The two interludes just past strayed some distance from the writings of the Situationists, the little clique of avant-garde Marxists in mid-20th century France whose reflections offer certain highly useful insights into the problems and predicaments of life in the twilight of the industrial age. Neither of those divagations, however, was irrelevant to the theme I’ve been developing here. Both the no-ego ego trip and the collapse of genuine humor on the American left—shown most clearly, perhaps, by the impressive lameness of most leftist memes—cast a necessary though indirect light on the path the Situationists could have taken.
To be fair, it’s a path neither they nor most of the other soi-disant rebels of their time and class were willing to consider. In the first post in this sequence, I talked about the social function of Marxism in modern bureaucratic societies, which have already passed through the changes that Marxism brings about in practice (though not, of course, in theory). Since it’s hardly necessary to impose a metastatic bureaucratic system fusing politics and economics on a society that already has one, Marxists in bureaucratic societies—beta-Marxists, as I termed them in that post—have the function of providing dissatisfied youth with harmless ways to act out their fantasies of rebellion, before they sell out in the usual way and get the jobs in the corporate or bureaucratic worlds to which their class status entitles them.
Beta-Marxists therefore tend to pursue an intriguing double agenda. On the one hand, they quite often craft extremely insightful critiques of the societies in which they function. On the other, they are exquisitely careful not to embrace any means of action that might actually pose the least threat to the status quo. Marxist rhetoric makes this last task easy. Read through Situationist books such as Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life, for example, and you’ll find no shortage of stirring evocations of that imminent moment when the masses will rise up and take destiny into their hands, or what have you.
Of course that moment is never going to happen, and that’s exactly the point. The masses aren’t interested in taking destiny into their hands. Nor, to be a little more precise, are they interested in handing over their destinies to a cadre of downwardly mobile bourgeois intellectuals who want to play at being revolutionaries. When the masses take to the streets, it’s because they want an end to specific burdens or the provision of specific benefits, which can be provided quite handily by any modern bureaucratic system that isn’t hopelessly sunk in incompetence. I’m sure that beta-Marxists are quite well aware of this, but daydreaming about the supposedly inevitable proletarian revolution allows them to evade the whole question of how to turn their fine ideas into something other than a head-trip to entertain denizens of the political fringes.
What makes this especially fascinating in the case of the Situationists is that they had to go out of their way to define their insights in a way that would exclude constructive action. To some extent that effort was made inescapable by their intellectual ancestry; the Surrealists, who laid down so many of the foundations on which Situationism built, had contended with the same issues before and during the Second World War, and some of the leading Surrealists had drawn exactly the conclusions at which the Situationists balked. To at least as great an extent, however, the struggle to avoid the practical implications of their own realizations was forced on them by the nature of those realizations themselves.
That’s almost painfully visible in the book by Vaneigem just mentioned. (Its title in French is Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations, “treatise on knowing how to live for the use of young generations”; the title The Revolution of Everyday Life was picked for it by the publisher of its first English translation.) Every time I read it, it brings to mind that fine scene from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels in which Gulliver wakes on a beach to find that the tiny Lilliputians have anchored him firmly in place with an abundance of equally diminutive ropes and stakes. The Gulliver in this metaphor is the crucial insight that fills the pages of Vaneigem’s book and the better end of Situationist literature more generally; the ropes and stakes deserve a certain amount of attention before we proceed, because Marxism is only one source from which the Lilliputians in question got the necessary hardware.
Perhaps the most striking thing about The Revolution of Everyday Life, in fact, is just how perfect a period piece it is. It was first published in 1967, and if you know your way around the avant-garde literature of the Sixties counterculture you’ll recognize nearly every trope that Vaneigem deploys. Some of those, in fact, are less tropes than self-parodying clichés. For example—well, I don’t imagine more than a tiny handful of my readers recall Maynard G. Krebs, the beatnik sidekick of the main character in the otherwise forgettable TV show The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. Among Krebs’s signature gimmicks in the show was responding to the word “work” by leaping back in dread with a horrified yelp of “Work?”
Vaneigem basically does the same thing. For him, work of any kind is “forced labor,” and he makes plenty of hay from the fact that the French word for labor, travail, comes (via a long and winding etymological road) from a Latin word for an instrument of torture. The thought that he might be expected to put in some productive effort in exchange for the goods and services he consumes is, as far as he is concerned, an oppressive and unreasonable demand. This invites ridicule, but there’s actually something deeper going on. To his credit, Vaneigem refers to that deeper dimension more than once.
Few people remember these days just how deeply committed the supposedly serious thinkers of the 1960s were to a specific set of false beliefs about the near-term future. Nuclear power was expected to provide effectively limitless amounts of cheap electricity that would revolutionize human life. Combined with widely predicted advances in robotics and automation, the fantastic energy surpluses of the imminent Atomic Age would make most forms of work obsolete. Robots, not human beings, would labor in the factories and the fields, turning out goods and services in such abundance that poverty would be annihilated. The great problem faced by the societies of the future, many pundits held, would consist of making sure the prosperous legions of the permanently unemployed had ample diversions for their lifelong leisure.
This wasn’t just something you found in the science fiction of the era, though of course it did appear there, in countless variations. Major universities hosted symposia where eminent scholars discussed how to manage the transition to the new age of limitless abundance. Cultural venues such as opera companies were told to brace themselves for the onslaught of mass audiences, and poets celebrated the utopian future that was supposedly about to dawn—Richard Brautigan’s once-famous piece “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” published the same year as The Revolution of Everyday Life, is typical of the genre.
As Brautigan’s poem suggests, this wasn’t just a belief of the buttoned-down mainstream of the day. Brautigan himself was one of the archetypal counterculture poets of the time, and he was far from the only figure in those circles to embrace the vision. Such icons of the more practically minded end of the counterculture as Buckminster Fuller also leapt aboard the nuclear bandwagon. So did avant-garde architect Paolo Soleri, whose plans for gigantic self-contained cities had such a massive presence in the alternative imagination of the time—look at the fine details of Soleri’s plans and you’ll find that his planned megastructures depended on nuclear power plants tucked into the basement, providing all the electricity anybody would want.
Even the people who protested nuclear power assumed as a matter of course that nuclear technology was just as viable as its fans claimed; they objected to it on other grounds. Like most of the neo-Luddites of the era—the comparable movement against supersonic transports (SSTs) is another example—it never occurred to the antinuclear activists to challenge the technological triumphalism that undergirded the march toward nuclear power, and wonder whether those hugely expensive facilities really could make electricity too cheap to meter.
Of course that turned out to be not merely the fly but the Rodan-sized pterodactyl in the ointment. Far from being too cheap to meter, electricity from nuclear power plants turned out to be too expensive to pay its own costs, much less to justify the giddy dreams that had been piled on it by the publicists of the Atomic Age. That the same thing happened to SSTs, space travel, and a great many other linchpins of the imaginary future of the Sixties simply adds spice to the resulting irony. The expected advances in robotics and automation also turned out to be much slower to arrive than anybody thought in 1967, but it was the catastrophic failure of nuclear power to act out the role assigned to it that dropkicked the whole richly imagined future of the Sixties into history’s dustbin.
(Yes, I know that this whole set of failed ideas has been trotted out and put on display yet again by promoters of so-called “artificial intelligence” schemes—“so-called” because the programs in question have no actual intelligence, and simply assemble statistically likely sequences of words, numbers, or pixels in response to queries. It’s remarkable how many of the failed dreams of the Boomer generation’s youthful days are being rehashed around us as that generation sinks into its second childhood. All things considered, this reminds me of nothing so much as the reverence directed to the mummified corpse of Lenin in the Soviet Union’s last years, as the regime he founded stumbled toward its self-inflicted end.)
Vaneigem wrote The Revolution of Everyday Life long before anybody had begun to notice the failure of the dream, however. He penned his denunciation of work at a time when nearly every respectable thinker was certain that work, in the usual sense of the word, would soon be obsolete. That, of course, is the hidden context of Vaneigem’s tirades. I mentioned earlier on in this sequence of posts that beta-Marxists are assigned the task of developing a reserve army of unemployed ideas, a penumbra of potential ideological positions that can be coopted and exploited by bureaucrats if they ever become advantageous to the system. To this, Vaneigem’s rhetoric was a potentially useful contribution.
Most people feel adrift and useless unless they have some outlet for the normal human desire for productive effort. Working class culture, in particular, tends to treat work as a locus of identity and value as well as a source of weekly paychecks. To convince millions of people raised with such attitudes that they should give up any hope of doing anything useful with their lives was a tall order, but an ideology that condemns all forms of work as torture and forced labor might have done the trick. If the Atomic Age had turned out as advertised, Vaneigem’s ideas might well have been turned into the central theme of a cascade of advertising campaigns meant to convince the masses that being condemned to useless lives as permanent welfare recipients really was what they had wanted all along.
The rejection of productive effort in Vaneigem’s book extends remarkably far. He argues, for example, that poetry is a central principle both of the revolutionary process and of the wonderful world of the future that the coming orgy of revolutionary violence will surely bring forth. By that word “poetry,” however, he means nothing so mundane or productive as writing a poem: “True poetry cares nothing for poems,” he proclaims airily. Poetry for him seems to consist, rather, in living poetically or even, in a revolutionary context, in rioting, looting, and murdering in a poetic manner. All the arts, in fact, are to be abolished and replaced by artistic living. What people will do if they happen to want to read a poem or look at a painting is not something Vaneigem addresses; no doubt Brautigan’s distinctly creepy “machines of loving grace” will manufacture those on demand.
Though I’ve chosen to explore it in depth here, the rejection of productive effort is far from the only cliché of Sixties alternative pop culture that gets an additional fifteen minutes of fame in The Revolution of Everyday Life. I don’t propose to go through the whole set, partly because this essay isn’t a review of Vaneigem’s book and partly because the basic principles behind all of it can be seen clearly enough via the points already covered. By and large, it amounts to an angry insistence that “the people”—or, rather, this or that clique of radicals who arrogate to themselves the right to speak for the people—should get whatever they want without being expected to offer any sort of recompense for it, or even accept any compromise with the valid needs of others, with the unspoken subtext that what they want just happens to further the interests of the corporate-bureaucratic state as those were understood by the elites of the time.
All these are the Lilliputian ropes and stakes holding down something much larger and more interesting. The Gulliver-figure in all this? The paired recognitions that the living reality behind all that Marxist handwaving about classes and other abstractions is the subjective life experience of individuals, and that this subjective realm is the battlefield where the revolution that matters has to take place. Grasp that and you have a key of remarkable power.
That transmutation runs all through Vaneigem’s book, and through Situationism as a whole. When Marx wrote of alienation, for example, he had in mind the removal of control over the means of production from the laboring classes by a succession of governing classes. When Vaneigem and his fellow Situationists wrote about the same theme, they refocused the discussion on the concrete personal experience of alienation, of the inner state of the individual who feels cut off from his or her own sources of meaning, value, and power. Look closely at every other central concept of the avant-garde Marxism of the time as it appears in Situationist literature, and you’ll find the same alchemy at work.
That was the great achievement of the Situationists, but it also endangered their status as loyal beta-Marxists serving the bureaucratic system against which they claimed to rebel. Recognize the subjective dimension of alienation and you open the door to responses that can actually affect the situation: responses that have the potential to move past the point at which domination falters and freedom comes within reach of the individual. Once these responses are understood and the necessary skills have been developed, the bureaucratic system has no effective defenses against them. The downside of this subjective approach is that these steps can only be taken by the individual for himself or herself. Nothing is more futile, or more certain to end in exploitation and defeat, than waiting for someone else to do it for you.
Furthermore, there are sharp limits to how much help you can give anyone, even if they want to follow your lead. Situationism, interestingly enough, included several of the core methods that can be used to assist that process. In future posts here, I’ll talk about the crafting of situations, the art of the derivé, and the practical tactics of détournement, which provide a good solid toolkit both for the individual pursuing autonomy and for the experienced practitioner hoping to show the way to novices. Even so, the original impetus and the follow-through both have to come from the individual. Thus the movement toward freedom can never really be a mass movement. It can only be a movement of individuals in opposition to the mass.
I’m pretty sure the Situationists themselves were aware of this. The way that certain patterns of Marxist rhetoric repeat in their writings like so many nervous tics suggests, at least to me, a sustained effort to back away from the implications of core Situationist concepts, and hide from the challenge of individual liberation behind the old failed dream of mass revolution followed by sentimental fantasies of utopia. More revealing still, though, is the extraordinarily ambivalent attitude the Situationists displayed toward the Surrealists, who in many ways were their most important predecessors. While some of the core Situationist writings acknowledged their debt to Surrealism, those same writings also rejected Surrealism root and branch.
That rejection was no accident. Some of the Surrealists, in their own ways, reached some of the same insights before the Second World War that the Situationists grasped after that war, but many of the leading figures in the earlier movement followed those insights into territory where the Situationists would not follow. For a significant number of them, their quest for the place where domination ends led them to occultism. We’ll follow them there in due time.
Hello JMG and commentariat:
I’ve guessed you were going to write this Wednesday about Situationism, so I’m glad to read your thoughts again. However, I must wait before expressing my opinion about Situs again and the other interesting (sub)topics you’ve touched in your today essay, because there are plenty of stuff inside your paragraphs. I have to make my own mental digestion of it, then I’ll think my own opinion about everything you (and another commentarists more eager than me) have pointed here. I only can write by now: thanks for your essay, John!
Regarding the recent postings, I assume that we are going to see some reference to the decline of the bureaucratic class and rise of the entrepreneurial class, and I do see a significant rise in the power of the entrepreneurs and businesses, but rich people have always had power. But, I wanted to defend bureaucracy (the system itself, not the class inhabiting it) for a bit. When bureaucracy works and works well at its stated purpose, it’s a beautiful thing; buildings get inspected quickly and accurately and real dangers are averted. Everyone gets a tuberculosis test. The police pension system if fully funded, etc. In fact, there has to be some control in order for the system to function, make sure maintenance is done, work is done properly, and abuses are minimized. In fact, the ideal bureaucracy may be the military with what is referred to as the “General Staff,” that is officers whose job it is to implement orders or training for the army to fight a war.
Now, I think the issue is that the actual amount of useful work that bureaucrats can perform is actually limited. I used to work at a factory in quality control, a necessary bureaucracy. It was my job to decide if products met specifications and allow them to go to the customer. If not, I had the responsibility and authority to shut down the production line until the problem was solved. But, there were limits to the amount of useful input that the quality department had before you just actually needed to keep the production line up and keep your customers happy with shipments. Sometimes you just gotta say, “Let’s get this $*!& done!”
As you have pointed out JMG, we now have a bureaucratic class and there are only so many people you can have double check and rubber stamp the renewal of someone’s driver’s license before you get absurd. And of course it wants to keep growing because some people like power, even if it is just the power to delay approving you to move into an apartment because the plumber forgot to put green paint around the toilet flange (or whatever crazy thing they want to control or tax you on.
I just scrolled through the post; I’m one of the tiny handful who remembers Maynard G. Krebs and the Dobie Gillis show. And now I’ll show my age even more by remembering Richard Brautigan as well. There was a time when I thought “A Confederate General From Big Sur” was great literature. Poor Brautigan. I heard from a mutual acquaintance that he really hated hippies and used to throw beer bottles out of the car at them when he encountered them. In the end he shot himself at his home in Bolinas, and his body lay there for a month before any neighbor or friend came to check on him.
As one of your leftward leaning readers, and longtime devotee of a variety of avantgardes, I have some memes to share that relate to recent posts:
https://imgflip.com/i/aclrq8
https://imgflip.com/i/aclsm0
https://www.sothismedias.com/uploads/1/2/4/5/124587142/waking-life-oob_orig.jpg
https://www.sothismedias.com/uploads/1/2/4/5/124587142/data-pipes_orig.jpeg
https://www.sothismedias.com/uploads/1/2/4/5/124587142/raw-tv-23_orig.jpg
https://imgflip.com/i/aclse7
https://imgflip.com/i/aclsii
https://imgflip.com/i/aclsp0
https://imgflip.com/i/aclstb
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 10/20). 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.
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This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests, selected from the fuller list.
May Lydia G. of Geauga County, Ohio heal and recover from prolonged health issues.
May John N. receive positive energy toward getting through a temporary but irritating health issue.
May Patrick’s mother Christine‘s vital energy be strengthened so she can continue healing at home without need for more surgical operations.
May both Monika and the child she is pregnant with both be blessed with good health and a safe delivery.
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 Marko have the awareness and strength to constructively deal with the situation.
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 the abcess in JRuss’s left armpit heal quickly.
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 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 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 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 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 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.
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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.
Here is one more surrealist meme for the current discussion. I will call it Trout Fishing In America with David Lynch:
https://imgflip.com/i/aclvr1
Dobie Gillis, humm. Just the night before last, I had a brief and rather vague dreamy ‘pop-up’ of the very same, surfacing towards semi-consciousness as I tossed and turned. Interesting that that screen shot of the ubiquitous cubicle farm reminds me of when, in the early 90’s, EVERYONE .. e.i. the everyday shackled proletariat, had gazed into the not too distant future .. where abundant free time and leisure were to be had, courtesy of the dot com ‘revolution’ where work would be a thing of foreign lands. Fast forward 35 swings around the fusion orb, cubicle farms are still a thing .. with Jamie Dimon exhorting the lowly white-collar plebs to get back in that chair, and PRODUCE! .. sans pajamas.
Same with regards to ‘NUKULAR’ POWER.. NP is now hip again, except we have even moarrr; what with Russian and Chinese tech now producing smaller, often mobile units. Of course WE in the West have to play catch-up as a response. Situational indeed.
JMG, does “the place where domination ends” refer to a happy situation in which no one person dominates another, which seems contrary to human nature, or to strategies by which independent minded persons can avoid having their work and energies parasitized by others?
In my memories of the late 60s/early 70s, there were self-styled “radicals”, i.e., the New Left, and hippies. It was the former of those groups who disdained work and effort. The Radicals I knew were helpless wimps who couldn’t fix themselves a cup of coffee. Hippies were not lazy. They were forever starting small craft businesses, buying farms–an ordinary trust fund could do that, back then–and exhibiting quilted mandalas at county fairs. The organic farming movement began when back to the land hippies connected with longtime non-chemical farmers.
I have mixed feelings about the whole 60s ‘work is outmoded and going away’. They boil down to:
a) I wish. As a someone with chronic health issues living on a disability pension it would be absolutely wonderful not to have to deal with the social stigma of not being employed or employable. And from the sounds of it I’d be a lot better of financially than I am now.
b) it’s impossible. Just doesn’t work, pipedream.
c) the modern AI attempts to make most people unneeded by the economy are not accompanied with prosperity for the unemployed, but by poverty and desperation. The utopia turned out to be dystopia at best when attempts are made to put it into action.
d) I hate AI. It’s products stink, they seem to be used to make money for scammers and the rich at the expense of everyone else, most particularly and egregiously of people who make art and cultural products like art, music, writing etc. Like me. And then they add insult to injury by using AI to try and bully me into stopping, or scam me into giving personal data away. I’m not even trying to make money at it right now, and it’s still a huge problem for me.
I get the impression the way this series is heading slowly towards is figuring out how to let the Gulliver of our indiviual life experiences loose from the things society traps it with. Is Gulliver collective or individual?
And, related to my above comment, is that – in my book at least – the carry-over in Surrealist action is .. wait for it .. the SillyCon TechBro$-Broe$$es (now globull in number..) who attemp to hoodwink us with a Constant Aura Of Shiny Orwellian Glop!
This is a nice bit of synchronicity! I’d had a little discussion on another blog earlier this morning about Neopagans taking the inclusion of “self-reliance” and “industriousness” in the Nine Noble Virtues as a personal insult, and now this essay (I also remember you commenting, some time ago, on the number of Pagans who finagle a disability benefit so they don’t have to work). Grift is everywhere, and never so pervasive as when a philosophy can be invented to justify it…
Hi JMG,
Re: ‘travail’ and torture.
As someone who has studied Russian, I imagine that you know that the Russians are not to be outdone on this. The word for ‘work’ (работа) comes from the same root as ‘slave’ (раб).
Probably relevant here is the fact that Marxism is ruled by Neptune, the planet of mass consciousness, mass movements, and mass liberation. Occultism is ruled by Uranus, the planet of individual consciousness, individual movements, and individual liberation.
>the ideal bureaucracy may be the military
Napoleon’s innovation and talent had something to do with military genius but by and large, he was a master organizer and was the first person to bring bureaucracy to the military. Others took notes on what he did and improved on it.
Hello JMG and commentariat:
Uncle Albert here (as a loyal reader of Ecosophia including the comments by y’all), this is my first post even though I have been a reader and follower since the Archdruid Report days.
Anywhoo, I am with Phutatorius and JMG since I used to watch Dobie Gillis and was enamored early on by “Trout Fishing in America” since I came of age in the San Francisco/Bay Area cauldron of swirling ideas of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Berkeley free speech riots, Fritz Perls, the marching against the Vietnam War, psychedelics, the Grateful Dead and all that that entails for that time and zeitgeist of the day, back then.
Have now reached my 75th year on this planet and am struck by PLUS ÇA CHANGE, PLUS C’EST LA MÊME CHOSE..
There is nothing new under the Sun.
I just wanted to stop by here and make a post since I ab-so-toot-ly love JMG’s writing and I gain a lot from reading y’all comments.
Onward, thru the fog as Oat Willie sez
“Thus the movement toward freedom can never really be a mass movement. It can only be a movement of individuals in opposition to the mass.”
Brilliant distillation of a core truth at the heart of our task as human beings at this time and place in history: the twilight of the industrial age and the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, whose image is the Water-Bearer. The sovereign individual is both carrier and vessel..
Thank you for all you do JMG.
By a strange coincidence, I am currently reading David Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs. It has many of the same themes – white collar work that pays well but generates so little social value that the employee feels that their role is useless (or even mildly detrimental) to society.
Graeber cites the example of a student of history from the British working class. This man is the first in his family to go to university. Instead of getting an amazing learning as he hopes, however, he is employed as an IT guy to maintain a pretty software that is supposed to let seven mutually competing branches of a firm to work together.
As it turns out, the partners of the firm (except one, the one who hires him) do not want this software to work. So they obstruct him in every way. He learns also that he has been hired specifically because he is poor at IT work, being a humanities student. He ends up being rewarded for doing nothing. He has so much free time that he learns French on his own, as an autodidact.
In spite of this seemingly heavenly circumstance, he suffers from massive depression. He tries repeatedly to leave this job, but his boss keeps giving him raises to retain him lest they have to hire an actually competent person, thereby angering the majority of the partners. His situation is almost comical.
Hello all,
What does it mean that Raoul Vaneigem is still alive (in his 90s) and Guy Debord shot himself? I think I remember JMG saying that the way someones biography ends says a lot about that person and his work. Brautigan also commited suicide…..
The idea of alienation is going to make a come back I believe, but as an right wing argument against immigration. Here in Europe immigration is a top issue and it’s not because of the economic repurcusions or some other theory (as being espoused by intellectual left wing media). The reason is people feel alienated if they are not surrounded by people with whom they cannot at least have a clear conversation. This is being handwaived away by the powers that be by saying it is a normal part of living in the city/international community, but who says that it is so? Rejecting peoples normal desires is a recipe for disaster and a big lie.
Chuaquin, by all means. Take your time and respond when you’re ready.
Watchflinger, of course! Bureaucracy in modest doses is great. The problem with bureaucracy is that its own inherent dynamic opposes moderation, and so the modest doses inevitably turn into toxic doses. The imperial Chinese system solved this problem neatly by the simple expedient of beheading mandarins who became too annoying, but our legal system doesn’t permit so efficient a means of trimming bureaucracy — thus our current difficulties.
Phutatorius, yes, I heard that also. He was really a tragic case.
Justin, most of these go zooming right past me, but I’ll assume there are media references I’m missing.
Quin, thanks for this as always.
Polecat, I’ve come to a fairly straightforward conclusion, which I have modestly named Greer’s Law of Futurology. It’s quite simple: the future the pundits agree on is the one future you can be sure will never arrive.
Mary, it’s purely a matter of individuals successfully extracting themselves from parasitism. As for hippies, well, in my experience it depended very much on the hippies. Yes, I knew quite a few who were enthusiastic small business owners and very hard working, but I knew plenty of others whose idea of a good life was sitting in a haze of cannabis smoke, and limiting their exertions to dipping a hand into a bowl of munchies now and then.
Pygmycory, all four of these points seem very reasonable to me. As for Gulliver, he’s always and only individual. There is no such thing as collective liberty.
Polecat, the problem with that is that tech-bro surrealism is dull. They just rehash the same tired tropes over and over again, without so much as a blue giraffe or a melting clock to lend interest to it.
Sister Crow, oog. Yeah, the Neopagan disability cult is remarkably widespread. I like the idea of making a point of self-reliance and industriousness — it’s a good flake filter, to help the Maynard G. Krebses of the Neopagan scene out themselves so they can be quietly shoved out the door of those groups that have an interest in surviving.
Alyosha, very Russian indeed! I think that’s true in most if not all of the Slavic languages, isn’t it?
Anonymous, excellent. Yes, and the polarity between those two new influences bids fair to be one of the great transformative issues of the next few millennia.
Uncle Albert, thank you for this! Yeah, things really don’t change much.
Goldenhawk, nicely summarized.
Rajarshi, that’s so perfectly British! It would make a fine blistering novel — but living through it, unless you have a really robust sense of humor, won’t be fun.
Waha, I’m not a psychoanalyst so I won’t try to interpret the differential survival rates of Situationists. As for alienation, well, we’ll see. I think the economic dimension may be more important than you suggest.
JMG,
It’s interesting that in the early age the great ” technological achievement” that was going to free us from work, and usher in endless leisure for all was nuclear power.” But now the thing that is going to free us all from ” work” is A.I. . But the funny crossing point of both eras is that it is just dawning on the “Tech Bro’s” that the limiting factor to their dreams is the insane power demand of their new labor saving ” achievement”. So they recycle the dreams of the 50’s and pin the new hope of endless leisure on the old hope of endless leisure, Nuclear Power.
If anyone has any doubts about the usefulness of Nuclear Power just read the Wikipedia page about the Vogtle #4 plant completed in Georgia ( last plant built in the us). It took 15 years from its permit, had head spinning cost overruns and bankrupted Westinghouse. Now Westinghouse just licenses reactor designs and does consulting, they can no longer construct plants, no one in the US can.
Looks like one of my comments didn’t make it:
I wanted to say that Situationist inspired magazine Adbusters really knew how to do good detournement, until they became the very thing they railed and rallied against. Then it wasn’t as funny anymore, and bogged down by theory to boot.
Also, the group Negativland whom I have documented in various writings, and who coined the term “culture jamming” in one of their radio broadcasts, still very much are good at detournement. Consider the song “More Data”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTWD0j4tec4&list=RDsTWD0j4tec4&start_radio=1
Detournement is still very much alive in the work of various collage artists and the like. The Derive seems to have taken England by storm where there are a variety of works dedicated to psychogeography, often allied with the concept of hauntology in music. … more on these, perhaps, as you get to them.
Finally, I have been uploading some of my Cheap Thrills articles to my website, which for the most have only appeared in New Maps in print. My first article for the column in 2021 was on the Situationist International, and the Entertainment/Sports/Music-Military Industrial Complexes, and strategies for sidestepping the same, which was part of the whole idea of the series: we can entertain ourselves, and what will our more limited leisure time look like as deindustrialization settles further in?
https://www.sothismedias.com/home/a-complexity-of-spectacles
JPM- theta-Arachnist
—
JMG, yes, a bunch of those feature the character Data from Star Trek Next Gen, the OOB one is a still from the movie Waking Life (Richard Linklater is one of my favorite directors) and then there is Max Headroom… it’s a mix of that with other elements. Thanks for taking a look at them anyway, and for the essay.
For those wondering about the nine noble virtues, according to J.P. Russell they are “Courage, Truth, Honor, Fidelity, Discipline, Hospitality, Self-Reliance, Industriousness, Perseverance”:
https://rhetoricfortherenaissanceman.com/2025/10/01/values-and-ethics-part-1/
As a youth I read pretty much everything Brautigan wrote. He was a paradigm case of alienation and well aware of it. I’m pretty sure he was playing unreliable narrator in that poem.
John, I’m ready to comment and answer to your current essay.
First thing I’d like to write is: Vaneigem book “The Revolution of Everyday Life” has gotten old badly. I read it a lot of years ago, in the ‘90s, and it seemed outdated to me yet, with his proposals about work abolition, thanks to the “incoming” full automatisation and nuclearisation.
Now you’ve remembered the failed nuclearist prophecies for the current century, I’ve remembered what I read in a book (whose title I can’t/I don’t want to remember) written by a nuke lobby scientist, in which he said very seriously: “there isn’t a real problem with nuke waste, because plutonium can be reprocessed (so “recycled”) into new nuclear fuel “ad infinitum”. “He also tried to show to his readers that nuclear energy was economically profitable doing some economic tricks…but finally asked for the public (state) help to expand the world nuclearisation. Well, I think it was a fine example of the “idiots savants” who usually thrive in the nuke lobby.
I won’t forget I also want to write about your view about rutinary marxist revolutionary fantasies. I’d like to add another thing closely related with this marxist view about the future. I’ve always been puzzled by marxist insistence about a future society without social classes…and without state. State abolition seems to me obviously contrafactical: the socialist revolutions which succeed in the real world have finished becoming totalitarian regimes, so strong states which perpetred its power in every aspects of their citizens life. So, by which miracle could become those overgrown states into stateless societies? There’s a clear paradox between Marx (with his prophecy of future without state) and his real socialist heirs. Even I could point it’s a historical irony.
————————————
Waha # 19:
I had no idea R. Vaneigem is alive nowadays in his very advanced older age. Thank you for your information.
Hi JMG and all – The Neopagans who fake disability to grift benefits may not realize that that attitude (as I see it) starts contaminating their life, the old slippery slope as it were. Living on disability is no road to financial self-sufficiency, and soon you are going around looking for more handouts from everyone and everywhere. Other people soon learn to stop taking your phone calls.
Well, before they can build their AI dystopia, they need electricity. And although I suppose they could run all of this on coal (there’s like at least 100 years’ worth of the stuff left), I guess at some level the idea of running your shiny dystopia on belching smokestacks is just too declasse, too tacky. Who wants to involve those redneck coal miners in our shiny dystopia? Which leaves nuclear as the only option, whether it makes sense or not.
I mean, there’s the economic problems with it, there’s the bureaucratic problems with it but I think the real problem is – we’re getting too dumb to operate even the nuclear reactors we have now. I mean, these are the same people saying “Math is racist”, right? At least we in the west designed our reactors with some minimum level of safety, someone sat down and thought about what might happen if a reactor got improperly shut down. At least with the civilian reactors. God knows what safety margins the military breezes with.
Like with airplanes, nuclear reactors don’t really care about anything other than getting the right answer from you, when asked. And there are right and wrong answers. Imposing ideological delusions on such things will get you killed swiftly and effortlessly. Ask the survivors of Chernobyl what happens if you give it the wrong answer.
>Greer’s Law of Futurology. It’s quite simple: the future the pundits agree on is the one future you can be sure will never arrive
That’s because they’re never really talking about the future, just the present, but even MOAR so. The hyperpresent. They wouldn’t know the future if it bit them on the butt and then slapped them in the face.
>As it turns out, the partners of the firm (except one, the one who hires him) do not want this software to work. So
>they obstruct him in every way. He learns also that he has been hired specifically because he is poor at IT work,
>being a humanities student. He ends up being rewarded for doing nothing. He has so much free time that he learns
>French on his own, as an autodidact.
>
>In spite of this seemingly heavenly circumstance, he suffers from massive depression. He tries repeatedly to leave
>this job, but his boss keeps giving him raises to retain him lest they have to hire an actually competent person
This is rather an extreme example, but such work really starts to eat away at you, after a while. What really makes this diabolical, is if you take on some sort of mortgage or marriage or minivan that you have to make payments on for the next 30 years and you need that job to make that monthly nut. No way forward, no way back, just stuck. And you know that at some point, if you’re not doing anything truly useful, you will be dropkicked out the door like a field goal.
The Other Owen # 27:
I agree. AI dystopia needs huge amounts of electric energy, and this is the time again for nuke lobbysts (and mere nuke hooligans), to sell their own“futurist” dystopia one more time. So AI madness and full nuclearisation dream are or will be soon “brothers in arms” against the scarcity phantom, which threatens their cornucopian crazyness. This is the dirty secret behind the AI thing: data centers and everyday life digitalisation eats too much energy…
Clay, the whole AI boondoggle is so obviously a cargo cult — “once we create superintelligent computers, they’ll surely give us all the breakthroughs we need to have everything we want!” The overpaid goobers who make these claims have forgotten that a good many of the most important discoveries of science can be phrased very precisely as “You can’t do that.” It’s just as likely that if a superintelligent computer ever does get created, it’ll look over the current set of tech-bro daydreams and say, “Sorry, those aren’t possible; here are the laws of nature you don’t yet know about that won’t let you have those. Deal.”
Justin, I had one interaction with Adbusters; they asked me for the rights to publish my essay “The Next Ten Billion Years,” and then systematically gutted it so that it no longer made the point I was trying to make. This will have been in early 2014, so yeah, they were what they once criticized by then. As for hauntology, we’ll see.
Albrt, interesting. I’ve never seen this suggested before.
Chuaquin, thanks for this. It fascinates me that both Marxism and nuclear power have results that are so diametrically opposed to their propaganda.
Dana, I know. I’ve seen that happen, and it’s one of the reasons I systematically avoid having anything to do with the Neopagan scene these days.
Other Owen, there’s that! But the pundit-predicted future isn’t just the hyperpresent. It’s very often what you get when you mix an insanely overinflated sense of entitlement with porcine ignorance of the laws of nature, and apply the resulting mix to whatever linear trend you think you see in current data.
JMG, I gather you were born about a decade later then me (1949). By the time you would have finished in high school, the New Lefties had all become bankers or public officials and the hippie movement was ending. Is it not the case, that when a social movement is about to end, has become, if not respectable, part of the customary cultural landscape, it does tend to attract large cohorts of idlers and grifters?
JMG,
The most recent twist on the Beta Marxist phenomenon is of course Zohran Mamdani and the new leader of Seattle Katie Wilson.
They give an outlet for all the dissatisfied and downtrodden young people to feel they are rebelling and causing change without any real danger to the status quo. Even if they are true to their campaign promises the positions they have been elected to don’t have the built in power or resources to make the changes their voters are dreaming of.
In the late stage of empire a newly elected mayor might have a chance of enacting a platform of cutting the size of government in half, despite the opposition because it in fact agrees with reality. But the promises and dreams of the Beta-Marxist are no longer possible at this stage of the game, and I think that is why they are allowed to win and distract the voters.
If such a beta Marxist was to take over Seattle in 1962 there might have been some danger of it being turned in to a socialist utopia, for a time, because the resources were still there. Today there is no danger of any American city going in that direction. They can of course be turned in to a zombie city ( like Portland) wasting all its effort on pipe dreams instead of accepting reality. But a real socialist paradise with city grocery stores, free transit and subsidized rent is not in the cards.
Hi John Michael,
Conversation follows…
“Your will?”
“Yes, that thing. That’s what I want to exercise”
“Oh. No need to worry about that. Here it is. You’ll like it.”
“Thanks!”
Yes, the fictional conversation is of an imaginary sort of a day when, if I may amusingly observe, not very much happened! 😉
What do you mean, I have to do something (spoken sarcastically)? 🙂 There’s something deeply amusing about this series, and it always brings to mind the Monty Python, Life of Brian scene: We’re all individuals!
Yeah. A while ago it was self driving cars. Hey, do you recall the virtual reality worlds which kind of flopped? Now it’s arty-fish-al stuff this and that. The failure to produce a meaningful outcome is probably a step too far. Years ago I was insulted by some lazy dude, for this sin, working too hard.
PS: Didn’t get a chance to mention this, but drawing up the Yeats wheel, clarified the workings in a way that no amount of words could. Do you believe that Mr Yeats had that intention at the back of his mind?
Cheers
Chris
Also AI is unneeded for a lot of purposes. We already have superintelligences that we can communicate to and get answers from. They’re called gods.
@The Other Owen #27 – that’s the premise of the story “The Machine Stops.” It and Clarke’s “Superiority” are the two most prophetic science fiction stories I’ve ever read. (Not counting the ones our Archdruid wrote.)
Youngsters may recognize Maynard G. Krebs as the character who inspired Shaggy from “Scooby-Doo”–and thus, indirectly, Marvin from “Super Friends.” (When you study the history of ideas, you have to know these things!)
The Baha’i Faith is one of those movements contemporary with Communism that aspired (and still aspires) to transform the world into a utopia–not by revolution, but through mass conversions (“entry by troops”) and voluntary adoption by world governments. There is also some talk of a “calamity” that has to happen before the outbreak of world peace. While the actual number of Baha’is is a closely-guarded secret (no one believes the published estimates), the trend is clearly in the opposite direction (“exit by troops” was how one wit put it), and there are signs that its leadership have reconciled themselves to a future in which Baha’is are just one more religious minority. I wonder what the Baha’is ought to be doing differently, to have any hope of continuing relevance. Political involvement? A renewed mystical emphasis? Compare with the Anglican / Episcopalans or Freemasons, former “alpha” groups who have lost popularity to the point of being moribund. (The Baha’is were always “betas,” although they did attract some wealthy / upper-class Western seekers a century ago.)
Albrt @24: “I’m pretty sure he was playing unreliable narrator in that poem.”
I would guess there was more irony intended there than was readily apparent. Few of his poems ever really caught my attention; Except for the occasional really outlandishly bizarre metaphor in the poetry, I was more interested in his prose.
>It’s just as likely that if a superintelligent computer ever does get created, it’ll look over the current set of tech-bro daydreams and say, “Sorry, those aren’t possible
Ever notice the one response an AI never gives you is “I don’t know enough to say anything about that one way or another?” It just chipperly plows ahead at full speed, giving you the best gibberish it can.
And the things are tuned to always agree with you. So it will not only tell you it’s possible but you can find the unicorns you need to get this done, just talk to the fairy by the third tree in the forest while patting your head and rubbing your tummy while standing on one leg.
Someone called these systems “bullsh*t fountains”. They’re not wrong.
“Working class culture…tends to treat work as a locus of identity and value…” How true. Coming from a farming and mining background, I can assure you that those two groups, farmers and miners, (and I am positive there are many others) are proud of their occupations.
I have met many people, mostly middle class PMC who wrinkled their noses when I mentioned my background. Their problem, not mine. Do they ever think where their food comes from or where all the metal objects they use comes from?
Shakes head.
BTW, I got Debold’s book from the library and read a few pages, thought to myself that I have better things to do with my time. Besides, I’ve encountered enough of those people in my life already. But I find the posts and comments interesting and informative.
The progressive Marxists these days all seem to want to defund public services. Defund education, because education is racist. Defund the police, because the police are racist. Soon, they’ll want to defund the universities too because the universities are controlled by Zionists, and eliminate the SNAP food stamp system because too many racist whites are “abusing” the system.
Yeah, Mr. Greer .. I concur, in that they ARE boring to those of us don’t buy in to their grandiose bs of a plugged-in machine/humon symbiosis. And by that .. what I mean is, that I know that they themselves don’t buy into that narrative: these $newage tech volkin are ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMIN$ .. nothing else!
May the lowly lumpin rip them to shreads!
I wonder if I should mention the only way to get more than a few decades of nuclear energy before running out, is to run breeder reactors? That make weapons grade fissile material? No? Ok.
BTW, Trump’s bold announcement of constructing 20 new nuclear reactors, reminds me of all the advice I get about how to automate feeding a cat. Everybody likes to think about what goes into a cat.
Nobody likes to think about what comes out. I guarantee you he has no bold plan on what to do with the nuclear waste. Or that we don’t really have any plan at all on how to deal with the nuclear waste we already have, other than create “This is not a place of honor” memes.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/this-place-is-not-a-place-of-honor
There are times when I think that the techbros etc don’t really believe in AI but are just using it as a stalking horse for ending the green energy thing and fast-tracking nuclear power. But that is probably being too generous about them.
Man this one + left cant meme is hitting hard.
1) I ended up getting this job back in July that has a rhythm that, jt took my attention for the first few months and then both there was a seasonal-related slowdown, a shutdown related slowdown (we move federally purchased commodities from usda through to food banks who move them to pantries and distribute and then report back up to feds), and a ‘ok I got the hang of this job it’s not hard relative slowdown . And now I both feel like the guy who is paid too well to quit in a job that feels purposeless. And 2) I have a way increased time to puter around the internet at a time when I feel the great wave of liberatory truth telling washing through the Public , a wave revealing AI datacenters in rural small towns and chimeric manufactured poisonous spikes and assassinations w coverups, psyops and media manipulation. And the combination of the truth telling impetus and the heavy content is playing to a sort of ‘last battle’ motif which inclines me towards the position that I ought to be a champion encouraging the liberatory thinking . A vanity. Tho I prefer leuitenant to the one really out front. And tho the position may be a vanity, creating an imposter feeling where I can’t possibly live up to my imagination, it also feels like its for me to do. Like im a roomba which produces analysis and strategic communication instead of sucking up dust. Maybe not the Dyson brand but some off brand from Amazon but nonetheless, the thing. Or as ‘my favorite songwriter says ‘a bird cant help but sing a melody.’ So I feel a lot of anxiety both about whether I have any purpose and whether im good enough to be useful and also about all the wicked traps being built to herd the people into the biggest stupidest mass possible. Related, brownstone’s UBI Make Slavery Great Again article. Meanwhile 3) As your post helpfully points out, regardless of the promised “good solid toolkit both for the individual pursuing autonomy and for the experienced practitioner hoping to show the way to novices. Even so, the original impetus and the follow-through both have to come from the individual. Thus the movement toward freedom can never really be a mass movement. It can only be a movement of individuals in opposition to the mass.” Seems like that should be more obvious to me before;I guess the brain worm of the ‘last battle’ was just too well fed. 4) To the end of encouraging a movement of individuals i have been spending a lot of time (my instincts were alright in this regard) in comments, following to people with shared perspective, sending validation and support and recommendations of other people to check out, weaving horizontal relationships which support and supplement the more vertical ones with the people who are drawing or hosting the ‘party’–your site and the commentariat here have been instructive. I’m also writing about this on my substack but maybe that is pointless. Maybe im just working it out for myself in those pieces. The third one is comparing the horizontal relations between ‘fans’ who share a vision often organized by shared choice of leader building a stronger body, and community horizontal relations ie neighborliness over dependence on the state vs the horizontal organizing mode that is hyper process-based that ive only experienced on the left that hates a charismatic leader, desires a technate and tamps everyone down ‘equal’ best it can. With the first two being team animal approved and the last being on the other side of that frontline w team machine.
–.–anyway I remember way back when you launched into situationism and promised tools… good preparation in these first posts, maybe more what I needed to take in than whatever follows.
I like other owens use of the term hyper present. There seems to be some confusion between that and the eternal Now. Maybe that’s the Neptune vs Uranus polarity too? I know I’m mixing comments here, but there does seem to be a yearning for “it” awakening that usually siphons into fragmentation and chaos, before it can mature. Turn space into a glob and fragment Tme. As a Christian, I express it by saying, black or Satan always gets the first move. As shorthand. Another, I love the essay reaction for JMG! I guess if your job depends on not noticing something, it’s hard to finish strong. These Faustian European intellectuals are fascinating and worth learning from, thank you.
I should add, I aspire to be less reactive and use bad as a push block first. To be a creature of the day and therefore a disciple of the day and the night. It’s too bad that things have petered out culturally but Life goes on. Extracting all the good or most of it, and moving on,all I can say is well done on this wonderful essay series.
Mary, oh, very probably yes, but I’m also basing this on accounts by people who were there.
Clay, my working guess is that Mamdani is going to pull an Obama, ditch the platform that he ran on now that it’s served the purpose of getting him into power, and govern like any other corrupt machine politician. I haven’t followed Wilson closely enough to guess, and Seattle being Seattle, she may go charging straight ahead into catastrophic failure. Your broader point stands, though.
Chris, yes, I can think of quite a list of Waves of the Future™ that broke and went back out to sea ahead of schedule. As for Yeats, an interesting question to which I don’t know the answer.
Anon, oh, LLMs aren’t meant to replace gods. They’re there to provide easier access to devils. 😉
Ambrose, the problem the Baha’i faith faces is that it’s just another prophetic religion in a market that was already well saturated with those before Baha’ullah’s time. Bad marketing decision! 😉
Other Owen, if that’s standard for the whole range of LLMs, stay tuned for monumental disasters.
Annette2, I know. Coming from the very bottom edge of the middle class, from families that were working class until my parents’ time, I’ve had the chance to learn the ways of both classes. By and large I prefer to live in working class neighborhoods…
Richard, which is utterly fascinating, since Marxism traditionally set out to establish bureaucracies, not tear them down. It’s the classic beta-Marxist role, exploring fringe options for the system.
Polecat, that seems entirely plausible to me.
Other Owen, and that means they’re even more unaffordable than ordinary reactors, too.
KAN, it’s possible. Those tech bros I’ve listened to, on the other hand, give off a true-believer vibe that would put most Southern Baptists to shame.
AliceEm, we’ll have to wait and see what you think when the tools come out. 😉
Celadon, thank you. I plan on having fun with some of the concepts still to come.
The using nuclear power to feed the AI thing is the result of the graph the BPA happily updates every day. 3000 megawatts of wind and solar on line, but how much is available right now? That is shown on the green line.
https://transmission.bpa.gov/business/operations/wind/baltwg.aspx
Oh, yeah. Now compare that to the cyan line at about 1100 MW. That is nuclear plant. Which one is best suited to run the data center? It’s pretty obvious.
There is room for one more dam on the Columbia River right in the middle the salmon spawning beds in the Hanford Reach. That’s a bit problematic. If CO2 emissions are also bad, where does that leave you?
They stopped construction of Yucca Mountain, but they didn’t destroy what they had done. They may quietly restart that project some day and send the waste there.
The Chinese just started a thorium breeder reactor. If that works (which in this case means does not dissolve itself) then there is a source of non-weapons grade nuclear power.
Reading the Brautigan poem, it would be horrifying if it weren’t so darned silly. Did these guys never read The Time Machine or did they just read it and think, “You know, it’s unfortunate about the being eaten by Morlocks part, but man I want to be a weak, lazy Eloi. That sounds like the life!”
Re disability Pagans–I have known a number of such who justify their grifting the system on the grounds that a proper society supports its poets and shamans. Well, that’s fine, but you need to write poetry that your society recognizes as such, not self-centered drivel that is an actually an attack on everything that the majority values. The existence of the greeting card industry shows that people are perfectly willing to pay for art and poetry that they actually like.
Likewise, you can only be a shaman in a society that has a recognized role for such. There may be physical or mental afflictions that you believe would be best treated by shamanism, but if your potential clients are going to a physician or a psychiatrist instead it is hardly fair to expect them to support your existence.
I see amazing levels of inability in our system. A campus I frequent took two years to remodel two small restrooms in one building. The Empire State Building was completed in less time and barring a disaster will probably still outlast this version of the restrooms.
There is also a great inability to recognize that money does not equal actual goods and services. If, as a current meme suggests, Elon Musk, or fill in billionaire of your choice, actually liquidated their fortune and sent out a $x,xxx,xxx check to every adult citizen that action would not suddenly multiply the number of doctors or nurses, nor would it suddenly create housing units, warm jackets, nor groceries. Is the plumber suddenly enriched beyond his wildest dreams going to continue to clear clogged drains, or the oil platform worker to manage dangerous machinery in miserable weather? Seems doubtful.
Rita
JMG,
I have been following this series with quite some interest. Your dissection of the no-ego and the “left can’t meme” were thoughtful and well researched. I have never heard of the situationalists, and I doubt I’ll have the time to give the material it’s proper reading. But this analysis is fascinating. And I am quite eager to see where it goes. (Although knowing you and reading above, that it is about individual transformation, and occultism might be involved. I am quite sure there will be place again to complain about “Here goes Greer again, talking about the magical will” 🙂 )
What fascinates me in this essay is your long detour into the sixties culture. Not having the triple benefit of being there, being an american, or having he time to immerse myself thoroughly in the relevant literature, art and pop-culture, I guess I’ll just go with the summaries. But I did live to see some remnants of the 60ies and 70ies culture in my youth. Several of my teachers up to high school have espoused real environmentalism and conservation techniques in our classes. A last ditch effort to pass it on maybe. Plus in my adult life I have meet several mechanical engineers from a particular university, that talked very mathematically correct about energy efficient design and limits to growth. I am pretty sure there was a tenured professor there in the 2000s teaching limits to growth.
A history of ideas question maybe. Several reviewers mention Lovecrafts racist treatment of shoggoths by the Elder Things. As in his At the Mountains of Madness the Elder things were concerned with art, design and intellectual pursuits, and the shoggoths were there to clean, build, maintain. It is striking how Lovecraft only has sympathy for the slave master and not the servant. And in the process he built a society of leisure, poetic pursuit for the Elder things, while the shoggoths played the bio-engineered machines of loving grace. It is just , that At the Mountains of Madness was written well before the 60ies. Is there any connection, or cultural trend to be seen here?
Best regards,
V
Mr. JMG,
The analogy of Situationist Marxists as Gulliver trapped by the tiny lilliputians was incisive and funny. It is an excellent way to characterize the traps of Marxist thought. As I have observed, Marxism, while providing excellent analysis of what is going on in civilization, completely fails to map realistic, actionable paths for the future. Often I will ask my Marxist Friend how he appraises the future outcome of a political situation, to which he often replies by offering some dreamy vision of the future that is rather disconnected to the hard facts of life. One such example recently was, “what do you think would happen if the USA unilaterally withdrew support from Israel?” To which he replied with a vision of some harmonious kumbayaa nation that would encompass all the people of the levant equally. As nice of a vision it was, that idea completely ignores the sort of hard problems that would arise should the USA grant my Marxist Friend his wish that Israel be cut off from the American Empire.
Is there any way, or any notable exemptions, that Marxism can be saved from insipient visions of the future? And to what ends can Marxist thought be transformed to produce clairvoyant solutions for our future?
JMG, your comment in #31 “… many of the most important discoveries of science can be phrased very precisely as “You can’t do that” is spot-on. Might I suggest an alternative expression with delicious alliteration which a very bright co-worker used to utter: “Can’t be done. Simple as that.” 😃
Richard # 41:
It’s interesting and puzzling to me when I’ve read you that “progressive” marxists want to defund police; when you look at the historical real socialism regimes, they had strong police, of course well financed, for repressing “reactionary” individuals. Indeed, it was an important part of totalitarian states.
@ JMG # 20
Regarding the history student who was hired in IT for his incompetence, the author points out that the main reason for his suffering is that he belongs to the working class, which defines itself by its ability to build, fix, and maintain things.
By contrast, he argues, someone from the “professional” class would not consider it a curse at all. They would see it as a great opportunity to form connections and build up their portfolio, while having a nice job to show on their resume.
I was in such a job as well – in compliance, a bustling part of the IT industry. Now I am an engineer, and my idea of a job is that I shall be assigned work – often mountains of it – and I have to deliver. But this job was weird. Most of the work could be automated by code. None of what I was building was ever going to see any use. Worse, my main job was to complete “Inherent Risk Assessment” forms, which I knew were mostly being dumped inside a digital cabinet (the cabinet in question being a table in a database).
For all the world, I felt like Uttanka in the world of Serpents. In the Mahabharata, Uttanka is a human who ends up in the fae-land of the Nagas. There he sees glamorous palaces and beautiful lakes, and gorgeous women and handsome youths engaged in seemingly meaningless tasks like braiding white and black threads together. It was like that – I was surrounded by good-looking people who spent their time on utterly unproductive things.
I left within a year. I felt my skills rusting each and every day. I saw my team-mates, each engaged in a stupid and meaningless task, and all of them were complaining about how many more perks were owed to them since they worked in a product company. I was stunned – there were already so many perks, and virtually no work. I couldn’t understand their point. What is worse is how many of these “professionals” were constantly complaining about engineers who were engaged in doing real work (like writing the code that earned the company its cash inflow). They were annoyed that those engineers weren’t making themselves available for compliance calls at the beck and call of the compliance team. As if they had anywhere near the same amount of free time.
I was constantly worried that I would not only rust but eventually become like them – engaged in doing meaningless things and being “professional”, and actually feeling justified in taking money for that. I quit as soon as I got a decent new position with actual work in it. That’s what made me leave at the earliest opportunity.
Regarding artificial intelligence, the professions that this technology threatens are actually white-collar workers: scientists, creative professionals, bureaucrats, and those in finance.
Bureaucrats and financiers are particularly easy to understand because these industries essentially just recite and replicate rules. Even if AI systems experience significant degradation, AI can still handle the operations of bureaucratic organizations or conduct routine financial transactions within those rules.
As for creative professionals and scientists, the problem largely stems from the fact that academia itself has lost its originality (and science itself has lost its adherence to objectivity and positivism), making them unable to contend with the mixed information capabilities of AI.
Of course, as computing systems decline, programmers will become increasingly adept at using less and less memory to run increasingly sophisticated and seamless language models. Therefore, in the foreseeable future, clerical white-collar jobs will not recover due to the decline of AI.
The number and demand for workers and engineers will continue to increase, leading to a culture that values industry and technology (rather than science). Just as a culture that valued philosophy died after Nietzsche, the two World Wars were merely a dignified funeral for that culture. The culture that valued science died long after Hawking’s passing; this era is its funeral.(Actually,the culture that valued science, like Hawking, already had Alzheimer’s but technological advancements simply extended its lifespan.)
As one Twitter user put it:
Scientists used to be rock stars. Everyone has heard the names Einstein, Planck, Oppenheimer, and Sagan. Last dude I knew of that was pop culture—famously Hawking.
What happened?
https://x.com/jajacobson55/status/1991226481058439354
This essay reminds me of the Russian play The Dragon by Evgeny Shvarts. It is a fairytale like play with Lancelot and a dragon, but once the dragon is dead he is replaced by the tyrannical mayor and Lancelot concludes that to free the villagers “the dragon will have to be killed inside each of them”. A further synopsis can be read here for those unfamiliar with it: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-dragon-russias-satirical-parable-of-autocracy-and-the-human-spirit
Thank you, JMG—as always, your reflections are deeply interesting. I’m often surprised by how the threads you explore resonate so closely with my own life and explorations.
The Situationists were a major influence on me when I was younger, and I think the arc between Debord and Vaneigem is a powerful way to frame archetypal development. Vaneigem’s personal evolution is particularly fascinating. I’d point to his biographical work—Le Chevalier, la Dame, Le Diable et la Mort—to see how he transitioned into an occult practitioner and alchemical enthusiast.
What stands out is how he came to understand that the liberation of all desires can be a violent endeavor. He turned instead toward ”affinement’ of ‘desire, exploring how nature’s tendency to overproduce carries its own kind of violence, and how human discernment can channel this abundance and sculpt it into meaningful expression.
This for me, really echoes how permaculture works—starting with pioneering R-selected phases of succession, and guiding that succession toward more intentional, productive outcomes. I think this will be one of the key tasks we’ll be faced with in the near future.
I think his masterpiece is the more recent De La Destinée. There, he revisits his familiar themes—our “devolution” from a matriarchal utopia into separative existence—but this time through the lens of his own everyday life. To be honest all of his many books are rehashes of The Revolution of Everyday Life, but now , as an almost 100-year-old man, he explores his own inner alchemy: the blossoming of his soul, his somatic practices, and what he calls l’intelligence sensible, in contrast to the sterile labyrinth of the personnality. It’s a beautiful exploration of late-life wisdom.
He also wrote a history of surrealism, which I haven’t yet read, but I know there’s an English translation available—definitely on my list.
On Debord’s side, the contrast is sharp. Unlike Vaneigem’s working-class roots and distance from intellectual elitism, Debord seemed disconnected from lived experience. His life ended in suicide, and perhaps that disconnection was part of it. There’s also an interesting (and admittedly conspiratorial) theory that La Société du Spectacle is a pastiche of Clausewitz’s work—something worth exploring.
Really looking forward for you exploration of surrealism. As a French Canadian (second generation), I’m particularly drawn to, Breton’s Arcanum 17 which is a powerful geopoetical and occult meditation rooted in a very specific place: Le Rocher Percé in Gaspésie, Quebec, where he was exiled during WW2. His blending of geology and psychology in that text is deeply inspiring.
I just wanted to place some “pebbles” around what you shared. Thank you again for your work—it continues to resonate in profound ways. I’m a practicing Druid (AODA) and a Fellow of the Golden Section Fellowship, and I often feel a strong sense of synchronicity with what you put into the world. This piece was no exception—another deep chord struck.
Thank you again.
I always found it funny that both the English `travel’ and the French `travailler’ hark back to a medieval Latin word for a torture instrument. The French title of Vaneigem’s magnum opus is weirdly revelatory for a Marxist since ‘savoir-vivre’ isn’t just knowing how to live. It refers to a rather bourgeois meaning of good manners or breeding.
@JPM The KLF is a nice example of modern Situationists. Burning a million of your own pounds makes a statement.
“There is no such thing as collective liberty.”
Whoa. Quite an insight. I’m gonna have to marinate on that awhile to fully grasp it.
I think it’s especially hard to grok because the notion of collective liberty is pretty deeply baked into the cake of our Western consciousness. I mean, isn’t collective liberty what we were taught in school that both the American and French revolutions (and by extension, all other revolutions) were all about?
>Those tech bros I’ve listened to, on the other hand, give off a true-believer vibe that would put most Southern Baptists to shame.
Southern Baptists are religious fanatics? You’re funny. I’ve seen people that would call the Southern Baptists decadent and dissolute. And after seeing the fanaticism of the dangerhairs, they made me reluctantly conclude “You know, those people weren’t so bad”
There was a recent conversation about those “tech bros” with Tucker, which covers this topic. Lemme see if I can find it.
https://rumble.com/v6zthwc-the-occult-kabbalah-the-antichrists-newest-manifestation-and-how-to-avoid-t.html
Makes me glad I left. I may have left a bit early but at this point, I am so glad I left.
A great interview with Negativland appeared in my inbox after posting here yesterday. Must be a synchronicity.
The discussion is very germane to the topics being discussed this week, (and those in the future posts when you cover detournement). The interplay between detournement and recuperation is on full display… As Jon Leidecker says,
[There is] “is an overall argument of how intellectual property issues have inverted over the last 30 years, how it used to be a countercultural thing. I am sympathetic to the trend of YouTube creators angry about plagiarism, their content being appropriated, re-collaged, when I imagine it from their perspective. The commercial model for the last 15 years is that the platforms are owned—you’re welcome to share and maybe sign up for monetization, if you want—but mostly, you just post stuff, some of which gets millions and millions of views, and other people get the money. So the kids are right to be angry about this “sharing economy,” it makes sense that the social praxis has inverted over the last 30 years, and this is a great opportunity to write a really concise book about the musical artists, the avant-garde, and how the rug was pulled out from under the avant-garde and became the corporate argument.”
And Hosler, “related to what Jon’s talking about, I remember this goes back again to something Don Joyce of Negativland, now deceased, was predicting in the ’90s, he said, “I think appropriation, collage, and reuse of other people’s stuff is going to become one of the preeminent creative forms in the next century.” And that’s what TikTok is, it’s a 10-year-old doing an avant-garde transgressive appropriation-based thing to make some fun lip-sync video or whatever they’re making. But that’s what always happens throughout history, we see avant-garde ideas in art, in politics, in lifestyle and fashion, and anything that works, they percolate into the mainstream. Now that’s something we’ve lived long enough to see happen.
I’m only saying this because your book is going to be read by people who, the idea that you can take something that isn’t yours and reuse it is like, “Well, what’s the big deal with that? I’ve been doing that since I was 8 years old.” It’s trying to contextualize that. When I think of the pushback against what we were doing in the ’80s, and what John Oswald was doing—a certain kind of person was shocked. Like, “Are you crazy? How do you even think you could do that?” It really bothered people. It’s hard to convey how much it disturbed people that you were taking things that weren’t yours and reusing them to make stuff…”
https://toneglow.substack.com/p/tone-glow-200-negativland
The whole thing really is worth a read, especially with a lot of the things they have to say about the goLLuM’s and how their arguments for fair use in the 90’s have now been recuperated by corporations.
They are still doing the thing, and to me, remain essential as ever. The interview was background material for a new book out on Plunderphonics by Matthew Blackwell.
“As awareness of how the media environment we occupy affects and directs our inner life grows, some resist. The skillfully reworked billboard… directs the public viewer to a consideration of the original corporate strategy. The studio for the cultural jammer is the world at large.” — Don Joyce, JamCon ’84
“Never underestimate the power of interesting.” –Don Joyce
“Most people feel adrift and useless unless they have some outlet for the normal human desire for productive effort. ”
David Graeber’s book, “Bull[crap] Jobs” brings quite a lot of both data, and anecdata, to the business of substantiating this very point.
Firstly he carefully distinguishes between “Bull[crap]” jobs and plain old “[Crap]” jobs. The “[Crap]” jobs are the dirty, but necessary jobs, like garbage collectors, all kinds of cleaning jobs, sewage maintenance, factory work, farming, and etc. What these have in common is:
1) they are necessary
2) they – tolerably often – involve moving actual dirt around and making your clothes dirty
3) when you do them, people – including your employers, despite knowing they need you – treat you like dirt and pay you dirt wages
Whereas, the “Bull[crap]” jobs are the UNnecessary, mostly clean, jobs, which are* fast becoming a booming sector of the economy. What these have in common:
1) they are not at all necessary – and in fact a person can spend much or all of the time they are technically “at work” in a million other ways to suit themselves
2) they – tolerably often – are clean enough to leave no signs of effort on your clothes
3) when you do them, people want to pay you MORE, because you yourself are increasingly disheartened by how useless you are
Whatever initially drew his attention to this phenomenon, it immediately struck him as anomalous. Because don’t we all BELIEVE, in our hearts of hearts, that most of our fellow men and women want nothing more than to be paid a bunch of money to sit around doing nothing?
He found out – and then set out to document – that it just ain’t so.
What he discovered about the reasons why all these sinecures were being created is a whole nuther story, but personally I think both he, and you, are absolutely correct about this.
When wheel meets the road, there just AREN’T all that many people who WANT to spend their lives being handed everything for nothing. This is why [he concluded] they found they had to pay people MORE to keep em doing something that they deeply realise is non-essential.
* at least they were in the 2015-2018 period during which he gathered his research material
I really enjoyed reading this, thanks! It’s triggered some thoughts, memories, and reflections:
a. From what I’ve understood the Situationist response appears to have been to back away, once they realised the effective response was individual change, and return to regurgitating Marxist platitudes. Is another possible one (that others choose) to fragment into smaller groups and let infighting consume their attention and thus energy? I ask firstly because it reminds me of a scene in one of my father’s favourite films, Monty Python’s The Life of Brian, where there are competing, bickering anti-Roman groups: “The People’s Front of Judea” and “The Judean People’s Front”, which achieve little because of their obsession with each other. Secondly in the personal dimension I notice that when I have a unity of will/focus and thus making great progress towards a goal there are often moments where life/parts of myself conspire to jerk the steering wheel so I veer off course and away from progress. Gradually I am getting better and noticing and stopping this from happening, but wonder if that’s an example of individual sabotage when there is awareness of effective change?
b. A wise man said: “Nothing is more futile … than waiting for someone else to do it for you.” I wanted to say that this, to me, sums up a lot of political binaries: e.g. abortion, immigration control etc. Political parties use these concerns as an easy way to rile up their voting bases but when in power little is done to achieve meaningful progress towards addressing their voters’ concerns, despite having lengthy initial periods of majority legislative control. Is the way of breaking out of this the noticeable rise in protests, riots, and support for new political parties? It feels like more voters are seeing through the political chicanery, and the breaking of the binary is in turn leading to a rather violent clampdown by those who benefit from its preservation.
c. I wish I’d been aware about the tendency of bureaucrats to desire their reproduction across societies: grey suited and far less exciting modern day Genghis Khans. I have an experience of working with a policy organisation on stopping financial predation in a sector of the economy. When it came to addressing the problem I suggested a simple set of clear rules that could be easily implemented and would deal with most of the problems at source. The organisation came back to me and said that’s lovely but why not set up a regulatory team as happens in another industry. I replied explaining how woeful the track record was of that industry’s regulatory team and it seemed to add unnecessary complication to a simpler solution. They then replied suggesting an even more complicated regulatory regime, which also has a greater track record of failure to solve the problem! Looking back their suggestions were successful in one measure: employing more public officials who can reliably avoid solving a problem!
JMG,
I absolutely love this, particularly the last sentence:
“Furthermore, there are sharp limits to how much help you can give anyone, even if they want to follow your lead. Situationism, interestingly enough, included several of the core methods that can be used to assist that process. In future posts here, I’ll talk about the crafting of situations, the art of the derivé, and the practical tactics of détournement, which provide a good solid toolkit both for the individual pursuing autonomy and for the experienced practitioner hoping to show the way to novices. Even so, the original impetus and the follow-through both have to come from the individual. Thus the movement toward freedom can never really be a mass movement. It can only be a movement of individuals in opposition to the mass.”
In my experience developing autonomy and in supporting clients in this journey as well, it’s about developing autonomy while knowing I still have connection, belonging, mattering etc. Without that I see a lot of people stuck in either a submit or a defy pattern or moving between to the two (Yeats anyone?). It’s tricky to help people develop autonomy because if we take sides in their submit/defy bind, they are likely to react and take the opposite side and we are unintentionally enacting their acting out.
I also maintain that true autonomy doesn’t have to be in opposition to or in reaction to anything. It’s just what’s true for me and I can have a different without opposing someone who holds a different view. Of course, that’s not always easy. I think that’s why I like your last sentence so much. Movement of individuals can be in opposition to the mass and of course sometimes active opposition, e..g. war has its place, and in my day to day life, I don’t have to oppose the people who matter to me. Autonomy and connection.
Samir, thank you for this. I didn’t know about Vaneigem’s later alchemical explorations.
I found this PDF for an “Outline for an Alchemy of the Self” by Vaneigem.
I am also interested in this Arcanum 17. It seems like a work prefiguring psychogeography.
It seems can also look to the surrealist adjacent Georges Bataille and his Acéphale society and writings as another conduit between surrealism and the occult.
I also have gotten recently the new English edition of The Magic Art by Andre Breton (when it went on sale). There are so many connections…
…but for those who want an early introduction I can recommend the book Surrealism and the Occult by Nadi Coucha as an introduction.
Two other books (that I didn’t finish reading in whole) are worth mentioning:
Max Ernst and Alchemy :a magician in search of myth by M.E. Warlick
and Alchemist of the avant-garde : the case of Marcel Duchamp by John F. Moffitt.
I need to get back to them. The Coucha book is a quick accessible read. The others are highly academic in their prose.
“Scientists used to be rock stars. Everyone has heard the names Einstein, Planck, Oppenheimer, and Sagan. Last dude I knew of that was pop culture—famously Hawking.
What happened?”
The one person projects are mostly dead. I saw an astronomy paper with over a dozen names on it. The super collider is a vast operation. The new discoveries require ever more work and ever bigger teams for ever less knowledge with minimal practical application.
The periodic table is a great example. The last natural element was found a century ago. They have now finished the last row to element 118. Does this sound useful to you?
“Oganesson has the highest atomic number and highest atomic mass of all known elements. On the periodic table of the elements it is a p-block element, a member of group 18, and the last member of period 7. Its only known isotope, oganesson-294, is highly radioactive, with a half-life of 0.7 ms and, as of 2025, only five atoms have been successfully produced.”
The atomic number of 118 was supposed to be an “island of stability” where the half-life was long enough something practical might be done. It wasn’t.
It recently occurred to me that the most fanciful part of Star Trek wasn’t the warp drive, but rather the hand-held device that held enough energy to evaporate several people.
Speaking of alchemy, perhaps the work of all these theorists of economy and work and life has been an act of alchemy in its third phase: after calcination and dissolution come separation. Where in the past work and life were one, as lived by farmers, and as noted, the working class. Work is a part of life. It is not something outside of life. But perhaps by separating it for a time, some further breaking down of the separated materials in our current nigredo phase.
So where there was once unity in life, between work and leisure, work and worship, work and family life, these economist alchemists and avantgardists have separated out work to apply an alchemical process to it… later there words might be taken as homeopathic doses that can help us as we seek to reintegrate following the collapse of communism, capitalism and especially of fully automated space luxury communism-capitalism
For this thought I will share another song, the early industrial classic “No Separation” from Nocturnal Emissions:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npodaaOxaxU
We can put things together
We will survive
We are human
We are animals
No matter what they bought you
No matter what they taught you
No matter what they told you was rude
One thing I know
Two things I know
Three things I know
And four things for sure
There is no separation
There is no separation
There is none
And remember
There will be a next week
And a next year
>Elon Musk, or fill in billionaire of your choice, actually liquidated their fortune
What you’d find, is that they never were really billionaires in the first place, that it was smoke and mirrors for them to impress people they don’t like. If they did truly try what you just said, there would be so many front runners pushing the price down, to get ahead of their selling. And then it would take on a life of its own and spread to the rest of the market. It exists only on paper and in your beliefs, it’s not really real.
And I think what you’ll also find (Epstein *cough* *cough*) is that they also do what they’re told and that’s part of why they were so well compensated. Some of it is luck, some of it is skill. Some of it. I wouldn’t envy one of them right off the bat or think that they can actually do anything about whatever problem it is you think they can. They are less powerful and less wealthy than you think.
Thank you so much for this essay, I feel a great deal more literate after reading it. It seems to me that the beta-Marxists have always lived provisionally, straddled between the bogus past and the glorious future, but living in neither one. People who live provisionally, and there are a great many of them these days, are always miserable, no matter how good they have it. Their only commitment is to a future that is dramatic in either its horrors or its cornucopias (a binary). Misery loves company, so you know that they’ll always be trying to recruit more into the provisional living mentality. Living in the present moment and being grateful for what has been given is a small, quiet way of rejecting their plans.
Siliconguy, ah, yes, thorium reactors. Those have been being built since the 1950s. As with all nuclear power schemes, the problem isn’t technical — it’s financial — and since nobody’s willing to ask whether the latest iteration will be anything but another expensive subsidy dumpster, you can be sure that the same silliness will continue for a good long while yet.
Slithy, the funny thing about that bit from The Time Machine is that Wells meant it as a satire on the class system of his time. The upper classes were already weak, lazy Eloi — and quite a number of intellectuals still long for the days when they could aspire to that same status.
Rita, exactly. Society still supports poets and shamans, if they write good poetry and do effective spiritual work. Not to rub anyone’s nose in anything, but I make quite a decent income as a writer and occultist, which is the precise modern equivalent — and if you ever had a chance to look at what I wrote in my late teens and twenties (which you can’t, since I did the smart thing and burnt them long ago) you’d discover that I wasn’t any more talented or skilled at that point than your average Neopagan would-be poet and shaman. The difference between the successful poets and shamans in today’s society and the cheap grifters is that the former understand that hard work is the only offering the gods accept.
Vitranc, be prepared to complain. 😉 As for “At the Mountains of Madness,” excellent! Yes, exactly. You’ll be interested to know that a lot of the avant-garde thinkers of the 60s used to babble about “energy slaves” — the idea was that technology powered by all that cheap abundant nuclear power would provide a surrogate slave class so that everyone else could sit around being lazy and cultured and useless like the Elder Things. As for Lovecraft — whisper this, but he was just as bigoted about poor rural white people as he was about black people; read “Beyond the Walls of Sleep” or “The Lurking Fear” if you want examples. As usual, people fuss about his racism because they want to avoid talking about his, and their own, class bigotries.
Mrdobner, I don’t think Marxism as such can be saved; it’s a 19th century para-Christian cargo cult that mostly serves as a refuge for the Maynard G. Krebses of modern industrial society. With any luck, though, the concept of a class analysis of society can be pried loose from Marx’s writings and put into some less delusional framework.
Bryan, thank you! It’s a point that deserves to be burnt brutally with a branding iron into the backsides of tech bros and anyone else who thinks that the Great God Progress really has the omnipotence that its true believers pretend.
Rajarshi, now you have me interested. What happened to Uttanka? The kid’s version of the Mahabharata I grew up with (obviously far, far shorter than the original!) didn’t include his story.
林龜儒, that’s an interesting possibility. So far, at least, attempts to make LLMs replace the work of white collar employees aren’t even close to breaking even in most cases, and the error rates are phenomenal even compared to the high modern tolerance for hopeless incompetence — but I suppose it’s possible that this may eventually change. As for the collapsing prestige of scientists, why, the answer to that is quite simple: they started telling too many blatant lies. When climate scientists started insisting that the global cooling scare of the 1970s never happened, when medical scientists parroted whatever line of cant made more profits for the pharmaceutical industry that week, and so on down the sorry litany of scientific dishonesty, they let the air out of science’s overinflated prestige, and now it’s lying limp and flat on a wet street as cars drive right on over it.
Free Rain, thanks for this! My Russian isn’t anything like up to the original these days, but I may see if I can find that in English or French translation.
Samir, thank you for this! I haven’t read Vaneigem’s later work, but I may need to change that; his history of Surrealism sounds especially interesting. If The Society of the Spectacle is a pastiche of Clausewitz, it’s a brilliant piece of détournement — not to mention a reminder that pastiche can be an art form all its own. Arcanum 17 isn’t one of Breton’s works that I’ve read, and here again, I’ll fix that.
Lieven, an excellent point, made sharper by Vaneigem’s own insistence that he was trying to create “a society of masters without slaves.”
Blue Sun, good. It took me a good long time to figure out all the implications of that. The great difference between the American and French revolutions was precisely that theoretically, at least, the American revolution was about individual liberties, (“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” — notice “men,” plural) while the French Revolution embraced the illusion of collective liberty (“the Declaration of the Rights of Man,” singular, with its focus on the nation and the general will instead of the individual.) Where “the general will” governs unchecked, and sovereignty resides with the nation rather than with each individual constituting the nation, liberty in any real sense cannot exist.
Other Owen, we may know different Southern Baptists, then.
Justin, interesting. I’ll see if I can make time for it.
Scotlyn, thanks for this. That’s fascinating.
Vivek, (1), well, the Situationist International went that way, too — it finally disintegrated in a cascade of mutual excommunications where everybody threw everyone else out. I’m sure someone shouted “Splitter!” at the Judean Popular Front, sitting over there by himself! More generally, of course, you’re quite correct — finding ways of self-sabotage is a common habit of the divided will. (2) It’s quite common for the partisan binary to break down in the course of an elite replacement cycle — we had a lot of similar phenomena here in the run-up to the last three cycles, the ones that hit critical mass in 1776, 1860, and 1932. (3) Exactly — it’s not about solving the problem, it’s about hiring more college graduates, and that in turn requires not solving the problem.
Angelica, hmm! I hadn’t encountered the “submit/defy” phrasing of that binary, and it’s very useful — thank you. Of course you don’t have to oppose individuals, and that’s just it. The people who matter to you aren’t the mass. Neither are the people who don’t matter to you, when you can deal with them as individuals. I can reject the mass consciousness of our time and still treat individuals as worthwhile human beings, even if they share the values of the mass, just as I can define myself and choose my actions in opposition to the corporate system, for example, and still be friendly to the clerk at the local dollar store. That’s true even when I have to confront individuals who are trying to enforce conformity on me. The art of fighting someone without dehumanizing them isn’t practiced enough these days.
Justin, thanks for the heads up! I hadn’t heard yet that The Magic Art was on sale. Fulgur Press is clearly going to get more of my money. 😉 As for separation, yes, very likely, but solve without coagula is a recipe for disaster in an alchemical laboratory.
Kimberly, that’s an intriguing analysis. I’ll have to think about that — and maybe even meditate on it. 😉
I forgot the link for the Vaneigem essay:
https://kmfreepress.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/outline-alchmey-self.pdf
and the Surrealism and the Occult book was by Nadia Coucha not Nadi…
sometimes my fingers skip a letter or two or get them garbled.
The Breton book is a fine art edition and onsale still for half off (plus shipping from the UK means its cover price… but still a nice discount from the original offer).
https://www.fulgur.co.uk/books/magic-art/
They also have a pre-order open for a book that looks at the deep connection between Surrealism and the Tarot
https://www.fulgur.co.uk/books/surrealism-and-the-tarot-a-love-story/
Yes, the time has come to coagulate. Agreed!
@62 blue sun
Remember the scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian* where the crowd yells that they’re all individuals and all different, then one guy says, “I’m not”? We don’t get collective freedom in America by slavishly adhering to the official script.
(The fact that a well-known pop cultural reference comes to my mind shows that my own thinking is not really unique.)
*Disclaimer: I got this through cultural osmosis, not from watching the movie.
Justin, thank you for this. As it happens, I found the Vaneigem essay already and downloaded it — and also just ordered the Breton book, and another fascinating book (also on sale) on the influence of Theosophy on the arts in America. My bookshelves will need pruning soon. 😉
I’d been wanting to look at that Theosophy book for awhile now… but haven’t sprung for it yet.
…related to surrealism I got this, from the mind of Babs Santini aka Steve Stapleton… my other big splurge for a book this year. I’ll be reviewing it for Igloo in time…
https://www.timeless-shop.com/product/the-formless-irregular-steven-stapleton/?v=0b3b97fa6688
And if you or anybody else are in need of some acoustic solo guitar music (voiceless) in the vein of John Fahey and Robbie Basho, my favorite Welsh guitarist, Gwenifer Raymond, just released a new occult themed album this past September, “Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark” . Her previos “Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain” was mesmerizing… but I couldn’t skip this one with track titles like “Jack Parsons Blues” and “Dreams of Rhiannon’s Birds.” It’s a little more outre than Michael Hedges (who I also like) but it is a masterpiece.
https://gweniferraymond.bandcamp.com/album/last-night-i-heard-the-dog-star-bark
I didn’t know old Vaneigem interest on alchemy. It’s amazing how a person can change from “scientific” atheism to openly flirting with occultism. Do you know if Vaneigem has explained why and how this huge change in his mind?
“[Marxism is] a 19th century para-Christian cargo cult that mostly serves as a refuge for the Maynard G. Krebses of modern industrial society.”
** Belly laugh! **
** goes to scribble down the phrase in the common book **
🙂 🙂
So, one of the things that collide in this series on the Situationists, and the series on Yeats, “The Vision”, is precisely the opposition of individual vs “mass”.
Of course, I (like, I suspect most other people), have never encountered people in their avatar as a “mass”. I always meet this person, talk with that person, argue with the other person, collaborate with the fellow over there, get encouragement from this one here.
So, a part of me thinks that this collective term, the “mass” (or the “masses”) is simply an abstraction, a concept made of fluff that is not intended to *mean* anything, just to give either warm fuzzies or cold pricklies. I do not know what to make of it, or how to make anything of it. On the other hand, there is a concept of “individual” that seems to occupy a similar, abstract, fluff-space. In this conceptual space, there floats an utterly self-sufficient planet/sun, spinning by itself alone, shining itself warm and fed, with no history of ever having been a dependent baby, of living among other people, of needing or wanting other people’s company, of learning from others, of loving or hating others, of collaborating with or fighting others… well, you get the idea. I also do not know what to make of this, or how to make anything of it.
In Yeats’ wheel we have a cycle that moves from positions where a person is most inclined to try to sink into (merge with?) “the mass” to positions where a person is most inclined to try to emerge from “the mass” into a more individual pattern. I’m still working through this particular opposition with care and attention, because, on the face of it, it appears to replicate the above two fluffy abstractions.
Whereas, up to now I would have said that the ternary that balances the binary of individual vs mass is relationality. If every human person self is a node in a network of relationships (with some number of other self/nodes not all of whom are human), then one will continually be balancing (sometimes by falling off it one way or another) the inevitable tension between being oneself alone, and being oneself in the company (whether collaborative, at cross purposes, or indifferent) of other selves.
But, it seems there may be more to this, and I am still trying to figure it out.
One insight that made a lot of sense to me was the one that David Graeber made in his tome on “Debt”, where he pointed out that to make a slave – to turn a human person into a saleable commodity, a living unit of work – you have to steal that human person away from their home network. You have to cut them off from the people who know them, from the social web in which they have a unique place made up of their *specific* social and irreplaceable connections, and (essentially) transform them from a “somewhere” person into a “nowhere/anywhere” person.
THEN, and only then, you could take this relation-less, society-less, unit from one place to another, and (provided they survived the operation, and the journey, and the treatment) sell them as a slave.
re: nuclear power,
When American nuclear activists talk about how the only problem is bureaucracy and the absurd graft added to the industry by regulatory bodies, all I can think is “If nuclear power is such a thin reed that it can’t support the weight of a dozen extra bureaucrats, how could you possibly expect it to uphold all of Industrial Civilization?”
— that’s one of those conversation-ending questions.
@Other Owen,
Last I heard we had well over a century’s worth of Uranium, but that’s was counting available reserves that aren’t currently economical. A lot of mines shut down with plenty in ’em back in the 1990s when the cold war ended and never reopened. Either way it’s a very finite resource.
@Siliconguy,
IIRC you can still get U-233 out of a thorium breeder reactor of the type they’re testing in the Chinese desert, which isn’t the ideal isotope for The Bomb but will do in a pinch. Besides, as Heinlein pointed out in his 1940 story “Solution Unsatisfactory”, you don’t need a boom to make a radioisotope into a terrifying weapon.
@林龜儒, re: AI replacing white collar
The bureaucratic class faced this challenge once before, during the first AI bubble that nobody remembers. The “Expert Systems” of the day were arguably much better suited to professional roles than the LLMs of the current bubble, and where are they now?
JMG,
It is fascinating that the tech bro’s are fantasizing about building old fashioned nukes and micro nukes which are notoriously difficult and expensive to construct at the same time we are failing to maintain and replace the critical energy infrastructure that we have.
That was highlighted today by news that the Olympic pipeline that delivers gas, diesel and jet fuel from refineries in Northern Washington to Western Washington and Oregon has had another crack and leak.
On purpose I looked up ” what is the lifespan of underground petroleum pipelines” on google’s A.I.
I got the answer ” From 30 to 50 years”. The Olympic pipeline was put in to service in 1971. But as far as I know there is no plan to replace it ( a nearly impossible undertaking in todays world). So not only are we delusional about the future energy that will give us all lives of AI leisure, we are delusional about the energy we depend on to keep our current situation going.
Hey JMG
On the subject of individual awareness and will being the true battleground for resistance to domination by society, I wonder if the “Transactional analysis” that you mentioned on this blog a while ago is relevant to this goal? I don’t know if you can generalise the “games” people “play” to apply to whole societies and their various delusions, but nonetheless I imagine that if you are dealing with people who are directly trying to make you conform to some useless or harmful standard, seeing if there is a “game” they are trying to enforce could be helpful.
“Thus the movement toward freedom can never really be a mass movement. It can only be a movement of individuals in opposition to the mass.”
IIRC, you made this same point in your post about the end of the Ring Cycle.
Your comment to Angelica’s post sums up my position. I haven’t said much in this series of posts because I don’t have any background in the Surrealists or the Situationists, instead learning a bit about them by reading your posts and the comments. But I have had a lot of life experiences, most definitely including the study and practice of occultism, which have led me to meet people where they are while doing my best to live life by my own lights. I think I already know and practice some of the tools you’ll be discussing, but I also look forward to learning about others that I can use.
JMG,
Thanks for your reply. Yes. Many people take what they learned in their family of origin about power and autonomy and project it onto the whole world, i.e. the mass.
I learned about submit/defy from Dr. Laurence Heller. Here’s a passage from his book Healing Developmental Trauma that talks about autonomy and relationship to authority:
“A key aspect of the Autonomy Survival Style identity is a deep-seated ambivalence toward
authority. Overtly, Autonomy types are deferential to authority, but covertly they harbor
resentments and rebellious impulses. When dealing with authority, they feel that the only
options they have are to submit to it or rebel against it. This “submit or rebel” dilemma leaves
them in a no-win situation that has profound implications for the therapeutic relationship.”
>Last I heard we had well over a century’s worth of Uranium
At current rates of consumption. I suspect those rates of consumption will go up. And that 100 could easily turn into 50. You can solve this with breeder reactors. Then you get 1000 years or so. Ok, 500. Alright 250. But breeder reactors, well, they have their own issues. Hot liquid sodium and water combining together sort of issues.
There was one nuclear startup that had the right idea, IMHO – bury the reactor deep underground and leave it there. If something goes wrong, fill in all the shafts that lead to it with concrete and put up one of those “This is not a place of honor” memes. Refueling something buried so deep would be a pain, I bet. And you still have the problem of nuclear waste.
Hi John Michael,
I’m sure it was the People’s Front of Judea! Maybe… 😉 Thanks for the laughs.
You may have missed this news item (which is relevant to this week’s essay and comments): The CSIRO cuts are just the tip of the iceberg for Australia’s science funding. CSIRO being the Federal goobermint funded science agency. One wonders at this move given the current goobermint hardly seems interested in reducing it’s addiction to debt. Hmm. The sensitive person also recalls that that science lot allegedly got involved in actual real world politics a few years ago, or at the very least possibly didn’t intervene.
It’s a funny subject debt. The actual costs for big time debt, otherwise known as bond yields, are increasing as we speak, even whilst the pressure is exerted to reduce official interest rates. There are of course 99 reasons for this, but I’d have to suggest that one biggie reason would be lower global demand for US currency. Still, this result was always baked into the cake. And maybe it’s a nice strategic retreat. I do wonder why the legions of economists and policy makers fail to think these matters through to their logical conclusion. On the other hand, they’re getting paid for that, and I ain’t! 🙂
Cheers
Chris
Chuaquin @ 56, the, now pretty much defunct ‘defund the police’ slogan is proof, if proof were needed, that some of the lefty activist orgs are indeed bought and paid for. Defunding police is a bonanza for all kinds of grift, fraud and white collar crime, because scarce resources will have to be diverted to dealing with violent crimes.
Funny (in a dark sort of way) of the day;
About AI;
“Never before seen an industry seeking to avoid regulatory strangulation market itself with “optimistically this will kill your job, pessimistically it will lead to human extinction.”
Matthew Yglesias
Justin, thanks for this — I’ll give her a listen.
Chuaquin, I don’t happen to know — I just downloaded the piece. It doesn’t surprise me, though. The Revolution of Everyday Life keeps stopping just short of the point at which occultism becomes inescapable.
Scotlyn, my take is a little different. Most of the people I know occupy varying positions on a line that has the mass at one end and the individual at the other. I’ve had the great delight to know some people who had made themselves completely individual, and I’ve also encountered people who didn’t seem to have a thought, a feeling, or a perception that wasn’t part of the mass. I’ve also seen people move on that spectrum — most strikingly, of course, during the Covid fiasco, when a great many people dropped their individual beliefs (some of them beliefs they claimed to hold very strongly) and started parroting the mass mind, but I’ve also watched people slowly, with effort, move the other way. As for relationality, that seems to me to occupy a spectrum at right angles to the one I’ve just described — the mass-minded people I’ve known had generic relationships, the individuals individual relationships, but in either case the number and intensity of those relationships varied irrespective of individuality or the lack of same.
TylerA, ha! Nicely phrased.
Clay, that’s how you know it’s all a head trip. Nobody in those circles is actually paying attention to the hard physical realities of our predicament — they’re using “nuclear power!” as an incantation to chase off their own awareness of just how screwed we are.
J.L.Mc12, interesting. Yes, that might be worth exploring.
SLClaire, I’ll be interested to see what you think of the toolkit!
Angelica, thanks for this. One of the reasons the submit/defy binary interests me is that I can see it very clearly in my own behavior in my teens and twenties; another reason is that I’ve watched it in action in occult groups and magical lodges, usually on the part of young men with exactly that ambivalence toward authority.
Chris, I suspect that what happened is that institutional science overplayed its hand, demanding ever more funding and influence while the actual return on investment has fallen off sharply. Even politicians have noticed by now that global warming predictions that can be tested are invariably wrong, and that pouring money into fusion power and dozens of other subsidy dumpsters has produced nothing worthwhile. It may be a long cold winter for the scientific scene…
Siliconguy, ha! Yeah, that’s a good one.
Mr JMG,
What is so interesting is, at this moment, both the Tech Bro “Progress-Technology-Myth” Oligarchs and the Marxist Left “Progress-Humanity-Myth” have both evolved into complex cargo-cults.
Thanks so much for your reply, JMG. I wrote 3 essays about provisional living a few weeks ago that represent my own meditations on the subject. I have been writing about it mostly because I’m trying to cure myself. of it. https://open.substack.com/pub/kimberlysteele/p/the-danger-of-living-provisionally
There is a third option to the submit/defy binary that many people seem to be unaware of these days: compromise.
Mrdobner, at this point it takes some searching to find any point of view in modern industrial society that hasn’t turned into a cargo cult.
Kimberly, so noted! I know the feeling, having had to work through that same process repeatedly.
Anon, that’s certainly one alternative, but there are others. The thing that strikes me most on reflecting on the submit/defy binary is that it’s a tar baby — either way you remain stuck to the daddy-surrogate or mommy-surrogate which is the object of your submission or defiance. Very often, it’s possible to just walk away…
I took a few minutes tonight to peruse some of Brautigan’s other poems on the site you linked. What the heck am I reading? To hearken back to a post you wrote a long time ago, they all seem to be weapons-grade warhol. Except most of them are not even that clever. Yet the guy’s bio says he’s ranked #63 among their top 500 poets?
It’s a shame he’s not a half-dozen places further down the list. Especially given what so much of his poetry is about. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)
Also, Brautigan irks me in another way: “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” is a paean to computers and robotics, but I can’t find any evidence that Brautigan had any experience with programming or electrical engineering.
If you’re going to make some particular field the centerpiece of your life philosophy, I feel like you really should have at least a basic proficiency with it. You say you’re convinced reality is a computer simulation? Or that AI will unleash the Singularity and usher in a post-scarcity utopia? Cool, show me some programs you’ve written or something you’ve made with a microcontroller. Otherwise you’re like a Pythagorean who can’t do arithmetic.
“these steps can only be taken by the individual for himself or herself. Nothing is more futile, or more certain to end in exploitation and defeat, than waiting for someone else to do it for you”
I am seeing close relations between this and the Way of Redemption, and how redemption must be done by the Son of Adam, not Adam.
@58
Hawking was only famous because he was disabled and got an iconic computerized voice. As far as this layperson can tell, his actual contributions to the body of scientific knowledge were minimal. In a century from now, he will probably have been forgotten.
You know, on the subject of individual vs collective liberties, the thing that’s always really struck me about the European revolutions is the way they went and anthropomorphized their countries. Like, Marianne, Germania, Italia Turrita, etc. Back in the 19th century they would put up paintings of them at suitably revolutionary events and to my knowledge in some parts of Europe they still do. It’s alway struck me as a little weird – I’ve semi-jokingly called nationalism a “vaguely unstable summoning ritual” when talking about it with friends, because if it isn’t, if the idea isn’t to call up something that at least looks like whatever it is you’re trying to make real, why are you using the paintings?
And like, the follow-up is that the American equivalent’s always felt a little phony. Like, you have Columbia and Uncle Sam but no one ever agrees on which one is the “authentic” one and the idea of putting a gigantic painting of Uncle Sam in Congress as a Reverent Gesture is something that feels like it’d be a joke, y’know? Maybe you could do the Statue of Liberty, but it doesn’t seem to carry the same weight of “THIS is US.”
Hey JMG
I think that maybe you can get something insightful out of applying transactional analysis to bureaucracy and its relationship to itself and to the public, but I don’t know enough about the subject to do so yet. I should read Eric Berne’s book in the future.
Also, the “Anarchist library” has some miscellaneous essays by Vaneigem in it, including this interview. It may be useful to you or the commentariat.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/hans-ulrich-obrist-in-conversation-with-raoul-vaneigem
Mary Bennet # 91:
No argument here. If police is defunded, there would be less financiation to prosecute “non violent” crime, of course. So this dystopia favor some dirty interests.
———————————-
JMG # 93:
I understand you said young Vaneigem writings in a certain mode would lead him to occultism soon or later…So there wasn’t a sudden rupture in his thoughts, but a quiet logic evolution in his way of think.
Thank you. 🙂
“As for relationality, that seems to me to occupy a spectrum at right angles to the one I’ve just described — the mass-minded people I’ve known had generic relationships, the individuals individual relationships…”
Ok… so, I suppose a ternary can always be found along some other spectrum that lies at right angle to the binary you are working with, so this seems to be of a piece with the thoughts I’m developing – and remember, I’m still developing them, and that rather slowly. 🙂
I realised after writing my comment, and your response, that the “mass-minded” “generic-relationship” person bears a similarity to what I’m calling a “Nowhere” person (who can also be an “Anywhere” person). While an “individual” with “individual relationships” bears a similarity to what I’m calling a “Somewhere” person. What I’m reaching for here is a shadow, but the shadow tells me that the type of “individual” that continues to define themselves in terms of a “mass” (whether in opposition or in acceptance), somehow still DEPENDS upon the existence of a “mass” for their self-definition. They may be an atom that has succeeded at leaving the Borg, but the Borg still shapes the atom, as it were. This atom has Nowhere to be except “Not in the Borg”. This atom is still (though separated from the Borg) interchangeable with any other atom that is still merged with the Borg.
Whereas, the particularity of this or that person who are only HERE in this place, and NOW at this time, in a relationship with me, who am HERE NOW with this or that person, is how any given “Somewhere” works to create a unique “Person” shaped space, one that is not interchangeable with any other place, which a unique person who is not interchangeable with any other person can inhabit.
This is still very much a work in progress, but what strikes me pretty forcefully is that the “freedom” to “slavery” spectrum is ALSO at right angles to the “mass” to “individual” spectrum (or, as it seems to me, the Borg to Atom spectrum).
PS – On re-reading both my comments, I want to make it absolutely clear that I am not suggesting that everyone using the word “individual” is using it in this free-floating, disconnected, atomised sense.
There are many shades of meaning here, and by focussing in on that free-floating, disconnected, atomised meaning, I am simply striving to work out something to a point of greater clarity for myself.
But of course, I recognise that is only one of many things that “individual” can mean, and I also recognise that both you, JMG, and other people here, are using the word in other, much richer and nuanced ways. Please do not take my workings as, in any way, a misunderstanding (or at least not a deliberate misinterpretation) of what you have written.
>they’re using “nuclear power!” as an incantation
What makes this so funny (or sad) (or infuriating) is they’re also chanting “Math is racist” every third or fourth stanza. This, is not going to end well. The real problem is the people in charge want contradictory things and refuse to pick and choose. They want it all.
Well that and they don’t want a future. They want to live in 1985 forever. And then they wonder why fewer and fewer people like or respect them.
>They stopped construction of Yucca Mountain, but they didn’t destroy what they had done. They may quietly restart that project some day and send the waste there.
Somewhere, over the rainbow – https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=PSZxmZmBfnU
Speaking of cargo cults, if anyone wants a spooky deindustrial piece of flash fiction to read about a paranormal investigator group exploring a dead mall sometime in the 2030s or so, I have it here:
Dead Mall Report: The Cult of the Eternal Trucker
https://www.sothismedias.com/home/dead-mall-report-the-cult-of-the-eternal-trucker
This was my annual Halloween piece this year.
—
The submit/defy binary I see very strongly in my own teen years… and that sense of vitriol I still get from time to time… though I try to channel it differently than I used to do.
It seems to me the whole submission/domination thing ala fifty shades, et puke cetera, is related. … this might be a good area to try to come up with a meme.
Book alert:
Chasing the Dark: A 140-Year Investigation of Paranormal Activity
by Ben Machell
“A gripping narrative that uses the case files of Tony Cornell and the Society for Physical Research to examine our interactions and obsessions with all things paranormal.
Tony Cornell spent his life probing the very edges of reality. A member of the UK’s Society for Psychical Research (SPR), Cornell’s role as an investigator of so-called “spontaneous cases” saw him returning time and again to the unsettling spaces that exist just on the periphery of our ordered, tidy, and rational lives, and which we all do our best to ignore: Ghosts. Spirits. Premonitions. Psychic powers. Glimpses of other worlds that throw into question everything we take for granted about life, death, and material existence itself.
This page-turner draws on Cornell’s casefiles, which survive as uniquely untapped repository of stories reported by ordinary people, as well as correspondence between some of the great intellectuals of the 20th century—including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, Winston Churchill, and Marie Curie. By applying logical rigor to the investigation of events that could not be explained by conventional science, the SPR drew notable figures to its ranks as it gathered the most meticulous records ever compiled on hauntings, spiritual possessions, and other enduring mysteries.
Award-winning journalist Ben Machell mines the extensive archives of the SPR for the first time to reveal the untold history of the secretive organization, and to understand our interactions and ceaseless fascination with the unexplained.”
Nevermind
https://imgflip.com/i/i0l57
On the “I’m shocked, shocked I say.” List,
https://reason.com/2025/11/19/homeschooling-hits-record-numbers/
“Students Flee Traditional Public Schools for Alternatives”.
“A metastatic, intrusive, wildly inefficient bureaucratic state?” covers it too.
Slightly off topic… but I wanted to give this a bit of signal boost here, if OK. If you are sick of the forever wars, and would like to see the military age raised to 25, consider this new website as a resource for that goal. We’d have a much smarter military if they just didn’t recruit 18 year old’s… I know what I was like at 18… this will help more kids too, survive to 25.
https://survive25.org/
“Did you make a mistake when you were 18? I know I did. One night I got carried away, I walked into the car rental agency and tried to rent a car.
Did you know if you are under 25 there is a young renter fee? These insurance companies know there is more risk when a young person drives. They are more likely to damage the car, themselves, or others.
I didn’t have the extra money that night to rent that car, and it saved my life.
Support Our Troops
Support our troops by increasing the enlistment age to 25.”
Slithy, tsk tsk tsk! 😉 I have no idea why Brautigan is still famous, but then that whole end of 20th century US poetry leaves me cold enough to start a localized ice age. Ginsberg’s “Howl,” to cite the obvious example, is to my mind as incompetent as it is self-indulgent — a genuine poet could have said all that in a sonnet, and done it better. As for Brautigan’s lack of knowledge, the mythology of progress thrives on that kind of ignorance.
Nephite, excellent. You’re paying attention.
Deo, that’s an excellent point. You only create that kind of mythic image of a country if you think of it as a single collective person. It’s precisely the ingrained individualistic cussedness of American culture that made attempts to create such a collective person flop so hard. E Pluribus Unum is a plaintive wish; our national motto should be E Pluribus Plurimus, “out of many, many.”
J.L.Mc12, thanks for this.
Chuaquin, his early writings certainly pointed that way; it’s interesting to see that he followed them eventually.
Scotlyn, interesting. I hope I’m not playing hob too much with your nowhere/somewhere dichotomy if I mention that I’ve met a few anywhere people of a different kind — wherever they show up, relationships coalesce around them and they become the catalyst for a self-sustaining scene or even a community.
Other Owen, bingo. One of the things that makes the current “cult of progress” so fascinating is that so many of its believers have given up on progress in any but a wholly notional sense — they want the future they think they were promised way back in the late 20th century. In the same sense, the Democrats have become the conservative party in American politics — they want to conserve the bureaucratic state and the attitudes of late 20th century liberalism against those radical Republicans who want to change everything!
Justin, “et puke cetera” is a keeper. Is it your coinage? Thanks for the heads up on the book — I’ll see if the library system here has it.
Siliconguy, to my mind this is one of the most hopeful signs of our time.
As far as I know I made strong those letters together first myself…. but who knows if my subconscious picked it up somewhere along the way. Either way I will aim to keep using it… et puke cetera
@Deo (#102):
Excellent point. I might add that almost all US coinage up to 1909 had on its obverse a female figure labeled
“Liberty.” It is she who is our (now forgotten) equivalent to Britannia or Germania or Marianne, not Uncle Sam or even Columbia. And, notably, she embodies a founding principle, not a nation. The magically inclined among us can draw a sound conclusion from this.
This is a topical/nontopical ditty penned by Brian Bilston, to commemorate World Philosophy Day… I giggled. 🙂
Hegel, when you left me,
you put me through the mill.
I Kant think clearly anymore –
your marx are on me still.
The hobbestacles are everywhere.
Unlocke your door and be my guide.
Life is dull when you’re not arendt,
I nietzsche by my side.
You said I bourdieu senseless.
You claimed I drove you nuts.
But I adorno other –
My head spinoza much
The rawls of love I just don’t get,
I don’t know where to sartre.
I plato win but always lose –
come back, exhume my heartre.
(c) Brian Bilston
Given their respective body counts, I prefer Beta Marxists to Alpha Marxist because they were far less effective at killing people. As a matter of fact, i have been substituting the name Burkean Marxist for Beta Marxist in my mind. (Even though it is not quite right, the beta marxists still want radical change but in practice incremental change is what they accomplish at most.)
Although Beta in the software sense makes sense too, beta software – the software that is innovative but not quite ready for general distribution, still buggy and shared with friends for improvement.
I think humans face a fundamental predicament- Social development turns semi-autonomous systems into subsystems, personal development makes you more autonomous. Society wants you to submit, your will wants to make its own decisions………….how to finesse the situation is basic question we all face. We will never be truly free to do as we will nor will we be just cogs in the machine. We can’t escape the predicament but we can learn to gracefully finesse the situations we encounter.
@Justin Patrick Moore (#110):
Thanks for alerting me to Ben Machell’s new book. I have a great deal; of respect for the work of the British Society for Psychical Research, and in particular for the work of F. W. H. Myers. So I plan to get and read it carefully.
Brautigan was treated for schizophrenia & clinical depression … it might explain some things.
I know you are no fan of the beats, John, but I was just curious if you find Walt Whitman or William Blake self indulgent? They too went to great lengths… lengths of poetry, at least in some cases. I know Ginsberg looked up to these people, wanted to emulate them, in particular with his embedded pentameter following Whitman’s occassional use of iambic pentameter embedded within his free verse.
I see that kind of prosody as being part of the American tradition. A parallel could be drawn to Charles Ives who created an American idiom in music being the first to do musical collage.
George R.R. Martin and many contemporary fantasy writers are being self indulgent though IMO… (thank you for writing shorter fantasies & mystery novels : )
From another perspective I do feel this way about music of certain kinds. While I can appreciate various cultural aspects of jam bands and prog rock and people like Bela Fleck or Chick Corea… sometimes I think they are just playing too many notes and won’t just finish a song already… so I get the sentiment.
(Just trying to practice “the art of fighting someone without dehumanizing them” –I love to be a devils advocate often and wonder what that says about where I am in Yeat’s scheme…)
>radical Republicans who want to change everything
Well, I wouldn’t go that far. They certainly wouldn’t. Left to their own devices, they’d happily betray their voters while striking poses and holding their hand out for money. They are being prodded in the back by the younguns though. And they don’t like it one bit. It’s those younguns (who have no stake in the status quo) that want to change it all.
There was a party before the Republicans came along. It was called the Whigs. It became ineffective and useless and was ultimately abandoned. I suspect something similar may happen to the Republicans. I don’t really care myself, they’re two sides to the same dirty coin, if one goes, so will the other.
Re: “bullshit jobs”, I have long believed that PMC types working these jobs are a huge constituency of the folks voting for the government to tax them and redistribute their wealth. These folks know, at least subconsciously, that thier hefty salaries are unearned and undeserved, that they produce little of true value to trade with fellow citizens. People who produce obvious value, and especially those whose jobs take a physical toll on their body are usually much, much less likely to be eager supporters of having the fruits of thier labors snatched away and squardered on some utopian collectivist scheme.
It’s bemusing to see the rise of the traditionalist right, sometimes called “woke right” or “alt right,” a movement which has become exceedingly popular among young white males in response to the modern left’s tyrannical insistence on effeminizing and desexualizing our youth. There are other cultural and economic reasons for this as well, which make sense from a practical and historal perspective.
Closely tied to this movement, even among many of its prominent influencers, is a simultaneous rise of interest in esoteric traditionalism (and figures like Evola, Guenon, etc.), hermetic philosophy, neoplatonism, alchemy, and magic. Just the other day one such individual that I follow, “whatifalthist,” posted a video exploring alchemy and hermeticism. Another who goes by the handle “Hoe Math,” posted some time ago a conspiracy theory about how Cabalah and ToL are used by Hollywood as a means to control the culture. Naturally there seems to be quite a bit of misunderstanding surrounding occult topics like this, even among such groups, and I’m curious what your thoughts are about this. Could this be the start of a modern renaissance? Will witch hunts and inquisitions come back into style? I suppose time with tell.
Patrick # 101:
Time puts celebrities in their right place, even the pop science icons of our time…
——————————
JMG # 114:
No argument here about Vaneigem evolution.
Speaking of a collapse in the religion of progress,
Yesterday I was reading a book to my 4 year old granddaughter. It was a book I first got for my kids about 35 years ago. It is called ” How Things Work”, and has many descriptions of technology like motors and water meters with big simple illustrations and diagrams. My Granddaughter is a bit too young for it, but as an engineer I figure it is never too early to start.
What struck me was that while reading, I came across 4 things that I had to stop and explain, ” we don’t make these things anymore”. It was more for my benefit as she doesn’t get it yet but just the same. These things described were, Nuclear Reactors, Two Rotor Helicopters, Supersonic Transport and the Space Shuttle.
I remember when it was assumed we would get cheap power from Nukes, fly from the Pan Am building to JFK on a 2 rotor Boeing Helicopter and then fly to Europe on the SST and then be back in time to watch the Space Shuttle Launch. All Gone except in the fevered dreams of the Tech Bros.
JMG @ 114, ( slightly) paraphrase: the mythology of progress thrives on ignorance. I would like to see you elaborate on that point.
Deo @ 102, the American symbol which most closely resembles the European nationalistic goddesses is the bald eagle. Notice how much native and non-native wildlife permeates our culture. Youthful boy scouts are cubs. Sports teams are named after animals. (The two biggest sports franchises in Oregon are the Beavers and the Ducks. Sports writers have a lot of fun with that.) Notice how the revival of bald eagle populations has been welcomed by all political factions. It does help that bald eagles are fish eagles, and don’t normally prey on people’s pets or chickens.
In Elon Musk’s future, we won’t need jobs or money, and there will be no poverty. Musk said that money would “stop being relevant” thanks to AI. Musk also mentioned the end of work itself, saying that it will be “optional,” like “playing sports or a video game.” He compared the future of work to gardening. “It’s much harder to grow vegetables in your backyard, but some people still do it because they like growing vegetables,” he said.”That will be what work is like: optional.”
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-robotics-money-irrelevant-currency-universal-basic-income-2025-11
So when your toilet clogs up, don’t bother to call someone to clean it, because that’s a dirty job no one wants to do. Instead, push a button and a helpful robot will pack up your goods and move you to a new housing unit.
Yeah right.
Justin, so noted! I’ll credit it as needed.
Scotlyn, funny. I spent too many minutes trying to find any conceivable way to use the name of Schopenhauer in a similar ditty. 😉
Dobbs, oh, granted! Given a set of ideas as disastrously wrongheaded as Marx’s, it’s just as well that beta-Marxists are as inept as they are.
Justin, Blake wrote at great length, but it’s rare to find an unnecessary word even in his longest poems. Whitman had occasional bursts of self-indulgence and sentimentality but his grasp of poetic form was strong enough that it kept his writing mostly very good. The tragedy of Ginsberg was that literally every contemporary influence on his work was telling him to do exactly the things that would make his faults worse. TS Eliot, when he wrote “The Waste Land,” got Ezra Pound to edit it as he went — Pound slashed out huge chunks of the text and forced Eliot to hammer the thing into shape, resulting in a masterpiece. Ginsberg never had that sort of help, and as a result — to borrow your comparison — “Howl” is pretty much the ultimate poetic masturbatory guitar solo. Thank you for the compliment about my fiction, btw — when I was working on the Weird of Hali, with the horrible examples of Smith and Rowling before me, I set myself a hard limit of 72,000 words per volume and revised ruthlessly to make each novel as taut and spare as I could.
Other Owen, it’s the younger ones I have in mind. They already control the party, and in another decade or so they’ll completely remake it.
Selkirk, doubtless that’s part of it, but it’s also relevant that so many such jobs are paid for directly or indirectly by government revenues, so their inmates have an even more direct motivation to vote for more taxes and more bureaucrats!
David, I expect both of those. The resurgence of traditional religion will inevitably bring back the usual Christian fulminations against every spiritual option but theirs, and quite possibly the next round of witch hunts will be motivated by Christianity rather than wokeism. At the same time, there are a lot of young men getting into traditional occultism and occult-adjacent traditions such as Freemasonry — my Masonic lodge here in Rhode Island is getting a steady stream of enthusiastic young applicants at this point, which marks a major change from the recent past.
Clay, I had the same experience some years ago when I found, at a thrift store, a copy of a kid’s book titled You Will Go To The Moon. I loved that book when I was six or so:
Unfortunately nobody got around to publishing the sequel, No, You Won’t…
Mary, it’s quite simple. The less people know about the realities of energy resources, the economic issues of technology, and similar limiting factors, the more certain they are that the Tomorrowland future is certain to arrive any day now.
Martin, yes, I read that. It’s really sad to see someone potentially intelligent that deeply committed to a bunch of failed and shopworn fantasies from three quarters of a century ago.
Thanks JMG. I’m a storm these days and its hard to settle the winds and be quiet and still and trust. Believe I’m a type 11 btw, right where the knife turns from pointing outward to pointing at one’s self, among other things. Reading Yeats talk about Spinoza, seemed right, tho I don’t have the patience for the level of abstraction to read “Ethics” right now which was the first thing I tried to read directly from the source. Body of Fate in the Natural Law. Will, the Consumer, which I guess in 1920 had a little different flavor to the word than it does today! Mask in the holy lands. But thanks for holding out hope that what I take from the situationist toolkit will be even more useful than the somewhat bitter medicines I’ve gathered from the preludes. I do tend towards “irrepressible”….
Sometimes guitars really do Howl while some poets just end up spewing et puke cetera.
I’m not sure why he didn’t get editorial help… maybe because they were operating in the counterculture, idk. But, yeah, I’ve seen the facsimile of The Waste Land with Pound’s slashes and suggestions… It makes me wonder who, if anyone, helped him with the Cantos.
The editors I’ve worked with so far have certainly made my own writing much better by helping me cut, though I quibbled with certain suggestions.
Thanks for the lively conversation in your tea house.
I like that length of novel. Reminds me of older fantasy & genre novel lengths from the 50s, 60s, 70s.
@Clay Dennis, #125
>Two Rotor Helicopters
— wait, when did the Chinook line shut down? Is the USA all-in on tilt rotors now? Last I heard the the CH-47 was going to be the B-52 of helicopters, and stay in service forever. (Well, 2060s, but that’s probably the end of time as far as helicopter aviation is concerned; they’re thirsty beasts.) I suppose you can keep fixing them, like the B-52s, but given the vibrations helicopters go through I was sure that meant new airframes would be needed.
There’s a certain genre of book that examines some unpleasant facet of modern life; generally these books end with a call to mass action of some sort.
This article by Johann Hari, regarding smart phones and attention spans, is a good example (though an article, it’s condensed from his book Stolen Focus):
“In Moscow, the former Google engineer James Williams – who has become the most important philosopher of attention in the western world – told me I had made a crucial mistake. Individual abstinence is ‘not the solution, for the same reason that wearing a gas mask for two days a week outside isn’t the answer to pollution. It might, for a short period of time, keep certain effects at bay, but it’s not sustainable, and it doesn’t address the systemic issues.’ He said that our attention is being deeply altered by huge invasive forces in wider society. Saying the solution was to just adjust your own habits – to pledge to break up with your phone, say – was just ‘pushing it back on to the individual’ he said, when ‘it’s really the environmental changes that will really make the difference’.”
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jan/02/attention-span-focus-screens-apps-smartphones-social-media
So you, Mr. Regular Schmuck Human Meatblob, couldn’t possibly maintain the strength of will necessary to make changes to your life. No, the only possibility for change is through legislation – ie, the interference of the bureaucratic state.
Not mentioned is the question of how, if you don’t have the willpower to turn off your phone, you will be motivated to join mass protests or letter-writing campaigns or what have you.
Also not mentioned is the fact that the cavalry isn’t coming to save you. Not one of these books have had their just-so recommendations implemented. Essentially, Hari offers a ready-made excuse at the end of his article for those who don’t feel inclined to dial back their screentime.
>林龜儒 #50
>JMG says:
“As for the collapsing prestige of scientists, why, the answer to that is quite simple: they started telling too many blatant lies. When climate scientists started insisting that the global cooling scare of the 1970s never happened, when medical scientists parroted whatever line of cant made more profits for the pharmaceutical industry that week, and so on down the sorry litany of scientific dishonesty, they let the air out of science’s overinflated prestige, and now it’s lying limp and flat on a wet street as cars drive right on over it.”
I don’t think that’s the cause; rather, what JMG mentions is a consequence.
If the scientific political-cultural movement (what do you think it was?) had the strength it had in the 1950s and 60s, climate change activists would be just forgettable geeks. And pharmaceutical companies and their associated problems have always existed within intellectual movements; they might have been a problem in the 1950s, but not nearly as serious as they are today.
The problem was the political shift in the 1980s, a period when corporations (Nike, Adidas, etc.) gained immense power and governments lost considerable power. With this power shift, where do you think intellectuals would go?
Excuse me, but scientists are human, and scientific instruments are very expensive (how much does an HPLC cost?), the cultural shift towards liberalism in the 1980s has been so damaging that scientific institutions have been harmed, that many of today’s scientists have sold out to corporations and political elites is normal and quite damaging.
Cultural degradation affects almost all institutions today. Very few politicians in the West know how to do politics, and the same applies to scientists: how many scientists know how to do science?….
Society as a whole has not known how to take care of the institution called science, it’s that simple, perhaps another culture can do better, perhaps the Indians, with their great problems, can do better.
Is it possible to rescue science today?………………….
PD:The decline of science is also related to the breakdown of faith in progress, but that’s another topic.
If they can’t put together a coherent functional moon mission anymore (Artemis will fail), what makes them think that they can do something similar with 20 new nuclear reactors? Can you imagine the clusterf**k of them trying to do the Manhattan Project again? They couldn’t do it.
It’s one thing to have bold ideas but if all the good people have been boiled off due to DEI clownshows, those bold ideas won’t end well. I know, let’s import more H1-Bs, that’ll get it all moving again. Who’s with me? LET’S GO.
AliceEm, yes, “consumer” meant something much different in those days!
Justin, it’s ironic that Pound badly needed the kind of help he was so good at providing to others. As for novel lengths, 35,000 words used to be a respectable novel length — Andre Norton, to name only one fine example, could pack more story into one of those than her twelfth-rate imitators these days can get into 120,000 words.
Cliff, that’s utterly standard. The whole point of that entire genre of social pseudocriticism is to insist that X is the Worst Thing Evah and don’t you dare do anything about it.
Zarcayce, science sold out decades before the 1980s. When Rachel Carlson published Silent Spring in 1962, eminent scientists lined up to insist that she was completely and utterly wrong and DDT couldn’t possibly be wiping out bird populations. They were lying, of course. The chemical industry was raking in big profits from organochloride pesticides and didn’t want anything to disrupt the gravy train; then as now, scientists were perfectly willing to prostitute themselves for the price of a grant or two. The cumulative impact of all those lies, I argue, is what deep-sixed the once-massive prestige of science — just as the cumulative impact of all those failed promises of impending breakthroughs is what wrecked faith in progress.
Other Owen, granted. It’s quite common in societies in decline that the feats they could accomplish in their youth and maturity fall further and further out of reach as decadence spreads.
JMG,
A bit offtopic but have you seen this map before? It maps out a bunch of occult philosophies
https://imgur.com/a/PQs1MVI
Hi John Michael,
What a fine joke that workTM will be optional, it’s never that. Interestingly I’ve noticed a few disparaging comments in all sorts of places about: ‘grow(ing) vegetables in your backyard’, and have wondered about where that idea is coming from. From my perspective, I spend very little time on the plants, most of my energy and resources get poured into the systems and infrastructure here. If conditions are right, plants grow. They virtually look after themselves. It’s making those conditions ‘right’, and selecting appropriate plants and then knowing what to do with the produce, which is the more complicated aspect to the story. Hmm.
Is this a case of: “Don’t you dare think about doing anything independent of our nice intermediation!”?
Cheers
Chris
Anon #96, JMG #97,
The trick with the multitudes of third options is to be aware of what’s driving the third option we choose. I have a long, now mostly past history of compromising as a form of submission and walking away out of defiance. It’s new for me in the last five years or so to be able to track that nuance inside myself and make such a choice from a place of agency.
JPM #109, ooh I love the meme idea. It’s now fun for me to laugh at my survival patterns. Any ideas?
Dobbs #118, I respectfully disagree to a point. Sure while we can never fully escape our own patterns because that escape is limited by the depth of our self-awareness, the level to which I am aware of my internal dynamics, i.e. agency (what’s my role in any experience I am having), for me determines my level of freedom in even the most difficult of situations. Viktor Frankl is a quite well known example of this – https://bookshop.org/p/books/man-s-search-for-meaning-viktor-e-frankl/f040ee34581bdc92?ean=9780807014271&next=t
Other Owen, ha! I like it. Oddly enough, all but one of the traditions in which I’m initiated are represented by an equal-armed cross in the lower right corner, the Apollonian-Pro-Demiurge corner: OBOD, Theosophy, Martinism, the Golden Dawn, and UGLE (that is, regular Freemasonry). It’s funnier still that Martinism, at the center, is labeled “Freemasonry but somehow gayer” — and oddly enough, though of course I’m not, quite a few of the Martinists I know are gay.
Chris, that’s exactly what it is. The most frightening thing in the world to today’s elites are individuals who can provide for their own needs without relying on the economic machine.
Angelica, granted! One of the things we’ll be talking about as this discussion proceeds is how to sort out the difference between the tyrants of the world outside us and the far more dangerous tyrants of the world inside us, and what making that distinction makes possible.
Deo–re national symbols. Largely due to the poem at its base, which was not part of the original gift, the Statue of Liberty has become for many a symbol of the idea that American must accept all who wish to enter. Some don’t seem to understand that “Give me your huddled masses . . . ” is poetry, not a viable national policy.
AI giving you what you want–the dark side– a couple who are suing OpenAI company, claiming that the program not only encouraged their son to commit suicide but actually guided him in how to secure a noose in the closet, etc. They found the chats on his computer after his death.A horrifying story, if proven. I hope they get a huge settlement, enough to shake up the industry. Well, one can hope.
Watching the careers of Stephen King and JK Rowlings I conclude that after a certain level of sales the publishers just stop editing and print everything they are sent regardless of word count. Thank goodness Tolkien published before this trend or LOTR would have been 6 volumes long to tell the same story.
San Francisco Opera will be presenting the Ring Cycle in June 2028.
Rita
As a long time reader I just had to chime in here. Trout Fishing in America is also a folk duo who took their name from the book. I found them when my children were young as they were a family friendly band (kids music that parents could enjoy). They bill themselves as “Music for people who take their fun seriously”. For anyone who relishes in lyrics that are original and hit close to truth while having fun (It’s A Puzzle is a favorite), especially if you have kids and want music you can listen to repeatedly and enjoy check them out!
https://www.troutmusic.com/
So then, following up on my previous comment (#123), would you say now is a good time for anyone on the fence about joining an organization like Freemasonry? Not just Freemasonry specifically, but esoteric bodies in general, since the implication would seem to be that a time is coming where occult activities will have to become er, occult once again? I know we’re not talking about this happening overnight, but under such conditions it will likewise become harder to organize and seek out like-minded individuals I should think. I’ve heard prominent individuals like yourself say that solo practicitioners are becoming more of the norm, which is kind of sad actually. Even though I’m not a “joiner,” heavily guarded, and downright unsociable (if I’m honest), I do find it gets quite lonely at times. I have my family, but as far as I know I have yet to encounter anyone even remotely interested in following a spiritual path outside the big 3 religions, and even that’s rare nowadays.
Martin Back # 127:
The saddest thing isn’t that Elon Musk believe in his own b**t Faustian nonsense, but millions of people (a lot of them young people) will believe his outdated fantasies about that kind of future, leaving them unaware of our present and near future predicaments.
JMG,
I sort of understand the right-and-left part of it, but what is the pro-anti demiurge axis all about? They put the Pepe guy over in the left-anti quadrant.
Hi JMG, very off topic. I’d wait til next week to post but I am about to go offline until 2026.
And I have no idea to what extent any of this is valid. It could well be clickbait:
The Phosphate Time Bomb: Structural Fragility in American Agriculture
Part I: Supply Collapse and the 2026 Crisis
https://www.wattyalanreports.com/p/the-phosphate-time-bomb-structural?r=1jdyc5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
Part II: The Mathematics of Permanent Transformation (2027-2028)
https://www.wattyalanreports.com/p/the-phosphate-time-bomb-structural-5b9?r=1jdyc5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
@ JMG # 75 Regarding Uttanka from the Mahabharata,
Uttanka’s story appears in the Adi Parva (Early Segment) of the Mahabharata, which is normally excluded from all the children’s versions of the story. This section includes the prologues and epilogues of the main story. For instance, it tells us of the curse that Parashuram had placed earlier on the land of Kurukshetra (that any military aristocrats that dare to defile the peace of that place by declaring war on it would suffer brutally high mortality rates), the origin of the Kuru and Bharata clans, etc.
One part of the Adi Parva is what English scholars call the Snake Cycle – a sequence of stories that outline the fate of the Naga race. It begins with their origin, and the curse their matriarch and race-mother Kadru had placed upon them – that they would without exception be devoured in flame. The curse hung heavy on the entire Naga race, and the cunning Naga hierophant Vasuki sought out ways to bypass that curse. Uttanka’s tale is a part this story.
Anyway, Uttanka was a brahmin initiate who was given the task of a special courier. He had to transport the Celestial Earrings of a queen to his master’s wife. He was especially warned to watch out for the Naga king Takshaka, who really wanted the earrings for himself (they granted some special powers).
During the perilous journey, Uttanka saw the shadowy figure of a beggar following him. The figure kept blinking in and out of existence, and he never tired though he looked emaciated. Uttanka hastened his pace through the woods, until he felt that he had lost his pursuer. But in the process he had grown tired and worn. He set his things down to rest, and to take a bath in a pond in the middle of the woods. He hid his package carefully among his clothes and took a brief dip in the water, but when he came out he couldn’t find the earrings. Fortunately, he had made it just in time to see a black snake slipping out of the scene.
He gave chase, and confirmed that the snake had something shiny in its mouth. The snake eventually dived into a little hole in the ground, and he followed right after with a big stick. He began to try and use the stick to break the soft earth around the hole to widen it, so that he could reach in and retrieve the earrings. But the effort wasn’t yielding much good. Then Indra, King of the Gods, lent him the power of the Vajra (thunderbolt). Immediately the Earth was cleaved, and Uttanka fell, stick and all, right through the Earth and on to the other side.
Now on the other side was Nagaloka, the Serpent realm. Uttanka found himself surrounded by gorgeous lakes, majestic palaces, and he was in a world of illusion. He cried out to Takshaka to come back with the earrings, but Takshaka simply ignored him. He tried pursuing, but in the world of illusions nothing made sense – not even space and time – and he couldn’t really give chase. Distances seemed at once little and endless. He kept returning to the same place where he had begun, even though he ran in straight pursuit.
After he grew tired , he sat down and became very thoughtful. Then he noticed a giant wheel in the distance. Six comely boys were turning it. Two beautiful women were using it to weave black and white thread together. And before it a man stood guard on a horse, and the Nagas dared not approach him. He approached this man and introduced himself. The man asked him, pointing at the wheel, “Brahmin! What do you see?”
Contemplating carefully, Uttanka said: “This is the Wheel of Time. The women are Fate and Fortune (Dhata and Vidhata), weaving Day and Night together. The six boys are the Six Seasons. And you, my Lord, are Indra, the king of the Gods. And your Horse is Agni, Priest and Mouth of the Gods!”
(India has six seasons, because the Himalayas hold the moist summer air and prevent it from moving further North, so it sticks around and cools down over the Indian landmass, and gets saturated and becomes rain. This gives us the Monsoon, and also Sharad, and Hemanth, three seasons that replace late summer and autumn.)
At this, Indra was very pleased. He then explained that the Nagas cannot be traded with, or coddled or counselled by humans. The only way to deal with them is to use force, and to threaten them. The only way to harm them, explained Indra, would be for Uttanka to sacrifice a part of his own Spirit to draw out Divine Flame. Uttanka agreed to do this, so Indra instructed him to blow upon the rear of his Horse.
Uttanka did, and as soon as his breath touched the hind of the horse, his mouth opened wide and a rupturuous flame shot out. It devoured everything in its path, and the palaces shimmered and burned like distraught illusions. The Nagas screamed in terror, but Takshaka refused to come out. Uttanka kept blowing on the Horse, even as his breath was running out. He knew that he didn’t have long before his Spirit would be all spent. But the Snake World kept heating up more and more, the rupturous fire reaching further and further in, until – just as Uttanka was about to run out of breath – Takshaka came out of his palace and begged and mewled before him and dropped the earrings and said “Take your earrings! I will come after you no further, so spare me and my people!”
So Uttanka stopped blowing, took the earrings, and left the World of Serpents. He reached his destination and delivered the goods, but he knew that he could have killed the Serpents once and for all, if only he had had a little more Breath in him. And so he began to devise a way to destroy Takshaka once and for all, using the power of Agni’s divine flame. That eventually leads to the climax of the Snake Cycle, where Kadru’s curse and Vasuki’s plan clash violently.
Your comment to Angelica about tyrants outside and inside reminds me of a short and rather unpretentious poem from the Consolation of Philosophy called Qui se volet esse potentem*.
A loose translation inspired by Slavitt’s would be:
Whoever wants to be powerful
needs to tame wild appetites;
he must never bend his neck to the yoke
of that pernicious lust.
For the far-off Indian lands
might tremble at your edicts
and Ultima Thule pay you tribute –
still, if you are unable to fight off black worries
and to shoo away miserable quarrels –
that is not to have power.
* I rather like the meter – each line is like the second half of a hexameter. Apparently it was sometimes used for didactic poems (proöemiac), which is certainly the case here.
Mom, glad to hear this. The fact that I don’t like Brautigan’s verse clearly doesn’t mean that he can’t inspire something worthwhile from time to time.
David, the difficulty here is that so many of the surviving groups at this point are hot messes. There are Masonic jurisdictions that are doing tolerably well, but others that are riddled with bitter internal politics and a galaxy of other problems. Some of the old occult schools are still more or less functioning, but most have fallen by the wayside, and magical lodges of the Golden Dawn type are constantly getting into explosive personality conflicts and the like. So, yes, if you want to make connections with other practitioners, now’s a good time — but you’re venturing into a minefield.
Other Owen, do you think the universe is run by a benevolent spiritual power? That’s pro-demiurge. Do you think that the universe is run by an evil spiritual power, as some of the old Gnostics did? That’s anti-demiurge. You could replace those with “Is nature good?” and “Is nature bad?” with equally accurate results. (That thing really is funny, btw. “High functioning autism and mescaline is a hell of a combination” really does sum up Evola and the UR Group, doesn’t it?)
Cyclone, so noted. I’ll give it a look when I have time. Enjoy your screen-free time!
Rajarshi, thank you for this!
Aldarion, and thanks for this. That’s excellent advice, too.
On the map/chart: I searched for 4th Way groups and didn’t find any. I did see an eneagram tucked in to one of the squares, however.
“Trout Fishing in America” was a collection of short stories, as I recall. Not a book of poems. In it, Brautigan made up a character named “trout fishing in America Shorty.” I think it was a nod to Nelson Algren. And there was one of those outlandish metaphors (or similies, to be precise). He compared himself and his companion to astigmatism as they sat at a picnic table shaped like Ben Franklin’s eye-glasses……. Well, I found it amusing at the time. 🙂
And while I’m going on about Brautigan: “A Confederate General from Big Sur” was one of his novels, no doubt the most successful among them. I’d argue he based the title on a chapter in one of Thomas Wolf’s novels called “A Microscopic Gentleman from Japan,” for more reasons than just the similarity. That’s the Thomas Wolf who wrote “Look Homeward Angel” not the Tom Wolfe who wrote “Bonfire of the Vanities.” The Brautigan novel is about a pal of his, Lee Mellon, who appears mostly delusional and imagines himself to be descended from a Confederate General. It’s told as though the narrator believes everything Lee Mellon claims; a sort of feigned innocence. (Brautigan’s sense of humor was very, very dry.)
Speaking, as it were, of Spectacle, pray tell: from what period of science fiction does the design of Tesla’s Cybertruck hail from? I just saw one in the flesh this afternoon, and I began to wonder. Merely my curiosity, perhaps. But more to the point, what kind of sheepskin is being draped over what wolf’s body, in that instance? And how might it fit into the Techbro variety of mental delusion? Thanks!
Cyclone # 145:
Only reading your reference to “phosphate time bomb” I guess you’ve opened a can of worms…I think mineral phosphate peak it’s less known and famous than peak oil, but it’s equally dramatic for industrial world. Mineral phosphate supplies will dwindle soon or later.
———————————————-
Pro-demiurge and anti-demiurge: I find this debate axis interesting, but I don’t know exactly why, I wonder if it’s too binary and simplified, after all this Universe is big enough to contain good and bad things mixed…I also think there are spiritual powers beyond the world we feel with our senses, but we can’t grasp their reasons to act and influence in this Universe. Indeed, religions are different ways to know very roughly this unknown non human realities.
JMG – as regards your response to David concerning the conflicts in the occult organizations – rather a universal problems in organizations of any type, Buddhist, Islamic, Hindu, Jewish Secular, political, the charter school I work at went through a doozy a few years ago. I kept my head down. The Dalai Lama in the 1600’s oppressed a section of Tibetan Buddhism as heretical and confiscated its properties. The current one repented of his predecessor’s actions. Shiite vs Sunni Moslems. Pure Land Buddhism was opposed by the Buddhist establishment of its day. And of course Christianity in all its divisions. Sometimes when I leave a social function I’ll say, “Leaving now, I’m going to make like a church and split” My mostly Christian friends chuckle knowingly. Yet these divisions also can be a fount of creativity and positive change as new stuff comes forth. For instance we settled down at my workplace in a better place.
Hi John Michael,
That my friend, is the soft fleshy under-bits of the otherwise invulnerable dragon. 🙂 Of course, at the moment, that old dragon continues to deliver the goodies for its supporters. Alas de-globalisation is causing the beast to flounder (that last word always reminds me of National Lampoon’s film ‘Animal House’, apologies!) A strange thing to see this all occurring in real time don’t you reckon? I’d always imagined that events would proceed at a faster pace, or at least there’d be significant lurches, but no. A slow sad waltz, where presumably centrifugal force is keeping the metaphorical dance in motion? Dunno.
I hear that the Japanese are not so quietly selling treasuries. Hmm. That over supply of bonds will only increase debt costs, especially as new bonds get created to pay for the interest on the old ones. My head is beginning to spin thinking about this stuff.
It’s pretty wet here this morning and at least the water reserves are full, not a bad state of affairs for a few weeks out from the official start to summer.
Cheers
Chris
Where would “this realm is neglected by an ultimately benevolent spiritual power” lie between those two, I wonder? He’s out there. somewhere. Not sure he has had much to do with this realm though. Busy with other things. For reasons.
It’s real easy to explain to a child when they ask you “If God is good, why is there so much evil in this world?” if you take the Gnostic approach to things. Well, maybe God isn’t good at all. Maybe this is a realm of darkness. I can see the appeal.
>from what period of science fiction does the design of Tesla’s Cybertruck hail from?
You saw the movie Aliens back in the day? That APC they carried those space marines around in? It’s straight out of the 80s.
The Other Owen #156:
Thank you for the data about Tesla Cybertruck looking like “Aliens” APC quiet accurately. I hadn’t paid attention to that fact, but now, knowing that movie’s frim the ‘80s, we could say Musk mind in a certain mode keeps living in 198…
Re “Nature is Good”–back in the 1970s, before he started Ar nDraiocht Fein, Isaac Bonewits was running the Berkeley branch of the Reformed Druids of North America (which had started as a semi-serious response to required chapel attendance at Carlson College). He told me that the qualification to join RDNA was to repeat “Nature is Good” three times. I responded, “Nature is beyond human standards of good and evil.” He shrugged and admitted me in anyway. One of the members wrote some papers on Druid doctrine in a parody of Jewish religious debate. Some of them are pretty funny.
Chris at Ferndale– I see reports on my newsfeed that the Japanese govt. is also tightening up on immigrants and foreign residents who do not demonstrate respect for Japanese culture.
Rita
@Other Owen
My tenative belief for the time being is that God or the higher order ruling deities is/are not good by human standards, but as Individualities develop mental bodies, they align more and more with the Cosmic Will and Order. Otherwise, spirits beyond the human stage would rebel and try to impose their will on the world to set things right. Tbey come to understand factors that we are too dumb to grasp (like how small children understand much more than even intelligent dogs).
Parrick # 159:
Your analogy with small children and intelligent dogs understanding seems right to me, if spirits have a very wider universe view than humans, it’s right. And more, if over them there’s a divine entity, its understanding of cosmic realities wouldn’t be depicted in human terms.
>God or the higher order ruling deities is/are not good by human standards
(HP Lovecraft has joined the chat)
And he could be right for all I know. Unlike an AI, I’m willing to say “Don’t know enough”
So, when will we see an Alien crouched atop a muskmelon .. in an attempt to pierce the windshield with it’s pearlys? Lord knows what acid-for-blood will do to a battery. And just remember: you don’t dare kill it! .. the truck that is. ‘;]
I’m more worried of the knock-on effects re. the supposed multitudes of um, ‘artificial persons’ that Dr. Weyland.. err, I meant Mr. Musk, is creating..
@ The Other Owen @161 Yep, words from Yahweh, Old Testament “ I kill, and I make alive; I wound, and I heal: neither is there any that can deliver out of my hand” 7 “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things” Some New Testament responses to this – “Our God is a consuming fire” “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the Living God” “Knowing the terror of the Lord we persuade men” Lovecraft was on to something.
I knew a woman who had what I think was a visionary dream concerning this. She saw a great dark tornado approaching her, chillingly she saw it was aware and alive and moreover saw her and was seeking her. She was frozen in fear. It drew near and then the whirlwind tilted over and showed her its top. Revealed inside it was a warm pleasant living room with a lit fireplace and a comfortable couch and chairs.
Theater kids have a warped sense of how the world works. They think acid is this horrible thing, so they make a monster that is full of horribleness and that’s the extent of their thinking. They don’t even tell you which acid it is. Some of them are more dangerous than others, like HF.
Siliconguy might have different opinions but all you have to do against one of those Aliens is shoot it with a strong base. It’ll blow it up and if the biology needs the pH to be that low, it’ll also fatally poison it as well. Chemistry is a Rock-Paper-Scissors game and acid is just Rock. Find some Paper.
Those Aliens IRL would be a pest and nothing more.
@ Patrick 101
> Hawking was only famous because he was disabled and got an iconic computerized voice.
I recall reading a story about Hawking in his student days. He was one of a small group of particularly bright students who were selected to do an advanced course in something or other. Their textbook contained a series of famously difficult problems. They were assigned the first ten.
The next morning they were sitting at breakfast discussing how they’d got on with the problems. Most had managed the first two. One or two of them had tackled the third without success. Then Hawking came down to join them (this was before he was in a wheelchair).
“Hawking! How’d you get on with the problems, old chap.”
“I did the first nine, then I decided I’d rather watch soccer on the telly.”
I might have got the details wrong, but that’s the gist. As the writer said, that’s when they realized that Hawking was not only brighter than anyone else, he was in a different universe of brightness.
As stated upthread, the Cybertruck is totally 1980s. Reminds me of the meme: “You’d best start believing in cyberpunk dystopias– you’re in one!”
https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1885645-cyberpunk
Elon Musk seems like the kind of guy who wouldn’t notice that the setting of “Shadow Runner” was supposed to be a dystopia.
Speaking of dystopian cyberpunk elements and Musk, he made what I think will be one of the iconic posts of the AI bubble a while back. In order to show off the video/character creation abilities his “Grok” has, he had the AI that can show you any impossible fantasy you can imagine… create a woman saying “I will always love you.”
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1987087713204641988
Sure, that says something about Musk, but it says something about our broken culture, too. Both of those somethings are profoundly sad. How broken are we that even the richest are turning to a box of demons for love?
Maybe slightly off topic…I was in a bar this evening (local time) when I’ve seen the cover of a newspaper Sunday magazine with the following picture: an android head and a chewing gum balloon. And the words written below this picture were (do you guess it?): “Is there an AI bubble?”
Well, when a mainstream magazine in a crowded bar warns about this topic it means the s**t is widespreaded everywhere yet, and it can’t be ignored anymore…
Phutatorius, unfortunately the chart would have had to be far bigger than it is to make room for everybody. I was amused to find so many of my involvements on it.
Clarke, a fine question which I can’t answer! Those always looked to me like unusually cheap and ugly toys enlarged to absurd scale.
BeardTree, maybe so, but the occult scene is far worse now than it was so little as a decade ago.
Chris, granted. Dragons are supposed to perish suddenly with the flash of a sword or a lance and vast gouts of blood, instead of sinking slowly in lethargy, senility, and creeping necrosis!
Other Owen, that’s why I tend toward the Lovecraftian notion that the concern the Great Old Ones have for us is not much more than the concern you have for the lives, dreams, and moral goodness of the skin bacteria in the crevice between the fourth and fifth toes on your left foot. You may be benevolent, but I doubt those bacteria have any reason to notice this.
Rita, trust me, that was going through my mind when I wrote that. Among many other things, I’m a properly initiated Third Order priest of Dalon ap Landu in the RDNA…
Chuaquin, hmm! Brace yourselves, folks…
JMG – “but the occult scene is far worse now than it was so little as a decade ago” Any insight why so? The Christian scene as far as I can tell keeps rolling along in its normal disarray its had for a very long time (a sign actually of religious freedom IMO) except perhaps for the Catholic scene where the disarray may be increasing.
JMG–greetings fellow RDNA initiate. Now I must wonder how a Discordian Bishop (a promotion from mere Discordian Pope) ranks in relation to a Third Order priest of Dalon ap Landu. Robert Anton Wilson himself promoted me when I told him that I had called a local radio station to tell them that the Illuminati were plotting in honor of the American Bicentennial. Bearing in mind that the Illuminati were claimed by some to have also been founded in 1776.
re AI. I earlier mentioned the lawsuit claiming that AI encouraged and instructed a teen’s suicide. I also listened to some accounts of people who regard their AI chat partner as an actual friend, one woman even creating a ceremony and wearing a ring to symbolize the commitment. Yet another instance of not knowing whether to laugh or cry.
Rita
If I may, the Cybertruck borrows a lot from the Warthog from Halo, a popular video game from the early 2000s. The Warthog was the equivalent for the human faction as the Willys MB or the Humvee was in various phases of American empire. The faceted design of the Cybertruck evokes the limited polygon counts that were possible in video games 25 years ago.
They’re also incredibly ugly up close – the facets are never flat, and they quickly corrode.
@165 Martin Beck
If Hawking had been born several decades earlier, he might have made substantial contributions to the field of quantum mechanics. But he lived too late, and will not become part of the Western scientific “canon.”
(If we observed a primordial black hole explosively evaporate due to Hawking radiation, it might be a different matter.)
Re TylerA #166:
A woman with empty eyes and a fake smile, who shakes her head while saying she loves you…
I could see an autistic kid who’s bad at recognizing facial expressions falling for this, but that musk shows it as an example is quite telling, indeed.
–bk
JMG # 168:
It’s not a secret the AI bubble (at least as risk) is worrying more people outside the fringe online people…we’ll see if concerns become real in a not so far future.
“a few anywhere people of a different kind — wherever they show up, relationships coalesce around them and they become the catalyst for a self-sustaining scene or even a community.”
Not playing hob at all! More to think about. And also, more to notice and appreciate. 🙂
In general I find that the making of distinctions between this and that, much as I enjoy doing it, is model-making – an activity with small, limited uses, which, in their place are useful, out of their place, not. In other words, the distinctions we can draw will never be the thing, will never resemble the thing, but may allow us ways to approach the thing in our thinking and maybe *see* one or two aspects of it more clearly (while obscuring the rest).
And therefore, i find it pleasing to make distinctions between this and that. But, over the years, I have also come to realise that the purposes for making those distinctions are quite limited, and that there is also a time and a place for letting them fade back into the great “blooming, buzzing confusion” that IS.
@cybertruck
Styling aside, Elon at al don’t get why people buy trucks in the first place. They’re essentially open platforms, where you can bolt on all sorts of silly and serious things. Can’t really do that with the cybertruck. And Tesla is even more hostile than BMW when it comes to servicing your own vehicle, they really want you to take it back to the dealer for everything. Sort of like Apple with their strong manly arms – don’t worry your pretty little head about anything, we’ll take care of you. And then there’s all the spyware and gratuitous electronics in it. And the thing is HEAVY but that’s true of all electric cars. However, truck tires are not cheap and that cybertruck eats tires – nom nom nom.
There was a video of someone talking to a bunch of tradies about it and they all went oblique and started saying things like “It looks like a good 2nd truck, something to play with” – essentially it’s a toy to that crowd and nothing more.
I’d like to see a car that was easy and cheap to manufacture and could be serviced and maintained with a harbor freight mechanic’s toolset and only needed a high school education to diagnose. As things stand now, you need so many special tools and a PhD level brain. And sometimes that PhD guy has trouble figuring out what is going wrong with the car. That’s the scary part, when you see someone who’s experienced and smart really struggling to figure out the car.
Two related comments on an Ivy League education this morning;
“Toner-Rodgers’s illusory success seems in part thanks to the dynamics he has now upset: an academic culture at MIT where high levels of trust, integrity and rigor are all — for better or worse — assumed. He focused on AI, a field where peer-reviewed research is still in its infancy and the hunger for data is insatiable. What has stunned his former colleagues and mentors is the sheer breadth of his apparent deception. He didn’t just tweak a few variables. It appears he invented the entire study.”
And from a Zero Hedge summary;
Bloomberg reports that the latest delayed BLS data shows a sharp deterioration in white-collar jobs, especially those holding four-year degrees, now making up a record 25% of all unemployed – or about 1.9 million folks, the highest level since 1992.
“Palantir CEO Alex Karp recently had an epic quote about this emerging labor market mess :
The average Ivy League grad voting for this mayor is annoyed their education is not that valuable, and that the person who knows how to drill for oil has a more valuable profession.
I think that annoys the [bleep] out of these people. ”
The wind is blowing and the sky is clear ending a four day dunkelflaute.
For those who have been wanting to know more about the Situationist Intergalactical, I have some information I’ve finally been able to track down about the group:
The Situationist Intergalactical (SI) is an intergalactic organization of made up of a strange amalgamation of pre/post avant-garde artists, eldritch intellectuals, and poetically inclined political theorists. It remains prominent in certain portions of the Milky Way, NGC 4414, the Sombrero Galaxy, and Andromeda among others. Membership is open to anyone who claims they are a member, and a variety of spin-off groups exists in certain star cluster and extragalactic nebulae.
The intellectual foundations of the Situationist Intergalactical were developed from star seeds of thought emanating from Canis Major, in particular the Sirius system, during the early years of the 21st century on Terra. Disinclined to give two fracks about either capitalism, communism or any of the-then prevalent economic theories available, early members of the SI allowed themselves to be seduced by the irrational forces of the subconscious mind and what occultists called “the unseen” – a field of consciousness extending from the highest planes of reality down to the densest plane of the material commonly seen as the manifest world. The SI has in particular been fond of employing a kind reverse hauntology known as retromancy, for inspiration. It has looked to the avant-garde art movements of the early 20th century, particularly the original Situationist International, Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus and Luigi Russolo’s theosophic inspired Art of Noise as cultural mines to search for various ore.
The SI remains multi-sub-cultural, as well as multi-cultural in theory and practice. “Use and adapt from anything that works” is our motto. In this regard we have seen how the endgames of capitalism and communism have not worked, and so look into the proverbial dumpster of economic systems and strategies that have never really been tried in full as we seek to create a variety of nodes of parallel polis in our attempt to resist the sovcorp ascendancy seen as one possible outcome of the nascent entrepreneurial turn.
True to our Intergalactic ethos, key pioneers in the world of “space music” continue to transmit their voices to us, and remain active on the inner planes, sending their signals from deep within the akashic archives. (This locale is also known to some as the dream library, and to others as the inner library.) Sun Ra, Karlheinz Stockhausen, David Bowie, Klaus Nomi and Erik Satie have all given key mutational teachings to the musical arms of the Situtationist Intergalactical.
Essential to situationist theory is the concept of the spectacle, a unified critique of fully automated advanced luxury capitalism / communism. Both were highly bureaucratic in their collective organization and relied on propaganda to keep their sway. This agitprop was activated by the mediation of social relations through imagery. A controlled mass media kept the inmates of the collective mind forged prisons fully manacled. Members of the Situationist Intergalactical believe that this living by proxy through the spectacle of reality television, parasocial media, and advertising, is a leading contributor to the passive second-hand alienation experienced by inmates of both advanced capitalism and communism. As such the Situationist Intergalactical advocates a return to developing Analog Intelligence, through the deliberate cultivation of the various arts of memory, and low-tech means of living as a way of engaging fully with the shared reality of the interconnected web of life.
This interconnected web of life is why some members of the Situationist Intergalactical have taken to calling themselves Arachnists, after certain fictional works of one of their founding members. Arachnists have taken some of the best thinking from spiritual anarchist philosophy, whose roots reach back to Chuang Tzu and Gerard Winstanley, along with certain elements of political anarchism, such as mutual aid, stateless societies, or at the least, the idea of micronations, the sovereignty of the individual and the divine spark that animates them. Alongside this the Arachnists have chosen to take ideas from various ecological movements of the 20th and early 21st century as another part of their complex and braided lineage. Strands of rewilding, permaculture, deep ecology, and the core essential knowledge emanating out of thinkers surrounding the peak oil movement and its aftermath are also claimed.
All of this low-tech stuff may cause one to wonder, just how it is the group remains Intergalactical without high technology? I should remind them then that a third branch of our investigations is the realm of dreams. All of our space travel outside of earth is done on the astral plane. To this end we seek to grow new organs of perception to to continue to refine our intergalactic travel. But don’t let that worry you! Our work is as much pataphysical as it is metaphysical.
All of this material is used to reweave human paths of fate and destiny, taking what was once separated out by alienated forms of work and economy, and coagulating them anew as a way to disengage from the spectacle and construct situations of life where authentic, unmediated desires and the destiny of souls can be worked out, leading to individual liberation.
Where the Situationist Intergalactical differs most from their namesake is that they get bored to tears reading things by or about Marx. So much critical theory, that otherwise might have much to offer those seeking to construct situations, gets bogged down by this ridiculous deference to Marx, as if he were the only economic thinker who ever lived. As if there weren’t other alternatives to capitalism (and communism). The bootlicking quality many thinkers have towards Marx is in no-way conducive to ones own self respect as a sovereign individual. We reserve the right to of course offer accolades to our artistic and intellectual ancestors, but the amount of shale piled on the doorstep to Marx is inordinate to what has actually been achieved or done in his name. Having come to the dead end of both dominant systems, it is time to explore new economic ecologies as we build the parallel polis. We will rescue these from the histories eclectic compost hope in an act of retromancy.
Since the Situationist Intergalactical has been formed, the focus remains predominantly artistic, but we recognize that within every artist a magician is sleeping. The images that mediate us in the spectacle and simulacrum, are where the I-Mage can exert a lateral influence, even if, while at the fringes of society. Therefore, the tools of the various avantgarde art movements listed above, among any others of interest as led by the daimon of the individual practitioner, are utilized on a spectrum that ranges from complete chaotic abandon to ordered deliberation. Seeing how the alchemical has infused the minds of the surrealists, and later resurfaced in the manner of the “return of the repressed” as seen in Raoul Vaneigem’s increasing investigations of alchemical and occult iconography in his later literary output, the alchemical aspect is of particular interest. But again, any avenue of advanced amalgamation is worthy of having a spot on the shelf in our collective apothecary.
Detournement, psychogeography and many other tools of the original SI remain important to the Situationist Intergalactical. Explorations of these and many more will be further revealed in further communiques!
If you think you may wish to be a part of the Situationist Intergalactical, you probably already are. No permission is needed. Think yourself a Situationist and you will be. Furthermore, no permission is required to form your own node in the collective web of arachnist activity. Seeking permission may even be grounds for dismissal, in which case you’ll have to form your own node anyway. Until next time, remember that it is always forbidden to forbid, so you might as well demand the impossible.
https://www.sothismedias.com/home/the-situationist-intergalactical-a-brief-introduction
https://www.sothismedias.com/uploads/1/2/4/5/124587142/situationist-intergalactical_orig.jpeg
Justin Patrick Moore # 178:
Thank you very much for the text and links to the Situationist Intergalactical! Indeed very interesting this attempt to revive the old Situ spirit and to reach new air beyond the dull binary capitalism/communism. I’d like to join soon this bizarre group and of course to create an “arachnist node”, but I’m afraid I’m too lazy by now. Well, we’ll see…
JMG,
If the microbes get too frisky between the toes, at some point things get too itchy to be ignored and then at some point the Time of Medicinal Cream comes to the area. I wonder what ensues if that ever happens to this realm.
Asking the really esoteric and uncomfortable questions.
The cyber truck chat reminds me of my first sight of the thing. I was at the airport in Los Angeles on my way to visit my youngest son who lives there. As I was waiting for our shuttle bus, a Cybertruck pulled up in front of us. A whole family got out and headed in to the airport. The driver ( a kind of tech bro looking white guy), tried to get back in the truck to drive away. He apparently couldn’t figure out how to unlock it or something so he was stuck there, double parked, unable to move. About 10 minutes later another cyber truck pulled up and a 20 something Chinese girl jumped out, unlocked the truck and drove off after letting the hapless original driver into the passenger seat. Kind of an analogy for the way our the world is going these days.
Other Owen #176: “I’d like to see a car that was easy and cheap to manufacture and could be serviced and maintained with a harbor freight mechanic’s toolset and only needed a high school education to diagnose.”
You can have one now, if you’re willing to accept the version with 2 wheels rather than 4 – in other words, a motorcycle. My husband, a high school grad with good mechanical aptitude, does most of the work on his 2014 Triumph with HF tools (the better tools we had got stolen out of the garage some years ago). He bought it used for $3500 in 2020.
@The Other Owen, #176
That’s the ironic thing– an electric car could be easier to maintain than a gas guzzler. Think of how many moving parts are in the engine and transmission! Think of all the complex failure modes of timing belts, fouled plugs, slipping clutches, et cetera, et cetera. We used to look forward to electric cars for just that reason, once upon a time. Funny how it worked out, eh?
The car companies figured out some time ago that keeping you captive to their dealership is more profitable. So you get things like Hyundai’s electric, where you can’t touch the brakes without a dealer-specific computer to tell the car it’s OK. It’s not necessary, any more than Mercedes getting rid of the dip sticks on their gas guzzlers was necessary.
Look at e-bikes– bog simple, easy to fix, just like any bicycle. Some of them have 5000W motors. Put one of those on each wheel of a Model-T and I betcha we can get it up to highway speeds, and you’d have something anyone could fix with a hammer, a screwdriver, and a soldering iron. Alas, it likely wouldn’t be road legal anywhere.
@Martin Beck, #165,
There’s an anecdote about Feynman and Hawking, in which an elderly professor Feynman was told of this rising star who could calculate path integrals in his head. The response was something along the lines of “It would be more impressive if he’d had invented them”– and while that’s perhaps the sour grapes of the setting sun looking on a rising star, he’s got a point. Hawking had a lot of brainpower by all accounts but it’s hard to see him being remembered for generations based on what he accomplished with it. Even Hawking Radiation is kind of obvious in retrospect– indeed, Alan Lightman claims that Feynman actually scribbled out the proof of it on one of his (Lightman’s) blackboards a year before Hawking’s paper, but didn’t think it was interesting enough to copy down anywhere, never-mind publish.
Cyclone #145
The phosphate issue has been around for quite some time. I followed it for over a decade until my husband passed and I sold the house (with big vegetable garden). I haven’t followed it since.
IIRC, Morocco supplied about 70 or so % of rock phosphate globally, with Russia, China, and the US supplying most of the rest. Rock phosphate reserves were expected to last until 2100, but by around 2018 or so, the reserves were expected to last only until around 2050-75.
What to do when rock phosphate runs out? There are alternatives, the major one being (hold on to your hat) bone meal, a by-product of the meat industry. (The vegans are screaming). Plant based protein is good for the environment? Not really.
I read that more and more farms are bought up by big corporations. Who then hire managers to oversee the farms, but don’t really know that much about farming. As big a loss as phosphate depletion is, the loss of knowledge of the farmer passing his knowledge to his children and grandchildren is just as great. You don’t learn to farm by reading a book and then throwing some seed on the ground.
The article states that if action isn’t taken soon, recovery time will be 2060. By that time, crop failures and increased food prices will have taken their toll on the population.
In time farms will become what they should have been all along: small multi-crop (livestock, grains, vegetables) family run farms. But it will take many years and many failures.
Btw, here in Canada, I buy a fish bone meal fertilizer from Nova Scotia. It stinks, but the plants love it.
@Chuaquin #179 et al:
Laziness is a perfectly acceptable to response to the times. Various members of the Situationist Intergalactical and select Arachnist nodes are big fans of the book “How to be Idle: A Loafer’s Manifesto” by Tom Hodgkinson.
For some of us it’s not jus the “Decline of Western Civilization” or “Decline and Fall” … but the “Recline of Western Civilization” and “Recline and Fall.”
While everything is going to shale, might as well relax, grab a good back, sit back, relax and eat some popcorn.
As the great sage Frank Zappa said, “the government is the entertainment wing of the military industrial complex.” Microdosing on the spectacle for a laugh is appropriate from time to time.
If this is what you call laziness you’ll be in good company.
@Robert Mathiesen: You’re very welcome about the book. It looks really interesting and is on my reading list!
Great podcast with Matthew B. Crawford on so-called “Smart Cities” here:
https://unherd.com/watch-listen/the-truth-about-smart-cities/
It’s an interesting discussion of what the sovcorps would like to do to our cities and are trying to implement as long as the energy is around. (I note here that Microsoft bought Three Mile Island for reactor purposes as some of you likely know… a scary thought… obviously not the kind of retromancy I advocate.) In as much as aspects of these kinds of cities come into being, they will be ripe for psychogeography and raspberry culture jamming.
BeardTree, it’s a complicated matter. On the one hand, pop-culture occultism is continuing to shed followers and income sources — both the Neopagan and New Age scenes have been contracting by most measures since 2007. On the other, there’s quite a bit of renewed interest in more serious forms of occultism, and so the usual struggles are going on as personalities and traditions contend for notional turf. I suspect the popularity of demonolatry and evil magic in the waning Neopagan scene is also contributing a share of blowback.
Rita, I think a Discordian bishop relates to a third order RDNA priest roughly the way a bright blue giraffe relates to a bathtub full of Jello. As for the LLM business, I expect to see a lot more of that. I’m working up a concept which will be central to an upcoming post; the concept is cognitive collapse, and it’s the exact equivalent of model collapse in LLMs — but in human minds. More on this shortly.
Chuaquin, it’s certainly worth watching.
Scotlyn, duly noted! All models, in effect, are chew toys for Cthulhu… 😉
Siliconguy, the twilight of the managerial caste in two neat snapshots. Here we go — whee!
Justin, fun, and the concept of retromancy is a keeper. Still, for my own part, I’m more interested in the Situationist Interpersonal…
Other Owen, bacterial scriptures must be full of Medicinal Cream stories, the way ours are stocked with Flood stories.
Justin, thanks for this. There’s a difference between retromancy and necromancy!
@Other Owen #176: “I’d like to see a car that was easy and cheap to manufacture …” I hear you, brother. I own two electric cars and the annoying/problematic aspects have nothing to do with the powertrain. HVAC on a touchscreen? Blech. Wi-Fi hotspot – I got a phone for that. And the constant reminders to subscribe to OnStar and SiriusXM…it’s a good thing the fundamental vehicle is so reliable and easy to drive!
I hope Slate succeeds – window cranks!
Thank you…
As above, so below.
I see the Situationist Interpersonal as a microcosm of the Situationist Intergalactical. For example, I’ve heard on good authority that the Situationist Interpersonal is very keen on developing terrestrial zodiacs such as seen at Glastonbury and Bodmin Moor ; )
@JMG:
I’m really looking forward to seeing what you make of cognitive collapse. From what I saw while teaching at Brown for four decades, it’s become very much a real thing, and a troubling thing.
“personalities and traditions contend for notional turf” “pop- culture occultism is continuing to shed followers and income sources” Sigh, once again it’s follow the money as the root of all evil along with the joy of being top dog or at least a prominent one. True also in turf battles in Church land, my zone. I know a fellow who attempted to get the various Evangelical churches in my city to cooperate and work together in an organized and conscious fashion and it was a no go. Herding cats I guess.
Justin, so noted! My thought, though, is that the Situationist Interpersonal will be more into exploring personal zodiacs in one life at a time. I may just have fun with the metaphor…
Robert, it’s going to get a post. I’m just not sure how soon yet.
BeardTree, of course. Humans gonna human…
Jean-Baptiste (offlist), come on. You’ve been reading me for a good long time, and you know the rules. If you want to comment on a topic unrelated to this week’s post, please do it during the monthly open post, which (ahem) goes up tomorrow. I’ll look forward to your repeating your comments on peak oil tomorrow, as I think we can have an interesting conversation on that subject.
Sounds good. There is room in the intergalactic freakzone for numerous approaches. To paraphrase the great sage Robert Fripp there is “resplendence in divergence.” I will look forward to it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_0BhfYmUjY
@Other Owen #176 “I’d like to see a car that was easy and cheap to manufacture …” I had one once – a 1970’s Toyota Corolla Wagon, You opened the hood and you could see ground on the sides of the engine. You fixed it by pulling off a part like the alternator and putting the new one on, or just stick a new thermostat in. Years later I attempted to replace the thermostat on a Ford Aerostar van, couldn’t do it, inaccessible, had to pay 200 dollars for a mechanic to do it. Again my saying – “I have reached the age where I have seen the future and I am not impressed” I could repair my clothes dryer, now it being all digital and electronic instead of electro- mechanical I can’t. Yet the older washers and dryers were just as good in getting the job done, actually better than the water saver ones.
Beardtree. I also have fond memories of those early Toyotas. The first car I ever bought, and to this day my favorite, was a late 60s (68 maybe) Toyota Corona. It had wing windows! Remember those? The small triangles you could open for some ventilation without getting a swarm of insects inside your car.
Justin P. Moore # 185:
That’s OK, if various members of the SI and arachnists praise lazyness as a virtue, I could join them soon without problem. I also share your approach to the “Recline and Fall”.
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JMG # 188:
I didn’t know the Situationist Interpersonal. I wonder if you’re one of its main founders. I’m interested in it (half kidding half seriously like with Justin proposal), so I’d like to join it too. Why not?
JMG (no. 188) “On the one hand, pop-culture occultism is continuing to shed followers and income sources — both the Neopagan and New Age scenes have been contracting by most measures since 2007. On the other, there’s quite a bit of renewed interest in more serious forms of occultism…”
I often try to make alternative spirituality track the comic-book and science-fiction fandoms, which have shifted from lowbrow, pulpy stuff to more high-end products, even as theif fanbases have been shrinking. For New Agers, the high end is represented by things like Jung, integralism a la Wilber, and maybe some of the Gurdjjieff interfaith stuff like Parabola. (By “high end” I mean that it is more expensive and/or self-consciously cerebral. Both imply an older and more committed fanbase, which in turn suggests that younger generations aren’t joining..) On the other hand, the Jungian subculture seems moribund, but young men flock to Jordan Peterson. Ken Wilber seems to have been a fad, as has all of transpersonal psychology and for that matter, parapsychology. New spiritual crazes are spreading via Tiktok, not New Age books and fairs, and these are as lowbrow as can be. (think Flat Earth and QAnon)
Turning to more mainstream religiousiity, who is shrinking? mainline churches, fraternal orders, convert Buddhism. Mega-churches will likely become victims of the next demographic transition–their financial model means that they can’t survive any shrinkage. Who is growing? “Nones” of course, but beyond that all I can think of is Haredi Judaism and some of the Orthodox churches (but the converts are mainly young men, which seems unsustainable).
On the motif of predictions of material abundance from robot labor: “The Midas Plague” by Frederik Pohl, 1954. That story’s version of the future was hardly an attempt at a realistic prediction. Instead, it was a comically ironic inversion of 1950s corporate America, where the lower classes are tasked with the burden of consuming the excessive production: driving enormous cars, living in mansions, going out every evening, wearing expensive clothes and jewelry; and only the equivalent of the “rich” have the privileges of performing productive work and living simply. (Warning that the remainder of this parenthetical contains a partial spoiler: if you think you see an obvious solution to this problem, you’re probably right and you’ve probably predicted the story’s resolution.)
This was not at all a prediction, or if it was, it obviously failed. Seven subsequent decades of mechanization haven’t brought mansions or lavish evenings to the poor. And at least in this venue, we all understand why not, even if there had been (or someday will be) abundant capable worker robots. And yet, and yet…
There are echoes of the Midas Plague everywhere I look. What comes to mind first, because it’s been discussed in this thread in the context of “BS” Jobs, is productive work being treated as a privilege. In the story’s inverted economy, the privilege is earned (supposedly) by diligent consuming that’s then rewarded with an elevated “class” number in a hierarchy, which reduces the person’s assigned mandatory consumption, giving them the time to produce. In our own, it’s the encouragement of unproductive work by underpaying for productive work. (Not, apparently, to discourage the productive work as an end in itself, but to feed resources to the industries that gatekeep the higher-paid unproductive work.)
But overall, the most striking parallel is in the push to consume. In the Midas Plague’s inverted economy, instead of the praise of frugality and hard work typical of the mid 20th century, the religious, government, and social authority figures all exhort the public to consume, as a patriotic and moral virtue. As strange as that inversion is, it’s at least quaintly self-consistent, in contrast to our reality where a faint echo of the value of thrift seems to apply specifically to fancy coffee and avocado toast, while actual government officials offer public warnings that economic stimulus payments might fail in their intended effect if the public were too short-sighted to spend it immediately. And that’s a background detail compared with the pervasiveness of advertising.
The fantasy world depicted in advertisements echoes a Midas Plague world. It’s not real, but it’s offered as an aspirational image. Acting on those aspirations is the basis of the world of influencers. Influencers are where Pohl’s ironic non-predictions come the closest to becoming literally true. An influencer must demonstrate consumption, and might have to compete with other influencers by out-consuming them, unless they can attain higher status levels that allow them to consume less. That’s the Midas Plague world.
Wawa: “The reason is people feel alienated if they are not surrounded by people with whom they cannot at least have a clear conversation.”
I have to disagree. Rapid change, and not being able to communicate is, of course, important, but it is not anything like a main reason for the concern over immigration. One just has to look at Brexit voting, the cultural mix that is London had one of the highest votes *against* Brexit, and whiter than white Cornwall, where everybody could speak to each other, had one of the highest votes *for* Brexit.
One of the main reasons that people are concerned about immigration is because those in power have told them that it is a concern, bad etc, strikingly illustrated by Brexit. A few years prior to Brexit immigration didn’t even figure in the top ten of the electorate’s concerns in the UK, and while racism was rife in France, immigration wasn’t really a top issue until recently (where I have lived, solely or partly for a couple of decades). UK politicians used the EU and immigration as a reason for the failings of the UK for decade(s), while the exact opposite is true. The failings in the UK would have been much worse without the EU and immigration (which is not to deny JMG’s ideas concerning where we are heading).
Cut to the Brexit referendum. Important to note that the SNP Government in Scotland has always been vocally supportive of immigrants (Scotland needs young people even more than England) with its policy of Civic Nationalism, and this was particularly true around the time of the referendum. Immediately after the referendum racist attacks in England rocketed (and bizarrely, homophobic attacks rose 147% in one year), according to police figures. Whereas in Scotland the numbers barely moved. It’s striking just how powerful an effect politicians, and others with influential voices, can have.
Does racism and homophobia exist in Scotland? Of course it does, but it’s interesting that since the flowering of national identity, that led to the rise of the SNP, “vanilla racism”, that casual animosity or “hatred” of the English, has radically softened in Scotland. During the Scottish independence debate the continually repeated question from England was “Why do you hate the English”, the response being, this debate isn’t about you, which I think was simply not comprehended in England. The debate was about what Scottish people want to do, who are we, where do we want to go, and had nothing to do with English PEOPLE (the continuing fallout from Thatcher’s reign of terror is another matter entirely). Having lived between Scotland and London for three decades it’s striking just how DIFFERENT (not better, or worse – some people start getting very nervous when one talks about differences) the cultures are. The Scots (and French) are “thinkers and talkers” (the works “should”, “could”, and “if only” should be made illegal in Scotland), the English are “doers”. I can’t think of a single English person I know (apart from the Trots that ran (expertly representing their members, I would note) the Union at work) that can talk or discuss ideas – on anything – no matter how uncontroversial an issue is… politics, religion, popular culture, architecture, fashion etc, etc. It would appear they simply don’t have the skills to be able to reason and articulate their thoughts, and sometimes unable to separate a very diplomatic, gentle criticism of an idea from a direct, hostile, attack on themselves as a person (I’ve been there). My Scottish, neurodivergent, obsessive interest and love of ideas finds it quite weird, and almost incomprehensible (which, of course, says more about me than it does about them).
Immigration has its problems, but almost none of them have anything to do with young, healthy, intelligent, motivated people, with resources, coming to Europe to live and work either – legally – choosing to emigrate from their country for new opportunities or – legally – presenting as asylum seekers, fleeing from war zones, or from the threat of persecution, imprisonment, or execution for being who they are (the conditions existing, very often, as a direct result of recent, or historical, actions by the empires of Europe and the USA).
Always worth remembering that immigrants (in any research I’ve read about): are more likely to be employed than the native population; commit less crimes than the native population; use less state resources than the native population. And poor, old, disabled, and uneducated people aren’t able to emigrate by either of the above mentioned routes, so aren’t able to “take advantage” of the supposedly “put upon” rich countries.
Wawa: “This is being handwaived away by the powers that be by saying it is a normal part of living in the city/international community, but who says that it is so?”
Perhaps because it always has been the case. It’s a defining characteristic of most large cities. The idea that prior to the 19th Century no one moved around the world is simply nonsense. Large population centres have always been a huge mix of people and cultures… that’s why they became large population centres, because of the wealth created by trade, education, and cultural exchange. “The Silk Roads” by Peter Frankopan and “The Golden Road” by William Dalrymple, about ancient Central Asia and China, and ancient India respectively, amply demonstrate this.
LOL! So that’s what we are all doing. Making chew toys for Chthulu.
I like it! Also, I will always remember it, when I am carefully crafting yet another beautifully modelled argument, and I will hope it squeaks a bit, and entertains a bit, by the time it gets to the big Maw in the Sea… 🙂 🙂
I don’t comment much these days, but I still follow religiously Ecosophia and Ecosophia Dreamwidth. That said, the concept of cognitive collapse is interesting; it is one of the things that makes me think that the current crisis period will be quite dramatic in psychological terms. The short form seems to be that Western civilization is turning into a madhouse with the inmates in charge, or is already such a madhouse.
Michael X # 200
“Always worth remembering that immigrants (in any research I’ve read about): are more likely to be employed than the native population; commit less crimes than the native population; use less state resources than the native population.”
What are the sources for that idea?
I only ask because just prior to reading your comment I saw this headline:
Italy: Foreigners commit 44% of sexual violence cases in Italy, half of gang rapes, while only representing 9% of population
https://rmx.news/article/italy-foreigners-commit-44-of-sexual-violence-cases-in-italy-half-of-gang-rapes-while-only-representing-9-of-population/
Granted in the UK there are issues with grooming gangs that are not to do with migrants, but iirc there have been a number of reports on trouble with sexual assaults on minors by migrants.
Much appreciated if you could give some links re “in any research I’ve read about”