Sorry for the uncharacteristic delay in posting. I just launched a new seminar and it has given me a lot to think about! I have also been reflecting on the ongoing tumult of current events. But those reflections have not quite coalesced into a new essay as of yet.

The last few weeks have also been haunted by news of two tragic suicides. Years ago, I worked with Carolyn Elliott on Evolver. She led our Pittsburgh hub. I published her first book, Awaken Your Genius, as part of my Evolver imprint with North Atlantic Books. She wrote a fantastic second book, Existential Kink, and became a leader of an occult scene that formed around her persona and ideas. A month or so ago, she ended her life, for reasons that remain unclear. Then, a week ago, Rolling Stone released a feature on the circumstances around the death of Katherine McCollough, the ex-girlfriend of comedian and psychedelic advocate Reggie Watts.

I’ve been processing these sad stories. If we have anything like a bohemian occult/psychedelic counterculture left, I would say Watts and Elliott held important roles in it. I sense an archetypal dimension in what happened to them that I also trace back to my own life experience. It will take me a little more time to pull my thoughts together on all of this into full coherence. I always find it necessary to go beyond the frame of the individual to understand the deeper, systems-level dynamics at play that make unfortunate or even tragic results highly likely, if not inevitable.

In what follows, I am continuing the book. I am looking at thinkers with radically different political perspectives who all reached an understanding that the metacrisis we are confronting cannot be met effectively from a purely secular or atheist perspective. Last time, I reviewed ideas from the admittedly dense political philosopher Jürgen Habermas and the Right Wing Catholic Patrick Deneen. Deneen argues that liberalism is finished. He advocates for a disciplined society under authoritarian control. Another thinker I discussed, Macario Schettino, sees the possibility of achieving transcendence through a new approach to digital technology and social media: We can apply the algorithms that shattered our shared reality to synthesize a new, more peer-to-peer one.

Everyone agrees that we must recover “transcendence” in some form — but we don’t know how this looks, who it empowers, and what kind of social structure it requires.

Today, I am looking at Simon Critchley’s Faith of the Faithless. Critchley is a British Leftist, an atheist philosopher who realizes the Left has surrendered the religious ground to the Right: We must win it back to survive. But his attempt to reclaim it—to build a “faith of the faithless” using complex theory while denying any actual transcendent reality—demonstrates why the secular Left can’t help but lose. We need a social movement with the visionary power to unite the people to defeat the tech-feudal, neo-fascist tide. Instead of showing us a solution, Critchley’s work reveals the distance we still have to travel to get there.

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In Faith of the Faithless, the British philosopher Simon Critchley builds a secular argument for the resacralization of politics. “Those who cannot believe still require religious truth and a framework of ritual in which they can believe,” he writes. He argues that the Left yielded the religious ground to the Right too easily. To win it back, the Left must fight a long-term war of position. He invokes Antonio Gramsci, who declared that socialism is “the religion that must overwhelm Christianity.”

Modern politics requires a quasi-religious foundation to build solidarity and drive communities to act. Critchley bases his “faith of the faithless” on a fierce commitment to the world, rather than supernatural dogma. He builds on his earlier work, Infinitely Demanding, which defined ethical subjectivity through an “infinite demand”—a traumatic, unfulfillable obligation to the other that finds expression in anarchist forms of resistance and ethical individualism.

We have entered a dark time marked by the dangerous “re-theologization of politics.” This shift has forced Critchley to confront the limits of purely secular politics. He asks how nonbelievers can “recapture the Rapture”—the deep commitment, easily accessed by communities of faith, that sparks collective action. The question remains open.

Before I can consider the substance of his ideas, I feel I need to examine how Critchley writes. As much as I appreciate his depth and complexity, I am afraid that his mandarin style indicates our current predicament.

The cognitive linguist George Lakoff spent decades explaining why the Right wins campaigns and gains populist support while the Left’s solutions often fail. Political struggles are won with clear moral frames, simple language, and emotional stories, not with complex theories or policy planks. Conservatives, Lakoff writes, “understand what unites conservatives, and they understand how to talk about it.” Steve Bannon, Jordan Peterson, and the right-wing media apparatus weaponized diffuse social anxieties to wage a political war. They pitted the people against the elites, the nation against the globalists, and order against decadence. Their frames are deceptive, but they work. A person can grasp one of these stories instantly (like “there are only two genders,” or “woke-ism”), repeat it, and then act on it. Leftist intellectuals like Critchley, Byun-Chul Han, and Slavoj Žižek are brilliant and charismatic when they theorize about power and psychopolitics. But right-wing thinkers deploy a brutally functional, Machiavellian genius. They seek to weild power instead of pontificating about it.

Critchley remains a brilliant thinker, widely considered one of our leading philosophers. While I enjoyed reading Faith of the Faithless, it also left me deeply frustrated.

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Hi folks,

Apologies for bothering those who aren’t interested… please just ignore this message. But I suspect there are some procrastinators out there who, just as I would do, wait for the absolute last minute to make a decision about things like this seminar, Magic, Prophecy, and the Creative Act. So this is a last little nudge for those stragglers.

I hope you will join us!

Some partial as well as full scholarships available for those who want to join but are feeling financially challenged. If this is you, please send us an email - hello@liminal.news ( cc me at daniel.pinchbeck@gmail.com ) and let us know what works for you.

Kind regards,

Daniel

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I thought I would put in a late-inning pitch for my new seminar, which starts tomorrow, by exploring some of my thinking behind it.

As I’ve expressed in recent essays, I feel there is most definitely something inexplicable to purely logical analysis in what’s happening in the United States right now. It feels as if something snapped: we’ve broken put of the rational framework and gone into something irrational and cacophonous, but above all mythological and archetypal. Carl Jung talked about Nazism in relation to the dramatic mythology of Wotan. Similarly, it feels as if Trump and his minions gain power by conjuring up and manipulating shadowy unconscious forces that seek, in some sense, release through collective ritualized sacrifice.

We’re being forced to remember or rediscover that the mythic and magical forces buried in what Jung called the unconscious are incredibly powerful. They can overwhelm the more limited faculties of conscious reason and the relatively shallow moral conditioning required to maintain a pacified mass society. Many modern thinkers recognized this problem. Georges Bataille focused on transgression, taboo, sacrifice, eroticism, and excess as the repressed underside of the Enlightenment project. Walter Benjamin understood that modernity had not eliminated our need for ecstatic and collective forms of ceremony. If we failed to develop forms in which these irrational energies could be consciously expressed and integrated, he believed they would always return in destructive forms: fascism, mass incarcerations, wars, and so on. And that is what we are seeing now.

If I speak honestly, our situation politically, socially, and ecologically now looks extremely dangerous and quite dire. At the same time, I feel there was an inevitability in reaching this current crucible. I also feel that something else is under way: a deeper process of transformation or evolution of consciousness, whether or not we experience its fulfillment in our lifetimes. Many thinkers I study have explored this in different ways. They give me hope.

What we will explore in this seminar is how an individual can best respond to this moment without collapsing into either passivity or frantic control. One response to chaos is to cling harder: to become more attached to particular outcomes or try to force reality back into a shape we can understand. The more unstable the world becomes, the more the ego demands certainty, and the more painful reality becomes when it refuses to comply.

The alternative is not resignation. It is a healthier form of non-attachment combined with inner flexibility.

Most serious spiritual traditions make some version of this distinction. Buddhism teaches non-attachment. Taoism sees the suppleness of water as the ultimate teacher. At its best, medieval Christian mysticism asks the self to surrender its will to something larger — as in Marguerite Porete’s The Mirror of Simple Souls.

Jungian techniques help you enter into an intentional relationship with your unconscious rather than pretending your ego can, on its own, govern the whole psyche. In all of these traditions, the individual gives up its fantasy of control while building the capacity to act. Surrender, understood properly, can restore agency.

The creative process offers a great model for this. An artist begins with an intention but cannot dictate the finished work in advance. Too much control kills the work; too little focus produces incoherence. Creation requires a shifting balance between discipline and receptivity, will and surrender. Creativity often verges on a possession trance, requiring negotiation with daemonic forces that seem to have their own will (something understood quite literally in ancient Greece and other cultures).

This is where practices like Jung’s active imagination can serve a valuable function. The point is not to impose a fantasy upon reality through sheer will. First you allow an image, mood, figure, or intuition to emerge, then you enter into dialogue with it. You maintain your own position, but you also let the image answer back. Through this procees, you may discover something you did not consciously know.

That approach differs sharply from the pragmatic American school of manifestation magic, represented by Norman Vincent Peale. Peale took “positive thinking” to its logical extreme. His method asks you to form a desired image, hold it firmly, and force out anything that gets in your way. Peale’s most famous acolyte and student is Donald Trump, who grew up in his church.

Trump shows us what this approach can yield when joined with narcissism, mass media, political power, and a refusal of contradictory reality. The result is not participation but domination: an attempt to make the world conform to a one-dimensional image and ideal. What we need, I think, is to more fully define the opposite pole of a contemporary magical practice. Instead of trying to dominate reality by will, we can open ourselves and participate in a process much deeper and larger than the initial ego.

This also helps clarify the distinction between possession and participation. In mass possession, whether political, religious, or digital, the individual gets swept into a collective field. Emotions weave into one massive force. Symbols become charged. Critical reflection weakens. In Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti studied the transformation that occurs inside crowds where individuals become part of a supra-organism. In Escape from Freedom, Erich Fromm explored why people who feel isolated and powerless often prefer to surrender freedom of thought or conscience to authoritarian structures that offer certainty and belonging.

Our media environment now creates a virtual version of the same process. We can enter a collective trance while sitting alone. Millions of us experience synchronized waves of fear, rage, desire, humiliation, and identification through screens. In the old days, the crowd eventually dispersed. The ritual had to end. People went home. Today, the digital mob never goes away: It is always ready to attack or hunt down its next victim.

The practical question, then, is how we reclaim our psychic and creative power rather than remaining its object. How do we participate consciously in this liminal time, instead of being subsumed or possessed by the forces of the unconscious that have been unleashed to run amock? Can we use imagination, attention, symbol, ritual, and intention for our own development, to gain greater agency, rather than allowing political movements, advertising systems, and algorithms to rob these capacities from us? Can we build new ways of relating to the cutting edge technologies which offer almost superhuman powers while robbing us of agency?

This is one way I understand “magic” in the context of the seminar. I do not mean abandoning reason. I mean working with consciousness as an active rather than a merely passive force. What happens if we take seriously the role of imagination (or the imaginal) in shaping experience, behavior, relationships, and collective reality? We will explore what changes for us when we work with this faculty deliberately.

The prophet, artist, inventor, or visionary senses something — a new pattern, a potentiality — not yet fully present, and helps bring it into manifestation by giving it shape. Every creative act has this capacity. Something begins as an intuition, a pressure, or a wisp of possibility, a quantum shimmer, before it becomes actual and tangible.

Each day brings another crisis, scandal, outrage, or threat demanding our attention. We spend enormous amounts of psychic energy responding to realities that other people produce. Some of that response is necessary and unavoidable. But reaction alone cannot shape the future.

At some point, we have to recover our own capacity to generate new creative possibilities. If we can bring surrender and agency come back together, we can act without pretending to control the process or determine the outcome. We can stop imagining ourselves as masters of reality without reducing ourselves to victims of it. We can reclaim the creative and psychic force now captured by political spectacle, technological systems, and collective trance, and apply them to our own lives, work, relationships, art, and other projects.

I do not think we can say to what extent changing our relationship to imagination and participation may or may not transform the larger reality. I am dubious of simplistic claims that enough visualization, meditation, or any esoteric practice will somehow dissolve the harsh political and ecological realities we face today. But it is clear that our human reality changes through shifts in perception, expectation, symbol, value, story, and imagination.

Every institution began as an idea. Every political order depends on collective belief. Every social transformation requires people to perceive possibilities that previously seemed impossible.

This is the experimental terrain we will explore in Magic, Prophecy, and the Creative Act: how to cultivate a healthy non-attachment without becoming passive, how to recover agency without hardening into control, and how to participate in the creative forces of consciousness rather than getting caught in the mass trance around us.

I hope to see you there!

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As I prepare for our upcoming seminar, Magic, Prophecy, and the Creative Act, I keep thinking about the Aboriginal Dreaming — or the Dreamtime — and its connection to what we’re experiencing now with the accelerated breakdown of the United States, the central pillar of the liberal order over the last centuries. The speed of this process is extraordinary. As a self-willed process of self-annihilation — a civilizational seppuku — it has the quality of a mythological interregnum. Faced with this slow-motion catastrophe, people seem paralyzed and dissociated, lacking a language able to encompass it.

Of course, there are many recent historical precedents for democratic breakdown, authoritarian populism, imperial decline and institutional collapse. In many ways, Trump has followed the playbook developed in Russia, Georgia, Turkey, and elsewhere: attack the press, subordinate the civil service, reward personal loyalty, weaken independent institutions, and make corruption inseparable from governance. Yet the present situation in the U.S. retains an uncanny quality because of the country’s central place in the modern order. Despite its history of slavery, racism, indigenous genocide, hard wars and soft economic conquests, the U.S. became the principal guarantor as well as benefactor of a civilizational model where representational democracy, scientific knowledge, technological development and materialism seemed to reinforce one another. For much of the last century, America supplied the dominant symbol for human advancement.

Now the country is tearing itself apart, while a third of its citizens cheer on the ongoing desecration. We are seeing institutions that took decades or even centuries to build rapidly undermined or demolished, in a stage that feels like the prelude to something like the Cultural Revolution in China or the Fundamentalist takeover of Iran after 1979. These include the scientific and research establishments, the administrative state, universities, international alliances, as well as the norms that sustained constitutional democracy such as prohibitions against Executive Branch corruption and the separation of Church and State.

In what follows, I want to explore the Aboriginal dreaming as something that can help give us context for what’s underway, while acknowledging “the Dreaming” is an English umbrella term applied to many distinct traditions, laws, and relationships. I feel obscurely certain that one reason for this collapse is a metaphysical deficiency in Western thought and consciousness. The defect has been amplified by rapidly changing technological and ecological conditions. It is not easy to address this deficit, as it requires interrogating some of the basic beliefs that inform our Western way of being.

I first learned about Aboriginal ideas of the Dreamtime or the Dreaming via Bruce Chatwin’s wonderful little book, The Songlines. Traveling in Australia, Chatwin learned about a vast web of songs underlying the visible landscape which connected indigenous communities across the entire continent, even when their languages were entirely different. He realized that the intricate loom of the aboriginal songlines was probably humanity’s most complex cultural creation — and just as we were discovering this, Western colonialism was tearing it apart. Through the songlines, the aboriginals maintained creation and communed with the Ancestors in the Dreamtime who had sung the unmanifest world into physical existence. Chatwin writes: “By singing the world into existence... the Ancestors had been poets in the original sense of poesis, meaning ‘creation.’ No Aboriginal could conceive that the created world was in any way imperfect. His religious life had a single aim: to keep the land the way it was and should be. The man who went ‘Walkabout’ was making a ritual journey. He trod in the footprints of his Ancestor. He sang the Ancestor’s stanzas without changing a word or note – and so recreated the Creation.” Of course, Chatwin’s perspective has since been criticized for reflecting particular Western biases, as is almost always the case when we seek to translate other cultures into our modes of understanding.

A few stories I heard about the Aboriginals in different contexts always stayed with me, whether or not they are apocryphal. In one of these stories, an anthropologist visiting an Aboriginal group asked one of his hosts to explain the Dreaming. The aboriginal pointed to a plane flying across the sky. “White man Dreaming,” he said. According to the Aboriginal perspective, every living thing and created artifact — whether an axe or an LLM — first exists as a thought or imaginal construct of the Ancestors in the Dreamtime, before it is emanated into manifestation.

Later, Robert Lawlor’s book, Voices of the First Day, had a profound influence on me, even though it has also been subject to criticism from scholars for smuggling Vedantic and Eastern ideas into his efforts to define and convey the basic principles of Aboriginal thought. The historian Mitchell Rolls has argued that Lawlor manipulated sources and assembled an Aboriginal counterworld out of his own dissatisfaction with modernity. The peoples and cultures he portrayed became, in Rolls’s phrase, “products of his disillusionment.”

Lawlor tells a story in that book of working with Aboriginals on land rights issues (I don’t have the text in front of me and may be misquoting it to some degree). As I remember, he recalls going through a government building with an Aboriginal representative, walking quickly through long hallways, carrying the papers for the case under his arm. At some point, the Aboriginal asks him to stop. He points to the papers and asks: “What are those?” Lawlor answers that these are all of the important documents for their case. Then the Aboriginal points at a door and asks, “What is that?” Lawlor answers that it is the door they need to go through to get to their appointment. The Aboriginal thinks for a moment, and says: “No, these are trees. These are trees that you killed and now the trees, in revenge, have locked you into little boxes of time and space. Your white culture will always be a death culture until you learn the difference between a tree, which means life, and a door, which means survival.”

One more story: Years ago I studied with the anthropologist Mick Taussig at Columbia University. He told us about documentary filmmakers Alessandro Cavadini and Carolyn Strachan, who wanted to make a film about the Borroloola Aboriginal community in Australia’s Northern Territory — but decided to make a film with the Borroloola, instead. The filmmakers showed the Aboriginals a number of documentaries, and asked them how they would like to be represented. The Borroloola defined strict aesthetic rules for how the filmmakers could record them. They didn’t want there to be close ups in the film. A tight shot on a face or a speaking mouth strips the subject from land and community, isolating the speaker in a way they found false.

The Borroloola insisted that the entire community be present in almost every shot. To meet their demand, the directors shot Two Laws (Kanymarda Yuma, 1981) with a wide-angle lens. The expanded frame kept the entire community visible. Men and women sat apart, as custom demanded, yet drove the conversations together. This approach anchored the speakers firmly within the land, the rivers, and the mountains that defined their existence. We live in a diametrically opposed societal construct that constantly seeks to elevate the individual (celebrity, plutocrat, or “influencer”) over the community while ignoring the ecological substrate that forms us.

Lawlor explores the distinction in Aboriginal thought and language between the concept of the Dreaming or Dreamtime as the unmanifest and then the manifest or expressed aspect of creation, yuti, the tangible world. “In Pintupi the word for Dreamtime or Dreaming, tjukurrtjana, can be translated as the absolute ground of being or the fundamental universal continuum from which all differentiation arises,” he writes. But Lawlor’s definition sounds perhaps too similar to Vedantic terms.

In Sand Talk, the Aboriginal writer Tyson Yunkaporta calls the Dreamtime a “mistranslation and misinterpretation” of Indigenous concepts. He notes that greater precision would require him to repeat a cumbersome phrase such as “supra-rational interdimensional ontology endogenous to custodial ritual complexes” over and over again. Reluctantly, he continues to use the simpler word. (For me, the phrase “supra-rational interdimensional ontology” calls to mind experiences on psychedelics such as DMT and psilocybin.)

Lawlor notes that, unlike Western languages, Aboriginal language focuses on the specific and concrete, abjuring generalizations and abstractions:

Aboriginal languages reflect the cultural emphasis on experiential awareness, or yuti. For example, Aboriginal dialects have hundreds of names for each particular type of tree, and they have names for many individual trees. In the case of fish and animals, there are sometimes separate names for the same fish or animal at different stages of its breeding cycle. The vocabularies of Aboriginal dialects are so enormous that it has been virtually impossible for Western minds to master any of their languages. Linguistic studies prove that the richer a language is in names, the more it disposes the mind to observe and record ever finer distinctions. In spite of this linguistic power to distinguish each aspect and each individual plant, tree, or animal, Aboriginal languages have no words for abstract, generalized categories such as tree, plant, or animal… There is no word or concept for fiction, fantasy, or personal imagination—something that does not occur or is not perceived is a lie, pure and simple. Any story that does not directly refer to tangible perceptions or to the original Dreamtime stories is considered deceitful or just plain silly.

What the West calls “imagination” is understood by Aboriginal peoples as an extra-cognitive, sensory perception of the eternal, living ground of the Earth itself. The Dreaming is not a psychological fantasy: It can be conceived of as a highly disciplined, shared, and geographically anchored Imaginal reality.

Another way I have tried to approach the Aboriginal worldview, however limited by my own ideological programming, is through the Austrian philosopher Jean Gebser’s ideas about the evolution of mind in The Ever Present Origin. Jean Gebser described various structures of consciousness — archaic, magical, mythical, mental, and integral — which do not replace one another cleanly. The archaic-aboriginal structure has no idea of history or development – Aboriginal rituals seek to maintain the Creation in its proper order. The magic structure has a limited time sense; magic operations can influence the future to some extent. The mythic structure understands time as cyclical, with examples including the Yuga cycles of Hinduism and the Mesoamerican 5,100 year “long counts.”

Each structure poses a different way of relation to time and space, with new capabilities becoming accessible while old ones are lost. Each structure persists inside the later ones, and each possesses both an “efficient” and “deficient” mode. We are currently in the mental-rational structure, which started in the Renaissance and gave us linear time, perspective in painting, empirical science, and market economies. Writing in the 1950s, Gebser saw this structure was already in its deficient mode, which means a new revelation is forthcoming. He named the next structure of consciousness the “integral-aperspectival,” leading to a condition he called diaphaneity, in which all the past structures become simultaneously transparent and available to us as “veils” over the spaceless-timeless ultimate.

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We’re now in the accelerated stage of the collapse of the mental-rational structure, reflected by Artificial Intelligence and the fixation on quantification and purely technological progress divorced from qualities of being and experience, which are seen as ancillary and meaningless. As the mental-rational structure collapses, in some ways we are collapsing back into the earlier structures, but without the depth and weight that those structures possessed in their original form. We seem to have entered something like a depraved or evacuated version of a mythic consciousness, lost in its imaginal projections.

We’re currently experiencing a blinding implosion of the future into the present that suggests approaching catastrophe. What’s missing is any sense that the present continues from the past into a meaningful future, or that a successor generation will continue tradition and legacy. What remains when this is gone is pure extraction and spectacle: the burn-out society. Just to take one almost random example from the current news cycle, the U.S. government is currently using short-term U.S. Treasuries to buy up long-term U.S. Treasuries, to keep the Stock market and the bond market afloat for another few days, like using your credit card to pay your mortgage. The illusion is collapsing on itself.

Another example comes from the changing paradigm around visual representation. This is brilliantly explored in the artist Trevor Paglen’s new book, How to See like a Machine. Paglen argues that the status of the image is undergoing a shift comparable in importance to the discovery of perspective in the Renaissance. For roughly two centuries the photograph functioned as verification. A photograph provided empirical evidence that something had occurred — for instance, an image like a tortured man in Abu Ghraib or a bombed hospital in Gaza proved that these events had happened in reality. Generative imagery, produced via AI, dissolves the connection between image and verifiable reality. When any image can be produced without a corresponding event, the photograph stops being a witness.

What replaces verification, in his account, is something closer to “operation” or intervention. Images and narratives become activations or interventions that act directly on the nervous system rather than testify to a real event. The relevant question shifts from what an image attests to what it does: what happens neurologically and emotionally when a person encounters a violent image, or an erotic one, or one engineered to produce a particular affective state. This is a change in the fundamental role of the image, not something to be solved by better detection.

When we step back and consider our long history of image-making, we find that the image as evidence or verification was a recent innovation or anomaly rather than the norm. Palaeolithic cave images were never documentary. The animals at Lascaux were operational — an attempt at manifestation, a way to build manna, or make contact with divinity — and the same holds for Aboriginal image-making, where marks and designs carry law and sustain ancestral presence rather than depicting a scene. We can now see image-as-evidence to be a local arrangement within a culture based on a limited form of rationality and empiricism, lasting a few centuries, which we seem to be exiting now. A strange, or uncanny, feature of the present is that we have returned to operational images by a different road, through machines rather than through ceremony. The sense is of an evacuation of presence rather than a communion.

The collapse of the mental-rational structure does not deliver us back into the thick felt presence of the magical or mythical, or into anything beneficial or positive, unless we do the hard work to understand and assimilate what’s happening around and within us, and if we can rebuild our ontology based on new insights and information. I would propose that the Dreaming of the Ancestors still exists under our feet, just as it does for the Aboriginals. Perhaps that is a culturally inappropriate perspective. As a postmodern cosmopolitan, I view my “culture” as not one parochial mode but the ongoing, always incomplete effort to synthesize different cultures and build bridges between them.

The philosopher Yuk Hui argues that Western metaphysics has reached its end point. The West’s effort to define a universal and unifying logic able to explain any system — whether a machine, a biological cell, or human society — through the flow of information and feedback loops completed itself with cybernetics. Everything in the world is now reducible to calculability, data, and a “standing reserve” for exploitation (what Heidegger called Gestell or enframing). We’ve reduced language, art, music, and thought to detached logic and reproducible algorithms.

European philosophy exhausted its trajectory by actualizing itself through global cybernetics. It can no longer offer a way out of the totalizing trap it has created — this partly explains the fury of reactionary populists who embrace extreme forms of mythic identification to break the cybernetic machine. Hui argues, to envision a future that isn’t just a homogeneous, transhumanist machine-world, we must make a “decisive leap” into a “post-European” philosophy. This requires abandoning the pursuit of a single universal logic and instead embracing “technodiversity” and multiple “cosmovisions”—fragmenting the order of thought by allowing different local cultures and cosmologies to shape their local futures. While Hui focuses on Chinese thought as one “line of flight,” perhaps the multiplicity of indigenous cosmovisions offers something even deeper and more replenishing, If so, the current path of destruction could lead through catastrophe to something beautiful and necessary: a new Dreaming and a new creation.

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Magic, Prophecy, and the Creative Act

In the early thirteenth century an Andalusian mystic named Ibn ‘Arabi (1165–1240) left Murcia, a city in southeastern Spain, for the East and never came back. Ibn ‘Arabi claimed that the heart possesses a creative power, and that this power does not merely imagine things but actually makes them. Henry Corbin (1903–1978), the French philosopher who produced the first French translation of Heidegger before spending the better part of three decades studying Persian manuscripts in Tehran, renders the Arabic term for that power, himma, as “the force of an intention so powerful as to project and realize (’essentiate’) a being external to the being who conceives the intention.” To explain this idea, Corbin uses a Greek word, enthymesis — “the act of meditating, conceiving, imagining, projecting, ardently desiring.”

Accessing the imaginal world has nothing to do with wish-fulfillment, New Age manifestation, or positive thinking that promises sports cars and trophy wives for those who visualize hard enough. Corbin insisted on the distinction. The imagination he found in Ibn ‘Arabi and in Suhrawardi, the Persian founder of the Illuminationist school, does not exist to satisfy consumer fantasies. Suhrawardi outlined a cosmology with three main terms: the world of sense, the world of pure intellect, and between them an intermediate world with its own geography, its own inhabitants, and its own laws, which Corbin named the mundus imaginalis. He distinguished the imaginal from the imaginary. The middle world, the imaginal, is perceived, not invented. He called the faculty that perceives it the active imagination, an organ of knowledge rather than a source of enrichment or entertainment. Ibn ‘Arabi, for his part, wrote of the barzakh, his own term for that intermediate region: “Since the barzakh is something that separates what is knowable and what is unknowable; non-existent and existent; intelligible and unintelligible; negated and affirmed — it has been given the term barzakh.”

The West dropped this middle term, despite occasional efforts to revive something similar by visionaries such as Pico della Mirandola or William Blake. Corbin dated the loss to the thirteenth century, when Latin readers of Averroes reduced imagination to a bodily faculty tied to the perishable individual; others put the break three or four centuries later, with Descartes or with the Reformation. Whatever the exact chronology, the West ended up with a cosmology that has a huge gap in it. We demoted imagination from an organ of perception to a private theater in the skull. The word imaginary became synonymous with “not real.” That demotion is so complete that it now feels like common sense rather than an intellectual event with a specific history.

Some may object that we have since learned that the world is not made out of intentions. Except that this is not exactly what we have learned. Bell’s theorem, formulated in 1964, converted a long-standing philosophical quarrel between Einstein and Bohr into a measurable question: if particles carry their properties with them, and if nothing travels faster than light between two measurement sites, the correlations between them must obey a specific statistical ceiling. Quantum mechanics predicts correlations that exceed it. In 2022, Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger won the Nobel Prize in Physics for a sequence of experiments, running back to the 1970s, that progressively closed the loopholes in experimental tests of that theorem. The ceiling is violated, consistently and by wide margins. The universe cannot be both local and real — particles do not simply carry definite properties around with them independently of measurement, and no local account of any kind reproduces what the laboratories keep finding.

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It would be a huge overreach to propose that the Bell results “prove” that consciousness creates matter. Most physicists resolve the apparent paradox by surrendering locality rather than realism, which leaves the world objective if strangely connected. Nothing in the experimental record vindicates Ibn ‘Arabi’s idea of himma. The real implication is narrower yet still crucial: the results withdraw the intellectual authority with which materialism dismisses accounts like Corbin’s as pre-modern superstition. The Western model of self-contained objects bearing fixed properties failed in the laboratory, under its own protocols. This does not settle the question of what the imagination is capable of. It reopens it.

Anyone who has spent time with living ceremonial traditions encounters realities that do not fit the materialist frame. Indigenous traditions do not practice variants of one underlying technique. Their cosmologies differ, their plants differ, their songs and diagnostic methods and understandings of illness differ, and each works best within its own territory. Yet the ceremonies produce changes, sometimes unbelievable ones. The magic of one lineage works differently from that of another — but it works, showing efficacy on its own terms.

The maverick English biologist Rupert Sheldrake’s hypothesis of morphic resonance offers one account of this. It remains outside the scientific mainstream and has been contested for four decades. Sheldrake proposes that repeated patterns of activity establish morphic fields that make the same patterns or forms easier to repeat. Applied to human cultures, a field of this kind would be primarily shaped by the tradition that laid it down rather than by any universal constant. Although Sheldrake also argues for something like the “hundredth monkey” principle, which suggests cultural practices can spread nonlocally, once a certain threshold is reached.

Applied to ceremonial practice, morphic resonance could help explain how a people living in one valley for many centuries, singing the same songs to the same beings on the same nights, can build a force with real-world effects. If such fields exist, they are not metaphors; they are the reason the tradition persists. I have seen a number of “magical” effects working in their original contexts. Sheldrake’s mechanism may not be the answer, but he addresses something that is generally ignored: magic is stubbornly local. Any theory of the imaginal must account for this.

In terms of how the powers of the imaginal can be applied, I am interested in the work of Georg Kühlewind (1924–2006), the Hungarian philosopher and practitioner of Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual science. In Becoming Aware of the Logos, his reading of the Gospel of John, Kühlewind writes: “To become aware of the Logos is to become aware of the Logos in oneself.... The world speaks. Before all else, it utters speaking itself. Or does speaking utter the world.”

The Logos, in his account, is the meaning-making activity that is already occurring in every act of perception. The activity is usually invisible precisely because we look through it. Nobody perceives raw sensation and then adds interpretation. We perceive and interpret as one intermeshed process, and it happens constantly, below the threshold of conscious attention or intention. The expression and creation of meaning are, for Kühlewind, intersubjective: “A single human being has no reality; the existence of ‘man’ begins with the word that floats between I and you.”

If Kühlewind is correct and perception is already a creative act, the question is not whether imagination participates in constituting the world — it does so continuously, unavoidably, in everyone — but whether that participation can become intentional, and what changes when it does. William Blake, the poet who saw angels in a tree on Peckham Rye as a boy and escaped a beating for saying so only through his mother’s intervention, put the same claim in its most compressed form: “Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself.” Imagination, as a cognitive organ, is not tangential; it is essential to building a world, or what phenomenologists call the “life world”.

A moment’s reflection reveals what this implies for politics. Our shared world runs almost entirely on abstractions that cannot be pointed to or tangibly grasped: sovereignty, credit, nationhood, corporate personhood, the market’s confidence, the legitimacy of an election — none of these has a physical location, yet all of them are brutally effective, capable of putting armies in motion or foreclosing on millions of homes. They are intentions, imaginal constructs, given an objective weight — himma at global scale — sustained by collective attention, mediated into existence, and dissolving if and when attention withdraws from them. This is not a mystical or esoteric reading of politics: it is a literal one.

A civilization that forgets or forfeits the imaginal “other world” does not become rational and sober. It splits. On one side you find a flattened materialism that can describe physical and sociological mechanisms but cannot say anything about meaning, purpose, or transcendence. On the other side, we find unanchored fantasy, paranoid conspiracy, and religious delusion. You end up with the spiteful dreamlife of people whose capacity for vision and initiation has been amputated for generations, addicted to dopamine hits.

The imaginal was never the enemy of realism. It was the thing that kept fantasy accountable to something. Earlier societies maintained a balance by acknowledging a real order in the middle world that could be handled correctly or incorrectly. The category of this third term gave people a way to understand how and why negating or misusing the imagination could have terrible consequences.

None of this implies or justifies retreating from concrete reality. The political realm carries its own weight and cannot be dissolved into pure consciousness. A nonviolent resistance movement, an armed rebellion, a general strike — none of these is a visualization technique. The past fifty years leading up to today’s techno-authoritarianism show us what happens when individual spiritual practice or inner work is treated, in itself, as a replacement for collective action.

The stories and images a society uses to define itself originate from specific sources and creators. Today, we are seeing these narratives produced through manipulative mechanisms oriented toward capturing attention instead of techniques for establishing shared coherence and a basis of evidential truth. AI contributes to the onslaught of deceptive media, “fake news,” and a collapse of shared context, and those who make these memes and images have largely abdicated responsibility for what they do.

Stepping away from active participation in that intermediate realm does not free anyone from its influence. It merely leaves people trapped within images fashioned by others, lacking the tools to counter these influences.

This raises the question of practice. None of the figures mentioned above treated this as a theory with no application. Ibn ‘Arabi prescribed specific disciplines — retreat, fasting, the repeated invocation of the divine names — and insisted that a seeker submit what he encountered to a teacher who could distinguish genuine vision from the soul’s own appetite. Kühlewind taught exercises in attention, on the grounds that the faculty in question atrophies without use. He believed that almost everything in contemporary life is engineered to prevent its use. The universal proposition is that the imagination must be trained and honed.

Starting this Sunday, I am leading a six-week experimental seminar, Magic, Prophecy, and the Creative Act. We’re going to test this proposition, moving through studies of myth and psychopolitics, the daimon and the question of magical practice, divine madness and the poet as seer, prophecy and the Logos, and the initiatory logic of ordeal. Each participant is invited to develop a single project across the six weeks, applying what we are studying and exploring in tangible ways. We meet live on Zoom, Sundays for lecture and discussion, Wednesdays for workshop, and every session is recorded for anyone who cannot attend in person.

Details and registration can be found at https://www.liminal.news/magic-prophecy-and-the-creative-act. Until Saturday, we are offering a “late-bird” special of 33% off. I hope you will join us for this experiment!

Last week, I posted about NUMINA, my first entry into the FutureX Prize competition (submissions due today). After tracking dozens of submissions and weighing the early reactions, I decided to take another shot. This time, I approached the project the way I would approach a mainstream magazine assignment: work within the parameters, gauge what the judges want, and execute. I asked myself what narrative and scientific concept would stand the strongest chance in a contest with a $2.5 million top prize and ten $100,000 finalist spots.

The result is ILLUMINA, which explores the realistic engineering pathway to constructing a Dyson swarm—the practical, megastructure variant of a Dyson sphere—in the near future. Please watch, like (if you do like), share, and comment.

Cinema often works best when it tracks the grueling, magnificent construction of an impossible object (what Jacques Lacan called the petit objet a). You see this in the assembly of the bomb in Oppenheimer, the mobilization of an insurgency in The Battle of Algiers, or the casting of the church bell in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, where the community-wide effort led by a single inspired genius becomes an emblem of artistic creation. As J. Hoberman observed of Tarkovsky’s film, “No movie has ever attached greater significance to the artist’s role.” In ILLUMINA, there is no conventional villain. The Sun serves as both adversary and source, while the immense pressure of finishing a multi-decade project across twenty-five years drives the human drama.

I entered this contest twice because I think we have arrived at an authentic watershed moment. Production tools, creative workflows, and generative models are colliding rapidly, carving out open territory for independent creators who work outside legacy systems. Because mainstream film and television institutions still resist or reject generative tools—constrained by legal inertia and legacy IP frameworks—the field remains open to newcomers.

Physicists and futurists have long noted that building a Dyson swarm would be accomplished by extracting minerals from Mercury for raw materials. A fleet of self-replicating automated factories would mine the planet, then build the factories to fabricate an expanding armada of ultra-thin solar collectors to encircle the Sun and beam massive energy arrays back to Earth. The laws of physics permit it; the challenge is sheer logistical scale and generational time. ILLUMINA links this impulse back to the Pyramids—another monument raised by a Sun-obsessed civilization—and traces the technical arc to its conclusion.

Watching the submissions stream into the private Slack channel, I noticed how rapidly generative video converges on shared tropes, drifting toward the plastic sheen of video game aesthetics. The uncanny valley remains stubbornly difficult to escape — we are so attuned, as humans, to micro-effects of voice or gesture. While generative tools can render almost any concept on command, keeping the visuals consistently on point requires immense effort; without constant friction and precise attention, the models pull everything back toward a generic (awful) median. I am not satisfied with every frame of the trailers, due to time and money constraints. But the technical and editorial lessons were invaluable.

Below is the trailer for NUMINA, my initial entry exploring time and consciousness, which took a somewhat more philosophical angle than the judges may want.

If you have a moment, please give both trailers a watch, leave a like, and share your thoughts in the comments. Following the parameters, these are quite mainstream. In future projects, including the upcoming Breaking Open the Head adaptation, I intend to lean much further into avant-garde experiments. I hope you will follow me there, as well.

What we’re experiencing now in the U.S. is what the poet Aime Cesaire called “the imperialist boomerang,” when the drastic techniques of torture, mass incarceration, suppression of dissent, and so on, previously used against foreign populations across the developing world get applied domestically. You could also call it an internal colonization. These techniques, unfortunately, are being turbo-charged through Artificial Intelligence and advanced surveillance tools. While many more people in the U.S. are against what’s happening than support it, we suffer from a massive coordination failure due to the dismantling of our civil society infrastructure over the last 150 years. In other words, the situation is becoming increasingly critical and existential while our capacity for collective response remains limited and dysfunctional.

To speak bluntly, I would say that one of the main reasons the Iranian regime has been able to thwart the U.S. war effort is because of their religious faith. Their leaders are much less afraid of death than secular progressives in the U.S. They equate death in war with holy martyrdom. The U.S. and Israeli leadership assumed that their capacity for targeted assassination would compell the Iranians to capitulate. Instead, we just strengthened their resolve.

Political philosopher Giorgio Agamben coined the term “bare life” (nuda vita) for the specific condition that emerges when a sovereign power or totalitarian State strips a human being of all legal rights and political protections, reducing existence to a purely biological fact that can be terminated by the State at any time. The Trump regime is telegraphing this power in a variety of ways — whether through the killing of American citizens in Minneapolis, the blowing up of fishing boats off the coast of Venezuela, or the brutal, inhumane treatment of immigrants, including many who have followed our rules seeking legal status here. The integration of the U.S. and Israeli military is another indication that the U.S. plans further repression of its domestic population here, particularly as Trump’s economic policies combined with AI will further decimate the middle and working class, leading to a society split between plutocrats and precariat.

Sadly, if we are ever going to see a sufficient counterforce in the U.S. coming together to push back against Fascist consolidation, it will probably require a significant subset of the population willing to accept the possibility of death, torture, or long-term incarceration. This is partly why I think it so essential that we interrogate the flawed ontological and metaphysical limits of the materialist worldview. At the moment, most progressives and Leftists assume there is nothing beyond this life, which makes them choose conciliation or capitulation over conflict.

I am serializing a book, Why We Need an Esoteric Left, in this newsletter. In the first chapters, we looked at how populist Right Wing and reactionary movements have embraced transcendence as well as the psychic, supernatural, and so on. We looked at Christian nationalism and “dispensationalism”, the messianic vision behind Israeli politics, the Silicon Valley drive toward a transhumanist Singularity, and the bitter subcultures of the manosphere.

While the Right offers mythic narratives of cosmic war and salvation, the Left counters with tepid policy papers, legal briefs, and structural critique. The Left is still wedded to reductive materialism, which is an obsolete paradigm: Recent discoveries in physics prove an intrinsic relationship between consciousness and physical reality. For the last centuries, progressives and Leftists saw themselves as brave realists because they did not attempt to escape or deny the scientific demystification of the universe. Now that worldview is out of date. But the entrenched discourse on the Left struggles to evolve out of it.

In the last section, I looked at Jürgen Habermas, a German political philosopher. He spent fifty years building the most rigorous secular defense of democracy, only to realize that it couldn’t sustain itself without a religious basis. Habermas called this the “motivational deficit,” and it forced him to reconsider religion late in life to supply the ethical will that cannot be generated by reason alone. He realized our modern focus on human rights and our secular faith in social justice were a direct result of our Judeo-Christian heritage, not some purely logical deduction.

Today, I want to look at two thinkers who highlight the necessity of a transcendence-based politics from different starting points. On the Conservative side, Patrick Deneen argues that liberalism failed because it achieved its aims, leaving an atomized public that now requires a conservative elite to restore order by force, backed by traditional religious faith. The Mexican political analyst Macario Schettino argues that our shared cultural fictions have shattered. He optimistically or naively believes that AI will be used by the younger generation to rebuild Democratic coherence. I don’t entirely agree with either view, but seek to explore a range of perspectives.

Our recent video on the Imperial Boomerang:

As I noted last time, a wide range of critics and thinkers now see the need for a resacralization of politics — that civilization requires some form of transcendence as the basis for social cohesion. A well-known conservative critic, Patrick Deneen is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, author of Why Liberalism Failed and Regime Change. Deneen believes that liberalism has failed — not because it fell short of its ideals, but because it succeeded in realizing them too well. Liberalism redefined “freedom” as the liberation of the individual from natural limits, local communities, and inherited traditions. This created the conditions for liberalism’s inevitable collapse. The final result of liberalism is atomization that leaves isolated individuals entirely dependent on a massive, centralized state to manage their lives, mediating their market participation and social interactions.

Ultimately, Deneen argues, the liberal ideology hollowed out civic life, degraded the environment through unbridled consumerism, and generated widespread alienation, proving itself fundamentally unsustainable by dismantling the cultural foundations required to sustain human community. There is a reasonable basis to some of his criticism, but Deneen’s 2023 follow-up veered further into reactionary populism.

Why Liberalism Failed was primarily a localist, defensive critique (shades of Wendell Berry) urging the creation of small, intentional communities to weather the collapse of the liberal order, Regime Change goes full Trumpian, advocating for what Deneen calls “aristopopulism:” the top-down replacement of the current progressive, meritocratic elite with a new elite of reactionary rulers ((people like him), in other words) who will enforce a fundamentalist idea of the “common good” through the raw assertion of state power. Regime Change aligns Deneen with the Heritage Foundation, who built the plan for using the government to reshape not just the political economy but what Habermas called the lifeworld. Deneen supports Trump as a “brusque” means to this end, a necessary evil. He anticipates a successor — someone like JD Vance — who will consolidate the gains without the corruption and chaos.

As with other conservative ideologues, Deneen sees traditional religion not as a private lifestyle choice, but as the indispensable basis for cultivating the virtues of self-governance and moral restraint. He redefines liberty, rejecting the modern view of freedom as the absence of external constraints, returning instead to what he understands as the classical and Christian understanding of libertas. For Deneen, true liberty is not the right to do whatever we want, whenever we want; it is the hard-won capacity for self-governance, achieved by mastering our base desires, appetites, and impulses.

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Just a couple of short things…

I made — “vibe-coded” — a spontaneous creativity App, and just added it to my website. Basically, I skimmed practices from 20th Century artistic movements such as Fluxus, Oulippo, The Surrealists, and so on, to put together this application, which is totally free to use. Below is a description… you can try it here:

First Thought Best Thought

If you do try it, please let me know in the comments how it was for you. I can still improve and modify it in all kinds of ways, perhaps even build a little social network around it. I’m particularly interested in the “multi-player” options… please give them a whirl next time you meet up with friends.

Also, I took my essay on the eclipse and turned it into an instant Youtube video essay, which you can watch here:

First Thought Best Thought

A writing app built on spontaneity. Random prompt, running clock, no delete key.

Beat poet Allen Ginsberg liked to say “first thought, best thought”. The Beat approach to creativity encouraged spontaneity and immediacy. The Surrealists created many different techniques and games to free up the unconscious mind, such as the infamous “Exquisite Corpse.” Writers from the Oulipo movement in France saw art as a form of play, creating rules for their works — such as author Georges Perec, who wrote an entire novel without the letter “e.”

Our first flash of uncensored insight is often more powerful than what comes through long reflection.

‘First Thought, Best Thought’ assimilates games and practices from these movements as well as others taken from Yoko Ono, Augusto Boal, and Fluxus. You can practice them alone or explore the multiplayer options with friends, or even strangers.

We give you a prompt picked at random and start a timer. The backspace key is disabled to encourage unmediated expression. What you end up with is not a finished piece. It is raw material — the thing you thought, before you even knew you were thinking it.

You can save the result to your personal archive or delete immediately. Hope you enjoy! Please add best results to the comments.

Tomorrow, August 12, 2026, a total solar eclipse will cross Greenland, Iceland, the North Atlantic and northern Spain, while a partial eclipse will be visible across much of Europe, Canada and parts of the northern United States. Eclipses are fascinating things. First of all, I consider it numinous and wild that we have perfect solar eclipses at all. This means that the Moon and the Sun have to appear almost exactly the same size in the sky, even though the Sun is gigantic — about 864,000 miles in diameter and 93 million miles away — while the Moon is comparatively tiny — about 2,159 miles in diameter and roughly 239,000 miles away. As the Sun represents, in our culture anyway, pure masculine force and Enlightenment rationality (although Georges Bataille has pulled that apart as I explored here), while the Moon represents feminine cycles, nature, and receptivity, their integration is of great symbolic interest.

Throughout history and across many cultures, eclipses were considered malevolent, dangerous thresholds. Ancient Mesopotamian astrologers regarded them as warnings to political authority. A solar eclipse could signify “grave danger for the ruler” of the region where it appeared. Assyrian courts sometimes responded with the extraordinary ritual of installing a substitute king, temporarily transferring the threatened monarch’s symbolic identity onto another person who might absorb the hex. Celestial events did not simply predict private psychological developments. They concerned the relationship between the cosmic order and the political order. The king embodied the State, but also had a relationship to cosmic forces. If the Sun disappeared, even briefly, something about sovereignty itself could be called into question or undermined.

I don’t believe any eclipse, no matter how portentious, will automatically unleash revolutions, wars or devastating financial meltdowns. But neither do I support the modern rational mechanism that dismisses all symbolic or archetypal interpretations of celestial events as primitive superstitions. The thinker who helped me overcome my aversion to astrology was Richard Tarnas. Tarnas, a Harvard trained historian, wrote the incredibly fascinating Cosmos and Psyche, where he correlated larger historical cycles with the long orbits of the outer planets. Tarnas proposed an “a-causal” ordering mechanism based on Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli’s work on synchronicity: “The evidence suggests not that the planets themselves cause various events or character traits, but rather that a consistently meaningful empirical correspondence exists between the two sets of phenomena, astronomical and human, with the connecting principle most fruitfully approached as some form of archetypally informed synchronicity.” (My 2007 review of Cosmos and Psyche is here).

Eclipse sale! 50% off all offerings from now until Friday. New online seminar starts August 23!

Eclipse Sale!

Tomorrow’s eclipse seems particularly suggestive because it occurs just weeks after the United States passed its 250th anniversary — an event that lacked the celebratory vibe of the 200th anniversary in 1776, as I dimly remember it. The coincidence becomes stranger when we consider that Pluto takes roughly 248 years to orbit the Sun. America, in other words, has just completed its first Pluto return. At the same time Uranus, which takes about eighty-four years to complete its orbit, has moved into Gemini, initiating what contemporary astrologers describe as America’s third Uranus return.

Astrologically, Uranus signifies disruption, revolution, technological innovation and sudden breaks with established order, while Gemini rules communication, media, information and networks. America’s previous Uranus returns coincided broadly with the Civil War era and World War II, so contemporary astrologers see the 2026–29 return as another period when technological change, information systems and political conflict could radically reorganize the country—though the exact return does not occur until 2027–28.

The recent American eclipse sequence gives tomorrows’ event more context. On August 21, 2017, a total solar eclipse crossed the continental United States from Oregon to South Carolina. It occurred in Leo, the sign traditionally associated with kingship, sovereignty, public authority, charisma and leadership. Astrologers paid particular attention to it because of the old mundane-astrology principle that an eclipse bears most strongly on the countries beneath its path. The eclipse arrived only months into Donald Trump’s presidency, a period of intense political polarization and institutional stress.

The April 8, 2024 total solar eclipse repeated the pattern in a different form. Its path ran from Texas northeast through the United States into Maine and Canada, cutting across the country on a different diagonal from the 2017 eclipse. The 2024 eclipse occurred in Aries, a Mars-ruled sign associated with assertion, conflict, initiative and struggle, during the same broad historical period as America’s Pluto return and a bitterly contested presidential election cycle. Taken together, the eclipses of 2017, 2024 and 2026 can be read not as a recurring symbolic punctuation around questions of American sovereignty, leadership and political identity. The 2026 eclipse is less an isolated omen than another indication of a deep Plutonic process underway, transforming the nation.

Astrologically, the August 12 eclipse occurs around 20 degrees Leo. Leo is traditionally ruled by the Sun and associated with kingship, sovereignty, charisma, spectacle, pride, creative self-expression and leadership. This makes the basic symbolism almost embarrassingly obvious: the Sun itself is obscured in the Sun’s own sign. It is not difficult to see this in relationship with our current political tragicomedy in the U.S., where our delusional President has just decimated the mythic power of the American Empire through a devastating war of choice in Iran, revealing our military approach to be twenty years out of date, while massive grift within our $1 trillion-a-year military industrial complex has rotted out our military capacity, similar to what has happened in Putin’s Russia.

Traditionally, Leo represents individuality, the king, charisma, and leadership. Aquarius concerns the collective, networks, groups and systems. This seems an appropriate dichotomy, considering the current political and technological moment. We are caught between increasingly personalized forms of political power and increasingly impersonal technological systems of manipulation and control; between the charismatic leader and the mimetic network; between the autonomy of the ruler and algorithmic coordination.

Tarnas argues that planetary cycles correlate with recurring archetypal patterns in human history. He believes psyche, history and cosmos participate in an underlying order in which meaningful correspondences happen outside of linear causation. Tarnas sees America’s Pluto return as a crucial juncture in our nation’s history.

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I just entered the Future Vision XPrize, a competition to imagine a positive future for humanity with a $2.5 million jackpot. I’ve made a short trailer for the project. It needs to stay“unlisted” for now, but please check out my attempt here:

The Future Vision XPRIZE is organized by the XPRIZE Foundation, founded by Peter Diamandis, the physician, engineer, entrepreneur, and futurist who also helped launch Singularity University and has spent decades promoting ambitious technological solutions to large-scale human problems. Diamandis and I don’t agree on many things—for instance, according to TechCrunch: “Xprize Foundation founder Peter Diamandis has joined a growing list of tech executives who think that global surveillance is a good idea, saying, “[h]umans behave better when they’re being watched.” I find this hideous.

The Future Vision competition is sponsored by Google, Range Media Partners, and Salesforce. The contest bridges Silicon Valley techno-optimism, private space exploration, AI, venture capital, and the entertainment industry, in an effort to generate compelling visions of a desirable technological future. Essentially, the competition is marketing designed to promote the possible benefits of technology and AI at a time when discontent is growing rapidly. I realize many will be ideologically opposed to it because of that.

I grew up on Star Trek, Dune, and Asimov’s Foundation series and avidly consumed science fiction throughout my adolescence. Despite all of the legitimate horrors and threats of AI, I still find it important to experiment with it and explore it as a creative medium. I agree with the philosopher Bernard Stiegler ( I made a short film about his ideas, here), who believed we can’t run away from new technologies but, instead, we must seek to use them intentionally, to try to reverse the entropic processes industrial society has unleashed.

The vision of a utopian technological future where people have overcome death, sickness, and other forms of limitation inherently creates a narrative problem: What dramatic stakes are left? NUMINA proposes that, even if we “conquer” space, matter, and biology, there would still be deeper dimensions of consciousness and temporality that present dangerous liminal zones.

NUMINA begins six hundred years from now. After centuries of crises, humanity has joined a flourishing interplanetary civilization called Concordia, which includes humans, synthetic beings, and extraterrestrial species. Scarcity has ended. Disease has disappeared. Human beings can extend their lives indefinitely through cellular regeneration and systems that preserve memory and identity. Artificial intelligence has become a common civic resource rather than the property of corporations or governments. Cities grow like living organisms from planets out into solar systems. People devote themselves to research, exploration, games, art, and the creation of new forms of life. Concordia is a decentralized civilization built around cooperation, abundance, and curiosity.

Subverting their understanding of physics, they experience ripples in the spacetime continuum. Objects and elements of the past start mysteriously vanishing, with only a flicker of memory holding the thread of what’s been lost. A child receives a wonderful toy — a moment later the toy disappears. It was never invented. Historical records rewrite themselves. Entire worlds and alien races suddenly disappear from the archives. Some citizens retain shadowy memories of things that, according to every available record, never existed (I was inspired by the Mandela Effect).

Scientists trace the disturbances to Chronos, an obscure planet at the edge of the galaxy. Two centuries earlier, Concordia sent an exploratory mission there. The expedition disappeared and the planet is assumed uninhabitable. Concordia sends two agents, Lyra and Ren, to investigate. Lyra is three hundred years old, genetically modified and highly trained. Despite living in a civilization that has solved nearly every practical problem, she has the nagging feeling that something is missing. A civilization without real danger loses something of its capacity for intensity of feeling and experience.

On Chronos, Lyra and Ren discover the ruins of the missing expedition and a strange insurgent civilization hidden in vast caves under the planet’s surface. Its leader is Octovious. He was the captain of the original Concordian mission. After becoming stranded on Chronos, he watched his crew die while the supposedly perfect civilization that had sent them there never returned. His grief became rage. Deep beneath the planet, Octovious found the Groffolux, enormous, ancient and wise caterpillar-like beings, thought to be mythical, who are the last survivors of an ancient star-faring civilization. Their species acquired immense technological power before they tragically destroyed themselves by altering the time lines.

The Groffolux possess knowledge of something Concordia doesn’t understand. They call it Numina. Through a combination of biological secretions, crystalline technologies, and meditative trance, consciousness can enter another dimension where time is not fixed. Inside Numina, the traveler becomes a child again, encountering an immense field of crystalline structures, each containing possible versions and branching paths of galactic history. By manipulating these structures, a sufficiently trained consciousness can alter the timeline itself. Octovious realized what this means. If history can be rewritten, he can reconstruct the universe around himself and become its absolute ruler. The strange disappearances throughout Concordia are the side effects of his experiments — test runs before he makes his bid for total power.

The Groffolux teach Lyra how to enter Numina, but they also teach her something Octovious has failed to understand. Time cannot safely be controlled through domination. The more someone tries to force reality toward a predetermined outcome, the more the intricate structure of the universe begins to collapse. Numina responds instead to states of curiosity, openness, attention, and play—qualities associated with the wonder of childhood. The final confrontation therefore does not take place through superior weaponry. It takes place between the child versions of Lyra and Octovious inside Numina.

As Octovious attempts his final transformation of history, Lyra confronts the childhood experience he has spent centuries trying to escape: his abandonment, his grief, and the emotional wound that gradually transformed his desire for discovery into a desire for control. Rather than trying to fight him, she shows him the possibility that his history might have taken another path. His grip on the timeline breaks and the continuum heals. Back in Concordia, species and objects that had vanished return. History stabilizes, but the civilization changes as a result. Its physics of consciousness was incomplete. Consciousness is not merely something contained inside the physical universe. Under certain conditions, consciousness participates in the formation of reality itself. Concordia responds by creating a new institution, the Order of Time Guardians, with Lyra as its first member.

In NUMINA, the final technological frontier turns out not to be another machine but inner dimensions within consciousness itself. That idea connects to my belief that human evolution requires an inner transformation, matching our technological powers, if we are going to survive. The premise of NUMINA is that technological development alone does not produce a mature civilization. The capacities for empathy, self-knowledge, attention, and restraint matter far more than increasing magnitudes of computing power.

Following the contest rules, I made the trailer with generative AI tools, using systems such as Higgsfield, Kling, Sora, Claude, Gemini, Elevenlabs, and others for images, video, prompting, and sound. With AI, the distance between imagination and realization is shrinking. A filmmaker without a studio or budget can now create stories based on distant planets, alien civilizations, futuristic cities, or altered dimensions of consciousness.

The tools remain klutzy. Continuity is difficult. To make something decent requires a serious amount of patient artisanal craft. But I sense we are witnessing the rapid emergence of a new artistic medium. And it is evolving rapidly. My personal perspective is that AI-based film and video might become its own artistic medium, separate from traditional human-made content.

Anyway I had fun developing this idea and making the trailer. Please check it out on Youtube, give a like or comment there, and also let me know, in comments here, what you think about it. I admit to feeling queasy about AI and I fully sympathize with the growing pushback against it. Yet… as a creative person who has often felt stymied by institutional structures that refused to support or fund my work, I can’t resist taking advantage of it. By the way, I am also working almost fanatically on the Breaking Open the Head film and video project I mentioned a month or so ago. I hope to show some of that work here, soon. (You can still support the GoFundMe for that project if you want — contributions of any size are very helpful, buying me time and assistance.)

As Wayne Gretzy said: You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take!

This piece marks the opening of Chapter Five of Why We Need an Esoteric Left, the book I am serializing here as I write it.

For readers joining mid-stream, the preceding chapters put forth a diagnosis. The American Right took political and cultural power because it offers a narrative of meaning and purpose. Cruel and distorted though it is, it remains a story: men are warriors in an Apocalyptic and Manichean conflict, women are guardians of civilizational continuity and the hearth, and wealth is the visible sign of divine favor. The Left counters with policy white papers, legal briefs, and structural critiques, with no metaphysical force beneath them.

This asymmetry is not a failure of branding or political messaging. Two centuries ago, the Left aligned itself with the scientific revolution, with materialism and the “demystification” of any transcendent hopes. In adopting a strict materialist posture—only acknowledging empirical facts, treating consciousness as an accidental biological byproduct, and dismissing religion as an opiate and the supernatural as superstition—the Left cut it itself off from the language of myth. Meanwhile, the Right has reorganized itself around a new ordering principle: algorithmic administration above, mythic identification below.

Chapter Five looks at the growing awareness, across many fields of inquiry, that modern civilization cannot survive without some form of mythic or transcendent ethos that dignifies human life and human suffering. We will be look at four disparate thinkers: German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, the American Catholic reactionary Patrick Deneen, the Mexican techno-optimist Macario Schettino, and the British philosopher Simon Critchley.

Despite their ideological differences, all four arrive at a similar conclusion: a purely secular, procedural order cannot generate the solidarity required to maintain post-industrial civilization. What divides them is the proposed remedy. Deneen advocates for a post-liberal aristocratic elite to impose a traditional order from above; Schettino expects technological automation to synthesize a new socio-economic paradigm; Critchley proposes a “faith of the faithless,” asking us to embrace a supreme fiction while fully aware of its fictional nature.

This installment focuses on the first thinker: Habermas spent half a century constructing a rigorous defense of political legitimacy in modern states. He then changed his mind, concluding that secular reason cannot supply the binding force we require, and a new synthesis of religion and reason is necessary.

This jarring period feels less like a routine political realignment and more like a structural collapse. Liberalism—the centuries-old framework built on individual liberties, human rights, rule of law, free markets, and consent of the governed—is giving way. With it goes the broader Enlightenment project, which anchored human progress in empirical reason, open inquiry, and the scientific method. For two centuries, these two forces drove the expansion of representative democracy across the globe.

That expansion has halted. More than three decades ago, Francis Fukuyama famously predicted the “end of history,” envisioning a globalized world bound together by liberal institutions. Today, that vision lies shattered. Democracies retreat while autocracies multiply. Where elections survive, states often reduce them to ritualized theater, building “competitive authoritarian” regimes that hollow out genuine participation from within.

The unraveling of the liberal world order is a stunning turnaround. By the mid-1990s, Freedom House reported that roughly three-fifths of the world’s sovereign states had embraced democratic governance, and V-Dem Institute metrics show that over half of the global population lived under democratic rule by the turn of the century. Today, those figures have inverted. According to the V-Dem Institute’s 2026 Democracy Report, autocracies now outnumber democracies—92 to 87—for the first time in more than two decades. Only 7% of the world’s population now lives in a liberal democracy—the lowest proportion in half a century—while 74% live under some form of autocratic rule.

Four thinkers with wildly divergent commitments illuminate this moment: a German liberal rooted in the Frankfurt School, an American Catholic reactionary, a Mexican techno-optimist, and a British atheist of the Left. Despite their ideological battles, they arrive at a shared diagnosis. A purely secular order cannot generate solidarity from its own resources. It lacks the engine to move citizens to shared sacrifice. To survive, society must recover, adapt, or invent a transcendent framework to bind its people together. The battle today centers on who builds this framework, and to what end.

This emergency did not arrive unannounced. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas mapped its fault lines decades ago. In Legitimation Crisis (1973), he observed that modern states must constantly intervene in the market to smooth over capital’s inherent instability. This intervention exposed a central myth of classical liberalism: that markets exist as autonomous, natural realms of equal exchange. When the state picks corporate winners, adjusts interest rates, and directs public funds, economic outcomes cease to look like natural phenomena. Poverty, inflation, and structural inequality reveal themselves as political choices. The illusion snapped.

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As the state intervened to shore up market outcomes, it inevitably disrupted cultural traditions and social norms. In his later major work, The Theory of Communicative Action (1981), Habermas formalized this dynamic as the conflict between the “system”—the administrative state and the market economy—and the “lifeworld.” The lifeworld represents the background horizon of shared meanings, organic relationships, traditions, and intuitive habits through which human beings actually live, communicate, and understand one another. State interventions continuously invade this sphere: public education sculpts the beliefs of the next generation, while administrative welfare frameworks shape family structures and child-rearing practices.

State planning creates its own trap. By steering the economy, the state invites public blame whenever the system falters. Governments must guarantee capital growth to service debt while appeasing a discontented workforce. The state bears accountability for every economic downturn, yet lacks the democratic consensus required to stabilize society.

To resolve this deadlock, Habermas called for a radical expansion of “communicative rationality”—a public sphere where citizens form binding consensus through open, uncoerced debate. “There is no administrative production of meaning,” he wrote. No central ministry, financial market, or media campaign can manufacture the moral legitimacy required to hold a society together. Legitimacy demands what he called “the unforced force of the better argument.” Modern politics faces a stark binary: expand democratic participation, or abandon it to technocratic control.

Habermas’s early work treated religious faith as a developmental stage that rational societies would naturally outgrow. In The Theory of Communicative Action, he argued that secular consensus would inherit the unifying role once played by sacred ritual. “The authority of the holy is gradually replaced by the authority of an achieved consensus,” he declared. Religion, he believed, would recede into private life, leaving public governance to pure reason.

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I am serializing a new book, Why We Need an Esoteric Left, as I write it. We are currently in Chapter Four, “Our Civilizational Psychosis,” which includes two parts: First, the outer history of how the American Left was tactically destroyed while the counterculture was absorbed, Second, the inner history, looking at the deeper metaphysical wound the Left inflicted on itself, and how to heal it so we can move forward in unity and solidarity.

Before I explore what kind of new paradigm or “transformation of values” might support a revitalized alternative, I felt the need to add another layer to my analysis about where we find ourselves now. Last time, I explored how the radical counterculture of the 1960s — which seemed, for a brief period, capable of instigating an actual insurrection — ended up absorbed into lifestyle marketing and identity politics that failed to address the structural basis of oppression. The Right eventually learned to imitate and co-opt the forms of countercultural rebellion (for instance with comedians like Joe Rogan and Theo Von), as the Left became more sanctimonious and controlling.

In the 1960s, the Left represented the exciting edge of transgression, the rejection of censorship, and the breaking free from ossified norms and structures. That changed over the last decades. As counterculture values were haphazardly institutionalized, a rebellion against them seemed vitalizing to many. (For instance the “trad wife” as an answer to an incomplete sexual revolution; racism as an answer to multicultural pluralism; Christianity as an answer to secular atheism). This flip intensified the general ambience of confusion and mistrust. As a cultural sea-change, it opened a window for reactionary populism.

We can now better understand and analyze how this reactionary movement operates: What’s fascinating is its paradoxical, apparently nonsensical, combination of highly complex technocratic instruments with a rejection and repudiation of science and reason as meaningful or even real. The authoritarian takeover in the U.S. combines high-tech algorithmic administration with mythic, grievance-driven populism (QAnon, etcetera) to manage a populace increasingly pushed to the margins by digital automation, precarity, depletion of resources, and environmental collapse. As platform monopolies hollow out middle-class prosperity and corporate elites lose their dependency on human labor (via AI and automation), they seek to weaponize instrumental reason through technologies of control and psychological manipulation while exploiting social media to deepen ancient cultural tribalism by spreading mass deceptions.

To break this loop, a humane alternative cannot merely defend an obsolete technocratic status quo: We must reclaim a deeper form of reason that not only restores material solidarity and genuine human agency but reclaims the sacred, holy, and transcendent from those who manipulate faith and fealty for authoritarian aims. If this seems opaque at all, I hope it becomes clear in what follows. Please let me know what you think in the comments!

The apparent contradiction of our moment—extreme technological sophistication combined with climate denial, conspiracism, religious nationalism, and attacks on scientific and democratic institutions—is not accidental. It reveals something fundamental about the new political order. One provisional thesis sees the present authoritarian turn as the political form taken by late-stage capitalism as it loses its capacity to generate broad levels of prosperity, democratic legitimacy, material improvement, and a secure future.

Digital technologies enable unprecedented concentration of wealth, information, and power, while ecological crisis and economic stagnation undermine the old liberal promise of continual progress. The resulting regime combines instrumental hyper-rationality at the level of administration with mythic politics at the level of mass consciousness. Rather than a regression or rejection of modernity, we are witnessing a new synthesis: algorithmic administration above, mythic identification below.

Yanis Varoufakis’s idea of “technofeudalism” captures one dimension of this transformation. Whether or not one supports his term, the central insight is compelling. The dominant technology companies no longer merely compete in markets. They increasingly own the infrastructures within which markets, communication, and even social life take place. They function simultaneously as landlords, regulators, surveillance systems, and marketplaces. Power has moved from competitive capitalism to ownership of the digital platforms and networks themselves (hence Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the Ellisons’ takeover of Paramount and of TikTok’s U.S. operations via an Oracle-led consortium, and their bid for Warner Bros., currently paused by a federal judge).

This profoundly alters the relationship between economic elites and democracy. Industrial capitalism required large workforces, rising wages, public education, and mass consumption. Digital capitalism increasingly depends on intellectual property, automation, data, AI, financial assets, and network effects. As AI and robotics advance, the bargaining power of labor is likely to decline further, or to crash to zero.

When ordinary people are no longer crucial for the functioning of the economy while they retain democratic claims on prosperity and political influence, elites become increasingly incentivized to weaken or disrupt democracy itself. Authoritarianism — or autocracy — becomes a way of preserving concentrated ownership while managing, and controlling, increasingly precarious and angry populations.

At the same time, the neoliberal agreement has exhausted its legitimacy. For forty years, societies were told that globalization, deregulation, privatization, and financialization would benefit everyone. Instead, many have experienced stagnant wages, declining quality of life, dysfunctional public institutions, growing levels of inequality, and loss of status.

As this promise collapses, the fulcrum of political discourse shifts away from competing economic programs toward struggles over identity, belonging, resentment, and national destiny. Material grievances become translated into cultural conflict. Economic insecurity can be directed to amplify anger toward immigrants, intellectuals, minorities, universities, or imagined conspiracies, hiding the structural forces causing mass precarity. The authoritarian leader offers a psychologically satisfying explanation for diffuse social suffering. Instead of dealing with the structural contradictions of late-stage capitalism, he points at visible enemies and the promise of national restoration.

Much of what we are now experiencing — in a new, intensified form — was already well understood and analyzed by Frankfurt School philosophers such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. Their book Dialectic of Enlightenment proposed that the project of Enlightenment—which aimed to free humanity from myth, superstition, and domination through science and reason—has, under modern capitalism and technological society, turned into a new form of domination. Rationality, instead of liberating people, increasingly becomes an instrument for controlling both nature and human beings.

Reason gradually narrowed into what they call “instrumental reason”: Thinking focused primarily on efficiency, calculation, prediction, and control. Rather than asking, ‘What is good?’ or ‘What is true?’, instrumental reason asks, ‘What works for my defined goal?’ or ‘How can this be managed?’ This constrained approach to reason gives science, bureaucracy, markets, and technology immense power while leaving deeper ethical questions unanswered and subordinating objective evidence to goal-oriented operations.

Adorno and Horkheimer did not believe that this form of rationality eliminates myth. Instead, they argued that Enlightenment itself establishes a new mythic mode: When reason is reduced to calculation, efficiency, and control — to instrumental reason — it eventually loses the capacity to reflect upon its own purposes. In fact, Frankfurt School philosophers continued to nurture the hope that reason would provide an antidote to the excesses of a hyper-rationalist and technocratic order. Herbert Marcuse noted in Reason and Revolution: “Reason, and Reason alone, contains its own corrective.”

As we see today, the contemporary authoritarian state does not reject reason altogether. Instead, it divides reason into two separate domains. Within systems of administration, it embraces scientific and technical rationality enthusiastically: artificial intelligence, surveillance, logistics, financial engineering, predictive analytics, military technology, and behavioral science.

Within the public sphere, however, it undermines the authority of science whenever scientific knowledge creates political or social obligations. Climate science gets reframed as a politicized mass deception. Public health expertise becomes ideological. Universities that support freedom of inquiry are turned into enemies. Journalism becomes propaganda. This distinction is perfectly coherent from the standpoint of power. Science as an instrument of control is welcomed. Science as an independent source of public truth becomes dangerous, and something to suppress.

Climate denial illustrates this particularly well. Climate science does not merely describe atmospheric patterns and future trends. It inevitably reveals that existing modes of industrial production, extraction, consumption, and ownership cannot continue indefinitely. Therefore, it threatens powerful economic interests, albeit short-term ones. Denial becomes less a rejection of evidence than a defense of an entire social order built upon foundational lies.

Meanwhile, the mythic dimension of politics has also changed. Twentieth-century fascism relied upon centralized propaganda, state media, and mass rallies. Today’s mythic symbols and narratives are generated via algorithmic tools and mass-distributed instantly (QAnon as an example). Social media platforms continuously reveal which stories best maximize outrage, fear, resentment, and tribal identification. The myths themselves often appear ancient—national rebirth, sacred identity, violent migrants, heroic warriors, secret enemies—but their mass production and distribution is a contemporary phenomenon. With this new form of algorithmic myth-making, ancient archetypes and virulent memes get optimized through real-time computational feedback.

The new instantaneous mythic style feeds into the phenomenon that theorist Anton Jäger calls “hyperpolitics.” In his recent book Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences, he looks at how today’s social movements and activist protests (whether from the Left or Right) function as short-lived digital “swarms” rather than disciplined, membership-based organizations able to build or wield long-term power. Jäger compares today’s “hyperpolitics” to the Cheshire Cat’s grin—intense bursts of political expression without an organizational “body” to bring about sustained results. He summarizes it as, all too often, “low-commitment, low-cost, and low-value” political engagement, supported by the instantaneity of social media.

Psychologically, authoritarianism also acts as a politics of disinhibition. Contemporary neoliberal culture forced people to constrain their antisocial impulses — to become entrepreneurs of themselves, constantly “on show” via social media. The policing of language and sexual expression by the identity-focused “victim politics” of the Left added to this subjective feeling of constraint. Knowledge workers and influencers, in particular, have to optimize themselves continuously, compete constantly, while struggling with precarity. They are entrained to blame their failures on personal inadequacy. As the philosopher Byung-Chul Han wrote in Psychopolitics: “Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise.”

When even this promise collapses, frustration seeks another outlet. The authoritarian leader appears liberated from the restraints imposed upon everyone else. He insults opponents, violates norms, ignores facts, and suffers zero consequences. His cult followers experience this as a symbolic liberation.

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This is the latest installment of Why We Need an Esoteric Left, the book I am serializing here chapter by chapter. The argument so far: the Left keeps failing because it lacks a metaphysics. It ceded myth, meaning, and the sacred to the Right, and it must reclaim them on the foundation of a consciousness-based understanding of reality — a new metaphysics that gives our lives meaning, purpose, and depth. The earlier chapters explored how the Far Right harnesses mythic and occult energies for its project of domination, how apocalyptic theology drives both Christian Nationalism and Zionist extremism toward catastrophe, and how the manosphere offers young men a counterfeit initiation — taking their genuine pain and aiming it at false enemies, including women.

We are now inside Chapter Four, “Our Civilizational Psychosis,” which moves in two parts: the outer history of how the American Left was destroyed, and then the inner history — the deeper metaphysical wound the Left inflicted on itself. In the previous installment, I looked at the neuroscience of male despair and the tribal reflex, the outrage machinery of the platforms, and the government’s deliberate demolition of the New Left through COINTELPRO: Fred Hampton murdered in his bed, the killings at Kent State, a generation shown the limits of permitted dissent.

This installment continues the outer history. The counterculture, I argue here, was not simply crushed; it was absorbed — its demand for liberation repackaged as a consumer style, its political substance amputated, and its populist “rebellious” stance assimilated. Countercultural rebellion became the operative mythology and style of corporate globalization. Neoliberal leaders like Clinton and Obama supported the expansion of corporate and military dominance. Meanwhile the Right spent fifty years patiently building the apparatus that now carries out Project 2025.

In The Conquest of Cool, Thomas Frank argues that the counterculture was not simply defeated by corporate capitalism; many of its values were absorbed into a new form of consumer society. Advertising and business learned to present consumption as an escape from conformity, appealing to a widespread “disgust with mass society itself.” Buying new clothes, records, cars and experiences could now signify independence rather than obedience. Frank describes how “leisure-time activities of consuming” were “redefined as ‘rebellion.’” The countercultural ideals of authenticity, personal freedom and resistance to authority became highly effective ways to market products. Rebellion ceased to threaten the system and became one of its most productive styles.

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Magic, Prophecy, and the Creative Act

This produced what might be called the baby boomers’ devil’s bargain: they could enter corporate, professional and military society while maintaining an ironic distance from it. They could prosper within the system without feeling that they had surrendered to its values. The revolutionary language of the 1960s gradually congealed into personal expression, therapy, spiritual seeking and lifestyle.

Tom Wolfe dubbed the 1970s the “Me Decade,” while Christopher Lasch diagnosed a broader “culture of narcissism.” Christopher Hitchens later derided the boomers as “a bunch of teetotalling, butt-crushing, Stairmaster creeps with no culture worth cultivating,” asking on whose watch the culture had declined into “candified, soft-centered, massified, and mushy narcissism.” The yuppie represented the completed transformation: the former rebel as affluent consumer, retaining the gestures and tastes of dissent while abandoning its political substance and yearning for systemic change and collective emancipation, with American Psycho its perfect symbolic expression.

For a brief period, electrified rock music seemed capable of doing more than representing revolution; it appeared able to instigate one. Rock concerts, radio and records synchronized millions of people emotionally, weakened sexual and racial conventions, and created the felt presence of a new society. Allen Ginsberg believed that rock music reopened the shut-down body of Anglo-European civilization: African-derived rhythm bypassed the hyper-intellectualized head and hit the base of the spine, a shamanic transmission that prepared the way for the sexual revolution (an ambiguous, and incomplete, transformation of values).

Yet this revolutionary experience depended from the beginning on radio stations, mass distribution of albums, cults of celebrity, mass media and corporate infrastructure. Its liberating force and its commodity form were inseparable. The counterculture therefore did not simply collapse into lifestyle at some later moment. As Frank suggests, it was “a stage in the development” of middle-class consumer values. Its demands for self-expression and personal liberation could be commercialized far more easily than its demands for economic equality, peace, workplace democracy or collective control over social life.

Fredric Jameson, the American Marxist literary critic and theorist of postmodernism, understood the 1960s dialectically: both a genuine liberation and a phase in capitalism’s global transformation.

The decade released what Jameson calls “an immense freeing or unbinding of social energies, a prodigious release of untheorized new forces”: anticolonial revolt, civil rights, feminism, psychedelic culture and experimental art. Yet Jameson argues that this freedom emerged through the transition from one stage of capitalism to another. Older institutions, hierarchies and social conventions were breaking down partly because capitalism itself was becoming more global, flexible, consumer-oriented and dependent on the constant production of new identities and desires. The sexual revolution and feminism, for example, benefited capitalist production as it meant both members of a couple would become productive laborers, as well as avid consumers.

Jameson calls this period “an immense and inflationary issuing of superstructural credit.” Culture appeared to promise more freedom than society’s economic structure could ultimately support. The “Third World and the unconscious”—territories outside Western capitalism and psychic depths seemingly outside the market—were being incorporated into a newly expanded system. The same forces that seemed to liberate colonized peoples, sexuality, imagination and personal identity also opened new markets and new areas of human experience to commodification (as we are now seeing with psychedelics).

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Hi folks,

I’ve been thinking about madness.

In The Spiritual Gift of Madness, the psychologist Seth Farber draws a helpful distinction—one we badly need right now—between madness and insanity. Our culture is full of people who are perfectly “rational” yet insane: Their disciplined, methodical efforts lead directly to the destruction of the biosphere and the harming of whole populations. Farber argues that in such a situation, madness— the arational break with consensus reality—can actually be a kind of sanity: a reasonable response to our true conditions.

The Beat generation understood this. Howl opens with “the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness” and unfolds as an address to Allen Ginsberg’s friend Carl Solomon, then confined in a psychiatric institution. Jack Kerouac wrote in On the Road that the only people for him were

…the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’

Rimbaud, the original poète maudit, seized by poetic illumination while still a teenager—he gave up writing at nineteen—and behaving atrociously to nearly everyone around him while pouring out masterpieces. In A Season in Hell, he wrote:

I called for executioners so that, while dying, I could bite the butts of their rifles. I called for plagues to choke me with sand, with blood. Bad luck was my god. I stretched out in the muck. I dried myself in the air of crime. And I played tricks on insanity.

Antonin Artaud felt an internal schism between himself and the world; his genius and his madness were inseparable. Sylvia Plath’s intensities revealed a madness that was also a genius, writing

“I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.”

She revelled in the dark shadows of our culture and her own psyche in works like The Bell Jar and Ariel.

Here is what bothers me: The redemptive, holy madness of the countercultural poetic spirit has largely dissipated from our culture. Meanwhile the political right has captured both registers at once. It perpetuates the rational insanity of the system, intensifying its cruelest and most barbaric aspects with, somehow, a sense of moral force—and it has embraced madness too, through its comedians, and above all through Trump, who possesses the freedom of the mad person. Theorists often associate Trump with the archetype of the trickster.

When a society suppresses divine madness—or, the moment it appears, rushes to commodify it as a new energy source, as happened to the Beats, to Syd Barrett, to Kanye West—that trickster energy gathers force from its repression. Eventually it reasserts itself. It erupts. Now the trickster, the out-of-control madman, runs the whole show.

I don’t believe we can respond to this with more rationality. I believe we answer it by reclaiming visionary madness for regenerative ends—cultivating states of inspiration, possession, and ecstatic seeing that serve life instead of destroying it. Transgression, the smashing of taboos, can be destructive or primordially creative. Facing this overwhelming authoritarian and technocratic assault, how do we “go out of our minds” to find our souls? How do we access the depths of creative madness, fugue states and manias, to unleash counter-spells and counter-sigils to what we see all around us?

This is one thread of Magic, Prophecy, and the Creative Act, the six-week live seminar I’m teaching starting August 23. Week three, “Divine Madness: The Poet as Seer,” takes up exactly this territory — Ginsberg, Rimbaud, Artaud, Longchenpa, the “holy fool” — with a practice of spontaneous composition designed to get you past the internal censor. Across the six weeks, each participant develops a creative project of their own while we work through myth and psychopolitics, the daimon, prophecy and the Logos, and psychomagic. Everything is live on Zoom, Sundays and Wednesdays, and recorded if you miss a session.

We’re extending our half-price sale, just for another few days:

https://www.liminal.news/prophecy-magic-and-the-creative-act

I hope you’ll join us!

Daniel

Today I am continuing the serialization of my new book, Why We Need an Esoteric Left. In this section, I am exploring the recent history that led to our current clusterfuck.

In earlier chapters, I tracked the metaphysical and esoteric underpinnings of the American Right, which has lurched over the last decades from ugly ideological fixity to open embrace of Fascist theocracy and anti-democratic tyranny, culminating in the stupefying Trump regime, which poses an existential threat to the future of human civilization and most forms of life on Earth. The rapid collapse of our institutions and guardrails revealed that the American system was already deeply rotten. Trump is a symptom rather than a cause; his rise is mirrored in the ascendancy of similar populist strong men in countries across the world.

That Trump had any chance of winning the Presidency was only possible because the Democratic Party had become utterly compromised and complicit. The failure of Democrats to deal with structural injustice and corporate malfeasance unleashed populist rage against the status quo, making some Trump-like monstrosity inevitable. When Democrats controlled both the executive and legislative branches, they did not accomplish basic things such as lifting the federal minimum wage or relieving student debt.

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Clinton, with his trademark sheepish grin, signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, a sweeping piece of deregulation that caused many of the horrors we are dealing with today. The Act erased strict ownership caps and allowed Fox to buy up local television stations to build a consolidated broadcast empire with a pronounced bias—a mass mind-control machine. The same law contained Section 230, a liability shield that protected internet firms from lawsuits over user-generated content. This allowed for rampant hate speech, the annihilation of copyright protection, and other abuses.

That Trump won again in 2024 revealed bottomless institutional rot. His open advocacy of sedition and his attempted coup following the 2020 election should have brought a swift criminal conviction and a permanent ban from public office. Now we are sliding quickly toward a totalitarian dystopia worse than what George Orwell foresaw in 1984, where people possess no intrinsic rights, no free speech, and can be herded into concentration camps or killed without due process.

At the same time, right now, we still possess some degree of agency. The military surveillance takeover is not complete. Recently, in New York, the Knicks won a championship after a half-century drought. The city erupted into rapturous celebration, with millions of people flooding the streets. On Instagram, a few Leftists noted the marked contrast between millions of people celebrating something that makes no tangible difference to their lives, and the small crowd of courageous activists showing up at Delaney Place in Newark to protest systemic human rights abuses perpetrated by ICE against detainees, including many who were in the country legally. The influencers noted that if those millions of people were to come together to protest against the decimation of Constitutional protections and human rights laws, the federal government would have to give way.

But people in the U.S. fail to act together in solidarity. It feels like the collective psyche is pulverized.

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Hi folks,

The initial response to Magic, Prophecy, and the Creative Act, our new seminar, was fantastic! I sense my intuition was correct: That in this time, when everything seems so heavy and overwhelming, we need to go back to the roots of poetry, prophecy, inspiration, intuition — even divine madness. We need to open new pathways to the imagination or what Henri Corbin called the Imaginal. We can explore the tried-and-true techniques available to us to overcome the dead weight of rationality and find our way back to what Allen Ginsberg called “spontaneos mind.” This seminar is truly an experiment for me — and for everyone who joins us. I hope you will be part of it!

We are still offering half-priced tickets until Monday. Live sessions start August 23 and run until Sept 30. If you can’t make all of the live sessions, everything will be recorded for a-synchronous consumption.

Join now!

The Metacrisis Dossier

In other news, we’ve been experimenting with The Metacrisis Dossier, a “faceless” Youtube channel, as a new and different way to convey important ideas. I’ve provided links to all of the Dossiers we’ve made so far at the bottom of this newsletter. The project is still very nascent. It will continue if we find the audience for it. I hope you will check it out, like, share, subscribe, and so on.

This week’s Dossier explores an idea from the poet Aime Cesaire: “The imperial boomerang.” Essentially, that is when the ruthless techniques of imperialist oppression come back to attack the center of the empire that previously applied them on subject populations abroad. If you watch it, please let us know what you think in the comments. We have a small team working on this now, but could bring in more contributors if anyone is interested in getting involved.

Chapter 1: Introduction: The Creeping Domestic Panopticon

Are you feeling it yet? That unsettling, creeping sensation that the place you call home is starting to feel less like an open society and more like an occupied territory where certain words are too dangerous to speak and certain ideas are becoming thought crimes. Police forces march down domestic streets clad in desert camouflage, driving mine-resistant ambush vehicles designed for foreign combat zones. Our digital squares transform into tightly monitored panopticons where every post is tracked, every movement logged, and dissent is quietly throttled by algorithmic corporate machinery. It feels like a sudden, shocking breakdown of democracy, a terrifying modern glitch. We look at the rising tide of authoritarianism and ask ourselves, how did we let this happen here? How did the technologies that they told us would make our society more open and connected become tools of manipulation, alienation, and control?

Chapter 2: An Unprecedented Infection? The Historical Reality

Do not make the mistake of thinking this is new. We treat this creeping police state as an unprecedented emergency, an infection that suddenly entered the bloodstream of the West. But if you don’t understand why our domestic institutions are turning against us here, you don’t understand history. You have to understand that the colonialist violence a society inflicts on others always comes home to roost. To diagnose this disease, we have to look back to 1950 and to a brilliant Martinican poet, essayist, and statesman named Aimé Césaire. In his foundational text, Discourse on Colonialism, Césaire unmasked the grand lie of Western civilization.

Chapter 3: Aimé Césaire and the Unmasking of Western Civilization

The West claimed its global conquests were philanthropic enterprises designed to spread the rule of law, education, and enlightenment. Césaire stripped away that mask. He showed that colonization was never about civilization. It was an extractive campaign of pure force, piracy, and what he called “thingification”—the systematic reduction of human beings into mere instruments of production. But Césaire’s deepest insight wasn’t just about what empire does to the colonized. It was about what it does to the master. He formulated an iron law of history that we desperately need to understand today: the imperial boomerang. Césaire wrote that colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism. Every time an eye was put out or a village was destroyed abroad and the domestic population accepted it, a slow poison was instilled into the veins of the homeland.

Chapter 4: The Iron Law: Defining the Imperial Boomerang

For centuries, European powers perfected the art of absolute domination in the Global South. They created legal exceptions, perfected torture, built surveillance networks, and used administrative mass violence against non-European peoples. The domestic public closed its eyes because it was happening safely out of sight to someone else. But Césaire notes that one fine day, the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific reverse shock. The prisons fill up. The torturers set up their racks at home.

Chapter 5: One Fine Day: When Fascism Returns to the Core

Suddenly, fascism arrives at home. The same techniques that seemed invisible when they were used against distant populations in Africa, Asia, and South America are now deployed against your neighbors, your relatives, or against you yourself. Césaire argued that Nazism was not an aberration. It was the supreme crowning barbarism that summed up all the daily barbarisms of empire. What the comfortable citizens of the West could not forgive Hitler for was not the crime against humanity itself, but the fact that he brought the boomerang back to the core. He applied to white Europeans the exact same colonialist procedures that had been reserved for the colonies. When we look at our world today, the surveillance, the militarized crackdowns, the stripping away of rights, we are watching the modern imperial boomerang completing its arc. The technologies of population control tested in distant resource wars are simply being redeployed against us.

Chapter 6: How Do We Resist? Breaking the Loop

So, how do we break the loop? If the tools of oppression are boomeranging back, how do we catch the weapon before it strikes us down completely? If Césaire and the radical left tradition were here today, they would warn us against superficial fixes. They would tell us that writing letters to our representatives or demanding minor policy reforms is like rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship. You cannot reform a civilization that is fundamentally sick from its own economic and social structures. Instead, they would point us toward tangible structural actions we must take right now.

Chapter 7: Pillar 1: Obstructing the Apparatus Through Law and Media

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Dear Subscriber,

First of all, thank you for your ongoing support of my work!

Second of all, here is a code to join the new seminar for $100:

Special Subscriber Offer

I hope you will join us!

With gratitude,

Daniel

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Hi folks,

I am really excited to be hosting Magic, Prophecy, and the Creative Act, a new online seminar starting August 23rd and running for six weeks. Until Monday, you can access a 50% discount “early bird special.” Also, paid subscribers to this newsletter will recieve access to $100 tickets, if they commit this week.

I hope you will be inspired to join us! Feel free to ask any questions about it in the comment section.

Sign up now!

Do you feel trapped inside systems that seem broken and obsolete, yet struggle to imagine or create alternatives? Our contemporary meta-crisis is not only political, ecological, and economic. It is a crisis of consciousness, creativity, and imagination — and it is at that level that this seminar intervenes.

Throughout history, periods of upheaval have produced prophets, poets, mystics, and visionaries who broke through obsolete assumptions and opened new possibilities for thought and collective action. Often at the edge of madness, they treated imagination, ritual, and prophecy not as fantasy or escapism, but as methods for renewing both self and society.

This seminar explores what those traditions offer us now, at a perilous moment when what Jungians call the archetype of the Apocalypse is surfacing in the collective psyche. As things go increasingly haywire, we benefit from developing internal detachment and mastery. A disciplined creative practice is one way to stay sane and grounded in a time of collective psychosis.

There is also a practical urgency. As artificial intelligence absorbs the routine work that structured traditional career paths, our innate human capacities — inspiration, intuition, pattern-breaking, the ability to see what the machine cannot — will increasingly take primacy. Learning to work deliberately with the imagination is no longer a luxury reserved for artists. It is becoming a survival skill for everybody.

What You Will Do

This is not a lecture series to absorb passively. Each participant is invited to develop a project across the six weeks — a book, film, artistic work, social initiative, business idea, or other undertaking that requires imagination, attention, and sustained discipline. Alongside the project, we will experiment with practices designed to interrupt habitual perception and recover creative agency: the attention audit, spontaneous composition, prophetic writing, work with the daimon, and psychomagic interventions.

Sunday sessions combine lecture and seminar discussion. Wednesday sessions are workshops devoted to practices, project development, and collective inquiry. All sessions are live on Zoom and recorded for replay. Readings and screenings are recommended but never required; every session stands on its own.

I have spent more than twenty-five years working inside these traditions — as a participant, not only a researcher. My books Breaking Open the Head, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, and How Soon Is Now? explored shamanism, prophecy, and the ecological crisis as an initiatory threshold. Through Reality Sandwich and Evolver I built early experiments in the kind of creative community this seminar continues. What I offer is decades of dedicated research into these topics as well as direct engagement with the visionary lineages we will study.

Twelve live sessions, recorded for replay.

We meet on Sundays, starting August 23, from 1 pm - 4 pm EST, and Wednesdays, starting August 26, from 2 pm - 4 pm EST. Last live session: Weds, Sept 30.

Full price: $299.99

The Core Idea

William Blake wrote: “The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself.” For Blake, imagination is not a mental faculty we use to escape the world but the ground that brings the world into being. Drawing on Sufi mystics like Ibn ‘Arabī and Suhrawardī, the scholar Henry Corbin described the mundus imaginalis — an intermediate dimension between the sensory world and the formless spiritual spheres, where spiritual truths take on form and physical forms are spiritualized, accessible through trained and heightened awareness. And the seventeenth-century mystic Jacob Boehme understood the universe itself as divine play (Spiel) — the self-revelation of the groundless divine source, expressing itself out of pure joy rather than struggle. As Norman O. Brown put it, glossing Boehme in Love’s Body: “God’s life is play. Adam fell when his play became serious business.”

Terence McKenna liked to say that the universe is made of language. If that is the case in some sense, then what new ideas and capacities follow from the insight? Can we draw upon the deeper source of the Logos itself — to reimagine reality and, also, to reconstruct it? Drawing on philosophy, poetry, esotericism, psychology, and cognitive science, we will explore how imagination and language shape experience, identity, and culture — and how practices of attention, ritual, and creative work become instruments of transformation.

Who Is This for?

Writers, artists, filmmakers, founders, organizers, and anyone who senses that the current moment demands more from them creatively than they have yet given — and who wants a rigorous, historically grounded framework for that work, along with a community of serious peers. No prior background in esotericism or philosophy is assumed; curiosity and commitment to a project are encouraged.

The aim of this seminar is not merely intellectual understanding. The goal is your liberation as a creator — with the hope, as well as the prayer, that the deep resources of the imagination can help shift society away from its current doom spiral.

Why do symbols move people more deeply than facts? Modern societies expected politics to become a matter of expertise and rational administration; instead we have witnessed the return of myth, charisma, and spectacle as central political forces — often accelerated by the newest technologies. The contemporary Right has integrated occult and supernatural currents in ways its opponents have so far refused: Trump, raised in Norman Vincent Peale’s church, has applied Peale’s techniques of self-programming and “positive thinking” to his political project with remarkable consistency. Any alternative will need to reckon with the mythic currents running beneath political discourse. We explore psychopolitics, propaganda, and narrative warfare.

Practice: active imagination and spontaneous mind.

What is magic once we remove superstition and fantasy? We approach magic as the disciplined use of attention, imagination, symbol, and will, and explore the daimon — through Socrates, Yeats, Hillman, and Steiner — as vocation, inner guide, and the organizing principle of a life. Patrick Harpur describes daimons as autonomous agents of the intermediate realm: shape-shifting boundary-dwellers who have appeared as fairies, angels, and gray aliens, matching the expectations of each era, and who rupture rationalist certainty precisely by refusing to yield scientific proof.

Practice: invocation of the daimon; first project presentations.

Why have poets so often associated inspiration with madness, possession, and altered perception? A distinction must be drawn between madness — arational states of altered awareness — and insanity, which can apply rigorous rationality to spiritually deranged ends, such as dismantling the planetary ecosystem for short-term profit. Against that rationalized insanity we cultivate the regenerative power of visionary states, drawing on Artaud, Rimbaud, Longchenpa, and Ginsberg.

Practice: spontaneous composition beyond the internal censor.

Can language become an instrument of revelation rather than description? We examine prophetic speech and the Logos tradition through Heidegger, Steiner, Owen Barfield, and Georg Kühlewind, whose Becoming Aware of the Logos argues that consciousness and cosmos are a living text: modern humanity mistakes crystallized, finished thoughts for the dynamic process of thinking itself, and what is required is a shift to “living thinking” — tracing our thoughts back to the moment of their creation, before they harden into categories.

Practice: writing in the prophetic register.

In Breaking Open the Head, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl and How Soon Is Now? I framed our converging crises not as terminal doom but as a planetary rite of passage — a collective death-and-rebirth process meant to shatter the illusion of our separation from the biosphere. The evidence of this trial surrounds us: climate destabilization, fragile supply chains, fragmenting social trust, an epidemic of anxiety and burnout. Individually the initiation demands ego-surrender; collectively it demands cooperative structures built on mutualism, local resilience, and a participatory relationship with the living Earth. We explore crisis and renewal through Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty, Evan Thompson’s neurophenomenology, the Burroughs–Gysin cut-up method, and Jodorowsky’s psychomagic.

Practice: design and undertake a psychomagic intervention.

If, as Boehme intuited, the divine life is play, then our creative work need not justify itself by worldly outcomes to carry deep satisfaction, meaning, and joy. We are, each in our own way, the universe in the never-ending process of becoming aware of itself, moving through chaos, order, collapse, and renewal. What does it mean to complete a vision in an age of distraction?

Final project presentations and closing synthesis.

Sign up now!

I am serializing my new book here, chapter by chapter — considering our political descent through different lenses including evolutionary psychology, esotericism, and the need for transcendence, stretching the limits of current political discourse. In the last few sections, I have been looking at the rise of the “Manosphere,” featuring figures like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate. As fate would have it, Tate is back in the news this week as he and his brother have just been arrested by US Marshals in Miami. The UK is now seeking their extradition on the following charges:

• Andrew: 7 counts of rape, 3 of arranging trafficking for sexual exploitation, 3 of assault, 19 relating to indecent images of a child and extreme pornography.

• Tristan: 2 counts of rape, 1 of sexual assault, 3 of arranging sex trafficking.

That’s quite a rap sheet! The evidence against Andrew Tate seems quite overwhelming, as it includes his own repeated admission of guilt in text messages, audio and video testimonies, and so on.

Whatever happens next, Tate has already done a huge amount of damage in poisoning the minds of a generation of young men. As I have been exploring, one major element in the Fascist resurgence and the new tyranny is the success of women in advanced, peaceful postmodern societies like the U.S. and Europe. Women now account for 60% of college graduates in the U.S. and have been advancing rapidly toward equalizing economic power. The Heritage Foundation’s 250-year plan to “save the American family” would regress women toward the status of second-class serfs — restricting abortion, opposing IVF, treating contraception as suspect, and eliminating no-fault divorce so women can’t escape abusive marriages. The push against women’s suffrage runs on a parallel track. The SAVE Act, already passed by the House, would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote — a hurdle that impacts millions of married women whose birth certificates no longer match the names they now use. Christian nationalists like pastor Doug Wilson now openly promote “household voting”: one ballot per family, cast in practice by its male head. (As an aside, I am actually quite surprised at the lack of organizing among women’s groups about this attempted rollback of every gain made in the last century. I know many women in the “neo-spiritual” community with huge networks of female followers. For the most part, they remain silent, as if they are having a collective “fawn response” to the existential threat now hanging over them, and all of us).

Men have fallen behind — at a time when, generally, the horizon of economic and social opportunity has dimmed considerably, partly due to the oligarchic centralization of wealth in fewer hands and partly due to the depletion of resources and over-exploitation of our shared environment. It is beyond reprehensible — tragic for the Earth, for all of us, and for our children — that the response of the reactionary power structure has been to deny the damage they have unleashed, to build and reinforce massive media infrastructures to project blame on demonized “others” like illegal immigrants and other marginalized groups. Particularly horrifying is watching technology CEOs who, until recently, promoted diversity and inclusion now kowtowing to Trump while they train AI to engineer mass layoffs. But I digress!

In today’s excerpt, I point out that the men leading our descent into hell tend to be the narcissistic sons of narcissistic fathers — Tate, Musk, Trump — locked into completing missions their fathers set for them, unable ever to stop proving themselves. We also need to explore how susceptible women and young men get drawn into these orbits. Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom explored how freedom itself can feel like a burden we long to surrender. We can trace a line from the German Männerbund and the Freikorps of the early 1920s that Klaus Theweleit studied in Male Fantasies to Tate’s “Hustlers University,” which is the Männerbund rebuilt for the platform age. My claim is that male rage here is bound up with two denials — that the Earth has hard limits, and that our culture no longer offers men any real path to transcendence. Only what I call a “mystical Left” can meet both at their proper level.

The Wound of Narcissus and the Manosphere

We find a familiar pattern in Tate’s background. His father, Emory Tate, was a chess master with narcissistic personality disorder. He beat his sons with a belt, raged, drank, and abandoned the family. When Emory died, Andrew posted a tribute: “He created a monster. As a father should.”

Across the Trumpian manosphere, the leaders of our descent tend to be such men — the narcissistic projections of narcissist fathers, pathologically locked into completing their fathers’ missions for them. Elon Musk has described his father, Errol, as having done “almost every evil thing you could possibly think of,” and Errol still belittles him in podcasts. Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist, diagnosed her grandfather Fred as a “high-functioning sociopath” whose regime of conditional love and humiliation produced her uncle Donald and helped cause her own father’s early death.

The narcissistic father does not recognize his son as a separate person. He sees him as an extension of himself, or as a rival to be crushed. The son survives by identifying with the aggressor and by building what Alice Miller called a grandiose false self over the buried shame. The authentically initiated human being dies to his adolescent ego-based self; he no longer needs to prove himself. The narcissist son of a narcissistic father can never stop trying to prove himself, because the father’s recognition never came — and never will.

But what about the women who become entranced by Tate and similar manipulators? The women in Tate’s compound, for the most part, were not kidnapped: They were courted, love-bombed, isolated, and exploited. Eventually, some of them helped police the other women under his control, to keep them compliant. One of his subjugated minions texted Tate: “I love you enough to fight for you, compromise for you, and sacrifice myself for you.” Most of them were young and not particularly well-educated — but older and more culturally sophisticated women also get trapped in similar cults, such as Keith Raniere’s NXIVM cult, where his women followers were happy to get branded by him as if they were his cattle. Many of Tate’s victims were very young. They fell prey to the hypnotizing trap commonly set by narcissistic abusers, using techniques such as intermittent affection, creation of a “trauma bond,” and then use of “DARVO” (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender) when challenged.

In Escape from Freedom, the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm realized there is a part in all of us that experiences our freedom as a burden and longs to surrender our will.

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A note for readers following along: I am serializing my book-in-progress, Why We Need an Esoteric Left, here as I write it. The book argues that the Left keeps losing because it has ceded meaning, myth, and the sacred to the Right, and that it needs a metaphysics of its own. We are in Chapter Three, on the manosphere.

In the last installment, I drew on Heidi Blake’s New Yorker investigation to anatomize Andrew Tate’s empire of exploitation, and I introduced the chapter’s central idea: Tate’s War Room is a counterfeit initiation, borrowing the form of the rites of passage that traditional cultures provided for adolescent boys — separation, ordeal, brotherhood, transformation — while filling that form with hatred and domination.

This installment goes deeper into what was lost. Joseph Chilton Pearce understood initiation as a biological imperative wired into brain development. Mircea Eliade and Bruno Bettelheim explain why the rites existed for boys especially, and how they bound male aggression to the community — even connecting men, through the symbolic wound, to menstruation and the feminine. From there I look at the evolutionary asymmetry beneath male psychology, the recent and fragile achievement of gender equality, the shadow side of post-#MeToo shaming, and the pickup-artist culture that Tate hardened into something fascistic.

As always, I welcome your thoughts and criticism in the comments.

In The Biology of Transcendence, Joseph Chilton Pearce explored initiation as a biological imperative rather than a cultural superfluity. Pearce argued that initiation is linked directly to how the brain develops. Human development unfolds through critical phases. In early life, secure attachment and free play prime the limbic system and the neocortex for empathy, imagination, and symbolic thought. Adolescence then demands a contained confrontation with fear and death — an ordeal that traditional societies staged as a rite of passage, designed to catalyze new neural integrations and reorganize the self at a higher level of function. The ordeal, in Pearce’s account, breaks the candidate free of the tyranny of the prefrontal lobe and opens the way to a fuller, whole-brain activation. Initiation completes a neurobiological circuit, carrying the person from survival through transcendence to communion.

Since modern culture lacks such intentional ordeals, Pearce argued, adults stagnate. We suffer from a prolonged neoteny — a stretched, unfinished adolescence — that induces status anxiety, fixation with dominance and control, and periodic eruptions of violence, whether in wars or in acts of stochastic terrorism, that discharge the pent-up aggression a rite of passage would once have transmuted into social benefit. People grow old without growing up; they become, in the unkind but accurate phrase, “kidults,” trapped in an adolescent mind.

Pearce saw culture as the trap that has to be escaped if a person is to mature: “We are shaped by the culture we create,” he wrote, yet “our culture is what must be transcended.” Authentic initiation is the way a society organizes that escape without tearing itself apart — an intentional “second death” of the child-self so that a larger, ethically anchored identity can emerge. “If society does not provide initiation and mentoring for its youth, they will invent their own, which are usually pathological, because the biological imperative for initiation will not be denied.” That is the manosphere in a nutshell.

Why should these rites have existed for men in the first place, and so much more elaborately than for women? Eliade observed that female puberty initiations were less widespread and “decidedly less developed” than the boys’ rites, and that they were individual rather than collective, because “female initiation begins with the first menstruation.” Nature initiates women directly: menarche and childbirth are inescapable ordeals that connect women to the cycles of the body and the moon, to life, death, and the sacred. Boys, by contrast, have to be culturally shaped into men, deliberately and collectively, or they remain dangerously volatile and immature.

Some cultures took this logic to startling lengths. Among Aboriginal Australian peoples, initiated men practiced subincision — cutting the underside of the penis — and periodically reopened the wound to bleed. Eliade reports that some groups assimilated the wound to the vulva and called the newly cut novice “one with a vulva,” and he cites Ashley Montagu’s interpretation that men, observing how women rid themselves of “bad blood” through menstruation, inflicted on themselves a wound that let them do the same: “Subincision makes it possible for men to obtain a certain quantity of blood by periodically opening their wounds.” In New Guinea, related rites were explained as purging the novice of his mother’s blood so that he could be remade with male blood.

Bruno Bettelheim built a psychoanalytic case on this material in Symbolic Wounds: male initiation as the ritual management of men’s envy of female creative power. Traditional male initiations were meant to build a deeper relationship to the feminine, transmuting male envy and awe of maternal generation into ritual homage through imitation. These societies were hardly feminist utopias, but they worked out, through centuries of design experiment, a balance between the masculine and the feminine. To his confused and dissatisfied male followers, Tate offers the exact opposite. Where archaic rites gave men a symbolic wound to connect them to the feminine, Tate’s War Room wounds women to feed the masculine.

The deeper answer is rooted in evolutionary biology. Warren Farrell argued in The Myth of Male Power that men learn from boyhood to repress their feelings and embrace risk because societies have always needed disposable men — for war, for hunting, for dangerous labor. “The weakness of men is the facade of strength,” he wrote; “the strength of women is the facade of weakness.” Farrell noted the link to initiation directly: studies of male circumcision found that “the more a society needed hunters and warriors in order to survive, the harsher were its procedures.” And he described the emotional price in terms that anticipate the present crisis: “The less a boy valued intimacy, life, and loving, the more he would allow himself to be disposable. We bribed him to do this by offering him respect — actually, conditional respect that we called ‘love’ when he met the conditions. The catch-22 was that the process it took to get love disconnected him from love.”

The male need for initiation reflects a deeper biological asymmetry. DNA research suggests that humanity descends from roughly twice as many women as men; through most of history, the majority of women reproduced while a significant percentage of men did not. Male psychology evolved under extreme competitive pressure, amplified by testosterone, which, as the philosopher Ken Wilber noted, pushes men to approach situations through a dichotomous instinct: to possess a thing or to destroy it (”fuck it or kill it,” Wilber put it). Dominance hierarchies, risk-taking, status obsession, the repression of vulnerability — these are not recent cultural tropes but ancient adaptations, which culture then organized and, at its best, civilized. Initiation was one of the principal technologies for doing so. It took the boy’s aggression and hunger for significance and bound them to service, humility, and care for the community as a whole.

Our evolutionary inheritance also means we have to be honest about the basis of the modern movement toward gender equality, which the reactionary Right is now trying to reverse as fast as it can. The emancipation of women is recent and rare — a byproduct, in large part, of industrial tools that erased the archaic premium on male muscle, while new networks of communication helped women recognize their shared circumstance and organize. Women have flourished in this new situation while many men struggled.

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