Monday, March 23, 2015

Op-Ed- Anarchism and Sub-Cultural Excavation: Politics as Occult?

Op-Ed

Anarchism and Sub-Cultural Excavation: Politics as Occult?  By Preston Copeland

I used to think that occult and politics were incompatible. That adventure in subversion and the pillars of the underground had no substantial place in esoterica. Even now, it’s hard to reconcile socio-spiritual paradigms of Self with the machinations of the political beast. But the correlations are prevalent and I don’t mean in just right-wing extremist cults or left-hand path liberalism. These things have been discussed extensively. No, I mean politics is occult. It is full of mechanisms that are secret, obscure, unseen and hidden behind a veil. Political occult is a bombardment of subtle yet complex myths designed under a network that remains behind closed doors.

Yet this network makes use of the media to perpetuate ‘tradition’ and discourage change. The press itself is in collusion with these reality makers to maintain the traditional status quo. When information funnels through the tunnels of media and is highly editorialized, it becomes a representation of tradition. Some viewpoints or “currents” are accepted while others whither in the cold. This results in “falsification through miscontextualization even of the currents properly present.”[1] The status quo no longer accurately represents the reality it tries so hard to convince us of. Thomas Jefferson understood these problems with the press when he remarked that “Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.”

You could say I’m an anarchist- but not in the ‘traditional’ sense of no government and unrestricted chaos. As philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend once remarked, “professional anarchists oppose any kind of restriction and they demand that the individual be permitted to develop freely, unhampered by laws, duties or obligations. And yet they swallow without protest all the severe standards which scientists and logicians impose on research and upon any kind of knowledge-creating and knowledge-changing activity.” (my italics). [2] It is the same with the reality making that occurs within political media arenas. Many so-called anarchists want to beat governmental policy like a mule yet tolerate restrictions on epistemological processes at face value. Many don’t even know what the acronym FOIA stands for or the implications of having this law prohibited. Peter Alexeivich Kropotkin said it best when he remarked that “Anarchism is a world concept based upon a mechanical explanation of ‘all phenomena’. It’s method of investigation is that of the exact natural sciences…the method of induction and deduction.”[3] A concept of “anything goes” must be included in modern political occult because ‘traditional’ epistemology, however decisively grounded in social architecture, is violated at one time or another. Ideas and information acquisition become the most important facet of this “anything goes” anarchism.  

Also hidden, made secret or outright ignored by mainstream media is the influence the 1% has on reality-making. For example, in Bill Clinton’s first six months in office a series of private parties or “soirees for the elite”[4] were hosted. Guests were political leaders, business men, and influential members of the press-corps such as Sidney Blumenthal of ‘The New Yorker’, Rita Braver and Susan Spencer of CBS and Evan Thomas of ‘Newsweek’. These parties were a way of molding upcoming reality. This was in the mid-1970s, “a period when Samuel Huntington of Harvard and Nelson Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission wrote of the need to curb the ‘excess of Democracy” in the USA, Japan and Western Europe.[5] At the time, profits were down and businesses needed to convince Americans to have less so corporations could have more. As elucidated in a mid- 1970s issue of ‘Business Week’, “Nothing that this nation, or any other nation, has done in modern economic history compares in difficulty with the selling job that must now be done to make people accept the new reality.” In an attempt to shape a new trajectory, millions of dollars were funneled into right-wing think tanks with ideas saturated by the media. It was reality-making at its best.

But perhaps the most concealed aspect of the socio-political spectrum now sits in the 4th branch of government known as the NSA. Abhorrent as it seems, a second Defense Department now acts without any fear of accountability whatsoever. In 2001, ‘The Economist’ wrote in regards to the Patriot Act, “Infringement of civil rights, if genuinely required, should be open to scrutiny and considered a painful sacrifice, or a purely tactical retreat, not as the mere brushing aside of irritating legal technicalities. Those who criticized such measures should be given a careful hearing, even if their views must sometimes be overridden.” Yet this hasn’t happened. The Department of Homeland Security has operated with impunity with much of the American public ready to protect it under a veil of fear. Now, CIA in collaboration with U.S. Marshal Services are invoking digital dragnet on cell phones. Planes equipped with tech that mimics cellphone towers can now gain complete access to emails, texts, and phone calls.

Indeed, we exist in a new Aeon- One in which politics, government and the media operate under a cabal while the populace remains blissfully unaware. I can only imagine the lunacy of the 2016 elections were these issues really addressed in open forum. As it is, there is an underground movement but it now exists in a re-design of the anarchist ideal. Anarchy is now pluralism and the real enemy is physical and mental constraints. When an anarchist now says they oppose the ‘state’ they refer to a state of ‘Being’; an ontological State of obliviousness and gullibility. The enemy is any law, organization or ideal that attempts to stop information from getting to the public. Citizen journalists are now the most important members of the socio-political system. Not just because they challenge the major news media to think for themselves but because they instill a shift from a few powerful entities towards an information democratization characteristic of grass-roots movements. Now, news consumers are also the creators. The sub-underground are those that utilize online and mobile technologies to contribute information to global discourse and re-affirm the real beauty and power of information dissemination.




[1] See Black’s ‘Beneath the Underground’ 1994.
[2] Paul Feyerabend. Against Method. 2010. Verso. New  York. pp. 4.
[3] Peter Alexeivich Kropotkin. Modern Science and Anarchism. Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets. Ed. RW. Baldwin. 1970. pp. 150-52.
[4] Roxanne Roberts of ‘The Washington Post’.
[5] End Times: The Death Of The Fourth Estate. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair. 2006. CounterPunch. pp. 25 See Reference for more information.

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