Impractical Purpose
A mathematician, a physicist and an engineer are sitting in their usual corner at the end of the bar, sharing a round of drinks on a common tab.
All of a sudden, a beautiful young woman walks in and sits at the opposite end. They make eye contact and raise a glass. The young woman turns the jukebox up loud, orders a strong drink from the bartender and necks it dramatically. She then starts taking off her clothes. She turns to the three men at the other end of the bar and makes them a wager. For each drink they buy her, they get to halve the distance between them.
The Mathematician says, "it’s no use; (f) = n/2 is an infinite geometric series, and it would take eternity to cover the distance between us."
The Physicist disagrees, "we are not points in space, but bodies with extension, so eventually we would be within millimetres of each other as measured from our centres."
But according to his calculations, that would take more money than they have on their tab, and so insists they buy the drinks on credit. The two set about bickering about the nature of the riddle, as their beers go flat, and the bare feet of the strange young woman moves to the music.
Finally, the Engineer calmly sizes up the room between them, and gestures to the barman for four double whiskeys. As the barman puzzles at the increasingly acrimonious dispute over the riddle, the Engineer leans over and winks at him, “Ah, but very soon I shall be close enough for practical purposes! Don’t worry, the other fellas can pick up the tab.”
The Patrons
It is time Western Civilisation faces its death. It has made itself completely sterile and poisonous to all cultures around the world which come in contact with it, and the best anybody can do is build some shelter until the storm passes. It has been quite beautiful at times, of course. The magnificence of Roman and Greek civilisation, the myths of Germania. The purity of the high mediaeval choir and secular song, from Machaut, Ockeghem and Monteverdi, the great Cathedrals and village churches, the castles and cobbled town squares. The symphonies, science and wild experimentation of the Enlightenment, and its rebellious, noisy successors in postmodernity. But the three spiritual streams which formed it, according to Edward Tiryakin (chthonic Paganism, revealed Christianity and gnostic Illuminism) have all in turn run out of steam.
Illuminism is still pretty strong, but it has crested the wave and now rules a global society in decline. The pursuit of arcane knowledge when the entire history of the world is laid bare for all on the internet is futile, and increasing purity cycles of iconoclasm and ideological arcana compete to condemn new heresies at a dizzying pace. The spiritual forms which underpinned this third arm of the West now form little more than idle and commercialised superstitions – the appropriated forms of spiritual wisdom which accrued in the great moment of Western esotericism at the end of the Bretton Woods era, when America was overflowing with gurus and man-gods, cults of ecstasy and hope – these forms have now melted down and mingled in the sweat and gore of Californication. Temporary belief in exalted wisdom from these forms is dabbled in in watered-down forms. Middle-class white women in yoga pants, women’ studies dropouts burning sage because the read that wicca represents the sacred feminine. Silicon valley nootropics nerds and DMT bros hoping the machine elves will tell them something that isn’t pure gibberish. Aleister Crowley fans and dabblers in Eastern mysticism.
But these forms have no institutional staying power, and do not pursue life so much as an escape from it. The only religions which have been able to survive and self-reproduce across a whole society are chthonic or pistic – that is, they are racist, or they are revealed doctrines. The New Age spirituality and its secular moral forms alike, are in constant flux, and exalt the individual and the masses, not the family or the community. It survives on the corpse of dying civilised forms, like a swarm of hagfish on a fallen whale.
Those which centralised soil and blood in their social order preserved themselves by fairly obvious means. Bantu Africa and India have extremely well formed Chthonic spirits, and while the Bantu religious sense, being a variegated and decentralised oral tradition, is rather more difficult to grasp whole. Nevertheless, it is in essence little different than that of any other chthonic tradition, at least in one specific criterion – it reifies the bloodlines of the nation and demands a sacred bond to the soil be honoured by crushing all other groups and preserving racial primacy, in a rather similar fashion many others around the world.
Those of revealed doctrines (Islam, Buddhism, Christianity), reproduce themselves by offering a stable social formation which is carried in an exoteric doctrine, predictable, orderly, and family-friendly. The Boers (at least those who recognise die Belofte) and Jews share the rather unusual trait of being both chthonic and pistic – they have a revealed religion, but that religion bonds them to a certain patch of soil, and certain bloodlines. And the West, as most alive today have known it, has likewise been dominated by an admixture, but lately of Christian and Illuminist thinking.
Illuminism is the modern form of Western esotericism. It is syncretic by nature, and pretends to special knowledge which the enlightened can obtain through secret methods. It has long since been the dominant spiritual background to our political life, as Eric Voegelin tentatively sketched in his treatises on modernity, though he called it “political Gnosticism”. Under an Illuminist moral order, knowledge and power are more or less the only things that matter, and in order to have power, one must control knowledge. More recently, as sketched out by people like Foucault, this power is wielded by institutionalisation and credentialism.
Much of the dissident right have alighted on the now-clichéd, but ultimately accurate, analogy between scientists and priests. Scientism reifies scientific theses or theories as if they had the value of a rigid and indisputable fact. Doubting is tantamount to blasphemy. We can see this all too clearly in the discourse around climate change, the SARS CoV-2 virus, and sex-change operations. Regardless of what facts may underlie these prevailing dogma, even to entertain the possibility that those producing them are mistaken is dangerous enough to the established order that many otherwise ordinary people believe that critics are devils who deserve no less than total social ostracism and perhaps even violent retribution. Of course, even if all the descriptive components of these theories were unassailably settled, the normative prescriptions would not be, and yet these are treated as inextricable – as if to be an Expert is to wield a supernatural authority.
As Wouter Hanegraaff has expressed, the gnostic tendency has characterised Western esotericism since the dawn of history going back to Hermes Tresmagistes and before. Gnosis is a rather specific notion of knowledge – it sees knowledge as coming from introspection and a reliance on symbolic, ritual and rational equipment accessible to the spiritual seeker, and which provides certain knowledge to those who seek it. It is a sort of overidentification with the powers of the intellect which in the West can be seen most prominently in three places. First, transgenderism – with the correct introspection, the patient identifies their true self, and the prison that is their body, and the chains that are society must be made to conform. Those who identify as amputees, or those with mothers with Muchausens-by-proxy – we don’t think too hard about that. Occasionally we might consider the troublesome notion of how the search for “authenticity” produces selfish narcissists, but today, such people hardly stick out.
Second, drugs. Nobody gains insight from drugs they can’t gain from a brisk walk, a lively dream or patient meditation. And yet over a third of the youth population in the rich world now experiment with drugs, to the placid none-judgmental reception of the cultural hegemons who promote it as an exciting lifestyle in pursuit of enlightenment and stress release, or else harmless pleasure.
Third, for those acquainted with the history of Western philosophy, the Rationalists – Descartes in particular – form the best exemplar. The solipsist who perceives external reality as a sort of illusory dreamworld subject which can only be grasped by the enlightened use of “reason”, usually from some sort of first principles, and can know the mind of God all by himself. This sort of abstract idolatry of forms was also expressed by the earlier Neoplatonists, who reified the Platonic forms as some sort of higher reality truly accessible to the philosopher, and have inspired generations of the Enlightenment, just as hermetic and other forms of magic have.
There is a sort of vain certainty that this approach to life gives one. There is some “formula” out there that the idiots and plebs just don’t get, and that the intellect and nobility of spirit granted by certain special insight gives different people the right to pronounce of various subjects. This we can see from the alchemical and magical origins of modern science and mathematics, which were once undistinguished from one another. Those who had sought out the sacred knowledge, adventured into the dark recesses of the soul, and the spiritual dimension, would be rewarded by what was to be found there. Adventure. Mystery. Conquest of the unknown. Hence old Spengler’s riff about “Faustian civilisation”.
The certainty derives from a notion which will be familiar to practitioners of Advaita Vedanta, which means “the school of non-dualism”. Confusingly enough, what the Hindus call dualism and what the west calls dualism are referring to entirely different ontologies. When we refer to dualism in the west, we usually mean a separation of mind and flesh. For orthodox Christianity, the soul is both spirit and flesh. For the Gnostics, the soul and the body were separate, and the soul and spirit were the same thing.
For the Hindus, dualism (Dvaita) means that God and individual souls are separate entities, whereas non-dualism (Advaita) means that the soul and God are one. What Advaita entails, if one believes in it, is that access to God and knowledge of the self are the same, and that self-knowledge is the font of sacred truth and power. This is what the Freemasons believe; that through the correct use of ritual and learning, certain special individuals may acquire self-knowledge and thus knowledge of the faceless god which is represented in all religions. It is also what most hippies, Theosophists and transgenderists believe – that reality resides not in the flesh, that the self is separate from the body in some way, and that true knowledge flows from the self, which is inaccessible to outsiders, and therefore privileged. Some are of course more enlightened than others.
The Bar
The secular institutionalised form of this in the West is, as mentioned before, scientism. Science, as Catherine Elgin eloquently demonstrates, is a rather humble and ordinary activity of finding pictures or descriptions of reality which are obviously not perfectly true, but are “true enough”. Scientists come up with models which they believe will give graspable form to the phenomena their observations and instruments collect, and though they never match one-to-one (just as no true perfect triangle or platonic solid ever materialises), they are true enough to nudge a little closer to a useful picture of the world. Theory can help bring together many of these little true-enoughs into one big true-enough that can coordinate human behaviour. But one must still bet on these, and know when to stop measuring, or one will be refining and disputing forever, and never be able to act.
As Immanuel Kant argued at length (with some unfortunately incorrect details along the way) the human mind has a certain set of innate faculties with fixed properties, which shape how we see the world, and we cannot but use these, though the nature of reality is beyond our grasp. We can dig all we like, but new mysteries, complexities and unseen details will keep emerging, necessitating new theories and true-enoughs for us to be getting on with. It’s fuzz all the way down.
Love for another person requires faith as much as any endeavour, and the paranoid desire to have them repeatedly show devotion or loyalty, the need to make certain that they aren’t straying, will destroy any relationship in psychosis. Even if betrayal is likely, love requires an unconditional surrender to the other for it to even manifest as anything other than jealous and vain possession. And of course, all people stray a little in their hearts, and many stray at least a little in their deeds. Knowledge is similar – to love the truth, and to realise that one can never truly know it, but merely edge ever close to it over the course of our lives, much as an old couple come to rely on each other to hold onto certain memories, intermingling to the final moments of entropy. We know our models will never be final, but we should delight in knowing, and have faith in what we do with that knowledge, fully aware that to some degree they will always stray from reality at least a little.
But the way in which the gnostic engages with knowledge is not for a love of truth, or for truths to serve what we love, but for a love of power – and as that old rogue Francis Bacon always said, knowledge is power. It is a mere instrument to achieving a particular end. In that regard, gnosis is like Frankfurtian “bullshit” writ large. And we all end up practicing a little of it in our arrogant or spiteful moments. To act in bad-faith is to act in gnosis – the presumption of a perfect knowledge that confers certain rights. Power as an end in itself begets nihilism and pointless activity, and at great cost.
The way most people have been taught to deal with scientific knowledge has adopted the nature of the occult and the arcane – these are pronouncements by the enlightened experts, and those who disagree do not see Truth. While many in the mould of a Richard Dawkins might associate this with the nature of revealed religions like Christianity or Islam, these religions are far less concerned with the descriptive qualities of empirical knowledge than they are with theoretical elements which undermine the moral prescriptions of the religion. In this way, atheists can role-play as Prometheus rebelling against a world which seeks to keep them ignorant.
Illuminism on the other hand, cannot abide uncontrolled dispute of facts, because of the strict relationship between knowledge and authority. Knowledge confers privilege – though “all men are equals”, certainly some are more equal than others – they have access to special knowledge, and this confers them the right of dictation. The peculiar phrase “scientific consensus”, conferred on matters for which there absolutely is not a consensus, is a sort of collective anxiety about the relationship between the knowledge and the authority.
A secure order will balance authority with openness, tradition with innovation, synopsis with critique, much as the Orthodox tradition of Christianity does. However, the Western tradition sealed its fate when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne in return for requests to alter the various doctrines of the Church. This bargain, exchanging the love of truth for power was, among other reasons, a contributing cause to the eventual schism of the church. To this day, the Western church continues to bear the arrogance of gnosis in its institutional culture, and are now dominated by the Jesuits, for whom all truths are flexible and instrumental to achieving progressive universal dominion and ecumenism.
In the East, Bible study was always encouraged, though it was acknowledged to be difficult, and therefore not something which any one person had the authority to rule on – deference needed to be paid to generations of erudite and kind-hearted scholars, who had demonstrated not only intellect in their pronouncements, but also spiritual sensitivity and purity of heart. It is widely recognised in Christian circles that one’s intent can and does shape one’s conclusions and interpretations.
We see, to some extent, that which our heart sees. To keep from surrendering control, we fight to defend that vision, through rhetorical tricks, selective skepticism, or biased accumulation of facts. And in this agonised defence of our distorted visions of reality, we expend energy to reinforce them and inculcate them upon the people around us, or beneath us. And here lies the heart of persecution. The desire to persecute preceeds the persecution, or the discovery of anyone to persecute. This desire is laced with a cruelty and a sense of guaranteed superiority which flows from the privileged knowledge that others cannot perceive.
The belief that there are demons out there, but that they are wearing ordinary-human skinsuits, and that therefore the skinsuits are expendable, is common ground for dehumanisation and degradation in any order with the power and freedom to act on it. Even our hallowed United States, the metropolis of the Abstract Empire, now heaves with fantasies of extermination, as meek and mild public commentators beg the weak, incompetent, under-resourced and marginalised MAGA movement to take on the military so they can be massacred and eliminated once and for all. They dream of conquest, liquidation and reeducation of their own lower classes. One might wonder what the moral justification for this fervour is. One could take their word for it and say it’s antifascism, but this is both obviously untrue, and completely opaque.
In Illuminist civilisation, the moral foundations are always obscure. Since the first open illuminists took political power in the French Revolution, they have been defined by liberalism – a system of no real values. Freedom is not really a value as such, and yet many things are done in its name. Supposedly, everyone is free to do as they please, and yet somehow an emergent conformity is demanded. This is a strange form of nihilism, where skepticism is applied to all forms of moral and social restraint without end, until the individual is stripped down to an atom, untethered amidst the masses of the human cosmos, shoving at every neighbouring atom to demand equal elbow room. But elbows can be coordinated by those who can convince the masses of which direction to shove.
While nature abhors a vacuum, various fashions (“modes”, hence modernism) can pass through the deracinated body politic, who learn to apply selective moral skepticism and demand the normalisation of any value that suits their interests, according to what inspires or motivates them. Fervour can burst out sometimes, when the vertigo of moral freefall and economic chaos overtakes us, and all the little atoms align with a single consciousness, which demands perfect adherence in order to keep power alive. But this is so often subverted in service of that same, purely negative value that created this condition – “freedom”.
Human rights serve to create freedoms, but they are peculiar forms of freedom. There is no guide to what is called a right and what is not – institutions of law and education, and the contemporary institution of the state-sponsored mass demonstration, perform a certain sacred ritual for creating new rights. Billionaire philanthropists and government departments will fund non-profit academic institutions who pursue ends they like. The high priests of the academy alight on a consensus for what “we” ought to recognise, and as it passes down through the society, and the “we” demands that the state, as an opposing and alienated organ of society, deliver the goods this new right entitles “us” to, by force. The media decides whether or not a rights claim is legitimate or not by playing gatekeeper and propagandist, based on the values its editors and writers have acquired at their institutions of learning, within the bounds the vested interests are willing to tolerate.
The portion of the state’s governing community which is aligned with the vested interests and the academic priesthood (the left), and which pushes for the recognition of a slowly but constantly shifting list of rights, decides the degree to which the armed forces inhibit their capacity to express themselves. Of course, permissiveness and viciousness can both be in the interests of demonstrators, and the state is also heterogeneous, and office bearers may have disagreements over whether or not they wish to collaborate, tacitly or explicitly, with the interests of either the inner (left) or outer (right) power grouping. Ultimately however, their competition serves established interests - the permanent bureaucracy's desire for expansion, the Transatlantic oligarchy's desire for corporate consolidation, financialisation and automation. The left hand and the right both know what the other is doing, but do not know themselves.
The Wager
But now there is no right any more. There is one monolithic state, formed from a myriad of impenetrable treaties and compacts, NGOs, financial groupings, commodity cartels, international bodies and clubs, and it is left wing. Boris Johnson says, “the right honourable gentleman’s 3% titanium tax goes too far,” and Keir Starmer says, “the right honourable gentleman’s 3% titanium tax doesn’t go too far enough!” Many Marxists seem to be confused by this. They believe that if the system has not dissolved all property distinctions and shared the wealth and power, it is not Left. This is a mistake. The Left can continue to pursue socialist-seeming policies, all while concentrating power and wealth ever-more at the top. This is because only the middle and the moderately wealthy pay, while finance, the permanent bureaucracy and international monopoly capital siphon off the dividends of public spending, anti-competitive regulations and open borders.
The real Illuminati, back when they briefly existed in the 18th century, were an alliance of Freemasons, Rosicrucians and Martinists, headed by Adam Weishaupt. He believed in a system when all kings would be dethroned, all borders erased, all property abolished, all sexual mores forgotten, and all men united under one state, ruled by a tiny, obscure, and enlightened elite, beneath which mankind would own nothing, and would be happy. Today, this is the motto of the occult cryptocracy of the Transatlantic Empire, an abstract, disembodied empire, without figurehead, without soil, without foundation without history, without a face - a weltgeist without a body. They neither believe in the free market, nor in communism, nor at all in common tradition. They simply believe in progress, and they will get to utopia if it means the whole world ends up nowhere.
We have been taught to think in its interest. When any person speaks in the first-person plural, they speak on behalf of the great temple and its invisible high priest. In this modern Shangri-La, we are promised perfect harmony, and an eternity of peace and abundance, so long as we do not judge, so long as we do what we please (within what we are allowed to want), and so long as we do not try to leave, or to ask too many difficult questions. While we may point at Klaus Schwab, a second’s reflection will tell you that this man is no more than Shangri-La’s Mr Chan, a majordomo or butler to a constellation of men and women beyond the grasp and sight of even the most ardent researcher. Carnegie, Ford, Rockefeller, Rothschild, these names grace only the pages of the most deranged conspiracy theories, and (of course) only a fool or a cretin would even think of poking about in the higher reaches of the power structure.
And so nobody truly knows who rules the world. We only know that in this new order, everything that makes life beautiful and sweet is exchanged for junk. In the most enlightened and progressive regions of this earth, heroin and crack are free from sanction, abortion is allowed in any circumstance, under any conditions, even after birth. Families are scorned, chastity and exercise is seen as unhealthy, and promiscuity and sexual deviancy is a sign of enlightenment and healthy release, and encouraged in children. People are granted the right to pass judgement, ethical or epistemic, on the basis of their identity, not their experience or insight, and children are encouraged to spy on their parents. The rules are esoteric at the best of times – when is a scientist to be dismissed, fired and silenced, and when is he to be listened to as an innovator? That is for the high councils at the big international conferences to decide, to which no ordinary mortal has access. When is a queer, differently-abled woman-of-colour speaking her truth, and when is she suffering from internalised oppression? Let the theologians of the new liberty decide.
And so everybody suffers. The economy becomes ever-more hollowed out, culture shredded in increasing waves of woke iconoclasm, and the great controllers that apportion rights and designate terrorists will tighten their grip until nothing, not even private thought, is left to anyone who finds themselves in the heart of the Western metropolis. But some will even enjoy it for a time, as their entire consciousness and libido is subsumed into the great hive through constant nudged conditioning, until the darkness takes them.
The contracting human population will trigger an inverted Malthusian crisis. China faces it already, and by most estimates, it is not automation that will save their greying population, but market imperialism, and the extension of their manufacturing base to the third world. And behind all the hedonic concentration of individual freedoms, free from the burdens of parenthood, fading into the grey never in the ashes of the West, the fear of death, that banished fear, will return. The corporeal reality we seek to escape will always be there, and however much we may hope for a transhuman redemption through cyborg immortality, death becomes us.
We will die alone, not as those who lived full lives in the dark ages – of some mysterious and surely deadly ailment, surrounded by family, awaiting the great beyond – but as post-humanity: isolated individuals in a crowded, disinfected ward, minds receding as impersonal machines and assistants, attending to catheters and bedsores, swimming in and out of a foggy delirium unbroken by even the slightest echo of human affection, a machine to sustain us and defeat every ailment that might hasten our descent into the infinite black. Or perhaps we will be simply put to death once our marginal utility exceeds the thresholds set by management in their enlightened felicific calculus.
This cannot go on forever, but it can certainly go on for a very long time. As we get ever closer to the perfect utopia that progress promises us, we realise that we are having our reality circumscribed by pure mathematics, flinging ourselves ineffectually at heaven, while the engineers of the system grasp the secret – that it’s all bullshit, and Zeno’s paradox can be solved by rudely walking the distance to grasp the fruits of knowledge.
Just like anybody else who is easily seduced, the powerful are merely playing the game in the narrowest form of self-interest, pursuing their meaningless ends for reasons they can barely grasp. They love nothing, but they shall possess everything, and find that when you believe in nothing, nothing is good enough. As all the world’s treasures turn to ash, we learn that it is not the hollow ruins of pagan and Christian civilisation which made them great, but the spirit that animated them. What spirit animates this great beast of steel, silicon, glass and concrete? Nothing, and to nothing it will return, like every prior spiritual order has before it, only less durable, and less beautiful.
What the men in the bar forget, is the woman has a desire of her own, and winning her brief affections isn't the victory they think it is.
And if you ask me, that lesson cannot come soon enough.