Feeling Hyperstitious?

Did our great postmodern authors of paranoid anxiety - Kurt Vonnegut, JG Ballard, Don DeLillo - subliminally predict today's tech-fascist collapse?

Robert Rauschenberg Scanning, 1963

I’m feeling a desire to veer away from political commentary toward fiction, film, art, and other forms of mythic narrative. I’m not sure yet what that will mean for this newsletter. We will see. I am curious to hear your thoughts and ideas. Please let me know in the comments.

At the moment, I don’t see the point in continuing to smash my skull against this nightmarish political reality day after day. I admit I have become a kind of progressive news junkie. Late at night, I stay up watching different liberal analysts and former Republicans (the Bulwark) on Youtube. I realize I am only watching all of this because I keep hoping for some sudden sign of a return to collective sanity in all of the clickbait. I find it difficult to accept this isn’t going to happen.

I yearn to find a path of meaningful action that can thwart this Fascist takeover. I intend to keep writing and experimenting about that. But I feel increasingly pessimistic — dubious that any near-term positive change is possible in the U.S. Too many people are too far gone.

The dominance of well-funded Right Wing media has become overwhelming in America. Fox and other Right Wing television have completely mind-controlled perhaps a third of the U.S. population. These people have retracted into the lowest, most primitive instincts around race, fear, hatred of the other, and group identity. They have abandoned self-reflection for absorption into a dank, dreary hive-mind. Other people are susceptible to more subtle expressions of the “anti-woke mind virus”, taking parts of it in without realizing it.

Even in New York City, people feel different than they did a decade ago, more drastically dissociated. I encounter many different types of people daily in my meanderings around the metropolis. If I am honest, many young people seem almost twitchily synthetic — they have assimilated into a TikTok reality of hyper-normalization, becoming living stereotypes (NPCs) lining up like zombies to buy the latest Superdry or Nike. They are psychically checked out to a degree that makes it difficult to imagine them becoming self-reflective or forming a meaningful resistance to the rapid, cancerous spread of an all-pervasive, invisible tech-fascism.

I’m sensing the only way to respond to this effectively is to plunge into mythic narrative — to try to change the zeitgeist at some deep, tonal level.

It occurs to me perhaps, more than anything, storytelling, fiction, film, art, as well as philosophy, have inflected this current situation, inciting this disintegration. The Bible, for instance, is a story. Patriotism is a story, a mythic narrative. Even capital — money — is just a story, a belief system: The post-Marxist political philosopher Antonio Negri defined capital as a “social relation.” Perhaps it is through fiction — myth-making — that we can find our way out of this, if there is any way.

In magical practice, occultists talk about the sigil: An icon or totem that binds occult energies. It could be a symbol, a meme, a book, a video or a film. I feel we need new counter-sigils — a counter-magical art practice — to overcome the black Moloch curse that has been put on us.

A very popular term at the moment is “hyperstition” — a melding of “hyper” and “superstition” — originally coined by the cyberneticist/philosopher collective CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit), which included the creepy Nick Land (Dark Enlightenment prophet) and tech theorist Sadie Plant. The group was loosely affiliated with the University of Warwick in the 1990s. Since then, the term has been absorbed into critical theory, art and occultism, migrating from fringe corners of internet subculture into the mainstream.

Hyperstition refers to ideas or narratives that, as they are believed and circulated, pull themselves into reality. Unlike superstitions, which are seen as irrational beliefs defended by a false causality, hyperstitions are fictions that re-engineer reality and turn themselves into truth: Stories that make themselves real. Starting out as memes, they gain tangible, phenomenological power, shaping culture and behavior, altering societal outcomes — sometimes in strange and unanticipated directions. The NxReactionary and Dark Enlightenment has discovered the power of hyperstitions in a way the democratic alternative has not. Trump’s insistence he won the 2020 election is one demoralizing example.

Apparently, Trump’s hires in the FBI are actively seeking out evidence to support their paranoid QANON delusions. I wonder if, eventually, rather than admitting they were wrong, they will manufacture that evidence (deep fakes, etc), and then arrest people because of it. Anything seems possible at this point. Trump and FOX have broken our collective contract with evidence-based reality, leading to the Fascistic regression — the submersion under the dark waters of the unconscious — that Carl Jung, among others, warned against.

As I experience the devastating sequence of current events, I keep thinking of a handful of novelists who deeply inspired me decades ago, when I was an avid fiction reader and wanted, above all, to be a novelist. I am thinking, in particular, of Kurt Vonnegut, JG Ballard, and Don Delillo. They seem super relevant.

I used to read fiction voraciously. I started a literary journal, Open City, in my twenties. Then I left literature behind. I resolved a personal crisis of nihilism by diving into psychedelic shamanism, writing my first books about it. In my thirties, I had many profound psychic and transpersonal experiences.

In my mid thirties, I realized we were approaching a literal “Apocalypse” due to ecological, archetypal, and geopolitical factors. I decided to focus single-mindedly on how to change the collective Psyche and “save the world” by initiating a new movement of consciousness integrated with regenerative practices and a new, cooperative societal redesign. I tried and ultimately failed to instigate this with my company and nonprofit, Evolver. I underwent a psychological collapse.

For a few decades, I stopped reading novels or paying much attention to cultural phenomena such as movies, rock or hiphop, or Netflix series. Most of this seemed like an adolescent waste of time to me, when we collectively confront a crisis of imminently approaching civilizational collapse or extinction. Now many of those novels I read so long ago have somewhat blurred together.

I was thinking about the “hyperstitious” quality of Delillo, Vonnegut, and Ballard, and how, from this remove, they seem incredibly similar as authors, in their dry and ironic styles, their emotional reserve, their focus on paranoid and conspiratorial themes. An incipient sense of the “end of the world” or Apocalypse haunts all of their works. Ballard, for instance, said: “I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: Disneyland. I think it’s going to be a much more sinister place than it’s ever been seen to be.” These three authors felt the incipient Fascism lurking behind the glossy ad campaigns, the techno-eroticism of consumer culture, with its rituals of mass submission (like the giant Rev Moon cult marriage that opens DeLillo’s Mao II).

From this distance, I find them almost like one mind — one cultural, existential ambiance — taking different forms and expressing somewhat different facets of our deepening dilemma. Each of them was obsessed with the dehumanizing and deranging effects of modern life, the hypnotizing power of mass media, the postmodern or post-human undertone of psychosexual cruelty or Fascist violence that seems to presage some dark culmination.

Right now, we seem to be living in a dystopian novel that is similar in tone and style to the works of Vonnegut, Ballard, and Delillo, but exceeds the imaginative capacity of any human author. It is, indeed, hard not to suspect we are living in some kind of simulation, considering all of the poetic, synchronistic, mythological flourishes. To consider just a few examples: Pope Francis — a principled pontiff as pontiffs go — dying just a few hours after his meeting with JD Vance, the former atheist, now phony Catholic. Our sociopathic VP will utterly betray any value or use any lie if it helps him attain power. One can’t escape the feeling that the Pope expired just after meeting the devil, who has taken a vaguely human form.

Another example was the LA fires that precisely erupted around Trump’s inauguration — as if to envelop, annihilate, the traditional Hollywood dream factory, generally considered a liberal or “Blue” enclave.