Remarkable Heresies

“The beyond can only be experienced through its parousia, its presence. This presence of the beyond is a formative presence that pervades the whole of reality in the form of things. In itself this beyond is non-experientiable, but since experience somehow reveals the beyond of experience mysteriously present in experience, this beyond needs to be evoked. But in conjuring this beyond, consciousness must inevitably image it in the ambiguous and limited form of be­ing-things, that is, ‘objectively’ through symbols and concepts, even though these symbols and concepts refer to no object” Michael P. Morrissey Consciousness and Transcendence

Do you ask to be conscious of this freedom? But do you also consider that all your consciousness is only possible via your freedom and that the condi­tion cannot be contained in what is conditioned?—F. W. J. Schelling, Vom Ich als Princip der Philosophieoder uber das Unbedingte im menschlichen Wissen

Momentous events appear to be upon us now - yet the ‘reality’ of these events is not beyond dispute; a captured mass, or ‘world’ consciousness, ever more mediated by channels of communication which control not only content, but thought process as well, is proven incapable of diverting it’s attention from the intended narrative. Societies & economies, with less and less direct relation to physical ‘things,’ - handled as tactile forms (thus useful to guage ‘the real’ as distinguished from ‘virtual’)

can be maneuvered into conflict or even auto-destruction, according to the wishes of actors whose presence is never more than imputed! More and more humans have been inveigled into viewing their world almost exclusively through the screens of their ‘devices’ - it behooves one therefore to review the meanings assigned to that word - screen - so as to be in no doubt what is happening… “before our eyes” … if not our ‘awareness.’

SCREEN - AS VERB ‘conceal, protect, or shelter (someone or something) with a screen or something forming a screen.’ ‘something that covers or disguises the true nature (as of an activity or feeling)’ : a system for examining and separating into different groups. ‘a piece of apparatus designed to prevent agencies in one part from affecting other parts.’ AS SYNONYM ‘bulwark, cover, defend, fence, guard, shield ward

from the sum of which the detached observer of the present moments’ descent into the maelstrom of universal terror can easily see the outlines of the CRIMINAL CONSPIRACY to DEFRAUD the human consciousness of it’s base conditon of ‘freedom’ - freedom of thought, springing from an ‘unconditioned’ awareness of what is ‘real’ - in other terms, our world as tangible, tactile phenomena “unmediated” by those ‘devices,’ ‘systems,’ ‘programs,’ or ‘loyalties’ which reduce our freedom of action to consumptive 'options’ retailed by dark forces.

The arrival of this means of mediating consciousness was celebrated in the previous century as a ‘revolution’ as great as- or greater than - that of the printing press. Supposed ‘prophet’ and high priest of this cultural revolution which arrived via “the screen,” Marshall McLuhan was presented as advocate for this displacement of ‘the real’ by the ‘virtual’ which he was - in truth - decidedly NOT. This displacement of his own position in the overall storyline by which the field of ‘communications’ has acceded to primacy in human affairs, reads as an ironic subtext to that ‘revolution’ itself. Yet very very few - either within academia, or in the wider world beyond - are aware of the innately ‘conservative’ and entirely skeptical view of ‘the screen’ and it’s users which McLuhan maintained throughout his career as media pundit and observer.

The irony quotient increases when it is realized that this world-renowned celebrant of the ‘democratization’ of knowledge and communication, as achieved via the transformative tools of media applied to the ‘global village’… ended up being more or less ‘exiled’ to a ‘village’ which bore ominous resemblance to that of Patrick McGoohans’ “THE PRISONER,” in his iconic television series of that same name!

After selling literally MILLIONS of copies of his books on media and technologies, to the great profit of his publishers, McLuhan was ‘screened’ from his own audience, when it came time to celebrate that tremendous success - by publishing the work of his which started it all - The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time.

Long past the moment of his own departure from this sordid dimension, McLuhans seminal study of the social and intellectual decay now in full flower world wide remained verboten - a single tattered copy of that thesis in the library at Oxford was all that was allowed to remain witness to his achievement - till finally, in 2006, a soul brave enough to publish it was found. What could have been so incendiary - or revealing - in the contents of a screed written as a Phd thesis during WW2? Nothing, really… if you buy into the perception of it as presented by those who have reviewed the post-humus publication…

with one exception>

BILL KUHNS THE WAR WITHIN THE WORD: MCLUHAN'S HISTORY OF THE TRIVIUM is a remarkable introduction to the heart of the matter; what made the soft-spoken scholar such a threat to the machine which had manipulated his own work into a seeming endorsement of its own shadowy culture war"? As such, it’s worth quoting from Kuhn’s article at some length:

"Only the traditionalist can be radical," he would remark in 1947, four years after completing his thesis, "The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time." The sources into which he immerses himself in the thesis are profoundly traditionalist: the mainstream figures of Western thought from the pre-Socratic era to the period of Francis Bacon and Erasmus. But McLuhan's purposes haven't the faintest gloss of traditionalist habits of thought.

Today two great ironies fall in mingled shadow over the Nashe thesis. The first is that it was never published. (In 1969 McGraw-Hill announced the upcoming publication in 1970, but it never appeared. But the absence of the Nashe thesis from McLuhan's available work tends to underscore a perhaps greater irony. The Nashe study contains, in historically fixed coordinates that are sighted as distantly as the Greeks, the exact precedents and traditions to which McLuhan's later thought belongs-indeed, the company to which he himself belongs.

But he is also announcing the precipice at which he makes the audacity of his leap

Having loaded the cannon with enough combustibles to achieve desired effect, Kuhn takes full aim with ‘the money shot’ =

“In conjoining the pre-Socratic era and the Middle Ages as the high moments in the history of the trivium, McLuhan flips most conceptions of Western history on their heads. It is hardly enticing to imagine what company McLuhan might share by championing preliterate Greece and "the dark ages" as the high moments of human culture. Yet his faith in the analogical balance of the trivium demands this audacious revisiting of history. What might these ages have been had our civilization followed their lead, their aspirations, and not the routes paved by Aristotle, Ramus, Descartes and company? What philosophies, arts, sciences, might have sprung from a Western culture nurtured by an undivided sense of the word? “

Choosing Marshall McLuhan as the subject of this posting has the decided advantage of making easy the logical continuity of this STUDY IN HERESIES series. The hidden meanings and real significance of his works branch off naturally into the realm of those of contemporaneous intellectual ‘heretics’ I’ve focused my interest upon previously… but also direct attention to some new ones. They point one, for instance, in the direction of “political philosophy” - a subject so seemingly dry and devoid of interest to anyone seeking an ‘exit’ to the entire farce of modernity - yet the consequences of avoiding a most careful examination of that field of endeavor show up right now…

in the farce being played out around us in the contemporary ‘geopolitical’ sphere, where a script so ragged, transparent, and lacking in subtlety as to be equaled only by the “kovid-kaper” storyline it replaces…. gets turned into an ‘action adventure’ thriller which supposedly pits ‘west’ against ‘east’… ‘liberal democracy’ against ‘totalitarian barbarism’ and so on. We don’t have to look very far, to see the evidence of that very same GIANT SWINDLE which created the myth of “western civilization” in the first place…

and then used it to cloak the centuries long campaign to nudge us all back into a state of devolved, neo-feudal penury and enslavement… hiding behind the dangled utopia of ‘woke’ socialist/facsist leftish dogma. The presumed ‘opponents’ of which are so sadly devoid of any moral or intellectual ammunition as to seem no more than ‘ducks in a shooting gallery! Granted that there is likely no hope at all for those hapless stooges - who all too willingly bought into the platitudes of a phony ‘right’ which serves merely as the covert adjunct of the leftish assault,

nevertheless, it is quite possible to assemble a trenchant and EFFECTIVE counter narrative to that brand of culture war. The outlines of which will only begin to become clear, after we parse the disparate works of our assembled HERETICS and collect the results together as a coherent ‘package’ of critique!

To which end, I welcome those who dare imagine themselves at liberty to choose their own - and our collective - destiny! An admittedly absurd - perhaps even ‘demented’ attitude at this point in time, yet nevertheless, both ‘noble’ and necessary. “Transcending” the errors which have resulted from several millenia worth of false witnessing, on the part of presumed ‘wise men’ whose credentials in the end will prove as fraudulent as their doctrines,

is the work of those among us who have cast aside the ‘mask of knowledge’ as acquisitive enterprise, to breathe the pure “beyond of experience mysteriously present in experience”… which, like Anaximander’s apeiron, lies open to the gaze of all who would see… outside the screen of conventional perception

!

To the chase then!

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now… on to the Part Two of this gnarly ‘manifesto’ of heretical celebration!

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Towards the end of a two year period during the previous decade, where I focused my attention upon ‘geopolitical’ themes, I found myself more and more drawn to the work of Eric Voegelin - a man whose name is so little known in contemporary circles of philosophy and politics both, as to be as good as ‘forgotten.’ Because of that unfortunate situation I am compelled to quote from the biographic sketch presented on the site voegelinview.com, so as to indicate why the man’s work may be considered integral to my purpose here:

Eric Voegelin’s work is variously described as a philosophy of politics, a philosophy of history, or a philosophy of consciousness, but he most often characterized his work as political science and himself as a political philosopher. Born in Cologne, Germany in 1901, some of his earliest childhood experiences, later recalled in 1943, became the basis of his philosophy of consciousness and are described in his book Anamnesis (from the Greek “remembrance).”

After emigrating to the United States in 1938, he devoted his life to understanding the spiritual disorders and political violence which began in the fifteenth century and reached their apogee in our own time. His own writings have drawn both accolades and criticism, as well as his original historical studies on such varied topics as Marx, the Mongols, and Machiavelli.

He did post-doctoral studies in the United States from 1924 to 1926 and in Paris after that, teaching political theory and sociology at the University of Vienna after his habilitation in 1928. He published two books analyzing racism in 1933 and this forced his flight from Austria following the Anschluss in 1938. After a brief stay in Switzerland, he arrived in the United States and taught at a series of universities before joining Louisiana State University’s Department of Government in 1942, becoming a U.S. citizen in 1944.

He remained in Baton Rouge at LSU until 1958 when he accepted the Max Weber chair in political science at Munich’s Ludwig Maximilians Universität. The chair had been vacant since Weber’s death in 1920. While in Munich he founded the Institut für Politische Wissenschaft. Voegelin returned to America in 1969 to join Stanford University as well as the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. After retirement from the university he continued his work to the very day of his death on January 19, 1985.

Publications

Voegelin published many books and scores of essays and reviews in his lifetime. He also left a number of manuscripts unpublished, including the massive History of Political Ideas that has since his death been published in eight volumes. His 1951 Charles R. Walgreen lectures at the University of Chicago, Truth and Representation, were published in 1952 under the title The New Science of Politics. Often seen as seminal in relationship to his later work, this small book made him famous, even earning a cover story in Time Magazine.

His magnum opus is the five volume Order and History, the last volume of which he was working on when he died. Order and History was originally conceived as an attempt to discern meaning in history through an examination of the history of order, an examination made possible by the burgeoning of non-ideological historiography. Voegelin undertook this task after he decided his previous large undertaking—the History of Political Ideas (existing then only as a manuscript)—was miscast by focusing on ideas rather than on experiences. Like all his writings, it was undertaken in response to his experience of the ruinous and often murderous disorders of our time.

none of which makes direct reference to his work on the subject of ‘gnosticism’ - work which I deem to be likely his most important…

but the sketch serves to place him in time and space, as well as alluding to the vast ground covered by his scholarly attentions. If the metaphysical theme of ‘consciousness’ serves as overall backdrop to his works, nevertheless it is in the political theory formats that his thinking takes on its most important dimension -

seeing the inherent gnostic roots of nazism and communism both, he was able to place the current we’ve come to know as “marxism” in it’s proper context, as a form of utopian speculation which seeks ‘perfection on earth’ at the expense of everything which makes the world habitable or even worth living in! For this, among other reasons, he became associated by most with the conservative movement in the post-war USA, yet he refused to be consigned to such an identity, in fact he pithily cut the legs out from under any attempt to do so, with the memorable line

“Just because I am not stupid enough to be a liberal does not mean I am stupid enough to be a conservative.”

which should tell you enough by itself as to why the man gets included in my offering of GREAT ICONOCLASTS OF ALL TIME(aka “heretical” thinkers!), in this devolved era when the pressure to choose a ‘team’ and root for it’s scripted shenanigans throughout the phony ‘events’ which are paraded every day

is almost overwhelming! “Leftish” or “Rightish” bullshit is compulsory to subscribe to - if you fail to choose sides, then your voice is effectively ‘canceled’ - as there is no one willing to listen to what you might think about the contemporary situation. Likewise, phony ‘nationalism’ is the order of the day; one roots for this or that puppet ‘government’ so as to be able to ‘forget’ for a moment the ugly truth that there are no sovereign ‘states’ in this world - simply STATES OF TERROR occupying various territories temporarily - with the long term aim of merging under one banner of universal bondage.

That ‘freedom’ and ‘consciousness’ are descriptors of a ‘legacy’ desire to be left out of that ghoulish program should be uppermost in the minds of any who remain mentally and physically ‘active’ enough to propose ‘delistment’ from such enslavement. Currently, luminaries of the bizarre but bustling demi-monde of ‘transhumanism’ are proclaiming free will and consciousness to be entirely passe; one’s brain is entirely malleable to currently operable ‘technologies - they can delete one’s memories, download them, exchange them with others, read one’s thoughts - all entirely plausible, and a logical corollary of the physical assault on the body which the kovid-kaper performed!

Real resistors to that program may find it strange that a moment be taken to study the works of ‘philosophers’ - surely the very least “active” of persons and useless to the ‘practical-oriented’ performer of late-stage neo-human resistance…

but my experience in building a pro-active response to this evil mandate over the course of 12 sustained years of nuts n bolts, trial n error DIY resistance indicates otherwise. Lots of folks can similarly build a bug out shelter, gather resources for sustainable, independent food production, create alternative systems of mobility, communication and so on…

but they’ve lost the plot long ago. To have stayed put in the fallen lands of the wester world, somehow convincing themselves that the MAIN ENEMY would never dare simply WIPE EVERYONE THERE OFF THE MAP … is the strategic error supreme. Tactical expertise is of little value under such circumstance.

Of course one can argue that any forthcoming nuclear exchange is as likely as not to wipe out ALL life on earth - but the pattern which has been established to date is a recurring cycle of large scale devastation in particular parts of the planet, causing the downfall of existing civilizations/populations there, followed by a long ‘recovery’ interval during which all - or almost all - knowledge of that past is completely gone.

Elements of those distant past places may remain with us, in the form of myths and legends which bear a common theme among widely different peoples, but it would appear that “history,” at least as it is known and practiced in the wester world, have been written deliberately to distort or cover up those memories. Having spent the past 8 months or so seeking to retrieve those patchy and distorted memories, I’m confident in predicting that this time round, more than likely some parts of this world will see humanity carry on in some form or other.

Of interest to me, in the work previously assembled as my take on ‘post-western living,’ has been just what “form” that edition of LIFE ON PLANET EARTH may take. It was in that same context I introduced the legacy of Ludwig von Klages - like Voegelin, Heidegger, and others of that Germanic stream of investigators who dared depart from the insipid “Hegelian” norm,

a man who saw ‘philosophy’ as a stepping stone to practical performance - performance as ritualized celebration of the amazing opportunity which one’s ‘being born’ into this world presents! Arid metaphysical speculations - such as which the Hellenes specialised in producing - could at last be put aside for ‘grown up’ thinking…

thinking the time for which will apparently only arrive after the devolved mensch of the dying wester world are eliminated from the playing field. It is in preparation for that moment - which appears ever closer on the horizon each day now - that I enter into this phase of my work. Reviewing the high points of previous achievements by which the best and brightest of that dying world pointed the way towards what might follow,

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Common grounds

Both men had critiques of modernity not as bad in an of itself, but where it disrupts traditions worth preserving… McLuhan focusing on the effects of media & technology, Voegelin on the political implications of consciousness as altered by distortions of perception. But Voegelin’s case was weakened by his reluctance to acknowledge his debts to predecessors like von Klages & Schelling.