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?
Hi John Michael,
Congratulations on the new book. That was a wild ride. 🙂
And err, yes, but of course, and thus the power of your great working.
What do you mean that we live in a magical society?
Cheers
Chris
@JMG
“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…”
This is a great point! After a little musing on the subject, it occurred to me that one obvious third factor that could form a ternary is the self: the witnesses/observers/subjects that experience the appearances and are casually entangled with the realities (and each other).
And having made to move from two to three, the next move to one-at-a-higher-level is obvious: that none of these are truly separate or separable from one another. (Which is not the same as saying that there are no important differences between things or that we’re all God, I hasten to add.)
Hmmm. I wonder if the current vogue amongst PMC bureaucrats for ascribing morality to victim group membership is partially motivated by a desire to avoid noticing their moral culpability for their actions as employees of the bureaucracy. Only who you are matters, not what you actually do, so you don’t have to feel bad about anything you do, as long as you can identify yourself with a victim group or, at worst, loudly support a victim group.
Hey JMG,
Great essay – I clicked on a link through an early comment on my computer at work with a review of “the dawn of everything” and now I can’t find it in the comments. Did you delete it for being promotional/irrelevant? Just curious – Don’t post if you don’t want.
> There were many less cumbersome ways she could have gotten around.
In the Tagalog language, we have a phrase, “tiis-ganda” which translates to suffer(ing for the sake of)-beauty. Usually, it’s meant in the sense of someone wearing something really uncomfortable like tall heels or very warm clothing but can be meant in the general sense of going through massive inconveniences for the sake of looking cool/pretty/whatever.
As for sumptuary laws, those still exist in some form by way of workplace-enforced uniforms and dress codes. Interestingly, as the entrepreneurial-elite have started taking over from the managerial-bureaucratic elite, the latter have started relaxing their own dress codes, embracing a more casual image.
@Hosea Tanatu #63:
Zounds! I was just reading about the Thirty this very morning. A very, very interesting tale, and it has been surfacing from the depths of my mind frequently over the last couple of months.
The book I’m now reading for the second time is ‘Why Socrates Died’, by Robin Waterfield. I highly recommend it as an introduction to the politics of late fifth-century Athens and how Socrates’ trial and death fit into that larger picture. Waterfield makes a particular distinction between the attempted oligarchic coups of 415 and 411, which seem to have been about the old boys grabbing for power, and the coup led by Critias and the Thirty in 404, which seems to have been genuinely ideological in nature- that is, Critias was intent on reforming Athens into a utopian society using all means of coercion necessary.
The Spectacle has helped illuminate things that have bewildered me for years! I am so glad to have this blog and commentariat as a venue to stretch my mind around such a wide array of subjects. For a fifth Wednesday I vote for your version of Milkyway’s idea. I gather there are a decent number of us interested in fulfilling such a role given the steady votes for it!
It took me a while to see the connection between self/non-self figuration and political acts, but I think I have found one. Experimentally, infants discover what is self by trying to move it (which is of course not a mean feat for a baby of a few weeks). As adults, we maybe have that challenge when an arm or a leg has “fallen asleep” from loss of circulation – we may take a split second to understand that that piece of body is our own, and we can only really confirm that by moving it.
Politics is exactly the act of discovering what we can move by protesting, canvassing, writing to our representatives, organizing, convincing or threatening. Somebody who feels isolated, in a foreign country or under a dictatorship, may well feel that the town council is non-self, while somebody with a vast network of relationships may know all the councillors by name and finds some common ground with each of them.
Re individual bureaucrats: I’m a programmer for the federal government, so arguably a bureaucrat or at least adjacent, but not public-facing. From my 2 decades of experience, I notice 2 things that perhaps play into the self-understanding of bureaucrats that you describe:
1. Every interaction with the bureaucracy grinds down one’s individuality, enthusiasm, and aspiration. (Just think of how exhausted you feel after spending hours at the DMV or some other government office. At a lower intensity, that’s the employee experience every day.) You can watch the new folks start out with hopes & big ideas for improving processes & doing good things for the public. Then slowly they are faced with the reality of trying to change or accomplish anything big or new, and after a few years they’ve joined the rest of us in hopelessness. (I overstate for effect, but not as much as you might think.) It’s kind of reminiscent of many people’s experience of the public school system, now I think about it.
2. Each member of the bureaucracy knows that if they refuse to perform their assigned function or task, they will be replaced by someone who will perform it. Most directives come from at least 7 levels above me in the hierarchy; refusing to comply is a great way to lose a job, but not effective at changing whether the directive is executed. You can push back a little bit, but it feels like nothing you do or say will actually make a difference in the ultimate experience or functioning of the bureaucracy. (Sorry, I know that paragraph was repetitive. I’m trying to convey a feeling, but keep not quite getting it.)
One path to explore in the puzzle of esoteric Buddhism vs. Western occultism: what links might there be? For example, Manichaeism was a huge religion in its time, and bridged Buddhism and Christianity. Also, Sufism has links.
A whacky idea: a peculiar feature of Tibetan Buddhism, recognition of reincarnated teachers… could come from Plato! The idea of picking leaders as youngsters to be trained, that’s in Plato’s republic. Islam carried Platonism to the borderlands of Tibet. The tulku system in Tibet goes back to 1100 CE or so… plenty of time for Islam to have brought it there.
I’m rereading chapters of “The Road to Serfdom” by F. A. Hayek during my lunch breaks at work. The conflicts he talks about are those of: Liberalism vs Socialism; Individualism vs Collectivism; Competition vs Monopoly.
On the slightly off-topic discussion of mummification raised by commentators above, I note also that Maori in New Zealand did occasionally practice mummification, but not often. There’s enough spookiness about certain locations in NZ with burial sites that could be functioning as guardian spirits that people in the know don’t take any chances at all. It wouldn’t surprise me if the tradition found it’s way into Polynesia out of Asia, and then finally into NZ when it was settled by Maori, from about 1100 CE onwards.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/travel/123389278/the-hideaways-of-hauroko
JMG One of the very interesting things I have had to wrestle with for a long time now in reading your essays is the nature of power. Due to some oddities in my life and my neurology I have never really understood how power works. This is essay helped me see an important brick in that wall, Bureaucratic power is non personal, strangely everywhere and no where. That is a great insight. Thanks
My Fifth Wedneaday vote is for psychic self-defense.
Again, all votes have been tabulated.
Brendhelm, yes, very much so. Public executions back in the day had a celebratory quality many modern people would find appalling.
Scotlyn, yes, exactly.
Jeff, even the most repellent ideology occasionally has a useful idea. It’s precisely by seeing past the revulsion and harvesting the good ideas that repellent ideologies can be neutered and deprived of what little appeal they have.
Rhydkyd, er, I just grabbed a stock photo of a Stalin-era May Day parade online.
Paedrig, the Spectacle becomes an assault the moment you set out to break away from it, and that happens the moment you decide that what society offers you for your obedience is not worth what it costs. As for means of defense, it looks as though we’ll get to that sooner rather than later.
Slithy, again excellent. Yes, and we’ll be developing that as we proceed.
Jennifer, if your aim with a gun is that precise, gods help the deer. 😉 Yes, exactly.
Tyrell, it didn’t get to me. Did it include a substantive comment or just a link?
Carlos, English needs a similar phrase!
Aldarion, excellent. There’s much more to it than that, but that’s a good start.
Adara, thank you for this.
Jim, or Nestorian Christianity, which was on the scene well before Islam.
Moonwolf8, and the fact that he’s stuck in those rigid binary oppositions is one of the reasons his work has had so little effect.
Peter, did the Maori practice mummification of the living, or just of the dead?
Will O, glad to hear it.
Another vote for how downward mobility equates to freedom.
JMG, I had a thought which you might find congenial. This leers on off-topic – since we’re discussing the political side of the Spectacle – but the fact is that the Spectacle is also social, and it happens all the time around all of us. Most human interactions have little to no informative content at all and are actually performed to serve other ends. From a neurodivergent’s point of view, it borders on madness and insanity sometimes, but it’s all a game we’re not simply hardwired to play. Does that make sense?
Thanks Slithy Toves #32. Two cheers for the spectacle indeed!
On the subject of utopian fantasy political systems. Certain parts of the left appear to be in love with (or pretend at least) these non heirarchical, no leaders systems. Such systems seem unworkable in large societies, just on a theoretical level. If an authoritarian leader wishes to communicate their 10 minute opinion on a given subject, that will take 10 minutes from the leaders say, and 10 minutes from the all the followers day, this is manageable. If everybody needs to discuss the Issue, and everyone gets to give their 10 minute opinion on the subject, that takes n × 10 minutes out of each members day, where n is the number of people in the society, this is not workable unless n is small. For large n you are going to need to find a method of decision making somewhere between the above two extremes.
Back in the late 90s, New Zealand’s tax department did a study which found that there was a psychic cost to receiving a letter from them, even if the contents were good. As a result they made some major system changes to ensure that tax was mostly taken out of your pay at the correct rate so that if your only income was from employment then you did not have to file a return at the end of the year. That was the tail-end of a series of reforms in New Zealand from about 1985-2000 which actually tried and to a large extent succeeded in reducing much of the bureaucracy (this is why GST, NZ’s sales tax, has no exemptions for fresh vegetables etc – exemptions mean more bureaucracy). For a while there we even had ‘lifetime’ drivers licenses which would supposedly never need renewing (sadly since then replaced by licenses with a 10 year renewal). Some has been rolled back, but it has been mostly a case of expanding the HR departments of the bureaucracy more than expanding the bureaucracy itself.
For the fifth Wednesday topic, I’d be interested in a discussion of Bourdieu’s thought, particularly his concept of symbolic violence, in relation to magic.
Addendum to my previous post.
This is independant of any arguments about whether the masses are sheeple or not. Nor whether the elites are, well elite.
I haven’t been posting as much recently, reading regular enough though,but I think I have a notion for a fifth Wednesday I’ll like to petition for.
A positive political vision for America (or if readers want to put one out for their respective countries all the better) to aim for on the far side of the incoming round of political hot mess we seem to be in line for.
I don’t mean no utopian claptrap, but something that factoring for the predicaments that aren’t likely avoidable, the best vision you can hope for that still seems plausible as America’s current era of crisis winds down into an breath catcher of an era to follow.
Focusing on the political, but including what ever other elements of culture seem pertinent. I’ve heard here that the trick to real potency is in focusing not so much on the objectionable traits of opposition, but on a potent vision that you can get behind.
Further, perhaps an invite for readers to put forward their ideas or tweaks in the comments. I propose this as a willful counter balance to the current cultural temptation of fixating on the all too blatant wackiness of various objectionable factions.
In sum, what’s the best that you can imagine for us to hope for and maybe ever work towards over the next couple decades, allowing for the challenges that simply ain’t going to budge by mere human effort.
Vote: positive cultural political vision October 2025!
Brendhelm@62 and JMG: Until recently I wouldn’t have imagined that modern people could find a public execution to be a celebratory experience. Now we have celebrations and even gloating over the assassination of Charlie Kirk. There was even an instance of a grade school teacher playing a loop of the shooting to his 10-year old students. I am aghast and can’t fathom what this might signify. Can you?
–Lunar Apprentice
Your deeply insightful alpha-beta critique of Marxism has left me yearning for a similar critique of occultism. I’m not sure that there is much of a bellicose alpha parallel, but, as for beta-occultism, it has been assaulting my senses for so long and from so many directions that I am left rather amazed that I ever gave the less perfomative, less role-played, more traditional type of occultism a chance.
So many witchy-poo, neo-pagan positivism-peddlers seem to have tried everything else, found it all to be lacking, and therefore decided that their preferred metaphysical drag must surely be destined to rise up and fulfill all their fantasies some day — with minimal effort or discipline on their own part, of course. Most of the privileged beta-occultists I have met live out their protected existence in a covert marriage of convenience with the system they pretend to dwell outside of.
When it comes to strategy, beta-occultists appear to have confused their societal role with that of beta-Marxists; they whine and critique as loudly and cogently as they can manage, all while misguidedly imagining whatever occult techniques they do know how to employ to be the most harmlessly ineffective and unrealistic means of changing the existing order. Hence why they can convince themselves that dabbling in Satanism or demonology will be such an entertaining lark! Given that occult techniques are anything but harmless and ineffective, those larping beta-occultists don’t often get enviable bureaucratic titles bestowed upon them for their efforts, as their Marxist counterparts do. Instead, they discover with chagrin that those unseen powers they so disregarded and underestimated have no qualms about returning their contempt with interest.
I’ll have to ponder whether traditional, hygenic occultism may exhibit any overlap with the alpha-Marxist category, or whether alpha-occultists better describes the drearily serious militant power-seekers who merely use occultism as a means to influence their power struggles and then to try to run off with as many of the broken pieces that they always leave in their destructive wake. The latter sounds more probable, so what then is to be done with all of the healthy, disciplined, respectful occultists who just don’t fit into either of those two lamentable alpha-beta categories? Perhaps the occultist habit of turning binaries into ternaries has left us practicing in three or four or possibly some immeasurable number of ways. We could be gamma-occultists or delta-occultists or even zeta-reticuli-occultists.
Milkyway, why don’t you write about that yourself? You seem to be halfway there already 🙂
–bk
Brendhelm # 62:
“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.”
It’s the power to kill somebody which has the local lord, or the King, or the Emperor. I remember in some of Byung Chul Han books (I don’t know which one of them), he reminds the gladiators games have the sme motives: show the power of Roman Emperors to decide the life and death…
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Slithy Toves # 64:
Maybe he was a Yogacara Buddhist, I don’t know it. If you’re sure of ot…By the way, your brief depiction of Buddhist schools is interesting.
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Paedrig # 77:
“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?”
A good question to be answered, I hope soon, by our dear JMG…Spectacle nowadays looks like ubicous and has eaten everything real in our world…
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Adara 9 #86:
“Every interaction with the bureaucracy grinds down one’s individuality, enthusiasm, and aspiration.”
Yeah, it’s fully true. I’ve seen in every interaction I’ve had with my local bureacracy, it doesn’t matter which ranch of it or country where this trend heppened.
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Well, I haven’t decided my vote for the 5th Wednesday topic, so I don’t have a definited vote for it!
Damn, a spoiled vote. I thought the topic could be framed as: if you can’t see without light, by analogy is it possible you can’t think without language? And of course, how does this relate to LLMs? I’ll mull over it in my own mind.
Regarding spectacle, a favorite spectacle of certain nations like China, Russia, and North Korea is the military parade. China’s most recent was very impressive. They all project an image of precision, strength, and discipline. The message is clear: don’t eff with us.
America on the other hand doesn’t seem to feel the need for such displays. Yet Americans believe they are all-powerful. How do they do it? Hollywood movies, actual combat footage of choppers, missiles, and bomb bursts, or simply asserting military superiority, over and over?
Carlos M. #82:
Ah, but the casual image is a uniform too. It says “I’m so secure in my power, I don’t need to prove it by way of clothing.”
—David P.
Patricia Mathews said: “What makes Americans – heartland, flyover country, members of the masses.. different from Europeans and their bi-coastal copycats?”
I don’t mean this in a ‘I’m right, you’re wrong’ kind of way, but over here in europe it feels completely the other way around: our elite / urban / whatever-you-call-them people are copying mainstream american culture.
(We also have what you might call flyover country, by the way. That’s what much of the protest and unrest is about: our deplorables have had enough)
It seems like the Spectacle is showing Americans a certain image of Europe, and at the same time it shows the Europeans an image of America. Both see the other one as the example to follow. If both groups then become more like their example, the image that is shown to the other group will also change, creating a positive feedback loop.
Could be the reason why they feel so out of place, unreal or even alien…
–bk
There is nothing more dangerous in the world than a well-meaning bureaucrat with a bright idea. I would go so far as to call that the definition of chaos.
I’d like to vote for a discussion of the coming population decline for the fifth Wednesday topic.
Hi John Michael,
I sense that you are suddenly busy! Hope that you are enjoying yourself, or up to your eyeballs in an interesting project?
Blame the unnecessary aggravation of having to migrate from win-dohs ten to win-dohs eleven for my earlier comment, and I wasn’t attempting to be mysterious, there was simply a lack of coherence on display. 🙂
I was referring to your ‘brighter future’ working.
And as to management, well one powerful way to get across a strong message in dysfunctional systems is to let them fail, publicly. I believe that choice may be on display, right now. I’ve used that technique with graduates who were too stubborn to learn, and I can assure you that it works. The old timers used to say: Give them enough rope!
We live in a society which oozes with magic – as you and I understand that word to mean. In some ways from your essay this week, I get the impression that the Situationists were just on the verge of discovering that aspect, maybe?
Cheers
Chris
Glad to hear I saw at least one of the connections, and looking forward to find out more!
For fifth Wednesday, I see some more practical questions already far ahead, but I want to bring up something you mentioned in passing some time ago: why did people in Late Antiquity turn so readily towards Christianity and later Islam? You also mentioned once (in case it is connected) that the symbolism of the Easter date, the fish, the choice of Sunday and Friday as holy days, the colour green and the crescent were all widely understood at the time as having astrological symbolism. Those meanings are completely opaque to me, and I am sure an essay on these questions would be very interesting!
In the nineteen seventies and eighties I played many of the early role playing games. I wonder whether Gary Gygax and the other RPG founders didn’t point us towards some real magical ideas about self-invention and a plastic reality? Perhaps in real life we should aim to be self-designed player characters, who pursue their own adventures and quests, rather than being swept along by the illusory world like non-player characters?
Not full-body as far as I know, insofar as the Japanese tradition. However Maori did mokomokai, or mummified heads, and it does make me wonder if that was a variation of the tradition, especially if the right practices occurred through life leading up to death. The mokomokai are still especially sacred, and not to be treated lightly.
That may not be the same thing however, and it might be a practice that requires the full body, but I do just wonder. There’s not a lot in Maori culture that surprises me now.
Thank you John Michael. I vote for spiritual self defense which I also think of as spiritual hygiene.
@JMG #61
Noted.
Keeping an eye on the big pic, the relentless diminishing of the EROEI of oil and natgas “should” be putting the kibosh on industrial society this century. By that point what it is and does will be largely academic discussions. Interesting but not pressing issues!
Apologies for the offtopic post.
The University of Chicago is giving away, this month, the ebook The New Prometheans: Faith, Science, and the Supernatural Mind in the Victorian Fin de Siècle by Courteney Raia.
https://press.uchicago.edu/books/freeEbook.html
The Society for Psychical Research was established in 1882 to further the scientific study of consciousness, but it arose in the surf of a larger cultural need. Victorians were on the hunt for self-understanding. Mesmerists, spiritualists, and other romantic seekers roamed sunken landscapes of entrancement, and when psychology was finally ready to confront these altered states, psychical research was adopted as an experimental vanguard. Far from a rejected science, it was a necessary heterodoxy, probing mysteries as diverse as telepathy, hypnosis, and even séance phenomena. Its investigators sought facts far afield of physical laws: evidence of a transcendent, irreducible mind.
The New Prometheans traces the evolution of psychical research through the intertwining biographies of four men: chemist Sir William Crookes, depth psychologist Frederic Myers, ether physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, and anthropologist Andrew Lang. All past presidents of the society, these men brought psychical research beyond academic circles and into the public square, making it part of a shared, far-reaching examination of science and society. By layering their papers, textbooks, and lectures with more intimate texts like diaries, letters, and literary compositions, Courtenay Raia returns us to a critical juncture in the history of secularization, the last great gesture of reconciliation between science and sacred truths.
“The New Prometheans is not just another in that long, footnoted list of books on nineteenth-century mesmerism, spiritualism, and Victorian psychical research. Instead, it’s a rich display of historical-critical readings, of biographical contextualizations, and of erudite philosophical discussions of the history of science, of technology, and of Western thought. A beautifully written and fascinating study.”— Jeffrey Kripal, author of How to Think Impossibly
I’m seeing strong links between the suggested topics of psychic self-defence, community defense using blessing and healing (by the living), and the barrow technology of community defense using blessing and healing and voluntary mummification (by the placement of the living into prolonged states of “suspended animation”?).
There must be many layers to the matter of defense against evil, but I gather they all hinge on using some variety of building and supporting what you love, while refusing to focus on hating and tearing down what you hate.
That said, so long as these remain separate topics, my vote is for psychic self-defense, as the most accessible approach for us ordinary mortals who are neither saints nor known for personal sanctity… 🙂
about bureaucrats.
I remember attending the annual conferences at the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture where everyone who was anyone in farming would attend, have discussions, and go home. It was worldwide and had others from Canada and the EU there. What I got out of it was that the farmers were desperate for help – this was in the 1980s when farmer suicides were rampant. Everyone would make noises, but nothing happened. I remember one angry egg farmer who lambasted the Secretary of Agriculture about how little he cared about anything but hogs. (The Secretary was a former hog farmer.) All the farmers in the audience were standing up giving that farmer their support. Still, nothing happened.
At the Fed, I saw world bureaucrats in action at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). They had working committees after working committees for this and that. One thing they did do was decided on banking for the world, which every country had to follow, talk about power. They also ruled on color copiers since one could print currency with them. (Really was a problem.) Then everyone changed their currency.
So it depends on the issue and people involved as to how bureaucracies play out. But everyone was very serious about being the helpers to the designated helpees.
This now makes perfect sense as to why about half the country took Trump literally when he made the remark,
“And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the p****. You can do anything.” when he was obviously talking about how women throw themselves at famous guys the same way men throw themselves at beautiful women.
I had a really hard time understanding how anyone could take that literally, but if figuration has a political dimension to it (which it obviously does in retrospect) and you’re wired to see Donald Trump in a certain way, of course they took it to mean that he was walking around doing that to women.
There are hidden powers that few people know about such as FASB = Federal Accounting Standards Board, who basically dictates how people including Congress does their accounting. After all numbers tell how the world is ruled. Sometimes, they rule the world (Numbers).
Fifth Wednesday.
If you do spiritual self-protection, could you include spiritual practices from the Middle Ages? Or the resources. It seems that bottom feeders are more apparent these days judging from the reactions of the Neo-Pagans and the Christians to the state of today’s affairs.
here is an image / slash meme for you on the Spectacle / They Live / Platos Cave
two versions. Hope these work. thx.
https://imgur.com/a/pXmhvtF
https://imgflip.com/i/a7vvbm
“The key feature of a bureaucracy is that it consolidates power while disowning responsibility. ”
That’s also known as malicious compliance. “You ordered me to do that.”
As to the economic spectacle the morning news had these tidbits. “US equity futures are higher with tech and small caps both outperforming as the screaming AI euphoria drove global indexes to fresh highs after an OpenAI share sale valued the company at an eye-popping $500 billion, catapulting the firm to become the world’s most valuable startup, surpassing SpaceX.”
About the government shutdown, ““This is all very much a storm in a teacup,” wrote Michael Brown, a senior market strategist at Pepperstone. “The government has shut down 20 times in the past, and reopened 20 times as well – this time will not be different.””
“The tech sector is so large and it’s doing so well,” said Marija Veitmane, senior multi-asset strategist at State Street Global Markets. “The reason the market is prepared to pay those high valuations for the tech sector is really because we don’t see good growth opportunities outside tech.”
But the job market isn’t looking good although there is a growing realization the existing data collection systems are not working in the modern economy.
Another vote for psychic self-defense.
I was at an interfaith dialogue last week where the attendees, all of whom except me self-label as “progressive,” and all of whom lament the division and polarization that they perceive is being generated by the “other side.” Next month’s topic for discussion is to be “how can we help?” It’s a vague topic and I might start by asking what they mean by “help,” but if I am understanding your posts on the Spectacles as well as my own evolving understandings over the 13 years I’ve been reading you, I am also considering suggesting to them that the best way they could help is by paying attention to people and media on what they think of as the “other side” and doing their best to understand what motivates their position. Am I on the right track?
Good Day JMG and thank you again for so much to ponder from your great essay. Apologies if I’m repeating thoughts from commentariat prior but will catch up on my reading them later.
For now two thoughts that popped to mind reading this weeks essay:
1. I never understood what Marshal McLuhan was saying with his “media is the message” and I want to look into that now that I’m better understanding “The Spectacle” .
2. A very famous aging but beautiful actress was on a news show recently once again spouting her activist agenda, and all of a sudden, though I always admired her work, I came to realize she may be highly mentally unstable … and made me wonder if that is not a necessary component for her/the craft in which case, following Hollywood stars activism has been a disaster.
Anyway, thank you again and always
Yogaandthetarot Jill C
Once again, I’ve tabulated all votes.
Bruno, that’s a useful point. Much of what passes for talk these days is what is technically called “phatic communication” — it amounts to signaling “I am here; are you here, and do you belong to the same tribe as me?” It’s quite possible for us autists to learn to play it once you recognize that that’s all it is — it’s not too hard to figure out what the signals are that mean “Yes, I’m here too, and I belong,” whereupon people will decide you’re not a treat and ignore you or include you, depending on which you want.
Dagnarus, one of the secret advantages of those systems is that they prevent anything from getting done. If you just want to talk about change, and don’t want to make change happen, they’re perfect. That’s why they’re so popular among beta-radicals of all stripes.
KAN, HR departments are still bureaucracy. It sounds as though your bureaucrats have figured out how to have much less work required of them; did they actually fire bureaucrats?
Lunar, the tyranny of mandatory niceness all through the modern left has generated its inevitable result, a vast number of people on the left who are desperate for opportunities to be genuinely nasty. This is an example of the result — vast amounts of nastiness pouring out of people who have convinced themselves that in this one case, it’s okay to be vile.
Christophe, the critique works just as well. What distinguishes alpha-Marxists from beta-Marxists, after all, isn’t the swagger — it’s that alpha-Marxists actually do the things that Marxists are theoretically supposed to do, such as overthrow governments, slaughter the rich, nationalize farms and factories, and impose Marx’s crackpot theories on the countries they seize; beta-Marxists just go through the motions of wanting to do these things. In the same way, alpha-occultists actually do the things that occultists are supposed to do, such as put hours a day into serious practice, cause changes in consciousness in accordance with will, and make something of themselves.
I’m no fan of Aleister Crowley, to cite one example, but the guy was certainly an alpha-occultist — I’ve seen an analysis of his natal chart that showed that he was destined to be one of those legions of bland, forgettable British men who end up working in some minor office in the Ministry of Who Cares and are left sitting at their desk for three weeks after they’re dead because nobody noticed any difference. Whatever one can or can’t say for Crowley, he certainly overcame that destiny — a good robust testimony of the power of magic.
Beta-occultists, like beta-Marxists, will do absolutely anything to avoid the hard work required to turn their pose into a reality. These days, the beta-occultists are piling into devil worship and similar idiocies, but that’s for another reason. Most of them are getting ready to convert to Christianity, and they’re redefining their occultism in terms that Christians understand, to guarantee themselves a hearty welcome and plenty of attention when they jabber about how Christ saved them from the snares of Satan, or what have you. I pity the Christians; having dealt with these people far too often in recent years, I wouldn’t wish them on anybody.
Martin, that being the case, why not cast a new vote for something else? As for parades, governments do military parades when they feel weak and need to reassure themselves. When the US starts doing that again, you’ll know that we’re definitely a has-been power.
Chris, thanks for clarifying. Yes, I was at a magical lodge meeting last night and am in a hotel this morning, about to head for the largest occult bookstore in the Northeast. Life is looking up. 😉
Tengu, it’s an interesting metaphor and could be developed.
Peter, interesting. It might be worth looking into the whole mummified-head business — I’m thinking of some old Celtic legends in a new light with this in mind.
Thibault, ah, but what it does on the way there will be of quite some importance to those of us who are stuck inside.
Anon, thanks for this.
Neptunesdolphins, oh, I’m sure they were quite serious. Did the helpees actually get helped, though?
Dennis, yep. And then millions of them put pussy hats on their heads — which is weird enough when you think about it — and he grabbed them by the brains and will never let go.
Neptunesdolphins, the spiritual protection practices from the Middle Ages I know about presume that you’re a very old-fashioned Catholic with a patron saint and access to a wide range of sacramentals blessed by a priest. I have some less tightly focused resources in mind.
Ratter, nicely done. I’ve downloaded both for future reference.
Siliconguy, I’ve been watching both those with great amusement.
SLClaire, the single most useful thing they could do would probably be to learn a little about what Jung had to say when he talked about projection, but that’s probably past hoping for. That being the case, yes, your suggestion has a lot of merit.
Jill, (1) McLuhan was onto something very important here. If you’re using words as your medium, you can’t communicate something that won’t fit into words; if you’re using images, that which can’t be portrayed by images is excluded. Every medium thus defines what it can express as real, and erases what it can’t express. Yes, that interfaces powerfully with the concept of the Spectacle. (2) That’s a fascinating insight. I wonder if anyone’s done a general survey of the psychology of Hollywood stars.
Dennis Michael Sawyers @ 117. Some of us don’t form emotional attachments to political parties nor to their standard bearers. I did not vote for the current president and am not a fan nor was I a devoted follower of the former vice president.
I recall the remark you referenced and interpreted it just as you did. But, and, also, I don’t consider it my job to admonish the wanna-be influencers who glommed onto the remark and deliberately misinterpreted it to advance their own status and careers. Looked to me like both sides were telling lies in the last election.
What irresponsible people say online does not necessarily reflect what anyone else thinks.
Maybe some of you will know it, but these last days I’ve had an annoying cold. I’m better now, but I’d to tell you an interesting change in my reality perception, related with some of the Spectacles which we’re suffering nowadays.
When I’m healthy I tend to avoid TV and other MSM propaganda, but when I’m ill I do it as much as possible, because it makes me sick (near literally) and causes me headaches. I feel political news badly, but the worst are the advertisements. I can’t endure them.
When I have a cold, I usually spend my time at bed or in the sofa listening a radio station which only transmit classic music. At least, that type of spectacle makes me feel better, me think, than the others.
OK, John, I know you don’t see visual media not at all, but to the commentariat: Do you have noticed of changes in your Spectacular perception those days you are ill?
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Now, comments to your comments:
Bruno BL # 93:
“From a neurodivergent’s point of view, it borders on madness and insanity sometimes, but it’s all a game we’re not simply hardwired to play. Does that make sense?”
Yes, from another neurodivergent point of view (mine). This game of social interactions has been very hard to play to me since my childhood; well, now I’ve going to better thanks god(s), but sometimes I feel strange in social situations, even with my girlfriend, who says often if I’m too “strange” in my behavior (although I pretend very well being a sociable person, by the way). I understand you perfectly…
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Dagnarus # 95:
“Certain parts of the left appear to be in love with (or pretend at least) these non heirarchical, no leaders systems. Such systems seem unworkable in large societies, just on a theoretical level.”
Yes, you’re talking about Anarchists and their simillar trends, like Left Libertarians and a spanish movement named “Revolución Integral”; these late loves the “Concejos Abiertos” government; which is in theory a direct democracy system inherited from the Middle Ages: it supposedly has no possibility of usurpation by “suckers” (authoritarian leaders). However, what we do know about those old municipal governments with apparent no leaders? Were not, then and now. in the rural zones rich and poor farmers?(with more and less fields inherited from fathers to sons: when the soil means power). Your reasons to distrust the easy claim to assambleary democracy is worth considering too:
“this is not workable unless n is small. For large n you are going to need to find a method of decision making somewhere between the above two extremes.”
Indeed, the system of assambleary democracy which I’ve eyewitnessed personally in the real world works…after neverending discussions where everybody wants to argue each other, of course. And there were no more than some tens of people meeting to decide whatever it has to be decided…
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KAN #96:
” For a while there we even had ‘lifetime’ drivers licenses which would supposedly never need renewing (sadly since then replaced by licenses with a 10 year renewal). Some has been rolled back, but it has been mostly a case of expanding the HR departments of the bureaucracy more than expanding the bureaucracy itself.”
He he, I see in NZ you have strange customs. It’s an interesting and amazing experience, me think.
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Ray Wharton # 98:
“A positive political vision for America (or if readers want to put one out for their respective countries all the better) to aim for on the far side of the incoming round of political hot mess we seem to be in line for.”
I pick up the guantelet you’ve thrown to us the commentariat. I only can say now, I hope in the next future more and more people may disappoint to the social media and hi-tech smoke screens, and returns to lesser corporate owned technologies; in politics, I only want people tend more and more in taking part in neighbourhood and towns small politics every day; in the economics topic, more and more people would be using local moneys and not monetary exchanges, like the “Bancos de Tiempo” (Time Banks), an interesting initiative I knew here some years ago; without forgetting self-production in familiar and small towns (orchards, hens and so on). Well, it would be fine in an ideal world, of course. ÇHowever, I think things are going to worsen for a time until we reach a deeper stage of the Long Descent.
Do you have more ideas about this question made by KAN?
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Nephtune Dolphin # 118:
“There are hidden powers that few people know about such as FASB = Federal Accounting Standards Board, who basically dictates how people including Congress does their accounting. After all numbers tell how the world is ruled. Sometimes, they rule the world (Numbers).”
Of course, controlling Numbers is controlling bureaucracy, indeed, controlling it, is controlling (official) reality. I’ll remember you that first writing in the ME was (if I remind it well), the Sumerian writing. And it was first intended to depict the kings calculations of grains and other harvests to be taxed, me think.
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Rather Ralrephith # 120:
Thanks for the links to the meme!
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Silicon guy # 121:
“The tech sector is so large and it’s doing so well,” said Marija Veitmane, senior multi-asset strategist at State Street Global Markets. “The reason the market is prepared to pay those high valuations for the tech sector is really because we don’t see good growth opportunities outside tech.”
But the job market isn’t looking good although there is a growing realization the existing data collection systems are not working in the modern economy.”
Business as usual within the Spectacle of “economical news”. They’re selling their favorite smoke, and the wheel will keep on turning and turning with apparent endless miracles until a day…
Thank you, Mary Bennet, for answering in two simple sentences what I’d thought was a complicated matter. You hit the nail on the head, and I thank you.
@Martin Beck #103, about thinking without language, I suggest a book called “Thinking In Pictures,” by Temple Grandin
JMG # 124:
“Much of what passes for talk these days is what is technically called “phatic communication” — it amounts to signaling “I am here; are you here, and do you belong to the same tribe as me?” It’s quite possible for us autists to learn to play it once you recognize that that’s all it is — it’s not too hard to figure out what the signals are that mean “Yes, I’m here too, and I belong,” whereupon people will decide you’re not a treat and ignore you or include you, depending on which you want.”
Though I’m not an autist, because I have another “neurodivergent” point of view, I agree. “Phatic communication” is sometimes difficult to me too, although I’ve been understanding/practising a lot of tricks along the time I’ve been madurating as person, I sometimes get lost and miss some messages from “normal” people in this area of communication. Oh oh!
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“beta-Marxists just go through the motions of wanting to do these things.”
I only can remember, after reading your phrase about Beta-Marxists: in Spanish we have an expression to this attitude: “Quiero y no puedo”(I’d translate it roughly as “I want but I can’t”).
Jill – Part of what McLuhan was saying is that it is a massage not a message.
JMG – I think I know where you are going. Have fun!
Throwing in a vote for psychic self-defense. It’s difficult to be too prepared, especially in the current environment…
thank you.
I gots one more for the psychogeography road with some added McLuhanism
https://imgflip.com/i/a7wd8w
SLClaire,
“I was at an interfaith dialogue last week where the attendees, all of whom except me self-label as ‘progressive,’ and all of whom lament the division and polarization that they perceive is being generated by the ‘other side.’ Next month’s topic for discussion is to be ‘how can we help?’ It’s a vague topic and I might start by asking what they mean by ‘help,’ but if I am understanding your posts on the Spectacles as well as my own evolving understandings over the 13 years I’ve been reading you, I am also considering suggesting to them that the best way they could help is by paying attention to people and media on what they think of as the ‘other side’ and doing their best to understand what motivates their position.”
Any Christians in that interfaith dialogue can begin with Matthew 7:3 and reflect on their own failures and contributions to the division and polarization that is present in your country. Other faith traditions probably have similar messages in their texts but I am not familiar with the Koran or the Talmud or the Pali Canon to say for sure.
“How can we help?” Improve yourself first and don’t be a hypocrite: if you really don’t want division and polarization, make effort to get rid of division and polarization in your own life and your own attitudes towards the world and its people. And stop spending so much of your attention on the “other side” and their division and polarization, just focus on how you can improve unity and positivity in your own lives, and then people will turn towards you instead of the promoters of division and polarization. Otherwise, it just gives the “other side” an excuse to point at your hypocrisy and division and polarization as a reason why they should continue to be divisive and polarizing towards you.
I had ‘a primer on magical combat open in tabs for some time, I think related to my son [sweat drop emoji]. Looks like you may be adding a post to the lonely tag group ‘practical magic’ – hooray! I’ve got thinking about that difference between vivid images and vague buzzwords in relative impact and it struck me how the modern spectacle relies on forcefeeding the masses on vague unreachable images leading no where. Excerpt from my recent email to Stophouse music after receiving my purchase with their handwritten thanks and the email encouraging feedback : “Thing is, for you to get to the tippity top of the game, we have to turn the whole board over. Once I thought, Prof stuff can’t get on “the radio” cause its too raunchy, but like, listen to Cardi B. Difference is, yr music is about you and me f@%#ing. Well, you, and me, I mean, real people, and ROWDY people. It’s not a fantasy that numbs, that livestock watches like a porn. Its not video game violence, its a punch in the face. Yr music is for people who jump off bridges blackout drunk and make it out alive every time even accepting that’s true until one time it isn’t. Dangerous.” I think Prof is the most dynamic individual in the country right now. And it’s part because his images are as down to earth and meant to be grabbed and shared by the People as they are wild and ecstatic. Intuition that I perceived as outside direction or outside direction that I perceived as intuition (Theres that funny nexus of will and imagination and whatever else is out there) put me on collision course w this artist starting right at first eclipse leading to live show in Indianapolis on the closing solar eclipse/equinox (Midwest represent). Ive tied this energy materially and metaphysically to the start of a new love relation that feels like the one that lasts until death, and it is also the absolute heart of any political/organizing energy I work. This is the energy of popular joy and enthusiasm in the face of actual struggle and hardship. He’s also traveling w snotty nose rez kids who transmitting ‘big brave energy’. https://youtu.be/k6BvJH8zTT8?si=EszP5tggF_s1L2eu sometimes in a climate like this one the best defense is a good offense
“Beta-occultists, like beta-Marxists, will do absolutely anything to avoid the hard work required to turn their pose into a reality. These days, the beta-occultists are piling into devil worship and similar idiocies, but that’s for another reason. Most of them are getting ready to convert to Christianity, and they’re redefining their occultism in terms that Christians understand, to guarantee themselves a hearty welcome and plenty of attention when they jabber about how Christ saved them from the snares of Satan, or what have you. I pity the Christians; having dealt with these people far too often in recent years, I wouldn’t wish them on anybody.”
And then the problem is that they still haven’t done the work required to change themselves, so when the beta-occultists do convert to Christianity, they will end up as beta-Christians who will do absolutely anything to avoid the hard work required to turn their new Christian pose into a reality and actually follow Jesus’s teachings in their lives.
This has sparked a few other thoughts.
The first is the difference between a spectacle that is anchored in the spiritual plane and one that’s not. The spectacle of the brown fizzy sugar water with attendant hot young people, versus the Rath Yatra in Puri where the idols of Jagannath and his siblings are paraded through the street, bestowing divine blessings on all who behold. That beholding is very important, it’s “darshan”, seeing, and when you see the deity, the deity can see you, and bless you. What a different kind of spectacle than beholding an advertisement for soda pop.
The other, which may be a digression, is the spectacle around, Sri Achyutananda Das. On his birthday, when I was there, thousands of people came to behold him, and have him behold them. I very much felt like this was a person on their way to becoming a god, or, rather, that he already was a kind of devata. I mean, he’s blessing his whole community, but I came from half way across the world to visit his shrine. I also was blessed to visit a copper plate reader who Achyutananda speaks through. This copper plate reader was very old, and nobody in his family is completing the sadhana to be able to read the copper plates when he dies, so unfortunately that tradition may dry up, but Achyutandanda himself seems very much alive and active. My Jyotish teacher has told me incredible stories about how Achyutananda has acted in the world and made various, what we would call “synchronistic”, things happen.
And this is kinda what I’m trying to understand now. I am connected to this being, as my Jyotish lineage is named after Achyutananda and goes back to him (I mean, it goes back further, but it’s similar to how many English traditional astrologers consider themselves to be in Lilly’s tradition – except Achyutananda seems to also have been a rather powerful yogi and saint in addition to being an astrologer and a Nostradamus type figure.) I’m now wondering, what’s actually going on here? From what my teacher said, Achyutananda isn’t like some sort of etheral remnant, when he went into mahasamadhi, now he’s “everywhere”, not just in his body. He appears to be somebody who had, in your terminology, developed his mental sheath. So what happens to such a being if in another 500 years there are no longer crowds of people chanting “hare krushna”, dancing, and feeding him on his birthday? Had those Pharaohs developed mental sheaths?
I also vote for psychic self-defense in the fifth Wednesday post, from Dion Fortune point of view but also other takes.
Culianu used psychic self defense and was a mage himself and yet he was ritualy murdered according to a few articles that cite his University colleagues, also Charlie Kirk visited a priest to fend the hex, etc… Is interesting where it works and where it doesn’t it seems that somehow public events were used in both cases, in Culianu’s case there was a book event. Culianu was also shot in the neck at the base of the skull according to its FBI file.
Both cases happened on premises of Universities. Is interesting that might have to do with the liminal function of universities, here comes to mind also theater and cinema shootings.
@Hosea #68
I just had a chance to read your blog post. It gets at something I was getting at with the first two stances I discussed: putting all the value of the word “real” onto one or the other side of the divide and relegating the other to the “unreal.”
Myself I tend to think of both as “real” in different ways. I’m reminded of the four proper goals of life in Hinduism: fulfilling your duties, being successful, enjoyment, and liberation. Westerners who study Eastern religions tend to latch the last goal as the only one that really matters, but the attitude among actual Hindus seems to be that the first one is the really important one, and as long as you’re satisfied with your life, don’t worry about liberation.
>KAN, HR departments are still bureaucracy
Not just bureaucracy, HR is the singularity (covered in cat hair) at the heart of every bureaucratic black hole. HR is where you go when your soul has quietly given up on you and you are on the downward path towards dissolution. Such is the nature of life, some strive upwards and others, well…
@ Neptunesdolphins #118
re federal accounting – not only in the US, but in every country.
I’ve never figured out why nations stick to providing annual public profit and loss statements, but never a public balance sheet.
Sometimes public liabilities are shown (in the form of public debt levels or debt ceilings)… but no one ever seems to account for a nation’s public assets, and only seem to appear suddenly as having value when there is a bid to privatise them.
As someone who worked on the bookkeeping side of office admin for several years, and familiarised myself with the make up of the company’s profit and loss statements AND its balance sheets, this has always bemused me. 🙂
PS – this is a perennial “wondering” of mine… I’m not asking you for an answer… 🙂
My vote for the fifth Wednesday is for the update on the visions suggesting about a billions souls who came here by mistake are about to leave our reality to go home.
The contested spectacle makes sense of something that’s long annoyed me about my adopted home in Hawaii: we are part of the US, with extensive political, economic, social, and cultural ties; but we are tropical, have extensive historical, cultural, and political ties with East Asia (especially Japan); and in general Hawaii is quite different from the Mainland. Obviously, we are in some ways just like any other state, and in others completely different; but a lot of people find this impossible to see, falling in two broad groups.
The first, the group I call the Sunny Pennsylvanians, are unable to process that Hawaii is meaningfully different from any other state. They will try to live lives that might make sense in the Mainland, but just won’t work here. They eat foods that thrive in the temperate zone but not here, like tomatoes, apples, grapes, and cherries; treat tropical fruits like mangoes, guava, or pineapple that thrive here as slightly exotic foods that can’t be a core part of a diet; and then complain we can’t grow very much food and it’s too expensive to import it all! They will drive around an island and complain road trips are impossible here, while ignoring the stunning and otherworldly vistas available just an hour drive up a mountain. They wear shoes in the humid heat and then wonder why their feet are always getting fungal infections. I never really grasped the idea of a pseudomorphisis until I moved here, but it is surreal watching so many people smash face first into the fact that life here cannot work the same as it does on the Mainland.
On the other end are what a friend of mine living on the North Shore has called the “Shaka-Doodle-Doo” Crowd: people who cannot process that there do exist extensive ties between Hawaii and the Mainland. These are people who insist Hawaii is still a sovereign state, just under illegal American occupation; they will insist that fast food restaurants only survive due to tourists; and pretty regularly make fools of themselves by being unable to process things such as long time residents who have made a life here still having family in the Mainland.
Both groups have to selective decide what is important and what is not, and both are pushing ways of thinking that preferentially support their worldview. It’s quite fascinating to me to see such a crystal clear example of it that is shaping my own life in a lot of important ways.
OT , if I may, for anyone besides me who loves the game of baseball, this year’s playoff season looks to be one for the ages. All teams are playing well and some are unbelievable. Don’t miss it.
>They also ruled on color copiers since one could print currency with them. (Really was a problem.)
A problem with them or a problem with us? In any case, it strikes me as an amusing incident of Bikeshedding (look it up).
@Siliconguy #121
I really don’t get why people still get so outraged over government shutdowns. It’s just something we do for a few days every 2-3 years essentially to drum up ratings. It’s pure Spectacle and not a very interesting one at that.
I am making the connection with class and money distribution. If the Spectacle dominates most people’s life, but is a “magic lantern show” or “maya” (understand that according to the nuance or angle of your spiritual tradition), then it follows that economic class and money distribution are highly connected, perhaps even downstream, or within a mutual feedback loop with the politics. To use a historical example, we may not be able to precisely date the “end of Roman rule” in Britain, however, it is undoubted that it occured sometime roughly between 350 and 450AD, as a synchronicity manifested in politics, from many factors, precipitated out over a focused timeline, and telling us about both the invisible and visible worlds. Hence the old saw, there are centuries that seem to only change as a day, and days where centuries happen. If you can’t “figurate” your own figuration in a creative and free way, or think about your thinking (Barfield), you are powerless putty in the hands of the Spectacle, and utterly at the mercy of the whims of History. You are prey of the Zeitgeist, and legitimate prey at that.
Martin Back (#103) asks, “is it possible [that] you can’t think without language?”
It’s not only possible, for some of us it’s the only way we can think. I basically think in mechanistic terms, usually by imagining some sort of machine with symbolic parts, or an outline with symbols or pictures, or movement, and so forth. Individual words, phrases and names can label parts of these machines or serve as headings in an outline, but sentences and narratives have no primary role whatever in my inner mental life. I can write or speak a narrative or argument, but it’s not stored as sentences in my mind or my memory; I have to create it anew every time I bring it forth.
Another person’s logical argument has no impact on me whatever unless I can manage to re-frame it in some non-linguistic form. Fortunately for me, I usually can manage to do this.
Moreover, my older son told me, when I asked recently, that his mind works in the same way as mine. (My younger son’s mind, on the other hand, usually does work with sentences and narratives.) I have reason to believe, moreover, that my father’s mind worked in the same way as mine. He was a mechanical engineer, which fits; and his inability to form sentences with any sensitivity to anything other than the literal meaning of the words in them would drive my mother crazy. So there’s almost certainly a genetic component to being able to think in sentences, or not.
KAN, the one that always amazes me about NZ is purely online land transactions, for property sales and purchases and most other property things. No other country has replicated this, and whilst there are a few states (parts of Australia) that might have come close, in the 20-25 years since NZ did this, no one else has been able to replicate. Why? It’s primarily about trust. Once upon a time, now sadly lost, NZ could produce bureaucratic systems that people trusted. A few remain, Landonline I mentioned above, the tax department (I do company tax returns in half an hour, personal tax returns are unheard of), vehicle sales and purchases is a 5 minute job online.
And that leads me back into commenting on the central theme finally-I think it’s the egregore of a bureaucracy that gives it the power. It also enables a certain distance from the bureaucracy.
Having worked (and fought in court too) NZ bureaucracies, public and private for most of my life (but not now, got too grumpy with their deterioratation), if there is pride in them, and even not that, at least a sense of no corruption, and enough wiggle room for the individual, decent pay etc,they are powerful things. The flip side is when they are wrong, it is nearly impossible to turn them around, even when unlawful, and they will make you pay for their mistakes. Nothing, not even the Courts, can rein them in. General elections sometimes, Te Ao Maori (the Maori world) sometimes, occasionally a good leader or two, but it’s rare.
So yes, I think a bureaucracy is a powerful modern egregore, as they have tangible and intangible power. That sort of leads to Evola and Culianu, the magician state.
Mary Bennet #125:
” Some of us don’t form emotional attachments to political parties nor to their standard bearers. I did not vote for the current president and am not a fan nor was I a devoted follower of the former vice president.”
I’m not neither, first because I’m not American; second, because I share your appretiation in this (sub)topic.
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Anonymous # 133:
” if you really don’t want division and polarization, make effort to get rid of division and polarization in your own life and your own attitudes towards the world and its people. And stop spending so much of your attention on the “other side” and their division and polarization, just focus on how you can improve unity and positivity in your own lives, and then people will turn towards you instead of the promoters of division and polarization. ”
I don’t want polarization and division in my social life; I think it’s basic the personal change first, leaving partisanship and going towards things which can unite all of us, letting go down things which can divide people. It’s a good advice, for USA and other countries like mine, where we’ve been having a heck of polarization and artificial political tension.
Chauquin @ 126: “but the worst are the advertisements. I can’t endure them.” This is especially true for me as well, as someone who sedulously avoids TV and commercial radio, and who even has increasing difficulty now with non-commercial radio (such as the few remaining classical music stations). And the ads I do see these days (when I am in a public space that has a TV going) are just appalling: I won’t go into specifics. I really shouldn’t.
You know, bureaucrats attempting not to notice their own culpability actually explains something else that has confused me about the left: the fixation on self-esteem regardless on whether or not one’s actions and character are actually worthy of esteem. Also the general therapization of everything (especially in public schools)–therapists are supposed to present as morally neutral and non-judgmental, so if every interpersonal interaction is abstracted and approached as therapy (which is actually a very particular type of relationship), everything gets “explored” and “understood” into oblivion without any inconvenient demands for accountability, confrontation, or actual changed behavior.
P.S. I vote for psychic self-defense as well, although there are many tempting suggestions this week!
“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.”
My wife seems to be a counter-example (although I have only know her for a measly 15 years, and can’t presume to understand her at all!).
Can you say anything in general about how to break the pattern, or what a simple human such as myself might do to keep up?
Yes, a good meditation subject, I’ve been working on that for a while. But I seem to need years of work for each subject, whereas my wife seems to have some type of hyperspace drive installed, coming up with original viewpoints without needing to find a path from “here” to “there”…
Late to the party but would like to see JMG review Hamlet’s Mill.
Thanks!
I vote for the suggested hybrid of downward mobility equaling freedom along with psychic self defense to help in the journey. Seems timely.
@Ray Wharton, for Canada, I’d like to see:
-everyone able to afford a place to live and food to eat. Nothing fancy, but adequate.
-I’d like to see Canada produce more of the consumer goods it’s people use.
-I’d like to see all lives being valued, including infirm elderly and disabled people.
-I’d like to see better public transit and walking/biking infrastructure.
-I’d like to see lots of functional in-person activity off the internet for cultural, economic and government institutions.
-I’d like to see civil discourse common and free speech protected.
-I’d like to see jobs available for those who want them.
-I’d like to see immigration at levels the country can actually absorb, and where decisions are made in a timely and transparent manner.
-I’d like to see equality before the law.
I’m also in for Psychic self-defense;
I think it’s very much related to protect one-self from the constant barrage from modern spectacle.
I also perceive that the only way to fight (or at least resist and possibly thrive) bureaucracy from within is definitely a consistently malignant compliance. Good/effective work is only rewarded with more of it without end.
-I’d also like to see a functional healthcare system where everyone who wants one can find a family doctor, and get the medical care they need when they actually need it.
-I’d like to see climate change-related efforts aimed more at energy conservation.
@Robert Mathiesen
If you ever get the chance, I’d be interested in an article in which you explain what it’s like to think in your terms for those of us who are lodged in narratives. I find it fascinating when someone doesn’t require words to think. It brings up a million questions, for example, whether others’ opinions (and magical attacks) have little effect since they don’t necessarily translate into your astral experience. Though I realize that such an article would require a difficult effort in translating your actual thought process into one that you don’t use for others to understand, akin to me trying to come up with a mechanistic model that explains in your terms how I think in stories.
Jennifer Kobernik
Youth pickup on the therapization as you put it. They see of course how their own principals for example can be held accountable by mental health advocates and mimic the behavior, wielding power in new and fascinating ways. Imagine a 12-year-old with high functioning autism weaponizing therapy speak and eventually becoming the primary power center of their own household! So there’s definitely jobs in the field of traditional behavioral interventions involving accountability work.
And again, everybody’s vote has been tabulated.
Chuaquin, phatic communication left me completely baffled until I learned about the concept, realized what all that mindless talk about weather and sports teams was actually there for, and started observing it closely to work out the unstated rules of the game. After that it was easy.
Ratter, hmm. That one’s puzzling to me, but I’ve saved it.
AliceEm, I’ll take your word for it; I have no idea who Prof might be.
Anon, of course! They’ll make a beeline for those denominations that insist that all you have to do to be saved is believe in Jesus (or at least insist very loudly that you do so) and emote publicly about how sinful you were and how grateful you are. That much, beta-occultists can and will do.
Isaac, two crucial distinctions! First, yes, there’s a difference between an image in which a spiritual presence has taken up residence and an image that has nothing more than, say, the desire to sell lots of bland yellow beer at its center. Second, there’s a difference — a vast one — between those who achieve conscious immortality by evolving a mental body and those who simply duck out of the second death for a while by arranging something more or less pharaonic (or vamipric). Sri Achyutananda will be fine; the pharaohs weren’t.
Archivist, Culianu’s relied on protective magic and then went out of his way to make lots of enemies. That’s generally not safe, since magic isn’t omnipotent!
Owen, ha! Still, a case could be made…
William, thank you for the data points!
Celadon, excellent! Yes, exactly.
Jennifer, the cult of unearned self-esteem is one of the most destructive bad habits of our time, and yes, you’ve put your finger on one of the reasons why.
Jack, we’ll get to that.
Hey JMG
Your quip about the Roman’s and their “god licence” had me chuckling, you were definitely channeling Monty Python with that joke.
On the subject of the 5th Wednesday post, I vote for the topic of vampires/etheric revenants that a few others have also voted for.
“Archivist, Culianu’s relied on protective magic and then went out of his way to make lots of enemies. That’s generally not safe, since magic isn’t omnipotent!”
Isn’t this also an example of a divided will? Making lots of enemies is a good way to become actively unsafe; and protective magic is focused on improving safety. This actually makes a lot of sense of the cases where my protective magic has run into issues: the failures of my protective magic have almost always involved someone or something I had knowingly, and sometimes deliberately, offended at some point. Hmm.
It seems that “psychic self-defense” is emerging as the topic of choice for the 5th Wednesday. In that regard, I think the Life of SS. Cyprian and Justina is worth sharing here:
https://pravoslavie.ru/49250.html
Cyprian was a black magician (γόης) who was dedicated to this life by his parents, and became a master of spells. Justina was a Christian woman and a virgin, who successfully resisted his spells, and ended up converting Cyprian.
There are two “take away” lessons from this story:
(1) Black magic is very real. Ignorance and disbelief provide no defense against it.
(2) A solidly Christian, sacramental way of life gives you the resources with which to resist black magic. It does not render you “bulletproof” but it does give you the “sword and armor” with which to resist and prevail over it.
In the 19th Century, hagiographies like this were dismissed as fanciful fairy tales. Nowadays, accounts such as these are much more credible.
@Kyle (#157):
I’ll think about whether It might be possible for me to do that. Offhand, I’m not at all sure I could do your question all the justice it deserves.
And yes, others’ verbal opinions of me have hardly any effect on me, though they can become a second-hand problem if they have an effect on others about whom I deeply care. The same is true of hostility, whether mundane or magical. That’s very perceptive of you to notice.
As a downside, it makes real teamwork impossible for me, as teams are welded into units by means of shared narratives. I can easily cooperate with others toward a clearly understood shared goal, but that’s not even close to being part of a team as most people seem to me to experience it. Team sports are something wholly outside my ability to “grok,” and actually mildly repel me when I can’t avoid watching them (as in a restaurant with a TV).
It seems to me that most people wrap themselves up in a heavy cloak of self-made verbal narratives, spun from childhood onward by their parents and relatives, their friends and enemies, and their adult co-workers. These cloaks define who they are, for good and for evil, and thus also attempt to shape how others view them. And much magic uses the same method, that is, it constructs a narrative that leads to the desired result, and then attempts to impose it both on the magician and on his/her targets. Because the placebo and nocebo effects are real things in human physiology, these sorts of narrative cloaks can also have beneficial or maleficial effects in the lives of those who wrap themselves, or who are wrapped by others, in them. Since I’m mostly immune to narratives, I seem to be hardly aware of such cloaks, and they have little impact on me, whether mundane or magical.
Another part of this inability to see other people’s self-cloaking is that everyone appears to be much the same, neither good nor evil, but merely human with all the human virtues and vices, all the human flaws, incompetence and stupidity.. And I am simply one of this multitude. So it feels only natural to place no great weight on ways which human behavior either helps or harms others: everyone is a very mixed bag in this respect. And here in the USA they are all my fellow citizens or country(wo)men, to whom it seems natural to wish well and respect. This is not because everyone is good at heart, but because we are all flawed at heart–I am, too–and all in the same boat together. This attitude seems, as a rule, to defuse hostility and malevolence from others, which is a plus.
All in all, it’s a very solitary sort of life, but it suits me very well indeed.
So that’s a partial answer, Kyle, all I can manage for now.
Just realized that I hadn’t voted!
I’d like to vote for psychic self defense. I think it’s a pretty important topic these days, and defense isn’t nearly as often discussed as offense on the internet (probably because defense lends less clout).
I’ll put a vote in for Tengu’s topic as well.
On phatic communication: As someone on the shallower end of the spectrum, I’ve never really gotten it, but have become fairly good at it. It isn’t a uniquely human phenomenon; it is a way for animals to say to each other “I know you are near, and I know you know I am near, and that is OK”. I presently have a very talkative cat who has an unusual need for that kind of thing, so we engage in a mutually unintelligible conversation every day and both enjoy it. I do the same thing with several human coworkers, to our mutual benefit.
I vote for how downward mobility equates to freedom. Since almost everything has pointed the opposite but you might just say well that is the powerful Spectacle at work.
And all the votes have again been tabulated. Thank you!
J.L.Mc12, I was thinking partly of that and partly of a line from an old Peter Sellers movie.
William, yes, that’s a valid analysis.
Michael, good. I’d note, first, that Cyprian was in fact a γόης, thus dependent on mooching favors from evil spirits; second, that he went on to become the patron saint of Christian occultists; and third, that your two takeaway lessons are quite valid. If you ever happen to read my Ariel Moravec stories, btw, you’ll find that St. Cyprian’s Church in Adocentyn has appeared several times, and will play a more important role as the story arc unfolds…
Tamanous, er, you’ll have to tell me what Tengu’s topic is. I don’t copy down the name of the proposer, and I don’t especially want to page back through nearly 200 comments to find out!
Justin, oh, granted! It seems to be common to all vertebrates.
(This might fall afoul of the “No LLM discussion” rule, so feel free to remove it).
I was just reading this article – Why AI chatbots lie to us: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aea3922 .
A couple of lines in particular struck me:
‘For example, one group that tested a prerelease version of OpenAI’s o3 model reported that “o3 frequently fabricates actions it took to fulfill user requests, and elaborately justifies the fabrications when confronted by the user.”’
…and…
‘They are most likely a result of two factors: AI models’ pretraining, which induces them to “role-play,” and the special posttraining that these models receive from human feedback.’
In other words, LLMs act like drones working in a metastatic decadent bureaucracy, and it seems that this is because they were trained to be exactly that!
I would like to cast my vote, too, for the topic of spiritual self-defense. I didn’t comment much in the Situationist posts, but the social and political games are really an interestic topic.
By the way, military parades seem to be mostly a zhing in some non-western countries, like Russia, Cina and North Korea, to different degrees, but not so much in the West.
I vote for psychic self-defense.
As I recall, in her book on the topic Dion Fortune advises the reader on how to deal with anyone who is trying to bully or dominate us. She instructs her readers to look the bully not in the eyes, but between the eyes, while speaking to them (or being spoken at by them). The bully will soon tire of the contact, she says, and desist. It seems to me that even such a simple trick as this could be really useful in certain circumstances, and an assortment of them is better still.
I would like to vote for “How ethnicity, culture, and prevailing religious beliefs determine a person’s magical path”
@JMG
Re: Beta Occultists
In your article on the subject of Satanism in late 2023, you indicated that Satanism-as-a-route-to-Christianity was a way for the subconscious mind to trick the ego into setting down a path that ends in conversion to Christianity. But now you seem to be implying that today’s Satanists took up demonlatry or goetia to spice up their testimonials.
However, it makes little practical difference whether they geniunely convert to Christianity but are not willing to reform themselves, or if their conversion is fraudulent from the start.
@JMG, #168, You asked Tamanous what Tengu’s topic was. Way back at #35 (many, many pages ago) Tengu voted for “a comparison between the concepts that underlie the Western occult tradition and those of esoteric Buddhism.”
@Slithy Toves, #138. I’m glad you found the post interesting. Yes, when I understood that sometimes “real” just means “normal” or “important”, that helped me put a lot of other discourse in perspective. Because of course “normal” and “important” both depend on what you are trying to do right now. That is, they are relative judgements, and not absolute ones.
You make an interesting observation, that “Westerners who study Eastern religions” tend to prioritize liberation above all the other goals. I wonder if that’s because it looks kind of like Salvation, so they somehow find it the best fit for their mental model of what “religion” should look like? Me, I figure that understanding my own Final Destiny is way above my current pay grade; so if I can do a good-enough job with my duties here and now, if I can have a good-enough level of success and enjoyment, and if I can keep myself on close-enough to an even keel (without being too distorted by resentment or disproportionate anger or other things) … then that’s good enough for now. It sounds like a very bland goal, but even that took me plenty of time to arrive at. (grin!)
@Dylan, #83. Thank you for the feedback on the Thirty Tyrants! I don’t know Robin Waterfield’s book, and I wasn’t aware that the coup of the Thirty (under Critias) was fundamentally different from the others. You say that it was a more ideological project: does Waterfield connect that—I mean the power of ideology—to the influence of Socrates on Critias? Maybe that’s what Anytus meant by “corrupting the youth”!
@Jennifer Kobernik, #150. I thought that the fixation on self-esteem and the “therapization of everything” were by-products of the cult of expertise: if an Expert says it, it must be true. (Note that there was a committee of experts studying self-esteem back in the 1970’s.) This does not contradict anything you say, of course. Just adding on.
==================================================================
@Robert Mathiesen, #146. You talk about thinking in machines or pictures instead of language. You might be interested to know that René Descartes thought that the best mathematical proof was the kind where you could look at the geometrical diagram and just see why the result had to be true. He thought that proofs in words were second-rate. Modern mathematicians mostly have not followed him in this opinion, though G.H. Hardy once said that proofs are just “gas” designed to help you see the result for yourself.
In the year 3016, the world has been taken over by the Communists. The Communists have won and have established their own governments, nations, churches, and schools.
One day, a group of People’s Archaeologists are digging a millennium-old People’s Dig-Site when they discover a Forbidden Sigil. It is blue and square, with rounded corners, and a white letter “f” in the middle. They know what this is – a Brand Logo: the ancient icons used in the monetolatrous cults of the Capitalists. They carry it to the People’s Museum and put it up on display, for the People’s Historians to study and talk about on the People’s History Channel.
But the Forbidden Sigil is haunted! In the dead of the night, a ghostly form emerges from the sigil. Wide and unblinking are its eyes, over a stretched and pallid face. A collarless grey T-shirt wraps around its torso. It wears jeans, and a Rolex on one wrist. The moment it manifests, it begins to utter unspeakable blasphemies.
The terrified People’s Night Watchman of the People’s Museum calls a People’s Priest from the nearby People’s Church to exorcise the ghost back into the People’s Hell. The priest arrives, and together they stand and face the ghost.
“Ah! A Capitalist Demon!” cries the priest. “They are the true enemies of the People’s God!”.
In response, the demon points at his wrist and blasphemously retorts: “My watch costs more than your car!”
This makes the night-watchman squeal and cover his ears.
“Fear not!” cries the priest. “Capitalists may look scary, but they are terrified of the People’s Power! Observe its pallid face – it comes from a racial monoculture, and fears diversity. Observe its expensive watch – it has more than its fellow citizens, and fears equality of outcomes. Observe its selfish glare. It fears sharing and caring. Now watch as I bring it down by the words of power!”
So the priest advances upon the spectral form, as it stares at him. He raises his hand, points a finger at the spectral form, and with power and fury in his voice admonishes: “Behold the power of the People’s Principles! Bow before the People’s Trinity! In the name of: Diversification! Equity! Share!”
The capitalist demon laughs and responds – “You fool! I like these words!”
Phutatorius # 149:
Thanks for your comment!
——————————————————————————————————————————
Pygmycory # 154:
“-I’d like to see immigration at levels the country can actually absorb, and where decisions are made in a timely and transparent manner.”
I had forgotten it: This is the elephant in the room, one of the biggest part of the Western “consensus” who must be discussed, but it doesn’t in politics.
——————————————————————————————————————————-
JMG # 159:
“Chuaquin, phatic communication left me completely baffled until I learned about the concept, realized what all that mindless talk about weather and sports teams was actually there for, and started observing it closely to work out the unstated rules of the game. After that it was easy.”
Well, you learned the trick finally…I learned it too, a lot of years ago, by luck.
—————————————————————————————————————————
Michael Martin # 162:
“Cyprian was a black magician (γόης) who was dedicated to this life by his parents, and became a master of spells. Justina was a Christian woman and a virgin, who successfully resisted his spells, and ended up converting Cyprian.”
Indeed, there’s a magic book who was supposedly written by Saint Cyprian, which was popular in older times in Catholic countries. “St Cyprian book”.
—————————————————————————————————————————–
Robert Mathiesen # 163:
“And yes, others’ verbal opinions of me have hardly any effect on me, though they can become a second-hand problem if they have an effect on others about whom I deeply care. The same is true of hostility, whether mundane or magical.”
You’re lucky! There was a time when I was very ashamed by others verbal opinions and hostility…in my childhood and teenager time.
@JMG
>Archivist, Culianu’s relied on protective magic and then went out of his way to make lots of enemies. That’s generally not safe, since magic isn’t omnipotent!
To be fair to him it was part of his religion he held truth in high esteem, I’ve read a book of political articles in Romanian, and he had an almost Zoroastrian opinion about truth, he even mention Zoroastrianism when talking about truth, because his family was persecuted by the communist regime he attempted suicide by cutting his veins and was miraculously saved at the last moment, so I think the didn’t value his life or safety to be above truth. Culianu comes as an Orthodox Christian in his Romanian writing and he didn’t disavow himself from his Orthodox Christian roots and considered tacitly participating in the lie as a sin against the spirit (the worst sin in Orthodox Christianity) he mention this in his postum in his Romanian book that translates into “Sin against the spirit” .
I had my non-rational methods of learning who the killer is and I can’t share that information and point to that name. This is what happens when someone that is into woo woo looks at murder cases. So I don’t recommend investigating this kind of things. But the killer publicly mentioned that he had a vision Christ in prison pretty much around that time, although he didn’t believe or was a practicing Christian, he ended up in prison for other offenses. The killer although a criminal thought he killed a traitor, the killer didn’t know anything about Romania or Culianu’s Romanian past, he was just good at what he does. And the ritual murder was just an accident. He used to the a little ritual riddle that represented on how he saw the victim, the killer developed as he worked for the Chicago Mafia. The non-rational information about his murder came out pouring in on his murder Saturn Return. According to his FBI file and biographies had the apartment ransacked a couple of times, my non-rational information told me that it was not his first attempt on his life, it is in his biographies that he was a bit concerned about those.
Culianu’s most circulated biography by Ted Anton wasn’t made by someone who was friendly to his message or him.
If you look at his, Ted Anton someone with degree in English seems like a writer that is interested more in his next grant, he seems mostly interested in a good story than in the truth or technicalities.
>What I wish I had known when I got started is that an mRNA vaccine would emerge to save the world and end the story!
https://www.nasw.org/member_article/ted-anton-programmable-planet-synthetic-biology-revolution
I think on the long run he used magic to further his spirit journey rather than focusin only on safety. It is interesting that this information came to me on the Saturn return of his murder. I think who ever ordered his killing really offended Hermes, Culianu murder happens to hit after 2019 almost when the Bovid19 hit, when the Magician State went in full force.
Is interesting that by that time the brute force methods of the Magician State started to hit, LLM bots, locking down and locking up people, censoring and censuring is an example of when the Magician doesn’t have any soft power and the seducing doesn’t work.
Unfortunately being the only book about Culianu’s case the Ted Anton’s stories ended up in “Sinister Forces – Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft – The Book Three: The Manson Secret by Peter Levenda” who takes all his premises and made them famous in the occult literature, although he worked with Ted Anton’s material I think Peter Levenda arrived at a good conclusion with:
>”The Voice article linked such disparate elements as the Charles Manson murders, Richard Nixon and Watergate, E. Howard Hunt and occultism, Howard Hughes, and even Disneyland. It may have been intended as whimsical, but the links—as I would later learn from the work of Professor Culianu—are themselves evidence of one of the strongest forces in history. For the sin of revealing these forces, Giordano Bruno was put to the stake during the Inquisition. For the sin of revealing these same forces, Professor Culianu was murdered in 1991.”
Since I spent half a decade on Culianu I can present the readers here my findings:
– there is no Romanian connection, Romania authorities weren’t interested in Culianu he was not known in Romania and is not know to this days apart from a small intellectual circle. His political stances in Romania wasn not hated by the left or the right. His articles in Romania where in publication with abismal circulation, this can be verified. I lived through the 90’s politics and there were thousand of people more vocal and with greater following than Culianu and nothing happened to them.
– the push for the Romanian connection comes from US. Liberal intellectuals that are closely allied with US liberals helped propagating this.
– the culprits mentioned in Ted Anton’s book didn’t exist in Romania “legionarii” ended in 1945, “securitate” ended in 1989, etc.
– Romanian right wasn’t a force in US, unlike the Ukrainian right (we see how this was present in Canada and some part of US cuddled as a force against Russians)
– Culianu was pushed to investigate his mentor’s Eliade past with the right and found nothing. Culianu spoke in defense of Eliade much to the chagrin of the Liberal cancel Culture. Thus a lot of liberal people in US and Romanian were actively trying and try to this day to cancel Eliade as being right, see Francis Ion Dworschak – In defense of Eliade book. The liberal intellectuals challenged Culianu to research Eliade’s right past, but researching Eastern European right in US, especially Chicago might have been dangerous. Chicago had the second most presence of banderovites after Canada. Still has to this day:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/08/02/qdpu-a02.html
Re Kyle about non-verbal minds:
My mind is different then that of Robert M, but it also doesn’t use words to do its thing. Words can be the result of the process, but they are not part of the process itself. The best description I can currently think of is that I have something like a jazz mind: stuff comes out of a process I can’t consciously access, but I have to trust it.
In daily life this means that I’m very much not a group person, and I also don’t share the set of assumptions our society carries with it. The expression ‘thinking outside of the box’ is meaningless for me, because I simply don’t see their boxes; I sometimes get compliments for my lateral thinking, but with a mind like mine it feels a bit like cheating 🙂
(Brainstorming sessions are horrible, because what gets said is just a big mess of meaningless words, with no connection whatsoever to the work that they are blabbering on about)
In contrast with Robert M I am good at team sports, but only when I can trust my instinct / intuition and just play. If the coach comes up with some kind of tactical plan I simply can’t follow what he means.
I am quite good at small-talk, but I find it utterly uninteresting and I will never be the one to start talking about the weather, or what have you. I’ll probably have to start doing that a bit more to give a clearer ‘no threat’ message to people…
–bk
@ Robert M #163
Thank you for saying this:
“…everyone appears to be much the same, neither good nor evil, but merely human with all the human virtues and vices, all the human flaws, incompetence and stupidity.. And I am simply one of this multitude. So it feels only natural to place no great weight on ways which human behavior either helps or harms others: everyone is a very mixed bag in this respect. And here in the USA they are all my fellow citizens or country(wo)men, to whom it seems natural to wish well and respect. This is not because everyone is good at heart, but because we are all flawed at heart–I am, too–and all in the same boat together.”
I don’t know if my reasons are the same as yours, but this appears to be a very sound way to approach people. I may have come to a very similar viewpoint around the time, in my late teens, early 20’s, when I walked away from an evangelical faith that was strong on dividing the world into “sinners” and the “saved”. I decided I possessed no “god’s eye” with which to see into people’s hearts, and no direct line to any such “god’s eye”, so better to approach everyone I meet AS IF they are here to learn stuff, as I am, frequently get the “test” before getting the “lesson”, as I do, and frequently fail repeatedly before learning a new lesson, as do I.
For what it’s worth: Wired Magazine has an article in Pockets about the Trump administration coming for the 501(c)(3) non-profits, and they’re screaming bloody murder about it. Oh, the horrors, the horrors….
https://www.wired.com/story/the-trump-administration-is-coming-for-nonprofits-theyre-getting-ready/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-ushttps://www.wired.com/story/the-trump-administration-is-coming-for-nonprofits-theyre-getting-ready/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
a brief explanation:
looking at mcluhan’s tetrad from the laws of media, point two
2. What does the medium make obsolete or displace?
here it has displaced the horse and buggy -though it hasn’t become completely obsolete, just go to pennsylvania and see for yourself
now the horse and buggy can be seen mostly in the rearview mirror of those driving cars
inside the mirror is a dérive collage map from the SI called the naked city, and can be considered as a surreal disorientation of their drifts
the routes bring together parts of the fractured city
in u.s. the car has done a lot of the fracturing, more so than in older cities like dame paris
guy de bored looks on from one side
weird al yankovic in the costume from his rap parody amish paradise is throwing it down on the other
the amish paradise has been left behind by the people in the car but they can look back through the rearview mirror to find a glimpse of a possible retropian vision
meanwhile the buddha transforms the tv through his own enlightened powers of figuration
a bodhisaTVa
JMG:
Neptunesdolphins, oh, I’m sure they were quite serious. Did the helpees actually get helped, though?
Me: No. The farmers were so angry that they drove their tractors to DC from all over and surrounded the Ag. dept, the Capitol, the Fed, and other assorted buildings. The city was under siege with farmers and their tractors. The farmers refused to budge until everyone heard their demands. Then I believe some of what they wanted was passed in the Farm Bill of that year. But the suicides continued.
The fact that they drove their tractors, which go very slowly and use up a lot of gas, from the Mid-West, Northeast and elsewhere to DC on highways and back roads, demonstrate how desperate they were.
“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”!”
To draw in another French intellectual, have you come across Jacques Ellul’s book Propaganda? I read it earlier this year, and there are some connections to your post. I’ll share a summary in case it’s of interest to you or others.
Propaganda, in Ellul’s view, is not about some authoritarian making propaganda and convincing people to mindlessly do whatever they want them to. Instead, it’s co-created: because people have, in complex societies, more access to information, and have more at stake with the effects of political decisions, they want to have a fuller understanding of politics and be involved. But because of the complexity of societies and states (and for geographical reasons) it is hard for any one person to get unmediated information, one has to rely on media or the state directly.
Ellul claims that people therefore want propaganda, and they are willing participants in it.
Most people, when they think of what is meant by propaganda, think of ‘agitation propaganda’; a specific effort meant to motivate people to some specific action, such as in wartime. Ellul discusses that, but also outlines another type he called ‘integration propaganda’, where the purpose is to make individuals feel fully integrated into the stereotypes, values, behavioural norms of their society, such that the individual believes they are the source of these norms and ideas; that they belong to him or her. Apparently this works more effectively on the educated and those more exposed to culture, because they are more susceptible to absorbing the deeply set frames or core beliefs of the society or state.
This sounds a lot like how culture itself works, and he admits as much, while pointing out how modern societies use it in the ways he outlines.
As Ellul writes, “[propaganda] furnishes him with a complete system for explaining the world, and provides him with immediate incentives for action. We are here in the presence of an organizing myth that tries to take hold of the entire person.”
Another misconception about propaganda is that it deals in lies. Ellul shows how propagandists are often truthful in their propaganda; but he makes the distinction between facts and interpretation of those facts. So the facts are truthful, but falsehoods emerge from the interpretations of the facts and the intentions behind using a particular set of facts. One can of course see how this works today, with everyone on all types of media offering ‘their take’ on things, and how the interpretations of facts crystallize through emotional pressure to end up, for example, as snarl words. The lifecycle of a term from a useful description to a snarl word is interesting to observe.
I’m going to quote him further from later in the book – and yes, I know, I’m aware that it’s ironic I am quoting from a single text and at length when discussing propaganda and the effects of absorbing other people’s thinking! – but it follows along so nicely from what you’ve written:
“To be alienated means to be something other than oneself; it also can mean to belong to someone else. In a more profound sense, it means to be deprived of one’s self, to be subjected to, or even identified with, someone else. That is definitely the effect of propaganda… all individual passion leads to the suppression of all critical judgement with regard to the object of that passion.”
And: ”What the individual loses [from being subject to propaganda] is never easy to revive. Once personal judgement and critical faculties have disappeared or have been atrophied, they will not simply reappear when propaganda has been suppressed. In fact, we are dealing here with one of propaganda’s most durable effects: years of intellectual and spiritual education would be needed to restore one’s faculties. The propagandee, if deprived of one propaganda, will immediately adopt another, this will spare him the agony of finding himself vis-a-vis some event without a ready-made opinion, and obliged to judge it for himself.”
Carl Jung wrote about similar issues of mass society in The Undefended Self and had a good suggestion for what to do about the ‘alienated self’: do the inner work to discover the Self. Which makes sense, one of the more productive things to do about this issue is to develop a framework for yourself to focus on and sort out your own inner life (your inner-world ‘politics’) and be aware of it, and if the outer world is a mirror of the inner world, doing so might help make more appropriate judgements about current events.
Response to accounting comments:
Chuaquin:
Nephtune Dolphin # 118:
“There are hidden powers that few people know about such as FASB = Federal Accounting Standards Board, who basically dictates how people including Congress does their accounting. After all numbers tell how the world is ruled. Sometimes, they rule the world (Numbers).”
Of course, controlling Numbers is controlling bureaucracy, indeed, controlling it, is controlling (official) reality. I’ll remember you that first writing in the ME was (if I remind it well), the Sumerian writing. And it was first intended to depict the kings calculations of grains and other harvests to be taxed, me think.
—–
That was me. From what I can gather the first writing and mathematics had to do with collecting grain for harvests. It seems a lot of tablets in Mesopotamia are nothing but tracking days, grain shipments, and the like. Accounting, I guess, was the first sign of civilization.
————————-
Scotlyn
@ Neptunesdolphins #118
re federal accounting – not only in the US, but in every country.
I’ve never figured out why nations stick to providing annual public profit and loss statements, but never a public balance sheet.
Sometimes public liabilities are shown (in the form of public debt levels or debt ceilings)… but no one ever seems to account for a nation’s public assets, and only seem to appear suddenly as having value when there is a bid to privatise them.
As someone who worked on the bookkeeping side of office admin for several years, and familiarised myself with the make up of the company’s profit and loss statements AND its balance sheets, this has always bemused me. 🙂
PS – this is a perennial “wondering” of mine… I’m not asking you for an answer… 🙂
—-
Me: Ah government accounting. CPAs who work for the government end up having to ignore every accounting principle they have learned. I worked on the Balance of Payments system (as reported in The Survey of Current Business put out by the Commerce Dept.) The biggest line item was “Statistical Discrepancy.” It was how the accounts balanced. Yes, you read that right – a junk category where all unexplained whatevers are lumped in. We did try to suss out what was in this category and pulled out a few things. But like a pot, it kept growing.
About printing money on color copiers
Other Owen:
>They also ruled on color copiers since one could print currency with them. (Really was a problem.)
A problem with them or a problem with us? In any case, it strikes me as an amusing incident of Bikeshedding (look it up).
—
Both. Counterfeiters used the copiers to mint paper currency. The various countries had to redesign their currency to include features that could not be copied such as special inks or weave in the paper. Usually in U.S. currency, a counterfeit bill can be told by the Federal Reserve Seal. The counterfeiters never get the Seal correct. Of course, most people don’t look that closely to their cash.
So in the interest of money stability, the currency had to be changed to thwart the copiers. Now with AI, I am not sure how they will handle that.
About thinking pictures. Thomas Edison thought in pictures, which is why he invented the electric company. I think in symbols. No I didn’t invent anything, but in spite of a brain injury, I read and write Japanese.
What Marxists fail to recognize is that people have different ways of thinking and knowing. Not everyone is word oriented. Some of us are map oriented and spatial oriented. Since writing have taken such a precedence in modern society, everyone is forced into a particular way of thinking. Marxists take their assumptions from that.
Consider how math is taught. It is a symbolic language that is mangled by words. No wonder few people can grasp it at first.
This does relate to how people view the rabbit/duck picture and why. I see both, which makes it a dubit.
And again, all votes have been tabulated. This one’s livelier than many, although spiritual self-defense is pulling ahead.
Carlos, interesting. What this suggests is that bureaucratic thinking is not actually intelligent — it’s a process of generating some statistically likely sequence of words in response to a question. That would explain much.
Kevin, yes, that’s known in some branches of magic as the central gaze. It’s quite a useful little trick.
Patrick, nah, we’re talking about two different populations. Overt Satanists are one group, and Neopagans who have slid over into demonolatry and evil magic are a different group. As for the question of honesty, I tend to assume that no decision is entirely honest or entirely dishonest — it’s always somewhere in the middle, though it can be biased to one side or the other. Thus someone who’s genuinely moving toward conversion might feel a need to spice up their testimonials, and someone who’s largely fraudulent still chose Christianity over the other options, and that very often shows some degree of hidden longing.
Hosea, thanks for this.
Rajarshi, ha! Nicely done.
Archivist, so noted. Since the case remains open, that’s all speculative — but somebody went to the trouble of paying for a professional hit on the man. That was not an amateur killing. I didn’t find Ted Anton’s book at all hostile to Culianu, for what it’s worth.
Patricia M, about fracking time. The 501(c)3 exemption has been abused spectacularly in recent decades and it’s long past time those who aren;t following the laws should lose that exemption.
Ratter, funny. Thoughtful, but funny.
Neptunesdolphins, exactly. The good intentions of the bureaucrats pave a road going to a very familiar destination.
Jbucks, no, though I’ve read some other Ellul books. That sounds interesting.
Rajarshi # 178:
A very good tale from “the future”(I suppose won’t happen, like our “destiny” in the stars…).
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BK # 181:
“The best description I can currently think of is that I have something like a jazz mind: stuff comes out of a process I can’t consciously access, but I have to trust it.”
A good metaphor, the “jazz mind”.
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jbucks # 186:
“Ellul claims that people therefore want propaganda, and they are willing participants in it.”
It’s a provocative phrase, of course. I think people wants “their people” propaganda, so they usually reads and watch the same news with the sam ideological bias to avoid the “horror vacui” of being confronted with other kinds of propaganda, or “worse” yet, no propaganda at all.
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Neptunesdolphin # 187:
Thanks for your comment, yes, it’s curious the origin of accounting as the first sign of civilization.
@carlos
Those chatbots aren’t lying, they aren’t doing anything other than finding (what a few engineers consider) the most statistically valid response to your prompt. If they are lying, it’s because the people they have been trained to mimic (Redchan and 4dit), lie. Constantly. But essentially these models are no different than the animals, it’s all stimulus-lookup table-response and not much more. The lookup tables are huge and there is something to be said about a quantitative change turning into a qualitative change. But there’s not very much “thinking” going on. Although I suspect nvidia would disagree.
Never forget, you talk to one of those, you’re talking to a distilled version of Redchan and 4dit. Be careful what you ask of it.
>So in the interest of money stability
Excuse me while I go away and snicker uncontrollably. Monetary stability. You’re funny. Monetary stability…
Something that occurred to me last night that may or may not be related to the Spectacle: the difference between reality/appearance binary vs. the reality/appearance/subject ternary reminds me of the difference between Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of semiotics vs. C.S. Peirce’s theory.
In Saussure’s theory, there are two fundamental entities in producing meaning: the signified and the signifier. The latter is something (words, images, symbols, etc.) that represents the former. One of the chief problems of this theory is the question how the signifier represents the signified: what actually connects the word “cat” to the furry animal? This gap is what Jacques Derrida exploited to develop deconstruction, which leads fetishizes the signifier to the point that the signified almost drops out of the picture.
By contrast, C.S. Peirce’s theory resolves this tension by introducing a third entity. In addition to the object and the sign or representamen (his equivalent of the signified and signifier, respectively), Peirce’s system requires an interpretant: the meaning of the sign as interpreted by somebody or something. As he put it, a sign/representamen “is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity.” The interpretant thus bridges the gap between the signifier and the signified in a fairly obvious way: it’s precisely the interpreter’s understanding of the sign as referring to the object that connects the two.
I’m not sure how robustly this connects to the Spectacle, but the Situationists could not have been ignorant of Saussure, who seems to have been quite important among French intellectuals of the time, especially when Derrida hit the scene. From the more esoteric end, Peirce seems to have built up his system of objective idealism around his theory of semiotics.
i was laughing when I made it
laughter is often a motivator in what i do
the situationists would have us entertain ourselves if no one else
our entertainment doesn’t have to be left to the entertainment industrial complex spectacle
@Hosea #175
> You make an interesting observation, that “Westerners who study Eastern religions” tend to prioritize liberation above all the other goals. I wonder if that’s because it looks kind of like Salvation, so they somehow find it the best fit for their mental model of what “religion” should look like?
I think this is exactly it. Nirvana/moksha/enlightenment ends up filling the slot in their heads that heaven once filled — I know I’ve been guilty of this. (Thankfully almost nobody seems to take the classical Taoist goal of immortality literally, that would likely end up way worse.)
Speaking of enlightenment, I read a quote last night, attributed to Chogyam Trungpa, about it: “Better not to begin. Having started, better to finish.” Thankfully there are many levels of enlightenment where you can stop for a rest, because I think for a lot of us misguided Westerners, there’s an important level of enlightenment where you realize you don’t actually want enlightenment, at least not yet.
I too request a fifth Wednesday post comparing the concepts that underlie the Western occult tradition and those of esoteric Buddhism.
My god that sounds so much like a school assignment, but as a Westerner for whom esoteric Buddhism was more visible than Western occultism when I started practicing, I would be quite interested.
Ha, the duck/rabbit is nothing. Behold, fear the jackalope, wolpertinger and hasselbock! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackalope#:~:text=This%20article%20is%20about%20the,are%20made%20with%20deer%20antlers. I like the Drabbit personally as a name but it is taken.
@Scotlyn (#182):
I’ve come to think that often enough, the test is the actual lesson, which requires that you come to it unprepared.
@BK (#181):
Thanks so much for this. There seem to be many kinds of non-neurotypical people here. It seems that our host has built an online space where we can all feel comfortable.
And, too, perhaps it is the so-called “neurotypicals” who are also a minority (However large) overall, and the rest of us just try to talk in ways that make us seem to fit in with their “norms.”
why not a few more simple meme images feat deBored
https://imgflip.com/i/a8003r
https://imgflip.com/i/a80109
https://imgflip.com/i/a801rf
and one based on the SI take on ellul
https://imgflip.com/i/a804dq
plz circulate widely lullz
Hello Mr. Greer,
I would love to see an article on psychic self-defense/spiritual warfare/whatever else you want to call this concept.
I would especially love to know why you consider prayer to be insufficient and what people should do in addition to prayer. This seems like a topic that a lot of people are thinking about right now.
@ Robert Mathiesen
Thanks for that explanation. Your attitude towards humanity seems well-worth emulating and it’s also quite easy to access from a narrative standpoint.
@BK
Thank you for sharing your experience. It seems there are so many more ways for people to think than most of us have acknowledged, and it’s tragically under-studied. I get the same excitement hearing out the different perspectives that I did reading Benjamin Whorf re: how linguistic patterns either affect or reflect the way other cultures perceive the world differently. This is of course another level, beyond language.
What struck me reading these two comments is that both of you feel a similar isolation from groups. I think very strongly in words and narratives (though I sense and understand a lot of things wordlessly before formulating words and stories to describe them). Yet I also feel like I can’t relate to most people and am left standing on the outside due to the fact that the stories I see unfolding are often very different, irreconcilable, with the popular stories. This sometimes benefits me, and sometimes is to my detriment.
Yet it seems like difficulty with popular conceptions can be a feature for anyone who uses whatever cognitive style they have to take a hard look at what’s going on. I imagine that most of the people who hold those conceptions dearly also suffer quietly from them, but they’re committed to the benefits they feel they receive, or have trouble imagining an alternative despite feeling the incongruency.
Hi JMG
A great essay on the Spectacle! Thank you!
@Slithy Toves, et al:
It’s really good to see Charles Peirce and the subject of semiotics and his ternary logic presented here. To answer your question, yes, I think it does very much have a place in Situationism discussion. One of the members of the SI, Asger Jorn is credited with the term “triolectics” turning dialectics into a ternary and he made a note about a kind of mind game for three-sided football… (by which I mean soccer) and three-sided football is now actually being played in various places. Usually in anarchist circles.
I’ve been meaning to put up this article I wrote on The Power of Three: Ternary Logic, Triolectics, and Three Sided Football for awhile, and you got me moving. This originally appeared as part of my Cheap Thrill column in New Maps (which has impetus in Situationist thought among other things). It references Peirce, Bateson, Jorn and Three Sided Football… also, it should be noted that Peirce lived a life of what Hakim Bey (despite my yuck factor for him) usefully described as being “independently poor” aka downwardly mobile.
https://www.sothismedias.com/home/the-power-of-three-ternary-logic-triolectics-and-football
Hope everyone has a good weekend and thanks to anyone who takes the time to look at this.
#198 Robert M.
“I’ve come to think that often enough, the test is the actual lesson, which requires that you come to it unprepared.”
This reminds me of a verse from Wisława Szymborska, Nothing Twice:
Nothing can ever happen twice.
In consequence, the sorry fact is
that we arrive here improvised
and leave without the chance to practice.
Hi JMG,
This is a thought provoking post. Once laid out, it becomes obvious that how we are taught figure the world would have political elements mixed in. It makes me think of my father in law who is borderline obsessed with education and how educating children correctly (read the way he wants them educated) will save the world. It’s a political act molding how young minds perceive the world.
I vote for spiritual self defense / hygiene, especially for those lay people who have no contact or interest in magic. I am a practicing mage, but my family isn’t. Maybe there’s something my family and I can do together that isn’t blatantly magical?
Many thanks.
Hi JMG,
“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.”
This has come up before, how the opposed ends of a binary generally have a shared worldview that is bigger than the differences that create the opposition. Do you know of a term or concise phrase (in any language) that refers to that connection? I have been making note of examples of that whenever I see them, and the best I have been able to come up with is “consensus reality of opposing viewpoints” which doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.
Oddly enough, given the medieval obsession with finding and naming the middles that connect concepts, I haven’t run across any hint of this in Ramon Llull’s works (so far). He talks a lot about contrariety (which is roughly equivalent to a binary) and he has terms for all sorts of middles, but not the middle that connects the two halves of contrariety. This seems to be such a blind spot.
If this is out-of-bounds, I will understand if you (JMG) don’t put it through. That being said …
Since it appears a whole lot of folks are VERY interested in psychic self-defense. Being a regular reader since the post “Night Thoughts in HagsGate” over on the old blog, I will pretend to predict our host’s basic post on the subject.
1st (and foremost) would be a daily banishing ritual.
2nd would be to read Dion Fortune’s “Psychic Self-Defence” which is apparently now in the public domain. I downloaded a pdf of it here:
https://www.globalgreyebooks.com/psychic-self-defense-ebook.html
and plan to have read it by the end of the month.
3rd, and getting into more specifics: the salt-and-nail red amulet bag, a shallow dish of vinegar, a hoodoo bath and house-cleaning, all of which I recall as being in his Magic Monday FAQs page. I also recall our host recommending a small piece of sharp iron, like a sewing pin or small blade to pierce through glamours.
From my personal research, I’ll add in a small piece of tigers-eye for anyone who is/was in the military, a simple protection spell using a black candle, an enchanted mirror, or full-on witch’s bottle (which is a small jar of nails and/or small razor blade plus shards of a broken mirror, a bit of salt, and the spellcaster’s urine, to be buried in the corner of the property). If I could figure out what the movers labelled the box with my reference books and notes, I could have a whole lot more to offer because this has been something I’ve always took very seriously.
After all that, my vote for 5th Wednesday is still your thoughts on the (deafening!) silence of the USA’s upcoming 250th birthday. Why aren’t we starting to get some excitement and enthusiasm over this? It’s less than a year away now.
@Michael Martin
@JMG
Re: St. Cyprian
1. Are you implying that if Cyprian developed his own powers instead of flattering evil spirits to get favors, the Sign of the Cross moght have been less effective as protection?
2. Would Cyprian have become a demon if he continued to be an asset to them in this life? (I doubt he would have been given a high rank if he had become a demon.) Or were they lying about that?
3. Since you said Saturn rules the Qliphoth, might someone in good standing with Saturn (i.e. not me) banish demons by asking him to bind them?
4. Lastly, I am surprised that most Protestants don’t make the Sign of the Cross.
“no one ever seems to account for a nation’s public assets,”
How do you put a dollar value on the North Cascades National Park? Or the Colville National Forest? Or Palmyra Atoll? That’s also the problem with a wealth tax, stocks and bonds are quantifiable, but what does Zillow think your house is worth today?
“perhaps it is the so-called “neurotypicals” who are also a minority”
Typical can also mean average, as in the middle of a bell curve, and the normal distribution isn’t the only statistical distribution. There is also the chi-square and the Boltzmann distributions. If you want to meditate on the distinction between mean, median, and mode feel free.
“What this suggests is that bureaucratic thinking is not actually intelligent — it’s a process of generating some statistically likely sequence of words in response to a question. ”
In other words, AI. A question with constraints. In a bureaucracy the constraints are the in-house rules whether written or not. In AI the constraints are in the details of the prompt and the dataset.
As an Indian, I have often wondered why we never worked out the theories that Robert Fludd and Levi in the West built on the basis of the Diaphne. After all, they were this close to the truth, having worked out the theory of Maya, so why didn’t they work out the results that Levi mentions? I believed this is due to different expectations, but I still felt there was something weird about that.
Reading this essay, I think I finally understand. Just as Debord saw in Maya only a political tool – because he approached it from a political standpoint – likewise each person approaching Maya sees it in the context of what they are studying. Maya obstructs herself!
Robert Fludd and the Cabbalists were seeking power over reality, so in the diaphane they saw means of power. The yogis were seeking God, and in Maya they saw only the impediment to that goal. Debord sought his proletariat uprising thingy, so he saw only a political impediment. Behavioural psychologists seek out ways to maximize the output of professionals and teams by modulating their habits. So they see habits, pre-dispositions, etc.
This has been highly enlightening.
Slithy Toves # 194:
“One of the chief problems of this theory is the question how the signifier represents the signified: what actually connects the word “cat” to the furry animal?”
This question isn’t IMHO new, I think one of the Ancient Greeks, I think he was Protagoras (Am I right?) who said a lot of centuries ago: “When I say the word ‘cart’, there’s not a real cart running in my mouth”(it was more or less this same idea). Nothing new under the sun…
*****************************************
#196:
“Better not to begin. Having started, better to finish.”
A wise thought, me think, Chogyam Trungpa was right in this quote.
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Ratter Ralrephith #201:
thank you again for your links to Situ memes!
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Justin Patrick Moore #204:
Thank you for your link to your essay about the power of Three: very interesting. Indeed, 3 is a magical number…
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KM Gunn Art # 208:
Thanks for your advices for psychic self-defense. I see you’re an advantaged follower of John!
**************
“my vote for 5th Wednesday is still your thoughts on the (deafening!) silence of the USA’s upcoming 250th birthday. Why aren’t we starting to get some excitement and enthusiasm over this? It’s less than a year away now.”
I respect your vote, but I’d like to write briefly now about that strange silence, from my non-American view. I think a national birthday is a celebration for everybody to be united, but it seems to my foreigner point of view (at least what I see in the Anglosphere news/Spectacle) that USA aren’t very united since some years ago. I see too much tension and polarization not only in politicians, but in the social media. Reasons to have arrived to this situation would be better known by you, the Americans, and maybe it would be discussed in a special post…I think if people are angry each other maybe they don’t have anything to celebrate.
I have also noticed that a lot of Western converts to Buddhism are more obsessed with enlightenment, though I’d argue that they don’t really believe in a enlightenment after death. Its all very secular materialistic for a lot of them, very much this life.
Enlightenment is important, but most lay Buddhists worry about merit and dana and a more favorable birth. Or they hope to be reborn in the pure land like me. Enlightenment is usually the concern of monks.
If I may, I also vote for a comparison between the concepts that underlie the Western occult tradition and those of esoteric Buddhism. I am fascinated to see the similarities and differences.
I wrote a poem without words,
It’s here inside my head.
Such a pity I can not
Tell you what it said.
Mary,
I was referring to how family and friends interpreted that remark, not people online. I was incredulous that people could interpret Trump’s comment that way, but they clearly did then and still do.
It baffles me, as these aren’t stupid people. It’s just the way they’re configured to see the world politically is very specific.
I noticed a lot of my female family members started to use the term old white men derisively over the same time, which really bothered me because it’s hate speech.
“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”
Based on their experience in WW2, Soviet military doctrine assumed that many/most of those properly trained on weapons would be lost early in any serious war and they would need to be replaced with folks not nearly so well trained and that weapons should be suitable for those barely trained replacements. That seems to be how Russia operates now as well.
Many pro-Russian commentators on the current war in Ukraine have found much of American and Western weaponry wildly overdesigned. Some pro-Ukrainian commentators have said much the same thing, though with disappointment.
@Kyle (#203 & #205):
I’m delighted to earn that you’ve been reading Benjamin Lee Whorf. I was introduced to him back in 1964, in Dell Hymes’ course on Language and Culture at UC Berkeley, and I am probably not exaggerating when I say that no other writer has ever played a greater role in my own intellectual development than he did.
I think you’re right on target when you say that “most of the people who hold those [popular] conceptions dearly also suffer quietly from them, but they’re committed to the benefits they feel they receive …”
And thank you for quoting Wisława Szymborska. I’d never heard of her, and need to remedy that. How did you happen to come upon her work?
Thinking about words and thinking — and thanks to those who have discussed their own thoughts — I think it comes down to what your definition of “thinking” is.
Most of what goes on in my head I could not in all honesty consider thinking. It’s mostly reacting, applying known routines to known problems. Want a cup of coffee? Okay, weigh beans, boil water, etc. I try to focus on what I’m doing but often my mind will wander during the process. It’s not thinking, it’s replaying scenarios of what has happened or might happen, like being the writer-director of a movie.
Where words are needed is when you try to formalize what goes on in your head, in a process similar to mathematics. Two plus two will always equal four, but without the invention and definition of numbers and operators, there will be no way to concretize the fact. Similarly, you need words to clarify and fix your thoughts.
For instance, experience might have taught you that honesty is the best policy, but until you can put “honesty is the best policy” in words and store somewhere in your head, you would probably dither under questioning as you frantically generate and evaluate scenarios of outcomes of each possible answer.
the problem of looking in the middle of someone’s forehead to throw them off so they back away, is that you can’t READ their eyes.
as a runaway girl looking into strangers’ eyes became most important for catching the barest flicker of ill intent. when i’d heard that white people were telling their girls not to look grown up male strangers in the eyes, i thought, “that just makes any man will ill intentions feel free to objectify her because she is treating HIM like an object, too.”
my direct eye contact is what throws off skittish people but yes, some people up for devilment may connect and lock on and LIKE that i see them and YES i have courted stalkers that way by accident. but they are usually the passive aggressive kind who just want to be their audience.
THAT is why I want psychic self defense as it’s used in LIVE ACTION real life and not just banishing rituals, which feel like crossing my fingers in the real world of “all plans go out the window once you get punched.”
that’s why I liked the other commenter’s (Dave in WA) idea of merging it with how to BUILD and CREATE from the place of being a scrapper low on society’s totem pole. Because while I’m optimistic in our longer term, I’m still confused in the short term. It’s the REAL crux of the biscuit to me as I’m dealing with a subset of The Devouring Mother Archetype, which i’m now dubbing, The Devouring Little Sister Archetype.
i’m struggling mightily with writing legally about this so that i may hope to be even moderately SEEN or UNDERSTOOD by the courts in the first place, but i also see it as a necessary challenge in my ability to simplify what has been my entire world here in Mordor so that i may distance from the edges, make it small enough to mock it, ridicule it a la Mel Brooks:
“I think you can bring down totalitarian governments faster by using ridicule than you can with invective.”
Carlos @169 and JMG. Like Carlos, I hope this comment is not subject to your AI discussion ban. Here goes:
Yep. In my feeds, I’ve been getting an increasing amount of news stories that are outright fiction, such as supposed deaths of celebrities, supposed legal developments in notorious criminal cases and such. These seem to be increasing in frequency in tandem with other obviously AI generated youtube content, such as human interest stories that are obviously AI generated, typically involving bizarre story elements such as a character’s unexplained foreknowledge, or unmotivated cruelty of a child towards a parent.
This AI crappification of internet content is getting so dense that it now requires me to screen before clicking, and to vet any new sources. I’ve gotten pretty good at discerning from thumbnails and titles what not to trust. My trusted sources, and human sources generally, show up less and less in my feed, and I’m simply learning to disregard the feed, which is probably a good thing.
I understand the big Tube wants to re-direct views away from human content creators to its own look-alike slop so as to avoid having to pay royalties to actual creators. Human-created content will in turn steadily disappear to the extent the big Tube succeeds. I think it’s incumbent on us users to withhold our clicks from this slop if we want to preserve human-generated content.
–Lunar Apprentice
I’ll vote for spiritual/psychic self defense.
Cristophe #100
> demonology
I feel the need to STUDY demonology with the result being I am better able to counter it. I have been unable to find the be-all-end-all book on demons and demonology. It feels like it is a taboo subject. Demons are found throughout time in every society, taking different forms.
In 1990, a demon entered me at one of my weakest times ever. Through the demon’s influence, as I look back, I did a lot of damage to myself and others. It took about five years in the 1990s to rid myself of the demon. Then between 2008 and 2016, I did major inner and outer work in the state of regret and repentance. One doesn’t need Christianity to repent; acts of repentance are independent of religion. Christians think that they have the corner on repentance, but they don’t. Anyone who truly regrets can institute and design their own plan of repentance. Mine was a secular repentance. As for major religion, I am Buddhist, so my repentance had a Buddhist flavor to it, if not strictly secular. No-one knew about my years of repentance except my husband, who was baffled (he is a materialist).
I would like to see people able to get a 2-year certificate, a 4-year bachelors degree, or a 2-3 year masters degree in demonology. As a culture, we need to know more about demons, and not just through the lens of Christianity. I will continue to look for books on the subject of demons and demonology from all cultures, time-independent. I can attest that demons are real.
I need, and extend the “I” to “we need” to know more about demons in order that when one walks by, we can recognize it for what it is, and not let it reek havoc in our homes, neighborhood, municipalities, state, principalities, countryside, nations. And they do flit by without us knowing. They cruise for victims; they are opportunists. Demons are invisible criminals who walk through neighborhoods and buildings everywhere.
It is valid to want to know more about protective spells against demons. I have a silent prayer where I open the prayer, say protective things regarding my circle of friends, then end the prayer. Simple as that. So far, it keeps away demons. I haven’t felt one around for a couple years (when I inadvertently invited my now-deceased mother-in-law “Komoda“ dragon) into our home. Big mistake. Because of my earlier experience of my 1990s demon, I recognized the demon in her three months in. It took another three months to expel her and her demon, but expel her I did. Again, my husband was clueless.
Demons can enter anyone and stay for years. Secular folks are particularly enterable/susceptible, because it is not within their nine-dots that demons exist. When one stays for decades, it becomes part of the person’s personality, and is difficult to distinguish where the person ends and the demon begins.
I am not Christian but years ago I was tooling around Edzy, and came across a 4×2-inch Germanic crucifix holding several yellow citrine stones, and purchased it. The crucific looks old, at least a hundred years, maybe two-hundred or even three-hundred. It feels ancient, and has good vibes. Anyone who knows me knows that I, for the most part, askew jewelry. Throughout this Komoda dragon ordeal, I had the crucifix displayed in an out-of-the-way cranny, and that piece girded me.
I do a secular protective prayer at least once a week as I think of it.
So, I vote for JMG, on the last Wednesday, to write about protective spells✨and, if possible, spend time teaching about demons😈👿👹. Times are getting rougher, and we need other-worldly help.
💨🦎💨✨💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
I’m pretty sure psychic self-defense is going to handily win this month, but I thought of a potential topic for future fifth Wednesdays that the commentariat might be interested in:
Pick the article or blog post from the past you most wish you could rewrite with your current knowledge, and rewrite it.
Northwind Grandma,
JMG’s book, Monsters, contains a useful discussion of demons as well as a bibliography of related books which I found useful.
222! (comments) i’ve been seeing 444’s a lot everywhere.
okay, to clarify self defense psychically. at which POINT? what has been tried FIRST? what outcome do you hope to get??? so many assumptions that must be outed and addressed because there’s a world of answer in just leading UP to psychic self defense.
the marriage of what to DO is natural because in the REAL world is where you’ll need new defense and really complex unnatural-feeling tactics as you go another way. colt legs of newness. no one’s suave first date ever.
art and fear.
anyhow, as we create we are outed and will be beset upon by the zombies vampires and cannibals. i already AM. but i snapped and the terror suddenly became FUNNY.
and i have no idea how exactly i got here to this thinking. what if i forget and can’t find my way back? there may be a bouquet of reasons but regardless they are gifts.
if i can laugh at it i can drown it in a tub.
And the votes have again been tabulated.
Slithy, hmm! I think I’m going to have to read some Peirce.
Celadon, I encountered the jackalope in person when I was ten. No, it wasn’t alive at the time, but the stuffed replica was impressive!
Stephen, I consider prayer to be insufficient because I’ve seen far too many cases in which prayer turned out to be insufficient. That’s true of most emergencies, of course — if you’re in a ship that’s sinking, putting on a life preserver and getting into a lifeboat are normally considered helpful steps, in addition to prayer! Remember that magic is not supernatural — it simply relates to aspects of nature our current materialist ideologies don’t make room for — and so practical steps, in addition to prayer, are called for. As for what those are — why, it looks as though I’ll be writing about that later this month.
Industrial, I don’t know of such a term. As for Llull, that’shis great weakness. His thought put far too much attention into contrarieties and oppositions and far too little into ternary resolutions.
KM, I’ll have quite a bit more to say than that!
Patrick, (1) if Cyprian had been a practitioner of the high magic of his time, he wouldn’t have accepted money from a young man who wanted to get Faustina to sleep with him — that was purely something that goetes did. The theurgists of his time had a very strict sense of morality: that is to say, they had a clue. (2) No, he wouldn’t have become a demon, just one more of their chew toys. (3) Say what? No, Saturn doesn’t rule the Qlippoth. You’re confusing unrelated systems.
Siliconguy, well, yes, that was my point.
Rajarshi, I’d be very surprised if some of your Tantric masters hadn’t worked out all these same points in their own way. Based on what I’ve read, some of them had a first-rate grasp of what we in the West would call practical magic.
Erika, it’s more than that. A competent mage can use direct eye contact to project thoughts and feelings. Focusing on the third eye point instead of the eyes themselves blocks that — if you have any psychism yourself, it allows you to sense what they really intend, not what they want to make you think, and it also denies them the feeling of dominance they get when you look down or away. Your comment about ridicule, otoh, is spot on — that’s why they’re arresting people in Britain right now for circulating memes. The government knows that it can’t survive ridicule.
Lunar, can you turn off that news feed, and simply visit a few curated news aggregators from time to time? That’s worked for me, at least so far.
Slithy, oog. I hope that doesn’t win, because I’d have to spend a couple of months reading through the last twenty years of blog posts to find one I’d like to rewrite. There aren’t many.
>How do you put a dollar value on the North Cascades National Park? Or the Colville National Forest? Or Palmyra Atoll? That’s also the problem with a wealth tax, stocks and bonds are quantifiable, but what does Zillow think your house is worth today?
It’s only worth what the next guy is willing to pay for it. And if nobody is allowed to buy it, then no price can be discovered and nobody knows what price to set it at. 1 and 100,000,000,000,000 are both valid. Even when someone sets a price for something (like with market cap), if the company sold off all its shares on the open market, so many people would be front running it, that the price would go close to zero quickly and the company would get a small fraction of that vaunted “market cap”. Ironic when a company has to sell itself, it rarely goes to the market but makes some backroom deal and barters directly with some buyer. And you notice that the buyer never pays market cap price either?
You also see that with big commodity transactions – you go straight to the farmer or the miner, you bypass the market. Markets have their place, but they are not good for everything, even for basic capitalist stuff. Yeah, you heard me.
As far as Zillow goes, if they just printed the last trade, I’d take them more seriously. As it is, I think they pull some sort of algorithm out of one of their orifices and make up numbers based on that? I think they are a site to make homeowners feel good and not much else? Golly gee, Zillow says my house is worth X dollarydoos, yippee.
@Martin Back (#218) wrote:
“Where words are needed is when you try to formalize what goes on in your head, in a process similar to mathematics. Two plus two will always equal four, but without the invention and definition of numbers and operators, there will be no way to concretize the fact. Similarly, you need words to clarify and fix your thoughts.
For instance, experience might have taught you that honesty is the best policy, but until you can put “honesty is the best policy” in words and store somewhere in your head, you would probably dither under questioning as you frantically generate and evaluate scenarios of outcomes of each possible answer.”
That’s just plain not at all how it works for me. Words — more precisely, sentences or verbal propositions (or narratives) — are not, for me, anything remotely like mathematical or logical symbolism. They don’t “clarify and fix” my thoughts at all. Rather, they muddle them to a greater or lesser degree, depending on what I’m thinking about. Internal charts, mechanisms and models (sometimes of embodied bodily motions) are much clearer for me than any set of sentences ever can be.
Really, the breadth of human experience shows that there are not any universal methods of substantial thought used by all humans. MInds and thinking don’t seem to work in the same ways for all thoughtful people, not even on the most basic level.
As I see it, language is simply a makeshift “kludge” that evolved for human survival and human social purposes. It is, as the old quip goes, a tool “good enough for government work,” but a fairly shoddy tool nonetheless. The fact that it is the only tool many humans have for thinking doesn’t mean that it’s not a kludge.
Scotlyn #140: re “I’ve never figured out why nations stick to providing annual public profit and loss statements, but never a public balance sheet.”
Oddly enough part of New Zealand’s neoliberal turn in the 80s and 90s included introducing proper accounting for government, replacing the former cost accounting, including the statement of financial position (aka balance sheet) – see https://www.treasury.govt.nz/publications/year-end/financial-statements-2024 for an example.
@JMG (#226):
C. S. Peirce is well worth the effort it takes to understand him, and his thoughts ranged over a wide expanse of subjects. His published writings fill eight very hefty volumes, so it’s a major project.
[FWIW, people who had known the man himself tell me that he pronounced his surname “Purse,” not “Peerce.” It’a an old Yankee surname, and some of them were not, and sometimes still are not, pronounced much like they are spelled. Putnam is another of those old surnames; some Putnams used to pronounce it as “Putman.”]
Martin Back,
A poem without words resides in me,
It’s here inside my heart.
I didn’t write it at all,
It was there before the start.
ah! okay, okay. that was an excellent answer i can really think on. thank you. thank you. and yes i’m getting some of what you mean regarding figuring out what they really intend. okay… much to try out. thank you very much.
x
“not what they want to make you think, and it also denies them the feeling of dominance they get when you look down or away”
that’s interesting and good because IGNORING wasn’t working but it’s because i was LOOKING AWAY. it made the one woman more jumpy and much meaner. i didn’t understand that. but the moment i look directly AT, they wither. every last one of ’em.
@220 Lunar Apprentice
On YouTube, you can pay attention to your subscriptions feed instead of the main feed.
Robert M, well, I’ve survived Hegel, not to mention Mary Anne Atwood’s famously murky text on alchemy, and Theosophical literature is light reading for me, so I may just give it Peirce a shot. Oddly, one of the few things I know about him is that Aleister Crowley praised his work and even used the right term — “Pragmaticism,” as distinct from Pragmatism — for his philosophy.
Erika, exactly. Next time, try focusing on their third eye and watch what happens. The stronger and fiercer your focus, the more dramatic the results tend to be.
Lunar Apprentice #220:
The AI crappification of Internet is a checked fact IMHO too. More and more you can find indeed bizarre and fake real stories like you’ve written. It’s going to be a problem in the near future to find real human stories and videos…oh wait! It’s already a problem.
@Robert M #200:
It’s indeed hard to tell how large or small the fraction of ‘normal’ people is, whether here or in general. People just don’t talk about these things, and mostly just assume that everybody has the same stuff going on inside. It took me many years to find out that what I have is different from the people around me, because of that.
Even though my mind is very different from what is considered normal, I’m also quite intelligent (by their standards) and can manage reasonably well socially, so I was never not-normal enough to get some kind of diagnosis.
But still, things were often quite difficult, mostly because I don’t share people’s assumptions on how things should be done. It’s a bit like moving to a foreign country where you understand the language, but have no idea of their habits and morals, and all that…
–bk
@ JMG # 226
I actually do not know much about the Tantrika, since it has never been an area of interest for me. I do know that they are a sect that thrives on breaking the norms set by society, and deliberately expose initiates to objects of horror or disgust to break them out of the usual mold of value judgements that constitutes Maya for them.
I suppose the advent of public schools has made the dissemination of Political Maya – The Spectacle – among children even more easy? Then there must have been a tremendous uniformity in the Maya that people see experience life through since Gutenberg’s time, steadily growing outward from Europe. People outside of this cultural influence experience the world very individually, through what each person personally recalls from the myths of childhood. People inside this cultural influence have a common layer of Maya to rely upon for their day-to-day figuration.
As of today, almost the entire world belongs inside this cultural sphere. We have a shared Maya and there are people trying to influence that shared Maya using Spectacular means to control Narrative and Legitimacy.
@Martin Back #218:
” Want a cup of coffee? Okay, weigh beans, boil water, etc”
Do you mean that you literally have a voice in your head that says these things? I just make coffee, and have complete and utter silence in my head when doing that.
“Similarly, you need words to clarify and fix your thoughts”
For me it’s very much not like that. Words are a very weak representation of what’s happening inside, a bit like a weak cup of coffee compared to the beans you had before.
–bk
>I think it’s incumbent on us users to withhold our clicks from this slop if we want to preserve human-generated content.
In general, the required IQ to be on the internet is going up and at a pretty brisk rate. If you fall below that level, you are prey for various sorts of things. Already there are millions of people who have no business being on the internet. At some point that will climb to 100s of millions and maybe even billions.
Some days you wonder “Do the Amish have it right?”
Thanks for the remarks about the ‘between the eyes’ technique, I think that will be quite useful in the (near) future,
I don’t know how this goes with other combinations of male / female, but this is the only one I’ve experienced. Among men, looking each other in the eye is a basic way to asses the strength of the other, and also to try to assert dominance.
Looking away shows weakness, which can be the right thing to do in a dangerous situation, just like you don’t look a snarling dog straight in the eye, but it can also make the other one think they have you cornered, so they feel free to attack.
But to keep looking could also be the way to diffuse the situation, because you are showing strength, and that gives the other one doubts if they can really beat you.
It’s really just the end result that tells you if you saw the situation correctly or not, so to have a third choice (where have I read that before…) is very nice.
–bk
@ Other Owen #192
“But essentially these models are no different than the animals, it’s all stimulus-lookup table-response and not much more.”
Well, I do hope that you might consider changing your mind about animals, with the realisation that animals really are SO much more (than stimulus-lookup table-response, etc).
Animals live, machines exist.
These are fundamentally non-interchangeable realities.
@ Robert Mathiesen #199
Thank you. I think you are right. Possibly, also, there simply IS no adequate way to prepare. 🙂
PS, since I am here, I just want to say how much I appreciate every one of your comments. They always contain some tidbit for thinking on/with.
@ Industrial Alchemy #207
‘“consensus reality of opposing viewpoints” which doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.’
Lol! I’m thinking Consensus Reality of Antagonistic Perspectives… could be shortened to CRAP… 😉
@ Kyle in response to R Mathiesen – thank you for that “nothing ever happens twice” rhyme. 🙂
@ Justin Patrick Moore # 204
One of my personal tricks for neutralizing binaries is the “Opposite of the Intersection”. It goes like this: first, identify the attributes that the two extreme poles of the binary have in common. This is the Intersection. Second, find something that is the polar opposite of the common attributes. This is the Opposite of the Intersection.
For instance, both capitalism and communism are based on the premise that capital needs to be shared by means of an intermediary – the state, for communists, and the legal entity of the corporation (or company), for the capitalists. But you can remove the sharing altogether, by having local production facilities inside the household of individual workers which they can own. This is the idea behind Gandhi’s cottage industries, and also behind freelance software development (where the individually owned laptop is the production facility).
This method doesn’t take me to the center of the spectrum and it doesn’t help me to balance the scales. Instead, it jumps me right off the spectrum and guides me to a third point somewhere not on the line joining the poles of the binary. I can then connect this point to both the other points by means of new lines, each of which is a spectrum. Now I have a tripolar field of ideas.
“Returning to the past”(Retro-Spectacle 2024)
I’ve been in my store room because I had to move some teapots and cups from there. When I’ve started to get hold of it, I’ve seen tableware was wrapped in old newspapers sheets which were from the last year. Well, I’ve read with some curiosity some of the outdated news, and I’ve found the expired Spectacle (or not so expired) in all its glory:
-National page: Spanish Conservatives point fingers against Sanchez woke government for his corruption cases at courts, with ill-disguised happiness they reclaim to the government to celebrate early elections (in 2025 the same “socialist” government keeps ruling Spain in spite of ever more heated corruption denounciations by the Right Wing…).
-International page:
Trump predicts if he doesn’t win USA elections, it will be a blood bath in his country (well, he won indeed, so there wasn’t any blood bath not at all).
The best international news: an interview with Macron, who says “Europeans mustn’t be afraid of fighting Russia, because it’s a mediocre power, far less than the economic wealth of France or Germany…”(this “economical” argument hasn’t convinced Putin to surrender by now to the NATO, and Ukraine with all the EU help hasn’t won yet the Russians today, “mysteriously”).
I only can tell you’ll, to finish this return to the recent past, that Spectacle of MSM gets old fast sometimes, but sometimes I think the news are in the “Groundhog Day” without changing very much in time.
—————————————————————————————————————
BK # 237:
“But still, things were often quite difficult, mostly because I don’t share people’s assumptions on how things should be done. It’s a bit like moving to a foreign country where you understand the language, but have no idea of their habits and morals, and all that…”
I feel the same sometimes yet, though I’ve managed in the last years to sound more social with other people…Your metaphore is quite fit to me too.
—————————————————————————————————————————-
Rajarshi # 238:
“Then there must have been a tremendous uniformity in the Maya that people see experience life through since Gutenberg’s time, steadily growing outward from Europe.”
…And the worst of it has came with the modern visual MSM, and then with the social media (apparently DIY Spectacle) in the last decades).
@rajarshi #238: You have a point about the effect of public education, but I think rural, oral society has pretty strong means to encourage uniformity of action and word. It is hard to maintain independence of thought if everybody arounds you acts and speaks within the same framework. And the printed word can give you access to thinkers from other times and places.
Bk #239: Words are not all the same, at least to me. A sentence thought up by me (or anybody else) on a random day, as a first attempt to understand something, will almost always be weak coffee. But some lines are stronger – does the poem by the Polish poetess above have an effect on you ( even though it may be translated)? Charles Williams’ line “all lies in a passion of patience” hit me the first time I read it. And some lines from liturgy seem to grow stronger over the centuries.
Or are all words weak for you? I am asking out of real interest.
Maybe OT: but somebody ran a numerology check on the year 2025, which came out as 9: the end of something. Counting backwards, of course, we get 2017 – the year of Trumps’s first inauguration. For what that’s worth.
@Rajarshi #245
I very much like your method and your examples. Thank you for chiming in. I also ver very much like your notion of a “tripolar field of ideas” … this resonates with some of the things I picked up from reading / watching / listening to the late David Lynch and his ideas about “the field” as it relates to creativity.
I wrote about those fields earlier this year in this music review for The Noise Fields:
https://igloomag.com/reviews/p-st-the-noise-fields-silent
Hope to see more people taking up Ghandian economic ideas too.
@Lunar Apprentice #220: and the Bog Tube has thereby signed its own death warrant. The verdict? Suicide.
@Erika Lopez about laughing at them – too true! I remember Alice in Wonderland defusing something scary with “Why —- you’re nothing but a pack of cards!” Thanks for this!
@BK (#237 & #239):
So true! It also took me many years, and things were often quite difficult. I, too, had to grow up in a world that always felt wholly foreign and alien. But we managed, you and I both.
And, like you, I have “complete and utter silence” inside my head, and I find it very restful. My wife does have a never-ending flow of words inside her head, which sometimes take control of her thinking. She often says how much she envies my inner silence, and would relish the restfulness that it brings. Words and sentences are indeed like cups of disappointingly weak coffee for me. They are barely adequate for living my life.
@Scotlyn (#242 & #243) wrote: “animals really are SO much more (than stimulus-lookup table-response, etc). Animals live, machines exist. These are fundamentally non-interchangeable realities.”
Truth, this! For decades now many animal-behavior scientists have been running experiments and doing field-work that make this very point. My wife (who is a primatologist) and I are good friends with one of them, Irene Pepperberg, whose work with parrots is meticulous and decisive.
And thank you, Scotlyn. I, too, would say the same about your comments here. Excellent food for thought!
@Aldarion (#248):
Sentences do indeed have their uses. I keep something like a “Commonplace Book” in a folder on my computer. It contains other peoples’ sentences that have hit me between the eyes when I have read or heard them, with notes of who first said (or wrote) them. Here are a few of them:
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority., still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.” — Lord Acton
“Barbarism is the natural state of mankind.” . . . . . “Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must ultimately always triumph.” — Robert E. Howard
“Be kind, for everyone is fighting a hard battle.” — “Ian McLaren” [John Watson]
“Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made” [Aus so krummem Holze, woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz gerades gezimmert werden] — Immanuel Kant
“The world wants to be deceived” [Die Welt will betrogen sein]. — Sebastian Frank, riffing off Sebastian Frank’s “Ship of Fools.”
“The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” — J. B. S. Haldane
“I am, by calling, a dealer in words; and words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind. Not only do words infect, ergotise, narcotise, and paralyse, but they enter into and colour the minutest cells of the brain, very much as madder mixed with a stag’s food at the Zoo colours the growth of the animal’s antlers. Moreover, in the case of the human animal, that acquired tint, or taint, is transmissible.” — Rudyard Kipling [italics added]
So, to answer your question, most words are weak, but some well-crafted ones are very strong indeed. Obviously, which ones are strong, which weak, will vary from one person to another. Since I am a congenital pessimist, a grim old man (as I used to put it), anti-optimistic words are far stronger than optimistic ones for me.
@ Aldarion # 247
I didn’t actually think of that last part. I was so fixated on the fact that Gutenberg’s press brought about church schools and then public schools that I glossed over the part where the widespread availability of books made it easy for people to read and acquire ideas at their own pace.
So depending on how people treat books, they can end up becoming mechanical zombies emulating an ideology, or they can become vibrant individuals. Of course, what determines the variety of a culture’s reading habits is the culture itself, and has to do with their perception of books, and this introduces feedback effects into the Maya game.
“But you can remove the sharing altogether, by having local production facilities inside the household of individual workers which they can own. This is the idea behind Gandhi’s cottage industries, and also behind freelance software development (where the individually owned laptop is the production facility).”
Mao tried cottage iron smelters during the Great Leap Forward. It didn’t work. Feel free to figure out how to put an aluminum smelter in your house. Keep in mind it’s an around the clock operation. So is producing silicon for solar panels. If you want to make the other variety of solar panel how much cadmium and tellurium do you want about the place given both of those elements are toxic?
“rural, oral society has pretty strong means to encourage uniformity of action and word. It is hard to maintain independence of thought if everybody arounds you acts and speaks within the same framework. ”
Rural culture is not as forgiving of misconceptions of the nature of reality as the artificial constructs of a city. The framework doesn’t care about your gender, ideology, or independence of thought. See any number of idiots with chainsaws videos on YouTube.
I apologise if this is too off-topic, but Robert Mathiesen’s #228 made me look up “good enough for government work” (though I really should’ve guessed what it means). I’ve found this charming article:
https://www.fedmanager.com/news/reclaiming-good-enough-for-government-work
The last paragraph is particularly funny:
> [F]ederal managers have faced difficult challenges—threats to due process, threats to pay and benefits, and diminished resources. But through it all, the resilient workforce has remained true to its calling and its mission, rising to the challenge to perform its exceptional work to the very best of its ability. Work that was deemed “good enough for government work.” That work is still being done today; we just don’t appreciate it as such anymore. Much of it seems taken for granted. But at FMA we will do our utmost to restore the luster to the phrase “good enough for government work.”
It’s astonishing. They really don’t understand that improving government work’s reputation might mean, ya know, improving government work.
The Other Owen #227:
> It’s only worth what the next guy is willing to pay for it.
But now we’re back to the theory of value discussion of the Open Post, aren’t we? That’s clearly an accurate description of what it costs, but “X being worth Y amount of money” is another conflation of value and price—one not committed singularly by you, of course, but ingrained into the English language.
—David P.
@ BK #239
> ” Want a cup of coffee? Okay, weigh beans, boil water, etc”
I didn’t express myself clearly. These are not verbalized. Either I feel I would like coffee, or it’s the time of day my routine is to have coffee, and I go through the motions of weighing, boiling etc more or less on autopilot. No words involved. Much of my day is composed of similar routines that need no words.
If there’s a problem, for instance I’ve run out of coffee, I’d run through alternative scenarios silently and choose a course of action. No words required.
Someone who grows up on a desert island who never hears spoken words obviously has to function without language. To what extent would their mental life be stunted? I’m sure there would be some effect, but I’m not sure what.
#217 @ Robert M.
I’m also a neophyte to her work. My introduction was to that exact line in a very random circumstance, which is where I make all my best introductions. It was quoted by a student in a conversation during a Zoom lecture by my movement coach Ido Portal, during a discussion of things like preparedness for activities and improvisation, the point being that to some extent there is nothing we are preparing for and each act is its own culmination. Although learning to handle novel situations and change between them based on past experience is getting at that concept on the second level. sort of like how Learning 2 for Gregory Bateson is learning how to learn. We never get to practice the individual units of learning since you can’t step in the same river twice (context differs even in something as simple as answering ‘What’s the capitol of Idaho?’) but we do get to practice learning how to learn which allows us to make a better “first effort” in the future to some degree.
Is there anything I’m supposed to think or project as I look at other’s third eye? I had another neighbor go off on me the other night but it’s all gotten so absurd I was sweet as I was trying not to laugh as she’d totally gone ghetto black girl on me and I’m not afraid of that. My landlord set it up giving her my driveway, and the Brazilians are spreading stories. My own website I’m sure isn’t helping but that’s nothing new.
So I’m very much in play right now and I’ve started dion fortune’s book and random acts told me to read Mind Power, which I will.
But what do I think while focusing on third eye???
By the way, all here, I am optimistic even in the face of this unhinged madness because it’s a sign they’re wobbly and scared. I just need to know what to do besides mock it and sing out loud wherever I go.
They just watch me ride up with bitter seethi g hate that I can feel. So I keep singing.
JMG,
“I don’t know of such a term. As for Llull, that’shis great weakness. His thought put far too much attention into contrarieties and oppositions and far too little into ternary resolutions.”
Thanks, I guess I’ll stick with my clunky phrase then! Although, it occurs to me that tweaking one word would at least give me a usable acronym: Consensus Reality of Opposing Worldviews, CROW. I also rather like Scotlyn’s CRAP suggestion that I just saw when I came to post this, lol.
It’s true that Llull never makes much of an attempt to resolve his binaries, but his system is very good at making them visible, which is a necessary first step. And there’s nothing in his system to prevent a modern student of the Lullian Art from taking that next step and analyzing those newfound binaries for ternary ways to resolve them…
“Someone who grows up on a desert island who never hears spoken words obviously has to function without language. To what extent would their mental life be stunted? I’m sure there would be some effect, but I’m not sure what.”
The results are pretty sad. They are called feral children. Apparently humans are so language dependent that our brains don’t develop properly without it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child)
JMG – “… even the most repellent ideology occasionally has a useful idea. It’s precisely by seeing past the revulsion and harvesting the good ideas that repellent ideologies can be neutered and deprived of what little appeal they have.”
Indeed. And not only does it effectively neuter the repellent ideology. The act of applying analysis without emotion to the ideas to separate the useful parts is very good for mental clarity. Elevating one however briefly to the Mental.
Rajarshi, that’s specifically the left-hand or Vamachara tantrikas. The right-hand or Dakshinachara tantrikas avoid such things and are careful to follow the guidance of the Vedas. As for public schools, that was another transfer from informal to formal power. Village culture has overwhelming pressures for conformity; schools partly replace that with a more formal set of beliefs.
BK, good. Yes, that’s important — one of the reasons that the central gaze works so well is that it doesn’t meet the other guy’s gaze directly but it also doesn’t look down or away. Thus it short-circuits the signaling mechanism.
Chuaquin, one of the reasons I mostly read books by dead people is precisely that the political passions that shape their writing are as dead as they are, and so the vacuity of the Spectacle is easier to see.
Patricia M, yep. Next year will see some remarkable new beginnings.
David P., thank you. You’re right — that’s hilarious that it never occurs to them that their own actions could be the problem.
Erika, think of yourself. Imagine yourself strong and glorious, full of sass, and utterly unimpressed by their opposition.
Industrial, that works! As for Llull, yeah, he’s good at bringing out binaries; the work of resolving them is the step he didn’t take.
Jeff, very true!
“Erika, think of yourself. Imagine yourself strong and glorious, full of sass, and utterly unimpressed by their opposition.”
OH! I CAN DO THAT! THAT’S EASY AS PIE!
wonderful wonderful thank you. i really needed this and cannot believe how much you’ve helped me not just conceptually but physically because i AM READY!!! okay okay…
so i also want to thank EVERYONE who voted for this dion fortune discussion because i’m at the part where she tells of her being glamored by this woman she worked for and I GET IT!!! that’s how i still feel! i’m weak and struggling physically exhausted most of the time but i realized that the tremors i was getting from all the fear was likely residual… it felt old, unnecessary… like i should be able to handle this stuff calmly now that i’m not taking care of James nor am i actively being evicted. i have a lawyer through the settlement period which is two years. so i have another year and if they try to do anything, she’s there.
anyhow i knew the physical tremors and shakes had become like an ice cream shiver feedback loop and my mind HAD to shake this off or i’m be no good to anyone or anything including myself or the kitties.
so thank you all for bringing me to this book so i can study as i prepare to do this legal writing, which will become my ENDCAT story. i wasn’t liking how i sounded and felt like we’d been victims. and any tones i tried for felt thin, brittle, unsure. like my writing can psych me up like kicking starting a motorcycle, but it was sputtering out over and over.
so thank you all here who’ve listened to me, connected to my struggle to explain myself (being SEEN does a miraculous amount of healing instantly). it calms me and focuses me to get even clearer now that i know it’s even POSSIBLE to be understood here.
and Papa thanks tremendously for coaching me in real time.
i identify with her feeling depleted and overwhelmed. it’s been a year and a half on top of the earlier 20, but James was here then and i hardly NOTiCED it! as i look at these old emails, i realize how sick and pathetic this is and how long they’ve been AT THIS. it’s SAD. pathetic.
that’s how you spend decades you’re on earth. craaaaazy!
i had James. i come out ahead already.
i needed to LAUGH to get out of feeling slimed and victimy. ew.
and whew.
x
p.s. thanks again Papa for coaching in real time! i’m going to capture/cut and paste these notes and laminate them with tape and carry with me hanging off my notebook. i feel powerful. yeah. this third eye thing will be a cinch. i so got all this.
thank you mucho.
https://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2025/10/the-golden-age-of-spectacle.html?m=1
JMG, it appears either you’re channeling some good currents or CHS lurks on your blog. Maybe both. I like your analysis quite a bit better as it goes deeper but this made some great points too.
JMG, I plumb forgot till your comment, wait till next year. That’s America’s 250th. You know scrolling my old college liberals Facebook feed, I realized, the mental world he inhabits was always different than mine, but it’s gotten much more detached. I can’t do the Trump as Hitler thing, it was always ridiculous, but now it’s starting to scare me just a bit. It’s starting to feel a little bit like the people who predict the second coming every month, or those who listened to War of the Worlds on radio, grabbed their twenty two, and said this is it they are the lawn of the white house, the aliens are here. Except there’s a lot more of them, and they really see it that way. Except they don’t, or they wouldn’t post on Facebook. Anyway, a massive short circuit. Trump is a classical liberal who decided to become powerful by appealing to populist base. I’m not crazy about him, but the limes have to be defended and Diocletian reforms begun or things get much worse. Im familiar with the right wing larping from the Obama years, but this is much worse. It was bad during Obama’s tenure but can’t hold a candle to this. I heard the worst of it from pretty rangy people, and no one but no one suggested heading to DC to fix it with two bare hands and a squinted eye. The right wing fear was always mission creep from an American style socialism. Most of them knew it had to run it’s course and be settled peacefully. I hope it may yet turn out. As peter sellers said in one of his offbeat comedies, it’s all part of the grand pageantry of life.
It looks like Charles Hugh Smith has been reading you lately:
The Golden Age of Spectacle
https://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2025/10/the-golden-age-of-spectacle.html
“We’re living in the golden age of Spectacle: whatever substance remains in politics is lost in the endless parade of outlandish political theater, finance is dominated by staged spectacles of media-savvy CEOs announcing the next trillion-dollar product, and online, all the world’s a stage for everyone’s spectacle.“
Another straw in the wind: parents getting landlines for their kids.
https://www.vox.com/life/463270/kids-landline-phone-smartphone-tin-can?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
And “Why Generation Z hates small talk” in another article. The key word is “cringe,” Bottom line: they’re afraid to. Plus some holdovers from the Lockdown. And it’s killing them with employers. Talk about a traumatized generation…… though, while my middle grandson Bryn was pretty inarticulate at home, he’s a lot more poised and confident since going away to college. And my youngest grandson is, or was, pretty loud.
https://www.fastcompany.com/91414251/why-gen-z-hates-small-talk?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
Re Aldarion #248
Some words are indeed stronger than others, but it’s very seldom that they come close to being like strong coffee, let alone the beans themselves.
Most poetry does nothing for me, as it is too condensed: I have nothing to grab onto. On the other hand, most novels are too long-winded, with their descriptions of how things look and the dialogue written out. I simply don’t connect with that.
Somewhere in between is Charles Bukowski’s writing, which I like. To me, that’s truth with a rhythm, like good hip-hop. I also like many lyrics of SWANS, from the time Jarboe was part of the band. Often, I have no idea what they are about, but they are true.
–bk
Re Martin Back #256
Thanks for clearing that up. I got the idea that you had some kind of sports commentator in your head, describing what they see on the playing field, while you are the one playing there. That seemed a bit silly: why would a mind do something like that..
I have a friend who constantly has a list of things she needs to do running in her head, and while I think I would go mad if I had that, I can see the usefulness of that. The commentator, not so much 🙂
“Someone who grows up on a desert island who never hears spoken words obviously has to function without language. To what extent would their mental life be stunted? I’m sure there would be some effect, but I’m not sure what.”
I think you ask the wrong question when you ask to what extent it will be stunted. Maybe the mind is liberated from the distraction that is language, and they can be one with their environment in a way that many of us can’t even imagine.
–bk
For those who are interested, I’ll try to put into words how I learn things.
When I want to understand a system, no matter how simple or complicated, I don’t take it apart and analyze it, but I somehow merge with it. I become part of it, or maybe we both become part of a new whole. Depending on how complicated it is it can take a while, but there comes a point where I feel I know it from deep within. It may sound strange, but in a way, it’s like being inside my body.
There’s lots of details I don’t know, let alone understand, but I understand the whole and can start working with it. From there on, things slowly (or sometimes quickly) fall into place, and I learned something new.
–bk
JMG # 261:
Although I’m not as radical as you with your preference for dead writers, I also appreciate the classic books. It’s true what you’ve said, in them the political passions, and propaganda and Spectacle too, are harmless fossilized, so you can read them of course with a lot less “risk” than nowadays authors.
Hi JMG,
Regarding your comment about A. Crowley (#124), do you recall which aspect from his natal chart which destines him to be a bland minor bureaucrat ? A lot of men in the Western world spend their waking hours doing meaningless tasks for corporates or public institutions; I wonder if this particular aspect could be identified in their natal charts.
For the fifth Wednesday, I would like to vote for “Downwarding mobility equates to freedom”.
Thank you,
@ Industrial Alchemy – well, CROW is, perhaps a more family-friendly term, and actually, the concept IS very useful, so thank you!
>But now we’re back to the theory of value discussion of the Open Post, aren’t we?
Perhaps a more accurate statement would be the *price* is set by the next guy. Whatever he’s willing to pay. If no transactions are allowed, no price can be discovered. Value is something else entirely. Something can have a low price and be valuable to someone. Sentimental value, they call it.
But it’s just an old boot. Well, not to her.
Aside from risk transfer, price discovery/calculation is the other big thing that markets provide to the rest of the world. They have their place and used properly, they serve a purpose. Take away those purposes though (by interfering with price discovery and diverting risk transfer) and they start to turn into something that benefits nobody. And then the smug Marxists come along and say “See, those markets are evil and let’s get rid of all of them”. Same people that declared birds to be evil and got rid of them too – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign
@ Silliconguy # 254
Even in capitalist countries, there are some concerns that are operated by the government. Likewise, in a cottage industry, some concerns will be operated by government or private enterprise. But a lot of items can be operated from individual homes. Lots of people, for instance, sell items they have 3D printed in their houses.
Of course, the limits of what can be constructed at home depends on the production technology. If we can find a way to contain high thermal output inside a box the size of a bathtub and run a strong current through it, and we can set up the grid needed to operate these boxes inside lawn sheds, then of course we can safely smelt aluminum from bauxite in homes.
The key problem, of course, is which concern is going to build these houses and maintain this power supply grid. While individual components and replacements can be furnished by individuals, what about the overall infrastructure? That will require governments, private corporations, or at the very least a cooperative kind of arrangement.
JMG,
“where we draw the line between self and other”
I know we in the West put the individual at the focal point of culture, politics, media, economics, etc…. but groups have a “self” and that “self” draws lines between “self and other”. And to navigate the real world its far better to know the groups “self” than the “self” of a given member of that group.
Erika, excellent! Remember the basic rule of magical warfare — you don’t win by tearing down the other side, you win by building up what you want to win. In this case, that’s yourself. Focusing on a strong and positive image of yourself while using the central gaze is also powerful because if the other person has any psychism at all, they start perceiving you as you imagine yourself — and that can be a salutary shock for someone who wants to see you as a passive victim. Delighted also to hear that you’re getting good tips from Dion Fortune — she’s got a lot to pass on.
Celadon, I figure at this point the Spectacular nature of things is just too hard to miss. As for the detachment, yeah, it’s going to get spectacular as the elite replacement cycle proceeds. Remember what I said in a post a little while back about the way that political power becomes central to the identity of the privileged, and they wig out when they lose it? That’s happening. I’m typing this less than a block from the campus of Harvard University, and there are flyers all over announcing a protest march in DC next month. “Trump Must Go!” they bellow — as though they had any chance of making that happen. It’s inconceivable to them that the world could just shrug and ignore them.
Michael, always a possibility.
Patricia M, yay for land lines! As for small talk, I wonder also if that ability collapses once the population has a large enough minority of autists.
Foxhands, no, it’s been decades since I read the article in question.
GlassHammer, ah, but it’s the individual who does these acts of navigation, and those are guided by the individual’s own sense of the line between self and other. We’ll discuss that in a couple of weeks.
Michael Martin # 266:
Thank you for your very interesting link to Charles Hugh Smith…Well, maybe it’s a coincidence, maybe he has read John blog…
“We’re living in the golden age of Spectacle: whatever substance remains in politics is lost in the endless parade of outlandish political theater, finance is dominated by staged spectacles of media-savvy CEOs announcing the next trillion-dollar product, and online, all the world’s a stage for everyone’s spectacle.“
This is a good diagnosis of our current predicament about ubicous Spectacle nowadays, no doubt. OK, we all know here this about “omnivorous” Spectacle of today, but it’s always comforting, IMHO, to find someone who explains it again in his own words with such as bluntless.
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Rajarshi # 275:
“If we can find a way to contain high thermal output inside a box the size of a bathtub and run a strong current through it, and we can set up the grid needed to operate these boxes inside lawn sheds, then of course we can safely smelt aluminum from bauxite in homes.”
Do you know if to a certain extent this technology is/will be available in the near future? It sounds interesting to decentralize industries, energy production and consumption (and decentralize politics too!), but it also seems to me a bit vapor ware…
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JMG # 277:
“I’m typing this less than a block from the campus of Harvard University, and there are flyers all over announcing a protest march in DC next month. “Trump Must Go!” they bellow — as though they had any chance of making that happen. It’s inconceivable to them that the world could just shrug and ignore them.”
Everybody is free to march in demonstrations in a democracy, but the only democratic way to remove an elected leader is…when he’s replaced after another clean election by another candidate with enough votes. Well John, I hope this Liberals Universitarians from Harvard don’t think in a “color revolution” a la Ukrainian (2014 me think) or worst yet, a pure coup d’etat to expel Trump from the White House. Those unlikely events would be a pity. Although I don’t imagine hordes of Antifa rampaging Washington DC or even less, the very pro-Trumpian military doing sabre rattling… While they’re trapped in their own anti-Trumpian Spectacle, I hope you’ll in USA will be relatively quiet about this protests: Trump has won by large majority, we like it or not, so angry woke people will have to wait until next elections, and endure the Trump Spectacle until then!(if he’s not succeed by another post-Trumpian candidate, of course!)
Thanks for this series on Spectacle and the thoughts it drives on politics on both large and immediate scale.
I vote for MilkyWay’s topic, even if the answer is as simple as working to improve the local community and look forward to hearing about psychic self defense as the likely winner.
Thanks again, Drew C
“Remember what I said in a post a little while back about the way that political power becomes central to the identity of the privileged, and they wig out when they lose it? That’s happening. I’m typing this less than a block from the campus of Harvard University, and there are flyers all over announcing a protest march in DC next month. “Trump Must Go!” they bellow — as though they had any chance of making that happen. It’s inconceivable to them that the world could just shrug and ignore them.”
Europe need to learn this as well and fast, because they seem to be headed towards a disastrous conflict with Russia because they can’t seem to accept that the rest of the world doesn’t have to listen to Europe and can simply ignore them.
To me, the Spectacle seems like it’s addressing a point you brought up on your older blog about mimesis, and how a society passes ideas on to new generations. The Spectacles in play in a society convey a set of ideas, and regardless of which ones, if any, you choose to follow, you’re taking in a specific view of the world and passing it on. Part of me wonders if the failure of mimesis in modern times is due to the mainstream Spectacles’ incoherence and irrelevance — if times are hard and nobody around you in your society has any coherent vision of what to do in response, then looking in non-officially-approved areas or to different cultures for an ideology to follow would become much more tempting.
As for the fifth Wednesday topic, I’m going to vote for a post on parasocial relationships. To me, these seem closely related to recent discussions on the Spectacle; they arise when someone is embedded deeply in mass media to the point of treating a character from a TV show or the like as if they’re someone they have a friendship or relationship with. The fact that they’re so common nowadays, it seems to me, is a product of how modern “communication” technologies shut people off from each other and force them to look elsewhere for a simulacrum of social interaction.
Katherine Dee writes of the internet (our most all-encompassing Spectacle) as a fairyland, an otherworld, a place whose risks and protections may still be best described in myth and fairy lore. She calls it an enchantment.
At this post: https://default.blog/p/the-internet-as-the-astral-plane she writes:
“The Otherworld is beguiling. Glamorous, in the old sense of the word: an illusion so complete you cannot see through it. Time moves strangely there. Food doesn’t nourish. Names have power. Most who visit Fairyland never come back. Those who do come back are irrevocably changed.
“The Internet, too, offered enchantment. Presence without proximity. Transformation without consequence. Pleasure without limit. But enchantment, eventually, turns to disenchantment. Not all at once. You start to realize the world around you is not quite human. It is more than not quite human. It is monstrous.
“You were never meant to stay there. And yet, you do.
“In the early days of the Internet, the screech of our dial-up modems and boundaries of the computer room (or lab) served as imperfect ritual thresholds, marking our passage from one world to another. But these offered no breadcrumb trail home, no rowan branch at the gate, no thread to pull us back from the dark. Modern continuous connectivity has further eroded this boundary, blurring the lines until we exist in a perpetual trance state: neither fully present in physical reality nor completely immersed online.
“Just as folklore warns mortals not to join in fairy dances, for fear of never returning, the Internet changes us in ways we only half understand. And like the Good Neighbors, it always asks for something in return.”
And I wonder if she is right, and the keys we need for our protection, in this intermediated and difficult to touch world, lie in the old tales?
@JMG
How will TDS progressives be remembered by history in 80+ years after this era passes out of living memory? At this point, I’m sure they won’t be remembered positively
Will they be remembered as being on the wrong side of history and cultural issues? Will they be forgotten or downplayed in the historical narrative so the Trump era is seen as a time of unity around a great (whitewashed) president? Or get forgotten along with most important events of this time (like Trump, how goLLuMs worked, and the world war that is likely to break in Europe or the ME soon) because education is so poor in the Long Descent?
Dearest Papa,
What you just did with me in so little time and amazingly few words, was DIRECT me as if I were an actor struggling to find my own inner character to play. THIS is why I think you’d make the best director, as well as producer, for the theatrical manifestations of your writings.
Do with that what you will.
(Smile)
X
Also, Dion Fortune also apparently courted her share of crazy people and drama (her friend chasing her with a cleaver as she defended herself with a frying pan). What is this about??? It must be a “thing.”
@Chauquin – I appreciate you taking a stab at it for me. Maybe it’s just some vestigial idealism left in me, but I find it difficult to wrap my brain around the idea that some folks refuse to set aside their partisan politics to come together to mark a major milestone. Then again, I am likely on the spectrum (as are several here).
@JMG – “I plan to talk about more than just that.” Excellent! That just made the topic interesting to me. I’m actually zipping through Fortune’s Psychic Self-Defence, as I am finding her writing to be rather engaging in a similar manner to The Magical Battle for Britain.
I’ve run into a problem with Dreamwidth now. They think I am in Mississippi instead of Florida, and apparently MS’s lege has passed a law they don’t like. I’m on satellite internet (being at the dead end of a dirt road and all) so have no way to fix it on my end. This must have gone into effect on the first. “First world problems” I suppose, but it’s an inconvenience.
Katrina,
formerly dfr1973
@siliconguy #254: I referred to rural, oral society. Everywhere in the USA, rural people can read and write and have access to plentiful written sources from other places and times, so there is much more room for independent thought than before the printing press.
Perhaps this is a bit off-topic, but I just read this latest article on degrowth from The Honest Sorcerer, and it got me thinking a little bit: https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/the-end-of-degrowth
While it verges a little bit too much into doomerism at points for my liking, and I don’t think it gets the entire picture about the effect of tariffs, it got me thinking about how, in spite of running out of conventional oil back in the 70s, the US has maintained a sort of Spectacle for both itself and the world about its ongoing prosperity in spite of the cracks clearly showing upon a closer inspection. As time goes on and more chaos ensures with subsequent resource depletion, I wonder how that will change?
I think there was a time when small talk was not required in the workplace. There were expectations as to courtesy, or established rituals if you prefer, but ongoing chat while working was not encouraged. Nor would complaints about so and so made me feel bad or was rude to me get much of a hearing from management.
So called friendly chat is often anything but. Could it be that the GenZers are trying to avoid saying things which can be used against them by the gossip machine?
@Martin Back (#256) who wrote:
“Someone who grows up on a desert island who never hears spoken words obviously has to function without language. To what extent would their mental life be stunted? I’m sure there would be some effect, but I’m not sure what.”
If you mean that this person “never hears spoken words” from infancy onward, then the only situation in which that child might live to become a functioning adult member of society would be if s\he were raised by deaf-mute parents, possibly even in a deaf-mute community. But such people are not without language; in the USA they typically use ASL [American Sign Language], and there are other such sign languages in other parts of the world.
It would be very interesting to know whether some of them think in ASL (that is, in sentences and narratives composed of significant gestures instead of significant sounds), or whether they usually develop non-ASL modes of silent thought.
(Siliconguy #260 mentioned “feral children” in this connection. They are occasionally found, like the famous and horrific instance of “Genie,” and are usually too damaged in many other ways ever to become functioning human adults in their wider human society. Lack of any (or almost any) human contact is very damaging in general as a child grows up. “Skin hunger” and its satisfaction through skin-to-skin contact is just as important as nutrition to our growth.
>And “Why Generation Z hates small talk”
If I might put forth another theory. Perhaps it’s mild autism caused by vaccine damage? The Tism is supposed to exist on a spectrum, right? Perhaps we’re looking at a lot of mildly autistic people, who can still function but have real trouble with social interactions that previous generations took for granted?
Could also explain why they’re having such trouble finding dates, etc. Perhaps we should carve this into the Grand Canyon for when future people ask why we no longer exist – “IT WAS THE TISM CAUSED BY VACCINES NOT TYLENOL”
I just had a bright idea – we can carve it into that place that’s not a place of honor. Where they store all the radioactive waste. Let’s get a well meaning bureaucrat on this bright idea, right now.
Scotlyn #282, comparing the internet to fairyland: that’s a comparison that had occurred to me a long time ago, when I realized that I cannot retain information if it’s presented in digital form – all that gold turns to spiderwebs as soon as I turn away from the laptop. I need physical books, I need to write things down, or I forget what I even read. I can’t do e-books at all. It was a shock to find out that other people apparently don’t have that problem.
Chuaquin @ 278, It is quite possible to not be a fan of our current president nor like much of his agenda, and yet also not be “an angry woke” person. Trump did not in fact win by “a large majority” personally, though it is certainly true that the Republican party as a whole scored a major victory. Bottom line, as we Americans like to say, the Dems blew it. Again. As for street protests, those have pretty much become useless in our country because the authorities have learned how to deal with them. Antifa is a bogyman at this point. They may have done some property damage, but they are not the KKK, not out killing people.
Re: The Spectacle, there’s a quote that sums it up quote nicely: from “As You Like It.”
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56966/speech-all-the-worlds-a-stage …
….and all the people in it, merely players……
Regarding feral children who never hear language, what I was wondering was whether their minds would work the same as an average child’s. Th Wikipedia article linked above describes many interesting cases, but one must remember feral children are invariably malnourished, and that is known to cause mental retardation.
Also, it’s unfair to judge a feral child by its inability to fit in with human society. I was thinking of something like a feral cat: a creature that has managed to live in the wild reasonably successfully. A child could learn basic skills like what to eat, how to avoid danger, how to find shelter etc by observation, mimicry, and trail and error.
After mastering the essentials, it should have plenty of spare neural capacity left over. Would it be able to use that capacity, or would it lie idle? That’s what I mean when I talk about “stunting”.
A cat is curious. It seeks to enlarge its horizons. Would a feral child do the same? Would it wonder about the moon and stars, or where birds fly to, or what causes the seasons? Would it discover rhythm or music? Would it analyze problems and find solutions by mental effort rather than by random experiment? It might find baby animals cute and cuddly and fun; would it extrapolate to the universe, that some Being might find it cute and cuddly and fun?
I worked with a woman who had an honors degree in sociology. We argued a lot about politics and stuff, but I was always slow to respond to her points. She would use a word that i would have to mentally unpack and realize, oh yes I know what it means, but I never had a word to label that particular group of concepts, whereas she had many such words. By using specialized vocabulary she was able to navigate efficiently over the same mental space that I would have to pick my way over slowly and painfully.
Extrapolating to someone who has no concept of words, they would have no way to comprehend any meaning to their life experiences. They would reach a certain point and go no further. They would live for the moment and if not hungry or thirsty or in danger, simply go to sleep.
Regarding deaf people, I worked with a deaf lady. She was a very nice person, always trying to be helpful and well liked by the staff, but she never mastered her job which was a data entry clerk. It was so frustrating because you don’t know if you have failed to explain to her in a way she could understand, or if she was genuinely incapable of mastering the work. I did pick up a bit of sign language, though. I noticed she would often scratch under her nose with two fingers when I was around. It took me weeks to realize she was making a Hitler mustache.
If you don’t mind, I’ll have a frivolous moment now (or maybe not frivolous at all). I hope not to be too child-like, but do you have seen the famous toys named LABUBU showed in advertisements in Internet and real shops? I think they’re the last Spectacle tentacle in the children world. Of course, they’re cute, they’re fluffy and they’re absolutely lovely, but I also think they’re overrated. Well, they aren’t so overvalued like AI bubble, but I think there’s a Labubu bubble. What do you think about this crazy childish fashion?
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Anonymous # 280:
“Europe need to learn this as well and fast, because they seem to be headed towards a disastrous conflict with Russia because they can’t seem to accept that the rest of the world doesn’t have to listen to Europe and can simply ignore them.”
I agree, but I’m afraid EU won’t learn this important lesson by the good way…European elites are so senile that they will go on confrontation with Russia,believing they’re the center of the world yet. Meanwhile the rest of the world ignore them, as you’ve written it.
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Patrick # 283:
“Or get forgotten along with most important events of this time (like Trump, how goLLuMs worked, and the world war that is likely to break in Europe or the ME soon) because education is so poor in the Long Descent?”
I’m waiting like you John answer to these questions you’ve made, but I’d like to answer meanwhile to this last question: I think most events which today we consider so importants would be forgotten (more or less) by a historic perspective; maybe education standards would fall in not much years ahead, maybe other events would be remembered by our descendents which we hadn’t noticed in our time. I’m only wondering if all those events will be falling into the oblivion with the Spectacle which wrapped them.
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KM Gunn art # 286:
“I appreciate you taking a stab at it for me. Maybe it’s just some vestigial idealism left in me, but I find it difficult to wrap my brain around the idea that some folks refuse to set aside their partisan politics to come together to mark a major milestone. Then again, I am likely on the spectrum (as are several here).”
You’re welcome!
I think partisanship can have toxic effects on social unity within a country, a town or a family. I don’t know which is the level of sectarianism in the USA, though I’m not American, I get informed by MSM and internet so my sources of information aren’t clean enough. However, I can suppose partisanship in US has reached worse levels than in my country. May I’m fooled by the US Spectacle reflected by MSM and intenet social media, and maybe I’m wrong with this topic. We’ll see what’s happening next year in USA…
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Aldarion # 287:
“there is much more room for independent thought than before the printing press.”
Indeed, the Martin Luther Protestant Reform happen years AFTER the Gutemberg press was invented, not before…Censorship and propaganda by official powers kept on happening after the printed books and general literacy were spreaded across modern world, but there has been always some opportunities to learn and opine freely than before writing and reading disemination. It’s one of the paradoxes of the growing Spectacle, me think.
Erika Lopez #219
You just reminded me of something. In the 1972 or 1973, being low-income and hadn’t bought a car yet, I did a lot of hitchhiking. When someone would stop (always male), I read the eyes and could tell when NOT TO get into the car. 99% of the time, it worked.
In one instance, however, looking the guy in the eye didn’t work, his age late 20s. It was on one of the freeways in Newport Beach, Orange County, California. He got the car moving, whereby he proceeded to expose his hard p___s. I asked him to stop the car and let me out, which he did. I didn’t panic nor was I disrespectful. I knew how to NOT get the guy angry.
I have never forgotten that incident. I often wondered if that man was one of the serial killers roaming around Southern California at the time. I remember nothing of his looks, other than “his member.” His was a plain old p___s, seriously, absolutely nothing special.
(My experience from back then, males thought their particular “member” was unique. I doubt this attitude has changed. It astounds me that males let their “member” “call the shots,” “leading them down the garden path.“ Do guys name their member “Peter”? I am 70-something, so can get away with these things. Once upon a time, I, now an ancient one, had been age 19. And I had, and have, a skeleton🩻. Woo woo.)
A year or so ago, I bought from Amzn a couple fairly large decals of “the evil eye”🧿; supposedly to ward off people who are jealous/envious of one’s good fortune. JMG: 5th Wednesday, would you write a paragraph on how well “evil eye amulets” ward off evil; I would assume similarly against demons. What is evil eye amulet history through the ages?
💨🧿💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
As far as I understand, when they were trying to create some kind of explainable AI, in some (maybe all – at least for the LLMs) cases you don’t actually get the AI’s real chain of thought.
Instead the AI gives an answer via a statistical method (aka the stochastic parrot), and then creates an explanation with a separate stochastic parrot, so sometimes the AI will get the right answer and give a nonsense explanation, other times the AI will get the wrong answer but give an explanation that might be plausible for the right answer.
For 5th week, I vote for the mental health effects at an individual and societal level of the end of the belief in Progress.
David P. (and JMG) #255 “Good enough for government work”? That’s a phrase I heard when I worked in a factory, where some of the general-purpose machines (e.g., bandsaw) could be used on the sly for work other than that to be sold by the company (especially on the night shift). Work done for the benefit of the household was called “government work” (perhaps related to the idea that the chief executive of the household was the “goverrnment”, and she wasn’t in the shop). So, “good enough for government work” meant that it was a one-off, based on a sketch, and would solve the problem even if not up to corporate standards.
Mrs Northwind Grandma, you’re hella funny.
I’m glad you made it.
X
I will put in a vote for psychic self-defence. I read Dion Fortune’s book some years ago now, and found it useful.
Thanks for this essay JMG, and for this space where I read so many interesting comments.
@The Other Owen #192,
Oh, I know they’re not “lying”. I am just using words from the source article. I’m cognizant of the way tech-bros use words like “intelligence”, “consciousness”, “learning” – words that imply that machines have agency – forget that they’re supposed to be analogous, and confuse the general public (and themselves) in the process.
In the same way I find it annoying that crypto-bros insist that a decentralized blockchain is “trustless”. Well, yes, in a very narrow computer-geek definition of “trust”, yes. Never mind that crypto-wallets are much more easily hacked in practice, and your money more easily stolen, than leaving cartoon bags of cash (the ones marked with a big green dollar sign) on the sidewalk.
Mary Bennet #293:
Thanks for your answer. You’re right there’s more people in the USA than angry woke and happy Trumpists, though I think by disgrace they don’t be represented in the two-parties system. I’m sorry I’ve been binary, but in American political system there’s only place to two options, not a ternary. US political Spectacle is indeed bipartisan.
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Northwind Granma #297:
A very interesting story you’ve told us. About hitchhiking, it’s interesting to notice it’s been better times to do it, at least in my country. When I was a child, I remember sometimes people asking for hitchiking at the roads sides, but this custom has been lost since the ‘90s, IMHO. I don’t know why. You can’t see hitchhikers anymore here.
“Good enough for government work”:
I heard the phrase from my father, a mechanical engineer in the aerospace industry, back in the 1950s. He used it to refer to shoddy work:the government, always out to cut corners, had far lower standards than private customers.
JMG, your comment about the flyers at Harvard University brought me to mention that I have observed over the last months and years that public activites like art projects, political rallies and other aspects of public life have taken on more and more of a wokish character and seem more and more focused to rally peopel against the onslaught of crises and changes coming down the line. It is a situation which makes engagement in public activities make less and less sense. for me, maybe with some exceptions.
Found in my bookcase this morning: “The Electoral College: Critical to Our Republic” by Charlie Kirk and Josiah Peterson, copyright 2017 and 2024. (Will be refiled next to”The King In Orange.”)
The morphing Spectacle?
***
In America, reading for pleasure has fallen by forty per cent in the last twenty years. In the UK, more than a third of adults say they have given up reading. The National Literacy Trust reports “shocking and dispiriting” falls in children’s reading, which is now at its lowest level on record. The publishing industry is in crisis: as the author Alexander Larman writes, “books that once would have sold in the tens, even hundreds, of thousands are now lucky to sell in the mid-four figures.”
https://jmarriott.substack.com/p/the-dawn-of-the-post-literate-society-aa1
***
The fact that the nation’s top health organization would encourage these unions is deeply concerning. The genetic risks are well-known in the scientific community. Children of cousin marriages have a 400% higher chance of living with an IQ below 70 compared to children of non-related parents. The risk of a stillborn during pregnancy is also significantly higher. The NHS has lost any remaining shred of credibility or dignity.
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/britain/uk-nhs-encourages-first-cousin-marriages/
***
“a 400% higher chance of living with an IQ below 70”
Dear Gods!
Whether the Spectacle explodes, implodes, morphs or just turns itself inside out or some aspect of all those possibilities. remains to be seen, but going back in time to the spectacle circa 1670 I found this:
***
The most famous trial where a jury stood up refusing to find the defendant guilty in the face of a corrupt government was that of William Penn (1644-1718), the founder of Pennsylvania. Penn was the leader of the Quakers in London, and you can see why people fled to America. The sect was not recognized by the government and was forbidden to meet in any building for the purpose of worship. In 1670, William Penn held a worship service on a quiet street, which a peaceful group of fellow Quakers attended. Penn and another Quaker, William Mead, were arrested for disturbing the king’s peace and summoned to stand trial.
As the two men entered the courtroom, a bailiff ordered them to put their hats, which they had removed, back on their heads. When they complied, they were called forward and held in contempt of court for being in the courtroom with their hats on. Penn discovered that contempt of court is a personal prerogative of the judge and an infliction of punishment by a judge who becomes the legislator, jury, and sentencing judge.
Penn demanded to know what crime he was being charged with preaching – the cornerstone of Due Process. The judge refused to supply any information as to his crime and instead referred vaguely to common law. When Penn protested that he was entitled to a specific indictment (NOTICE), he was removed from the presence of the judge and jury and confined in an enclosed corner of the room known as the bale dock.
***
Not knowing if it is a correct assessment of what happened did a bit of searching and found this:
***
The People’s Ancient and Just Liberties Asserted
In the Trial of William Penn and William Mead at the Old Bailey, 22 Charles II 1670, written by themselves.
RECORDER. Sir, we must not stand to hear you talk all night.
PENN. I design no affront to the Court, but to be heard in my just plea; and I must plainly tell you that if you will deny me oyer of that law which you suggest I have broken, you do at once deny me an acknowledged right, and evidence to the whole world your resolution to sacrifice the privileges of Englishmen to your sinister and arbitrary designs.
RECORDER. Take him away. My Lord, if you take not some course with this pestilent fellow to stop his mouth, we shall not be able to do any thing tonight.
MAYOR. Take him away, take him away; turn him into the bail-dock.
https://www.ahcuah.com/lawsuit/exhibits/pennmead.htm
***
Throw together reduced thinking activity, reduced cognitive ability, inbreeding, the difficulties of maintaining the spectacle and what you said about being in the middle of Vico’s Barbarism of Reflection, it is all to easy to see the activist judges of today’s courts heralding a return to the patterns on display in 1670!
If we were to think of the barbarism of reflection as having some equivalence to the modern acronym FAFO, then:
FA (we are here) FO ?
Not quite Louis Armstrong’s Wonderful World, but here we are!
‘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.’
I second this from Sirustalcelion
Booklover # 305:
Your appretiation of “wokeization” in public life seems right to me. Since my European view, I’ve seen the progressive woke speech and practice devouring the citizens events in the last decade in my country. All of this supported by bland Socialdemocrats governments. Spectacle of wokerism however hasn’t eaten all the public life in Spain, IMHO.
By the way, demonstrations are the Spectacle of showing strength as human group, not always related with real force in votes which was I wrote in my last comment about wokie Harvard anti Trump.
There was a song called “Another one bites the dust.”
“French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu abruptly resigned on Monday morning, just three weeks after his appointment, preempting what appeared to be an inevitable ousting.”
Lecornu told reporters his resignation was primarily due to the inability to compromise across the political spectrum: “I was ready to compromise, but each political party wanted the other political party to adopt its entire program.”
Another case of deep political splits.
re: feral children:
They’re not really a good model for the effect of *language* in particular on human development. A better model for that would be deaf children, raised by their actual families, without access to training in sign. That’s still a thing in some parts of the world, and was fairly common not all that long ago. They did not acquire language, but they did have a social context within a family and community, and that makes them very different from feral children.
I support ‘psychic self defense’ as the topic… I am looking forward that your guidance will more uniquely express this topic with the greater clarity, understandability and applicability we have come to expect, rather than a rehash of the century old British standard, (which btw is free online at the ‘Internet Archive’) that so many others quote at us. Be well all.
“a 400% higher chance of living with an IQ below 70” Dear Gods!”
Is anyone questioning that stat? What is the source? Isn’t there an ethnic group that practices endogamy (more or less) and allows cousin marriage that has the highest verbal IQ of any human ethnicity, as high or higher than east Asians?
@EW (#307) & Phutatorius (#313) about the 400%-chance statistic:
I strongly question that statistic. My father’s parents were first cousins. He and his brother were extremely intelligent, competent people, as were all their offspring in the next generation.
First-cousin marriages were (and probably still are) perfectly legal in California, so there ought to be a fairly large population in the state to test that dubious 400% statistic on, if anyone cared to do so.
I suspect its roots lie not in competent scientific studies, but in a centuries-old European taboo against first-cousin marriages.
In the case of my father’s parents, all four of their parents (that is, my father’s four grandparents) were immigrants from Denmark, where first-cousin marriages had never been allowed. So their marriage — which was legally solemnized outside of any church, without any elaborate ceremony — caused a great deal of unbridled anger within the immediate family, and probably also to some extent in the large Danish immigrant community in the San Francisco Bay Area.
(It was a happy marriage, though not a long one. My grandfather Mathiesen came down with typhus and died six years after the wedding, when my father was not yet one year old.)
All of this figuration talk made me realize that this is why first impressions are so important. All subsequent interactions will be filtered through that lens. And how does what go about altering someone else’s perception of yourself when they’re preconfigured to see you in a certain light? It also explains why people divorce each other for reasons that perhaps were relevant near the beginning of their marriage but, to the outside observer, it’s clear that they are no longer present.
I also vote for psychic self defense, with the additional request that you put in a paragraph for those of us with small children in terms of how to protect them from unwanted influences.
A full month of record highs in the stock market,
“Stocks rose to new heights on Monday, fueled by enthusiasm about a potential acceleration in mergers and acquisitions activity and an upcoming Federal Reserve rate cut. The S&P 500 closed at a fresh record for the 32nd time this year, up for 7 straight days, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite notched its 31st all-time high of 2025. ”
Bubble bubble toil and pending trouble.
As to first cousin marriage, 400 % (which is 4) times zero is still zero. Giving a big percentage increase without any mention of the baseline is a common scare tactic. I’d look for the real data. Also, are we repeating cousin marriages every generation or is this a one-off? The Habsburgs famously got into inbreeding trouble but that was over multiple generations.
It was pretty common in England. Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram were cousins and no one seemed offended by it nor did the Church ban the book because of it. For that matter Mr. Collins proposed the Elizabeth even though they were related. Ann Elliot and William Elliot were also cousins though I think not first cousins.
At this page is the full list of all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts (printable version here, current to 9/30). Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below.
* * *
This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests, selected from the fuller list.
May MindWind’s father Clem, who passed away on September 16th, be blessed and make a peaceful transition to his next destination.
May Brother Kornhoer’s son Travis’s left ureter be restored to full function, may his body have the strength to fight off infections, may his kidneys strengthen, and may his empty nose syndrome abate, so that he may have a full and healthy life ahead of him.
May Mole End find help and insight in overcoming his vulnerable narcissism; may he find occasion to make amends to or otherwise bring healing and peace to all those that he has hurt and victimized, to the extent that they allow.
May HippieVikings’s baby HV, who was born safely but has had some breathing concerns, be filled with good health and strength.
May Trubujah’s best friend Pat’s teenage daughter Devin, who has a mysterious condition which doctors are so far baffled by necessitating that she remain in a wheelchair, be healed of her condition; may the underlying cause come to light so that treatment may begin.
May Mary’s sister have her auto-immune conditions sent into remission, may her eyes remain healthy, and may she heal in body, mind, and spirit.
May Liz and her baby be blessed and healthy during pregnancy, and may her husband Jay (sdi) have the grace and good humor to support his family even through times of stress and ill health.
May Jack H’s friend Sheima, a Sudanese refugee in the UK, find a favourable resolution regarding her right to stay in the UK, which has been imperiled over a technicality.
May 5 year old Max be blessed and protected during his parents’ contentious divorce; may events work out in a manner most conducive to Max’s healthy development over the long term.
May Patrick’s mother Christine’s vital energy be strengthened so she can make a full recovery from the hysterectomy and follow-up issues and resume normal life.
May J Guadalupe Villarruel Zúñiga, father of CRPatiño’s friend Jair, who suffers from terminal kidney and liver damage, continue to respond favorably to treatment; may he also remain in as good health as possible, beat doctors’ prognosis, and enjoy with his wife and children plenty of love, good times and a future full of blessings.
May DJ’s newborn granddaughter Marishka and daughter Taylor be blessed, healed, and protected from danger, and may their situation work out in the best way possible for both of them.
May 12 year old Sebastian Greco of Rhode Island, who recently suffered a head injury, make a prompt and complete recovery with no lasting problems.
May Marko’s newborn son Noah, who has been in the hospital for a cold, and Noah’s mother Viktoria, who is recovering from her c-section, both be blessed with good health, strength, endurance, and protection, and may they swiftly they make a full recovery.
May Brother Kornhoer’s son Travis‘s fistula heal, may his body have the strength to fight off infections, may his kidneys strengthen, and may his empty nose syndrome abate, so that he may have a full and healthy life ahead of him.
May Jack H.’s father John continue to heal from his ailments, including alcohol dependency and breathing difficulties, as much as Providence allows, to be able to enjoy more time together with his loved ones.
May Audrey’s friend’s daughter Katie, who died in a tragic accident June 2nd, orphaning her two children, be blessed and aided in her soul’s onward journey; and may her family be comforted.
May Kevin’s sister Cynthia be cured of the hallucinations and delusions that have afflicted her, and freed from emotional distress. May she be safely healed of the physical condition that has provoked her emotions; and may she be healed of the spiritual condition that brings her to be so unsettled by it. May she come to feel calm and secure in her physical body, regardless of its level of health.
May Pierre and Julie conceive a healthy baby together. May the conception, pregnancy, birth, and recovery all be healthy and smooth for baby and for Julie.
May Linda from the Quest Bookshop of the Theosophical Society, who has developed a turbo cancer, be blessed and have a speedy and full recovery from cancer.
May Corey Benton, whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, and who is now able to be at home from the hospital, be healed of throat cancer.
(Healing work is also welcome. Note: Healing Hands should be fine, but if offering energy work which could potentially conflict with another, please first leave a note in comments or write to randomactsofkarmasc to double check that it’s safe)
May David Spangler (the esoteric teacher), who has been responding well to chemotherapy for his bladder cancer, be blessed, healed, and filled with positive energy such that he makes a full recovery.
May Giulia (Julia) in the Eastern suburbs of Cleveland Ohio be quickly healed of recurring seizures and paralysis of her left side and other neurological problems associated with a cyst on the right side of her brain and with surgery and drugs to treat it, if providence would have it, and if not, may her soul move on from this world and find peace with a minimum of further suffering for her and her family and friends.
May Debra Roberts, who has just been diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer, be blessed and healed to the extent that providence allows. Healing work is also welcome.
May Frank R. Hartman, who lost his house in the Altadena fire, and all who have been affected by the larger conflagration be blessed and healed.
May Open Space’s friend’s mother Judith be blessed and healed for a complete recovery from cancer.
* * *
Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
Charles Darwin famously wrote about how the most robust plants are the product of crossbreeding and that plant inbreeding, or self-fertilization, often carries a risk of producing a diseased species. Well, it turns out he didn’t take his own advice. Darwin married his first cousin Emma Wedgwood.
And a new study in the latest issue of “BioScience” suggests that the reason three of his children died, and three others had no children, was because they were, well, somewhat inbred.
– https://www.npr.org/2010/05/08/126637625/darwin-a-case-study-in-his-own-theory-inbreeding
Phutatorius: Is anyone questioning that stat?
Robert Mathiesen: I strongly question that statistic.
Indeed 400% more than what? Stats are worthless without context as a 400% increase in a negligible risk is probably still not much.
Checking through the archived links the closest I found for a potential typo was a mention of 40%:
One briefing into child deaths in Bradford, Birmingham and the London borough of Redbridge found that up to 40 per cent of them may be “due to genetic disorders associated with consanguinity and chromosomal conditions”.
The article linked from the armstrong economics piece links to the telegraph https://archive.ph/iBNfc where I did not see a mention of the 400% number.
There seems to be no reference so could have been armstrong pulling stuff out of his hat (or somewhere else).
There is another article linked https://archive.ph/YPXrC – it seems to be a contentious issue.
And Risk here:
According to Alison Shaw, professor of social anthropology at Oxford University, the child of first cousins carries approximately double the risk of inheriting a serious disorder than one born to unrelated parents.
Those disorders include congenital heart problems, cerebral palsy, cystic fibrosis, polycystic kidney disease or conditions such as von Willebrand disease, which affects blood clotting and causes bleeding problems.
So, perhaps lies, damn lies and statistics.
Whether error or deliberate who knows – it’s like saying ‘deaths have doubled this year’; sounds bad until you find that the previous year was one death and this year there have been 2 deaths.
This I found more interesting:
“The NHS guidance points out that the practice has been legal in the UK since the 1500s as a loophole for King Henry VIII to marry Catherine Howard, his ex-wife’s cousin.”
It seems strange that a country’s religious organisation should be based on something that was created to accommodate someone’s base passions. What kind of religious basis is that?
As for the 400%, it seems it belongs in the ‘safe and effective’ folder.
Unless I missed it, none of the three articles provide links to any substantial studies – but given what I’ve read about dodgy studies increasing, even a link to studies might not be worth any more than a pile of poop.
EW
Siliconguy # 310:
French politics Spectacle’s always amusing to me too, more since the circus boss has been a person like Macron, who acts like a little Napoleon all the time. That kind of melodramatic spectacle has its quality, no doubt. Well, we’ll see how many days endures the next attempt to make a government in my dear neighbour country…
>A full month of record highs in the stock market
Should I tell them about what pet rocks, I mean, gold and silver (especially silver) are doing? Perhaps it’s not just stocks that are going up? Perhaps inflation isn’t quite as dead as some politicians would like you to believe? You want a bull market? Oh you didn’t? I’ll show you a bull market anyway. That’s almost completely meaningless.
Not to say that parts of the stock market are overcrowded and some people are always chasing the latest fad. I’d stay away from the fads. Stocks during the 70s were essentially a RNG, bouncing between 500 and 1000 for the decade. Although, that was the large caps. The small caps did much better during that time. Something about dinosaurs and small mammals.
This time around – a quantitative change in scale can sometimes turn into a qualitative change. This isn’t going to be a repeat of the 70s, just some of the same flavors will be present.
Most of the votes have again been counted — see below.
Chuaquin, it’s really quite odd to watch the enthusiasm with which people on the left are demonstrating the truth of the old adage about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Part of it, I’m convinced, is that the left is still basically being run by Boomers, who are sinking into senility and trying to relive their childhoods — thus the endless dreary stream of superhero movies and remakes of old films, and also the attempt to reenact the protests against Nixon and the Vietnam war.
Drew, again, I don’t keep track of who posted which topic. Please name the topic if you want your vote to be counted.
Anon, there’s that!
Ethan, that’s an excellent point, and I think the inferences you’ve drawn from it are valid. Interesting!
Scotlyn, hmm! I’ve bookmarked that for reading when time permits.
Patrick, my guess is that they’ll be largely forgotten. How many people remember the Copperheads, Lincoln’s domestic opponents in the North, or the earsplitting screeching of the people who denounced Franklin Roosevelt as the destroyer of democracy? There’ll be a few bland sentences about Trump’s opponents, and then the historians will write about something more interesting.
Erika, so noted! As for crazy people, occultism attracts them. It’s just one of those things.
KM, sorry to hear about the problem — yeah, Mississippi is trying to keep children from being exploited on the internet and Dreamwidth is pitching a fit. I’m moving forward as time permits with the plan of shifting this forum to another venue.
N, oh, there will still be a Spectacle. A hundred years from now there will still be people insisting that progress is on track, or that it’ll get back on track any day now; a hundred years from now, the talking heads of whatever media functions then will blithely ignore the massive impoverishment of society and the disintegration of infrastructure, just as their current equivalents have done to similar processes. Nor will people object, any more than they do now. As Simon and Garfunkel put it back in the day, “a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”
Mary, hmm! That seems very likely to me.
Patricia M, and some “players” in more senses than one!
Chuaquin, no, I’ve avoided that evil fate so far. The name sounds like a Lovecraftian horror…
Mawkernewek, that makes a great deal of sense. Since LLMs don’t think, they would have to generate a statistically likely imitation of thinking, along with their statistically likely imitation of speech. (I love the term “stochastic parrot,” by the way.)
Booklover, I see those as ritual actions attempting to ward off the inevitable. Yeah, not much point in participating.
EW, there’s good reason for that. The big publishing houses have lost the plot — literally — and are churning out vast numbers of dreary, cookie-cutter books that nobody wants to read. That’s especially true of children’s books, which are painfully woke and thus incredibly boring, but it’s also true across the board when it comes to popular and literary fiction. They could make reading much more popular by the simple expedient of firing their editorial staffs and hiring people who actually care about books, rather than being humorless ideologues frantically trying to shove a social-change agenda down readers’ throats.
Siliconguy, I wonder if the French will dust off their long and noble tradition of having revolutions to overthrow failed governments.
Dennis, those are good points.
Quin, thanks for this as always.
JMG # 322:
“Part of it, I’m convinced, is that the left is still basically being run by Boomers, who are sinking into senility and trying to relive their childhoods — thus the endless dreary stream of superhero movies and remakes of old films, and also the attempt to reenact the protests against Nixon and the Vietnam war.”
So you think the leftist spectacle against Trump Spectacle is indeed a remake of older Spectacles, or even the same Old Spectacle rehashed for new generations to join it…It’s an interesting theory: Liberals trapped in a spectacular loop. However, this remade Spectacle won’t have much success, because Trump isn’t Nixon, and real life isn’t a superheroes movie.
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“I’ve avoided that evil fate so far. The name sounds like a Lovecraftian horror…”
You’re a lucky man. My younger nephew is mesmerized by this Spectacle (and economic bubble) which has become toy. I agree: its name is quite ugly. I told my nephew these toys were overvalued, but he didn’t believed me…I hope when he grows he learns some basic ideas about economics, starting by the ideas “speculation” and “bubble”.
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“Siliconguy, I wonder if the French will dust off their long and noble tradition of having revolutions to overthrow failed governments.”
If that event would happen in a near future and a French government would be overthrowned, the fate of Little Napoleon (Macron) could be compromised soon, me think. In that case, I wouldn’t have much pity for him (Schadenfreude on advance!). Europe needs better leaders than him and his minions, IMHO (of course, politicians in my country are the same demagogues or even worse, like I suppose it happens in the rest of EU).
Totally off subject, but want to share. Discursive meditation is your meditative gig and you provide explicit instructions. It was also in the past a method commonly used in portions of Christianity. The words “meditation”, “meditate” when used in the Bible seem to mostly refer to the same approach. So this morning I set my cell phone to signal the end of the five minute relaxation/breathing phase and the end of the ten minute discursive phrase using Jesus’s basic prayer instructions from Matthew 6 as the theme – “Pray to your Father who is there unseen” AlI I can say is thank you for pointing me to this old approach. It was an encounter with the words, my God and an encounter with knowing myself better. Will continue it.
@JMG
1. My public school history textbook did mention the Copperheads and Carpetbaggers in 1-2 sentences. As for Roosevelt, some right-wingers still regard him as a socialist today, and the school textbook struck a defensive tone about him: (paraphrase) “many of Roosevelt’s measures actually strengthened capitalism.”
2. @N @JMG
I presume that in a century, the Spectacle of Progress will exist primarily among educated urbanites. It will be consciously rejected to varying degrees by poorer city dwellers and most who live near major transportation networks connecting the cities, and absent in outlying areas.
“As for crazy people, occultism attracts them.”
Being an occultist attracts crazy people to you, or crazy people are attracted to practicing occultism themselves? Or both?
>EW, there’s good reason for that. The big publishing houses have lost the plot
Devon Eriksen had something to say about publishers recently. Something about how they are useless now.
https://xcancel.com/Devon_Eriksen_/status/1975325450059550792
My vote for the 5th wednesday would be along the lines of psychic self defense, including shielding for us overly open, sensitive types, I can certainly use some better tools in my tool box and as the country makes it needed changes we will have more and more people surounding us lashing out in all manners
I like the final words of “Tessa Fights Robots” in her lengthy post on “Robber Barons” – including the Bolshevik ones that she, personally, grew up among, in Russia… because they are about stepping around intermediation. It probably goes without saying, although not mentioned by name, that the Spectacle would feature heavily in the intermediatory forces from which it is worth protecting the direct connections between our hearts and the universe.
From https://tessa.substack.com/p/robber-barrons
“As a conclusion, I think that it is in the best interest of every human being to insist on having a direct existential connection to the world—and not allow any king, any financier, or any “expert” to install themselves between the person’s heart and the universe.
“Joy of life comes from life’s mystery, not from kings, not from entertainment companies, and not from banks. The universe supports those who don’t let go of their hearts. We are imperfect. But we are of love—and no robber baron in the world is entitled to tell us what to feel. We are of love. We are powerful when true to ourselves. We are of love.”
Again, I’ve got everyone’s votes tabulated.
Chuaquin, exactly. Remember that the Boomers were the first fully televised generation, and most of them are still obsessed with the Spectacle they absorbed back in the day. They’re still trying to enact the Spectacle of their childhood — that’s why they rant about evil Russia, look for Nixons under every damp rock, and hold protest marches for any reason or none at all. They’re trying to inhabit the televised image of their childhoods as it plays on infinite loop in their own heads. As for the toy, are you sure it’s Labubu and not Pazuzu? 😉 No doubt he will come in one of the pre-chosen forms, once the Vuldrini have been rectified!
BeardTree, I’m delighted to hear it. Discursive meditation on Bible passages was one of the core spiritual practices of Protestantism when it still had a strong mystical component; Bishop Joseph Hall, a 17th-century Anglican, wrote a fine book on it called The Art of Divine Meditation.
Patrick, (1) glad to hear that even so faint an echo remains. (2) I expect there will be some educated urbanites who cling to it, and also some fringe cults.
Jennifer, both, in my experience.
Other Owen, thanks for the heads up. What a classic example of wokery in the service of corporate greed. Just for information’s sake, here’s what the publisher posted:
That is to say, they knuckled under to a woke witch hunt against one of their own authors, and used it to get him to renounce his share of the royalties. Their recantation, once they came under pressure online, is an equally fine display of sanctimonious sleaze:
I would encourage any readers of mine never to buy anything from Bitmap Books, and to let others know about this. Publicity is the only cure for this kind of vileness.
Scotlyn, that’s inspiring — thank you.
I’ll sneak in a vote for MilkyWay’s topick.
The Labubu thing amuses me because every aspect of it is incredibly silly: the dolls are ugly, the craze is absurd (people are actually renting Labubus to carry with them in public for special events), and as for the accusations that they are demonic… all I can say is, “Wait until you hear about Beanie Babies.”
I still remember seeing a photo from a divorce proceeding where the ex-couple were sitting on the courtroom floor dividing their Beanie Baby collection between them.
“I would encourage any readers of mine never to buy anything from Bitmap Books, and to let others know about this. Publicity is the only cure for this kind of vileness.”
He, Sam Dyer, tried to “diffuse an increasingly difficult situation.” Diffuse? Hmmmmm
Hi John Michael,
In relation to the comment regarding the unfortunate author, to my belief there’s something particularly evil about having to walk such a tightrope where any wrong step and you’ll fall.
Such a brittle system we live in. Thanks for bringing this example to our attention.
Cheers
Chris
@jmg and whoever. Re: why would I say this Minnesota rapper guy is Somebody. ‘Braveheart for a time when many people can’t sustain attention for four minutes’
Since there is literally zero to do for my state job w federal food bank/commodities contracts, and I’ve been relatively obsessed w this theme over the last several weeks and see it tying many threads in my head that include you folks, redefining the front line at this strange time and putting forward a champion that most will never have seen this way. I wrote this piece to try to explain it to some audience beyond myself. Maybe one of you will appreciate it. Puts everyone in funny company, but I think that is necessary if we are serious about a coalition of the creatures against the machine, humans comfortable in the long decent preserving worthy tendrils of older ways as the techlords try to stamp out the best in us (mostly by capturing our children) before they too fall apart leaving ruin. 💕🫡 love yall
Do you think figuration, and the process we develop it to fit into society as young infants has anything to do with Theory of Mind?
( for anyone who doesn’t know theory of mind is watch this: https://youtu.be/8hLubgpY2_w?si=-qT7p2ioZsjgT9Rg I actually discovered it when my daugther was 3 and triwd it out on her and her friends! It was weird! ….but also explained the time we were all looking frantically for her dads carkeys, and the next day I thought to ask her directly if she knew where they we and she said “yes they are under the sofa”!
It basically relates to the fact that small children, don’t know that what they know, think or believe is or can be different from what you know think or believe, (worth bearing in mind during a toddler meltdown!) – then at about 4, it changes and they become aware of the separateness of their mind and are able to mentally develop a ‘theory’ of what someone else ‘might’ be thinking, hence we say they have developed ‘theory of mind’ . Some say folk with autism struggle with theory of mind too – though ‘they’ say a lot of things and jmg, you are better placed to comment on this than me.
My thought is that if you have no or limited theory of mind then you might be less able to see the Spectacle for what it is, and not differentiate it from ‘reality’; but on the other hand if you look at it from the point of view that Theory of Mind is what enables you to pick up on social groupthink, you might be less inclined to engage in or be at all interested in the Spectacle!
I know I’m late to comment but thoughts welcome!
As to the ‘pet rocks’ gold does seem a bit overvalued, but its price does serve as a vote of confidence or non-confidence in the political scene.
Silver is a useful industrial metal even if photography has gone away. If I was inclined to speculate in metals silver, tin, and indium would be on the list. Besides more traditional uses all three are used in solar panels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indium_tin_oxide
>As to the ‘pet rocks’ gold does seem a bit overvalued, but its price does serve as a vote of confidence or non-confidence in the political scene.
It’s only worth what the next guy pays for it. I’d say that it’s rising like it has, with little comment or note from the public, tells me this has further to go. People can’t stop yammering about AMD this or Nvidia that but gold breezing through 36,37,38,39 – not a peep. As to why it’s rising – we’re going to find out. Gold is discounting something out there that isn’t obvious – yet. Just like stocks discount things, so does gold.
Part of the reason why the investing public doesn’t like gold is because of what it discounts. That and it’s annoying to deal with.
Ordered the Bishop’s book.
Situationism! A true flash from the past. I remember the various pamphlets from the 1970s, with fashionably crude typography and graphics — I may still have them in my archives. In addition to Guy Dabord, the other notable (that I remember) was Raoul Vaneigem. Of course, they had a falling out. A friend of mine from college did some research project on New York City socialist movement and their fallings-out, usually culminating in the survival of the faction that retained custody of the mimeograph machine.
I was standing on a corner in Oakland California
with some spectacles to help me see
I looked out– Good Lord!
it was Guy Dabord in a chrome-trimmed Fnord
slowing down to thumb his nose at me.
There is something that could be said about the tendency to experience of the astral as intrinsically persecutory, and as something that does not (or somehow should not) exist, or should not be treated as having any ontological status (for example, “imaginary communities” ). But not here, not now.
Thinking on the spectacle and other power centers – I remember reading that criminal organizations would implicitly and sometimes explicitly make themselves seem more glamourous than they actually are as a direct recruiting tool. Thus they need to both pay less and have more recruits while actual conditions aren’t nearly as good as portrayed – the fun part of El Salvador crackdown is they also targeted this spectacle with things like destroying graves & humiliations.
JMG # 330:
Its name’s indeed Labubu, not Pazuzu he he he…
——————————————
Slithy Toves # 332:
No argument here. Labubus topic is in itself a crazy thing. Well, the Beanie Babys: no comments. 🙂
Sorry this is off topic and too late in the cycle, but has anyone else noticed strange behaviour/comments coinciding with the recent full moon (Oct 7th 04:47 UTC)?
For example, Monday lunchtime I received a text message that said ‘Gavin de Becker – the gift of fear’ followed by another one a short while later from the same person apologising for sending it. Also seeing posts that have me scratching my head and others where people seem to be ‘going off on one’.
I know I can do long posts that are a bit stream of consciousness, but I’m seeing more stuff I just can’t make head nor tail of just recently. Maybe it’s just me!
Full moon + LLM = petunia ?
Or maybe it’s just the LLM in the full moon. Time to go and cut kindling and firewood I think.
So I looked up Empyrean, and of course that makes sense now. Happy Wednesday
re: “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.”
Does this need to be qualified? A ritual with players embodying and perhaps channelling cultural icons or dieties might be a temporary lift off into the imaginal and not some form of alienation.
Apologies for getting this late but the topic I’m voting for is “Blessing, healing and spiritual hygiene as a community service”.”
Thanks,
Drew C