Situationism: The Road from Raswashingsputin

Two weeks ago, in our ongoing exploration of the ideas of the Situationist International and their application to the ongoing crisis of industrial society, we ended up face to face with a point of immense importance. I didn’t develop that point in that earlier post, partly because it took the rest of the post to get to the point from which its importance could be grasped, and partly so that I had the time to brood over how best to communicate that importance to readers. It’s not that it’s a difficult point—it’s quite simple. The difficulty is that it flies in the face of everything that our current political thought treats as obvious common sense.

A metaphor might be better suited to make sense of the point I have in mind than any more literal or simplistic approach. With that in mind, I’d like to welcome you to the Democratic Republic of Lower Slobbovia. Any of my readers happen to be fans of the once-famous Al Capp comic Li’l Abner already know about Lower Slobbovia, though it’s been a while since the last press releases from that far-off country and they may not be up to date on its current political situation. Those who didn’t have the privilege of growing up in the company of the inhabitants of the town of Dogpatch will want to know that wherever you are, Lower Slobbovia is a long, long, long way off. It’s very cold there, the national dish is either bagels or raw polar bear meat, depending on who you ask, and its currency is the rasbucknik. One rasbucknik is worth nothing. More than one are worth even less, due to the trouble of luggng them around.

Back in the day, Lower Slobbovia was a monarchy, constitutional in theory but not in practice, ruled by King Nogoodnik II. He died in 1982, and his even more feckless son Nogoodnik III was overthrown by an insurgency of irate polar bears in the Glorious Ursine Revolution of 1996. Since then it has been, on paper, a democratic republic. What this means in practice is that it’s a one-party state headed by President-for-life Goldarn Stubbornovsky. (One scurrilous rumor claims that the president is really Nogoodnik III under an alias and a fake beard. Another claims that he’s actually a polar bear.) Stubbornovsky’s party, the Lower Slobbovian People’s Revolutionary Progressive Conservative Party (LSPRPCP), holds elections every third leap year in which Stubbornovsky inevitably wins reelection with 110% of the votes.

The Stubbornovsky regime has all the usual trappings of a modern state, including a Peoples Assembly to take lavish bribes and pass ineffective laws, plenty of ugly government buildings in the capital of Raswashingsputin DC, and a military equipped with whatever dilapidated gear got cleaned out two decades ago from warehouses in the US, China, and a dozen other nations, and hasn’t yet been passed on to the international arms trade. The Stubbornovsky All-Slobbovia Blivet Factory, the nation’s one industrial concern, churns out three-prong, two-slot blivets under contract to several big multinational blivet firms. Secret police agents spy on each other in the back alleys of the capital, polar bears parade down Stubbornovsky Avenue on the anniversary of the Glorious Revolution, and envoys from global and regional powers fly into Raswashingsputin International Airport, pay absurdly inflated prices to stay at the Hilton-Stubbornovsky Hotel, and compete for attention from the president and his inner circle of advisers with an ample stock of grants, loans, kickbacks, cute sex workers, and outright bribes.

It’s all of a piece with every other small nation in the backwaters of today’s global politics. The one distinctly odd thing is that if you travel outside Raswashingsputin, signs of the LSPRPCP and the Lower Slobbovian government fade out very quickly. Slobbovian villages are governed by their elders in the traditional fashion, and the handful of cities outside the capital have equally simple and old-fashioned arrangements for governance. Since you’re an outsider, of course, everyone you meet claims to be loyal to the Stubbornovsky regime, to go in fear of the secret police, and to pay crushing taxes to the bureaucrats in Raswashingsputin. They also do their level best to extract every penny of hard currency from you that they possibly can.

Get them good and drunk, on the other hand, and they’ll admit that it’s all a sham. After the Glorious Revolution, a coalition of tribal elders and polar bears decided that they’d better set up a modern government, or the US, the Chinese, or any of a dozen other nations would do it for them. That didn’t mean they wanted a government interfering in their lives. The arrangement they made with Goldarn Stubbornovsky was therefore quite simple: he can be president-for-life, and stash his ill-gotten gains in Swiss bank accounts, so long as he doesn’t expect the Slobbovian people (or the polar bears) to pay for his government or follow his orders. All those grants, loans, kickbacks, and bribes from abroad provide him with his budget. (For some reason nobody anticipated the cute sex workers, and neither the elders nor the polar bears are sure what if anything to do about them.) Similarly, none of the idiotic laws passed by the Peoples Assembly are ever enforced for more than a short distance outside the city limits of Raswashingsputin.

Mind you, there’s a steady trickle of Slobbovians who decide they want a more exciting life, some of that foreign cash, and maybe a shot at bedding one of the cute sex workers, and move to Raswashingsputin. Once inside the city limits, they have to obey the laws, find jobs as soldiers, secret police agents, government bureaucrats, or workers at the Stubbornovsky All-Slobbovia Blivet Factory, and assist the Stubbornovsky regime in furthering the nation’s one real industry, which is extracting money from the foreigners. There’s also an equal and opposite trickle of Slobbovians who get bored with the game and move back to some other part of Slobbovia to gnaw on bagels and polar bear meat and resume a less hectic life. A case could be made that those Slobbovians who live in Raswashingsputin are in fact oppressed by the regime, but it’s a very curious form of oppression: it falls only on those who choose to accept it.

Now of course most of us don’t live in Lower Slobbovia, and most countries don’t have quite so impressively absurd a system of government—though I suspect there are nations in the global South that approximate more closely to the Slobbovian model than most pundits like to admit. In most countries in the developed world, however, there’s an extent to which Slobbovian conditions actually do apply. Romanian-American historian of idea Ioan Couliano pointed straight to this odd fact in his deservedly famous book Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, where he argued that most industrial societies in the modern world no longer bother with police state tactics in most cases. He described them as “magician states” that maintain the obedience of their populations through methods closely akin to those of Renaissance sorcerers, manipulating the mases through symbols that conjure up desires and hatreds, luring them into thoughts and actions that benefit the system at their own expense.

This isn’t quite as true as it was in 1984, when Couliano’s book first saw print, and of course it wasn’t entirely true even then. Every modern industrial state, even (or especially) those that love to mouth platitudes about democracy, keeps the full arsenal of police state tactics in readiness, and uses them from time to time on visible targets to remind everyone else to stay in line. Most people in modern industrial nations, however, experience what the Marxists of my youth sulkily called “repressive tolerance”—that is, the regime lets them believe what they want and, within fairly broad limits, do as they like, while using control over the media and educational systems to keep alternative ideas from finding a mass following. That leaves a lot of room available for those who want to make constructive use of it.

The metaphor of the magician state has been taken up by various later authors and put to work in some very thoughtful ways. One book that deserves very close attention in this light is Mauricio Loza’s The Hounds of Actaeon: The Magical Origins of Public Relations and Modern Media, which appeared in 2020. Though there’s a crucial flaw to its central argument—one that it shares, interestingly enough, with Couliano’s work—it’s a tour de force in its own right. Loza took Couliano’s fascinating but brief discussion of the magician states of the modern world and filled in the gaps, showing how the machinery used by modern states to manufacture and manipulate public consensus uses the same principles and, via some of the odder channels of the history of ideas, derives some its historical roots from the Renaissance sorcery that Couliano chronicled so ably in his book.

The essential flaw that Loza’s work shares with Couliano’s is one that I’ve discussed on this blog already. Neither writer paid anything like enough attention to the fact that for every spell, there is a counterspell, and that these counterspells are readily available to individuals. Nor did they mention that because of the nature of magic, counterspells by individuals have a massive advantage against the incantations of the sorcerers whose job it is to maintain the established order of things.

Let’s take the road from Raswashingsputin to some distant corner of rural Lower Slobbovia as a metaphor for the process by which the sorceries of the magician state reach their targets in the minds, hearts, and unthinking reactions of individual people. It’s not a short road by any means. Consider a television ad meant to whip up support for some corrupt policy or other. Students of occultism will recognize most of the steps in the process by which this incantation has its effect. First, the intention of the spell has to be clearly formulated by the sorcerer who casts it; then it has to be embodied in a symbolic form that will have an effect on the target; next, it has to be communicated effectively to the medium that will carry it to the target; after that, it actually has to reach the target; and finally, it has to evade the target’s defenses, so it can convince the target to believe or act out something that is not in the target’s best interest.

The first three steps along the road from Raswashingsputin are, so to speak, under the control of the Stubbornovsky regime. That doesn’t guarantee that they’ll be done competently, just that it’s usually not effective for a counterspell to interfere with them at this stage of the working. Badly done sorcery, in fact, is astonishingly common in today’s magician states. Quite often the intention of the working is poorly thought out, the symbolic form isn’t well suited to affect the target, and the spell isn’t transmitted to a medium that will get it to its intended target. The failed Democratic presidential campaigns of 2016 and 2024 are particularly fine object lessons in all three of these classes of magical failure, for those that are interested.

The target of the sorceries in question rarely has the chance to influence the spells sent their way on that part of the road from Raswashingsputin, however. It’s in the last two stages of the trip that counterspells become most effective, because those are the stages when the power of the individual to shape what is received becomes stronger than the power behind the message. The most lavishly funded and professionally produced television ad ever made won’t have the least effect on an individual who chooses not to watch television. It will be no more successful if the person in question knows how to use appropriate symbols to shape his or her own consciousness.

The reason for this latter point is important to understand. The sorceries of public relations and advertising are vulnerable to this sort of individual counterattack because they have to be aimed at whole populations. They can’t be tailored to the specific passions, fears, and quirks of individuals; they must aim at the lowest common denominator of human reactions, and so their workings can only be blunt instruments. By contrast, anybody with a little self-knowledge and a very modest capacity for reflection can develop far more effective spells to use on himself or herself, targeting personal desires and aversions with much more precise effect than the sorcerers of the regime can manage.

It’s intriguing, at least to me, that Couliano never mentions this in his book. If what he wrote in Eros and Magic in the Renaissance is anything to go by, he believed that magic is and can only be the manipulation of people in the mass by individuals who have the requisite knowledge and power. Loza makes exactly the same curious and inaccurate assumption repeatedly in The Hounds of Actaeon. As every real mage knows, by contrast, the most potent of all forms of magic are those that the individual works on himself or herself.

What makes this all the more fascinating is that both writers had every reason to know better. Couliano was a capable practitioner of Renaissance magic and knew the occult literature of the period inside and out; he quoted the great Florentine mage Marsilio Ficino at length, and so he had to be aware of the potent spells Ficino taught his readers to use on themselves to ward off melancholy and elevate their minds toward the Divine. Loza, for his part, references Theosophy, Martinism, and New Thought in his book; all of these are occult schools that teach individuals to transform their own states of consciousness, and thus provide effective tools against the sorceries of the status quo; yet he relegates Martinism to a footnote and dismisses Theosophy and New Thought as shallow and vapid.

It’s a very odd blind spot—but it’s one that we have seen already in this sequence. The job of developing the most incisive possible critique of the existing order of society, while being exquisitely careful never to suggest any meaningful way to do anything about the problems thus made clear, isn’t simply assigned to the beta-Marxists we discussed in previous posts. It’s just as strictly incumbent on all those professional intellectuals whose work is officially disparaged by the manufactured opinion of the day but is supported financially by academic venues and publishers. For what it’s worth, I doubt that either writer ever consciously censored his work to fit this mandate. There are thoughts that every respectable intellectual knows better than to think, much less hint at on paper.

For those of us out here on the utterly unrespectable fringes, by contrast, the questions that doubtless comes to mind first center on just how far the counterspells can be pushed. Does the road from Raswashingsputin really extend to places where the power of our current crop of Goldarn Stubbornovskis doesn’t reach at all—and if so, how many people can go there at a time?

Those are valid questions, if complex ones. To begin with, it’s entirely possible, using relatively simple means of signal jamming and personal counterspells, to reach a state of relative immunity to the public relations sorceries of the existing order of society. Getting rid of your television, minimizing your screen time, and using a good ad blocker will do quite a bit all by themselves; replace the excluded content with something you choose—old vinyl records and books by dead people are my inputs of choice, but your mileage may vary—and add in daily spiritual or esoteric practice focused on developing self-knowledge and reflective awareness, and you’ll soon be watching the people around you with considerable bemusement, while stepping around the pitfalls into which they plunge with unwavering enthusiasm.

It’s when you put your awareness into action that you have to be careful. The evidence of history and my experience alike suggest that you can get away with an enormous amount provided that you do it quietly, don’t call attention to yourself, and avoid whatever activities panic the system into police-state actions. This is easiest to do if you’re alone. It’s not that difficult if it’s just you and a partner or spouse. As the number of people involve mounts up, so do the challenges, because anything that looks even remotely like the beginning of a mass movement will set off violent overreactions from the ruling elites.

How far individual freedom can be pushed by these methods also depends to a great degree on historical factors. In an era of decline like the present, two seemingly contradictory trends show themselves. On the one hand, a failing system cannot tolerate public dissent. You can see this in Britain right now: the facts that some 10,000 people have been imprisoned there over the last year for criticizing government policy on social media, and that the government is abolishing jury trials for most crimes, are not signs of confidence. They display very clearly the stark panic of a ruling elite that knows it’s circling the drain.

At the same time, the resources available for repression in an age of decline are far from unlimited, and tend to focus quite reliably on highly visible expressions of dissent. In effect, if the officials back in Raswashingsputin don’t notice your existence, they’re not going to spend increasingly scarce resources trying to control your behavior. Yes, I’ve seen the current claims that omniscient computer systems will soon overcome that obstacle; if you believe that, I have shares in a defunct dotcom company to sell you. One of the great speculative frenzies of modern times is raging around us, and it centers on generative large language models, the complex and resource-intensive programs mislabeled “artificial intelligence;” the destiny of the AI bubble, and the impending collision it faces with the hard limits of energy and resource availability, will be the subject of a future post.

The fine art of not being governed, to borrow a phrase from a book we’ll be discussing a bit further down the road, thus involves both significant challenges and remarkable opportunities. As we’ll see, the legacy of the Situationists offers certain very useful tools for dodging the challenges and making the most of the opportunities. We’ll get to that in an upcoming post.

*****

In the meantime, there’s another issue that deserves attention. December has five Wednesdays, and by longstanding tradition, the commentariat gets to nominate and vote on the subject for the fifth Wednesday post. What do you want to hear about? Goldarn Stubbornovsky’s secret agents want to know.