ACFM - #ACFM Microdose: Erik Davis on the Cosmic Right

Episode Date: August 13, 2020

Jeremy Gilbert talks to Erik Davis, scholar of weird culture, mysticism, and the fertile crossover between esoterica and politics. From gnostic revivals to conspiracy theories, the JFK assassination to QAnon – why does there seem to be a sudden resurgence in conspiracy theories, sometimes in the most unexpected corners? Is there a connection between conspiracy […]

All right, so hi, everyone. I'm talking to Eric Davis, who is a writer, public speaker, broadcaster, well, podcaster, essayist, meditation teacher now, to some extent, and sort of social organiser in some ways, who has been one of the leading writers, and I would say the leading writer in English on the relationship between technology, mysticism, consciousness, alteration, cultural change, you know, social change, weird culture, etc., for decades now. Still very well known for the book, Technosis, which looked at the kind of relationships between technology, sort of mystical thought, gnostic thought in the late 90s, visionary state, a collection of essays about Californian culture, which is something I'm sure we're going to talk about here. His most recent book is Nomad Codes as well, a collection of great collection of essays, And the book, most recent book is high weirdness, drugs esoterica and visionary experience in the 70s. If you go look for the podcast feed for the Culture Power Politics Seminar series.

And we had Eric during extremely like an exhaustive and exhausting like seminar on that book last year. I think probably like I said at the time, probably the hardest, hardest we ever worked to contribute to that seminar. yeah um and it's um and and and and also i would really encourage people as i always do to check out the archive for erics are going to long running a podcast series expanding mind um exploring cultures of consciousness um which you know is is on hiatus maybe gone maybe finished maybe coming back in some transformed form at some point but has generated an extraordinary archive like looking at that whole range of topics from a sort of critical, but not cynically sceptical perspective, which I think is really important. And I would say, like, you know,

for the ACFM, you know, project, it's been quite an inspiration in many ways. And it's certainly sort of, you know, certainly, yeah, it has been for me. And so what we wanted to talk about today, what we sort of decided we had to talk to somebody about was, and Eric was absolutely the first choice and ideal person for us to talk to about it is what Keir on the show, what Keir refers to sometimes as the cosmic right. I think we got that phrase from somewhere else. Really the sort of interaction between new age culture, conspiracy theory, psychedelia, etc. Which is sort of cropped up on the, you know, which is, and sections of the political right

or sort of conservative political forces, which is, which is, seems to become a distinctive feature of various sort of cultural zones over the past few years and so I guess I mean this is quite a general topic area but I think that's something I mean that's certainly something

Eric that you covered on expanding mind in a few different times and it's both from a historical and a sort of contemporary vantage point yeah yeah there's a couple ways into it First, I'll just say that I've been interested in, let's just call it, conspiracy theory, it's always important whenever you use that phrase to just immediately mark that the term is problematic, that it was a term that was literally designed in order to produce a particular political function in a nutshell.

At the time the Warren Commission came out and declared that Lee Harvey Oswald was acting alone, when he killed John F. Kennedy, that there was immediately a sort of crisis of authority because everyone was like, no way, man, that's ridiculous. And people started to go after it. And so you got these other ideas that were part of public discourse. And the phrase conspiracy theory emerges then precisely as a way to cordon off all of those alternative scenarios and separate it from the official story. So anytime you use conspiracy theory, in a sort of unreflective way. In a way, it's easy to participate in that zone. So obviously, there are conspiracies. Some conspiracy theories are true. And there's another

additional problem, which is that the phrase unfortunately blends two different modes, which admittedly are also often blended themselves. But it's important to distinguish from the get-go that in a way you can have a category of conspiracy theories that are, located in purely historical secular forces that are uncovered through processes of investigation, research, you know, fact-based, you know, there's speculation, there's ideas, there's concepts, but it stays pretty much in the realm of what you could call, you know, historical analysis or journalism. And then there's another thing that we also call conspiracy theory, which is the super bizarre, far-out, mystical, non-ordinary,

forms of also, you know, identifying hidden agents behind the surface of consensus reality or a conventional history. So, you know, an obvious example like David Ike with the, like, the lizard race from Orion is actually bred in with the aristocrats and European royalty and, you know, that kind of thing. We were like, whoa, that's pretty far out, man. That's like much more like science fiction or fantasy, but that's also a conspiracy theory. And so that's already complicated and then it's additionally complicated because those things are often blended. And a lot of the things that I would talk about now in terms of the question you've asked, and I will narrow this down, are feature that kind of blend. So anyway, I've been interested in this stuff for

for a long time. I became more interested in it, I think, around the time of the you know, the Trump, lead up to the Trump election, or interested in it in a new way, lead up to the Trump election because it was taking such an interesting political force and a lot of new images and processes were coming out mixed in with a lot of new forms of propaganda that were themselves very recognizable to me as coming out of paradoxically a kind of left or anarcho-left tradition of using pranks. and disingenuous humor and insider references as sort of a kind of counter-politics,

something that I trace in high weirdness to the work of Robert Anton Wilson, who himself is a politically complicated figure. He was an anarchist in some ways. He was a libertarian, but not in the way that people usually mean that way, particularly in a European discussion. But let's talk about libertarianism later.

And what I was, I was interested, of interested in that and in his work, Illuminatis, which was written in the late 60s at a time of strong paranoia and justifiable paranoia amongst many on the left, he was an anti-war activist and many people in the anti-war scene were quite aware that there were, you know, hidden agents. And so there was an air of kind of conspiracy around that. And at the same time, there were these sort of fever dreams of the counterculture of these sort of psychedelic visions and they all get mixed up. And so you start to get this very intensified, wild kind of conspiracy thinking that Illuminatis both sort of celebrates and critiques and

indulges in and turns into a kind of literature and playing with the kind of political phantasms that inhabit America in particular, which is a long and rich and self-conscious tradition of conspiracy theory and paranoia, largely on the right but not exclusively so. You know, there's a that famous essay, anybody who studies American history will stumble across the Richard Hofstetter essay from 1964 about the paranoid style of American politics, and which an essay that itself was also reacting to that key moment of JFK assassination, which is kind of like the origin point for contemporary conspiracy theory in America. It's sort of a lot of roads lead back to that room, even though, of course, they go farther back to the protocols of the

elders of Zion and sort of European traditions of, again, generally right-wing or reactionary forms of conspiracy theory. So there's all this stuff kind of going on. I'm kind of more interested in now. And then like everybody else, I've been watching as all of these fringe topics and narratives and symbols that I've been tracking my whole career in my 50s became more and more present, more and more visible in popular culture on the internet, in YouTube videos, in movies, in references, everything. It's just like more and more. There's more and more psychedelics. There's more and more occultism and esotericism and more conspiracy theory in the broad sense, you know, including political conspiracies and, you know, wild pseudoscience and, you know,

likely scenarios. And, you know, I was got to say that. It's not like I'm writing it all often is saying it's a you know hey guys it's a new york times reality stick to the facts no way it's not it's not going it's more way more complicated than that but nonetheless and then a lot of stuff about UFOs and ancient aliens and hidden forces in history and then increasingly dark scenarios and i would i would kind of point to a couple of things that i think are our contemporary developments that are worth talking about one is the growth and i would say that this is probably equal true in both a right and a left way, although those categories themselves become blurred by this very process we're talking about. But there's a growing emphasis or analysis of what you could

call the archons. And the archons is something that are who are explicitly evoked by some, but more generally kind of characterize the style of forces that various theories posit as being the actual drivers of history. And the archons go back to ancient Gnosticism. So even though it sounds a little like a bit of a leap, stay with me for a moment. So in the Gnostic view, in a way, could be seen as the first sort of paradoxical or critical form of religion in the sense that if the mainline Jewish account of the origin, of the world says, oh, there was a Garden of Eden, and there was God, and God creates Adam and Eve, and they screw up, and then God kicks them out, and history begins, and that's why we

suffer. And the Gnostics, at least some of them, come along and say, well, you know, actually your guys aren't reading that text right. You have to read that text through what we would call now a more paranoid critical approach, meaning that actually that guy who's running the garden is not the real God. He's a lower God. He's a, he's a, he's the product of some cosmological process and they had different narratives to describe how this lower God or, or a demiurge came about. But he's not the real deal. He thinks he is. In some versions, he's just ignorant, and in some versions he's actively evil. And we, therefore, are kind of trapped in the cosmos that he and he and his associates, a.k.a. the archons, control. Another way of understanding the

archons is to think of them in terms of astrology. Like, you know, modern astrology puts a lot of emphasis on our own will and our own ability to sort of psychologically come to terms with the forces that in some sense characterize us or describe us, you know, through our birth chart, who control us to some degree. But older forms of astrology were much darker and more terministic. Basically, you're, you know, if you're born with a bad Saturn conjunction, you're just screwed. It's just going to ruin your life. You're probably going to die early. No way out. So, but you can imagine that as these guys, as archons, which some people saw them as, which is their rulers. That's what the word means. It's like archa or, you know, architecture. It's like the rule. And so these

are rulers, powers and principalities that were modeled on worldly leaders. They're The word archon can refer both to a kind of metaphysical principle of control and a real-world political status, like the leader of a city, state, would be described as an archon in Greek often. So it's this weird form of like partly real politics and partly a metaphysical speculation about the ultimately evil rulers that control material reality. And the goal of the Gnostic is to break through that. false story, the story where God is the supreme leader and we got kicked out of Eden and to say, no, no, no, it's the opposite. That's a lower God we're trying to escape. So not only do you have this kind of paranoid structure inside the mythology, you also have this kind of exemplary act of

counter-reading where you take a dominant story or a myth and you read against the grain as a way of exposing the hidden forces behind the surface story, which itself is tied to a kind of narrative of liberation, like in order to break through this realm, leave the fallen world that's ruled by the demiurge, and make it into the realm of the true God. Now, you know, that's a very nutshell version of Gnosticism, which is a very complicated field that some people don't even think we should call, use the word anymore because it's too complicated. Nonetheless, that covers enough of the bases that it's worth invoking here because one of the things that's happened in conspiracy theories and just sort of weird speculative thought in general over the

last handful of years, you know, half decade or so, is that the figure of the archons have become more and more explicit, that the idea that we are being, you know, ruled like, not unlike David Ike's lizard overlords, but were ruled by forces that are kind of. kind of both real-world elites with their hands-on forms of power that we can't conceive of and mystical, otherworldly, metaphysical principles that might either be alien, like actual, you know, concrete physical aliens, or other dimensions of reality, or Satan, or some kind of, you know, form of devilry. But what's interesting about the archons is that they're more They're more real world than demons.

Demons have an inherently metaphysical or otherworldly character to them. The demonic, the satanic, the idea of devils. The archons are a much more interesting mix of real world control and otherworldly evil, let's say. And so to me, it indicates that one of the functions, one of the ways that the contemporary conspiracy theory is working, is that it's increasingly trying to think at the same time, elite power in all of its various functionings, the technologies of control, which have become more and more sophisticated, more and more pervasive, and to restore some kind of metaphysical value structure that can provide a meaning or a narrative to the conspiracy theorist that makes sense, some kind of,

war of light and darkness, some kind of struggle that ennobles the theorist in their own work to uncover all these plots, but also to give them a kind of motive in history. And describe that way, you notice that I intentionally didn't really politicize it right or left. And that's because I think it's really important to look at this stuff not under that guise immediately, even though almost immediately the next step is to say, okay, how is this being weaponized and absorbed into contemporary culture, contemporary reality building, contemporary narratives? And here's my second point. My first point was about the rise of the archons as an important figure, and there's more to say about the Gnostic dimension of conspiracy theory.

But to get to the second point, this is something that I've noticed, much more recently, and I've been studying it, not exhaustively, because I can only take so much of the stuff before I start to, you know, lose it, because it gets really dark and claustrophobic after a while, spending too much time with it. But, you know, not alone, a lot of people have been kind of looking and have noticed this phenomenon. And what it is, is a sharp uptick within the worlds that we generally think of as progressive on the kind of new age end, so new agers, environmentalists, natural healers, alternative medicine people, psychedelic people, burning man people, yoga practitioners, that zone.

Like, you know, it's some interlocking kind of complex zone, which is kind of my beat as like a cultural critic or something like that. I mean, I have other ones too, but that's one that I, that I sort of, you know, partly identify and come from and then partly think about and track, although probably less so these last years than in the past. But in any case, I have noticed anecdotally, as well as many other people who occupy different nodes of this sprawling network, that there's been a significant uptick in people who are reproducing particular conspiracy memes that are drawn from the large bizarre network known as QAnon. And so for folks who aren't tapped in, QAnon is a

very strange phenomenon that's really taken off only over the last three, four years since Trump. And it's important to say that it is essentially a pro-Trump, a Trumpian, you know, meta-conspiracy theory. At its heart is Trumpism. But it'll elaborates in this incredibly networked way that's in some ways either very sophisticated in terms of how it's been designed or at least ceded or, for whatever reason, has figured out the optimum viral logic of our contemporary technological environment and media environment because it's sort of like a, it's a conspiracy but a meta-conspiracy that has many, many nodes, many, many features, anti-vax ideas, ideas about the deep state, which begin as a

political critique, but then take on increasingly dark forms, ideas about Hollywood and pederast ritual child abuse groups among the elites, so Epstein and all that kind of stuff, various forms of mind control. And it's sort of a DIY live action role-playing game. And that's what's brilliant about it, is that as you play the start to play the game, you participate in what a lot of Q&N on people call research. Like if you ask them, like, gee, this sounds like conspiracy theory. They say, no, no, no, we're doing research.

And if you go, I don't know, that doesn't seem like your skepticism is really very sharpened as you go through all this crap and they'll go no no no we're the real skeptics you're the one who's buying the you know the so it's got these very clever ways of kind of encouraging people to go deeper into research and what research is is this vast you know largely unmapped i don't i haven't i mean i'm i'm not deep into this stuff because as i say i can only take so much of it before i need to you know get need the light of sanity um it gets very claustrophobic and very and very dark Twistian that's animated in some zones by a very kind of pathological energy, some of it is also probably true. And some of it is definitely true. Some of it involves critiques of power,

critiques of, let's say, contemporary pharmaceutical companies. Well, there's some things that we can talk long and hard about what's screwed up about pharmaceutical companies in the way they organize so-called objective scientific research, the way they suppress alternative healing. I mean, you know, it's like right away you can see sort of how truth and legitimate critique get involved with stranger critique and then fantasy. And so it's a very difficult zone to maneuver. Anyway, so this is going on, this has been going on for years, largely from the right, largely around the fears of the deep state. Basically, the idea is that the deep state in conjunction with these worldly elites who practice ritual forms of child abuse in which they're actually kind of reaping the whole. horrible emotions of these abused children as a kind of food that feeds them or maybe some

kind of mystical demonic forces or aliens, something like that, the deep state in concert with these people is about ready to unleash another version of the New World Order, global control, you know, absolute domination through technology and mind control devices. And that the heroic, the only thing standing between us and this horrible future, that's ladies and gentlemen, is the noble knight Donald Trump, along with some help from Putin and other kind of right-wing conservative religious characters. So that's sort of the basic element. Yeah, we should explain why it's called Q and on, because it's this...

Oh, right. Basically, it started off with these, some character called on 4chan, calling themselves Q, just issuing these cryptic posts that are almost like these kind of Delphic Oracle kind of statements. They just don't really mean anything, like, what for the Blue Lagoon at three or something? And people started interpreting them as statements from some hidden operative, some ally of Trumps, who is kind of helping in this war against darkness. And the character post has Q.

I mean, that's where it all kind of spirals out from. Yeah, yeah. And I'm glad you brought that up, too, because it's important when I mentioned before, how it's so well designed to the degree that it is designed. And I do believe there were game, game. sophisticated gaming people who were part of the initial play because they were they were it's just so well done and part of it is that it it gives you the internet surfer uh and it the adventure of trying to decode and decrypt the twilight language this the ambivalent ambiguous language

of contemporary media so that you start to put the pieces together and as you put the pieces together you seem to be driving towards a more and more explicit truth, which, of course, it never arrives. And so you're in this perpetual game of research. And as you go along, you're just pulled farther and farther away from like, let's call it the dwindling sphere of consensus reality. You know, and so part of it is it's just fun. You got to put the pieces together. They got some lucky breaks where, like, you know, Trump did a hand gesture just at the time that he mentioned something. And, you know, he's been all sorts of predictions about events that are coming. And the other important thing to mention about the Q&ON world is that not only does it rest on a fundamental good and evil story, which is always important to recognize.

You always know conspiracy theories are getting mystical or phantasmagoric when they get more explicit about the good and evil battle. battle, but the battle also has a culmination point, the Great Awakening, or the tribulation, or whatever it is. Again, these are apocalyptic Christian motifs drawn from centuries of Christian historical imagination that posits in end times, where there's an antichrist and a control over world government or a control that then is finally overcome with the forces of light. And that same kind of anticipatory temporality is part of QAnon, and that's another reason that it becomes very addictive, because it's like the real hit, the final pile of cocaine is just around the corner. Just keep taking your little toots, and you're really going to, you're just going to fully indul, you know, that your desire will be fully satisfied just around the corner. And so it exploits those things. Anyway, that's all a lead-up to say, to go back to the point that I was saying, is that in these more or less progressive worlds, over the last few months, there has been a significant and noticeable uptick of individuals who are succumbing, reproducing, whatever you want to call it, elements of this particular scenario.

They don't always recognize even that they are participating in a Trumpian game. some of them though do i remember the very clearly the first person i heard about who will obviously remain nameless someone i knew about from the festival scene an older woman uh you know not the not an intellectual not to what you know whatever but but a very sweet person and very generous to the community and you know had some new agey kind of approaches to life and medicine and things like that but a very sweet, open-hearted, progressive, hippie person. And then I just heard, you know, this was, this one was actually over a year ago, was like, yeah, no, she's totally cune on so much so that she actually thinks Trump is the only thing keeping this stuff at bay. So when I heard that,

I was like, okay, that's not just about this one woman. That's not even just about the attraction of conspiracy type thinking. It's about a whole like mutation in the relationship of mind and reality and value to technology and how technology is playing an integral role in fomenting and feeding these kinds of models and that this is going to be significant. This has political significance, even in some sense ontological significance if you think about how consensus reality is maintained. And it certainly is a sign that, you know, I don't even know.

There's so many different ways to go. But let's just say that it's, it's of great significance. It's not the kind of thing we should just go, well, those are soft-headed, you know, yoga Burning Man people. What did you expect? And I'm like, no, no, it's more than that. You know, even if, you know, people who are hardcore critical thinkers, they still wrestle with all these problems because there's some really good critical thinking,

embedded inside a lot of conspiracy theories. As models or myths, they're often very, very right on. But in any case, those two points, the rise of the archons and the increasing noticeable uptick of Q&on style ideas and motifs and narratives and images inside generally progressive worlds indicates that I think we're reaching a kind of tipping point around conspiracies. theories, which have, you know, already been growing a lot. So it's a good time to talk about the cosmic right. Yeah, well, that's really interesting. And it's also, I mean, you know, this is, I mean, this is exactly the thing that prompted

us to want to talk about this at the moment, actually. It was precisely this. It was the circulation of Q and on, you know, the circulation of Q&ON conspiracies. Like G5, I mean, the G5 COVID conspiracy theory, which has been partly circulated, I think, through QAnon adjacent networks. Absolutely. Those are very related now. You know, which is obviously related to anti-vaccination, sort of ideology and this sort of paranoia about, you know,

in some sense a sort of paranoia about, I mean, I would say to, I mean, partly what seems to be informed some of that stuff is a certain paranoia, just about sociality as such in some ways. Just. Yeah, absolutely. This, the very, you know, the idea of, you know, it's partly what happens in the situation

which the idea, any idea of the sort of the state or the public institutions like ever being sort of benign, like ever actually just looking after you, ever actually doing anything for you. It's just being completely evacuated from the imaginary terrain.

So you can only really see the sort of the, I mean, you know, I think to me in some of those discourses, the deep state is just a sort of a metonym for the state as such. And it's a sort of reaction to the recognition that under neoliberalism, the state which is supposed to look after you has become, you know, part of the problem. It's become, but the state has been

retooled, you know, in the period between the collapse of the New Deal settlement and the kind of current phase of entrenched hyper neoliberalism. You know, the state has stopped being the thing that would protect you from capitalism and has become the thing that will do everything it can to help capitalism kill you, you know, to help it destroy you, to help it get into you. Well, that's part of our predicament in dealing with this stuff is it's a, it's, you know, just like so many things these days, it's easy to be polarized. And so as one starts, you know, if you take it the approach that we have where we are critical thinkers with investment in, in specific, you know, political accounts of the actual historical forces of our time, recognizing the complexity of history, the complexity of institutions, et cetera, et cetera, you know, the temptation is just to. kind of critique and write off or or or uh even mock or or just look on and with in befuddlement when it both in terms of the actual explicit critical ideas that are embedded inside a lot of

conspiracy theories but even larger than that is that they're perfect there i hate to say this they're in a way perfectly reasonable responses to the degree of the collapse of our institutions of, you know, conventional science, of conventional medicine, of, you know, they're marvelous metaphors, and I don't want to just say, call them, oh, they're just metaphors, but they're marvelous metaphors when they are just metaphors for the sense of powerlessness, for the absolute disappointment in these institutions for the lack of trust, because it's been, it's a two-way street, man. Trust is a two-way street. And there are many reasons to not trust anymore. And that's, you know, of course, one of the main psychological things that allow people to

go into these narratives is that they reach a point where they start distrusting a source of information, a source of authority, a source of practices, social practices. And for whatever reason, and that's, I think, an interesting thing to talk about, rather than being like, okay, we're in this struggle. We got to struggle again even more with these institutions. You go, that's it. They're evil. We're going to write them all off. It's got to be something else. There's got to be something else going on. But it all kind of makes sense. And so it's a tricky place where you want to sort of clear up the field and get a lot of this myth out of the way and get the really fuzzy forms of thinking out of the way. But when you do that, you're left with a lot of really coherent stuff.

And, like, I would take 5G as a great example for me. I am not an expert in these matters, but I do know people who have spent a lot of time looking at it. And without going into the detail, because in some ways the details, it's not like they're a trap, but they get you off from the larger dynamics in a lot of ways, I believe, that there are reasons to be concerned about the biological effects of these particular technologies. And when you couple that with the way that we have absolutely no power over these, you know, technological mutations, this installation, particularly of 5G, which of course isn't just about better signals and blah, blah, blah, it's about instituting the internet of things. It's about instituting internet everywhere, surveillance everywhere, trackers everywhere.

You know, it is, you know, if you want to think of it as the Antichrist system, which, as I said, it's a perfectly good metaphor for the degree of control just under this weird capitalist ideology rather than a kind of demonic totalitarian state that it's a completely legitimate reaction on that level. And so even the idea that it's having these particular things, but then what happens is it gets literalized. It becomes a form of kind of popular imagination that has just the right mixture of truth and fantasy to draw people in and then also allow more conventional actors to write the whole thing

off. And that's where you get back into the trap of even the term conspiracy theory. It's like it's very hard to talk about conspiracy theory critically and not simply fall back into its original purpose, which is to other and distance ourselves from social narratives, actual political claims, actual scientific claims that are embedded in these popular folkloric forms, and to just other the whole thing in some vague, and you're like, you wind up being a tool of the authorities if you're just trying to talk about conspiracy theory, particularly when you recognize some of its really dire political implications in terms of, you know, of QAnon. So it's a very tricky zone that I kind of enjoy for its trickiness, but it's, it's tough.

I always feel, every time I talk about it, I always feel insufficiency. Like I didn't take something into account or I wasn't acknowledging some of the important, you know, features, features of the thing. Well, I think that's, I mean, that's partly inherent to the thing. I mean, there's a book from a few years ago now by old friend Claire Birchall, which is a sort of deconstructionist account of conspiracy theory, which... Oh, what's it called? I can't even remember what it's called now. But it, but she partly writes about the way which conspiracy theory is partly the, you know, is partly the, you know, conspiracy theory. discourse is sort of a, is, by definition, sort of textually excessive to the point where you

never can actually sort of stop. You never can feel you've actually done the analysis. That's very good. Fully adequately. But also, I would say also in terms of reference, in a slightly more prosaic sense, you know, with reference to what you were saying, actually conspiracy theory, the term conspiracy theory, it works a lot like the term populism in some ways at the present time. And then it simply just, it indicates the kind of break, and to me, I mean, all these things are partly just symptomatic of, you know, what I'm always asserting is the sort of historical phenomenon of the past 10 years, which is the collapse of authority of the kind of professional

technocratic political class, which sort of crystallized in the 80s and 90s, you know, had its most kind of accomplished representative in Obama, really. And, you know, and the sort of collapse of authority of that political class, really just, you know, for basically economic reasons that since 2008 it's become increasingly apparent. They can no longer offer people. people, what they were able to offer them for a few decades, which is, you know, very high standard of material standard of living, despite the fact that society was disintegrating. And so, you know, and under, and the trouble with dismissing both populism and conspiracy theory is that really, you know, it's difficult to dismiss either of them without just wanting

to reassert the authority of, you know, of that gang of people who just did everything, just completely bent every rule in the book to deprive Bernie of the nomination and save us from safe civilisation from collapse. So I think that is, you know, there's a kind of obviously really sort of interestingly, you know, connected. But I think part of what's, one of the things I was thinking about when you were talking about this, though,

I mean, one of the things I'm interested in as well, in terms of this, the bigger context is just, which is something you've already alluded to, which is really, I mean, the rise of, you know, what Zubov, of course, surveillance capitalism, what Nixernich calls Platform capitalism. basically the rise of Silicon Valley as in some sense, I would say that the leading sort of section of capital globally, with all of that entails. It entails, as you've said, entails the rise of this other kind of surveillance culture.

But it also entails, you know, it entails on the one hand, you know, the sort of normalisation in some way, a sort of universalisation of Californian culture because that's the cultural media it's come from in some ways. That's something to talk about. But it also entails this, you know, it entails this just extraordinary sort of concentrations of power. Like it's historically unprecedented concentrations of unaccountable power. And I was listening to a talk, there's a talk online. It was part of the Seattle Red May festival just a week or so ago. Talked by Jodie Dean, who was talking about what she was called neo-feudalism.

And she was pointing to the kind of rise of these, you know, features. Because, I mean, you know, you could make an interesting analogy. between some of what you're talking about and, you know, the resurgence is of nosticism and magical thinking, et cetera, in the medieval period and in historical periods when people feel, indeed, people sort of feel that any kind of legitimate or meaningful vehicle

for sort of political change or social change or just collective agency has sort of been shut down by the vast concentrations of power in particular contexts. So that seems like an interesting, you know, that seems like a sort of, you know, that seems sort of potentially significant in terms of understanding all that sort of all that stuff. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, we could talk about the kind of California aspect of it. And, you know, in some ways we're still operating in the incisive, but to my mind, incomplete analysis that Richard Barbrook and I can't remember his writing partner came up with the Yeah, no and ever can. Yeah, sorry, the California ideology. Yeah, the California ideology, which he described, you know, as a blending of hippie values, you know, freedom, the individual creativity, etc.,

with increasingly hardcore market-driven libertarianism as a kind of, you know, operating software of world building. And then when you, if you, and then he didn't talk about the technological future. so much, but if you then add on a layer of progret, like sort of transhumanist technological speculation and mixing it with those other things, and you get this very strange mixture that's sort of, you know, now no longer amazing, but at one point was amazingly represented by the representation of all of, you know, leaders of these corporations going to Burning Man, which has very different roots, though there is this element of what is the libertarianism or what is

hippie anarchism or what is that kind of freeing of the self. And the problem that I have with the way that the California ideology has come to be constructed or even California in general in these discourses is that there's just not enough emphasis, and you see this with Adam Curtis as well, is that there's just not enough of an emphasis on that these were large-scale, multifaceted movements, let's say the hippie vibe or whatever, and that there were many different sides of it, including extremely social ones, including the communal movements and the exuberant embrace of the idea that we could engineer better social experiences, better realities for people to live in. So, for example, for a certain kind of critic, the whole

Earth Review and the idea of maker culture and the idea of, you know, sort of tools first just leads straight into this dystopian solutionism or some kind of, you know, ruled by the libertarian engineers, et cetera, et cetera. And that's just not true. It's a complex, rich phenomena. And it's once again that there's a kind of fundamental historical problem. And I bet somebody's named it, which is that you have a complex social. movement and certain parts of it become selected by the next order of power and so that you're sort of drawn into it if you if you're kind of naively celebrating those social movements it's very easy to then become part of a certain moment where there really are better possibilities and then

those get selected over time into something that's much more unsatisfying unhelpful and then as from a historical perspective, you look back and you say, oh, that's what it was all along. All the hippies were a road towards, you know, dominant cyberculture. And I just think that's not good history. And again, you see it a lot of people. And, you know, this totally jives with your whole orientation towards the liberatory social dimensions of psychedelics, of dance culture, of, you know, forms that other people could more cynically see as just parts of the problem. Yeah, well, I think well, completely, I mean, people, anyone listening to

the show is going to be sick of, sick of hearing me say all that. So, you know, let's, but I think also, I mean, in a way, there's an even, this sort of, I think this ties up more as well with some of the stuff he was saying before, or it puts it an interesting light. I mean, if you take the perspective of, you know, someone like Hart and Negri, I think, you would

say, well, actually, the truth is what happens is you get these zones of kind of very intensive radical social experimentation, you know, whether it's the free cities of Italy in the early middle in the middle ages or it's Paris in the 19th century or it's and it's California like in you know the late

20th century I will read it's California going back to the early 20th century in some ways and capital itself it's capital the most innovative dynamic hungry parasitic sections of capital get drawn to them yeah you know so California has to be there before Silicon Valley can come can emerge and can

become yeah that's a wonderful way can become you know the zone you know you need that energy And to some extent it has to cultivate it, to some extent it has to protect it, you know, for a long time, San Francisco is like the protected garden, you know, until, but not only then, until it finally gets, well, you can. Yeah, yeah. I think I go back to something Bruce Sterling said. I think he wrote, I think he even did it in his article about Burning Man, you know, way before it was, it was just an obvious place that tech people went. It was just, it was in Wired Magazine, the mid-90s, something like that. But he talked about the way that hippie culture and kind of bohemia in general is a petri dish. You know, that's a really interesting way of thinking about it.

You're like, you know, and you're like, okay, so then, you know, do you buy the petri dish? And then as somebody who participated in, on the edges of digital culture in the 1990s, and can, you know, speak to a fact that however naive you might later see a lot of those actors, being that at the time they're they're not motivated they really are motivated by attempt to make the world a better place to create more you know uh you know both social and individual freedoms and uh to overcome some of the sclerosis within uh contemporary civilization etc etc and then it just it just loses and then you get into an interesting kind of metaphysical problem almost which is that power what do we do with it it seems to

really corrupt. It really does seem to corrupt. You know, like, it's like, it's no joke. And so if that's true on some naive, but profoundly insightful level that, like, you concentrate power, it's going to go south, you know, in a capitalist regime, but probably in other regimes as well. That then you get into this, I think, one of the crises on the left and one of the reasons that people who are, let's say, good-hearted folks who are kind of new. age, but really believe that light and love is part of the world and that we need to get back to nature and get more in balance and get connected to other people and that kind of stuff, why they would be drawn into a Q-Anon scenario is partly that we don't have

an equivalent kind of, I'll just say it, religiosity on the left anymore, that progressive values, the way that progressive movements have been a kind of religion, which is something that conservatives say all the time, you know, they're like, look, liberalism, I mean, what we call liberalism, let's call it progressivism, is really like a kind of religion where it needs to, it needs to constantly reproduce a new enemy, which is the racist or the this or the that, in order to stage a kind of confrontation between people we have empathy for and these forces of reaction. And it just keeps doing that as a way to extend its power. And now, from our point of like dystopian collapse, we can recognize, again,

how much of that has been captured by, by globalist forces, by the, and one phrase that came to mine, I'm ranting a little bit here, but I'll get back to the point, that came to me very clearly over a conversation I was having with folks at the rebel wisdom conference, which is another kind of interesting space, but was that one of the guys was talking about cosmopolitanism and the importance of cosmopolitanism, and he was talking about this idea of rooted cosmopolitans the idea that you could have both a specific identity that is responsible and rooted in a particular kind of current, space and time, identity, you know, ethnic configuration, and at the same time, be a cosmopolitan. And he used that word, and I was like, Cosmopolitan, nobody's uses that word anymore. And then I thought about it, and I thought about how appealing cosmopolitanism has been to be in the past.

What does it mean? And, of course, one of the only places you really see that term a lot these days is in a negative conspiratorial. way, which is not the rooted cosmopolitan, but of course the rootless cosmopolitan, which is often a stand-in for the Jew, and that this becomes part of the evil, that the evil of the one-world order, the evil of, which is itself a metaphor for kind of global neoliberalism, is that it has absorbed, again, part of what cosmopolitanism is. And so now if you just reproduce in some kind of simple way a call for cosmopolitanism for, the rainbow flag, for togetherness of different peoples, each living their own wonderful, most,

you know, melting pot life. And if you, it's just sounds like neoliberal crap. And it's like, oh, man, where's my, you know, it's like the progressive, you know, form of religiosity that drew us to some model of the world that would make space for many different kinds of people, many different kinds of bodies, many different kinds of capacities in a larger positive social framework, that that very motif has been so thoroughly absorbed into a, you know, like the Democratic Party, the kind of neoliberal overlords, that you don't have a, you don't have everywhere to go anymore. And so people who do want to have these sort of gushy new age, but still lovable values that I still share in many ways, it's easier to, you know, to

find them in a kind of QAnon scenario where all the evil is very apparent and you just sort of project some kind of resolution or some kind of liberation on the other side of what is in many ways a more honest assessment of the forces that are kind of constructing contemporary reality. So this whole problem of how to generate an exuberant but even somewhat irrational or post-rational or visionary or ideal or religious sort of imagination that is capable of not just reacting negatively, but producing a positive value that's general enough for lots of different people to find buy-in and to then create a bridge between different perspectives and different positions, which is part of the problem of a left that's in some zones dominated by identity politics.

that's part of the crux is that we can't just have a rational, grounded, skeptical reaction to what's going on. There's got to be some kind of positive principle, and it's just not that available in a way that it has been in previous generations. Well, I think you're right. I think that's completely right. I mean, that's really echoes. I mean, the few notes I made before we started talking with sort of thinking about this and think the fact that, well, I mean, If you go back to Marx's time, I mean, most, I mean, the discourse of the left is sort of anti-religion and it's rationalist. And it assumes that rationality is going to coincide with socialism.

And that's, and sort of one of the things that happens, really, I mean, one of the things that happens from the 60s onwards with, you know, the entry into post-modernity, really is it just becomes apparent. That's just, it just doesn't really work like that. Yeah, probably it never was going to work like that. And, yeah, there is a sort of, you know, there's a, and then there's this moment when, I mean, you can point. You could point to a moment, sort of in the 80s, I would say, when you could arguably say, sort of there was a fairly clear distinction, sort of political distinction in the way that religiosity was aligning

with sort of different political tendencies. So you have the new right, the Reaganite new right, and it was, and it was allied to the evangelical Christian conservative movement. And then you had a sort of very, there was quite a powerful strain of sort of establishment, you know, California Democratic Party establishment, So people like Gary Hart, Jerry Brown, who had these sort of new age, you know, seemed to have sort of new age affiliations. And there was, but then I think under the sort of pressures we've been talking about, you know, all those sorts of distinctions have broken down. And I, you know, partly because that stuff actually, actually, I guess, I'm thinking on my feet here, but I mean, really, that sort of new age liberalism of the 80s just got absorbed into this neoliberal cosmopolitan technocratic paradigm that we've been.

been describing that, you know, just became actually sort of, in many ways just became hegemonic. It just became a kind of dominant culture. And the elements of it just became bars of dominant culture. And so when people are reacting against that, I think you're, I mean, I think what you're, I think the implications of what you've been saying actually is that there's a sort of diagnosis here of the, you know, the, the Q and non-loving yogis. There's someone who does, they intuit, they're in, people are sort of intuiting the, that, the capture of certain elements of new age and the kind of, you know, the kind of. mindfulness being taught at the Google

campus and that stuff, they sort of understand, there's a sort of intuition, that stuff is wrong. That isn't what should be, that isn't where the political place where that religiosity should go, or how it should be expressed. And so it's sort of looking for other forms of expression, and it's looking for other forms of articulation, and it's, and

it doesn't want to just collapse back into a kind of retro-Marxist, you know, anti-religiosity, and then, you know, it's completely understandable that it should take some of these very weird forms, you know, from I think that's a really key thing. You know, I wanted to talk about one other element and then, you know, maybe, and partly

to tie it up to something I said earlier where I promised that I would, you know, explain why I spent all that time describing Gnosticism. And this is, this is more of a diagnosis of the kind of psych, psycho-spiritual, of appeal of conspiracy. and that it has this very interesting kind of Gnostic dialectic. So if you remember the mode of like, no, actually the world is not ruled by God, it's ruled by these lower forces, and we have to break through it. So if I am, you know, drawn down a rabbit hole and find myself, you know, increasingly convinced by a conspiracy narrative, there's a really interesting, there's a couple ways that are really, relates to the idea of agency. One is that part of the, what happens is I start to realize that my conventional world

was actually a lie, is that I have what one scholar calls agency panic. And a lot of conspiracies take this form of like agency panic, which is like, oh my God, I'm not actually in control. I've been manipulated. I've been lied to. And my very desires even, my very fundamental beliefs and values are themselves. implanted or controlled or programmed. So there's a whole other way that all of this stuff relates to ideas in psychobiology and ideas of neuro-economics and the degree to which

contemporary technology is taking advantage of, you know, hardwired components of our nervous system in order to optimize certain things online and optimize buying and the way it's been absorbed by, again, the capitalist regime. And that there's some sense of that. And so to reassert itself, the agent then has to project agency onto a system that while a sociologist might say, well, the system wants certain things to happen, or capitalism, just the way, you know, we've been saying, using the words capitalism as a kind of agent, as a kind of animated entity that is doing certain things. Well, did we actually mean it's a conscious agency? Is it an egregore and from occult traditions. Is it some kind of archon from some crypto-Christian tradition?

Well, no, we can speak as sociologists or sociologically minded and talk about systems as if they have agency. But for the awakening conspiracy thinker, they do have agency, and that's the point. So that a lot of the ideas around like the elites and the child abuse things, the Hollywood creep, you know, all of that is because there has to be some kind of identifiable agent as opposed to going, well, civilization is a longstanding game that we're not playing very well anymore. And the whole system is sort of degrading and falling apart. And we're trying to make meaning and make life in these collapsing, you know, breakdown of all of these forces, no, it's much easier to, you know, to project this kind of, kind of agency. And then

this move whereby agency is projected as a way to recover agency on the part of the conspiracy thinker, then there's another dynamic that's even more Gnostic, which is this one, is that you are now awakened. You are now illumined to the truth. You invariably then have some kind of evangelical twist. Now it's not just about understanding what's really going on. It's awakening people from their delusion. So you have like a purpose. You have a dimension and a dynamic. But you also have an explanation for any kind of frustration, pain, marginalization, alienation that you have in your life. Because the, you know, the archons rule the system. So if I've woken up to the archons and I'm trying to get my friends to come along with me, but they're rejecting me. The people at work make fun of me. I don't

have a girlfriend. I just got laid off. It doesn't matter because that almost intensifies your knowledge that this is actually the case because it explains why those forces of alienation are coming your way because you're an awakened one. So it's like you wake up, but you don't get to rule the world. In fact, you just get to see the way that it's ruled by these other kind of forces. And that whole dynamic is just very, it's, A, it's very powerful. And B, it's incredibly well suited for our particular technological, mediated, political environment. So it's very viral, if you will. Well, that's a really great analysis.

And I think, well, there's this whole, there's also, there's this whole geniality of libertarianism, and weird libertarians in California. But I sort of starting to think, I think, you know, we're going to get tired if we try and talk. much longer. And there may be a whole other conversation about that sometime, you know, because I think, because your work has really helped me understand a feature of the whole culture of neoliberalism, I think, and a neoliberal hegemony that I don't think has really been talked about at all, which is the way in which kind of Californian weird libertarianism, going back to the Discordians

and Ayn Rand and other weird stuff, it actually feeds into sort of global neoliberalism. But I sort of think we should maybe talk about that another time. I think that's probably good. I think it's because I like the hour long. Hour is a good chunk of time for both our attention and for the attention of listeners. But I wanted to ask you, well, I wanted to Clay is asking you to talk about one thing. Just because it's nice to talk about something positive. Absolutely.

And so, you know, one of the, I mean, to some extent, all of the conditions we've been talking about and all of the circumstances we've been talking about are sort of one of the reasons why, you know, I know the people like me and I'm sure you're kind of. sympathetic thing you know there's there's there's there are good reasons for sort of you know you only push back against the kind of right wing capture of some of this stuff and the right wing articulation of stuff this stuff by a sort of left wing you know approach to some of the stuff we've been talking about but which isn't which is also non dismissive and so yeah we're interested in things like the practices of consciousness raising and we're interested in you know psychedelic and meditative cultures as potentially kind of liberatory and part of a left project and One of the things you've been doing, I know you've been doing that I think is really interesting, is the psychedelic sanger, which seems like a really interesting not, I get that it's not explicitly political, but it seems to be a really interesting sort of alternative to some of the really individualistic, all the sort of cultic sort of tendencies, which have definitely emerged in psychedelic or re-emerged in psychedelic culture as it's become, you know, not really mainstream, but so, so broad that it's, it's not.

It has all these different sort of tendencies in here, including sort of, you know, people like Jordan Peterson and these kind of alt-right figures. But can you say a bit about psychedelic sang? Sure. I mean, there's a couple of, I mean, right now, there, the, the idea for it came from some folks in New York City. And the way they were kind of manifesting it is, you know,

partly through meditation classes and ideas and getting people together. what it is like it. Yeah, but they were really focused mostly on events, what they were calling happenings. And part of the goal was to revivify the kind of avant-garde intuition or move and its relationship to Buddhism, you know, the John Cage into fluxus moment, if you will, the idea of happenings, the idea of a kind of experimentalism that is done, in a mode of a quest, of a spiritual quest, but it's done very much in terms of community and collective gatherings and collective art. And so that was what was really happening on the ground in New York. And I decided to start doing more classes. So I have one coming up on this

Saturday, whatever it is, the 6th of June. And I do the... You know, they're once a month, and they're mostly, they're more like meditation classes that were in San Francisco in a place, and now they're online. And, you know, and my interest has really been to kind of, you know, it's what it seems to have done is to draw a lot of bridgeers, you know, people who are in between, you know, some of them are technology people. some of them are old hippies, some of them are hardcore psychedelic heads, but there's a sense that somewhere between a more sophisticated articulation of the relationship between meditation practice and Buddhist ideas and psychedelics as a kind of exploratory space, that in that very process to use the openness of that environment and the need for exploration as itself a kind of way of formulating community. and formulating new ways of talking about stuff within a critical framework. So I'm really interested in just keeping alive a certain kind of criticism or self-reflection amidst these things as they go through a period of tremendous transformation and incorporation into a lot of mainstream worlds and corporate worlds and medicalized frameworks.

And it's been very interesting. So I wouldn't say it's not like a movement thing, but it's a place for, for a certain kind of seeker, if you will, to find a community and to find not just a community in terms of individuals that are bonding together and maybe doing work together or spinning off each other's experiences, but also just a way of exploring what does it mean to be a Sanga, that the idea of the Sanga in Buddhism, which is one of the three jewels, the Buddha, the Dharma, the teacher, the Buddha, the guy, the idea that you, you can do this too, the teachings, the Dharma, and then the Sanga is the community of practitioners.

And by really just emphasizing that whatever, wherever we're coming from, we're also part of as community of practice, that that opens up, I think, certain practical and conceptual operations that are limited when there is an explicit teacher or an explicit system. Like, I'm not interested in that. You know, sometimes I think people come are a little frustrated, like they want, like, a guru, a capital T teacher who's telling him how to meditate or what the thing to do is. And I'm just like, hey, jump in here with, jump into the mess with us all here. And, you know, try to like, let's try to make our way out.

And I just come back to that, a metaphor that Cornel West dropped on a class I was in with him in the 80s. And he talked about, he was actually talking specifically about a kind of Christian attitude towards history or a prophetic left Christian. attitude that he was representing or has represented, which is that we're in a leaky boat together. And the boat's leaking. So we got a bail. We got to bail water. And the boat's going where it's going. We look at the horizon. We don't see anything. And there we are. That's it. That's where we are. And that sense of community not as a salvation, not as even a unified ideology or a tribe because there's a lot of tribes inside popular culture inside subcultural identities and that's not quite what it is it's more like an

awareness that the whole process is is something that we're doing on the fly moving forward and that critical thinking questioning is part of the process part of the way that we're bailing the water out from the boat and so it's not like it's not designed for mass, you know, a transformation, you know, like it's not the way that gurus make their their careers online today. But for me, it's been an incredibly, and others, a very valuable way of kind of bringing some sense into both of these worlds, undermining them and expanding them with each other, and doing it all in a framework of collective practice that I think is in some ways, in some ways all we have to do, or at least in some dimensions of our life.

Well, that's great. That's fantastic. That's a very ACFM way to close. Excellent. This broadcast is brought to you by Navarra Media. Go to navaramedia.com slash support.