learn about the taboo? The likely scenario is that the kid innocently brings up the forbidden topic or uses the forbidden word and receives some sort of feedback suggestive of the taboo – remonstration or punishment from authority figures, surprise or tattling from peers, outright being told it’s not allowed, etc. The conversation might go something like this:
– Kid: “But why is it a ‘bad’ word, Mommy? Daddy uses it all the time.”
– Mom: “It’s a very not-nice word that grown-ups sometimes use when they’re angry, but grown-ups shouldn’t use it either.”
This associates, in the kid’s figuration process, the following: (1) the word is taboo, (2) the word is adult, and (3) the word is associated with being angry… meaning that when they’re a teen, they might use it to, for example, tell the world that they’re not a kid anymore and that they’re angry enough to dishonor the taboo.
I vote for the suggestion of DaveInWa. I would be reading for clues on how we downward types can protect ourselves, by psychic or other means.
Howdy,
Quite interesting post, as usual, but not much to add on-topic.
As for the Fifth Wednesday post, I’ll put my vote in for Milkyway’s topic, following whatever outline you deem best!
Cheers,
Jeff
Last week I asked about the curious feature of contemporary leading-edge progressivism that it rejects any attempt to label it, especially labels that leading-edge progressives themselves used for years (ex: Social Justice Warriors, woke) to the point of denying that there even is such an ideology, instead insisting that the sweeping social changes they demand are just basic human decency (despite approximately zero humans having ever held such ideals before about 2005).
You said that would be addressed this week, and while it’s not addressed directly I think I see it: “Power in a bureaucracy is exerted in the name of the bureaucracy as a whole, and each official from the bottom to the top of the bureaucratic hierarchy sees himself or herself not as a person having and exercising power, but as a cog in the great machine, subject to the colossus he or she serves.”
In other words, since leading-edge progressivism is the last-ditch attempt to backstop the bureaucratic elite, it’s no surprise that progressives would try to see themselves as simply “cogs” in an inevitable process of social change instead of wielding tremendous amounts of social power to push that change along.
***
For the Fifth Wednesday topic, my vote is going to be for an overview of the ideas of your favorite New Thought author, William Walker Atkinson. I have of course read the Kybalion, but I’d be interested in an orientation to his broader body of work and key metaphysical ideas. (I realize that many New Thought authors would excoriate me for this, but the metaphysics of New Thought schools interest me more than the techniques.)
@6 Milkyway
Re: How to avoid being tagged as a “bad witch”
Sorry, I haven’t paid enough attention to your posts to know your gender or religious beliefs.
Dress in a way society deems semi-respectable (i.e. not like a lazy bum if you’re a male), and above all avoid the woke look of blue/red/green/purple dyed hair & nose/tongue/lip piercings.
For a 5th Wednesday post, inspired by the mention of psychic self-defense, I’d like to suggest a post about a less-psychic form of self-defense (though the two could be combined): defense against blowback against occultists. Obviously one way is to hide any sign you’re an occultist and deny it, but even that doesn’t always work if witch hunts ramp up. Are their other modes of existing as an occultist within a less-tolerant society that history teaches us? How do occultists who don’t wish to completely hide walk that tight rope?
If this is an easy answer, or if it looks to lose the vote, I would be fine with a comment rather than a post.
My Fifth Wedneaday vote is for psychic self-defense.
For the 5th Wednesday post I suggest a discussion of the following quote:
“Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye.”
— William Gibson (2008). “The Miracle Worker”, p.24, Simon and Schuster
“Before then, your social class determined very strictly what you were and were not allowed to wear. This had practical advantages, but it also projected the medieval Spectacle into everyday life; each person became an advertisement for the class system of the time, not an individual but a visually labeled member of a class”
This brings to mind Simon Forman, why him donning the purple robe of the doctors was such a big deal, and why the Royal Physicians guarded their power to license physicians so closely and came down so hard against people like Forman. Forman bucked the formal power relationships and gained his status through informal power – he was better than the licensed physicians at healing people, and the people knew it. When he bought his purple robe and wore it, he signaled that he was equal to any licensed doctor. He wore on his shoulders the victory over the doctors that had thrown him in prison, fined him, and harassed him for years.
@8 Dylan
The literal truth of JMG’s vision about the stranded sixth cosmic plane residents returning home can be supported by rapid population decline, an abrupt change in emphasis in prophetic religions from transcendence towards immanence, and many more visions/dreams of loved ones leaving forever that had appeared on those MMs, all by 2036, the theorized end of the Plutonian Era.
@JMG
The point about the DuckBunny reminded me of a story my father told me – it basically has two young Indian businessmen, each of who has his own shoe-making company. They were invited by the government of an African country where everyone walked and ran around barefoot, to expand their businesses into the country. One of the two young businessmen said “there’s no market; everyone goes around barefoot, so it’s useless for me to sell my products here”, while the other said “exactly; the fact that everyone walks around barefoot itself is a HUGE green flag as regards a business opportunity for my shoe-making company to come here”. Talk about how the same thing means something VERY different to different people…
I’d be interested in a history of barrows, pyramids and vampires.
I read that bit in Magic Monday too late to comment, but somebody had mentioned a Japanese version of that.
When I went to India this year, I visited the mahasamadhi shrine of Sri Achyutananda Das on his birthday. 500 years ago he sat down into samadhi at his ashram, and mud cloth was wrapped around him. He’s still there. They do pujas for him daily, and on the day I was there, there were hundreds of people there celebrating and giving homage. I didn’t really think of this as related to the pyramids and barrows, but I guess it could be a similar tradition, and this is what I imagined the Japanese tradition is more closely related to.
I’m enjoying your discursion on the Situationists very much. Thank you. Still I wonder, what do you mean by liberation of the individual? Doesn’t embodiment entail entanglement to some degree, if only to keep a roof over one’s head and food in the belly? Won’t any system of thought lead to figuration or is liberation the ability to recognize figuration at play and make choices with that discernment?
Thanks for the timely reminder that not only do we build our own prison, but we also have the key with which to free ourselves. Too bad for us that it did not come with a tracking device. We’ll just have to search for that key. I suspect that’s a feature; not a bug.
Your historical examples are wonderful. I honestly had not connected the dots between Queen Bess chowing down in the rain, silly pointy slippers, over-the-top processions, tribal ceremony, and our mainstream media. I feel fairly confident that the crowds that once lined the proverbial street for mainstream media have thinned considerably.
My vote is for any psychic self defense tips you’re inclined to share, perhaps including natural magic? And I hope Milkyway writes that essay!
OtterGirl
“In such a society, even the most obviously culpable servants of the bureaucracy—say, torturers who work for the secret police, or for that matter members of the Politburo—can see themselves as powerless, even as victims of the system or rebels against it, while they spend their working hours following its mandates and furthering even the most abusive of its policies.”
This struck a chord for me (and not a happy, major-key chord) with reference to the Covid catastrophe. In retrospect, it will be possible for *everyone* to claim they were a victim, or just following orders, or just mandating what the situation seemed to require.
And didn’t I myself follow orders at various times too, thereby helping to uphold the Great Pandemic Spectacle and its atrocities? In the aftermath of any collective crime, justice is rather tricky to administer if the cooperation of most people in society to at least some degree was necessary for the thing to happen at all.
It almost feels like one of those raspberry jam things- it’s hard to stick the blame on someone else without getting at least some on myself. Conversely, I am now wiser to the fact that I can play an active role in saying a firm ‘no’ the next time a Situation like this rears its head, and that this can make real difference if done in a strategic way.
To pick up on a different thread: the connection of the Spectacle to maya and the gap between reality and appearance is particularly interesting to me.
One of the classic responses to noticing this gap has been to label one side of the divide real and the other unreal — a judgment woven into the very framing of “reality vs. appearance” — and then insist that the latter is either unimportant or dramatically less important than the former. The Spectacle thus something to be liberated from. This is of course the response of several Hindu schools of thought and many if not most Platonists.
Another is to fetishize the appearance side of the equation, to the point of dismissing the reality side as either unimportant (since we can’t know much/anything about it) or even denying that it exists in any substantial way. So what’s important is not liberation from the Spectacle, but its manipulation for desired ends. Some strands of postmodernism and ancient Greek sophists take this approach.
A third response tries to reconcile these approaches by insists that the two are distinct in the mind but not really different in actuality. The underlying reality may be “more real” than the appearance, but the appearance is not separable from it and anyway what were you planning to do once you got liberated? Some schools of Hinduism and Buddhism (especially the Tantric ones) as well as New Thought take this approach.
It occurs to me these can be summarized as “Boo the Spectacle!”, “Three Cheers for the Spectacle!”, and “Two Cheers for the Spectacle!”
My own inclination is the last approach, if that wasn’t obvious. The appearances are subordinate to the reality but not absolutely different from it and they enrich the reality with experience. So, two cheers for the Spectacle!
But perhaps there are some other responses I’m not aware of. I’d be interested in hearing of any.
I’d like to vote for anything to do with defensive and protective magic, as 5th Wednesday. Great, great essay as always. Even moreso, I should say.
@Milkyway This sounds like a project I hope to get to eventually and I too would encourage you to write more about it. Obviously, you’ve thought about it enough to have written an intriguing comment. Trying to follow up on my late husband’s wish that my retirement job be “herb granny,” I spoke with our (Anglican Church in North America) priest about it because I felt uneasy that I might do certain natural magic things I ought not to as a Christian woman. Instead of counseling me against it, he emphatically urged me to proceed. It’s hard to describe, but he summed it up for me as “designing western Christian tea ceremonies,” and I think, yes, that’s what I have in mind …. Figuring out what’s the best hymn to sing while brewing up this tea or which Psalm goes with which tincture. Anyway, I’m still recovering from my husband’s death, and I don’t know if I’ll ever again be contemplative enough to go down that road. The least I can do is encourage you, so consider yourself encouraged!
My request for a fifth Wednesday post is for a comparison between the concepts that underlie the Western occult tradition and those of esoteric Buddhism.
It occurred to me after I posted the last comment that my summaries could also be written as “Boo the Demiurge!”, “Three Cheers for the Demiurge!”, and “Two Cheers for the Demiurge!” and they would mean roughly the same thing.
JH, thank you for laying down the glass bead of Pirsig on the playing board. I am a big fan of his. To Pirsig, Quality is the place where subject and object meet. Now, to understand the spectacle of image mediating human relations, you just have to make a “quality sandwich” by stuffing an image between subject and object. When you mentioned Pirsig, my understanding clicked because this idea just popped in my head. Thanks.
JMG, you are making some excellent glass bead moves with this series as well. I’m especially intrigued by your mention of a unhelpful habit of human thought and it possibly being related to the ego. While writing, I realized that ego is an image in it’s own right, a self image, and we are constantly mediating our experience of our realities with our egos/personas. Maybe that’s what your alluding to.
I think unmediated reality would belong to the Individuality, and mediated reality to the ego/persona. I’ll refrain from rambling on about that for the sake of brevity. I kinda feel like I downloaded an ecosystem of ideas with all this; pretty fun.
Re John on Education:
You are right. I once heard someone say that education “Shouldn’t teach WHAT to think, it should teach HOW to think.” But I don’t think that such a thing is even possible. No matter what set of assumptions/worldview you settle on teaching, you’re still teaching a worldview. There is no neutral, objective worldview to teach.
John–
Re 5th Wed
Understanding this is rather outside the normal range of discussion, but I would be extremely interested in an outsider esotericist’s analysis of and commentary on fundamental Christian doctrine and praxis, taking one of the ancient creeds, for example, as a guide of topics. (E.g. Apostle’s for conciseness or Athanasian for detail.)
[…] a way back into the discussion of enchantment and disenchantment […]
Aah, I seem to have been lowkey waiting for something like it since 2023. Let it come in its own time and it’ll be fun to rekindle old flames.
[…] It therefore followed irrefutably that the Communist societies whose alpha-Marxism loomed so large on the horizon had to be redefined as capitalist. […]
Something that’s been in the back of my mind for years : around the time I was reading Debord, I was also reading a contemporary French writer whose take on Marx was that he wouldn’t have approved of the USSR and such societies. He likes to quote what Marx allegedly said at the end of his life : “All I know is that I’m not a Marxist”.
To him Karl’s message was roughly “À bas l’argent, à bas la marchandise” (“Down with merchandise and money”). What afflicts our societies, then, would be the premium put on production/productivism, whether they’re nominally liberal capitalist or communist.
Get rid of “commodity fetishism” and many social ills would be mended.
It’s very utopian too but I’ll admit I found it seductive, it was “radical” to my younger mind.
So. In your opinion, is that too much of a rewriting of history ? This paints Marx more like an anarchist, I reckon (which I know he wasn’t in his private life lol).
“The process by which we learn to assemble the world through figuration is inevitably shaped in a political manner….”
Is that why people with different political commitments often seem to be living in different worlds, where this one sees obvious features in the landscape (seemingly as obvious as hills and trees) that the other can’t see at all? I’ve had this experience with family members, where they allude casually to facts about the world that they assume everyone can see, but I can’t see them.
Or is that a more superficial phenomenon (e.g., persuasion by propaganda) than the deep psychological processes that you are describing here? Maybe I’m overthinking things. (It wouldn’t be the first time.)
@jmg #11, @NephiteNeophyte #7
Re: education
The problem IMO with the current political zeitgeist within education is that education is following and adopting the evolution (and logical conclusion) of post-modern identity-politics in to Subjective Solipsism.
Teaching children that a shared identity doesn’t exist and that the only identity that matters is the one in their heads is in no way sustainable but that’s what’s happening.
Replace “identity” with “reality” – because what is being taught is that ones identity IS what constitutes reality – and you get solipsism.
Solipsism is getting pushed as “inevitable” in the larger culture, largely driven by identity politics (purposely conflating identity with reality), big tech/AI (specifically about using AI to create specific “realities” for specific users), social media (which for years now has atomized individuals by showing them different things, thus creating individual “realities”), and Transhumanists (solipsism allows them to ignore biological realities), among others.
This is also why language is being pushed towards genericization, at least in the anglosphere (eg, removing gender, using vague amorphisms instead of specific words/descriptions, etc). You can’t know what someone’s “reality” is, and so it has become uncouth – at least among the Professional Managerial Class – to potentially offend it.
Darren Allen recently touched on this on his substack, but I think he put that post behind a paywall.
I’d love to see a post about this push towards solipsism in society on this blog some time.
Congrats on the new book!
And as for my vote for 5th Wednesday, I’m throwing Occult detectives in the ring one more time! I’m in the middle of reading the Great God Pan and have several other Machens on my to-read list so the subject has captured my imagination for the moment and I’d love to read what influenced your Ariel Moravec series.
@JH, #5, but also @JMG and others,
Oh my gosh, of course you are right that this is close to Pirsig’s territory! One difference of emphasis is that Pirsig talked less about politics per se than about psychiatry and the putative differences between sanity and insanity. But he definitely saw the psychiatric profession as a means by which society exerts control over people who are different enough that they become a nuisance. So the difference between that and straight-up politics may be more verbal than substantive. (See also R. D. Laing and others.)
My vote for the fifth Wednesday is the best and worst of the New Thought movement. Your article on affirmations was lifechanging, and the word “meretricious” brings the immediate association with the book “The Secret”.
Whether or not the mass exodus makes fifth Wednesday, and heck, I’ll vote for jt, being brought to the PG movie/existence or non-existence of naughty bits bit was worth the attentional price of admission to the post this week!
“In situations where one had some other reason to doubt the existence of such a top-down constraint, it’d be all too easy to reason, like: “Naughty bits don’t exist. If they did exist, we totally would have had been able to engineer a situation that would have produced bulletproof evidence by this point; it’s been decades and decades. Instead, we just get these consistent ambiguous points that just generate dispute (and ill-will). Responsible extrapolation from other available evidence compels the default judgement that those patches of flesh are just smooth. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”, or something.”
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary claims indeed! In defense of these claims, I would like to suggest that, kind of like the gods can be intuited from their works, the existence of the naughty bits can be intuited from the passion they inspire in their devotees (Prof, highly trusted, explicit, say… ‘need your love’). Their works (storks). Direct experience! Unfortunately this gets trickier to map out from the early stages of such a mass exodus if that is what comes our way…
Might the Spectacle have something to do with the light reflected off of Plato’s cave and into the glasses of the characters in John Carpenter’s They Live?
>bureaucrats are often not capable of perceiving of the world in a way that doesn’t rely on strict hierarchy and are unwilling to believe that people actually need a lot less governance
I’d say bureaucracies attract a certain kind of person to them and boil off everyone else. And the more “distilled” the bureaucracy, the more solipsistic and hidebound it gets, until one day all it can see is itself and nothing else and all it can do is what has been written down and nothing else.
I’m torn between psychic self-defense & Milkyway’s community-blessing topics. For now, I’ll hold my vote, I guess.
Wanted to say thanks for linking to a US-based Aeon website. I prefer to order directly from the publisher, but always blanch at the cost of shipping shown on UK site orders.
My vote for the fifth Wednesday is the one I posted earlier: “What makes Americans – heartland, flyover country, members of the masses.. different from Europeans and their bi-coastal copycats? I’m not talking about Spengler’s analysis of the latter, which we’ve all heard a lot about, and which Kipling depicted so clearly in his tales of the British Raj. I’m talking about the ones that have been overlooked from the start, or referred to as faceless,’ sullen masses….’ who deeply resent said copycats when they try to impose their rule, and ignore or laugh at them when they try to without results. Joe Sixpack, Jame Brownbag, Jesus the bus driver, LaQuita the dining hall server…….
As I said in my original request, Grantsville, West Virginia, Cedar Key, Florida, Las Cruces, New Mexico, Redding, California, Klamath Falls, Oregon…….. the “real Florida” I found when driving through the Ocala National Forest as opposed to what I saw on the road through Orlando.
And what the comments that ours is a barbarian culture (no argument from me) works out to in practice.
P.S. Speaking of Spectacle, the Open Post ended with talk of video games; my youngest grandson, born and brought up in the age of Online Everything, is an avid gamer….. of tabletop board games of astounding complexity, and nary an online connection in sight. His motto also seems to be, “Whatever is worth doing, is worth overdoing.”
After reading your today online essay, John, I’m really fascinated by the abundance of topics and subtopics within these same topics: Situs, marxism, Eastern philosophies, Spectacle, and so on…This is a banquet for the mind!
However, I’d like to limit myself to a couple of topics (by now) which have made me to pay attention especially from my point of view. Let’s leave you and the commentariat writing about this topics feast gradually..
Now, I’m going to quote two IMHO interesting paragraphs:
“The supreme example, at least to me, is Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. This collection of essays, which focuses on the awkward way that rationalism paves the way for the rise of irrationalism, comes within a hair’s breadth of realizing that the grand historical narrative of Marxism is as thoroughly mythical as anything in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. What’s more, it does this repeatedly, before backing away awkwardly each time from that shattering discovery at the last possible moment.”
I haven’t read that book, but I can tell you I’ve seen that peculiar mind behavior in a lot of Marxists and their essays. They can’t admit their ideology is an ideology, what is to say it’s an Ersatz for religions in the modern world. They’re uncapable to do that jump into the void (“horro vacui”?).
When Carl Popper explained Marxism was unfalsifiable (with some solid and hard reasons which could deserve another topics flood here…) he was “only” certifying the theological-metaphysicial basis of Marxism. Ironically, Marx disdained other types of Socialism as Utopics, so for distinguishing of them he named his ideology as “SCIENTIFIC Socialism”. And some decades after that, in the Soviet sphere of USSR influence, all the students in those countries had to learn a subject called “SCIENTIFIC Atheism”.
In the XIXth century, the Science had huge prestige, so Marx claims of “science” were cool in his moment, but nowadays are clearly outdated (after Popper classification beside the Freudian psychoanalisis). The History vision in the Marxist classic stages is another expression of the Faustian Myth of Progress, in which the final Paradise is of course irreversible, according to the problematic Marx prophecies.
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“the formal banquets that Queen Elizabeth I held regularly in the courtyard in front of her London palace, in full view of the Londoners of her time.”
(…)
“This had practical advantages, but it also projected the medieval Spectacle into everyday life; each person became an advertisement for the class system of the time, not an individual but a visually labeled member of a class: a serf, a yeoman, a knight, a baron, or what have you.
The sermons that played so important a role in shaping opinion in those days came under similar pressures. Under Elizabeth I, for example, ministers of the Church of England were not generally permitted to write their own sermons.”
OK, this thing’s what I was speaking of when I wondered some weeks ago about the Spectacle in pre-industrial times, before massive newspapers and other MSM . Well, in the Elisabeth I time the printing press was already invented, but indeed it was too primitive if we compare it with the later developments. And only a few people could read. So the power of then had to control religious sermons to unify the message, of course. The Queen banquets and the homogeneous sermons were the Spectacle of its time, more rudimentary than industrial Spectacle, which is modern Spectacle as it was dissected by Situs.
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Having written this comments to JMG essay, I’m going to comment the comments, if you don’t mind this redundance. 🙂
Nephite Neophite # 7:
“As society continues to decline, more and more propaganda has to be shoveled into education, because the status quo can’t justify itself by its effectiveness anymore.”
In the past, propaganda always was there, but we could bet it was a smaller percentaje than nowadays, at least in my country propaganda is worse than in first times of our democracy. The thing has going even worse with the continuous pendulum strike of changes in parlamentary majorities in the last maybe 20 years. Each political party on power tries to accomodate its political agenda to the education contents without consensus. I think in your country is more of less, the same disaster. By the way, are you living in the USA?
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JMG # 11:
“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail; if all you have are managerial skills, the whole world really does look as though it needs to be managed.”
It’s a law very suitable to every set of pre-conceived beliefs and ideas. For example, in the (fading?) peak oil sphere, even today we can find some people who interpret every event as a prelude to imminent collapse (yes, they exist yet, you can find them today with the same doomer speech than 20 years ago). It’s the Procrustean bed in which they fit the reality.
Suggestion of 5th Wednesday topic:
Is the egregore of the nation of the United States significantly weakened, dead or by the nation becoming an international empire become what Mark Stavish terms “a fierce tyrant” (deviated from its original purpose).
>Ours is failing not because it’s more political than others, but because the politics it supports have become so obviously dysfunctional
You talk about spectacle and theatrics – what if those kids are just mere props in a Teacher Union Play? That they are there just to make what the teacher does all day, plausible? After all, if someone was in an empty room, talking to the far wall and scribbling things on a chalkboard behind him, you might think that person might need some mental therapy. What’s the word the kids use these days? Schizo? But put a gun in the back of some sullen kids (and don’t think they don’t know they are there by force, they do and they resent it) tell them to file in and sit down in front of him and all of sudden the whole thing looks well, plausible. Almost like a class is going on, doesn’t it?
I’d claim everything else is secondary to that primary function. Even the political propaganda. That’s all and-oh-by-the-way, here’s a pantomime of what the bureaucracy thinks we should be doing, going through the motions sort of thing. Half-*ssed comes to mind, although I think that’s describing too much care. Quarter-*ssed maybe.
A while back, you mentioned that one fine day you’d write an essay about entryism, and how to defend one’s group against it. (I think it was when Diana Paxson was ousted from The Troth?) That’s my vote for the 5th Wednesday, because I think it’s one of the foundational skills to have during the long descent.
I looked up the Wikipedia article on sumptuary laws, and they emphasize that the laws were written in the late medieval to early modern periods to keep the rising urban merchant class down and to keep the wealth of local economies from being lost to foreign merchants.
I assume that during the early medieval period, there were unwritten sumptuary customs to keep peasants in their place? It seems unlikely to me that Dark Age dress codes were much looser?
And apparently prostitution was not officially banned in late medieval society, just regulated?
i second Dave in WA
“how downward mobility equates to freedom.”
Certain people in my life have the annoying habit of quoting thoughts gleaned from YouTube non-fiction videos as if they are their own genuine thoughts. Where I would say, “I saw a video from X on Y that said Z,” they just say “I think Z,” and assume that nobody else might have seen that same video. I never thought to apply that to the prefiguration of self and not-self before, but it makes a lot of sense. Usually I’ll say “Oh, I saw Y video from X too!” And nod knowingly as a cloud of confusion washes over their faces.
My vote for 5th Wednesday, even if it’ll likely be thoroughly outvoted, is for the unique role of Kabbalah in the rise of Sabbatai Zevi, and the impact that his public and embarrassing capitulation had on the development of Kabbalah after him.
Dylan # 26:
“I am now wiser to the fact that I can play an active role in saying a firm ‘no’ the next time a Situation like this rears its head, and that this can make real difference if done in a strategic way.”
The COVIDian Spectacle has its own blog, but I cannot do other thing than agree with this phrase. Let’s see next time we are told to obey the “pundits” and not so say nothing…
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Slithy Toves # 27:
“A third response tries to reconcile these approaches by insists that the two are distinct in the mind but not really different in actuality. The underlying reality may be “more real” than the appearance, but the appearance is not separable from it and anyway what were you planning to do once you got liberated? Some schools of Hinduism and Buddhism (especially the Tantric ones) as well as New Thought take this approach.”
Some years ago I attended to a conference about Buddhism. When the turn of questions came, I asked the monk if life was a dream. Well, he corrected me: “Life is LIKE a dream”. I don’t remember what was the monk Buddhist school, but that answer marks a clear difference. I think the third approach would be more simillar to this fine answer to the question if the reality is real or not.
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Ratter Ralrephith # 42:
Oh, oh, you should know JMG doesn’t watch TV or cinema movies, not at all; however I do it…So I can tell to you I’ve seen that old movie and I’ve enjoyed it as a metaphore for propaganda in modern societies (well, modern before the arrival of smartphones and subsequent full fragmentation of Spectacle). John Carpenter is a underestimated filmmaker, IMHO. I don’t want to make a spoiler here (if you haven’t seen yet this movie, I recomend it to your all), so I’m not going to tell you’ll how it ends. However, its end is very logic with the script around the propaganda topic…
Briefly unlurking to vote for psychic self defence.
I’ve got all the votes tabulated (with one exception noted below); thank you.
Milkyway, if you haven’t started researching the matter, why not do so?
Brendhelm, an excellent example!
Slithy, that’s exactly it. To the bureaucrat, their power does not exist and neither does their ideology — blatant and brutal as both may be when seen from outside.
Martin, I have no idea at all what he might mean by that, so I’ll pass. Sorry.
Isaac, a very apposite example, and also a useful reminder that the medical industry hasn’t changed noticeably since Forman’s time.
Viduraawakened, if that actually happened, it would be fascinating to look up which one turned out to be right.
Isaac, thank you for this! Okay, so it didn’t just survive in Japan; Robert Mathiesen has already pointed out that it’s documented in China, and you’ve just shown that the same thing is true in India. Yes, that’s very similar to the Japanese tradition; in the temples in Senninzawa that enshrine sokushinbutsu, they are placed in the spot usually reserved for statues of the Buddha and receive the reverence of pilgrims and monks.
Brandi, good. By the word “liberation” I mean something relative, not something absolute. Stay tuned!
Ottergirl, now you’ve got an old song by the Eagles playing in my head:
“Heaven knows it wasn’t you that held me down,
Heaven knows it wasn’t you who set me free,
So often times it happens that we live our lives in chains,
And we never even know we have the key.”
Dylan, exactly. That’s one of the harsh realities we all live with.
Slithy, excellent! Yes, and the idea that it’s possible to resolve the binary through a third factor, transforming it into a ternary, is very rarely mentioned by anybody…
Nellperkins (if I may), I don’t think I was aware you’re a widow — please accept my condolences. I hope you follow your late husband’s advice — it’s a profession that will be much needed in the years ahead.
Luke, also excellent. Good; I’ll have some things to say about that in another two weeks.
Nephite, precisely. The choice of how to think determines a very great deal of what ends up being thought, just for starters.
Thibault, I’m quite sure Marx would have been horrified by what Marxism turned into. That’s very often the fate of intellectuals who start movements.
Hosea, the “living in different worlds” effect has many roots, and both of the ones you’ve named are among them.
AliceEm, ha! Very good.
Ratter, you could certainly use those metaphors if you like.
Chuaquin, all good points. As for Procrustean beds, yes, very much so — there’s the bed of doom, the bed of we’re-going-to-the-stars, and quite a few others.
Other Owen, the supreme weakness of bureaucracies is that they very quickly fall into the habit of going through the motions rather than actually accomplishing anything. This is why bureaucratic societies only really thrive when what’s over the top of the bureaucracy is an imperial tyranny. If you know you will be beheaded for not actually teaching children, or what have you, you will manage to control your fondness for going through the motions…
Patrick, it was less of an issue because in the Middle Ages, the rich simply wore expensive things that the peasants couldn’t afford. The threat of the rising urban classes was that they were as rich as the nobility. As for prostitution, that’s correct — the obsession with sex as the worst possible category of sins didn’t come in until the Reformation.
Sirustalcelion, a good example!
Public executions – and, more generally, public punishments – would, I think, also have been part of the Spectacle. There’s no reason the local lord couldn’t have hanged a thief in the privacy of his own castle dungeons at midnight rather than on the town square at noon, but doing the latter reinforces to the general public the lord’s authority and the message that crime will be punished.
@Dylan, 31. “And didn’t I myself follow orders at various times too, thereby helping to uphold the Great Pandemic Spectacle and its atrocities? In the aftermath of any collective crime, justice is rather tricky to administer if the cooperation of most people in society to at least some degree was necessary for the thing to happen at all.”
I think this happens a lot. There is a famous example from the history of Athens under the Thirty Tyrants, when they tried to implicate as many normal citizens as possible in their crimes. At one point they ordered Socrates to join a few others in arresting one man illegally. Socrates just went home—the closest he ever came to any overtly revolutionary act. But I’m pretty sure that every tyranny since then has tried to do the same kind of thing.
@Chuaquin #59
I would hazard a guess that the monk you spoke to likely subscribed to the Yogacara school of thought in Buddhism, as opposed to the Madhyamaka school. That doesn’t say much about which tradition of Buddhism he practiced, although I think (someone more knowledgable can correct me) that the Tantric Buddhists are more likely to be Yogacarins than Madhyamakans.
The central dispute between the schools is one of those points of religious contention, like dyaphysitism vs. miaphysitism in Christianity, where it’s of the utmost importance to the religion’s intellectuals while almost nobody on the outside can figure out what the heck they’re fighting over. I’m not fully sure what the dispute is about, myself, but at minimum Yogacarins are more willing to make positive claims — if only as skillful means — about the existence of minds, qualities, etc. So the fact that the monk said “life is like a dream” instead of something more evasive like “life is not unlike a dream” strikes me as evidence of a Yogacara inclination.
Patrick @ 56, in pre-industrial times, clothing was very expensive. Flax had to be retted, wool carded, then thread spun and woven. The poor could afford very little in the way of clothing. Even into the early modern period it was expected that wealthy folks would give their discarded clothing to their servants, to be parceled out among the servant’s families.
Patricia Matthews @ #50, I believe I know parts of the answer to your question, which are a. the fact that the heartland was settled by European peasantry, capable people who had good reason to despise highfalutin ways, and b. the extreme geographical differences between Europe, with its’ comparatively salubrious climate and the far more violent North America. Floods, fires, tornados, hurricanes, earthquakes, blizzards.
“Power in a bureaucracy is exerted in the name of the bureaucracy as a whole, and each official from the bottom to the top of the bureaucratic hierarchy sees himself or herself not as a person having and exercising power, but as a cog in the great machine, subject to the colossus he or she serves. Thus power in a bureaucratic society, being impersonal, is at once invisible and omnipresent. In such a society, even the most obviously culpable servants of the bureaucracy—say, torturers who work for the secret police, or for that matter members of the Politburo—can see themselves as powerless…”
I’d argue more that even the most culpable servants of the bureaucracy can see themselves as responsibility-less…
The key feature of a bureaucracy is that it consolidates power while disowning responsibility. There may BE consequences arising from bureaucratic acts, but who, exactly, can they stick to? Bureaucratic power belongs to the egregore, and the egregore is its own, unprosecutable, “person”, not identifiable with any specific bureaucratic servant. From the point of view of the servant, the idea is to lend one’s power to an entity greater than oneself, which *raises* ones status accordingly, while reneging on any personal responsibility for any act taken in the name of the bureaucracy, or in the name of the bureaucracy’s animus.
I vote for your take on Milkyway’s idea.
Thanks for your work!
Mike
@Slithy Toves, 32. The whole distinction between “reality and appearance” is interesting, because I think the word “real” can mean different things. Suppose you are lost in the desert, and you think you see a pool of water on the horizon. But your companion realizes it is a mirage, and tells you, “Stop. It’s not real.”
He’s not saying it’s unphysical, because a mirage is a physical phenomenon. He’s not saying it doesn’t exist, because obviously you both see the shimmering on the horizon. What he’s saying is, “That shimmering doesn’t mean what you think it means.” So I’d argue that sometimes “unreal” just means something like “this thing has a different value than you normally give it.”
This probably aligns me somewhere near your third option, of “Two cheers for appearance.” (I also talk about this a little more in a short essay from a few years ago, here: “What is reality?”.)
Fascinating read, thank you. Another vote for psychic self-defence
I like how you peel back this situationalism ‘onion’. Maybe I’ll have some comments on it after I have digested this most recent ‘layer’. Looking forward to the next post on the topic!
In terms of the 5th week topic, count me in for psychic self-defense. Given how much emotional and psychic energy, fear, hatred and cursing are sloshing around these days, I’d say it would be a very timely topic. As much as I like MilkyWay’s suggested topic of blessing, healing and spiritual hygiene as a community service, I feel that maybe it can wait a couple of months.
One addition to my comment on Robert Pirsig. What I called a “quality sandwich”, with image mediating between subject and object, actually is what Pirsig calls a “static filter”. He distinguishes between Dynamic Quality which could be called raw unmediated reality, and static quality, which are patterns that prevent you from perceiving dynamic quality (not a great definition, sorry). Static quality isn’t all bad as they can also be considered patterns of cohesion, and structure. I’m struggling to think of better definition for static quality; it’s been awhile since I read him. I have notes on my computer, but they’re not as good as I thought they were. Also, I don’t think Pirsig every applied static filters to spectacular images. He likened it to confirmation bias. But applying it in this way works perfectly, imo.
I’d like to vote for milkyway’s suggested topic. It’s an intriguing idea, but I haven’t a clue where one would start if one wanted to try that.
Vote for the 5th Wednesday topic:
Wow, there are a lot of topics that have already been suggested! I count over a dozen. I wish I could vote for more than one, but I know it doesn’t work like that. So this time around I’ll vote with Tengu on “a comparison between the concepts that underlie the Western occult tradition and those of esoteric Buddhism.”
But I hope some of the other topics come back later!
I join Slythy in voting for a post on William Walker Atkinson.
JMG, I didn’t expect to find this week’s post so interesting, but this was excellent, thought-provoking stuff. It reminds me to look past my revulsion for anything connected to communism and remember that their analysis of the system’s problems are often quite good and worth paying attention to. Thank you.
For the 5th week, I would vote for the psychic self-defense, with a suggestion echoing Kyle’s: some advice for occultists and polytheists in troubled days ahead.
Jeff H.
Delightful that you chose the Red Army with the SVT-40 for this essay since it was a good design hampered by manufacturing speed (the muzzle brake among other things) and quality control issues (especially the stock) and by being too complicated for conscripts. The irony of the Soviets replacing a modern rifle with an older design because it was too complicated for conscripts to use effectively must have rankled in Moscow… and rather parallels the Situationist’s fear of their own toolkit… of course, both are good salvage opportunities for Green Wizards.
I would like to put in my vote for spiritual defense, protection, and hygeine. I currently practice a daily sphere of protection ritual as part of the modern order of essenes apprenticeship program, and have found that I am constantly being challeneged to improve myself in my habits, physically, spiritually, and in my relationships. But there is always room for improvement and to refine one’s understanding.
To play off that idea, I have a question – at what point could one consider the specatcle to be a form of spiritual assault? I understand that the spectacle is unavoidable, as conscious beings that impose a framework of meaning to comprehend ourselves and our world. But the modern world is full of countless spectacles that are horribly addictive and destructive – from the news cycle to pornography, from social media to television to llms, all offering entire simulated realities to escape into. At what point is this an attack upon your mind, and how does one defend onself from being helplessly pulled along, and gain detachment and discernment over which spectacle one allows into one’s inner life? I am certain you will suggest daily meditation, daily protective ritual, and daily divination. Any other advice for spectacle management?