The ArchDruid John Michael Greer wrote a most interesting blog post this week. In it he compared Anton Lavey's Satanism, Ayn Rand, and elements of GOP and various purported Christian agendas. As the favored tendencies of the GOP so resemble Lavey's diabolical morality and Rand's Objectivism, Greer speculated as to whether Rand-isms (paeans to Ayn) had become code between the followers of the prince of lies:
"...The Satanic Bible....a book-length screed denouncing Christian morality and upholding an ethic of raw selfishness and might-makes-right. It’s still very much in copyright, so I’m not going to quote it here, but any reader who turns its pages will find the present social policy of the GOP precisely reflected in LaVey’s dismissal of two thousand years of Christian teaching about our duty to care for one another, his shrill denunciations of the vulnerable and needy as “parasites” and “vampires,” and his insistence that the successful owe nothing to anybody else.
Greer called his post satire, but it cuts a little TOO close to the truth.
As the number of devil worshippers in evangelical churches
and the Christian end of the Republican Party increased, though, their most
pressing need would have been some surreptitious way to signal their
involvement to those who shared their convictions, without believers in the
Christian gospel being any the wiser. Coming up with a Satanic shibboleth that
would be instantly recognizable to other devil worshippers, but completely
opaque to devout Christians, might seem like a tall order, but it’s one that
seems to have been met with aplomb.
Yes, this is where we discuss Ayn Rand.
I love it. I encourage everyone to read it :) From the comments:
That's the most interesting post I have read in a long time,
anywhere :)So I was visiting my parents this week. Christmas Eve, my father was watching Fox news. Eric Bolling was celebrating a young entrepreneur, as a "maker, not a taker." Then he was celebrating $10,000 tips to servers for dinner (on bills around $500-600), "Tips For Jesus" [It perhaps not occurring to many Christians, the irony of a rich man giving tips to Jesus, about giving. 'the best way to give to the poor is to get super rich!] I turned to my born-again Christian mother and said, "It's Jesus birthday, let's celebrate money making and rich people!" She gave me as close to an evil eye as I have ever seen from her.
Then my father turned it to CNN. They were wailing
She's no Satanist, but she'll believe just about anyone who claims to be Christian. And she's been taken in....
Incidentally, thinking further, I was wondering what Christians would have to say if those who initiated the total surveillance states were proto-satanists, and not really the Christians they claim to be? ;)
WHD
John
Michael Greer said...
William, a good point. I'd encourage
you and other readers to spread the word! ;-)
Bolling and his Fox News ilk were not merely busy managing a proto-satanic moral agenda about rich and poor (are autistic people makers or takers?), they were busy blaming the deflationary 2013 holiday retail numbers, on The Affordable Care Act. Because of course, the shitty retail numbers couldn't have anything to do with a trillion dollars of student loan debt (due predatory capitalistic institutions of higher education and their investors and creditors); or turning half the workforce into marginalized, economically insecure part time/seasonal/contract "associates"; diluting the dollar with 85 billion dollar-a-month shifts of private loss to private gain/public debt; generalized global resource constraints; 
or guys like Bolling making millions, sanctifying expanding inequality and the rights of multi-national corporate/banking/finance overlords to run rough over everything and everybody.
It's a dark magic,
the way they are silent about Fukushima. What were the topics that could be talked about this holiday Christmas season? Retail sales, Duck Dynasty, Health Care Hijinks, and South Sudan. NSA was in the news, but only to talk about what was being done to fine-tune the total surveillance state. Notice there is not a serious national discussion about who set it up, how and why. What for? Why do we really need it? For whom? You (whom) want to be able to record every digital communication - but you won't talk about Fukushima, and you stopped measuring radiation in the atmosphere? You want to know what everyone is saying and doing digitally, at all times, and record that information for eternity - but you don't want us to read the global trade pacts you are negotiating, before you enact them into law? The only thing we can talk about, apparently, is that which will service economic growth no matter what cost. We cannot talk about Fukushima anymore than we can talk about nuclear facilities here in the States. Cannot talk about corporate/finance takeover of nation states, evisceration of existing law. Cannot talk about what crisis could initiate what nightmare expansion of the existing military/police state with full internal dispersal of drones/total surveillance?
the way they are silent about Fukushima. What were the topics that could be talked about this holiday Christmas season? Retail sales, Duck Dynasty, Health Care Hijinks, and South Sudan. NSA was in the news, but only to talk about what was being done to fine-tune the total surveillance state. Notice there is not a serious national discussion about who set it up, how and why. What for? Why do we really need it? For whom? You (whom) want to be able to record every digital communication - but you won't talk about Fukushima, and you stopped measuring radiation in the atmosphere? You want to know what everyone is saying and doing digitally, at all times, and record that information for eternity - but you don't want us to read the global trade pacts you are negotiating, before you enact them into law? The only thing we can talk about, apparently, is that which will service economic growth no matter what cost. We cannot talk about Fukushima anymore than we can talk about nuclear facilities here in the States. Cannot talk about corporate/finance takeover of nation states, evisceration of existing law. Cannot talk about what crisis could initiate what nightmare expansion of the existing military/police state with full internal dispersal of drones/total surveillance?
It hardly matters if there are genuine satanists in the various levels of government. Capitalism mirrors any serious definition of demonic, the way it is so dependent on lies and evasion of the truth, the show of force. Even the current guy in the typically uber-obtuse-about-the-poor office of the Pope gets it! LOL. If you were part of a cabal of Satanists or proto-satanists attempting to destroy the earth or enslave it, just because, you couldn't invent a better way than to convince most people they are consumers, that producers can be rich without limit. Or invent a more powerful machine for the managing of mass consciousness than the MSM. Seriously, does "devour the body of the earth without limit, that we might become rich without limit," sound like Jesus talk to you? Sound sense, even? But that is basically the message of Christ-mass, and consumerism generally.
Which, btw, few Americans could believe those towers could be brought down by Christians. Which initiated this total surveillance, increasingly paramilitary state. But what if the perpetrators were Satanists, or proto-satanists, masquerading as Christians? Could you believe it then? What then, if some of the the most basic tenets of Capitalism are effectively Satanic? Why is Capitalism so dependent on proto-fascist, mercenary, all-seeing controls?
Of course Marxism is as dead as industrialism, so don't go there. Marx saw Capitalism devouring itself. He didn't see how readily and unremittingly his glorious centralized workers party would devour and despoil the earth. Jobz! Jobz! Jobz!
So it would seem time for some revisioning, eh, about where we are headed? Because they are otherwise setting up more wars, Christian-Muslim-Jew, Capitalist-Socialist, rich-poor, white-nonwhite. Strong-weak. Divide and conquer.
I mean, seriously, if you were a Satanist, assorted minion of the devil, wouldn't you totally glory in the spread of nuclear energy, weapons? How would you get off, setting off one, or hundreds of nuclear charges over the years? The people cowering before you! What wicked glee, Fukushima. And if you don't get cancer from radiation, wait for long term immersion in systemic chemical toxicity! Off-shore, deep water oil platforms? Fracking? The price of progress? Or a plan to enslave the earth? Or simply to destroy it? How to make the people glory in their self-destruction? Seriously, how would you laugh and laugh to hear the monarch butterfly population has crashed? What proverbial orgasm would be the total surveillance state, military/industrial complex? Drones? Seriously, demon.
So btw, how far along the continuum of societal and biosphere/specie collapse are we, if monarch butterfly go from 100 million to 3 million, 2012-2013? About time something shifted for the better? But then, most everybody thinks that means, more growth, more stuff, more money, which only exacerbates the problem. Societal collapse may mean an extended period of lawless consumption, war and pollution; laws barely protect what's left.
What's needed is not a change in behavior, or even a weeding out of Satanists or proto-satanists, but a mass shift in consciousness. Mass consciousness now capitalist/consumer/proto-satanic, is fundamentally indifferent to and uncaring about the health of the earth. If we are to survive as a species and not be enslaved, some new consciousness will have to learn to care for the earth. To care for each other. To care for all things.
Simple . As . That
WHD
WHD
You say it well William. I hadn't seen where Greer said it was satire...must have been in the comment section.
ReplyDeleteThis is all why I say we must begin turning our backs on the Matrix. It's rotten and beyond redemption or fixing. We give those in power the power by complying to their rules. Fuck their rules.
I'm gonna play by the rules to the minimum extent I can get away with...always pushing the edge slightly in the margin hiding in plain sight.
We have to envision a better world and then work towards creating it. The Matrix wants us to get mad so that we fuck up end up in one of their cells, a literal prisoner to the Matrix rather than a symbolic one.
What's the difference if you're living in a prison cell at a prison or in your own home...a prisoner to your own failed and miserable life.
It's time to take the power back, turn around, and go the other way.
LD,
ReplyDeleteI may say it well, but I can only reach a few, most of whom already get it. It's true, if we immerse ourselves in the media of the Matrix as you describe it, then we see the world through the lens of the matrix. Only by pulling away and learning to see the world more as it is and not how those in power wish us to see it, can we take back the power that we have unwittingly given. Then of course, we have to figure out what to do with it.
WHD
Figuring out what to do with it is the fun and easy part IMO. We share it, and use it to build a world of natural abundance. We don't let it concentrate in one place. In a word...I guess anarchy is the best. However that being the type of anarchy that is self organizing and not chaotic. The type of anarchy that recognizes its own inherent value.
ReplyDeleteNot only well said, William, but Right On.
ReplyDeleteAs for changing Consciousness - yes!!
However, we who already know are currently either too few, too dispersed and/or too fearful (wise?) to mix it up with tptb - which would be futile in any case. So I agree with the premise that the 'way' is to turn one's back on the Matrix insofar as one is able and continue to spread the word, as you so ably do.
First I've heard about the demise of the Monarchs - makes me sad and even more pissed-off. Interesting that they're nectar-eaters, like bees. Wonder how long it'll be before someone notices a drop in the Hummingbird population.
LD,
ReplyDeleteBe careful about that anarchist talk. Ashvin P. over on the Diner will accuse you of being a satanist. :) LOL
Otherwise, yeah, we'll likely see a lift in anarchic cooperation between people, attempting to deal with cascading failures in the matrix, by way of generating abundance together.
Martin,
Thank you. And yes, there really is little "mixing it up" with TPTB. It's abundantly clear, whatever the MSM, FBI, economists etc say, people will believe. Until they can't anymore, in which case perhaps they start listening more to people like us. In which case we will find out then if there really is anything like freedom of speech in America.
As for the Monarchs, that NBC affiliate in Philly spread the word, but not even the World Wildlife Fund, which is supposed to be tracking this, have raised anything like a serious alarm. Like the boy who cried wolf a thousand times and then the wolf arrived and no one believed him anymore, so he didn't bother to say anything.
It's not just about nectar eating, btw, though that's related - the loss of habitat, the vast expanse of industrial GMO corn and soy. It's also about nicotinoids, bug killers, from the likes of Bayer, formerly IG Farben, of Zyklon B fame.
WHD
Greer's distant constructed memory of the U.S. opting out of the conservation movement and limits of energy awareness of the 70s that made it all the way up to Carter's white house in terms of consensus, in favor of a credit fueled oil binge because feeling good won out over rational decision making, is an outgrowth of a particular frame of consciousness.
ReplyDeleteA slightly different frame of consciousness explains the past as a layered, mirrored, inverted recursive web of deceit and control that takes form in the irrational, Satanic social norms of our culture, the Matrix.
If what is needed is a shift in consciousness, then we must begin by shifting our own individual conscious. I agree with Greer on this absolutely.
Through another frame of conscious reference, the last few decades are explained as an unavoidable fate. The US and the west no more "chose" to do a credit binge economy over the green shoots of the echo-tech movement than a summer chooses to go into fall and winter. It was inevitable, fated, just as we are no inevitably and fatefully marching right into a grisly end of our empire, corporate do nothing energy spending jobs, and PC enforced surface culture with it.
Another way to say it is that all of these explanations are right and wrong simultaneously, which points to a deeper framework of understanding. In my view, we get right back Greer's post. He called it satire in the comments as a cop out, I don't blame him. The blog is a sales pitch for his books, I think he sensed trouble detrimental to that end if he got defensive. Awhile back Lucidd posted something about his backwoods, black snake enounters.
We shall have to compare notes on what and how we experience shifts of consciousness.
Do you believe in activism?
How do you become an activist for expanding and shifting consciousness on a mess scale?
In my view, the fight to explore your own consciousness and tinker with yours and only yours, given what is needed on a mass scale, is one of the most morally active things you can do.
The alternative idea has it that activism means trying to affect changes in consciousness for others, which I think is one of the most immorally active things you can do, and should really be seen as an attempt to hold your present state of mind in place, working against the goal of a slippery, expanding consciousness.
Be rough, light, cool, thin, hard, mobile.
Justin,
ReplyDeleteDo I believe in activism? I don't know. The confrontational way it goes, won't change much in the way of most people's consciousness. I think it will take something like Fukushima going critical, to focus people on what is really going on, the BS lying of the state, the crooked, ruthless, uncaring nature of corporations, the need to care for the earth or we will in fact destroy it.
WHD
WHD,
ReplyDeleteYeah, I have no belief in that sort of thing either.
I still remain unconvinced that anything like a change in consciousness is what is required, or possible. I'd say the decisions we made about peak oil were made the first time a European killed an Indian. The logic of expansion by conquest, acquisition and technology is evident at that point, at least, and is the same logic governing everything that has happened since. We've systematically rooted out and destroyed alternative consciousness because we could not stand for that. What you are proposing essentially means a willingness to call everything we know about the last several centuries completely inverted and false in terms of what we call progress, enlightenment, intelligence, etc.
This is in spite of the fact that among the activities we consider greatly intelligent is the ability to make wastes that poison and corrupt life at the protein level that last for generations. That is the boundary condition for any reasonable definition or measurement for total stupidity if you ask me, but I am not a nuclear scientist, so what do I know.
In any case, I don't see people willing to go through the ego death of admitting western civilization is a barbarous, backwards, stupid enterprise and that advanced cultures are the ones with less technology, material wealth, and what seems to us like a maddening, confusing, contradictory and magical understanding of human existence as of myth, light and things like chakras. That's a tall order of ego death.
Find me five people in the U.S. that aren't going to reflexively add a 'but' and distancing qualifier to any systemic critiques along these lines. If a mass change in consciousness was going to happen, it would have. The longer we go, the harder the ego attachment to this crap is. Now we have a black president, see, progress, and how long are we going to feel good about that and the first female president to keep going about this experiment in Roman democracy?
Justin,
ReplyDeleteVery interesting ideas. I think you are right, that what we need is not necessarily what we are going to get. We could get three Fukushimas, and if the economy were running reasonably well...even if the dollar collapses, things could descend into internecine...it is possible humanity could head straight for a Zero Point being none the wiser about how.
And you say maybe we don't need...
But...see, even I do it...I remain hopeful, that perhaps, humanity will surprise us both, and take the best of w.civ and the best of the spiritual and the indigenous, and make a miracle ;)
WHD