Hell Freezes Over, Revisited

[ecosophia]

Longtime readers of mine will doubtless recall my several run-ins in the past with radical leftist Neopagan Rhyd Wildermuth. Back in 2018 I was startled to see him post a solid essay opposing the popular wokester notion that all white men are by definition evil and should be exterminated. That was startling, of course, because this sort of race hatred -- you know, the sort of thing that people on the left used to object to -- has become standard in the political circles in which Wildermuth runs. This outburst of common sense was not exactly well received, of course, but to give him credit, he refused to back down. 

Well, he's done it again. His latest essay is a thoughtful piece which starts by challenging the currently fashionable woke habit of, and I quote, "validating every neurotic belief human beings come up with," and then goes on to talk about the way that defining oneself in terms of an endless imaginary struggle against Evil Oppressors functions as a means of hiding from the reality of a vast, magical, and indifferent universe that is serenely indifferent to the common human sense of self-importance.  I'm sorry to say he couldn't resist parading his own status as a Genuinely Oppressed Person -- that's still practically de rigueur in the circles he runs in, and I don't think he's yet realized that it makes him sound like just another category grifter* -- but it's definitely worth a read, and worth careful reflection as well. 

*Category grifters? Those are the people who insist that because they belong to some category of people who have suffered awful things, they ought to be given goodies they haven't earned. It's a very common scam these days, drawing heavily on the paired fallacies that suffering awful things makes you morally superior to other people, on the one hand, and that the awful things their category suffered are somehow more important than the awful things that everyone else in human history has suffered, on the other. 

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Excellent essay, and really gets to the heart of the matter. There is so much to chew on here. My favorite passage is probably this one:

The world itself is much more magical than any of our fantasies about it tend to be, but that’s because those fantasies aren’t about the world at all. They are about us.

The only part where I would have been more nuanced is at the very start. I don't totally dismiss the otherkin phenomenon: I can see someone retaining a sense of themselves as whatever species they were in a past life. But I don't see it as helpful to make this life about that past life: you're a human now, and I think you should deal with that instead of wrapping yourself in a past life identity.

The same is true of identity as a historical figure: presumably someone alive today was Abraham Lincoln in a past life, but that doesn't mean they're really Lincoln now.

[ecosophia]

Agreed -- I think there's a core of reincarnational reality in the otherkin phenomenon, though at this point a lot of it is a matter of spectacularly failed reality testing. But you're right, of course -- I remember my last life tolerably well, but that doesn't mean I'm "really" a Los Angeles housewife who grew up in Iowa between the wars...

[tamanous2020]

I had an ex-girlfriend once who tried to "educate" me on that last part of your post. She wanted me to look at members of a particular ethnicity and ascribe superior moral status and goodies to them just because some ancestors went through awful things. You can imagine the kind of fights that would occur when a stance I once thought was common sense, that of judging a person by their personal intentions, words and actions, was presented. And that coming from a woman who otherwise was a very decent human being. It truly felt like someone caught up in a glamor spell of a truly toxic ideology.

It startles me how much the tables have been inverted since the mid 90s and early 2000s. If you went back in time to that era, and told them that segregation and racial hatred, just reversed, was in vogue by the most "liberal" people, they'd think you were a madman. Personally, I ascribe a lot of the change to what happens when a civilization reaches its decline (especially with Peak Oil) and when elites, to keep their deck chairs at the bow of the Titanic, find people at the bottom who are "evil" and need to be kicked off. But I'm sure theres a big spiritual component to this major step down in the overall tenor of American society. After all,"Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad".

At least the author's entry show that there are thinkers closer to the center of the culture, as opposed to us fringers, who are starting to have issues with the modern discourse. Too early to tell if it will lead to anything, but I'll take positive signs when they pop up.

Tamanous

[(Anonymous)]

What's really bad is that the liberals would have thought you were crazy… and the conservatives would have said, "Of course! Anyone who's paying attention knows that's where they're heading."

The question to my mind, then, is to what extent the Right summoned wokeness (back) into existence, just as the woke have resurrected white supremacy. One thing that has stood out to me again and again is that the woke are what you'd get if someone listened to a whole bunch of Rush Limbaugh's rants against the Left from the 90's and said, "You know all that crazy stuff he says we're up to? Let's do that!"

[violetcabra]

I confess that reading Mr. Wildermuth's essay caused me to think rather forcefully of Yeats' description of the 28th Phase around the first Millennium:

"Intellectual creation has ceased, but men have come to terms with the supernatural and are agreed that, if you make the usual offerings, it will remember to live and let live; even Saint or Angel does not seem very different from themselves; a man thinks his guardian angel jealous of his mistress; a King dragging a Saint's body to a new church, meets some difficulty on the road, assumes a miracle, and denounces the Saint as a churl. Three Roman courtesans who have one after the other got their favorite lover chosen Pope have, it pleases one's mockery to think, confessed their sins to ears that have heard their cries of love, or received the Body of God from hands that have played with their own bodies. Interest has narrowed to what is near and personal and, seeing that all abstract secular thought has faded, those interests have taken the most physical forms. In monasteries and in hermit cells men freed from the intellect at last can seek their God upon all fours like beasts or children. Ecclesiastical Law, so far as the law is concerned not with government, Church, or State, but with the individual soul, is complete; all that is necessary to salvation is known, yet there is apathy everywhere. Man awaits death and judgement with nothing to occupy the worldly faculties and helpless before the world's disorder, drags out of the subconscious the conviction that the world is about to end."

[ecosophia]

You're not the only one who's noticed that. I just hope the 1st Phase will start to dawn in my lifetime.

Gosh category grifter

[(Anonymous)]

Well, I grew as poor as he did, tried killing myself over twenty times..... And a whole host of other stuff.... But does that make me better, finer, more woke blah blah blah..... Well I have met so many people who could give me a run for the money in the oppression Olympics.... So that and five dollars will get me a cup of coffee.

What I have been told by people who are fans of him and his site that my whiteness negates all of that. So, it's a never-ending circle that gets no one any relief.

Meanwhile, I enjoy being a squirrel.
Neptune's Dolphins.

Re: Gosh category grifter

[ecosophia]

By all means enjoy being a squirrel. It beats being miserable and woke!

Just sayin´

[(Anonymous)]

With the risk of sounding "woke"... ;-)

I think one of the things driving the SJW craze is that White privileged middle class males (and these days, females too) can´t be "category grifters" since neither them nor their ancestors were oppressed to begin with, so they have to invent all these new identities and subcultures as a way of LARP-ing a civil rights movement. Blacks and Hispanics were oppressed for real, many still are, but now anyone in Bel Air or Beverly Hills can claim to be oppressed since "my pagan ancestors were burned by the Christians", "people look at me funny cuz I dye my hair purple" etc.

OK, I promise to read the essays now!

Tidlösa, Sweden

Re: Just sayin´

[ecosophia]

Of course! The Oppression Olympics is always accepting new competitors, no matter how, er, colorful the notions that lead them to claim to be oppressed...

[(Anonymous)]

What do you think caused this change in view? Do you think there is hope that many are beginning to question wokism, and that this is the start of a turn around to a more balanced way of thinking among the left-leaning population?

Joy Marie

[(Anonymous)]

It may be what happened with me: I was a twenty-something far-left proto-SJW for a few years. Then one day while reading the latest article about how awful white men and everything we liked was, something snapped.

[mo_drui_mac_de]

Never did I imagine, certainly not in the past half dozen years or so since he took a long dive off the deep end, that I would want to give a standing ovation at the end of a Rhyd Wildermuth essay. And yet, here we are.

[ecosophia]

Back in the day when I was calling him out for trying to launch an anti-fascist witch hunt in Neopaganism, if someone had told me that he'd be writing this only five years later, I'd have dismissed the claim as utter nonsense. I'm glad to see that I was wrong.

Moving goalposts

[cs2]

Thank you for these links. Might poke around and see if I like anything else of his.

The internet has its own egregore, and if you don't spend your whole life on it, it takes too much time to keep up to speed with everything happening there. Every time I do a shallow dive, there's a whole new set of categories and terms for things. I could never hope to not somehow put my foot in my mouth.

So I'll attend Pride and have a fun time, but if I have no idea what the current Tumblr genders are, that's just how it's going to be. I'm pretty sure most of the people at Pride with me are in relative agreement about letting the Tumblr bunnies go their own way.

[cutekitten]

He’s certainly come up with one of the all-time great opening sentences:

“...I had a date with a bat.”

Holy intersectional interspecies bodies, Batman!

[ecosophian]

At first I thought he meant a baseball bat: "I had a date with a bat, or rather my face did".
Then things got weird after that.
Still that's a good essay, things are changing.
You could say the worm has turned.
But I guess that would be insulting to worm people.

[causticus]

I usually can't stand the whinings and ravings of most leftists, but you're certainly right, this was a very thoughtful and intelligent read. Though he still identifies as Marxist (I wonder how much though....really), he almost sounds like a recovering leftist. I think at least he'd arrived at a vastly more depoliticized worldview; which I think would eventually become self-evident to any polytheist who understands the cosmos is not particularly human-centered.

Even if he still remains a committed Marxist I can at least respect him for actually understanding his own ideology, unlike the hordes of unreflective wokesters, who actually have very little understanding or awareness of what it is they actually believe.

[ecosophia]

He really does sound like he's recovering. I wonder how soon he'll realize that he's become a moderate.

[drhooves]

Hmmm. I see some interesting twists here - the topic of "fantasy" run amok, where a bit too much in freedom of inner thoughts (IMHO) conflicts with reality - or, other's thoughts. And the parallel twist of the source of some of these conflicts (again, IMHO), is a detailed and sinister and planned process by the elites to continue keeping the masses at each other's throats.

A conundrum of being human.

[hearthspirit]

My brother went through a Tony Robbins phase, and bought us all The Giant Within one Christmas (this was better than his Pick Up Artist phase, when he bought us all The Game). It was a very long book, but I dutifully read it, because he was very pained that none of us "got" him, and I wanted to try... and I ended up liking ole Tony a lot more than I thought I would. If nothing else, he was a great collector of humans and their stories.

The only story I still remember, though, was the one where he interviewed two brothers: one was a very wealthy human rights lawyer who had, along with his equally powerhouse wife, become one of the best known philanthropists in the New York society scene as well as a beloved father and mentor to disadvantaged children; the other was a lifelong jailbird, crack addict and petty criminal with a trail of abandoned children of different women behind him. The brothers had grown up with a father like the second brother, in one of the deadliest neighbourhoods in LA, while their mother worked three jobs to keep them off the street. When Tony asked each of the brothers why they had become the men they were, they gave identical answers:

"How could I have been otherwise, with a father like that?"

I am not sure that it is funny ha-ha that it is actually the first brother that would now be considered to be evil for having used his suffering the way it was meant for.

[ecosophia]

Thank you -- that's a great story.

[ill_made_knight]

i have a bit of history with rhyd. he's is a player...as a sjw he quit his social worker job and ran off to the 'safety' of france...he lost favor with the woke crowd and now has to try a new angle to up his waning patreon income...he's now using arguments presented against his earlier tirades...as his own.
I remember the falling out he had with the polythieist crowd after that 'many gods' thing and the anarchist/ leftist/ woke crowd he ran with... contacted the FBI for 'protection', heh.
I also remember his essay calling out all of modern pagandom as being infiltrated by alt right.supremacists except for a couple chosen orders, mainly craft streams most of his supporters belonged too as pretty much immune to such things and a few months later one of those orders was scandalized by being infiltrated by a two bit journalist who scammed supposed hot shot witches...lol just to note, I am of that order. He spun egoist witches into poor oppressed witches under the crushing foot of capitalist ambition, when it was the witches who were the ambitious ones who fell for "this book will make you famous" con.

[ecosophia]

Thanks for this! I wish I could say I was surprised.

Demagogues and demigods, and monsters, oh my!

[(Anonymous)]

Archdruid Greer,
I found it noteworthy that between the lines of 'Here Be Monsters' there are gods and some familiar myths...

"That world cares nothing for what we think of it, nor for our human fantasies. The trees and birds exist for-themselves and of-themselves, communicating in languages completely foreign to our constellations of meaning. There are actual bats, it turns out, and actual clouds, and they aren’t human and don’t care what we call them.

Most terrifying of all, if they have an enemy it is us, the ridiculous destructive things we do to forests, to the atmosphere, to the oceans, to the soil, to all those places outside our social fantasies of progress, growth without limits, and life without suffering or pain."

But what stands out most to my thinking is how, in his mundane humility, the author Wildermuth has found something quite real, and transformational.
I believe you have every right to be amused...

Black Tuna and Hand

Bat Beastiality ?

[(Anonymous)]

My question after reading this is: if you have sex with an otherkin bat, does that make you a practitoner of beastiality?

Now if it were a real bat -besides the danger of possibly stirring up another covid-19 virus or something like that- it would be frowned upon as being disgusting and abusive to animals. But if you have sex with a bat in a human body it's okay I guess. I know Rhyd turned the bat down, but...


Know Brainer

Re: Bat Beastiality ?

[brenainn]

I remember watching an episode of "Louder with Crowder" a few years ago. One of the things they discussed was a middle aged man who left his wife and kids because he identified as a little girl (I think 6 or 7 years old). This individual now dates middle aged men. And works a job. Are the men dating this poor fellow pedophiles? Is the employer violating child labor laws? To ask the questions answer them, and exposes the insanity of the present woke community.

Conceptkin

[(Anonymous)]

Also, I didn't know anything about conceptkin which I just learned about when looking up the otherkin for a hot minute. That group of "people" (don't know what the right word to use for them is, concipere?) who identify as abstract concepts.

Identifying as an abstract concept must be the literal dead end of western civilization.

Thanks,

Know Brainer

Re: Conceptkin

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, wow. In hindsight I’m not surprised, though.

I feel like a great troll would be to identify as Sunyata in the sense of the concept of the inapplicability of concepts to reality.

[(Anonymous)]

Goodness, gracious, what have some of these people been smoking?

Though I do understand both the feeling of being "other" and the temptation to assume a popular fantasy ID that makes you look important, rather than a medical diagnosis that tags you as imperfect. I watched one of the members of my former circle grow up from "Indigo Child" to self-acceptance and regular attendance at our local s/f conventions, where she blossomed.

To be fair, New Mexico Witch Amber K's beliefs include the notion of one's nonrational ("Younger") Self as a wild animal. Hers is a dolphin, which suits her perfectly; her partner's is a fox, ditto.
That doesn't mean they think they "are" that animal in real life.

The Grey Badger, who attended her workshop on the subject, and.....here I am. Actual self-descriptor IRL: "old woman." But - nobody has ever told me the nickname doesn't fit. Quite the contrary.

Oops! Lunch time - even badgers must eat. With a knife and a fork, off a plate.

[(Anonymous)]

JMG, something caught in my throat reading this essay. I will admit, I have seen his name mentioned in one or perhaps more of your posts, however I never felt inclined to travel to meet. Just arriving at the site seemed to put my system on alert. Very hard to articulate because I agree with you and commenters - many thoughts are most profound. That said, I simply experienced such sadness during reading. Odd, but true.

I also just chuckled thinking I may need to meditate/journal on this......

dMay

[(Anonymous)]

"He explained to me that it wasn’t like being a furry, the subculture of people who dress up like animals to have sex. He didn’t need to “dress up” like a bat, because he actually was one."

What....How....Okay, can anyone explain how on Earth people could become that detached from reality?

[ecosophia]

If you already believe that feeling like a woman makes you a woman, even though you have a penis, testicles, and Y chromosomes, then it makes perfect sense that feeling like a bat makes you a bat, even though mere biological reality would seem to contradict that claim. The logic is the same in each case.

(Please note that I'm quite aware that gender dysphoria exists, that it can be a serious problem for those who have it, and that it can be very helpful for those who have it to adopt the labels appropriate to the other gender. That doesn't mean that they are the other gender -- just that they're people with gender dysphoria.)

I wonder...

[walt_f]

It occurs to me that when I address a tree, I don't say, "Greetings, I'm a tree like you, just feeling a bit restless and uprooted today." When I address a river, I don't introduce myself as a brook. A couple of weeks ago I sat for a few hours with a bereaved swan who came to my doorstep, which is crazy enough by my standards (TSRH, this stuff really happens). I spoke quite a bit but I didn't say, "I know how you feel because I'm a swan too."

Is it possible that some people who have no training or experience in any tradition of how to relate to the natural world just... get it completely wrong, and that's how they "become" bats or clouds? Like, they're so shocked when they eventually discover there's anything at all out there to identify with that they react by identifying as?

Re: I wonder...

[cutekitten]

This makes sense to me.

—Lady Cutekitten

Karpman drama triangle

[(Anonymous)]

When describing his mindset, he says "We are always the heroes, of course, which also means always the victims."

This is a marked difference from the Karpman drama triangle, in which the hero and the victim form a triangle with the persecutor. It is not set in stone, but it is a common archetype in human psychology, including progressive politics, such as when a privileged celebrity gets offended at a careless statement by a deplorable even though it didn't effect them, on behalf of somebody else who probably didn't care as much. The status of persecutor is projected onto one person, victim on another, so the projector can be a hero. (clever readers will notice that I accidentally did the same thing, with the triangle merely rotated. It is a very sticky archetype)

The idea that the left lionize victimhood is nothing new, but this conflation of hero and victim, as well as the implication that it is obvious, illustrates that he, and people who have a similar worldview, live in a very different paradigm. Perhaps this is what allows Marxists to conflate the vanguard and the proletariat, when history shows they are very different, usually to the proletariat's woe in Marxist societies.

Whew.

Re: Karpman drama triangle

[ecosophia]

I think what's going on is related to the drama triangle, because most of these self-described victims aren't "heroes" in the triangle's sense, the category I was taught to call "rescuers." They're victims first and foremost, and heroes solely in the sense of protagonists of a sad story meant to attract the attention of rescuers.

[(Anonymous)]

May I propose celebrating by donning mittens and drinking hot chocolate?
Category grifters? Is that why the woke go splutter-choke-rage when they find out I have mixed ancestry and civil rights heavy hitters in my family tree…
I kinda figured we’d start seeing wokesters concede defeat while denying they lost – woke-level cognitive dissonance must be exhausting. (My heads-up came a short while ago when legacy media outlets started running op-eds on the end of wokeness, cancel culture, &c.)
And – Might you say a few words about the current rise of populism sometime soon? The Cosmic Doctrine is making the wokester versus populist dynamic real interesting…
Rhydlyd

[ecosophia]

I propose to celebrate by building a snowman in Hell. ;-) I'll consider a future post on populism.

From your favorite Marxist Demogogue ™

[(Anonymous)]

You know, you’ve still got the honour of writing the most eloquent criticism of me. I loved the imagery—like I was Efnysien having just tossed Gwern into the hearth. And maybe I was.

Also, I’m glad you enjoyed this essay.

I’ll happily tell you what led to this apparent turn. A few years ago, I started noticing there were some particularly “bad actors” in the American antifa crowd who wielded rather extraordinary power in silencing fellow leftists, and only seemed to use that power against them. Noticing a pattern in the targets they always seemed to go after gave me quite a bit of pause. Add to this an odd series of twitter bots (each with perfectly crafted “woke identities” and always with anonymous anime character profile photos) that simultaneously piled on those same leftists with really bizarre smears in an obviously co-ordinated way.

Eventually, probably too slowly, I realised something bizarre was happening.

The targets were all leftists who talked about material conditions (class) as a grounds for organisation. Because of course class includes the apex-oppressor “white cis het abled male” who is the necessary foil for all woke politics. That such a person might have something materially in common with a Black trans woman (etc) is obvious from a Marxist perspective, but anathema to the American woke dogma.

Even Black Marxist women writers—the sort for whom woke politics supposedly exists—became victim to these anonymous twitter campaigns and Antifa crusades, and many Black Marxist male professors were accused of being fascist sympathisers for suggesting that “critical race theory” is much more useful to the capitalists than it will ever be to the poor.

Turns out, though, that at least one of the primary architects of Antifa in the United States (a country I left five years ago) is currently working with ex-CIA chiefs and is funded by the Charles Koch foundation. You’ll find it interesting to know this guy has been one of the primary ideological forces pushing the idea that “eco-fascism” is the next big threat, as well as churning out research papers to prove that any leftist who questions woke ideology is being influenced by the Kremlin and (ha!) is on their way to becoming fascist themselves. (More on him: https://abeautifulresistance.org/site/2021/3/16/mission-creep)

Add to all this that recent “woke” CIA recruiting video and you can probably see why many Marxists such as myself have been recently pushing really hard against the woke madness that’s consumed the non-Marxist “left.” I suspect it’s become a repeat of the Congress for Cultural Freedom strategy, favouring and funding a left that focuses on identity, betting (correctly) that it will represent no real threat to their power and only ensure the lower classes continue to blame each other for their poverty.

Anyway, be well!
—Rhyd Wildermuth

Re: From your favorite Marxist Demogogue ™

[ecosophia]

I'm glad you appreciated the criticism -- and even happier that the hunt for fascists in Neopaganism went nowhere. As for the deployment of critical race theory, thanks for this; several people have pointed out that it suddenly popped up shortly after the Occupy Wall Street business scared the bejesus out of the investment class, and it makes sense to see it as a deliberate distraction.

My next book The King in Orange -- out this month -- talks at rather some length about class issues, though doctrinaire Marxists probably won't like it. It'll be interesting to see what kind of reaction it gets. Maybe you can denounce it in one of your blog posts. ;-)

[michaeliangray]

Well blow me down, that was a fantastic read.

I have never minded Rhyd's writing over the years, I disagreed with large parts of it, but he has always be reasonable in trying to explain his points of view. This one however was exceptionally clear in its flow and message.

[ecosophia]

I thought it was well written -- and of course it was nice to see some familiar ideas. ;-)

[(Anonymous)]

JMG,

It is interesting that you posted this on this blog as I was tempted to ask your thoughts on the pronoun issue on your other blog. I struggle a bit with it.

On the one hand I met someone who told me he was a dragon. This was in the same manner that the person introduced himself as a bat. My response was to shrug my shoulder and say, OK. It's no skin off my nose if you want to think your a dragon. Now, if you start demanding my gold we got a problem, but other then that you do you.

But then you get into language. Let's say the dragon told me that as a dragon his pronouns were Khes/Khef/Ker or whatever. Sure it's no big deal for me to use those words. Except if I'm suing a pronoun in reference to this person they are likely not who I am talking to and possibly not even there. So, if I say James is over there in the blue jacket, can you take khes this bag. I have to stop and explain the whole pronoun issue. The use of the pronoun is an attempt to communicate clearly. And using exceedingly rare pronouns just interferes with that.

With someone who is transgendered this issue is a bit easier, but not always. If the person easily passes as their identified gender then using the pronoun communicates clearly. But these days a person may identify as male one day and female the next with no change in appearance. Once again you may end up confusing the person you are talking to if you refer to someone with a full beard as "her."

So, what are your thoughts?

AV

[cutekitten]

My thoughts are this sort of thing is an attempt to get everyone else obsessed with the pronoun-er as khef is with khefself, and we should all politely make it clear to khef that if khef wants to live in our heads khef will be charged rent.

This is different than normal courtesy. If Bruce Jenner decides to be Caitlin Jenner, I’ll happily say “Hello, Caitlin “ and “Yes, ma’am.” If Caitlin starts trying to police every word I say, we’re going to have problems.