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.

[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

[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."

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.

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

[(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

[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.

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!

[(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!"

[(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.

[(Anonymous)]

Following up on my last comment about being a proto-SJW and something snapping, there's another aspect I think at play here: Wildermuth may have made the mistake of actually believing in the principles of social justice, as I did. It seems to be a rule of American politics and religion since WWII that, as was once said of the Soviet Union, one can be intelligent, honest, or loyal — pick two.

[missbreanna]

I read a few of his other essays on his blog page and it seems to me that the change is for reasons of personal insight: he is recently out of an abusive relationship and is seeing many parallels between the strategies his ex used to abuse him and the strategies woke groups use.

[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.

[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]

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...

[ecosophia]

There's a real extent to which the GOP summoned the woke phenomenon. Back in the day they insisted on using the word "Communist" to refer to anything much to the left of Joe McCarthy, and I predicted at the time that they'd end up causing people who were sick of predatory kleptocratic capitalism to give Marx a second chance.

[ecosophia]

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

Re: Gosh category grifter

[ecosophia]

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

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...

[ecosophia]

I'm pretty sure that at least part of it is called "growing up." There's a fine old quote that's been attributed, probably falsely, to Winston Churchill: "A man who is not a communist at age 20 has no heart. A man who is still a Communist at age 40 has no brain."

[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.

[ecosophia]

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