Look What You Made Me Do
Pop Culture, Monarch Programming, and Mind Control
I want to continue my “rhizomatic thought cluster” on the demonic and daemonic elements in contemporary popular culture: these are things I have been reflecting on, inconclusively, for many years. By putting them out into the public sphere, I hope to hone my analysis and also purge them from my Psyche to move on…
Look What You Made Me Do
This investigation is partly inspired by the Vigilant Citizen’s article on Taylor Swift’s video, “Look What You Made Me Do”, with over one billion views on Youtube. VC argues:
The symbolism of the video directly refers to the sinister side of the entertainment industry and its obsession with mind control… LWYMMD is indeed a blatantly obvious Monarch manifesto… The main goal of Monarch is to program slaves to have multiple personas that can be triggered at will. Beta Programming (aka Sex Kitten programming) is used to create sex slaves to be trafficked in the shady elite underworld.
About Monarch programming, VC writes:
Monarch programming is a mind-control technique comprising elements of Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA) and Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD). It utilizes a combination of psychology, neuroscience and occult rituals to create within the slaves an alter persona that can be triggered and programmed by the handlers. Monarch slaves are used by several organizations connected with the world elite in fields such as the military, sex slavery, and the entertainment industry.
The Swift video starts with the iconic pop star rising from the dead after being re-programmed. She then practices “sex kitten” techniques before she becomes the leader of an army of sexy, faceless mannequin women. The video ends with Swift’s various subpersonalities or “alters” arguing with each other. The title refers to Swift’s handlers in the industry, who program her behavior: “The video symbolically describes what happens to stars who get caught up in the higher levels of the occult entertainment industry. Although they are insanely successful, they also become slaves to the industry, with no life of their own,” VC speculates.
Later in this essay, I will explore the question of whether Monarch programming is something that happens in reality (VC claims two million Americans have been subjected to it, which seems outlandish), or if it is, instead, a kind of conspiracy theory archetype that keeps emerging autonomously because it expresses something about our collective condition at this time. It certainly stretches the Overton window to take it seriously!
Pop Culture as a Control System
As Antonio Gramsci explored in his Prison Notebooks, the ruling elite exerts “hegemonic” control over society through political and economic means, but also needs to produce and disseminate cultural narratives that reinforce the dominant worldview. Popular culture, including music, art, literature, and film, plays a crucial role in this. Mass media works as a “consciousness control” or “occult control” system. Through indoctrination and repetition, mainstream popular culture traps the frequency of the collective, maintaining a consensus trance.
A powerful arrangement of sigils, myths, and rituals keeps the collective from awakening. Awakening would mean breaking from the hegemonic spell and working together to confront our ecological and geopolitical emergency. Awakening requires a real-life movement toward collective political, economic, and spiritual liberation — something most people do not imagine to be possible, at this point. As long as it can't be imagined, it remains out of bounds.
Even as we approach planetary meltdown, people continue to obey remote authorities (imprinted into their subconscious via what Freud named the Super Ego). They are indoctrinated into the dominant worldview, unable to respond intuitively, creatively, and spontaneously to the dire threats facing our world.
Lacking public spaces and forums for authentic action and debate, we get trapped in the programming, which includes hyper-consumerism, fake democracy, romantic love, “perpetual self-optimization,” standardized learning, entrepreneurial competition, and so on. We have even been trained, Walter Benjamin realized in the 1930s, to enjoy the spectacle of our own ruin: “Humanity’s self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”
We are like tiny cells within a gigantic life-form — a hyper-adaptive, complex system which works to perpetuate itself even as it changes continuously. In his excellent book Mediated, Thomas De Zengotita looks at the system’s absorptive capacity and gives it a name: “The Blob.” The Blob eventually figures out how to absorb anything that might trouble or challenge it. The ongoing assimilation of the psychedelic experience into entrepreneurial Capitalism provides a good example of blobbiness in action. What was once considered so dangerous that it needed to be legally and culturally repressed has now been tamed. Instead of threatening the system, it now feeds energy to the system by creating a new market.
The popular media normalizes structural injustice and extreme wealth inequality. Endless shows promote technocratic control, apocalyptic and world-ending scenarios that make this system seem inescapable. Popular series like Squid Game, You, or The OA exaggerate and gamify domination, surveillance, and predation. They perpetuate the system by glamorizing and dramatizing its techniques for causing dissociation. Where are the series about people building anarchist utopias, seeking authentic transcendence, or creating new systems of value and meaning outside of this one? It even seems absurd, laughable, to ask this.
The system traps the mass consciousness in a narrow bandwidth, with a limited ideological, imaginative, and emotional range. It does this by propagating anxiety-inducing news, mindless sports spectacles, distracting narratives, sexual provocations, disruptive musical frequencies, antidepressants, and so on. It promotes hegemony through the architecture of its glass skyscrapers and malls. As a society, we are always in “crisis,” forced to be reactive rather than proactive. Sleek gadgets like iPhones make our current system seem air-tight, inescapable. The ecocidal impact of our gleaming gadgets matters less than our culture’s quest for the techno-futurist ideal. We are entrained to believe in the fantasy of an upcoming technological Singularity that will fix everything, instantly.
I realize that exploring the Satanic/Ahrimanic undercurrents of popular culture might seem a waste of time, compared to researching proactive “solutions” such as building networks of community resilience (a theme of Embracing Our Emergency, our current seminar). But I feel we need a more accurate mapping of how power — above all, its occult, invisible underside — operates, before we can intervene effectively. Carl Jung wrote: “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” Also, in some strange way, I find this fun.
The philosophy of monistic or analytic idealism allows us to approach the occult and archetypal elements of popular culture in a more coherent way.
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