Conspiracy by Any Other Name
“We might wonder, for example, whether the activities of intelligence agencies involved in spying and carrying out covert missions count as conspiracies by this definition. They are by their very nature plotted in secret, and they are indeed intended to alter the shape of history, but we might wonder if the everyday machinations of, say, CIA agents constitute a conspiracy because they are merely doing their job. Only in some cases is it immediately obvious that their actions are illegal or improper, and hence a conspiracy rather than merely being a covert operation. The problem with making illegality or impropriety part of the definition of a conspiracy is that it depends who is defining what’s illegal or not.” —Peter Knight, Conspiracy Theories in American History
The above quote underscores something I think is central to understanding the resistance to the notion of far-reaching, long-term, and multi-level global conspiracies. It is all about context.
As Lance deHaven Smith’s Conspiracy Theory in America (University of Texas Press) persuasively demonstrates, the term “conspiracy theory” was subtly promoted by the CIA following the John F. Kennedy assassination.[1] This was done as a means to discredit researchers by creating a “soft” categorization for them, a conceptual climate that would gradually suck all the oxygen out of their efforts and reduce it to a shriveled facsimile of itself. Denial and ridicule are invaluable tools for dealing with anything that potentially threatens to undermine the official narrative about how the world (and the government) operates.
That the CIA covertly introduced the term “conspiracy theory” into the common vernacular (back in the days when going viral took a decade or more) is not, as the uninformed reader might suppose, itself a “conspiracy theory.” Or at least, if it is, it’s backed by academically collated data, source documents, and rigorous analyses generally considered sufficient to constitute historical fact, and not mere theory. My point isn’t to offer up more theories—or even evidence—about CIA skullduggery, but to indicate how what’s often derided as “conspiracy theory” is just business-as-usual for intelligence agencies like the CIA.
Also, how reframing evidence relating to covert operations (to manipulate individuals, society, and even history itself) as “conspiracy theory” has been central to creating a false and unnatural—yet ever widening—gulf in the field of historical research, a gulf between Establishment figures like Noam Chomsky and fringe voices such as Douglas Valentine, Howard Blum, and Michael Parenti, even as conspiratainers like David Icke and Alex Jones enter the mainstream without rocking the ship of state.
If merely naming a thing is, to a large extent, enough to discredit it, this is only possible after a long and concerted effort to create a sociocultural quarantine for certain kinds of data to be confined to. There is an artificial context into which certain kinds of facts (or, yes, theories) are pulled, as if by a psychic gravitational field, and there inducted into narratives that have clearly been marked as “conspiracy theories,” not history, political science, or the study of espionage.
And yet: espionage as a practice, methodology, and central component of statecraft throughout history is so wholly dependent on conspiracy as to be very nearly synonymous with it. Men in rooms (and women), plotting to bring about specific ends via the manipulation of mass media, military and police action, government policies, legal sanctions, assassinations, technology, commerce, and so forth, all done with flagrant disregard for common laws, in secret, on a “need-to-know” basis that ensures there is only the communication between levels of hierarchy that’s strictly necessary, that almost no one has more than one or two pieces of the puzzle, and that everyone has plausible denial—often even to themselves.
How far-reaching is such an ongoing enterprise? The US Intelligence Community is a federation of at least 17 separate government agencies that work separately and together to conduct intelligence activities to support the foreign policy and national security of the U.S. Member organizations of the IC include intelligence agencies, military intelligence, and civilian intelligence and analysis offices within federal executive departments. The IC is overseen by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) making up the 17-member Intelligence Community, which itself is headed by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), who reports to the President of the United States. The Washington Post reported in 2010 that there were 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies in 10,000 locations in the US working on counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence, and that the intelligence community as a whole includes 854,000 people holding top-secret clearances. According to a 2008 study by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, private contractors make up 29% of the workforce in the U.S. intelligence community and account for 49% of their personnel budgets.
These names and figures are of course not even remotely accurate, because they cannot take into account the existence of “black-ops” (and because police forces have their own intelligence branches, as do many corporations nowadays). In 2017, a Foreign Policy article brought public attention to a spy agency even Barack Obama, five months into his presidency, didn’t know about: the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), whose “headquarters is the third-largest building in the Washington metropolitan area, bigger than the CIA headquarters and the US Capitol.” This is to say nothing of all the deep-undercover agents and informers who, for security reasons, would not be included in any publically released statistics.
I think it’s safe to say that the scope and reach of “the intelligence community”—of spooks both on the ground and behind desks, at home and abroad—is something few people can even conceive of, much less guess at. And let’s not forget Google, Apple, and Facebook—and all of them (or us) working day and night to secure and advance the interests of State power.
Reassuring, isn’t it?
David Brock’s Alt-Right
“I’m kind of a builder of institutions. I think I’ve got some ability to look at what’s out here, look at a playing field, and identify gaps and niches.” —David Brock
For an example of how perception management and narrative creation can shape society and influence individual behavior (including the all-essential element of a possible backfire), David Brock’s covert media campaign for the Hillary Clinton candidacy is worth a brief look. David Brock is an American political operative who founded the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters for America and was described by Time magazine as “one of the most influential operatives in the Democratic Party.” Yet Brock began his career as a right-wing investigative reporter during the 1990s, and wrote the book The Real Anita Hill, which led to Paula Jones filing a lawsuit against Bill Clinton. In the late 1990s, however, Brock switched sides and went to work for the Bill and Hillary Foundation.
Media Matters for America is a non-profit organization that describes itself as a “progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing and correcting conservative misinformation in the US media.” Brock also founded the super PACs (political action committees) American Bridge 21st Century and Correct the Record. He was elected chairman of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). The Nation described Brock as a “conservative journalistic assassin turned progressive empire-builder”; the National Review called him a “right-wing assassin turned left-wing assassin”; and Watchdog called him “possibly the least honest man ever to succeed in American journalism.” In 2015, he wrote Killing the Messenger: The Right-Wing Plot to Derail Hillary Clinton and Hijack Your Government.
The name of Brock’s game is “astroturfing,” the creation of fake movements to obscure, discredit, hijack or counteract real movements. As described elsewhere (“David Brock, Invasion 4Chan, the Alt-Right, & Pizzagate”), during the lead-in to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Hillary Clinton’s campaign commissioned Brock’s Correct the Record to dispatch Internet trolls to respond to a long running joke on 4chan, where the posting culture revels in absurdity and political incorrectness. Brock and company “lacked the situational awareness and basic intelligence to understand that the posts were not serious and, as a result, began to launch a political attack on 4chan.”[2] This included attempting to tarnish Donald Trump and his supporters with the taint of neo-Nazism, racism, and other deplorable qualities; Brock’s efforts were so successful, they helped give rise to the “Alt-Right movement.”
Here we have another example of the principles of schismogenesis previously outlined (see Part Two of this series), and recently cited in an article in Off-Guardian, “Bateson’s Schismogenesis as a propaganda tool,” which describes schismogenesis as a tool used “in online discussion forums by trolls, supposedly planted by intelligence services or the editorial board itself.” In a similar fashion, Brock’s covert campaign was designed to intensify polarization in the U.S. by strengthening (or creating whole-cloth) associations between Trump-supporters and extreme right-wing and racist ideologies, as already being lampooned at 4Chan. Evidence of the efficacy of this method is now all around us.
Brock’s campaign was so effective in fact that, when factual information came out about (for example) the Clintons’ intervention to protect Laura Silsby, who was arrested for child-trafficking in Haiti, many Hillary supporters dismissed it as right-wing propaganda, and as further evidence of the deplorability of the opposition. Information was now being evaluated on wholly ideological grounds, and the question of its accuracy was no longer considered pertinent. Believing certain sets of evidence—and above all sharing them—has itself become evidence of one’s political affiliations, that and nothing more.
At this point, it is probably impossible (as with the Illuminati meme described in Part Three) to distinguish between elements of the Alt-Right created by Brock’s secret smear campaign, the pranking and acting out of 4Channers, and a genuine grass roots internet movement. What’s indisputable is that—whatever its true origin—the “Alt-Right” now “exists.” Perhaps the same must now be said of the (non-Bavarian) Illuminati?
What Cannot be Concealed: Marina Abramović’s Blood Puddings
“I test the limits of myself in order to transform myself . . . but I also take the energy from the audience and transform it. It goes back to them in a different way. This is why people in the audience often cry or become angry or whatever. A powerful performance will transform everyone in the room.” —Marina Abramović
In the alt-media shitstorm of 2016 that became known as “Pizzagate,” many of the claims had to do with how the cultural set in Washington DC was signaling a value system comfortable with child sexual abuse, murder, depravity, and occult symbolism (i.e., all the earmarks of a “Satanic Illuminati”). To a degree, this was indisputably the case: photographic images at James Alefantis’ Instagram account of children, accompanied by tasteless sexual jokes; sexually suggestive artwork on the walls of Comet Ping Pong restaurant (a supposedly “child-friendly” environment); a creepy “stand up” performance by a musician (Majestic Ape) in the same locale, including “jokes” (open insinuations) about pedophilia; artwork owned by Tony Podesta depicting children undergoing sexual torture; and so on.
Where there’s smoke there’s fire, the paranoid Hive-mind of the Internet reasoned, not entirely rashly, as it turned out, since there were several smoking guns to “Pizzagate.” Laura Silsby’s child trafficking in Haiti, Dennis Hastert’s history of child sexual abuse and friendship with the Podestas, and Jeffrey Epstein’s Lolita Express constituted three direct links to the Clinton Foundation, which Alefantis, his boyfriend Brock, and Comet Ping Pong were all closely affiliated with. On the other hand, guilt-by-association is one of the easiest traps for conspiracy researchers to fall into, and such ties don’t make all the accusations flying around at the time correct. But they do mean that using the “circumstantial” evidence as “leads” did bear some conclusive fruit (even if today “Pizzagate” is mostly viewed as a “Fake News” debacle).
The inception of the “Pizzagate” online furor (reaching its mainstream—and probably fake—crescendo with a “deranged conspiracy theorist” entering the restaurant and allegedly firing a gun) was the John Podesta emails released by WikiLeaks. Several of these referred to Marina Abramović’s “spirit cooking,” an art project which some (possibly over-zealous) researchers claimed was inspired by an occult ritual designed by Aleister Crowley that included the consumption of blood, breast milk, urine and semen. Besides the Crowley link, this item got my attention at the time because of the possible overlap indicated between occultism, ritual abuse, and the arts and entertainment industry, which is why I am returning to it for the present series.
In her 40-odd years as a performance artist, Abramović has dealt in what she calls “true reality,” often at great physical and psychological cost to herself. She has stabbed her hand with knives, sliced her skin with razor blades, lain naked on a cross of ice for hours, and invited the public to prod, probe and abuse her naked body. Once, she almost died during a performance, lying inside a huge flaming star made of petrol-soaked sawdust. (The fire sucked the oxygen from around her, causing her to pass out. An audience member intervened and she was rushed to hospital with burns to her head and body.)
Spirit cooking, the performance piece and/or occult ritual that caught people’s attention after the release of the Podesta emails, relates to a series of performances from the 1990s in which Abramović used pig’s blood to write phrases on the walls of museums, such as “Fresh morning urine sprinkle over nightmare dreams,” or “with a sharp knife cut deeply into the middle finger of your left hand eat the pain.” One phrase, “mix fresh breast milk with fresh sperm, drink on earthquake nights,” caused WikiLeaks to tweet on 4 November 2016: “The Podestas’ ‘Spirit Cooking’ dinner? It’s not what you think. It’s blood, sperm and breastmilk. But mostly blood.” The implication was that Abramović’s performance art became something more openly satanic behind closed doors, and that this was all part of the evening’s entertainment for the elite. On the same day, The Washington Post ran its non-too-subtle counter-spin, entitled: “No, John Podesta didn’t drink bodily fluids at a secret Satanist dinner.”
So much for non-denial denials, this is an example of the inverse method: repeating the charges in a “playful” way to emphasize the supposed absurdity of them.
Another Abramović performance that raised internet eyebrows was a Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) show she did with Debbie Harry in 2011, which raised over $2.5 million for the museum. The event was attended by an impressive roster of Hollywood Illuminati, including Kirsten Dunst, Will Ferrell, Pamela Anderson, Rosanna Arquette, and Tilda Swinton, all of whom were obliged to don white lab coats as worn by the staff. “At each of the round tables, a nude woman was stretched out, draped with a skeleton . . . instructed to show no emotion and remain immobile. At the rectangular tables . . . heads popped out of the middle of each rectangular table, and rotating slowly, the actors seated, below the table, on lazy Susans.” (Ref.) “For dessert, 12 bare-chested young men carried in two life-size cakes representing Abramović and Harry in the nude that had been created with disturbing anatomical precision by the food artist Raphael Castoriano.” At the end of the night, the female body replicas were cut up into slices so “the well-heeled guests could indulge in the visually absurd bacchanal of devouring the artists’ various body parts.” (Ref.)
Visually absurd bacchanal? Only to some.
The Untouchables
“That which cannot be wholly concealed should be deliberately displayed.” —Quentin Crisp (a line my brother later stole)
Some dismissed all this as simply a case of bad-taste/bad-art from the liberal progressive avant-garde, and maybe it was. On the other hand, this avant-garde also involves high-level political figures with a presumably acute awareness of just what the lower classes, the “Philistines,” and the plebeians think of them and their costume parties. Can their eyes really be that widely shut? And if not, if they are aware of people’s growing suspicions about dark rituals occurring in their midst, why would they deliberately play into those fears?
Consider: If you knew your neighbors suspected you were a closet Satanist, would you start playing tapes of children’s screams at night and hanging inverted crucifixes on your door to make fun of them? If you wanted to drive them insane and risk being murdered in your sleep, you might. At what point does bad taste, bad art, mischievous humor, and elitist arrogance become a malicious kind of psychological operation?
Something else I learned while listening to the audio commentary for David Fincher’s Se7en: After completing the film, Brad Pitt wanted to buy the obese corpse model from the autopsy scene, cut it open, and serve bean dip from its entrails at the after-shoot party. Isn’t that just the sort of mischievous humor we have come to expect from our Brad? Was Pitt unaware of the hidden backdrop to his joke—any less than Abramović was—or was he subtly playing off of it?
When Jimmy Savile openly joked on national television and radio about hating children and sexually molesting teenage girls, it seemed like cheeky bad taste at the time. After he died and it came out he was actually molesting children, and a lot more besides, the jokes became something much more sinister, something strategic. Sometimes Savile’s victims were even sitting or standing right beside him while he let slip his creepy insinuations—insinuations designed to communicate to them just how untouchable he was.
What greater show of power exists than to flaunt abuses openly, and suffer no consequences?
Continued in Part 6
This series forms the basis of the upcoming 16 Maps of Hell: The Unravelling of Hollywood Superculture.
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[1] “The pejorative dimensions of the term ‘conspiracy theory’ were introduced into the Western lexicon by CIA ‘media assets,’ as evidenced in the design laid out by Document 1035-960 Concerning Criticism of the Warren Report, an Agency communiqué issued in early 1967 to Agency bureaus throughout the world at a time when attorney Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment was atop bestseller lists and New Orleans DA Garrison’s investigation of the Kennedy assassination began to gain traction.” http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article42768.htm
[2] “Drawing the Public Eye: The Unintentional Consequence of ‘Astroturfing’ by Political Organizations,” The Web of Slime, Nov 10, 2016. https://sites.google.com/view/webofslime/article See also: “Hillary PAC Spends $1 Million to ‘Correct’ Commenters on Reddit and Facebook: FEC loopholes mean Correct the Record can openly coordinate with Clinton’s campaign,” The Daily Beast, April 2016. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/04/21/hillary-pac-spends-1-million-to-correct-commenters-on-reddit-and-facebook.html And: “If You Really Want To Get Rid Of “Fake News,” Start With David Brock,” Medium, Nov 28 2016. https://medium.com/@mtracey/if-you-really-want-to-get-rid-of-fake-news-start-with-david-brock-918224966c4b.
When Delamer Duverus guided us to read your new post today, we were delighted to do so because we enjoy your writing despite the fact this pea brain has to read them twice. It is not that you are a bad writer, for you are very good, but you do pack quite a bit into a paragraph and even a sentence.
When He asked us to comment we couldn’t think where to begin except to thank you for showing us the scope of the Hydra Beast in a way we hadn’t seen before. However, Delamer Duverus has shown us a different point of view and another conspiracy which we had never heard of before. It was in March of 2003 when Bush was calling for war with Iraq because of supposed weapons of mass destruction, when Delamer Duverus woke us up and told us, “The Mormon Hierarchy gained control of the FBI in 1953. That was the year of our birth and though we had known of many conspiracies for many years, we had never heard of this. He told me to “Google” it and we did and found several items which may substantiate His statement. J. Edgar Hoover liked to hire Mormons because he thought he could trust them, probably their blood oath ritual, and we did read about a lawsuit where non-Mormon agents sued the Bureau because they felt they were being overlooked for promotions which always went to Mormon agents. Later He told us there wasn’t much difference between the FBI and the CIA. It was a point in Delamer Duverus’ Campaign for the Children exposing drug cartels to themselves, to write to the local FBI agent, wherever we were, to let them know what He was doing. Not one ever came to see us about it.
Before or right after Bush started his “shock and awe” on the innocent Iraqi people, dropping 320 tons of depleted uranium on them, He had us write to the President of the Mormon Church, sending it through an FBI agent in Salt Lake City, to tell him to stop the war. We suppose He was letting them know He knew who was in control. Wasn’t it Scowcroft who flew back from 9-11 on an E4B that day?
So, here is a President with his two advisors and 12 others forming the top council of the Mormon Hierarchy and then 70 more below them, can’t remember what they are called, who all work together in one mind about what happens in our country, and maybe the world.
Besides all the shenanigans of which you speak regarding mind control of the populace, they also gained the device Edison had which was a receiver of voices, which Edison thought were those of the dead. What Edison didn’t realize is that the dead do not have a brain with which to transmit thoughts so it had to be thoughts of the living. My mentor had read about it in a magazine, and then never heard about it again even when he inquired about it. However, he began to see where the device had been made into a weapon, projecting thoughts into the minds of its victims to make them do things they would not ordinarily do, like kill themselves or others. Later it had been used against him which led him to write a book titled, “The Next Voice You Hear”. He wrote that it was Edison’s device, but it may have been Tesla’s for he worked for Edison for a while and might have had to leave any inventions with Edison when he left. It was the FBI who confiscated everything Tesla had in his lab after his death.
My late husband and I were also aware they were using these insidious devices against us, humanity in general, when we woke up to dreams which were obviously not from our subconscious or from God. My husband was a vivid dreamer and woke up to eight dreams spanning a number years where male homosexuals came on to him and in the dream he accepted it. When he woke up and remembered the dream it made him mad because some part of him, obviously his conscience, had accepted it when, in his awake state, he would not have know that it could lead to the annihilation of our species. It was during this time that male homosexuality became more accepted.
The same happened to me waking up to dreams about cannibalism, and accepting same, as if there were some people whom it was okay to devour if you were hungry. Cannibalism is a crime against God, but they were making it okay. It was then we saw two series on Netflix about cannibalism, a fiction book, a non-fiction book, and a friend wrote about the Cannibal Club in LA. Of late there has been numerous stories of injecting young blood into your body to prevent aging. This is again cannibalism. You alluded to satanic cannibalism as well, although it wasn’t human flesh but cake.
Are they creating transgenderism through thought projection during our dream time? Drug use? We know they can create the political polls they want because for three mornings in a row, way back when Bush Sr. was the President, we dreamt that he was a very bad president and needed to go. We thought so, too, knowing his history, but why would we dream about him for 3 mornings in a row, especially when we weren’t politically minded at the time. The dreams occurred on the weekend and Monday morning, and in the Friday morning headlines of our local paper it said, “Bush down in the polls.”
Anyway, we thought we would add thought projection to your understandings of mind manipulation.
Delamer Duverus is funny and He has had us write to many an FBI agent explaining all of this and not one has ever denied it. Recently He wrote to an ex-FBI agent who now owns a security firm and asked him about the cannibalism dreams and if they promised him a place in some underground bunker when they finally collapse everything and the proverbial shit hits the fan and the hungry resort to cannibalism. He never wrote back, but bet he’s making plans, because even those who are a part of the system, don’t know the endgame
Just finished reading Guenons “The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times”. The liberal political and corporate elites have largely rejected god and religion, while the conservative holy rollers have externalised evil and become scapegoating Manicheans. Both types have led the way into the realm of ‘infra human psychic elements’ to quote Rene. Such elements populate the outer rings of darkness far from the Spiritual centre of man, to borrow another metaphor.
Without doubt such people will be looking for ways to cheat death by retaining or reanimating their psychic selves after physical death. Creating cultures such as this among the living may be their way of feeding the dead. Bram Stoker had it nailed, the Only Lovers Left Alive.
So… What’s the big picture here?
I think its pretty well established that Hollywood has run on the basis of Directors requiring a tumble on the casting couch as part of the entrance fee for starlets getting into show business. This also seems to be a power/control move on the directors’ part.
Is the whole rape-of-the-underlings phenomenon a standard feature of maintaining rulership, in politics, big business, sports, and everywhere that there is a large vertical power structure? I guess I don’t understand how blackmailable sex abuse could help anyone stay in power.
And how does doing any of these terrible things to children who are on ‘our side’ help the CIA get better foreign information?
I suggest reading Vice of Kings for some (partial) answers to those questions. Or listening to some of my recent interviews, listed here: https://auticulture.com/multimedia/interviews/
I get the idea Abramowitz may just be what she says, a bonkers artist. But I fail to apprehend what statement is being made by making art about cannibalism. That we devour celebrities? Maybe. If it’s just about showing us proles how arch and intellectual thy are by shocking basic human sensibilities, then they are merely feeding a reaction that’s going to really bite them in the end; When people go railing against Islam, I point out that the Wahhabist ‘thing’, which causes so much trouble in that part of the world was thr result of the ruling caste of the Caliphate becoming thoroughly decadent and openly flouting the tenets of the religion they claimed to uphold. It was, in large part, a religious revival fuelled by poor people. Protestantism has similar roots. As Islam adn Christianity both became rotten and hollow, people turned to consumerist materialism. Now that, in turn has gone sour. Rather quickly too. Maybe now a return to animism. Islam and Protestantism at least had the benefit of not requiring a state-sponsored clerisy to talk to the divine power for you (because you didn’t quite rate a connection to god/Allah)
Thank you for another thought provoking article. Some thoughts below.
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For those who have spotted that the (more visible) games are rigged, is there another bigger game: persausion and coercion = Hollywood, pop music, journalism, etc.? And is there a further game: hoodwinking those “not in the know” = e.g. David Brock’s astroturfing? Then perhaps a further game of creating the conditions for these games to emerge / be created = social engineering? And perhaps many games beyond that.
Maybe.
And maybe we create these games when we’re bored/tired of / frustrated by the standard games on offer? (an idea from Scientology – it’s mentioned in the article I link to below – but it was probably borrowed / stolen from elsewhere.)
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Scientology (itself a weird cult/psyop/psychic talent recruiting operation/social engineering laboratory) has a few things to say about games and I came across this interesting article on Medium: https://medium.com/@gregkarber/5-game-design-lessons-from-l-ron-hubbard-4343cbd50577. The author applies its ideas about life games to the field of computer game development (they might be applied equally well to other spheres).
This quotation, early in the article seems apt:
“In a New York Times interview with Tarn Adams, the co-creator of Dwarf Fortress, he said, “Many popular games tap into something in a person that is compulsive, like hoarding. … You sit there saying yeah-yeah-yeah and then you wake up and say, What the hell was I doing?” He also adds, “I used to value the ability to turn the user into your slave. I don’t anymore.””
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Perhaps some only respond to “games” where the goal is power over others.
Does having slaves, acolytes, devotees, initiates, subjects, constituents, audiences, followers, etc. – willing or unwilling, conscious or unconscious – make one into some kind of vampire? Perhaps there’s a distinction to be made between “having” (I.e. perhaps resulting from other goals and intentoins) and “needing to have” (I.e. doing things or being something in order to gain these followers).
Have we been trained, by our own desperations and emptinesses, to salivate Pavlovian-style for the “false idol” of power over others? What would constitute real nourishment and why don’t we pursue these things instead? We seem to have made too many false and alluring gods.
Cara. Thanks for that link.
Also, I first got interested in the Fabian thing listening to Red Ice. Fabianism is Henrik’s bete noir. (sorry I couldn’t find the diacritical for that ‘e’). Digging into that, I found Terry Boardman’s site which deep dives into British parapolitics. Jasun was just on Aeon Byte for an interview which was really thought provoking, but for me, all the Crowley talk and discussion of OTO &c. ties right back to Boardman’s esssays on the Cecils, who were connected to John Dee, who was famously Queen Elizabeth’s wizard as well as a master spy. So many gems to turn over an examine lately.
I bought your “Prisoner of Infinity” – and I just love, LOVE, the Title. You have captured the disease that haunts the minds of elite/thug alike – especially with the interference of infinity.
I have learned so much from my interactions with people at abovetopsecret.com, where this notion of being a ‘prisoner of infinity’ was definitely the unconscious known I was interacting with.
One guy even described a dream where he was a young boy (now he is an adult), and a UFO was descending upon him from above and he felt overwhelmed: it was too much for him. After falling down, he noticed that material reality became “liquid”; simultaneously, his dad went over to the fuse-box of the house and short-circuited it. Reading all this, I could not help but read the hidden reality behind the metaphor: the UFO is what is called in mysticism the “Godhead”. It is a social-exposure, or ritual exposure, of the child/kid, to a concept that is way above his ken to affectively metabolize. He is a part of a trauma cult, and his dad – the person who inducted him into it – is the reason why his experience “short-circuited”.
He, like other humans, is a “prisoner of infinity”. The Godhead, or the eternal, which is the basis of his internal subjectivity, has completely superseded and taken control of his relations to the world, such that ‘maya’, or ‘demiurge’, or ‘the matrix’ i.e. a perception of reality that disavows reality is mirrored, or modelled, on the much earlier denial of agency/effectiveness at the interpersonal level.
This metaphorical symmetry, or continuity, between self and other, and then mind and body, is mirrored yet again at self/body and Universe. Awe is the experience of self-embeddedment. If I do not experience myself as embedded in an intersubjective ‘matrix’, then how could I ever feel properly related to an even higher existential and metaphysical relation?
The prisoner of infinity is a prisoner of his own psyche – his own unresolved and unknown trauma-objects.
I mentioned to you that after reading “Supernormal” that I was deeply bothered by this implicit imagery of sexual abuse against Streibler, and in sharing this with Kripal, the latter seemed insufficiently bothered by the moral problem of the abuse: Kripal – with his crappy Freudian education – seemed to see that as a good thing, rather than as a travesty of epistemology.
Do you think Kripal is consciously misrepresenting the truth or himself, or that he is seduced by knowledge & well-meaning but deluded?
any impressions of Peter Levenda?
I think he is seduced by knowledge but well-meaning. Even people who are ‘consciously misrepresenting’ are implicitly believing themselves to have the truth, but in the case of Kripal, I really think he has a romantic belief in the value of trauma. Being exposed/educated in just – or primarily – traditional belief systems, and paired up with the quantum-obsessed new-age physics, he doesn’t understand enough – or is educated enough – to realize how atavistic his ideas are. I get a very deep sense that he is in the ‘other-camp’: that is, he doesn’t seem very interested in epistemology, or how reality works, but is more interested in justifying/finding support for his generalized interest in supernatural phenomena.
Kierkagaard once addressed this left-hand path vs. right-hand path thinking by discussing ‘carpocrates’ – the ancient gnostic – with regard to ‘thought’ and ‘action’ (in concrete). He thought anyone who engaged in immorality – or evil – in ‘concrete’ was bound to destroy themselves.
More generally, I see the mind as emergent. I see the I as existing within the context of the “I”, so, in a competitive society, the “I” is made nasty and mean – and delusional about the ‘rightness’ of its “I”ness i.e. what it believes is right. The philosopher Axel Honneth has spent some time unpacking the illogicality of this position by emphasizing that the “I” is most fully realized within the context of the “We”. Translated into my traumatological vocab: a self with negative affects is a broken self; the self which infers/relates from these affects is bound to misrepresent both itself, the other, and reality. Unless the process of its growth is made clear to itself – and the errors/mismatches understood to be a function of fundamental physical laws (symmetry), then the experience of reality I’ve known and lived is best chalked up as an illusion: we should engage in “tikkun olam”, or repairing the world, because the world, in fact – the world in between our head – needs to be repaired, because it isn’t organized/wired in an ideal, low-entropy way.
As to Levenda. I’ve read a few of his books, and I even picked up his Sinister Forces book at around the same time as I read your “Vice of Kings”, and you’ve definitely modified my relationship to him with his own adamant – and deeply implausible – denial of sexual abuse – and yet, the sinister forces he describes as existing – why in the hell wouldn’t they be into pedophilia?
So, is Levenda like Alex Jones? A man dedicated to dissembling? If you take reality to be one big illusion – i.e. the matrix/demiurge/maya – then living a life imitating the structure of reality sounds like a whole lot of sense – right? This is what I assume people like Levenda may believe.
Is this issue related to pedophilia? This seems to be the big-button issue. Even a book I was reading – and was repulsed by Mike hockney basically asserted that people who subscribe to a “dharmic” or “moral law” system are evil, because they demonize other people. Hockey of course is a Pythagorean, which helps explain some of the positions of Empedocles, etc.
So, I think people who’ve grown through ‘left hand paths’ are deeply damaged people trying to be good, but find it very difficult to let go the more salacious parts of their identity i.e. related to sexuality. My theory is that early-sexualization by adults interferes with the normal development and regulation of the forebrain (OFC) for the simple reason that development should be – and evolutionary speaking, has been – an emphasis on the control of feeling, affect, in the different situations of our living – whereas the sexualized adult demonstrates/exhibits the exact reverse understanding. By prematurely exposing the child in this way, the self of the child evolves around intense affectivity that will not be managed/overcome until the basis of this arousal is understood to be related to these intense early experiences. Paradoxically, the affectivity can be transformed from the shame elements (which interfere) into joy when the self begins to interface with the effects of those actions on his subsequent development/behavior.
I get and completely understand your confusion as to Levenda. I have a similar issue with people like Levenda: basically, in my opinion, anyone who gets published by Inner traditions, Bear and Company, Park Street Press or even Tri-day and whom I’ve interacted with appeared to have very a wrong epistemology that allowed them to cultivate/foster a primitive dualism.
I have family members who think this way – of being “above good and evil”. They have all sorts of psychological and emotional and physical problems – and why? Because they can’t think coherently. They don’t trust reality. They don’t know how to think about reality coherently.
Dualism is the problem of not realizing that generative processes (feeling) and cognitive or structural process are co-occurring, complementary functions. People think this way: they feel, but don’t ask why or how they feel. There is very little interaction within themselves – in metacognitive/mindfulness type manner – probably because they’ve been dissociated/externalized by assuming that God is “out there”, with no interactions or significance “in here” – in my mind. Dualism is spread out through a persons being – affecting the physics of bodily organization, affective representation, and semiotic representation. It is a full mind-fucking. It is apparently so powerful, that it takes a society of interacting and cooperating humans to recognize how powerfully we’ve been structured.
Science is a form of knowledge-acquisition based in the purest of human feelings: a desire for truth. What makes it beautiful is how democratic it is: you want to know? Read. Do the work. Effort. The mystic, on the other hand, is typically a megalomaniac who thinks reality has picked him and made him very, very special. He does not ‘work’ in interpersonal situations; doesn’t usually ask “why is this person affecting me like this” but rather has something more cognitively self-defensive: “this person is so undeveloped”. They are always thinking ABOUT the other, and not how the other and he are part of a larger system.
The discovery of geometry is about realizing that physical processes are always going on. Relaxing asymmetries is the name-of-the-game.
Sorry for going on and on. Thinking about Levenda, Kripal, etc, makes me realize how complex – but ultimately understandable – we are. Another book I finished awhile back – “Egregore” – an inner traditions book, once again was peddling an idea of reality which seemed to be overly sexual. Even how the author understood the so-called egregore seemed superficial, specious and dogmatic to me. I could not help but criticize again and again the non-relational understanding; a complete
attitude of ‘taking for granted’ what is known about how the mind works. People like this read theosophy, Rosicrucianism, alchemy, Jungian psychology, Campbellian mythology, and then think they know-it-all. It is precisely this simplistic deference to the ‘ancients’, and not realizing, as Steven Pinker has written (and one of the few things I agree with him about) that with more people working on knowing the world comes more knowledge about reality. If you are a reader, it is only by comparing modern knowledge with more ancient/mystical traditions that the former seems far more comprehensive in what it seeks to take account for than the latter; and that the latter, properly understood, should be embedded in the social, cultural and political conditions of the era to be properly understood. This is what modern scientific scholarship does; it focuses on ‘what causes what’. Dick worship, or power worship, goes back a long time, and epistemologically speaking, it is as wanton as can be imagined: it is pure nonsense built around the human desire for power which itself is related to the human dread of shame and vulnerability. So long as the latter is unacknowledged, everything created by that dissociation is a massive illusion. Hell is right around the corner for the person who refuses to humble themselves by acknowledging their vulnerability. Hegelian type notions of master/slave – the evil of that cheap psychology – needs to be overcome; the master must submit to natural reality; and the slave must demand from the master that he be coherent. The slave must be more impressed with reality than with the cheap deluding facsimile erected by the self-alienated maniac.
Umberto Eco’s book “Foucault’s Pendulum” really goes into the nitty-gritty of what you, I and other’s find deeply important. Eco-too seemed to get it. He got that reality already had a structure – and human beings, in not being sufficiently aware of it, have unwittingly re-programmed themselves in their interactions to come to see – or experience their identity – as the “only” one, or essential type, that comes with existing. Structure = function. Or said differently, a culture of nurturing and a culture of competing creates completely different human minds; in the latter, the I celebrates its connectedness to a “We”; in the latter, it is preoccupied by shame-affects that require robust narratives/understanding to be effectively metabolized. The effect is a “I” that does not feel in its gut any goodness about its connection to others. Neuroscience and the polyvagal theory (Porges) explains this by going into the evolutionary anatomy of the nervous system. Since our emotions are correlated to our brainstem (solitary nucleus inhibits the amygdala and vice-versa) – because that is the first part of our brain growing in early life and being regulated by caregivers – it can be a very difficult matter to de-center yourself from an uncomfortable phenomenology, and just accept the ‘bare-truth’, as if from a higher level awareness of the perfect symmetry of things – of the path of least resistance created with the Universe.
Our “liquid” society is fundamentally non-sustainable. Being an adversary – self against self – will recapitulate the logic of the flood, noah, etc, since these tales are archetypal ones and describe the nature of our psyche: a society/civilization built from babble – or dissociative representations (idealizations) pits humanity against nature, and we have to adapt to continue living on the Earth, since the Earth evidently is connected to our psychological, social and economic behavior.
“So we attempted to do what was not allowed us, what we were not prepared for. Manipulating the words of the Book, we attempted to construct a golem.” “I don’t understand….” “You can’t understand. You’re the prisoner of what you created. But your story in the outside world is still unfolding. I don’t know how, but you can still escape it. For me, it’s different. I am experiencing in my body everything we did, as a joke, in the Plan.” “Don’t talk nonsense. It’s a matter of cells….” “And what are cells? For months, like devout rabbis, we uttered different combinations of the letters of the Book. GCC, CGC, GCG, CGG. What our lips said, our cells learned. What did my cells do? They invented a different Plan, and now they are proceeding on their own, creating a history, a unique, private history. My cells have learned that you can blaspheme by anagrammatizing the Book, and all the books of the world. And they have learned to do this now with my body. They invert, transpose, alternate, transform themselves into cells unheard of, new cells without meaning, or with meaning contrary to the right meaning. There must be a right meaning and a wrong meaning; otherwise you die. My cells joke, without faith, blindly.” – Umberto Eco, Foucaults Pendulum, pg. 566, Harcourt, 1988
One more thing: This deals with ‘what’ mysticism seems to deal with. Why would ‘infinity’ be so disturbing, if not because reality appears to be ‘in the mind’? The neuroscientist Don T Tucker, whom I’m a big fan of, recommended that I read the neurologist Jason W. Brown, who I’m reading but finding difficult to finish. Brown is a profoundly deep thinker, but he is a solipsist – and this is a massive offense and delusion in my book (being so deeply educated in the developmental neurosciences). I emailed him but Brown – who a chapter on compassion – gave me a 10 word sentence reply telling me to ‘read this’. And yet what I was reading didn’t sufficiently emphasize the stochastic and fundamentally interdependent nature of intersubjective dynamics between self and other. Very little was written in this way, and hence, I found his psychology overly one-person. Why? Is it because psychology in the twentieth century, so heavily influenced by Freud, Behaviorism, and cognitive science, all act – or imagine – that the mind can be explained in a simple one person way.
How could Brown – as intelligent and insightful as he is – not notice how incoherent it is to not notice the significance of allocentric stimuli? He can’t even conceptualize the origin of affects properly; instead, his focus is very internal and private: on the ‘microgenetic’ unfolding of our mind from an older evolutionary structure.
Thinkers like Brown worry me, because there is this premature solipsism in their writing. I see this equally well in David Bohm, John Wheeler, Freeman Dyson, Frank Tipler and others who take this all-encompassing solipsistic logic to the extreme. Why else does this happen -how can someone become a prisoner of infinity – unless there is a significant ‘reaction’ between one part of the self (brainmind configurations) and another? The logical answer is: there is a structural similarity between the three domains of object that exist. This notion of there being three domains is purely my invention; no one else seems to have theorized the existence of these domains because traditional narratives have displaced an openness to what is actually happening. The sciences – especially the modern cognitive sciences – give one the freedom to cultivate an openness to learn what is there.
Thinking about the world isn’t a primitive. This is the issue with historical philosophy: taking for granted how feelings form, and instead, theorizing in an abstracted and metapsychological way the existence of ‘eternal archetypes’. The Jungian psychologist Warren Colman has challenged Jungs assumptions by noting the tight relationship between biology and ecology, and hence, archetypes are ’emergent’ and dynamically transformable, and not static ‘eternal ideas’, as Plato imagined.
When the caregiver interacts with the baby, the baby is being ‘configured’ by the regulatory function of the caregiver. How affects – feelings – are processed is thus directly aligned with the other. Feelings and the Other are thus synonymous, whereas self – in the interaction with Other – and self (as observer), in interaction with the feeling-body, are also synonymous. This point is a subtle one but very important. Clara Mucci in her book “Borderline Bodies” theorizes in just this way as well, recognizing the tight relationship between expectation in ecological/social situations, and how past others have reacted to something you initiated. Feeling is always the Other, yet we imagine that our feelings are simply “there”. We don’t even recognize the structural continuities between the various layers.
So if my feeling body feels this way, and it feels this way because others have conditioned my regulation processes to work this way (being projectors themselves), then the narratives I’m affected by are going to be those which ‘resonate’ with the affective states of my body (determined by recognition, diet, and sleep, mostly). Nihilism is thus not a ‘choice’, but a consequence of being poorly regulated by caregivers in your early life.
Relational affects are what Brown ignores. He ignores that caregivers create feelings of care and joy in us; he ignores that play – fun – emerged millions of years ago, and in cichlid fish, it is well shown to be related to the ‘fun’ of the body. In evolution, the first relational affect to emerge is fun – the mind/body interaction (as when the cichlid fish swims through a bubble it created), and then this early-life metabolic ‘surplus’ synergistically interacts with the context of mother-infant pair-bonding/feeding that evolved in mammals in relation to the increased movement created in them (which entailed the evolution of heavily myelinated neurons) so that they could get away from dangerous predators (usually dinosaurs). Pair bonding was thus a two-part solution to the problem of getting away from dinosaurs: being faster means more energy loss, which means less energy to run bodily processes; the system compensates for this by encouraging ‘huddling’ behavior, so that heat-loss can be reabsorbed by conspecifics, and hence, prevent energy loss. The huddling behavior co-evolved with the emergence of internalized gestation, which led to the premature state at birth where milk is required to foster further brain development. To summarize: dinosaurs are the threat; this leads to the evolution of thicker myelin sheets to promote faster action potentials/greater speed in mammals relative to dinosaurs; this comes at an energy cost which is reconciled with the ecological dynamic of huddling. Huddling in turn promotes the evolution of the cingulate cortex where attachment feelings are represented; this coincides with the evolution of mammillary glands and the process of feeding, so that the process of feeding is synergistically ‘folded’ into the biological regulatory dynamics of huddling and attachment.
All of this positive feeling increases attention to signalling, so that brain areas that evolve subsequent to the cingulate/insula regions (of desire to attach and feeling the other) are involved in an affective point/counterpoint that moves between ‘being connected’ and ‘being disconnected’, which is really just the normal fluxes of biology between different organisms that are in a ‘discordant’ state with one another.
Point being, we think about things, and don’t even recognize that there is a logic – a neurologic – that connects relational development, brain structure, and a particular qualitative meaning of the environment.
Awe emerges with fire, meaning the ability to ’embed’ the I in a larger context entails the mastery of fire. Awe is a feeling that mediates abstract thinking; it is this dimension of feeling which synergistically combines with care/fun when one seeks to understand the world more clearly. But how could this self-conscious ability emerge without a feeling of wonder? Fire is obviously that beginning point, and hence, once again, reality reveals its tripartite structure with awe. Fun/Care/Awe interface between Body/Other/Universe, with exactly that sequence in evolution. Indeed, the crux and core is care; and that is because that is the emotion which determines the life we all live. Fun creates the universe; whereas awe is the eternal subjectivity. Quite literally, our brain is the embodiment of these ”spirits”; we are the ‘node’ of evolution which created mind; but mind is emergent – its relative and temporal emergence provides a vantage point towards the eternal subjective. Yet, it can appear so different from the ‘ground’ of the body. A traumatized person sees a world with no order; no commitment to goodness. It see’s emptiness, and infinite nothingness in every direction. It does not reason that its feelings are what they are because of development. This suggestion is the most logical one – but it needs to be socially enunciated again and again to penetrate the minds emotional attachments. Ergo, the “prisoner of infinity” is a mind that has been raised under traumatological circumstances – into a world of meanness, and alienation – and has come to form all the grades of self-experience that makes a mind feel like the ‘eternal’ is the only real truth. They become emotionally attached to a belief system which, is not only irrational compared to the one described above, but actually reifies the self by preventing it from gaining more energy and enlivenment to help encourage a healthier and happier future.
When I think of Donald Trump, I honestly wonder: what has this guy seen in his life? That level of egotism is not by accident; it is usually kept in place by a profound Gordian knot – a profound series of obstructions that have been handled by – or regulated by – the severe narcissism that Trump lives by. Even his name: Trump. Like the Trump card. His dad’s last name – Trump, and his own mothers last name – Christ, gives Trump’s paternal side – the rich side – as meaning “trump Christ”. That’s downright weird. It is the strangeness of how the solipsist – which Trump certainly is – lives by: a universe that appears to be synchronized to its internal reality. Because this is only a partial-overlap, and not complete, this partialness can only be noticed by a balanced mind – a mind balanced by care. But for the traumatized person weighed down by guilt/shame (of past abuse or abusing others), the universe in its synchronistic mode overwhelms and creates the impression of a world ‘created for you’. If meaning is truly social, yet the egotist elite benefits from being materially selfish, then there is a total mismatch between the awe synchronicity exposes you to, and the way your body represents the other. The mistake is assuming a non-continuity between the latter and the former. Indeed, the latter – how mothering was valued (which is what this ultimately roots back to) reflects the nature of the former: how the universe is conceptualized.
Eco totally gets this when he says that “you can’t understand: you are experiencing the consequences of your meddling with the structure of reality”.
As your series of mini-essays continues a picture is gradually emerging…. If you arent already working on a book, you are now. The Eco quotes are very helpful in condensing things down to a few phrases, simultaneously, all the deep analysis you do makes those phrases far more coherent to me than they ever were while reading the book, which I have two or three times.
Your points about fire seem to coincide somewhat with the thesis Gib & I arrived at in a recent podcast (184: TV Knows No Night), coming from a different angle and adding lots more to it.
Regarding your description of neuro-logic (great title) and mammalian brain development, this surely relates to neoteny – a concept I have been aware of for some time but never quite managed to incorporate into my theses…
Yup, neotony appears to be what is going on: extending the youth period of life.
Have you heard of the Russian silver fox experiment which transformed a wild/feral silver fox into a dog in just 10 or so generations of selective breeding? Facial features changed; tail began to curl the way they do in dogs. Neotinization is the consequence of attachment.
And what is neotinization but a coupling between external sign and internal feeling? Solipsists annoy me to no end because they ignore the significance of external signs (ala Peircean semiotics; this man, CS Peirce, has a good deal of influence on my thinking) and their correlation to internal feelings. If I feel something, wont my face exhibit/display that feeling? And wouldn’t another person implicitly know the meaning of that sign by how their own – analogically the same – feelings and facial expressions correlate? This is what mirror neurons – as a dynamical phenomenon – suggest: just as mirror neurons fire when a monkey watches another monkey reaching for an apple i.e. one monkey’s brain ‘reads the intentional action’ of another monkey’s brain as if it were its own action – so to do your facial expression imply a ‘self-experience’ which underlies that action, and implicitly suggests, by its affective quality, what the intentional, or implicitly intentional, relation of the other person is to me (when I say ‘implicitly intentional’, I mean the person is fundamentally aware at some level that so-and-so ‘chafes’ them in some way; whether or not this becomes an explicit reflection is irrelevant to the way and manner these two individuals interact at a reflexive, ‘rhythmic’ level. Since the lower level constrains the higher level (in the absence of a metacognitive commitment to love and order which can constrain the lower level after it appears – as mindfulness teaches) its likely that passive-aggressive behavior works in this way, and since this usually triggers explicit reflections in more developed, Machiavellian like minds, the implicit always informs the explicit, and they are always united through facial, vocal, or bodily signs. The signs are the links. Close your eyes and plug your ears and you aren’t likely to experience a state-change from the relational/social environment (beyond your own existing attachments for interaction).
How important this is – recognizing the significance of signs – was captured by Peirce (who was and remains, in my mind, arguably the deepest thinker in human history). But Peirce himself was an unstable character steeped in mysticism and the occult, even if he was a king logician. Because of this, he could make use of deep ideas like semiotics and its tripartite structure (he got carried away with his creation of triads), but not properly see how they operated/worked in human interaction. To be fair, the Victorian world made such knowledge a practical impossibility. It took feminism to push relational thought into the mainstream, and then when it was combined with the specificity/systemization of cognitive science/neuroscience, and of course, with the historical inputs of Hegel, Marx, Peirce, Freud, and Mead, a certain relational psychology was concocted. By the 1990’s, Stephen S. Mitchell had pushed psychoanalysis into the relational realm, but this was largely spear-headed by infant and developmental psychologists like Louis Sander, Dan Stern, Beatrice Beebe, Ed Tronick, etc. In any case, when you combine infant psychology with semiotics, cognitive science/neuroscience, anthropology (especially “material engagement theory”) you can fix what the ancients screwed up.
Even more strange, the Jews really have an interesting understanding of things. I’ve stated elsewhere that Jew or Yehud, means “he who acknowledges” Hebrew means “to crossover”. These are mystic/ideological positions that have nothing to do with ethnicity.
In anycase, history/elites haven’t been too kind to Jews, have they? I’m not a Jew myself, but by-golly! Judaism just seems to attract the traumatized person…I’d imagine, at least in my case (totally chance interaction), there is a sort of power/mystery around Judaism/Kabbalah that is totally a function of Jewish showmanship; the Rabbi’s certainly do a good job representing this tradition as the ‘de-facto’ word of God.
I am not so epistemologically certain as they are, but I cannot help but see – reading biblical Hebrew as I do – an incredibly profound system of belief. Eco – this mysterious man – once again, in Foucaults pendulum, captured the ideological issue:
“And bang, the cabalistic tradition begins: a heroic attempt of the dispersed, the outsiders to show up the masters, the ones in power, by claiming to know all.” “But, doing that, they give the Christians the impression that they really do know.” – Umberto Eco, Foucaults Pendulum, pg. 526-527, Harcourt, 1988
“Gave the Christians the impression that they really do know all”. Culture is so all-encompassing that a culture of love is a culture that encourages reflection; reflection allows one to learn – since reflecting is really just you ‘mirroring’ the structure of the external world in your mind. The percept (right brain image) and the meaning it contains, is ‘read’ by the ego – the left brain. A coherent representation in language is a ‘hit’. Indeed, the Hebrew word for sin – Chet – is used both to mean an arrow which ‘misses’ its mark, and a behavior which ‘misses’ the ideal generated by symmetry dynamics in reality. It doesn’t sound very demonizing at all – just a mistake; an error of perception/representation made by a mind that is overwhelmed by emotion and entrained towards false/confused meanings.
In any case, I know quite a it about Judaism/Kabbalah, and of course, the Hebrew Bible is profound in its self-psychology, and in understanding it, as Eco also has written, one feels one is interacting with a pre-scientific culture which, like the Buddhists, referred to the ‘experiment’ of self-experience to determine what was an wasn’t real.
In any case, but to ‘try to kill off the Jews’ – as the Nazis attempted and the Allies also supported in various ways – by not bombing the tracks to Auschwitz, for instance (the US/British), to literally sending back ships full of Jews to die (British, in Turkey), is based, in all probability, in moral-differences created by where you appear in the ‘tensional integrity’ system of social-class self-organization. The “single social being” is constructed by relations; and class-relations are ‘deep-seated’ cultural-biological-psychological ‘bubbles’ which work through secrecy (social behavior), lying (psychological behavior) based upon a false ontology/epistemology which justifies/supports the former activities (i.e. regulates the negative affect created by being a mean/socially irresponsible person)… All three of these dynamics appear in the ethnographic record, and show quite clearly that mythology comes at the expense of coherency. The psychopath is someone necessarily sold on his own self-mythology – and this defense, or blockage, is precisely that, in my speculative opinion, which will haunt the self when it dies. Why? Because the reflective part of your being is literally – ala Vygotsky (or Michael Tomasello) an emergent product of socializing, the lower manifestation of which is felt as ‘love’. That is, reflecting comes from attaching. Attaching – love – precedes reflection ABOUT things, as animals show us.
The world and its leadership is, unfortunately, full of mean-spirited people with a psychotic belief in their own invulnerability.
Anyways, the Judaism thing has to do with what I call polarization. When two people are arguing, its because both parties are equally polarized, or equally delusional, as to what needs to be done – or what matters, ontologically – in getting us into a situation where we can hear one another.
Since frantic emotional arousal is a situation of increased arousal in the brainstem/mid brain in the service of some forebrain narrative, what most people don’t realize is how such a process speeds-up natural selection in your head (where teleodynamism is organized) so that you prematurely think ‘such is the case’ even though this representation is wrong – myopic – which means ‘quick/agitated’ cognition is a cognition that is insufficiently differentiated, or attuned to, the complex array of causes behind such a phenomenon.
My brother/sister sometimes characterize me (if they’re upset) as a ‘robot’. What they fail to understand is that, knowing that I am also capable of anger/goofiness/playfulness/compassion, it is precisely my continuing experience with communication and the way arousal tends to be the ‘substratum’ organizing identification processes, that it is crucially important to slow your experience down and get some sort of awareness of both what’s causing your arousal, as well as what the object-topic of conversation is, and how my affective response may be causing me to prematurely misrepresent what the other is saying (which is often the case). It is this quality of ‘slowing down’ which people who are not yet fully developed (in the sense of ‘enlightened’) don’t understand. What the kabbalah nicely captures (with the sefiroth) is how fundamental understanding (Binah) the implicit structure of things (Hokmah) is to knowledge (Daath) – and hence, effective self-regulation (affect regulation, or the control of the sephiroth). Knowledge is not arbitrary. It matters and has important consequences for biological and psychological self-organization. Ignorance for humans means ‘no knowledge for coherent managing of affects produced by social dynamics’. This tidbit of how we work plausibly explains human myths of ‘dark ages’ – where knowledge of functioning has not been properly constructed/passed on, and instead crappy/dissonant narratives organize human minds. No doubt, the language systems/forms we have had – relying on mnemonics in imagery or design – were way too indirect/vague to be effective containers of knowledge – unlike what I and you are currently doing on computers (each with our own personal libraries): we are at a more theoretical differentiation of cultural/mental development so that we are more concerned with the ‘how’ of things than with the ‘what’ of things.
Language gets way more precise when this becomes our primary focus (since we never lose the ontological focus; to prioritize the epistemological is a moral attainment).
Aye! I dissociated again from my point. The point was how dissociation/idealization in one-to-one interactions are mirrored or re-represented at large between religious groups, or competing ideologies, the two outstanding positions of which – in the history of western civilization from the Near East – is ‘gnostic’ (antinomian/individualistic) and gnostic (holistic; including self/other). The irony of how this situation evolved is the tendency for the latter group to adopt/assimilate some of the characteristics of the former group (ethnic egotism i.e. Israelites), while the former group, in experiencing the intense-group centric logic of self-organization of the latter group, and interfacing with its all-encompassing God-Human systematic logic, experienced the latter group as calling for nothing less than the complete evisceration of human identity: ergo the easiness of the myth of Man vs. God as described in the tower of Babble. Is this myth not a re-representation of the general human tendency to demonize – in the persecutor-victim dyad? The Israelites are the victims of Egyptian slavery; the victims of Babylonian slavery; the victims of Greek, and then Roman slavery.
Here the possibility emerges: there are deep truths about the nature of the human being and the way it evolved (Genesis) which nevertheless devolves into a history of petty squabbling. What is most interesting to me is the absence of understanding of dissociation. If the other cannot tolerate a theological representation of reality without becoming aggressive and negative, maybe I need to limit my representations to social and phenomenological reality, without invoking the metaphysical perspective because it tends to activate fear/anxiety and hence, hardens the self-defenses that have historically existed for selves which function this way. If anything – a self like this NEEDS the world to ‘de-numinize’ itself if they are ever to feel sufficiently IN the world, and hence, feel like he has a stake in its continued existence. Since the top is too disorienting without a body that is properly moored, it is a great irony that the Jews considered themselves on an important mission, because, paradoxically, the Israelite religion is the emergent property of the whole master/slave dialectic in western history. That is, the other is read in the self just as much as the self is written in the other. I cannot become what I am without taking into account the effect I have on you – and the way you are in turn motivated to act towards me.
I see the alienation of history to be a function of ‘not finding a safe space’. Nobody feels safe, and for good reason. Safety entails safe cues. Can you find a space – a public space – where people are all smiling and friendly? Or is each self experiencing some shade of distrust/fear in the bodies of others? How can you know that you feel that way other than by paying attention to what your body says; are you closed down? The body is ‘down there’ and my mind ‘in my head’. This means words/images/stories are in my head, and my body feels what it does and that feeling has an undefined/explained relationship to the words/images/stories in my head. Coherency – or cognitive safety – means knowing the meaning of the cause of those feelings. But knowing is not ‘getting rid of’. Other people need to cooperate and work with me if I – as only one part of the dyad – am going to feel bigger. A constructive interference wave comes when the other recognizes (mentally) and communicates as much as that recognition as possible in their non-verbal language (face/voice/body) and language. The self grows just like a water wave or a light wave grows. In the head, these dynamics are ‘contained’ by the structure-function of the brain. But the communication process is just like the interactions between water waves and light waves. And just as two different phase-interactions between waves create a different wave, so to with human beings. Valuing competition over cooperation is akin to valuing destructive interference over constructive interference. The irony is, your very valuing derives from your being constructed by those very dynamics.
Only beginning to work my way through this article, and I already have to thank you, Jasun, for clearly articulating a point that I try to make frequently; (when I engage in debates about the presence and relevance of conspiracy in history.)
A question of context and perspective. That’s truly the essence of it. The way that you outlined how an artificial distinction between “conspiracy theory” and other historical research was fostered.
The point that I try and make, and even (demonstrated it once to a friend), is that you can go to a public library, and pull down any half-dozen respected historical texts. Go through them, and find evidence of conspiracy. What I mean is that you will find admissions that a crucial historical event was determined not by some public meeting, or even by chief executives; (at least not solely those.) You may read a description of how in order to accomplish some goal, a group of “behind the scenes” people came together and leveraged it into existence.
This is, by definition, a conspiratorial act. Because said goal was achieved without public knowledge or support; and did not proceed through sanctioned channels.
And, yet, because those involved were not depicted as meeting in darkened, candle-lit room, wearing robes, etc., this is just “history”. It’s not a conspiracy…
While I am running the risk of simplifying things too much, it seems to me that an openness to the idea of a Deep State, or some phenomena of this kind, is stronger among Europeans than citizens of the U.S. And, I believe that this may be the case because even a cursory knowledge of history in their part of the world, shows conspiracy as an active historical dynamic.
A UK author, (whose name I do not recall, but whose books I skimmed), wrote this text on his time in Italy. And, he poked fun at what he perceived was the Italian obsession with conspiracy theories. According to him, he was always being asked if Princess Diana had been murdered, etc. He spent at least half a chapter mocking this mind-set.
But… uh, remember Propaganda Due? This was a media covered event; I mean its exposure. Even Wikipedia, with its constant attempts to minimize these types of things, admitted the P2 was composed of some of the most influential men in Italy. That they had large amounts of money and human resources at their disposal. That they had very deliberate plans to concerning the course of Italian and European politics.
This is real; it’s fact. It’s documented. But, still we have these pithy, myopic, authors snickering away.
Consider, as well, the facts of politics in Renaissance Italy; the time of the Merchant Princes. Then, almost every significant political development was being, to some degree, managed from behind the scenes. Again, this is something that you can find out if you read even a Harvard printed text on the era.
And, yet here, in the U.S. we are so sure that either conspiratorial plans and actions are entirely a fiction; or at the very least “those kinds of things can’t happen here.”
Covert operations are conceived and executed in the manner of conspiracy; if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be covert. And, yet we go on trying to deny this.
In alignment with what you have to say here, about schismogenesis and its impact on the Alt/Far Right, I have some interesting things to say about the Order of Nine Angles.
If you are not familiar with this (from your occult days), I will offer just a brief introduction, before delving into the internet enabling angle.
The O9A appeared (at least in print and reference) back in the 1980s. At the time, it cast itself as a secretive, extremist Satanic order. The Satanism it espoused was of a kind with the darkest elements of the Volkisch lodges of pre-WWII Germany. It’s cosmology and aesthetics, however, were most definitely post-war.
There is no need to go into the details of that. For the moment I focus on the mystery and confusion that surrounds it. At the time, it was linked with Christopher Myatt, who was part of the Racist Right underground in the UK. And, this is where the confusion comes in.
At the time that Myatt was involved in all of this, the publications released under the O9A name claimed that the order was composed of cells all over Europe and the UK. And, that it represented a merging of two previously existing, hidden, dark pagan/Satanic orders.
A great deal of the original publications of the Order were penned by someone going under the name of Anton Long. Various sources claimed that this was actually Myatt himself. The constructed lineage here was that Myatt was involved, for some period of time, with LeVey’s COS. But, found them too timid, and went off to found the O9A. (From this point of view, the name ‘Anton Long’ was perceived to be a jibe at LeVey and the COS.)
But, even as these stories were circulating, others claimed that there was no Order. That the whole thing had been engineered by Myatt as a trap for intel work. I.e. lure people who want to be Satanists into this faux Order, entice them to commit criminal acts, and document it. Use it as blackmail, etc.
At any rate, Myatt seemingly moved on (though there is evidence that he may be one of those “lifetime actors” that you reference herein), and became involved in other projects.
It wasn’t until the appearance of the internet that the O9A again came back into the light.
At this point, we had another spate of books being released, and multiple sites appearing online, claiming to represent one or another cell of the Order.
Eventually, this all came to a weird sort of pseudo-conclusion, when some person of prominence on one of the sites claimed the Myatt was deceased, and that the leadership of the Order was now rightfully theirs. Myatt them reappeared to denounce the claim, but took no further action.
It was claimed thereafter that the “revived” O9A had been a ruse by two high-school age girls, obsessed with Satanism. That they had set up numerous sites and blogs, using different names and online IDs.
And, the story just keeps going from there. Even now the debate about it continues.
My point in all of this, and where it aligns with your discussion, is its similarity to a much earlier phenomenon. Namely, the Rosicrucians.
As I am sure you are aware, the R.C. appeared in literature, before there ever was a group that publicly declared itself. At some point, manifestos began to appear in Europe and the UK, talking about the R.C. as an already existent, secret order.
Within a short time after that, groups began to appear that laid claim to being the authors of these manifestos. But, no one has ever been able to determine if any of their claims were true.
A very early form of meme-seeding and viral engineering, then.
And, going forward from that point, references to R.C. became a part of established occult lodges, with groups like the G.D. and OTO claiming some kind of connection to them; (as inheritors of their supposed wisdom, etc.)
As for Myatt, he has undergone numerous transformations. In the immediate wake of the 9/11 events, he cast himself as a radical Muslim, and terrorism advocate. At the present time he claims to have renounced all political extremism, racism, etc. And, has an online presence advocating a conveniently harmless type of mysticism. But, other sources go on linking him to racist attacks, harassment, etc.