ecosophia | Magic Monday

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Magic Monday

It's getting on for midnight as I write this, so we can proceed with a new Magic Monday. Let's start things out with a quote again:

"Discipline has long been interpreted as self-control, or as some would say, "the overcoming of the lower nature.' The difficultiy is that such words as 'conquest' and 'overcoming' suggest an entirely inconsistent aggressiveness of technique. The true metaphysician is not a wearied man wrestling with his lower nature; rather he is poised and relaxed, achieving through realization instead of conflict. Avoid the process of suffering your way into a spiritual state."

That's from Manly P. Hall's Self-Unfoldment by Disciplines of Realization, arguably Hall's best book and one of the classics of the Golden Age of American occultism. (The image to the left, on the other hand, is one of Augustus Knapp's splendid illustrations for Hall's The Secret Teachings of All Ages.)

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~~With that said, have at it!~~

***This Magic Monday is now closed -- see you next week!***

***AHEM. THIS POST IS CLOSED. Please quit with the political bickering!***

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In the immortal words of Bugs Bunny, "what a maroon." Since the coronavirus is no more dangerous to most people than a bad cold, Miller has embraced failure right out there in public. Now he gets to live with it, and have it infect his magic more generally. What blowback he gets beyond that depends on exactly what he's been doing, but I wouldn't want to be him.

I wonder if it's occurred to any of these people that while they're posturing online, there are Christians, Hindus, and Sikhs -- very, very large numbers of them -- doing rituals and prayers for Trump's well-being, and a lot of occultists on the rightward end of things who are hard at work with their own toolkits with the same end in view. (And in my experience, as a general rule, the mages on the right are better educated and more competent than those on the left.)

Is that coincidence or enemy action? 😄

Seriously, do you think there’s a reason for this difference? My experience with leftists is they are all certain they’re very intelligent (oddly enough, a lot of them object strongly to IQ tests) and that’s why they’re leftists, because they are so intelligent. QED. Whereas the rightists are usually happy to tell you the reason they took up a right-wing position.

Lady Cutekitten

It's central to the mythology of the left that they're smarter than anyone else, and so people internalize that false belief when they embrace that political position. It's a serious mistake, since it keeps them from learning from their mistakes or, really, from anything else. That's why their magic so often sucks; since they believe that they're smarter than, say, the great authors on magic of past generations, they never get around to learning anything more than the bunny-slope stuff they already know. Meanwhile people on the right, who don't suffer from that delusion, are more likely to learn what they don't already know.

As I've pointed out before, what you're talking about isn't "The Left" in any meaningful sense, and its members don't refer to themselves as leftists. They still retain a few of the thought habits and bits of vocabulary from the true Left which they took over (and which they hate with an all-consuming passion) but in practice they are nothing more than the PR organisation for the Professional/Managerial Class. The PMC's ideology of extreme social and economic liberalism, especially for the wealthy, requires an intellectual courtier class, whose main function is actually entertainment, and diverting the masses with faith-based economics and pseudo-intellectual social theory. In addition, they function as a type of police force allowing the PMC to destroy its enemies - like the real Left. I've heard it plausibly argued that the Democrats' principal objective this year was not to defeat Trump but to defeat Sanders, to ensure that there was no risk of anything changing. (They certainly did that effectively); And it's part of the PMC's self-image that they are cleverer than the rest of us - otherwise they wouldn't be where they are, with their money and their nice houses.
In the old days, of course, it was very different. The Left was highly supportive of education, not just for intellectual elites, but for all, correctly appreciating that an educated electorate was harder to fool, and was a better foundation for democracy. (The British Conservative Party was popularly known, even by its members, as the Stupid Party, but, like all parties of the Right, it was only interested in power, and didn't worry about whether the policies it promoted actually made sense.) Thus, the assault on education was the first, and longest-lasting, of the policies of the Right adopted since the 1980s. It's been a huge success, hasn't it? With the effective end of the formal Left-Right split in the 90s, and the rise of the Monoparty of the PMC, education (or at least credentialism) has stopped being a public good, and become just a financial investment you have to make if you ever want to be received into the PMC one day. And even if you are one of those NN Taleb described as Intellectuals Yet Idiots, your piece of paper entitles you to feel superior to those who, for various reasons, couldn't make it that far.

Nobody has trademarked the term "Left," you know. I quite understand that people on the factions of the Left that don't have access to power these days are angry at the faction that does, but from a conservative point of view -- and in particular, from my idiosyncratic moderate Burkean conservative point of view -- the similarities greatly outweigh the differences. All factions of the Left share in the delusion that some group of intellectuals or other is smart enough to reorganize human society from top to bottom and have the results come out as something other than a dumpster fire; all factions of the Left, whatever their rhetoric about workers or the poor or what have you, are vehicles by which some group of intellectuals or other seeks power -- the difference at present is simply that the people who control the Democratic Party have gained power, and the people for whom you speak haven't done so, and almost certainly never will.

I don't want to turn this into a political discussion and we obviously aren't going to agree on political principles anyway, which is fine. My point was that it's unhelpful to see the current conflict as between "the Right" and "the Left", but much more helpful to see it as a relatively trivial squabble between different wings of the Liberal Monoparty which has consolidated its grip on the political systems of most western countries. And such squabbles are, by definition, the most bitter and most violent, paradoxically because the stakes are so small (think Freud, but also think magical movements, or even academic politics, which is one explanation for the bitterness of the SJW movement.) The two tendencies within the Monoparty agree on soaking the poor and giving money to the rich, but disagree violently on access to toilets and use of pronouns. One tendency is trying publicly and violently to wrest control at the moment, as often happens in one-party states.
The Liberal Monoparty did not happen by accident, although its creation is easier to understand outside the US, because political evolutions there are very untypical. They first took over parties of the Right from the 1970s, and I can't imagine a Burkean conservative like you would have been very happy at the whirlwind economic and socially revolutionary consequences for those parties. Then they came for the Left, and, because there was an ideological edge to the confrontation they couldn't just promise power, as they did to the Right; they had to trash the traditional ideology of the Left as well. Thus, the contempt of politicians like Clinton and Blair for the principles of the parties that had brought them to power. (As I pointed out, such politicians never claimed to be from the Left, and never stopped sneering at its principles) Thus also, the substitution of Liberal, elite middle-class ideology, whose greatest exponents are the management consultant, the financial analyst and the contract lawyer, for any set of principles based on what people actually want and need. I don't know whether you have this phenomenon in the US, but in Europe, you are starting to see a rapprochement between the traditional (pre-1970s, non-liberal) Right, and the traditional (pre-90s non-liberal) Left, on issues like sovereignty and the defence of communities.
We can debate the relative merits of political systems. I was born just after WW2, and grew up in a society with free health care and education, jobs for all, and, most of all, opportunities for people from very ordinary backgrounds to succeed in life. That's why I didn't have to leave school at fifteen to do unskilled work in the local light engineering factories, but could spend another decade in education, and why I'm typing this at the moment. My children's generation are worse off in every way. For me, this is an adequate argument for supporting policies of the Left, but of course such views remain subjective at the end. What isn't subjective, though, is the replacement of the traditional Left/Right scheme of politics by a dominant Monoparty with a radical Liberal ideology on the one hand, and a mass of people who are disenfranchised on the other.

Whereas I disagree, and see the current struggle as involving meaningful differences between a Left that has always been a vehicle for the professional-managerial classes and a Right that has been largely taken over by a populist insurgency against those classes. That said, you're quite correct that this is not the place for a political debate, and doubtless also correct that neither of us is likely to agree with the other's viewpoint.

Well said JMG, my thoughts exactly. There is a hubris on the left no matter how moderate one fancies oneself to be. It can be well-intentioned but still it boils down to the all too human impulse to believe oneself capable of knowing the way things "should be" and thus justifying the use of both soft force (controlling education, cancel culture) and hard force (taxation, threat of imprisonment, excessive law-making) to achieve those things. The successive failures of this delusion to provide the promised utopian results can gradually turn even the sweetest moderates into extremists who become prepared to justify ever increasing amounts of force to achieve their dubious ends.

My favourite example of this is how a university professor I know is adamant that the root of right wing populism is a rejection of "post-modernism" and the desire to be able to hold ideas uncritically. It's truly bizarre....

He's right that one of the roots of populism is a rejection of postmodernism, but what they reject is the enthusiasm with which postmodernists insist that 2 + 2 = 5 whenever that's convenient for themselves or their corporate masters.

Not oddly enough: if anyone can measure it, they might discover they aren't smart, but those people are!

Amusingly enough, this has been doing the rounds of late...

Republicans have greater probability knowledge? I'd say the last year has shown this in a surprisingly dramatic fashion...

I was going to quibble about whether his actions are actually embracing failure but then remembered the curse's goal was better governance.

Edited 2020-10-05 06:17 (UTC)

Seeking better governance by feeding the flames of partisan hatred is right up there with barbecuing pork ribs to encourage vegetarianism or having an orgy to further the cause of celibacy.

His lack of self-awareness would in the past have been impressive.

Edited 2020-10-05 06:30 (UTC)

It IS amazing if you ever sit down and read Miller’s work, these actions fly in the face of everything he’s taught.

Pick a goal that could work even without magic, then break it down into subgoals.

Do an enchantment of them whole thing and work magic at every step.

What’s going on now is the sort of goal he’d have said was a waste of time and dangerous just five years ago.

Then again recently posted about being able to reach across the isle, be kinder to the other side, and end purity spirals one of his Pro-Trump students said Miller was correct that the lefts purity spirals have driven many to the right.

Miller told the student that he was pathetic for switching sides just because the right treated him better than the left and had a ready made ideology (as if Miller’s side doesn’t have one.)

Since the coronavirus is no more dangerous to most people than a bad cold

The thing is, there's no way to tell who's going to suffer a particularly bad case of it vs. who isn't. (Herman Cain, for example.) Polio was the same way before the vaccine was developed -- most people survived, but some were left with devastating permanent effects even if they did survive. Compassion for anyone who is suffering from any illness is always the best way to respond.

Of course. My point is that gloating over Trump's supposedly imminent demise was not a bright move on Miller's part.

Also, there are masses of ordinary people holding prayer vigils outside of Walter Reed.

How is what Jason Miller is
doing different from what happened on 4chan with Hilary's pneumonia?

That was also a bad idea.

It should also be pointed out that the first time many on 4chan didn’t believe it would work. Miller is VERY aware of what he is doing and has young children who could be harmed by the splashback. Not anyone targeting then mind you but his own spell work harming them via raspberry jam effect.

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