I'd gone along to Conway Hall for a London Fortean Society talk about the influence of occultism, esoterica, and chaos magick on the far right ultra conservative side of politics but I was to start my evening with something of a very welcome surprise.
On taking my seat I Googled the speaker Gary Lachman to see if I could find out more about him. I certainly could. His Wikipedia page revealed he used to call himself Gary Valentine and was a founder member of Blondie who played bass in that band and wrote the music for X-Offender and the music AND lyrics for their huge hit single, the rather beautiful '(I'm Always Touched By Your) Presence, Dear'.
What's more, as the evening went on Gary revealed that the lady he'd written that song for was not only in the audience but was sitting a seat but one from me. She looked as embarrassed as she did touched to have this brought to the audience's attention.
Completing a hat-trick of Blondie based revelations on the way home from the walk, on my way to the 63 bus stop on Blackfriars Road, I looked up the lyrics to '(I'm Always Touched By Your) Presence, Dear' and found that they're peppered with references to psychic frequencies, theosophies, levitating lovers, secret stratospheres, and outer entities. Gary Lachman/Valentine is not new to this stuff. That single came out in April 1978. He's been doing it for at least forty years
After he left Blondie he played for a while with various other bands and toured with Iggy Pop before moving to London in 1996 (the same year as me) and becoming a full time writer (sadly, unlike me) contributing to The Guardian, Mojo, and the Times Literary Supplement before putting out books on subjects like the countercultural revolution of the 1960s, his own role in the punk wars, and, bringing us back to the talk itself, occultism, consciousness, and 'spiritual science'.
As I sat with my bottle of Volvic and packet of mints (I was 'rewarding' myself for getting my blood pressure down to a 'good' level by having an evening off the sauce) and people snapped up copies of Lachman's new book 'Dark Star Rising:Magick and Power in the Age of Trump', the second part also the name of this talk, the room filled up nicely and Lachman began by outlining the recent, and curious, rise of occult politics in the USA, Russia, and Europe.
He made it clear that occultism isn't just employed by ultra-conservatives and devotees of the far-right but all across the political spectrum, his last book 'Politics and the Occult:The Right, The Left, and The Radically Unseen' in 2008 had tackled that, but that, tonight, he was here to talk specifically about that end of politics and his most recent book's writing, and this speech, were both, of course, inspired by the rise of one particularly divisive and insidious character. You've guessed it. It's the man everyone loves to hate. It's Donald Trump.
"We made this dream our reality" are the words that white supremacist alt-right founder Richard Spencer said on the election of Trump to a room full of two hundred odd members of the National Policy Institute who gave him and Trump not only a standing ovation but a Nazi salute. Although Spencer later backtracked and claimed it wasn't a Nazi salute but a good old fashioned Roman salute. Hmmm.
What Spencer was trying to say with "we made this dream our reality" is that, somehow, Spencer and his ilk had used the power of their minds to will Donald Trump into the White House. It's a bit like Noel Edmond's infamous cosmic ordering but with even more terrifying results.
Movements like New Thought, Mind Power, and Mental Science all drill down deep on the idea that "thoughts create reality". Not necessarily in a direct way but in a mysterious, indirect, way. This was the first, but not the last, time that Lachman had me wondering. His talk was fascinating, if a little necessarily inchoate, but he did lose me a bit at times.
He backed up his assertion of the possibility, if not the probability, of thoughts creating reality by saying that noted thinkers from Plato to Jung, from John Locke to Emmanuel Swedenborg, and even Samuel Taylor Coleridge had all posited similar, if highly differently motivated, theories in the past. Certainly none of those names would have used what Spencer and his racist friends did. Something called 'meme magic'.
So the story began of how Pepe the Frog, once a harmless amphibian slacker, drifted to the dark side. The young Donald Trump was a devotee of New Thought and, with his father, used to attend Norman Vincent Peale's sermons at the Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue in New York. Peale wrote, in 1952, the negatively reviewed but hugely influential and massively popular 'The Power of Positive Thinking' and Trump was so enamoured of the man and his ideas that he even had his first two weddings in Peale's church.
Peale, and his book, and his sermons, drummed into Trump that success is everything and in Trump's own book (which he almost definitely didn't write) Trump echoes the mantra that winning is all that matters to the degree that he openly admits he'll do anything within the bounds of legality to win. Morals simply don't come in to it and it's not a stretch to imagine the clause about legality was only included to save him future lawsuits. Does anyone really believe that Donald Trump does not consider himself above the law?
Trump claimed he was Peale's greatest student ever. Of course, he did. Trump claims he's the greatest at everything ever. Trump lies as easily as he breathes. Judging by his diet probably easier. Trump also learnt from Peale that facts don't matter but how we think about, or present, these 'facts' or, in the words of the heinous Kellyanne Conway, the 'alternative facts'.
Lachman made a case for this line of thinking dating back to the Stoic school of Hellenistic philosophy but we didn't have time to linger on all things Greek (this talk could have veered off on so many different routes and remained utterly absorbing) and soon moved on to chaos magick. Trump's not a magician himself (no shit) but he does use some of the techniques of chaos magick to empower himself.
It's a results based technique that is utilitarian, practical, and functional. Trump doesn't see reality as a stable thing. Hence we now have post-truth and fake news. Nietzsche predicted that this kind of nihilism would arrive in the 21st century and so it has come to pass. If deconstructionism and post-modernism have 'liberated' us from Western rationalism then at what cost and who seeks to benefit?
People like Steve Bannon and Aleksandr Dugin unfortunately, it seems. In front of an audience at the Vatican in 2014 Bannon spoke about his usual bete noires of Islamofascism (which is a very real thing) and immigration (which has been used to whip up hatred and isn't related to Islamofascism) but he also namechecked one Julius Evola, an Italian esoteric thinker of the extreme right who felt Mussolini's ideas not to be sufficiently fascist and threw his lot in with the Nazis instead. Due to his ideological form of racism (he believed your race was defined by your 'soul', Hitler and the rest believed you couldn't change your race) he was unable to work with them. Though his racism of the soul was just as pernicious as Hitler's racism of the blood.
Post-war, Evola's writings found popularity amongst and informed Italian neo-fascist groups and this is why Bannon mentioned him. His 'magical' way of influencing, or controlling, people using chaos was adapted by Aleksandr Dugin, the man known as Putin's Rasputin for the power he carries in Putin's court. Bannon, a fan of Putin's 'traditional values' was talking about Evola in context with Dugin.
Dugin is also a devotee of chaos magic and hopes to use it to create an all out war that causes the 'end of times'. Scared yet? Or does this sound like bullshit? Well, Dugin's ideas, as interpreted by Putin, have already caused, or at least helped to cause, the wars in Ukraine and Crimea. Many deaths have come from Dugin's ideas and many more will do still.
Dugin's belief system is a pick'n'mix of many things. Stalinism, Nazism, fascism but definitely not 'liberal democracy'. An idea he decries as 'decadent' and responsible for all that is wrong in the world. He styles himself as the antithesis to Francis Fukuyama's now, admittedly discredited (thanks to the likes of Dugin), theory that we are at the 'end of history'.
To show how far back this illiberal philosophy goes Lachman took a brief detour into one of Evola's key influences, the French author Rene Guenon who also went under the name Abd al-Wahid Yahya. Guenon believed that Western culture had been deteriorating for centuries and saw the Renaissance as one of the key engines in that change as it spurred people away from spiritual and aesthetic concerns towards rationalist thought and theory.
Hugely influenced by Hinduism, Guenon thought we were currently in the Kali-Yuga stage or cycle, described in the Sanskrit scriptures as a time of strife, quarrel, and discord but one that would eventually give way to the golden age of Satya Yuga when humanity is governed by gods and every manifestation or work is close to the purest ideal and humanity will allow intrinsic goodness to rule supreme. It seems Guenon, Evola, Dugin, and Bannon (and indeed ISIS, philosophically their fellow travelers) feel that this age needs to be pushed into action, willed into being, and if a global war possibly resulting in several million or even several billion deaths is the outcome then that's a price worth paying. That's what they call collateral damage.
Both Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl have said, after a fashion, that what happens in the mind informs not just our perception of the world but the actual world we percieve. Jung's concept of synchronicity, or 'meaningful coincidences', has been transferred to cyberspace and turned into 'meme magic' or synchromysticism and Lachman cited a list of coincidences relating to the Germanwings Flight 9525 that crashed in to the Alps north west of Nice in March 2015 killing 150 people.
This was the only time in the talk I felt Lachman might've been reading too much into coincidence. He didn't say these things were probable but he said they were possible. I though they were pure coincidence. We'll have to disagree on that. I'm not falling out with the bassist of Blondie, no way!
The coincidences were all to do with the film The Dark Knight Rises! Tom Hardy played Bane in the film and the nearest city to the crash, Divonne-les-bains, has 'bains' in it which sounds a bit similar. That was about the level of it and I felt it wasn't a great example of how this stuff works.
Which was a pity. As the talk had been excellent and it kind of faded out rather than went out with a bang. There's two reasons for that. (1) Lachman has a book to sell (and it looked to me like he was doing okay with it) and (2) this is still ongoing stuff. Looked at from the outside there can be no rational reason why people like Trump and Putin are in power when they're both such obviously destructive forces so we look to irrational forces to try to understand them.
The danger then being that we become as irrational as those we're trying to counter. That, if nothing else, proves the lethal power of chaos and destabilization. It was suggested at the end of the talk that we could use psychic self-defence to think these monsters out of existence but I still believe our best line of defence is to stand firm in our rational denouncing of them, to not fall for their arsonists dressed as fireman schtick, and to educate, agitate, organise whenever we can. March, complain, rant, don't take this shit lying down. Don't let them make you the bad guy.
As we learnt earlier Pepe the Frog started off as an innocent anthropomorphic pond dweller whose catchphrase "Feels good man" is a long way from "It's OK to be white" (or green in his case) but internet trolls and scared little fascists cowering in their bedrooms transitioned him to the far right against his creator's will. Have they done the same with Donald Trump? Is the reality TV show host the simulation that became real? Is Trump the Frankenstein's monster our modern world has allowed us to create that we've now lost control of? Well, Frankenstein's monster only became violent when love was withheld from him. Trump is incapable of even grasping the concept of love so Trump is way worse than any imagined monster. Trump is real, Trump has power, and Trump is actively working to the agenda of people who openly admit that they're looking to advance an all out war and bring about not Fukuyama's end of history but the end of times.
It's time to be very fucking scared indeed. We're all fucked by his presence, dear!
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