I just received and read your piece “A Post QANON World,” and I was quite impressed with your analysis. Just as with the 2012 phenomenon, Q-Anon does tap into some deep intuition that we see only a fraction of what is going on, that we are subject to large-scale cosmic movements and other-than-natural systems of control, but so…
I just received and read your piece “A Post QANON World,” and I was quite impressed with your analysis. Just as with the 2012 phenomenon, Q-Anon does tap into some deep intuition that we see only a fraction of what is going on, that we are subject to large-scale cosmic movements and other-than-natural systems of control, but somehow their interpretation of such structures then goes completely haywire, perhaps, as Steiner said, due to the scrambling of thinking, feeling and willing.
As you may remember, I was one of the main organizers for Evolver Boston from 2008 to 2013. While I am a firm believer in the existence of large-scale time cycles, I was always disturbed by the obsessive focus of group members on the 2012 date, which I saw as a kind of one-size-fits-all projection screen, or a balloon waiting to be popped. And sure enough, the group did dissolve shortly afterwards. (Luckily, many of the good writers, artists, and musicians that I met there continued to come to the bimonthly salons that my wife Deni and I organized up until the start of the pandemic.) From the time that I joined Evolver Boston, I had argued against our investing too much of our energy in any linear prediction, but the temptation was far too seductive for most members to resist. I would clutch my head and grit my teeth as people fantasized about grand, overlapping plans of “world transformation” while brushing aside all practical actions that could actually sustain the group and lead to hard accomplishments. My own vision was that that the group should define itself in terms of the explosive power of the seed, that we should, as the 1960s cliché went, “think globally but act locally.” This was, I think, the model for such groups as the Pythagorean Circle. Sadly, the local part proved all too difficult, and the global part proved easy but disastrous. I have been shocked to find how many Facebook friends that I once met through Evolver have drifted over to the hard right. Oh well. Enantiadromia. Can’t live with it. Can’t kill it.
In 2013, with the collapse of millennial expectations—once again, not mine—I set out to write a kind of autopsy, an exploration of time and of the difference between prophesy and prediction. I did a complete revision of the piece, “The Snare of Distance and the Sunglasses of the Seer,” over the summer. I thought that the essay might interest you. It’s attached.
In “A Post-QANON World,” you write,
"As a result of modern acculturation and a dualistic way of seeing the world that is built into the syntax of Western language, we tend to be very literal-minded. We are trained to seek hard evidence, immediate outcomes, and definitive proof. It is hard for people brought up in our society — even well-educated, intelligent people — to handle ambiguity, complexity, paradox, and other edge-spaces where something may not quite be or not be. We innately seek safety, security, and conviction. This influences how we think and what we believe."
I once said to author James Curcio that I tended to see Nazism as a failed art movement, in that it literalized archetypal forces that should have been expressed in the form of ritualized play. We have just seen a similar thing with Q-Anon. While, on some abstract level, I am grateful to them for lifting the contents of the Underworld into full daylit visibility, I am horrified by the utter stupidity of the way these contents were expressed. While I do not in any way discount the idea that there are powerful archetypal forces at work behind the scenes (as well as political arrangements that lead to the steady consolidation of wealth and power), most conspiratorial thinking tends to take a childlike form, which can be broken down as follows:
1. I am an innocent victim, with no dark impulses. I only want what is best for the world.
2. A global elite possessed of occult knowledge is responsible for all of the evil in the world. They are evil in their evilness. The extent of their power and knowledge is too vast to even comprehend, but I can piece together the small but damning details that show how mischievous they are. Did so and so A’s cousin eat at the same restaurant as so and so B on September, 14th, 1987? Aha! You can see how it all fits.
3. I am very special. I am not a “sheeple.” I am one of the chosen few who see through their deceptions, who has begun to disentangle the threads of this vast conspiracy. Let these rulers tremble, for it is I who will sow the seeds of their destruction!
Or, to simplify: The self is good. The other is bad. The self is here. The other is over there. This type of thinking violates one of my key principles: All genuine vision must proceed from the integration of the Shadow. We are part of the world body, and we can’t come to terms with our actions if we separate them from the context of the whole. If we define ourselves as victims, as beings who are only good, then we will tend to see the movement of archetypal presences and forces—even benevolent ones—as a threat, or else to divide them along purely tribal lines. (In Hollywood movies, for example, supernatural forces are most often seen as demonic.) If we see the self as a point on a continuum, however, if the self exists in a multitude of locations—both on physical and subtle planes—then what first appears to be a threat then presents itself as an opportunity for knowledge, as a lesson that we have not bothered to learn.
Over the past two weeks, I’ve been revising a piece called “Anonymous, and His International Fame”—again a piece started in 2013, no relation to the Anonymous of Q-Anon—which plays with the idea of “planetary rulers” without falling into any hard and fast oppositions. This is the first section of the essay.
Part one
Genetic engineering of the planetary rulers has projected each subject’s shadow as a hex, as a door that none should open, as a gulf that none should cross. All attempts at purification are shaped like a figure eight. We are not natural. Our powers are congested. If we were to add up all of the experiences that define us, we would note, upon closer scrutiny, that it is always the key element that is missing. Why do people we do not know dare to occupy our homes? They do not dress well. We must hurt them. An archaic wound pursues us like the voice of superconsciousness.
From the end of the last ice age, when what were first small streams broke through the dams of the Himalayas, when whales were stranded on the Andes, when ships crashed on the sky, Earth’s rulers have agreed to play the role of our absent yet somehow abusive guides, and to model, in the mists of our imaginations, those behaviors we would do well to avoid. If they have set up signs and left us rules for their interpretation, we might, in the end, perceive such help to be a threat. If, however, the self exists in a multitude of locations, then what haunts us may be the lesson that we have not bothered to learn.
For what harms can heal. What does not kill us can potentially make us stronger, unless, as with Nietzsche, it strips us of our identity altogether. True harmony is disjunctive. We know that evil exists. We know the top 28 people hold as much wealth as the bottom three and one half billion. Trauma? Whose fault is that? We are fetuses. We are innocent. You can see how happily we kick against our wombs. It is said that the spheres make music.
Earth’s rulers would prefer to rule, for that is the role to which their memories have assigned them. This leads them to see the destruction of an ocean in the light of a bigger picture. In terms of vision, it is only practical that I not attribute too much virtue to myself, that I not be quick to accuse. I have benefited as much as anyone from the extraction of rare elements, such as tantalum, from the Congo. I wear socks manufactured by starving children in Bangladesh. I keep my milk in a refrigerator, thus adding to the spread of HFCs and helping to push Earth’s temperature towards the point of no return. Like the rulers who have conspired to take away my breath, I am also very old, what did not kill me has made me stronger but less sane, and my relationship to the living has grown steadily more ambivalent.
I have taken what I need. I fear no unseen hand, and I do not need to be liberated. Able finally to act as a good parent to the child that I was, and am, I am intent on making use of every scrap of my experience. The years now rearrange themselves, permitting me to wander through each period of my development. Time turns into horizontal space, as though the future and the past were no more than the handicapped-accessible rooms of a museum.
__
Untimely Books will be publishing my book of essays Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence sometime over the next few months. If you have a chance, perhaps you could let me know of any podcasts that might be good for me to do.
Hi Daniel,
I just received and read your piece “A Post QANON World,” and I was quite impressed with your analysis. Just as with the 2012 phenomenon, Q-Anon does tap into some deep intuition that we see only a fraction of what is going on, that we are subject to large-scale cosmic movements and other-than-natural systems of control, but somehow their interpretation of such structures then goes completely haywire, perhaps, as Steiner said, due to the scrambling of thinking, feeling and willing.
As you may remember, I was one of the main organizers for Evolver Boston from 2008 to 2013. While I am a firm believer in the existence of large-scale time cycles, I was always disturbed by the obsessive focus of group members on the 2012 date, which I saw as a kind of one-size-fits-all projection screen, or a balloon waiting to be popped. And sure enough, the group did dissolve shortly afterwards. (Luckily, many of the good writers, artists, and musicians that I met there continued to come to the bimonthly salons that my wife Deni and I organized up until the start of the pandemic.) From the time that I joined Evolver Boston, I had argued against our investing too much of our energy in any linear prediction, but the temptation was far too seductive for most members to resist. I would clutch my head and grit my teeth as people fantasized about grand, overlapping plans of “world transformation” while brushing aside all practical actions that could actually sustain the group and lead to hard accomplishments. My own vision was that that the group should define itself in terms of the explosive power of the seed, that we should, as the 1960s cliché went, “think globally but act locally.” This was, I think, the model for such groups as the Pythagorean Circle. Sadly, the local part proved all too difficult, and the global part proved easy but disastrous. I have been shocked to find how many Facebook friends that I once met through Evolver have drifted over to the hard right. Oh well. Enantiadromia. Can’t live with it. Can’t kill it.
In 2013, with the collapse of millennial expectations—once again, not mine—I set out to write a kind of autopsy, an exploration of time and of the difference between prophesy and prediction. I did a complete revision of the piece, “The Snare of Distance and the Sunglasses of the Seer,” over the summer. I thought that the essay might interest you. It’s attached.
In “A Post-QANON World,” you write,
"As a result of modern acculturation and a dualistic way of seeing the world that is built into the syntax of Western language, we tend to be very literal-minded. We are trained to seek hard evidence, immediate outcomes, and definitive proof. It is hard for people brought up in our society — even well-educated, intelligent people — to handle ambiguity, complexity, paradox, and other edge-spaces where something may not quite be or not be. We innately seek safety, security, and conviction. This influences how we think and what we believe."
I once said to author James Curcio that I tended to see Nazism as a failed art movement, in that it literalized archetypal forces that should have been expressed in the form of ritualized play. We have just seen a similar thing with Q-Anon. While, on some abstract level, I am grateful to them for lifting the contents of the Underworld into full daylit visibility, I am horrified by the utter stupidity of the way these contents were expressed. While I do not in any way discount the idea that there are powerful archetypal forces at work behind the scenes (as well as political arrangements that lead to the steady consolidation of wealth and power), most conspiratorial thinking tends to take a childlike form, which can be broken down as follows:
1. I am an innocent victim, with no dark impulses. I only want what is best for the world.
2. A global elite possessed of occult knowledge is responsible for all of the evil in the world. They are evil in their evilness. The extent of their power and knowledge is too vast to even comprehend, but I can piece together the small but damning details that show how mischievous they are. Did so and so A’s cousin eat at the same restaurant as so and so B on September, 14th, 1987? Aha! You can see how it all fits.
3. I am very special. I am not a “sheeple.” I am one of the chosen few who see through their deceptions, who has begun to disentangle the threads of this vast conspiracy. Let these rulers tremble, for it is I who will sow the seeds of their destruction!
Or, to simplify: The self is good. The other is bad. The self is here. The other is over there. This type of thinking violates one of my key principles: All genuine vision must proceed from the integration of the Shadow. We are part of the world body, and we can’t come to terms with our actions if we separate them from the context of the whole. If we define ourselves as victims, as beings who are only good, then we will tend to see the movement of archetypal presences and forces—even benevolent ones—as a threat, or else to divide them along purely tribal lines. (In Hollywood movies, for example, supernatural forces are most often seen as demonic.) If we see the self as a point on a continuum, however, if the self exists in a multitude of locations—both on physical and subtle planes—then what first appears to be a threat then presents itself as an opportunity for knowledge, as a lesson that we have not bothered to learn.
Over the past two weeks, I’ve been revising a piece called “Anonymous, and His International Fame”—again a piece started in 2013, no relation to the Anonymous of Q-Anon—which plays with the idea of “planetary rulers” without falling into any hard and fast oppositions. This is the first section of the essay.
Part one
Genetic engineering of the planetary rulers has projected each subject’s shadow as a hex, as a door that none should open, as a gulf that none should cross. All attempts at purification are shaped like a figure eight. We are not natural. Our powers are congested. If we were to add up all of the experiences that define us, we would note, upon closer scrutiny, that it is always the key element that is missing. Why do people we do not know dare to occupy our homes? They do not dress well. We must hurt them. An archaic wound pursues us like the voice of superconsciousness.
From the end of the last ice age, when what were first small streams broke through the dams of the Himalayas, when whales were stranded on the Andes, when ships crashed on the sky, Earth’s rulers have agreed to play the role of our absent yet somehow abusive guides, and to model, in the mists of our imaginations, those behaviors we would do well to avoid. If they have set up signs and left us rules for their interpretation, we might, in the end, perceive such help to be a threat. If, however, the self exists in a multitude of locations, then what haunts us may be the lesson that we have not bothered to learn.
For what harms can heal. What does not kill us can potentially make us stronger, unless, as with Nietzsche, it strips us of our identity altogether. True harmony is disjunctive. We know that evil exists. We know the top 28 people hold as much wealth as the bottom three and one half billion. Trauma? Whose fault is that? We are fetuses. We are innocent. You can see how happily we kick against our wombs. It is said that the spheres make music.
Earth’s rulers would prefer to rule, for that is the role to which their memories have assigned them. This leads them to see the destruction of an ocean in the light of a bigger picture. In terms of vision, it is only practical that I not attribute too much virtue to myself, that I not be quick to accuse. I have benefited as much as anyone from the extraction of rare elements, such as tantalum, from the Congo. I wear socks manufactured by starving children in Bangladesh. I keep my milk in a refrigerator, thus adding to the spread of HFCs and helping to push Earth’s temperature towards the point of no return. Like the rulers who have conspired to take away my breath, I am also very old, what did not kill me has made me stronger but less sane, and my relationship to the living has grown steadily more ambivalent.
I have taken what I need. I fear no unseen hand, and I do not need to be liberated. Able finally to act as a good parent to the child that I was, and am, I am intent on making use of every scrap of my experience. The years now rearrange themselves, permitting me to wander through each period of my development. Time turns into horizontal space, as though the future and the past were no more than the handicapped-accessible rooms of a museum.
__
Untimely Books will be publishing my book of essays Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence sometime over the next few months. If you have a chance, perhaps you could let me know of any podcasts that might be good for me to do.
Keep up the good work.
Best wishes,
Brian George