Konrad asked me a question over the phone,
a few days ago and it's a very interesting one and I thought I would start with that.
He wanted me to think about the way in which the irrational or the contra-rational
is in a state of shifting its locus, you might say, from left to right at present. Of course,
I knew what he meant immediately, so this is what I think: first of all, it has a long history.
We have to start with the Romantics and their response to the rationalism of the Enlightenment
and in that response already we find a left and a right.
The right consists of Romantics who respond to the progress-ism, and I might even say the leftism,
of the Enlightenment by a move to the right which consists of looking back to the Middle Ages,
chivalry, the Roman Catholic Church, and what I call Pastism.
However, this is not the exclusive story. There's also almost immediately a left-wing,
and an extreme left wing if you like, of the Romantic response that includes people like
Shelley. If you think about Shelley, he's the polar opposite of these people. Not to that
he is deaf to the charms of medievalism, none of none of them are, no romantic could ever
be deaf to the charms of medievalism, but there's certainly already from the beginning a left and a
right. And the idea which has been put forward in recent times, by what I call the Whig historians,
the smiley-face liberals and people like Isaiah Berlin, and Stephen Pinker, for that matter,
that being anti-enlightenment means to be reactionary and right wing and that it was
because of the irrationalism of Romanticism that we got the fascism of the of the 30s and 40s. This
doesn't fly. As a historical proposition or as a philosophy to live by, in my humble opinion. Yes,
it's true that Nazism and other forms of fascism have been and were, how to put it,
cancers on Romanticism, but it doesn't mean that Romanticism itself got sick and died.
And what happened after about 1950 of course is people began to see that a tremendously important
baby was being thrown out with the bath water, this tainted bath water, Nazi-tainted bathwater of
Romanticism, and that it had to be recuperated. And the process started by which the Romantic
left came back into being. Of course, there were certain people who never hesitated. If you want
to think of surrealism as part of the Romantic Movement, they were always on the left they stayed
on the left and they emerged from the horrors of the second world war still on the left. So, they
just deserve credit for that, even though they may have fallen into Leninist and Trotskyite pitfalls,
from my position pitch walls. They finally, as our friend Ron Sakolsky says, they finally made
it through to a logical connection between contra-rationalism, leftism and anarchism.
There may be flaws in his thesis, but I'm essentially in agreement with it.
And by the way in his latest issue of the Oyster Catcher is a fascinating
interview with Ben Morea (really, really interesting, boy I wish I knew that person)
he talked about his relationships with Guy Debord, that was fascinating. He said that
Debord was insensitive to, in fact even frightened by, spirituality which made a problem in the
Situationist movement because Situationism itself existed because "Surrealism was like looking over
his shoulder all the time" or some phrase like that. Surrealism was the elephant in the room
for Situationism. And in fact, that is the problem with Situationism and it was Debord being timid
of the romantic contra-rational that led him to an exaggerated view. Not Vaneigem however,
Vaneigem overcame this and he wrote that very excellent book on the brethren of the free spirit
in which he came to terms with the spiritual and the Contra-rational and managed to meld that
into Situationism in a very satisfactory, well not entirely satisfactory, but anyway interesting way,
and I have a feeling if I could sit in a room with Morea for a while, we could hash this out
and arrive at an interesting synthesis. But in any case, let's gets back to the main point
The left has historically had a problem with the fetishization of rationalism. And I would
make this a criticism even of anarchism, that progress, science, the worship of science,
the hatred of the spiritual because of its association with authoritarian religion and the
authoritarian state. These have all been obstacles in the path of leftism that have accounted for its
lack of imagination and its lack of true humanity, in my view. And this is something that needed to
be overcome and in the 60s, in the 70s, the 80s and so on, there was a process of overcoming
what I call "the cruel instrumentality of reason." Which by the way is a phrase that
I know that Adorno said, the instrumentality of reason, but the cruel instrumentality of reason,
I have not been able to track that down. I don't know who said it and there are people who believe
that I said it so that may be true, I don't know, but what I mean by that is that the enlightenment
itself has an incredibly cruel authoritarian aspect whether of the left or the right.
It's something which I've always detested and which has kept me all
my life on the side of Romanticism, of the contra-rational and the critique of science.
It is precisely that element of cruelty which for example I accuse the surrealists in their
brand of leftism as being insensitive to the cruelty of reason. For example, fetishizing
the Marquis de Sade has never made any sense to me from a surrealist point of view. I don't see
why they did it and I wouldn't. It's one of the reasons why I ultimately don't accept surrealism.
I love it but I can't join it because I do not fetishize the
Marquis de Sade, or even the Comte de Lautréamont to tell you the truth.
In their unfeeling cruelty which was so apparent in the early surrealist films by Buñuel and later
on. Buñuel was a cruel person. He's a brilliant filmmaker, maybe the one of the best, ever,
but a cruel person. It was it was well known that Buñuel used to go out on the streets at night with
some rough companions and wait to be solicited by homosexuals and then beat them up. Fag bashing,
he thought this was a good surrealist thing to do. They also did priest bashing which
is perhaps a little more amusing, but no less cruel. I never liked this aspect of surrealism
and I don't like that aspect of the Enlightenment and of the rationalists. So that's why I consider
myself to be a person of 1968. There's no getting around it. I am of that generation,
of that of that mindset. Peace and love is what I like and somehow we have to theorize it in
some way that it makes sense. That was the goal and the means was all power to the imagination.
And you know, I think that intellectually and on the level of theory I believe that there was
some success. I think that the post-situationists and some of the French theorists and some of the
German theorists like Feyerabend and so forth, actually succeeded in theorizing a new form of
Romanticism that took all of this dialectic water under the bridge into consideration.
What's happening now, is that the right seems to be appropriating
the success of the theoretical left in implementing irrationalism
and going back to the cancerous Nazi version, if you like, of Romanticism. Where they had been
very rationalistic and scientistic and where science seemed to be even a force on the
reactionary right, to a lot of people like me, now they've taken up the torch, the tiki torch,
of resistance to rationalism in the name of a kind of romantic contra-rationalism.
You know, the other day I was having a conversation with somebody about, I even I hate to
put his name on tape, uh... Mr Trump and they were going giving me the usual liberal Whig version
of trump as a f*cking moron you know which was actually said about him by one of his own people
and I said you know, uh f*cking moron, okay, interesting concept. Are you the president? Did
you get to be president of the United States? Do you think that a moron,
think of a Peter Seller's movie, a moron actually gets to be president of the United States? No,
the guy if anything is a f*cking genius. And what kind of genius is he? He's a chaos magician.
He works magic, he works image magic like the chaos magicians. Does he know
that he's doing it? I don't know, but I know that Steve Bannon knows he's doing
it and that's why Steve Bannon got on board with Trump and became one of his advisors.
By the way there's an interesting new book by a guy named Benjamin Teitelbaum called the War for
Eternity which is about Steve Bannon, René Guénon, Julius Evola and Alexandr Dugin. It is trying to
show how the European neo-traditionalism was brought into communication with right-wing
populism by Bannon and Dugan. It interprets in this case Trump as almost a puppet of Bannon,
which I don't think is quite right, but, anyway, it's an interesting, really good book. He made
a few mistakes about traditionalism, but nothing too terribly deleterious.
So anyway, the point being that we have a crisis that we must face
over the origin and fate of the imaginal and the contra-rational
are we going to allow this appropriation? Is there anything we can do about it?
The culminating moment for me came on January 6th, epiphany by the way,
when the three kings came to see Mr. Jesus, when the alt-right people attacked the Capitol
building and, of course, the Liberals all clutched their pearls and shrieked in horror,
even the leftists. And I thought to myself, what if it had been the left that had done this? Or
if that was Anarchist swarming into the Capitol building? And I thought dod damn, I'm jealous
I thought for a while I shouldn't admit to this and I shouldn't put it on recording but now what
I don't give a damn, I have to admit. I had a moment of envy; this should have been us.
I'm sorry the five people got killed you know, I didn't I don't like what they were there for
I don't like any of it, except the fact that they did it. They had the gall and the balls to do it.
But it's fascinating if there could ever be such a thing as a cross between right-wing
populism and neo-traditionalism and it's something that's a that's a left, what's left of the left,
is going to have to deal with. It's a crisis, it is a crisis that that
kind of rhetoric should appear not just in tired Old Europe but in, you know,
vigorous new America, which is not so f*cking vigorous anymore, and I have to leave it at that.
Agriculture seems to have been the big mistake. That, for whatever reason agriculture was adopted,
and the jury is still out on that, what it led to was a social hegemony
and from there to civilization, with writing and permanent armies and a serf class and so
forth. All of which when we were young, you may recall, we were taught to look on as evolution.
This is what humankind was meant to do. It was meant to leave the nasty, brutish and short
life of the caveman and come into the glories of civilization. What they never told us at the time,
although we could have figured out if we had any brains, was that civilization was
for about one percent of the people, maybe 10 percent at most and the others were the
fellahin who were expected to devote their lives to supporting that hegemonic elite
in its beautiful life of art and culture which was the great evolutionary future of humanity.
And somehow the fellahin never evolved they're still there, supporting the one
percent in it's beautiful - not so cultural anymore because those people are so f*cking
stupid they don't even know what culture is. Nobody's stupider than a billionaire,
this is my thesis, in order to be a billionaire, you have to be really a
jerk and you have to be somebody who grew up in high school reading Ayn Rand and Robert
Heinlein and that's your idea of intellectual development. That and your unbearable personal
greed that drives you to get 136 billion dollars. And do what? Escape to Mars.
Technopathocracy was the term that I tried to popularize the way I popularized TAZ it didn't
take. I've noticed a couple people using it but it didn't catch on. What I mean by it is the rule
of sick machines, or the sick rule of machines, and this is the stage I think that we've reached.
Have I discussed in this series of
talks that we've been having my idea that the end of the world is already happening? Well,
getting back to that idea I would say that one of the one of the really tragic and ghastly aspects
of that is that it becomes ever more difficult to do anything about the technopathocracy.
That the more we go on, the more people accept that they are basically just Androids.
Now this is very poignant for me because due to my medical situation I've become even more
of an Android myself. Because that's what they do in the medical hell realms they make
you into a half machine so you can live forever and they can get all your money.
Basically, what we're looking at is a society going towards what we call artificial intelligence
which actually bears no relation to intelligence as conventionally or traditionally known.
It's not intelligence, it is what I call the end-run around intelligence.
In other words, you don't need machines to be intelligent in the sense of R2D2,
with feelings and emotions and appreciation for art.
That's human consciousness and it's probably not synthesizable. What they care about is
computational intelligence and that doesn't depend on consciousness in any way. Consciousness is no
longer either necessary or viable. What good is consciousness in a world where everything
is based on computation? Where it´s pure number, pure number meaning also pure money,
because money is money is nothing other than pure number, where the world runs on algorithms.
As a medical patient I've been forced to watch some television recently, commercial television.
I've noticed that in in almost every commercial no matter what it's an ad for,
somebody's looking at their iPhone. Was showing somebody out there what's on their iPhone
or there's an animated mock-up of what's on the person's iPhone.
You cannot get away from the screen which is on the screen which is on the screen. It's like an
infinite regress and it does not end up in human existence, it ends up in machinic existence.
This is what I call the technopathocracy. This means that the true hegemony is no longer even
human beings. The jerks in Silicon Valley are not really in charge of anything that they think
they're in charge of. They're just wage slaves of the of the big machine like everybody else,
only their wages are billions and ours are peanuts and always will be peanuts.
I don't care what the Chinese say that they've lifted everybody out of poverty. I say BS, they
haven't lifted everybody out of poverty, maybe they put a little extra rice on the table but
that doesn't mean there's no poor people in China. How could there be rich people in China if there
weren't poor people. You can't have one without the other it's like the horse and the buggy.
In order to be rich and to really appreciate being rich you must be able to look out your window and
see people starving to death. It's de rigeur, you gotta have It. And we do have it. Actually,
there are people in America who starve to death. They say that one quarter of all
the children in America go to bed hungry every night. Presumably a lot of them die of diseases
related to malnutrition. I don't have figures on that but I'm imagining it to be the case. But if
America doesn't have people who are miserable enough all we have to do is look at India
where they're also supposed to have made everybody rich and it's a total dirty lie. It's not true.
The poor will always be with us as long as we have civilization because that's what civilization is.
It's the one percent and the 99. It always it has been and it is now.
Maybe in the distant past it was more like ten percent ninety percent, a little tiny
bit more redistribution was going on, not much but at least a little.
The great economic anthropologist Karl Polanyi once said, I think he said it back in the in the
1940s, there were basically three economic systems in the world. One was the economy of the gift,
that's the Paleolithic. Second is the economy of redistribution. That's civilization where there's
some trickle down. It's the shape of a pyramid like an Egyptian pyramid or a Mayan pyramid or
a Mesopotamian ziggurat. There is an actual top middle and bottom and there is some redistribution
of wealth throughout that system. Not much but some. Polanyi said the mystery was that the third
stage, which is the end of redistribution, had not occurred yet, and he was wondering when it
would occur. Well, if he had only lived another 30 years, he could have seen it. We have it now.
Now the shape of the pyramid is a totally flat bottom and a sudden spire going up in
the middle. They actually build buildings like that. Architecture is always an infallible
reflection of human consciousness on the social level. That's why I love architecture so much.
All you have to do is look at a building and you can tell everything about the people who made it.
Just analyze it like Freud would analyze a patient on the on the couch. What we have now is spires,
look at Manhattan since after 9-1-1. It's all these incredible spire buildings in Midtown,
with one large apartment on each floor. Does anybody live in them? Well, that's not important.
They're sold to Russian oligarchs and Chinese gangsters who never show up. It is what John
le Carré called "dark real estate". Which I think is a very good very good phrase,
deserves to be more widespread. That's Manhattan for you. That architecture is
an absolute and London is the same. Look at London the Spire in London, that's what they're building
because that's what's in their brain, because that's where humanity is at. Simple as that.
Consciousness is both what makes us human and it's also what causes the human crisis. Right from the
start consciousness poses a problem. What is the start? Is the start actually pre-homo sapiens?
Does consciousness start with Australopithecine? Certainly, the Neanderthals are conscious. I
have no doubt about that, in the in our sense of the word they're conscious. They might not have
language in quite the same sense that we do, but they certainly have consciousness.
If it starts with Cro-Magnon, in other words Homo sapiens sapiens, so self-called,
then it must be, in my mind, pretty much co-extensive with language.
It is language itself which begins the dialectic of consciousness. It starts as
awareness. Terence McKenna said "the monkey ate a mushroom", something happened to to
cause a shift, and that led to emergence, not development, but the emergence of language.
So, language is both the means by which we communicate and the means by which we fail
to communicate. As is so well known to so many people who try to talk to other
people. It doesn't usually work, or at least not completely. You're lucky if anything gets through.
Real communication seems to take place on another level altogether. Maybe looking deep
into somebody's eyes or something, who the hell knows. It's usually not about language. So right
away with language we have a problem, right from the start. Is it communicating or is it in fact
the opposite? Is it not communicating, is it alienating?
Flash forward, a million years or so, and we get writing. Now there is a real problem. They
say that when Hermes Thoth invented writing he went to Aman Zeus and said: "Look father what I
have invented. I call it writing. Now Humanity will never need to forget anything ever again,
isn't it great?" And Zeus says "On the contrary, my son. Now they will forget everything."
And that's what writing turned out to be: an abyss of forgetfulness, a loss of communication
altogether. It was supposed to be the magic means of communication and in fact it was
magic. It was based on magic. You made these marks on a piece of paper and you sent somebody
to the neighborhood kingdom and the scribe of the neighboring king was able to decipher that and to
say what you were thinking to the other king. It is a miracle! So, writing begins as a form
of magic. It's meant to control reality through communication, through symbolic communication.
What it really does is add to the alienation of human position, to the existentialist angst and
crisis that we've always been in. We didn't need to get to the 20th century and France, Paris,
for that. That's been there since the beginning. There's always been a crisis about communication,
about really being together. And when I say for example that a TAZ depends on physical presence
and conviviality that is begging the question what is conviviality. Is there any such thing,
really? Is there any such thing as communication? Is there any such thing as consciousness for that
matter. People argue, and this is a big argument in consciousness studies today:
is consciousness something real or is it just an epiphenomenon of flashing neurons?
There are plenty of people who will tell you it's nothing. It's just an epiphenomenon,
it doesn't it doesn't compute you don't need it and it doesn't really exist
I on the contrary, think that it does exist. I think there is such a thing as consciousness.
It's problematic, very problematic but it exists.
There's a history of it. It develops in certain ways over the course of human history. Which is
really very short when you come right down to it, but it can be divided into periods.
You can hypothesize that those Paleolithic people lived a tribal existence without hegemony,
or without exaggerated hegemony. If there was a leadership concept it was temporary. As it was
for example amongst the Plains Indians in North America, where a war leader would be
chosen typically by the grandmothers of the tribe and once the war was over the grandmothers would
depose that leader. And if he tried to maintain power, somebody would push him off a cliff.
This is what Georges Dumézil was talking about when he talked about the melancholy of the
warrior. In traditional context the warrior spends his life defending the tribe and then ends up with
nothing. Why? Because whatever he wins, he must distribute, redistribute it to the whole tribe.
This is the whole idea about the sacrifice. This is a whole complex of ideas which I could get
into but it would take hours and hours to explain. The sacrifice is the sharing of the game that one
person or a small group of people gets. They bring it back to the tribe and everybody gets a slice.
The hunter does not keep it all for himself and his family,
he shares it with everybody. And if he doesn't, boy is he in trouble.
You can see this working itself out in situation after situation, from which I deduce, that it is
possible to read archaeology and come up with an ancient anthropology that's valid to a certain
extent. So, I would say that the consciousness of the paleolithic consciousness differs in
some way having to do with values from the civilizational consciousness which is based on
a rejection of the old Shamano-Pagano spiritual concept that made everybody basically roughly
equal in terms of the goodies of society to a new form of consciousness. Typified
for me by Mesopotamian mythology, which Abdullah Öcalan also got on to in a very interesting way.
That there's been a revolution in heaven, if not on Earth. There's been a revolution in heaven and
now the chief gods have declared that humanity exists only to be their slaves, the slaves of the
gods. This is the fall of Tiamat the goddess of chaos, the ocean goddess who represents chaos in
the Enûma Elish, the Mesopotamian creation myth. She is replaced by Marduk who is probably related
to Mars, not only etymologically but certainly in personalities, the big masculine patriarchal war
god and he says human beings are just basically made out of blood and shit, by the gods to be
their slaves. What does that mean in terms of life on Earth? It means the representatives of
the gods, the priesthood and royalty, which was the same thing in ancient Mesopotamia, in Sumer,
that everybody is created to be the slave of the Lugala, the high priest who is also the king.
And from this we get the beginnings of civilization which, wherever we see it emerging,
in this so-called evolutionary way, it always involves mass murder and human sacrifice.
If you look at the archaeological remains from Ur III, like Sir James Wooley did in his famous book
about Ur, you find massive amounts of people who were thrown in the tomb with the king or the high
priest to die of suffocation so that they could serve him in the afterlife. Same thing in Egypt,
same thing with the Kurgan people, the early Indo-Europeans, as far as I know,
same thing everywhere. Then kings realize this is economically not such a great idea.
We shouldn't kill off all the poor people, we should save them so that they can slave for us.
Then you get basically modern society. Now we have modern society as we know it. Because not
much has changed, except the technological level. As technology changes, of course consciousness
changes. It's a feedback situation. Consciousness changes, then technology changes, then technology
changes consciousness and so forth and so on, until we get to the point of the technopathocracy.
We get to the point first of what I call "bourgeois consciousness"
which is where you have an entire class of people who are convinced that they have inherited the
sacred role of the king themselves. That's what the great revolutions the American and the French
revolution were about. The bourgeoisie seizing the power of royalty and the aristocracy for
themselves and saying now we're the leader, we're the rulers. That consciousness leads
towards what we think of as middle-class culture. It leads towards an exacerbated self-consciousness
and self-obsession with self-care. Which is a stage that we're very much in now in America,
where everybody in the middle-class is obsessed with well-being and wellness and health. Bringing
up their children in silos, the helicopter parent syndrome, all this kind of intense self-care,
not of humanity but of you, your family and your class. That's what I call Bourgeois Consciousness.
Beyond that, when you add the really modern technology to that,
it turns out you can do without consciousness altogether. You don't need consciousness. What
the f*ck good is consciousness. It doesn't buy anybody any hot dogs. But if I were to try to
expand on it, I would say that it is the ruling consciousness, both on the so-called left and the
so-called right, essentially middle-class culture. It's more poignant perhaps on the so-called left,
where you have the liberal elite, who really, really, truly believe that they are enlightened.
That they know all the answers, that science is the new God, that we trust in science,
that science never did anything wrong. A proposition which I find mindbogglingly stupid.
How can anybody think that science never did anything wrong? Who do you think caused global
warming? Okay, was it automobiles? Who invented automobiles? Technicians! Who told the technicians
how to do it? Scientists! Scientists cannot escape their moral investment in the end of the world,
they're just as guilty as everybody else. The society which worships them and thinks that
all answers flow from rationality and science is a doomed society. And that's why the end of
the world has already started, because of the idiotic belief that rationality is the answer
to everything. What is rationality? Rationality is basically counting. What is counting? Counting is
money. What is the answer to everything? Money! The answer to every question is always money.
The big discovery was, you didn't have to do it through force. You didn't have
to keep killing people and throwing them in the king's tomb to suffocate. All you had to
do was get them so deeply in debt that they could never get out. And the temptation is:
yeah, you can have your little farm, and we'll loan you these three bars of silver, and all
you have to do is, next year it's 33% interest you owe us. Oh, great deal, we will do that!
This is how hegemony emerges literally through money. Or as Ezra Pound called it so disastrously
"usury". What is usury? Usury is the unfair sale of money to other people. The sale of
money to other people at an unfair rate. As Benjamin Franklin said in Poor Richard's Almanac
that the miracle of money was, that money begets money. I guess he thought that was
a wonderful thing. I don't think he was being critical. He thought that usury was a miracle
and, in fact, I call usury the magic of money. It makes money out of nothing. In fact, I call it,
since money is dead, the sexuality of the dead. Money reproduces itself. It must be sexual.
But it's dead, so it must be the sexuality of the dead. That's the economic system that we're
basically living in and have been living in since ancient Sumer. Now if that isn't magic,
then there is no magic if you. If the king can say "let there be money" and lo, there was money,
I don't know what else magic could possibly be. Money is proof that magic works.
You don't need any other proof. I sometimes say, the problem with magic is that it doesn't work,
but that's not the point. Anyway sometimes it does
The point is, that when you run the world on the basis of magic it's very different than running
it on the basis of rationality. So, it doesn't matter whether it works or not, the question is,
are you running the world on that basis. The second point is that sometimes magic works. And
the one big, overriding clear-cut, fantastically obvious example is money. In recent years,
since 1973, a very recent development [it lost] even the last physical tie to gold.
What was gold? Gold is nothing. Gold is just a metal. You can't eat it, you can't smoke it,
you can't shove it up your ass and get calories from it. It's purely symbolic.
Gold and silver symbolize sun and moon. That's why the price ratio was always around 14 to 1.
Because that's the cycle of the moon to the sun.
It has no other reason. It's not about the rarity of gold. Gold is not rare. There are tons,
way more of it than they can use. They have to put it back in the earth so that people can't use it.
So, the gold which is upside, sitting in bank vaults will have some value.
Which it still does, but it's not monetary value in the strict sense of the term
I came to the conclusion, from my sort of sociological embeddedness, that I would say human
beings are justified in doing absolutely anything to get free of that fate. Crime, war, you name it,
it's all justified to escape really what work is. Obviously, I'm not talking about my "work",
my writing, my art, whatever. Which is a bit of a joke anyway, because I never
make any money out of it. But I'm talking about work as the malignant fate of the wage slave.
After the Civil War there was talk amongst radicals in America,
"well, we got rid of chattel slavery now we must get rid of the other great evil",
of the north, primarily, "wage slavery". That didn't happen and it's now totally forgotten.
People now think that it's natural to get a wage. Well, it is the alienation
of labor through the wage. That's what it is, that's what the wage does. It separates you
from the reality of anything that you might be doing that might offer you some human dignity
and sustenance. So, that was my big lesson that I learned. It wasn't pleasant but I learned it.
I have kept it in mind all my life that bourgeois existence is not normal. It is
not natural for most people. Most people are working shit jobs and they're wasting
their lives. If they had anything to offer life, they're wasting it. I consider that to be the big
Ur-sin of our society of capitalist society. From there on we can build a whole
intellectual framework about what is capitalism and what it does, and alienation.
It had occurred to me that I was tired of sitting around waiting for the revolution. I thought that
the revolution was going to happen in 1968, it didn't happen. I left America in disgust and
when I came back there was no sign that it was any closer to happening. I mean, we could all believe
in the revolution in some kind of existentialist way but it clearly wasn't on the board.
And so, my question to myself was, how do you get the experience of living in a liberated situation
without a revolution. Is it possible? I came up with the idea of the Temporary Autonomous Zone,
by which I meant that naturally, and to a certain extent by design,
it was possible to find oneself in a situation where there was no authority telling you what
to do. This could be anything from a simple dinner party or even a love affair up to
including a whole city trying to become a utopia. Larger than that there the examples are rare.
The difference between what I was talking about and what had existed in history before
was I wanted the TAZ to be conscious of itself as temporary and not put false dreams into the
idea that it was going to last forever and that it was going to be the precursor of the revolution.
Whatever you could get, that's gravy. In the way of freedom,
whatever you could experience in in your lifetime of liberation however you would like to define it,
that was all to the best. And if it was just one evening spent with your friends,
when nobody was ordering anybody around, or pulling any authoritarian routines, or
insisting that they knew what was good for everybody else in the room.
Then that was a TAZ and it was fine and that's why people like dinner parties
You also asked about Pirate Utopias, which is the title of one of my books in which I
hypothesized that one of the existences of the TAZ in the past was where pirates moved on shore
taking their treasure and with them and led the glorious life for as long as their treasure would
last. Port Royal in Jamaica was one of these places. There were two or three in Madagascar
where they retired from the sea, at least temporarily, married native women, typically,
and their descendants still live in Madagascar. They're called the Children of the Pirates,
they're still there. Probably everyone knew that these were not going to last forever
and so they were in a sense Temporary Autonomous Zones. If you read Daniel Defoe's
history of the pirates, about Captain mission in Madagascar and his comrades, he presents them
as ideological utopians, not just as wacky pirates, but people who were against slavery,
who had mixed race crews, who believed in a society without law and so forth and so on. Did
Captain Mission really exist? That's another question, we won't get into that. But there
certainly was something on Madagascar that was pretty much like what Dafoe was thinking about,
and elsewhere as well. So, my point is, that all through history this phenomenon has existed,
whether consciously or unconsciously, and it has always been an actual physical place or event.
Well one of my little aphorisms is magic doesn't work but that's not the point. And also,
magic does work sometimes. I've seen it seen it often enough myself, from Afghanistan to New York,
that sometimes it works. But even if it doesn't work that's not the point.
The point would be peak experience,
in Collin Wilson's terms again. In other words, to use to use magic as a way to augment
one's ontological and epistemological status for oneself, if I can put it that way.
This could lead to ecstasy, or it could lead to a cool clear intellectual whatever, it could lead to
all sorts of things. It could even lead to magic that works but that's not the point. The point is
to take an active part in the great ancient and most ancient of all traditions
which is the idea that the world is alive and everything in the world is alive, everything
in the world is aware and many things are conscious that you didn't think were conscious.
That things can change into other things, and that there is such a reality as the spirit,
although we don't know how to define it, and that it's worth going after ecstatic or
hyper valuable mental states for their own sake. Life is in love with life.
It doesn't matter. I hate above almost everything the scientific attitude that,
"oh, it's all just a big accident", cosmic accident. Life is just an epiphenomenon of
something that's in a big accident. It doesn't mean anything, has no meaning. But don't worry
kids, you can still have a sense of wonder. What this is supposed to mean I don't know.
It's like you're supposed to console yourself with the fact that the universe has been
dephlogisticated and fucked with the idea that things are pretty weird and isn't that
wonderful? l it's just not enough for me, I'm sorry. I can't get on that bargain basement
wagon. For me there's got to be some hope of a miracle or else it's not worth doing.
So, that would be my politics of magic. That there is always a politics of magic, there has been
right from the beginning of consciousness itself and there is now. Despite all the vicissitudes,
despite all the collapses, despite even the end of the world.
There is such a thing. And it doesn't matter whether you can change lead into gold, or whether
you can influence the judge in your court case, or whatever. That's not the point. The point is -
are you living a life that is more than just crap?
The end of the world is not coming; it's already been here for a number
of years. We are going through the end of the world already.
It's going to be a long-drawn-out situation and in fact it may never come to an end.
Paradoxically. The date that I choose, fairly arbitrarily,
is 1945 because I was born in that year and that was the year of the atomic bomb. When
human beings realized for the first time that they could destroy the entire world,
by pushing a button. If that isn't the end of the world I don't know, it is pretty severe.
Maybe before that. Maybe civilization itself was the problem, as the neoprimitivist anarchists say,
and there is a good argument for that. Maybe language itself is the problem.
Maybe we should never have started using language, because it's a kind of mediation that takes away
the immediacy of life. But whatever. The end of the world to me starts with in my own lifetime
and has only gotten more and more evident during the 75 years that I've been alive.
Now I think many people are able to see it. Except that thinkers like Bill McKibben are able to see
it but they refuse to see it. They say, "Oh but we still have 10 years. We must all change
our consciousness and pull together and make sure that we get the temperature down to 1.5".
And so he claims to be an optimist. They all claim to be optimists, because if you don't
claim to be an optimist, nobody's going to listen to you and they're not going to buy your book,
apparently. There are some people who have gone all the way into pessimism,
like the whole Dark Mountain Group, for example. They are a sort of disciples of Robinson Jeffers
and who say, yes, the end of the world is underway. There's nothing to be done about it,
except to try to live one's life in some authentic way, even though it's all going down the drain.
Actually there's a supposed Hadith, whether it's authentic or not I don't know,
where the Prophet is supposed to have said. "Even if you know you're going to die tomorrow,
plant a tree - and even if you know that you're going to live forever, repent – now!"