Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go Back To The Podcast...

[ecosophia]

...it's another JMG podcast on The King in Orange: The Magical and Occult Roots of Political Power, this time on The Leak Podcast with host Rex. We had a very lively conversation about the role of magic in politics and contemporary culture, including -- but not limited to -- the Trump phenomenon and the accelerating decline of the American status quo.  Check it out on YouTube here. 

Comments

ANOTHER PODCAST!!!

[(Anonymous)]

So I guess that is the formula. When you want tons of exposure talk about political triggers, of which the King in Orange is the biggest. At this rate you should put together an anthology of essays on abortion, homosexuality, gun rights, and so on and then retire early.

Re: ANOTHER PODCAST!!!

[ecosophia]

I'm not sure if it's the topic, or simply that I placed this volume with a publisher who's good at getting podcast interviews for their authors.

[thuley]

I'm thoroughly enjoying my trek through the King in Orange. I honestly have never seen a nonfiction book so well-themed, and the choice of Hastur's regalia is a particular delight for me.

I do find one point puzzling, though: you draw explicit lines (and acknowledge the multitude already drawn) between Trump and Caesar. Caesar overthrew his government with a military coup and replaced a republic with an autocracy. Those parallels don't exactly assuage the concerns of Trump detractors, many of whom gritted their teeth and voted for Biden for fear that a vote for Trump would be the last they ever cast. The result was a predictable coup attempt, albeit behind a skillful veil of plausible deniability. Altogether, the comparison seems a little too close for comfort.

My question is: Do think authoritarianism is the Destiny of America and the dramatic contest between redhats and antifa for dictatorial control is ultimately just a matter of Incident? If so, shouldn't we be looking to organize ourselves in a way that sidesteps the grizzly future of politics, rather than give energy to either side?

[ecosophia]

Caesar overthrew an oligarchic kleptocracy that pretended to be a republic and replaced it with a dictatorship that was more responsive to the interests of the average Roman than the old Senatorial system had been. If we want to keep a republic here in the United States, finding some way to get the existing system to notice the needs of the 80% of Americans who've been badly treated by neoliberalism is an inescapable first step. Otherwise, yes, we'll get an autocracy of one kind or another.

[thuley]

Thank you.

And thank you for talking about "hyperstition" in this podcast. I've been aware of the phenomena ever since my friends in high school all watched the movie Fight Club and started compulsively quoting the movie and then meeting in secret to fight one another. One of them, no joke, wound up in the UFC and did surprisingly well. That's the first time I realized the ability for fiction to bleed off the page and into reality was far greater than most people were comfortable talking about. But I haven't had a word for it until now.

[ecosophia]

That's a great example of what Nick Land is talking about. I'll be doing an essay in a while, talking about hyperstition -- it's a good concept but Land's discussions of it have certain problematic features I'll need to explicate.

[lincoln_lynx]

It comes down to when America's economy collapses. The oligarchs will never let real (positive) change happen until there's nothing left to gain. If they drain America dry, collapse happens, and they go find a new victim before people push a dictator in office then the republic will be saved. I don't see that happening.

[ecosophia]

Don't assume that the current elite class is omnipotent. One of the repeated lessons of history is that political power really does come from the passive consent of the governed, and can go away with astonishing speed once they withdraw that consent. May I make a suggestion? Go find a good book on how the French Revolution unfolded. It's quite an eye-opener.

[lincoln_lynx]

My operating assumption is people are still too easily deceived. I expect a reform movement will win several victories, and as has been the case throughout American history those gains will ultimately benefit the neediest very little and the richest a great deal.

The elites could easily accomplish that if they swallowed their pride and were willing to let the plebs think they had won. But that may yet prove impossible for them. Here's hoping.

Any book in particular you'd recommend?

[ecosophia]

I think we've gone past the point at which reform is an option, and are facing a very real potential of convulsive change -- think France in 1789 or East Germany in 1989. As for books, Simon Schama's Citizens is quite good, and so is William Doyle's The Origins of the French Revolution.

[michaeliangray]

I cannot find who said it, but "The more hungry people get, the more they will lean towards autocracy.".

As it stands currently seem like those in power are making this warning an inevitability.

[booklover1973]

Yes, quite a while ago I read that democracy doesn't thrive well in poor countries or countries with extreme wealth inequality.

[(Anonymous)]

Sorry about the long post, your point reminded me of something and it just snowballed.

I'm not prone to cries of "eat the rich!", but I can see another way in which wealth inequality could weaken democracy: The "rubber stamp" of Bernays.

"Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubberstamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought."
- Edward Bernays, Propaganda

The elite, using focus groups, lobbying, and propaganda outlets, could present voters with, if any choice at all, a choice between two barely meaningful or outright counterproductive solutions to their problems. They would have such overwhelming power over the narrative that it is as if the powerless aren't voting at all. It's the equivalent of handing your little brother an unplugged game controller. Sounds fine as long as the populace is happy and thinks they're in charge, right? Well, a government using this decision-making method will become increasingly irrational over time. Our host has described how out of touch Hillary Clinton's campaign was, and it was symptomatic of this irrationality, of thinking the voters are to be told what to do instead of the other way around.

I do think democracy can be saved, but the fact that some people now think that "saving democracy" means "preventing the non-establishment candidate from winning at all costs" shows how deep the problem goes. I do think it is a good sign that those who are supposedly the biggest threat to democracy, hardcore Trump supporters, aren't saying that democracy is bad, but that the 2020 election was fraudulent and not real democracy (whether or not you believe them).

I would almost assign the PMC an equal threat to democracy. If populists keep sneaking onto the ballot, one can easily imagine them trying to lock the door behind them to prevent their own rules from being used against them.

[(Anonymous)]

One thing I thought after listening to the podcast was that the book of Revelations might have worked like the Illuminati card game, and sort of helped to take down the Roman Empire and replace it with Catholic de facto medieval ruling.

[ecosophia]

Hmm! A case could be made that you're right, and the Book of Revelations functioned as a hyperstition -- a narrative that makes itself real.

[(Anonymous)]

Brave New World and 1984 also seem to be culprits of this. I don't want to make hyperstition a hammer to crush every story, but the concept that these two books helped to shape our future is everywhere.

[(Anonymous)]

Dig the gets! https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/133331.html#comments

[ecosophia]

Hmm! Thanks for catching that -- I managed to miss it.

[(Anonymous)]

Sorry to be a wet blanket, but gets need to include the final number, otherwise large series of post numbers in a row would have the same gets. That post number ends in 31.

Projecting empathy through humor... Caesar's way.

[(Anonymous)]

Long, long ago I read a novel entitled Jannisaries, written by Jerry Pournelle. When you mentioned caesarism, and Trump's ability to get his audience to identify with him by appealing to informal dress codes (the red cap), hair cuts that seemingly offend the more stylishly inclined, etc, I thought about the passage in Pournelle's novel wherein a character alludes to Julius Caesar inspiring his troops with obscene humor. Again that ability to say to his audience, in a kind of openly displayed code, "Hey, I'm with you guys. Those other guys? They're the real clowns, and they don't even get that they're the joke, here."

I remember guys at work saying, regarding Mr Trump: "He's saying what we're all thinking."

It took me a while to assimilate all this... But I eventually realized the reality of what you've been saying... The reality of socioeconomic class distinctions, and our collective efforts to pretend such distinctions don't exist. All my life I've been consciously ignorant of these social barriers, pretending that it's just a matter of networking to climb the ladder. But of course, I was unconsciously aware of the actual state of affairs, and that was what made me feel ill in walking away from interactions with my social superiors that left me feeling humiliated.

So... We want to believe (some of us do, anyway), that we're classier than we really are. We try to send the signals of our worthiness in our dress and in our hobbies, in the clubs we join and in the TV shows we binge-watch. But Jung is right yet again! There's a part of us, deep inside each one of us, that absolutely knows the true state of affairs, and we deny it at our peril. This Shadow rubs our noses in these uncomfortable facts... We, the Deplorable masses... We, the Despicable many! We ourselves are earthy and frequently vulgar. At the conclusion of the working day the undersides of our fingernails are lined with dirt. And for some of us that is unbearable... And then again, for others, the fact that such Deplorables continue to live is equally unbearable!

What must be even more infuriating for the Thinking Class is the possibility that an orange haired opportunist saw all this and knew how to tap into the suppressed rage and humiliation, while they themselves, isolated in their Ivory towers and air conditioned offices, had absolutely no idea... But neither did most of us, I think, until this strange creature pointed out the obvious.

It's been your blogs and podcast interviews that have have finally slapped the comprehension into my head! And every time I pedal to work I see things differently now.

It is likely that The Best of Us feel they have slain this particular Dragon, but it's even more likely the Beast has merely slunk back into the hills from whence it came, and waits there still. Waiting for Caesar.

This is disturbing, and, for those few members of the Thinking Class that actually think, terrifying. Yet encountering one's own Shadow and acknowledging it can be liberating.

I think if there's one thing, one piece of formerly occulted knowledge I should thank you for exposing, it is nothing to do with fraternal lodges or aetheric energies, but the simple realization of the fact of my social class, and the implications this holds for the way I can live my life. From this all else follows, including the realization that, indeed, magic is the politics of the underclass.

Thanks.
Casey.

Re: Projecting empathy through humor... Caesar's way.

[ecosophia]

I remember Janissaries! A fun read, though Pournelle knew less than he thought he did about linguistics. As for the occultation of the class issue, yes, exactly. The negative reviews of The King in Orange I've seen all insist that it's "incoherent," while the positive reviews talk about how well argued it is; what "incoherent" means, of course, is "this book talks about our class privilege and We. Will. Not. Think. About. That."

Re: Projecting empathy through humor... Caesar's way.

[(Anonymous)]

I saw that response to the Joker movie, which was basically "Occupy Wall Street with clowns". Internationally it was understood immediately, but in the US the media either didn't understand it at all or tried desperately to make it about race and gender when it wasn't. The populace, of course, understood entirely, and made it the most profitable comic book movie ever and the first r-rated movie to earn $1b.

[mollari]

Is this a new record for how many podcasts you've been on for one book?

[ecosophia]

Not so far, but that's because some of my other books have had very long tails in terms of podcasts. If this one keeps getting me airtime, it'll surpass the others by a long shot.

[(Anonymous)]

I love the sound effects used to bleep out "vaccine". That seems like a very strange choice of word to bleep; do you know if it's because of a fear of censorship?

[ecosophia]

It's because of the reality of censorship. Anything that critiques the conventional wisdom about coronavirus vaccines can count on getting scrubbed from YouTube and other big corporate websites.

[mollari]

"If only you wait and are patient, the corporate system will make you happy."

This is making me think of the concept of provisional living; where people will imagine a perfect life, instead of addressing the world they live. It's always set off somewhere where it'll never happen (ex: after losing 20 pounds, getting a divorce, etc., while making no efforts to move there), and now I'm wondering: do you know if anyone has looked at the idea of progress in light of provisional living?

[(Anonymous)]

Reading the introduction side by side Levi, I really appreciated the parallels in structure that these two introductions have. I suspect that the further I read, the more of a self initiation will unfold as the pages turn in the King of Orange. An initiation into what, I wonder I wonder ;)

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, I feel kind of embarrassed. I missed this one because I couldn't download MP3 file and had to watch it on YouTube and turns out this one has all answers to my question about book of Revelations. I'm so happy.
And what a great host. Never interrupts, ask interesting questions and has this eighties vibe (right on).
Another interesting thing is that just yesterday I started practicing LBRP. I needed to hear this podcast today and so I did. Thank you so much!