John Michael Greer - Political Magix - PRE-RELEASE
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Greetings from the North, humans of Earth, welcome. Today we're attempting to combine two subject fields frequently explored by the Forum, namely: Parapolitics and Metaphysics.

For there are, in fact, people who profess to live in a higher reality, with a greater outlook on existence, understanding that each incarnation is like a day, and therefore consider all the days, and not just the immediate, which is implied by boosting self-descriptions like occultist.

who nevertheless gets lost in the profane, mundane, temporal, illusionary minutiae of day-to-day politics. And I'm not even referring to political ideas, i.e. the art of considering optimal ways for human beings to organize their existence, rather to the triviality of party politics, personalities and identity politics. A sucker trap, if ever there was one.

Now these dilettantes, who by the pudding proof has by some accident dabbled with the spiritual sphere and therefore ornate themselves with fancy and childish titles like witches, magicians, wizards, mages, etc., but are no more enlightened than a heretic burning inquisitor,

came out of the woodworks en masse during the 16 US presidential elections, which by then was a climax of the effective divide and rule sleight of hand called the lesser of two evils. Like everyone else who got lost in that Maya, just like your creepy uncle, fanatical sister-in-law, an intolerable neighbor,

They were raveling in the mud fights, only with a slight difference. They were also engaging in this battle at the astral level.

It's an interesting phenomenon worth examining, like our guest tonight has done, and as an extension of this phenomenon, we will also examine the idea of political occultism and what, if any, considerations and energy we ought to pay to that temporary realm, whilst still being grounded in the eternal.

and to what extent the esoteric and the political has natural crossovers. Here's a taste of that discourse.

So the democratic movement was into what I've come to call the psychotic end of new thought, the end that says the universe is totally plastic to your desires. You can make the world do whatever you want. All you have to do is develop an overinflated sense of entitlement to the point that the universe will cater to it. That way lies doom. Hmm.

And yet a lot of people buy into it, especially people from our comfortable classes, people from the upper middle class, from the managerial class.

They get into it very deeply into this notion that all they have to do is have a positive attitude and the world is their oyster. And that blows up in people's faces. That blows up profoundly in people's faces. We saw that when, what was the guy's name, Robbie Mook, who was running the computer models for Hillary Clinton's campaign.

We're coming into campaign headquarters and saying, look, the polls are going against us in the Midwest. This is going wrong. This is going wrong. And Mook was going, my models disprove your anecdotes. Well, his models were wrong. It never occurred to him.

Because positive thinking. But people are sick of it. Vast numbers of Americans are desperately sick of the same old nonsense, not least because the economic and social consequences of that nonsense have landed very hard on ordinary working Americans. So Trump was preposterous. Trump was absurd. He's loud. He's brash.

He's brazen. He says incredibly stupid things. He's a caricature of a candidate. And so, of course, an enormous number of these young men went, whoa, he's our boy. But that's when it started getting weird because somebody introduced him to the basic concept of chaos magic. Are there secret societies and conspiracies in the world? Of course not.

Do they run things? No. One of the things that history shows is that secret societies are how you get power if you don't have it. I mean, the elites that run the world don't need to skulk around in lodges. They can do what they want to.

People organize conspiracies in secret societies because they don't have power and they need the secrecy to build power. Or just to be left alone. Or just to be left alone, exactly. That's why a lot of magical groups do the secrecy thing. I think one of the problems with magic in a political context, as Adolf Hitler found out to his cost, is that it's very, very dangerous to do political magic secretly.

If you're trying, you know, for the benefit of somebody in power, because it can go to their head. They can end up convinced that they're invincible. And then they fail to put out, they fail to pay adequate concern to the upper Midwest as Hillary Clinton's campaign did, or they get into a two front war with the two largest industrial powers in the world, the settler did or whoever. If you're going to practice magic in a political setting, don't,

Let it go to your head. And you can also say that there's a certain amount of what you and me would define as magic, but you could say that hypnotism or manipulation or advertisement, I mean, these blurs. Look, I remember the first time I got aware that advertisement is newspeak for what we used to call in the pre-industrial era, we used to call it magic, black magic.

has morphed into what we call advertisement. Magic is the art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will. So if you're trying to change people's consciousness, you can do it with magical means. It's not the only thing that works. There are many ways to do it, and there are many ways to ground that magic in physical reality to help empower it down here on the plane of matter. But it can have an effect.

And so we had on the one hand the pagans and so on who were hard at work doing their magic and basically just sort of wallowing in the glory of this borrowed glory that they'd invested in Hillary Clinton. And

And you had, on the other hand, the Keck Brigade, who were busy, who just delighted at the thought of Donald Trump in the White House and cackling over that, and managed to get their point across. Then there are things that are, in fact, metaphysical. One of the writers who I find most useful in this is me, Lane, who's hardly a household name these days.

But he and his allies in the Borderland Sciences Research Association studied UFOs back in the 40s. And we're saying, these things are not physical. These things are metaphysical. That's another of the old theories of UFOs that I think desperately needs to be revived. The idea that we're talking living things here. Yeah.

We're not talking hardware. We're talking life forms. There were half a dozen. I think Trevor James Constable was discussing that one. There's certainly a book, it may not have been him, but titled They Live in the Sky, which was focusing on the idea that at least some UFOs are aerial life. Yeah, Willem Rysch was into that too, wasn't he? Oh, yeah. Yeah, Rysch was all over that. I repeat this over and over again, and people don't get it.

Occultists can have a very positive effect on the world, but only if they focus on building up things they want to see, not tearing down the things they don't want to see. If you want something in the world, build that. Focus on it.

That quick-witted voice engaged in conversation with me belonged to John Michael Greer, a highly respected writer, blogger and independent scholar who has dedicated nearly five decades to studying and writing about a wide range of topics, including druidry, occultism, ecology and the future of industrial society.

With more than 75 books, numerous essays and a prophetic online presence, he has established himself as one of the most significant voices in the modern study of Western esotericism and sustainability. Hailing from Seattle, Greer developed an early interest in intellectual history and esoteric traditions. He attended Western Washington University from 80 to 83, where he studied the comparative history of ideas

and graduated magna cum laude. His academic training gave him a broad perspective on the intersections between philosophy, history and spirituality. In 1985, he became a master conserver, certified and licensed by the Washington State Energy Extension Service. This achievement sparked his lifelong engagement with sustainable living and appropriate technology.

As a part of his scholarly pursuits, he studied geomantic texts from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, testing ancient techniques and integrating them into his modern understanding of Earth-based spirituality.

Being fluent in Latin and medieval French allowed him to delve deeper into the esoteric traditions. His academic and personal interests include astrology, tarot, actually being a certified tarot grandmaster, and martial arts. For nearly 50 years, he has immersed himself in the study of esoterica and occultism, particularly the druid path.

His early journey into occult traditions involved initiation into several hermetic, golden dawn and masonic groups. By 93, Greer had found a spiritual home in Druidry, specifically within the order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, where he served as a Bard, Ovate and Druid companion. Let me briefly add that there are two types of Druidry.

One works as a vehicle for genuinely spiritual people seeking tools and companionships to cultivate their education, training and self-work within the path.

The other type is more like a gentleman's club, albeit rooted in spirituality and traditions, now somewhat of a museum, as an upper-class leisure a la certain Masonic orders or the Bohemian Grove, where perhaps the content of their tradition is not taken as seriously as in the first type. An important clarification if you only are aware of the latter. Now, in 03-04,

John Greer was awarded the Mount Hamus award for his groundbreaking lecture "Phalic Religion in the Druid Revival" which explored the complex symbolism of phallism in early druidic thought. That same year his involvement in Druidry extended further when he was initiated into the Ancient Order of Druids in America, an organization dedicated to Celtic nature spirituality.

founded in 1912. He served as Grand Archdruid from '03 to '15, leading the organization and guiding its members. His books, the Druidry Handbook, became the core textbook for them, providing essential teachings on nature spirituality and earth-centered rituals. He is also a third order priest in the Reformed Druids of North America, where he has served since '08.

In 13, he founded the Druidical Order of the Golden Dawn, merging Druidic and Golden Dawn ceremonial magic practices. His book, The Celtic Golden Dawn, an original and complete curriculum of Druidical study, serves as the central guide for this order's teachings.

He remains an active member of these druid organizations, in addition to one fraternal and two magic lodges, and in one of these he attends meetings in a building with its own resident ghost. With a congenital passion for writing, he became a freelance writer in 1995.

His works often revives forgotten ideas and traditions, merging ecology with spirituality and political thought. His award-winning A New Encyclopedia of the Occult

From 03 was praised by critics and became an essential reference, chosen by American libraries as a reference text in 05 and receiving accolades from library, journal, book lists and publishers weekly as a vital resource in the study of Western esotericism.

Other notable works include the "Ecotechnic Future" from 2009, which was highly praised in "Choice", "Current Reviews for Academic Libraries" and recommended in "Energy Policy". The Futurist Magazine described it as one of the most realistic portrayals of the end of civilization.

Another notable work: "The Wealth of Nature: Economics as if Survival Mattered" from 11 was lauded by the International Journey of Agricultural Sustainability for challenging prevailing economic paradigms and offering insights into how the natural world should influence our understanding of wealth and economics.

John Greer has also written for a wide range of periodicals including Renaissance Magazine, Golden Dawn Journal, Gnosis, Mezlim, New Moon Rising and Alexandria and has co-edited Caduceus, the Hermetic Quarterly. In 06 he launched the Archdruid Report, a blog focusing on issues like peak oil industrial decline and appropriate technology.

It ran until 17 and gained a substantial following. Since then he has continued his public engagement through EcoSofia, where he writes about the intersection of magic, politics and ecology. He also offers exclusive content on SubscriberStar and Patreon, focusing on political astrology.

He has a strong public speaking profile and has appeared in numerous films, documentaries, radio shows and podcasts. Some of his appearances include Coast to Coast AM, Rune Soup, Occult Unveiled, Tim Ventura, Occult of Personality, Hermetic Astrology podcast, Hermetics and Tooth Hermes podcast.

Finally, since he visits us with his political hat on, let's learn where he's coming from in this regard.

Greer identifies as a modern, Burkean conservative and has long argued that the decline of fossil fuel-based industries will lead to a gradual collapse of modern industrial societies. He has contrasted the overwhelming attention given to global warming with a relative neglect of peak oil, arguing that the latter represents a far more imminent and irreversible challenge.

His well-known theory of catabolic collapse, published in his 2005 paper, posits that civilization fails when production cannot meet the maintenance requirements for existing capital. His model has been recognized by philosophers of science, including Jerome Ravetz, who summarized Greer's theory in his study of global systems failure, praising it as a simple but powerful model of societal collapse.

In his 21 book, The King in Orange, John analyzes the American political landscape through the lens of class analysis and occult practices, focusing on the presidency of Donald Trump, the opposition to his administration, and the broader cultural implications involved.

He suggests that magic and politics will continue to intertwine as various class factions in the US vie for control. He also stresses that occult practices are more effective when practiced with secrecy, criticizing the attention-seeking of liberal occultists who engage in public displays of their craft. And that's the perfect segue to our conversation tonight.

Welcome to Forum Borealis, John.

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be on. Such a pleasure to have you. I've been aware of you for quite some time, maybe 20 years. I'm into esoterica myself, and I liked very much a book you did. I've had a book of yours lying around. So my only awareness of you was that you were a good author, and you knew your stuff when it came to Druidry.

Well, thank you. Obviously, as people heard, you have been involved in the Order of Bards, how do you say, Ovates? Ovates, yeah. Ovates and Druids for a long, long time. But you're so much more than that little square I had packed you into. Let's see if I can find it on the list. But then I see you've been, oh my God, you're prolific. I write a lot of books. You have? Yeah.

Which makes it a nightmare for me because I don't want to dance around many, many topics. It seems rather that if we both enjoy this conversation, I should have you back for...

another focus because there's so many other great avenues i could walk down with you so i'll try to lobby you on in the future for other topics because it's it's a waste not to i will look forward to that sounds great john and like i said it it makes it a nightmare for me to you know choose what to discuss today because you're such a

Renaissance man, I guess, is the word. Well, thank you. Yeah. But I've taken a 180 because I should totally ask you about Orange Man book, The Magical War. Oh, yes. Yes. The King in Orange. Yes. Yeah. Are you motivated to discuss that? I can talk about it. I will happily talk about any of my books.

No problem. That's great. That's fine. There's so many who... The thing is, that one I didn't even write that long ago, so I don't have to go, gosh, what did I say back then? Yes. Plus, I mean, it's still a relevant issue, right? So we're actually going to combine two subject fields that I have shows about. One is politics and the other is

I guess we could call it occultism or esotericism or the spiritual. But let me also add this. That is not a very... I mean, first of all, when you hear that combined, it's usually on a very infantile level. Oh, yeah. Right? Yeah. So I pine to discuss that in an adult way with someone. So you are the best one to do that with as far as I'm aware today. Oh, thank you.

I'll do my best. And if you can throw something at me that I'm not familiar with, that'll be interesting. You spoke like a true magician. Okay, then. Yeah. So we will do occult politics today, then. Works for me. But I'll give a shout out to all the other stuff you've done. But so. Yeah. So occult politics, political occultism. Yeah. Go ahead. Throw a question at me.

Well, I mean, the book you made should be our map for this. Now, full disclosure, folks, I have only had friends recommend this book to me. I haven't read it myself.

But I venture, you know, sometimes that is actually an advantage. If you have some rudimentary knowledge of the field, you're not completely green as a host, then it could be interesting that I haven't read a book because then it's going to be an unbiased questioning from me. Although in this show, some questions are very convoluted and long, more like reasonings. So you'll have to forgive me if I get engaged. But yeah,

I think this book, I think I can wing it. Okay. We'll use this book. I'm going to look up the index at Amazon, so I'll have a little clue. But you made this book in 21, was it? That was when it was finally published, yes. When did you write it? I actually wrote it in, well, okay, this is complex. What I do with some of my books, not all of them, but some of my books, I will do a series of essays on my blog. Okay.

exploring a topic. And then I will take those essays as raw material and convert them into a book. It's not just a collection of essays, but there's a lot of prose that gets passed over because I spend the time on my blog discussing the concept and exploring it in various ways. I get feedback from my readers. And so The King in Orange, actually, to some extent, I began writing it in 2015.

And there are some of the concepts in there actually date back to then. Really, the core of it was written in terms of those original essays between the beginning of 2016 and about the end of 2017. I turned it into a book in 2018 and 2019. And then I spent rather a while trying to find somebody who would publish it. That is not easy with a book that is...

Well, it doesn't fit anybody's conventional wisdom. I'm used to that. I'm seriously used to that. One of the jokes that I have, and it's not entirely a joke, is that I don't really feel satisfied with one of my blog posts unless it gets attacked with equal venom from the left and the right. Right.

Oh, man. Hallelujah. Yeah. And so this book, The King in Orange definitely got its share of meltdowns and tantrums and tirades and did finally find a good publisher. It's with Inner Traditions, who is very praiseworthy in their willingness to publish things that a lot of people won't touch. And, yeah. So that's basically the evolution of The King in Orange unfolded over, yeah, getting on for six years.

So the last year you wrote about this was when? Because this is a soap opera still unfolding. So I'm just wondering how updated it is. It's the last year whose events I took into account was 2020. I referenced the 2020 election. Okay. But most of the information actually focuses on the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Okay.

And that's because that really brought out the points, both in terms of political magic, in terms of the various untouchable concepts in American politics and American culture. All of those were really highlighted by the 2016 election. So it mostly really does focus on that election and on its outcome. Yeah.

You know, from the vantage point of Europe, who by now has become a vassal state of America, of course. Yeah. We've lost anything. I mean, we used to be a good check and balance, but not anymore. But anyway, from our vantage point…

We have a completely different political landscape, as you probably know. For example, in my country, if we're going to operate on the left-right dichotomy, which is so outdated and it's more a charade today, but if we're going to operate with it, Bernie Sanders is a centrist in my country. And then you have the cultural differences and you have the

Yeah, so many. So for us, like every election going on over there, it just seems that things get crazier and crazier. But I grant you that 16, it was a climax, a true climax. And I saw everyone coming out of the woodwork. It wasn't just...

I mean, I'm not amazed that also spiritual people who should be above... Look, let me just say this. When we are on the deathbed, who on earth are going to start ranting and raving about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton? These are mundane matters that should be like it's a fly. I mean, it's not irrelevant. Of course, you have to be present in the world. But...

But to lose friends, to lose marriages over this, how spiritual are you? Yes, I am sorry to say that in the United States today, there are people who will be shrieking about Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton as they die. There they are in the deathbed. The last words they want to speak to the people around will be something about Trump or about Clinton, Obama or about Biden. It's bizarre.

It really, truly is bizarre. But yes, the political passions in this country have risen far past the level of mere absurdity.

And it's very, very strange. Yeah, it must be a sign of the end times. I mean, the same mania we saw during COVID. So I think our culture is lost. I think the alienation has gone too far. And I'm not surprised that out of the woodworks came all sorts of self-declared occultists. Now, the only thing I noticed during that time was

was there was some Wicca people who were... Because remember in 15, people still thought Donald Trump and all that would be like a fascist movement. We've had four years with him now, so we kind of know what it represents. But

It was much, much scary back then. And now we have had four years of the establishment. What do they say in Starbuzz? The empire strikes back? That happened with Biden, right? And now we are heading for a nuclear war. But I want to start this discussion by asking you which occult identifiers, which streams were obviously present in the

let's say the magical level of this battle that started then.

Okay, I want to say first of all that most of the really serious occultists that I know were basically uninvolved. They were watching the whole thing. Many of them were watching it in horror, whether they were more or less grudgingly supporting Clinton, whether they were more or less grudgingly supporting Trump, whether they were just stepping back and saying, I'm out of here, man. Most of the serious occultists I know of had nothing to do with it.

Then there was the Wiccan and neo-pagan scene, the sort of popular, you know, the suburban folk occultism of modern America. And nearly all of them were singing praises of Hillary Clinton at the top of their lungs.

I had a chance in what would have been the summer of 2016. I was visiting the headquarters of a very large publisher in that field. I won't name them, but the place was literally festooned with Clinton sites inside the workplace. Usually in the United States, politics is left outside of the office, outside of the job site, but not this time. Oh, my God. It was all over the place.

And this was a company that sells a lot to the Wiccan scene. And then there was the other side. And the other side is a long, weird story. Um,

Basically, what happened was that there were, you probably heard of the chans, various image boards out there on the internet, where people, where young men mostly, get together and it's rude, it's crude, they hang out together. Many of them, especially in the United States, many of them have no jobs, no prospect of jobs, no prospect of getting a life going because of various factors which we can discuss at length as we proceed. But there they hang out and being rude and crude and profane is

And first of all, a lot of them became interested in Donald Trump's campaign, partly because of the sheer satirical value of it. One of the things that I think most people don't realize, especially you may not realize this in Europe, is that an enormous amount of the support that Donald Trump received was because he was so preposterous. Yeah. Because he was outside. Grabbed them by the pussy. Yeah, exactly. He was outside the political jargon, the political culture of the time, and unbiased.

A vast number of Americans are sick to death of the political culture of our time, of the endlessly interchangeable Republican, Democrat, Democrat, Republican, Demublican, Republican. They're all the same thing. They're all airbrushed. They're all smiling. They have their actual positions in terms of politics. You have to measure the difference with a micrometer, although they shriek about it.

And they're all basically... Yeah, like we say up here, two cheeks of the same ass. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. At this point, it's more like the two sides of the same rectum. They don't even get as far apart as the cheeks. And so... But people are sick of it.

Vast numbers of Americans are desperately sick of the same old nonsense, not least because the economic and social consequences of that nonsense have landed very hard on ordinary working Americans. So Trump was preposterous. Trump was absurd. He's loud. He's brash.

He's brazen. He says incredibly stupid things. He's a caricature of a candidate. And so, of course, an enormous number of these young men went, whoa, he's our boy. But that's when it started getting weird because somebody introduced him to the basic concept of chaos magic.

Did somebody introduce Trump to it? No. These young men. These young men hanging out on the chans. All of a sudden, they started talking about chaos magic. Now, it is not difficult to find out about chaos magic these days, like so many of the sort of pop culture magical traditions. The books and websites and things are readily available. I suppose they could have grabbed onto anything, but they didn't. They grabbed onto chaos magic.

And so all of a sudden you had this scene, mostly connected by the Internet, of the vast number of young men living in their mother's basements with no prospects for the future and no hope for the future. And they had something to energize them, something to be enthusiastic about, practicing chaos magic for the benefit of Donald Trump's campaign.

And that's where the other side came out of. And so through the 2016 campaign, you had this weird subculture of the chans with its own in-jokes and its own images. If I mention Pepe the Frog, many people will know exactly what I'm talking about. And away it went.

And so those were the two sides. In terms of the magical struggle, you had the neo-pagans who were heavily pro-Clinton, and you had the chancellors, the Kekistan Brigade, as they came to call themselves, the worshippers of Pepe, who were on Donald Trump's side. And it just got weirder from there. So that's kind of a roundabout answer to your question, but that's where the two contending forces in the magical side of the whole 2016 election came from.

Do you think any of them had any serious influence? Yeah, I think they did. I think now, of course, Hillary Clinton had a lock on the election. The way that Bernie Sanders' challenge to her was shoved out the door by dubiously legal means was very clear to a lot of people. But she had a lot of support and a lot of blind support.

I remember... Wait a minute. Do you remember this... I guess it was a scandal in conspiracy circles that she was involved, at least Podesta was, with this artist who were holding these... She's associated to Telemann vaguely. Oh, yeah. Remind us about that thing. Okay. There was... What was the business? There was...

There was an artist who was doing these performance art pieces with a ritual dimension. I don't even remember the details at this point, but yeah, the conspiracy

conspiracy culture scene went orbital over it. They have to have something to talk about. And by that point, I think Pizzagate was winding down. Yeah, and I think Adrenochrome was connected to it, but she had these bizarre images, paintings. Oh, yeah. I forget who's still claiming that Hillary Clinton is actually an evil lizard from another planet. Mind you, I'm fine with lizards. I think reptiles are nice, but

I think it's really rude that they're, you know, I'm sure one of these days the reptiles of the world are going to complain about being compared to Hillary Clinton. Yeah, it's an insult. She's not a pleasant person. But the thing is, on the one hand, you had an enormous number of people on the left who didn't just go, okay, Hillary Clinton is the best candidate we have.

Hillary, you know, she's got these various qualifications. Let's run her. People were worshipping her. People were going, Hillary Clinton is light itself. I'm not making that line up. It's been taken down, but that was an actual headline. No, there was a savior complex on both sides. Oh, there was a total savior complex. And I think she got caught up in it. I think one of the problems with magic, you know,

in a political context, as Adolf Hitler found out to his cost, is that it's very, very dangerous to do political magic if you're trying, you know, for the benefit of somebody in power because it can go to their head. They can end up convinced that they're invincible. And then they fail to put adequate, they fail to pay adequate concern to the upper Midwest, as Hillary Clinton's campaign did, or they get into a two-front war with the two largest industrial powers in the world, as Hitler did, or whoever.

If you're going to practice magic in a political setting, don't let it go to your head. Now, the Kekistan types...

I think they also had an effect. And I think their effect was largely just putting out the idea that Trump could actually win. Because nobody thought he could win. All the media was convinced. Even the day before the election, the odds... Even the day before the election. Yeah, all the pollsters... The odds were completely... You would be rich if you bet on Trump the day before. Exactly. Yeah, all the pollsters were saying, nah, Clinton's going to take this one. Everybody was saying... But...

There were many other reasons why Donald Trump won that election, but one of the core reasons is I think enough people, when it came right down to it, said, you know, maybe, maybe it's worth casting a vote for him. If nothing else, it'll irritate the bejesus out of the jerks in suits. And so they did. So I think one of the things you can do, paying attention to cases like this, cases where there's magic at work,

If you can see that, you know, magic, well, let me start, let's step way back and do a definition, a little bit of definition here. The definition of magic that I like to use is the one Dion Fortune used. Magic is the art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will. So,

So if you're trying to change people's consciousness, you can do it with magical means. It's not the only thing that works. There are many ways to do it. And there are many ways to ground that magic in physical reality to help empower it down here on the plane of matter. But it can have an effect.

And so we had on the one hand the pagans and so on who were hard at work doing their magic and basically just sort of wallowing in the glory of this borrowed glory that they'd invested in Hillary Clinton. And you had on the other hand the Keck Brigade who were busy, who just delighted at the thought of Donald Trump in the White House and cackling over that and managed to get their point across. Yeah.

But it seems that you can define Trump too as flirting with magic because he has been associated with this evangelist Christian brand that if you pile away all the Abrahamic layers and symbols and rhetorics, it's down to materialism.

materialism magic. It's down to all of the secret. It's down to... You know what I mean. You take it from there. Okay, the term you're looking for is New Thought. That was what it was originally called when it emerged in the middle of the 19th century, gave rise to the Christian Science Church, gave rise to a whole series of other movements. But New Thought was the brand name. And yes...

Donald Trump was heavily influenced by New Thought ideas. He grew up going to a New Thought church in New York City. His attitude has been shaped throughout. As occultism goes, New Thought is kind of weak beer. But if

But it can be very effective. The secret, you know, we saw the secret. We saw how millions of people here in the U.S., for example, millions of people read the secret and piled into real estate convinced they were because, you know, the universe owed them a living. They were going to make millions of dollars. Of course, we then had the real estate crash. Every single person I knew who was using the secret to try to get rich lost everything and had to declare bankruptcy. It was quite remarkable. There are limits.

to what you can do with this kind of power of positive thinking. Norman Vincent Peale was the one who made that phrase. Trump

Actually, both of the candidates were heavily associated with that sort of thing. Trump was associated with what we can call the pragmatic end of the New Thought Movement, the end that says, okay, you also have to do all the practical things, but you can give it a push by affirmations, by positive thinking, by thinking big, by imagining your future is huge, or what have you.

There was a lot on the left, well, to the extent that we have a left, of course, we don't really, but the Democratic side, we'll say, okay. The other right wing. Yeah.

The corporatists. Yeah, well, the thing is that until Trump came around, both sides were as corporatists as the days went along. But so the democratic wing was into what I've come to call the psychotic end of new thought, the end that says the universe is totally plastic to your desires. You can make the world do whatever you want. All you have to do is develop an overinflated sense of entitlement to the point that the universe will cater to it. That way lies doom. Yeah.

And yet a lot of people buy into it, especially people from our comfortable classes, people from the upper middle class, from the managerial class.

They get into it very deeply into this notion that all they have to do is have a positive attitude and the world is their oyster. And that blows up in people's faces. That blows up profoundly in people's faces. We saw that when, what was the guy's name, Robbie Mook, who was running the computer models for Hillary Clinton's campaign,

People were coming into campaign headquarters and saying, look, the polls are going against us in the Midwest. This is going wrong. This is going wrong. And Mook was going, my models disprove your anecdotes. Well, his models were wrong. It never occurred to him because positive thinking.

OK, it never occurred to anybody in the in the Clinton campaign, except people who were on the ground having to deal with what's actually happening, that maybe they were they were making a mistake. Maybe they couldn't just assume Hillary Clinton's coronation. Yeah, I remember Chuck Schumer. What's his name? Chuck Schumer. Is that his name?

Yeah, he was saying brazenly that when confronted about losing the working class, he said it doesn't matter. We'll pick up for every blue collar voter we lose. We're going to pick up a white collar in the suburbians, you know, former Republicans or whatever. And you can repeat that in Michigan. So they went into it eyes open. They don't want the working class. Yeah.

No, no. And the thing is that that's doomed because the Democrat, you know, that's one of the things that doomed them because the Democrats can't appeal to the suburban class as much because they, the democratic, um, democratic policies mean higher taxes. And so a very large number of people in the suburban classes are going to go, no, that's going to raise my income tax.

But they're trying to counter it with cultural identity politics and that stuff. Yeah, and that's a lot. And of course, you can make a certain amount of headway that way. But when it comes down to it, people vote their pocketbooks. Yeah.

Rather than their cultural identity. And that's why so many former Democrat voters voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984. Because they were voting their pocketbooks. They were saying, yeah, I want to vote Democrat, but I want a tax cut. I want these things that the Democrats are not willing to give me. So it was just amazing to watch.

the extent to which people got caught up in that sort of delusional end of the New Thought Movement and convinced themselves that all they needed was a sufficiently inflated sense of entitlement and the world would cater to them. You got that, frankly, it came from the top. I remember back in, what would this be? This would be in

Yes, in the 92 race when we had Obama and Hillary Clinton were the two, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were the two major figures. And Clinton launched off her speech announcing her candidacy with the words, I am so ready to lead.

Okay. Why should we cater to your desire to have the presidency? She never addressed that. It never occurred to her that maybe she needed to give people a reason to vote for her. And this attitude, which is pervasive in our American elite class, they don't have to care. They don't have to give anyone a reason to support them. And that's why the country's falling to bits because so many people are not supporting them. It's definitely a break with the truth. It's bad magic. Yeah.

Yeah, it's about everything. And it's a break with, you know, politics used to be make your case and get the votes. Now it's like we are entitled to your votes. Yeah, exactly. You know, to be the devil's advocate, you could say that it kind of indicates that actual democracy doesn't matter anymore. Actual because a combination of a lot of things, for example, that

Most of the mainstream media, actually all of mainstream media is co-opted and controlled by one way or the other by the corporate side of the left or right. You could also say that there's a certain amount of rigging, overt, indirect, whatever. Oh, yes. And you can also say that there's a certain amount of what you and me would define as magic, but you

You could say that hypnotism or manipulation or advertisement. I mean, these blurs. Look, I remember the first time I got aware that advertisement is newspeak for what we used to call in the pre-industrial era. We used to call it magic. Black magic has morphed into what we call advertisement. So I think it speaks to that, that they don't really...

actual vote isn't that important anymore. No, no, no. The first thing I want to say, I'm going to want to build on that whole issue of advertising as magic, advertising as sorcery. But the first thing I want to point out is that there is nothing new in the current state of the US media. There is nothing new in the current state of US politics. Vote fraud is as American as apple pie.

People have been – there have been vote fraud scandals in this country since – I don't think there was any during George Washington's two campaigns. But that's about it. There have been serious vote fraud scandals consistently. The thing is that's inseparable from democracy.

Because if you have a democratic system, there will be people who want to buy votes and there will be people who want to sell them. So, you know, in ancient Greece, they had vote-rigging scandals. Okay. So when people talk about real democracy and they present it as this abstract ideal of perfection, all I can do is chuckle.

Real democracy is democracy as it happens in the real world, which always involves some degree of corruption, always involves manipulation. As Winston Churchill pointed out, democracy is the worst possible system except for all the others.

It's got enormous problems. It's just that the problems are not as bad as those of the rivals. So, um, but the, in the United States vote fraud, um, control actually didn't used to be primarily corporate control of the media, but party. Oh my God. Yes. It used to be that you knew which party every newspaper, um, in,

in the country was affiliated with. When I was growing up in Seattle, Washington, we had two papers, the Post-Intelligence or in the Times. The Times was the Republican paper, the Post-Intelligence was the Democrat paper. They were wholly owned subsidiaries of the parties. And so it wasn't that different. As for manipulation, now, the methods are different, but again, as you point out, this is magic. This has been going on for a very, very, very long time.

One name that I want to bring up here that deserves discussion here is Ioan Colliano, the Romanian historian of ideas, historian of religion, who wrote, among other very good books, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. One of the points that he makes in that book, one of the central points, is exactly that. Modern advertising, modern public relations is magic.

It's magic by the strict Renaissance definition that he was getting out of people like Giordano Bruno. And so he argued that a lot of what goes on in today's societies is that what we have is not, you know, tyranny nowadays does not require jackboots and armbands. It is performed by what he calls magician states.

Nations that use magic, that use the art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will to manipulate the population to get their way. Now, he's right, but there's nothing new in that either. If you look, for example, at Queen Elizabeth I of England, who had this immense symbolic cult built up around her as Diana, as what have you. There's an enormous amount of magic going into it.

building up her regime. Nowhere as overt, of course, as the Nazi state. But even China and Soviet Russia, even though they were outspoken atheists, they knew the value of cult and symbolism. Exactly. They were using it all the time. The problem with the Nazis is they were incompetent.

They were clumsy. One of the problems with German culture, when German culture can achieve subtlety, it accomplishes astounding things. Good, it comes to mind. But when it allows itself to fall down into the sort of lumpenintelligencia of the lower middle class, you end up with Nazism and things like that. You end up with these clumsy, awkward, ham-handed people

magical workings, which don't really work that well. So, just as well, frankly, but there we are. But yeah, the thing is, every European monarchy back in the day had its monarchical cult, had its monarchical magic to create that consensus of support, of authority. I mean, John Dee worked for the Queen. Yeah, John Dee. He was a house astrologer and mage. He was a wizard. And everyone...

every monarch in europe had one of those yeah they had an alchemist and an astrologer and whatnot exactly they all had those because they understood we now our current president you know presidents now have you know public relations consultants but it's the same thing they had to issue them let me inject a question there do you think it's true that i've heard that on the trump side he had uh

I don't know if it was via Bannon, but he had the connections to Alexander Dugin. It may be a conspiracy theory. I don't know. But that's on that side. And on the Hillary side, there was the Podesta who had some connections. What do you think about this?

Okay, this is complicated. Okay. First, now, we have to, okay, traditionalism is one of the intellectual movements strongly influenced by the occult scene. We have Flanaganon in France. We have Julius Evola in Italy. We have a range of other figures creating this sort of

This ideology of revolt against the modern world, an ideology of the modern world has gotten completely bollocked up and we need to return to something saner. That's the traditionalist view. Yeah, I'm very sympathetic to aspects of that I have to come clean and say. I think that even those people who disagree with traditionalism – and I disagree with a lot of it –

badly need to read and study and confront its ideas because, you know, the traditionalist challenge is serious. It's not pointless. It's meaningful. And so whatever you're going to say, whatever you're going to think, you need to wrestle with it. Mm-hmm.

And so, yeah, I mean, I think I would like to see anybody who claims to be a thinker about the state of society to read The Reign of Quantity, for example. But Make America Great Again is obviously related to that sentiment. Exactly. Now, Steve Bannon

Who was, of course, very heavily involved in the Trump campaign in 2016. Bannon is a traditionalist. He's been a traditionalist since his early adulthood. So that's open. Yeah. No, he's a serious traditionalist, and he has connections with various traditionalist circles. However, he's kind of a heretic.

Because so many of the traditionalists tend to focus on this very elitist notion that there are certain people, certain holy sages or what have you, and that's who you have to turn to. Bannon is saying no. Ordinary people also resonate. People who are outside the intellectual scene. Ordinary people resonate with a kind of deep tradition that is simply passed on in the conservatism of everyday life.

And that was the basis of his campaign strategy. That's so interesting. Hitler had the same realization. Let's use the working class. Let's use the working class. You know, the thing is, so did the communists, so did the Marxists, but of course... Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, but are they traditionalists, though? But that's just it. You see, the Marxists are saying, let's use the working class as candidates.

cannon fodder. We're not going to listen to them. We're going to tell them what to do. We're going to have them die by droves in an orgy of revolutionary violence so a small cadre of middle class intellectuals can seize power. That's communism. Whereas Hitler and a great many other people have before and after him have noted the working classes also, they have their own tradition. They have their own orientations, their own ideas. What if we listen to them? Yeah.

What if we ask them what they want and give it to them? And once that happens, certain changes become inevitable. But yeah, so that's what Bannon was pushing. Now, Alexander Dugin, I have not yet started reading.

I know that I have to one of these days when I finish my current round, my current several rounds of focus mostly on Renaissance philosophy. I really need to read Dugin and confront what he has to say, but I'm not familiar with his ideas at this point, so I can't really address them.

No, but I know that, I know it's a conspiracy theory that he was involved with Putin. That's a part of the Russia propaganda. So because that's not true, I'm starting to wonder if it's also bullshit that he was connected to Trump. Yeah, this whole thing. The thing is, the Democrats could not deal with the fact that Trump won because he wasn't supposed to win. Yeah.

Because he's the bad guy and the good guys are supposed to win. I did a blog post a little while back called Stormtrooper Syndrome, where I talked about the way that so many people are caught up in a kind of Star Wars delusion where the good guys always win no matter what happens. You know, Luke Skywalker will find that point, that cooling port and blow the death star to pieces because he has to, because that's

Lord of the Rings. Exactly. It's the same thing. Or Harry Potter. We have this endless profusion of endlessly regurgitated, the bad guys are really powerful, but no matter how stupid we are, we will win against them at the last moment because we're good. I think that's why Game of Thrones was so popular, because it broke with the dichotomy. It introduced nuance. Yeah. Well, its approach was simply, there are no good people. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, and so which has problems of its own, but still, it didn't just follow the same dreary, the same dreary line that's dragging Disney down to failure, where the good people are the good people, and therefore they win, and the bad people are bad people, and that's why they lose. And the real world does not work that way. In many ways, it works the opposite. Well, no, it's

Are you familiar with Stefan Schweig's... I don't know the English title. Let me try to transliterate it. It would be something like The Eternal Brother's Eye. I'm not familiar with that one, no. It's a small... I really recommend it. You know Schweig, of course, right? It's a small novel. Is that what you call it? A short story? Yeah. But the moral is mind-blowing. He kind of demonstrates that...

It's kind of the same as Jesus said, my kingdom is not of this earth. If you do the good and the right, you may actually risk complete loss at the material level. If you do all the bad things, if you're a psychopath, a black magician, whatever, you will get material gain. But mind you, only at the physical level. We're not introducing other levels here. The thing is,

is, I'm going to quibble with that because even, of course, we have the example of Adolf Hitler, okay? Who was unquestionably an evil magician, okay? There's no, you know, he was into it up to his eyeballs. Look how well his thousand-year rank lasted. Mm-hmm.

Because, in fact, doing all the wrong things will also blow you to bits. I much prefer the attitude of the classical moralists, of Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus and so on, who are saying virtues are the things that enable human greatness. If you have virtues, you will be able to achieve more than if you don't have these virtues. If you have vices, vices are weaknesses. Right.

And so, you know, when all you're doing is feeding vices and all you're doing is… But I was talking at a strictly monetary material level that, you know, kill and plunder will accumulate wealth. But of course it has costs. Yes, of course. It will accumulate. There will cost. And eventually somebody who isn't so…

uncontrolled and offers other people the hope that they can have, like hang on to their possessions, somebody else will gather a much greater force than you have and crush you. That's where feudalism came from. That's where the feudal system came from back in the Middle Ages. And revolutions, of course. Yeah, but you have all of this chaos and war bands and war leaders just taking whatever they want and then people start turning to

strong leaders who will say, no, I'm going to impose peace during this area. You are going to be able to keep your own stuff. You are not going to be pillaged and looted. And now we're going to go kill the people who are trying to pillage and loot you. You need help. And they helped.

I suppose in a Jordan Peterson's kind of approach, you could say that it's a pendulum. If it goes too far, there will be a reaction. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's a pendulum, but it's not a pendulum going just back and forth. It's a pendulum that's sort of wobbling and swinging and waving around in various... In a spiral, maybe? Yeah, not even that organized. It's just kind of wobbling chaotically around. But you don't...

But you do know that if it swings all the way over to one side, it's probably going to drift over to the other side sooner or later. Butterfly effect. Yeah, exactly. Except there are like a million butterflies flapping their wings in all kinds of different patterns. And the pendulum is just jolting and wobbling. Human beings have a bad habit of thinking that they understand more about the world than they do. We want the world to make sense. And the world doesn't. But isn't that where magic comes in?

Yeah, that's one of the places magic comes in. One of the things you can do with magic, and this is where magic gets tricky, okay? You can create order out of chaos. You can take this wobbly, this bizarre, etch-a-sketch mess made from the swinging pendulum, and you can find an order in it.

And if you do that and you're careful not to assume that the order is the truth, then you can do very well by it because you can pick up on actual regularities. On the other hand, you can convince yourself that you know all about what the pendulum is going to do and you get clonked by it. Yeah, but there are some very interesting studies into cycles and patterns. The problem is the quantum level, right? So that's why determinists can't really translate

with their philosophy because they are just seeing a little aspect of reality and

But who knows, you know, if you can insert your will into the apparent chaos. I mean, Pythagoras coined the word cosmos. And to him, it meant perfect arranged order, but not from the human perspective, but from the perspective of the gods, right? Which we don't have, obviously. We're just ants. Which we don't have. So, in a way, I feel there is...

a higher order but I don't think we can measure it materially because then we are excluding most of reality notwithstanding consciousness one

One of the very useful things about Pythagoras' basic structure was the way that he opposed the limited to the limitless, one and two, the ordered cosmos to the chaotic, wider reality. That's right. The Eperion and Aperion, he called it. Yeah. In some ways, it's actually rather similar to one of the basic images from Norse mythology. You have the gods...

Well, you have the gods in Asgard who are defending this midgard, this realm of ordered things. And out beyond it, you have Jotunheim. You have the realm of the giants who are the chaotic forces. And the Norse were sensible enough to realize that sooner or later, the order is going to break down. Sooner or later, you're going to have that last battle on Vigrid Plain. The gods are going to be slaughtered. Everything is going to perish in flames. And then there will be a few surviving gods who will start the game over again.

So there's a lot of rich philosophy in that, and I'm by no means certain that Pythagoras wasn't drawing on some such set of insights.

possibly taken from mythology. According to the old historians, he was initiated into a whole series of mythically-based initiations all over the ancient world. Egypt, Persia, you name it. You name it, exactly. So you can use magic to trace out your magic circle. You can trace out a circle and have everything nicely ordered in it, and you can maintain that circle. But outside the circle, it's always going to be a mess. Right.

Yeah, I really hope there is a random factor still in play because the modern tech, the transhumanist wave we are caught up in, I mean, they are measuring every goddamn detail because we have the power to do it now, AI and whatnot. Any thoughts? Oh, they have the power to measure things, but... And predict. Well, except how often are their predictions dead wrong? Right.

I'm thinking of a, I'm thinking just, there was an example in the news here a little while ago. I forget which school district here in the United States got this hot new AI program to arrange the pickup, you know, picking up and dropping off kids with the bus system for school. Okay. They had to literally shut down school for a couple of days because they tried it that first day. There were still kids on the buses at nine at night.

Because the thing had gone completely haywire. Someone said that's on account of the public, you know, the state. No, no. Crucially, I would argue that

Human beings are much less smart than we think we are. I mean, our brains are basically an eight-inch long piece of greasy jello. I don't think many people can put up an intelligent counter-argument to that. Exactly. We are suicidal. So this little brain is trying to understand a cosmos...

trillions of light years across. We can't do it. All we can do is pull out a few regularities, put them into a pattern that tries to, that more or less makes sense of them and says, okay, this is our theory. This is our hypothesis. This is our model. The transhumanists are trying to insist that the model is more real than the world that it imitates. They're trying to insist that we can become these godlike beings. It's the

same drivel eternally. People are constantly trying to do this, whether they're trying to do it with religion, whether they're trying to do it with magic, whether they're trying to do it with technology. This is very dark. It's a material-based version. Exactly. But the thing is, the mere fact that it's material-based, it looks very impressive to people who are impressed by machines. It just doesn't work any better than the other things you end up with. Here we have these vast computerized systems, and I think we all know that

Every time the computers become more complex, life becomes more dysfunctional. More things go wrong. Fewer things function at all or function adequately. We are not getting this kind of utopian tomorrowland effect. We're getting esthetics.

esteeming dystopian mess. Yeah, but that's because that's what they seek. Run by computers that don't have brains. Yeah, I need to challenge you, brother. First of all, that's because the utopian is what we project onto the powers that be. I see no sign that anyone there are seeking anything. I mean, dystopia is probably their utopia, right? So that's number one. Here's the challenge. I agree with everything you said.

And there's no way I can counter it. But my suggestion is that if you limit the scope of manipulation, you exclude the quantum and you exclude macroscopic and you stay within the field of politics.

So you defined it yourself. So here is about forcing our will on this unformed mass. And obviously, it's a problem that in the mass, there's a million small wills.

So we have to bereft them of a way to express that will, which is easy with the working class, can be a little harder with, you know, your peers in the elite, because the elite has never been one big Illuminati agreeing with each other. It's more like a mafia, many mafia families, right?

But if you can remove the masses way, their channel to express their will, and then you also can start gaslighting with their reality, which you do when you take over first public press, then the social media and every way we have to express ourselves. So you kind of get a complete control and then introduce centralization, AI, this kind of technology, right?

I think we're not very far away from a wet Stalin or Hitler dream. Please prove me wrong here. Okay, the first thing that I'm going to point out is that all this assumes, which of course elites these days do assume, that the working classes are just going to sit passively by while this happens. One of the things we've discovered is that that doesn't necessarily, that ain't necessarily so. We saw it with the election of Donald Trump.

We are seeing it now with the incredible popularity of the song Richmond, North of Richmond. We're seeing it with the ongoing boycott of Bud Light. Yeah, but these are just small glimmers of light coming through. No, this is what's going on in the surface. The question is what's happening down below. Right. Government really does...

depend on the consent of the governed. Not in any kind of airy-fairy democratic sense, but simply if people just start refusing to cooperate, there's only so much that the government can do. This is what brought down the Eastern Bloc in 1989. People just stopped cooperating and down it went. You know, the government of East Germany with all its secret police and its army collapsed because people just walked away. And that's far from the only time that's happened.

Most of the revolutions, if you look at the French Revolution, you look at the Russian Revolution, they were not these bitter, long-fought wars to overthrow the government. The government imploded because people just got sick of it. Now, there were wars afterwards. Of course, we had the Napoleonic Wars. I have not forgotten about those. There was the Russian Civil War that followed the seizure of power. But the actual collapse of the government was extremely easy. It was a very simple thing.

And every empire is doomed to collapse anyway. Exactly. Every empire is doomed to collapse. Every government that loses track of the fact that it has to placate the ordinary people. It has to find out what they want and give them at least some of it. And

Okay, I agree with you. But what about this? America seems to be at the verge of implosion. Nowhere more visible than all the money going to Ukraine, the COVID, everything, right? But

I venture that the elites has become so corrupt as they do in end stage imperialism that they become so psychopathic that they're not going to go voluntarily. So now comes BRICS. And I think they would rather launch a world war, nuclear war, than see their own privileges and power and the dollar and everything go down the drain.

The question is whether anyone will obey them if they give that order. Remember, they don't launch the missiles themselves. They don't point the guns themselves. One of the persistent problems with empires is the older they get, the more decadent they get, the more the people who benefit from it are removed from the day-to-day operations. So,

So you have this circle of elite types who are tampered and privileged and surrounded by an endless torrent of yes-men. And if, you know, whatever they want, somebody screes out to get it. But you have to go level after level after level down the hierarchy before you actually get to people who are doing anything. And this is why, for example, if you look at the history of coups d'etat,

the guy who sees his power is normally, up until fairly recently, is normally not a general. He's somebody further down who actually has contact with the troops. And so we're in a situation where I could very definitely see if the United States is up against the wall, the dollar has lost its reserve currency status,

Hyperinflation is collapsing. The U.S. government can no longer pay the bills. Joe Biden freaks out and orders a nuclear strike on Russia and China. The people behind him, I mean, he's just an empty shell. Well, yeah, I'm just saying, yeah, but he would actually have to make the actual motions under his direction, under whoever's direction. But there's a decision made to do this. And the people who are actually responsible for sending out the orders, the ordinary colonels and captains,

And the grunts who are supposed to do it just say no. Yeah, but that's assuming it happens overnight. I'm thinking a hot war with Russia in between, right? And that could… I really don't think we're going to see that for one simple reason. The Pentagon knows perfectly well that if it goes head-to-head with a major military at this point, the United States is toast. Yeah.

Seriously, all of our weapons systems for the last 40 years have been created not to fight wars, but to make maximum profits for corporations. The F-35, that's kind of a funny story here. Some years ago, I wrote a book, I wrote a novel titled Toilets Less Gleaming, which is about the collapse of the United States.

And what happened... You actually wrote about that. Okay. I wrote about that, yeah. It was kind of a fun project because basically I figured the United States would get over its head in a proxy war and lose. And...

Things would just unfold from there until the United States collapsed and broke apart into a bunch of successor nations. Wait a minute, wait a minute. This is the problem with magicians playing around with fiction. You've got to influence reality, man. No, no, I hate it. It has happened. I was just saying, this is the most likely outcome, unfortunately. No, the thing is, in that book...

The F-35 fighter, quote, lightning too, was the pilot, because that was still fairly new when I wrote the book. Okay. It hadn't really, it was just getting out there. So my version was that the pilots all called it the lard bucket, the F-35 lard bucket, because it was a lousy piece of technology. It turns out, I found out about a year after it was published, that the pilots actually call it the penguin because it flies like one. Hmm.

And so I wasn't quite right, as you see. I also had the proxy war in East Africa rather than Ukraine. But the thing is... Well, now it's West Africa, so that wasn't too far off. West Africa, that's a fascinating scene. And we can talk about that as we get to it. But we have this business in Ukraine. And what the Russians have demonstrated is that

U.S., NATO, tanks, armored fighting vehicles, the whole nine yards are not as good as they're supposed to be. You're right about that. They certainly have taken away some of the illusions about NATO. Exactly. As the Russian media has been saying, they burn very well.

Typical Russian sense of humor. But yeah, we haven't yet seen Abrams tanks yet, and I think the U.S. is desperately hoping that Ukraine will collapse before the Abrams tanks arrive, or else the Abrams, the myth of the Abrams, we've already seen the Challenger 2, the British tank burning on camera. Our military technology is not that good. It's not meant to be good. It's meant to be profitable, like you said. Exactly. And the problem with this is that the Russians...

And the Chinese are building things that are meant to be good. Yeah, they have to. They have to be. And the Russians have now had more than a year of war to refine their military doctrine, to refine their techniques, to refine their technologies. And so they are way ahead in this game. It is worth remembering that there are three nations in the world that have hypersonic missiles, and the United States is not one of them.

Our technology has not yet succeeded in making a working hypersonic missile. The Russians are using them in action. Iran has one. China has one. But America, I mean, look at the Congress hearings. America has some aces up their sleeves in terms of

covert technology. God knows if it will be rolled out. When I say America, I mean not the state, but the private corporations. Oh, yeah. The thing to keep in mind is that they're not the only one who has aces in the hole. Every nation does. Every big one, yeah. Okay. But the fact is that the United States simply doesn't have what it takes to fight a war at this point. Hmm.

We can go bomb some poor third world country and cause it maximum damage, but even there we can't hold on to it. Afghanistan proved that. We don't have what it takes at this point to fight a sustained war against a peer competitor. We no longer have the domestic industry. We offshored all of that, much of it to China. How are we going to fight a war against the Chinese when they have most of our defense factories? The level of sheer...

drooling stupidity in terms of... Again, it's the end-stage imperialism. It's unavoidable. End-stage imperialism, yeah. Well, you know, as Lenin was saying, the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we hang them. But yeah, one of the problems with a kleptocratic state of the kind we have in the United States these days is precisely that everybody does everything for the sake of personal profit even when it is to the lethal disadvantage of the country.

Hang on, hang on, John. Where I see the real magic isn't anymore nation states. That's a kind of a passé thing. I see in this globalism world, I mean, it's true for Russia and China. They are old schoolers. But in terms of the West, I see...

see the multinational corporations, you know, some of them have a bigger budget than entire countries. Oh, I know. And I'm not so sure that they'd give a damn. I think that let's exploit America as much as we can. And when the ship is sinking, no problem for us because we are multinational. We have the city of London in addition to Wall Street. Yeah. We have other power bases. So what if America is just being used as an empty vehicle and these powers will survive as corporatist oligarchs?

I'm sure they will. I think that there is a kind of mutual parasitism between the various Western governments and the big multinational corporations that are based in the United States and Europe. They feed each other and they feed on each other. And

Among other things, if the United States were to go down, if the United States were to be, heaven help us, conquered. Or just fraction into several states. Or just fraction and just fall from its... It's not as though our corporations are going to have those kind of sweetheart deals anymore. There's a lot of Chinese corporations, which are mostly half-owned by the government, which will be replacing them. So the thing is, I think a lot of what's going on is we have an elite class that...

moves back and forth from government office to corporate office and back and forth. So it's a kind of two-headed system.

And the same people are in charge in either case, whether you want to call it the American empire, whether you want to call it a corporate empire. Globalism was never more than a way to, you know, to mass produce the absorption of, of dollars to maintain the U S U S dollar as the reserve currency. Yeah. Because global trade was in dollars and the more we can globalize, the more dollars have to use. So the bigger monopolization of production. Yeah. So the, so the bigger deficits, um,

the bigger deficits the US government can run. But don't you agree that corporations are very good expressions of occult power? Their symbolism, the way they are using manipulation techniques? Yeah. I mean, look at even names like Palantir. Oh, I know. They're even obvious about it. Oh, yeah. They're very much. But the thing that we have to remember is that when magic comes face to face with brute force, magic does not come out ahead. Right.

Think of the Eastern Front in World War II. Hitler had the magic, but the Russians had the tanks. Yeah, and the manpower. Exactly. And so the thing is, magic is subtle. Magic works best in subtle situations. It works best in situations that are relatively balanced, relatively at peace.

That's why... Okay, so to tilt a balance. Yeah, exactly. You tilt a subtle balance. This is why Germany was full of mages up until the Thirty Years' War. But the mages didn't have... The cultists of Germany didn't have much effect on that war. Some of them may have helped start it. But it was sheer brute force that finished it. So...

So, if you follow the old traditions of magic that see everything as coming into being on the spiritual level and cascading down to the material level, that makes sense. You know, because what's moving on the spiritual will get all the way down to the level of brute force where it manifests. But obviously it's not that hierarchical. It's more like a, what do you call it, a…

back and forth thing, feedback loop, synergy. You can certainly see it that way too. I was just thinking of the older Neoplatonist version in which it was very hierarchical in nature. The traditionalists are into that. We were talking about that.

But I'm not discounting it. I'm just saying that I think it was it Ken Wilber who talked about the holarchy where there is in addition there is a feedback loop coming from down and up. It's actually the old Plato versus Aristotle. Is it mind over matter or is it matter on mind? Matter over mind, exactly. But I think it's both. There's certainly elements. It's waves and particles. Yeah, there's certainly strong elements of both.

All of our files are free and will remain free. If you like to show, you can show support by donating $1 to help with expenses. Just use the tape link on our webpage. Thanks.

But one way or another, it is one of the pervasive bad habits of mages, of occultists, to think that magic is more powerful than the material world. And they typically discover the hard way that that just ain't the case. When they burn at the stake? For example, yes. The material world has its, you know, again, Stalin's comment, quantity has its own quality.

If the Germans have 10 Tiger tanks and the Russians have 100 T-34s,

It doesn't matter that the Tiger tank's a better tank, the Russians are still going to win. And so, yeah, you cannot discount the material plane in this. And unfortunately, our current sorcerers in their high towers, they've forgotten that. They've forgotten the material world actually means something. A lot of my writing back 20 years ago was very much focused on things like the future of industrial society.

and focusing on what happens as we use up the remaining reserves of fossil fuels and things like that. And the number of people who would just look blank and say, oh, we'll think of something. Notice, we'll think of something. The mind must triumph. You know, at that time, oil was $10 a barrel. Now it's $80 a barrel. Right.

Our economies are lurching and shuddering under the impact, and it's just going up. But try telling that to people. Again, they'll think of something. The trance is very strong. To me, it's very apparent that America has expropriated all industry except oil.

War industry. That's what's running the show, you know. Oh, yeah. But let's go back to the Clinton-Trump dichotomy because I asked about Dujan. What about on Clinton's side? Many will argue that Podesta represents – and probably others too. I'm not too familiar. But they represent kind of a – I don't know if they identify as it, but in function at least, a magical clique –

We also know that Podesta has been involved with the UFOs, of course. So there are metaphysical aspects. I didn't happen to know that Podesta was a UFO guy. Okay. Oh, he's a big UFO head. Interesting. Okay. In fact, he's the one who pushed Hillary in the 16...

to sit on the talk shows and say that, yeah, UAPs, we should disclose it. Of course, just to get the UFO vote. Not that she means it, but, you know, to get the vote because they have been aware so long that it's a huge amount of voters out there who cares about that thing. And now it's being rolled out in the Congress too. Uh-huh.

To me, it's metaphysical because I have a Jungian view on this. It's not just what you called nuts and bolts. It's not just that.

It's not the hardware hypothesis, as some people call it. One of the books on that long list that you glanced through, one of my books, is in fact on UFOs, and it draws very heavily on Jung, among other things. Yeah, I saw that. Is it the one called the UFO Chronicles? The UFO Chronicles, that's the one. Originally published, what, back in 2009, I think it was, as the UFO Phenomenon, but it got expanded and developed, and I had some more fun with it.

Let me give the subtitle because it kind of gives some away. It says, How Science Fiction, Shamanic Experiences, and Secret Air Force Project Created the UFO Myths. I think that's a brilliant subtitle.

Thank you. Basically, the crucial point of that whole book is there is no one thing behind the UFO phenomenon. I mean, when you say UFO or UAP, to use the current euphemism, I prefer UFO. I grew up with it, okay? Unidentified flying object, that's all that it means. Something that's flying that you can't identify. There's no justification for a claim that all things in the air you can't identify must be the same thing. Hmm.

And so one of the things that I was doing was unpacking some of the different things that are within the UFO phenomenon and talking about such things as the role of poorly understood shamanic experiences in, for example, the abduction business or the way that the U.S. Air Force has manipulated the UFO phenomenon since 1947 to cover up the flight and test flights of their own. Exactly.

You probably remember in, when will it have been? Oh, right around a little after the turn of the millennium, there were all of these black triangle UFOs. Yeah. Okay. No, late 1990s. That's right. It was the late 1990s. Gosh, what was the U.S. testing in secrecy at that time that looked like a black triangle? It's out in the open now, isn't it? Exactly. It's out in the open now. Equally, the

The CIA admitted some years ago that about half the UFO sightings reported to Project Blue Book were flights of the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes. Yeah, we've had shows about what we call the classified space program.

So that is a component. But then there are very weird, almost metaphysical things. Yes. Then there are things that are in fact metaphysical. One of the writers who I find most useful in this is me, Lane, who's hardly a household name these days. But he and his allies in the Borderlands Sciences Research Association,

studied UFOs back in the 40s and were saying, these things are not physical, these things are metaphysical. Now, Lane was a Golden Dawn initiate. He was involved back when California, I think San Francisco, had its own Golden Dawn Lodge. He was heavily involved in the occult. He wrote some very good works on that subject, but he was also attuned to what was going on in terms of the UFO phenomenon and so on. And so he was pointing out, look, these are not nuts and bolts things. We are dealing with something

to the metaphysical plane. And he made a very good case. Interestingly, Jacques Vallée, one of the best... Oh, yeah. He frequented magical milieus. So he was... Oh, yeah. He had some inputs from there, but he concluded that

the phenomena seems to be like, I mean, part of it seems to be like a natural regulation system. A control mechanism, yeah. Have you seen, I ask everybody when we talk about these things, have you seen the footage from the 90s that leaked out, after it leaked out,

They had to implement a law saying that it should be 50 minute delay so that they have time to cover it up. But it was NASA TV who were naively just streaming directly everything they were filming. And then you have certain incidents like the Tether incident.

where you see these enormous uaps ufos in the top of our atmosphere between the moon and earth and they look like pac-mans but they are football stadium sizes and honestly when you see that footage you can't help but think this looks like some like fish in an aquarium like they are organic or maybe frequency plasma now that's you see that's another of the of the

all the theories of UFOs that I think desperately need to be revived. The idea that we're talking living things here. We're not talking hardware. We're talking life forms. There were half a dozen. I think Trevor James Constable was discussing that one. There's certainly a book, it may not have been him, but titled They Live in the Sky, which was focusing on the idea that at least some UFOs are aerial life. Yeah.

Yeah, Willem Rysch was into that too, wasn't he? Oh yeah, Rysch was all over that. Yeah, in fact, there are all of these different things. You watch the skies, you might see anything. As Charles Fort pointed out, the world's a complicated place. Many strange things happen here. And we were talking earlier about people trying to get the world into this nice, neat, orderly structure. But the world is not orderly.

Not to us.

We can sit there staring at the lit section and say, we know the location of every single twig within this little bitty area. There's a whole forest out there that we're not dealing with. Yeah. So there's one thing I think we should address too. And that's, you know, in the conspiracy theory field, there is this idea that there are occult players around.

you know, like groups, organizations running the world, whether it be the Jesuits. I mean, it's to some extent, it's true. Look at the Opus Dei, right?

But you have this Illuminati idea, or it's maybe a counter to that in the more real world. It's like the Freemasons. Of course, notwithstanding that there's no such thing as a universal Freemason. There's a million organizations, and many of them disagree. But I think we should address that idea before we go on, because I think it would be...

if you don't mention it. So what would you say about this? Okay. Are there secret societies and conspiracies in the world? Of course. Do they run things? No. One of the things that history shows is that secret societies are how you get power if you don't have it. I mean, the elites that run the world don't need to skulk around in lodges. They can do what they want to.

People organize conspiracies in secret societies because they don't have power and they need the secrecy to build power. Or just to be left alone. Or just to be left alone, exactly. That's why a lot of magical groups do the secrecy thing. And you know what? I think the clue for a group to survive is to keep your head down. It is precisely to be secret and work privately. I think that's crucial, especially today with surveillance. Oh, yeah.

And the thing is, if you can, Chuang Tzu, the Chinese philosopher, about more than 2,000 years ago, noted that if you can make yourself look harmless, nobody will bother you. Well, I mean, it doesn't hurt being harmless, too. Between you, me, and NSA, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And good. That too. But I mean, one of the revolutions that was most obviously arranged by secret societies is the American Revolution. We had a secret society called the Committees of Correspondence, which organized it. We had an outfit called the Sons of Liberty, which was the, that was basically the army. And those organizations turned into the Continental Congress and the U.S. Congress. And the Sons of Liberty became the Continental Army and the United States Army.

Once a group is powerful enough to leave secrecy behind, you ditch the secrecy and seize power. The same thing happened with the Bolsheviks in Russia. The same thing happened with the Nazis. They started out as a secret society. But I think one of the reasons there's been so much stress in the corporate media and focusing on getting people focused on these evil secret societies is that

Secret societies are an effective way to organize change. And I think a lot of people in the corporate scene do not want people organizing secret societies because people could organize secret societies against the corporate system. And then where would they be? Because it works. That's the thing for, you know, an organization for people who don't have the kind of power to make change. A secret organization is one way to get it.

So the rule would rather be that most of them would be counter system critical rather than establishment. Most secret and yeah there are very few establishment secret societies. Hmm.

And those that are always at least slightly system-critical, only because they want to, like Skull and Bones, they want to drink more than the system thinks it's a good idea. Or Bohemian Grove. Bohemian Grove, yeah. You have a bunch of really rich men who want to spend two weeks... Isn't that a perverted druid thing? It strikes me more as a perverted summer camp for boys. Yeah, on a physical level. But the symbolism they're flirting with, isn't that...

stolen from... They call it a grove and...

Yeah, they call it... Well, it's a good question. They might have gotten it from one of the Druid organizations because there was one of those actually in California at the right time. But, you know, it's mostly an opportunity for a bunch of rich guys to get together, get drunk and pretend that they're still young. And with some homoerotic experience too, I hear, which was forbidden back in the day. I'm sure there's a lot of that as well. And of course, you can... Yeah, of course, you know, there's...

Although women are not supposed to be brought into the camp itself, there's a lot of rental talent very close by. So, yeah. Well, I mean, to the extent there are secret societies with a spiritual alibi among the elites, I think it's more like remnants from before they became elites. Oh, yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's just that you still had...

scraps of actual Marxism in the communist parties of the Soviet Union and so on. Generally, it was just about power. But they still... Didn't stop them from killing Trotsky. Yeah, exactly. Their great hero, so... Exactly, yeah. It didn't stop them from killing anybody who they thought they could get away with. Exactly. Exactly.

Let's shift gears because I only have you for half an hour more. Let's assume now that many of the listeners are rather spiritually mature human beings and into one way or another into some practice. Now,

Would you, from your vantage point, from your life experience, from wherever in the light you are, would you even advise, should we advise

even try to interfere one way or the other with the mundane power and, you know, the field of human organization? Or should we stay away from it? It's like, should we be Buddhists here? Or, you know, should we be detached? Or should we be involved? What's your view on this? My view is very heavily shaped. One of the figures whose work I've studied most closely is Dion Fortune, the English occultist, English 20th century occultist.

Achivas Hans Zornmann. She had a very specific approach to this, and it's crucial, and it's one that I repeat this over and over again, and people don't get it. Occultists can have a very positive effect on the world, but only if they focus on building up the things they want to see, not tearing down the things they don't want to see.

If you want something in the world, build that. Focus on it. Build the dream. Visualize it. Charge it. Use your techniques to focus on building that up. Don't focus on tearing down the obstacles. Don't focus on tearing down the enemies.

I think most people know at this point that she was involved in setting up a network of magical practitioners to try to keep Britain free from Nazi conquest during the darkest days of the Second World War. Her principles, which are explained in great detail in the very nice book that Gareth Knight put together, The Magical Battle of Britain.

Build up the British egregore don't attack the Nazis Okay, what you do on the material plane is another matter and that's that you know again brute force rules and there it did take a lot of Spitfires and a lot of a lot of military activity but on the metaphysical planes Find your ideal focus on that ideal build it up strengthen it energize it charge it and let that flow down into material success now

I hear all the time from people who say, well, that's not enough. Well, you know, let's compare. We have the unfortunate doing that, and we have the Nazi occultists in the SS of Evelsburg doing the opposite, doing these magical attacks on their enemies. Who won? Yeah, right, right. It wasn't the Nazis. Not in the outer, but I see the values being perpetuated. Yeah.

Yes, because so many people put so much energy into hating them. One of the reasons that Hitler has become the most iconic figure of our time. I mean, you can do a little square for a mustache and a swash for the hair, and everyone instantly knows who you're talking about. Nobody else has an image that distinct. And the reason is because everybody uses him as the projection figure.

screen for their own hatreds. They use it as a dumping screen for their own shadow, to use Carl Jung's phrase. And so it charges that image. One of the pieces of magical common sense that I somehow got through here in the United States, people who do certain kinds of atrocities here, people who commit certain kinds of crimes, their names never get made public. Hmm.

They vanish. And so there is no, I mean, I think people watch what happened with Charles Manson who became an icon. Yeah.

Okay. But no, you just erase them. Forget about them. Bury them in an unmarked grave in a penitentiary somewhere. Don't give energy to it. Don't give energy to it. People have been giving so much energy to Hitler for so long that it's amazing we don't have large Nazi parties in every country in the Western world. And

But, yeah, no, fortune's approach requires letting go of hate. It requires letting go of the desire to project. You know, instead of projecting your shadow onto someone else, you have to own your own shadow. You have to accept your own limitations. You have to focus on your ideal and put your energy into that, and then you can succeed. Then you can achieve something great in the world. It can be done. It's been done many a time. And...

It could be done now. The one thing I want to encourage any of our listeners who are tempted to do this, don't try to organize something. Don't try to get everyone united in something. Instead, let's have everyone focus on their idea of a good society and focus on that and build that. We'll do it in a democratic way because all those energies are going to flow together. And whatever...

of that vision are shared by many, those will receive the charge. That's also known as a scientific method. Exactly. Exactly. There was a Polish, I don't know, she may still be around, a Polish literary critic named Ewa Ziarik who wrote a book called, what was it, a

An ethics of dissensus. We all hear about consensus, right? Dissensus is the opposite of consensus. Dissensus is deliberately avoiding finding a consensus. Instead of, we're all going to go this way, it's, okay, everyone head out in a different way. If you want to find something and don't know where it is, dissensus is how you find it. The scientific community, the scientific method, when it works the way it should, is all about dissensus. When anyone talks about a scientific consensus, you know science has gone wrong. Because everyone...

Because everybody should be looking their own way. Everybody should be trying something. It's become a religion at that point. Yeah, exactly. It's become a dogma. And yeah, so instead, everyone goes their own direction. Everyone looks. And if somebody says, I'm sure this works, okay, let's all test it and see if we can prove it wrong. That's the way you get results.

That's the way science works well. That's the way magic works extremely well that way too. And so you get that element of choice flowing together into a larger whole. Go ahead. Yeah, yeah. So no, I was just going to say that, okay, I can buy that. And by the way, we have this new age slogan that kind of sums it up to that, be the change you want to see in the world.

right? So I agree and I also agree with don't give energy to bad things but here is a huge trap that many new agents go into and that's that they think if you talk about the bad things, if you talk about corruption, if you talk about evil, if you talk about obvious things

you know, people who destroy boundaries, et cetera, who does destruction. Talking about that is not feeding it because it's, to me, it's like use yourself, the individual as a,

because the same is true for the collective. In me, I first have to acknowledge my shadows. I have to accept that they are there before I can start, because otherwise I'm going to project them. And the same is true on the collective, right? Of course. That talking about the corruption, talking about the bad stuff doesn't... It's like you used Hitler as an example. That's because he was played out by that point.

In the aftermath, people were still maintaining that boogeyman, giving it much too much energy. But while it was going on, you would be crazy not to talk about Hitler. But here's the thing. Talking about it is one thing. Obsessing about it is another. And the other thing that I think was more effective for Hitler was

than anything else was that people made fun of him. Same is true for Trump, by the way. Exactly. Exactly. Same is true of Hillary Clinton. The range of Hillary jokes that I saw during that campaign. I mean, Joe Biden is a gift to the nation's comedians. Yeah, but there's a huge difference. Establishments are taking Hillary as

And Biden, seriously, the establishment never took Hitler or Trump for that matter seriously. No outsider is ever taken seriously by the establishment. Actually, Hitler, you need to go back and read some things from the 1930s. You'd be amazed. One of the things that I've done recently, I've been doing some research into, of course, one of the things I study and write about is political astrology.

And that ended up, because of certain things that happened in the British astrological scene, looking into the number of people in Britain, the number of elite people in Britain in the 1930s, who not only took Hitler seriously, but were very much in favor of him.

But wasn't that after he grabbed power, though? Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, actually, in some cases it was before, as soon as he became a serious presence. By 1930, he had a fan club in the British aristocracy. Yeah, yeah, that's true. And among wealthy Britons and all the way down into the upper middle class. And so, you see, Hitler had a fan club. It's just everyone desperately tried to cover that up after the effect. Yeah, yeah. But making fun of the man...

I mean, I grew up knowing this song. Hitler has only got one

Do you know that one? It's a song the soldiers sang. Well, I know the melody and I know the contents combining them. No, I didn't know people did that. That's brilliant. Exactly. But yeah, there was a song about the testicular state of all four of the top Nazi leaders. And as a kid in the 19... But that's a prerogative of humor, isn't it? To be subversive. Exactly. And that's one of the ways you can talk about somebody

and diffuse the potential obsessive quality, the potential for feeding them energy. Talk seriously about the problems and then start singing. And in the same way, if the people who distrusted and disliked and were worried about Donald Trump...

had talked about the problems and laughed at him, they would have gotten a lot further than becoming hysterical about his very existence. You know, we reached a point, and this was even before Trump's time, back by the mid-1990s, I knew people who could not walk past an image of a politician, a national politician they hated, without literally screaming insults at it.

In the 90s when everything was easygoing. Well, everything compared to now, yeah. But the political conflicts that have now made America ungovernable were already heating up by that time.

They were very much heating up by that time, and especially because a lot of people on the left were buying into the idea, we're going to ditch the working class and just concentrate on feeding the upper middle class. And people went along... Which actually happened. Of course. And this was back when the so-called left cared about... Exactly. Now they aren't even... Yeah. But the thing is, people went along with it, but they were uncomfortable with it. And so they dealt with it by projecting their hatred into the Republicans. The Republicans...

The Republicans, meanwhile, had their own set of problems. They were projecting all the hatred onto the Democrats. And so we have this perfect union tennis match with each side tossing their hatred across the net.

Back then, Republicans were dominated by evangelists and reactionary. Today, there's a realignment, right? The working class is coming into the Republican Party. What has happened is that largely because of Trump's candidacy,

there's a populist working class centric movement that's seizing power in the New Republican Party. A lot of old line Republicans are horrified by it. Yeah. They're hardcore elitists. They don't like that. I think... Yeah, they are corporatists. But you see, a part of the problem is actually what you said about the left because...

Over so many years, the real left has been crushed. So activism, anti-war sentiments, those who used to fight for freedom, like that organization you have that accepted that Nazis could march in the street even though they were working against you. You know all this. Now, this is now, if you have those values today, you'll be called a white supremacist. So they are actually pushing…

Everyone who is not identified with neoliberalism or neocon into the so-called populist right, whereas there is no room for a populist left anymore. Bernie Sanders betrayed that. So in a way, you have the, like I see it, John, is that the top down has taken over for the left right. And you have still some top left.

in the right, in the Republican, but the down has seized most of the Republican Party and they are now seeking to the Democrat Party for refuge because there the top has hijacked everything. Notwithstanding because of the so-called superdelegates, you know, the most undemocratic thing in the so-called Democrat Party. That's my reasoning. You follow? No, it makes perfect sense. Because, yeah, the thing is...

That's just exactly it, because the Democrats have become the party of the elites at this point. And war, censorship. Yeah, exactly. I mean, the fact that we have, and this isn't just in the United States, watching the Green Party in Germany used to be heavily anti-war, cheering on the proxy war in the Ukraine. It's embarrassing. And I think there's a very straightforward reason to it. This is what happens when

the left becomes, the left gets into power, the left seizes control of the system and then decides they like it. And they don't necessarily want to change things because they're kind of comfortable with all the benefits and perks of being in power.

But it means – That's a word. It's called corruption. Yes. At the same time, they have been ousting any idealist or working class. Look at how they're treating Robert Kennedy Jr. Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, he's – yeah. He's getting a worse treatment than Trump that shows that he's not on the left-right. It's about top-down. Well, yes. But the other thing that terrifies them is that he's a Kennedy.

He's got the charisma. Exactly. And nobody else in the Democratic Party does. And he has won every case against the corporations since he'd begun. Yeah. Yeah. No, seriously. The reason that they've canceled all presidential debate, all primary debates in the Democratic Party is that all it would take is one debate with RFK Jr. and Joe Biden. And Biden would be out of a job. And so.

So it's just they're frantically trying to cling to the power when they've given up the base in...

among ordinary people, which is what gives them the power in the first place. But if they were so against Trump, they would want Kennedy against Trump. You'd think. Because he would even dismantle Trump. This shows to me that what they really care about is the top down. It's not the left right. Yeah. No, they want to maintain the current situation. It's weird because in effect the Democrats have become the conservative party.

They want to maintain... And you said this in your book, actually. You said it was about establishment versus... What did you call the other ones? I honestly don't remember which... In The Orange Man, you said that there's an establishment thing, and that's Clinton. And then there's everyone else. Everyone else, okay. Yeah, that'll do. I don't remember the specific turn of phrase that I used at that time. There are various ways to talk about it. But yeah, it basically...

Since the establishment has lost control of much of the Republican Party, they're circling the wagons of the Democrats. Yeah, you called it, I remember now, sorry, outsiders, you said. The outsiders, yeah, that'll do. So the establishment versus the outsiders. And one lesson of history is that sooner or later the outsiders win. Yeah, and they become the establishment, of course. And then they become the new establishment, and we repeat.

In Lenin's world, the revolution eats the children. Exactly. It doesn't meet the new boss, same as the old boss, except not always exactly the same. And very often in the course of the change, some problems get fixed. Right, right. In the transition period, yes. In the transition period before the new boss becomes as corrupt as the old boss, which takes a little while.

Are you familiar with, it just dawned upon me, there's a precedence of this kind of topic in esoteric literature. There's the book called Zanoni. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, by Beau Roulin. It kind of describes the same versus the French Revolution. Good heavens, that's a very good point. I need to reread Zanoni because you're quite right. This is talking about the same thing. Yeah, I forgot that. I just remembered it now. Wow. Thanks.

Thank you. Yes. Because that was never what I was reading it for, but it was looming in the background. But it's this constant theme in the background of the story. That's a very good point. I had not thought of that. I have a copy, of course. And so I will reread it. And there may be a blog post in that.

Oh, nice. Yeah, so thank you. If you can stomach, I mean, I read it when I was young and romantic. If you can stomach the, you know, the romanticism. Oh, yes.

I've read Arthur Edward Waite. I can read anything. Touche. Touche. I want to say, by the way, one of my mentors, just to back up what you said about how seriously they took it back in the day. One of my mentors, he was actually, he's passed now, but he was sitting in the basement under Atlantis Bookshop.

in London. I've been there. Yeah, it's a traditional thing. He was buddy with Watkins, the other bookshop, you know. But he was sitting and meditating under... They had a little secret compartment in the basement under Atlantis Bookshop while the bumps were falling over London. Wow. They were sitting there meditating. That's how they were partaking. But the reason I asked you if we should involve ourselves is that

I've seen this in my own anecdotal experience, is that when people don't... You said it yourself. Our brains are limited. And when people don't have the whole puzzle bit... Like, I've had people in my network. One completely pro-Trump. Another completely pro-Hillary. This is back in the 60s when it was so loaded. And they both were right from their own perspective. Now, both of them had...

Trump derangement syndrome. You know, it manifested in two ways. One was to see him as the new Satan, which is still going on. The other was to see him as the new savior. So they both were suffering from this, but they were projecting onto each other because they just had bits of the puzzle bit. Now, if they were listening to this, they would take your advice and they would start fighting.

Now, so this is why I'm thinking maybe we should be a little more humble and don't assume that we know everything, you know? That's a very good point. That's a very good point. But again, that's one of the reasons, that's one of the things I think which was behind Fortune's suggestion to focus on building up what you want, not on tearing down. Right. So you can, if you focus everything on building up what you want, you're not trying to build the whole world. You've just got one thing that you want to create. Right.

Right. And you can create it. Yeah. And the rest of the world will flow around it, however. And instead of trying to, like, remove something entirely from the world, which is a rather complex operation. Yeah. Yeah, and it's much more risky in terms of karma, too. Oh, yeah. And it usually ends up blowing up in your face. Yeah.

Hans Hitler. No, I agree. One of the projects that I will, I don't know if I will ever get to this, but it would be really worth doing a study of Hitler as a mage, as a set of examples of what not to do. Because he could have actually, I don't know, given his personality, he might not have been able to do anything else for what he did. But the situation was such that an enormous amount of good could have been done, and instead it was a total disaster for everybody. Yeah.

And maybe looking at that and looking at how he went wrong, how the area of the esophageal movement that he came out of went wrong, etc., etc., etc., might pass on some useful lessons, but I don't know if anyone will learn from him.

Maybe not, but that's on account of our inability to learn. I think this is a theme you can see in many powerful people. Only in Hitler, it's so caricatured, right? So it's easier to use as a metaphor. Yeah, exactly. But no, you look, the best, if anyone can take anything out of this conversation today, I think maybe the crux of it is build, not tear down. Yeah.

Build and don't tear down. And just the basic rule of magic, your power comes from focus. The more specific the thing you want to create, the more tightly focused you are, the smaller it is, the more likely you are to triumph. And so, yeah.

Yeah, and if someone says to us, yeah, but what about all the bad stuff? You know, you can remove the bad stuff by building something that is antagonistic to it. So, like, it's the same in me. If I have a bad habit, the best way to get rid of that bad habit is to cultivate the opposite habit. Yeah, yeah. Right? That's the analogy. If you fight it, you just walk it into place.

There's another bit of Dion's part. And you give it power. Exactly, you give it power. If instead you build the opposite habit, you lock that into place and the other just dissolves. Yeah, it rots on its own root. Exactly, you just leave it alone and it goes away. Yeah, I'm reminiscent of in her psychic self-defense when she got a hard lesson when she conjured up this idea

Wolf, this angry dog. Remember? And she projected it and it started to cause havoc. And she had to... I believe she got redeemed because she had to... She realized she had to take...

consequence of her own creation and drag it back through the navel cord and then integrate all those externalized feelings. Exactly. And that was heavy. And that's powerful. That's very powerful magic. And this is something we can also do with things we don't like in the world. Look at how you're feeding it.

Look at how you're projecting onto it. Bring that projecting into yourself. Instead of hating Hillary Clinton or hating Donald Trump, ask yourself, as Jung said, the reason you hate someone else is because you're uncomfortable with what it is in yourself that is like that. So reflect on your own behavior. Draw it into yourself. Own it. Embody it. Integrate it. Yeah.

And then you've actually reduced, you know, taken away a certain fraction of the nastiness in the world. Yeah. Now, I see many of those with Trump derangement syndromes. One of the reasons they hate him, like the comedian Jimmy Dore says, is because they have Trump in their shadow. And they prove it because when they then try to

counter what they think Trump represents to them, then they are doing all these things that they blame him for doing. And that's such a basic error that in my pursuit of my noble goal, I have the right to do what I'm fighting against. It's like Gandhi said, the goal is the way.

I'm paraphrasing, but you cannot distinguish between them. You have this saying, right, that the goal, the target is excused by the mean, but that's not true. The mean and the target are the same. Exactly. Our venture is the spiritual perspective. And it's a

It's an essential one. It's an essential rule to keep people from, to keep you from falling into the kinds of stupidity that lead to defeat. Yeah. Yeah. And dichotomies are usually these black, white things is how they divide and conquer, right? That's the, when you see something black and white, you know, there's a game going on.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. One of the things that I was taught early on by one of my occult teachers was anytime you see a binary like that, find the third factor. Right. Find a third factor that is not one and not the other. Turn it from binary into a ternary. That's something the French school was very good at. You read books by Papou and people like that, and they're very into that sort of thing. But it's a useful habit.

Just, you know, every day, look at the news, choose a binary, find a third factor. Before long, you pop yourself out of the habit of thinking in binaries, and then you are much less easy to control. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Mm-hmm. And, oh, the golden mean, as Pythagoras would say. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, I remember. John, we have to, before we leave today, we have to go through your enormous, I mean, we can't go through everything, but I want to discuss a little...

I think Wikipedia is probably the most complete... Hmm.

I'm glad to hear that. For a while, now this is a few years ago, but for a while Wikipedia was really bad about keeping up to date on occult authors. They had some of your typical scientific rationalists running things and they were going, no, we don't want these people. Oh, they still do. Yeah, they seem to have gotten their act together on that. The whole thing is a CIA rag. You can trust them for looking up which date did that war happen. I mean, those things are okay.

Yeah, yeah. But look, how have you been able to write so many books? When did you start? When did I start writing? I guess, yeah, your first book. As soon as I could hold a crayon. Seriously. I loved to write from the time that I was very small.

My first book was published in 1996. That was not the first book I ever wrote by a long shot. I wrote a whole series of really bad fantasy novels, which failed to get published, and just as well, they're dreadful. And I wrote a bunch of other stuff, which was equally bad. It took me a long time to get to quality. But the thing is, I love writing. I can write fairly quickly, and...

And that's how I make my living. So I write a lot. Maybe a cliche question, but do you have any who inspired you in terms of that as an author? Oh, yeah. Really, most of the authors that I've ever read inspired me either to learn something from them or to do something different. Right.

Good answer. You know, there's a lot of occult writers have influenced me very powerfully. Dion Fortune, again, is one of the important ones. W.E. Butler is another. Yeah, I like him. Yeah, William Westcott's work. It's written in an older style, but I find it very meaningful. I find him very hard to read personally. Do you? All the more respect to you. Go on.

I grew up with English. And old-fashioned stuffy English was never that hard for me. But I have learned an enormous amount from Schopenhauer. I've been inspired by Nietzsche.

by Sartre. I could go on for a week. And then there are the dreadful writers out there, and I'm not going to name any names there, but I read those two, and I go, oh, I see that problem. I know I'm going to avoid my next book. But I read a lot. I always have read a lot. When I was a kid, I was the geeky kid in the corner with his nose in a book. And so all of that, all of that feeds into my writing. Yeah.

But you have taken on so many subjects, man. So many subjects. I pegged you for a very... Like, for example, I have another book by you. I didn't even know it was you. Inside a Magical Lodge. I have that group book. Oh, yeah. I didn't know it was you. No, that was one of my early books. Let's do it now. Yeah, that was an early book of mine, although it's been redone, of course. Yeah.

Yeah. I ended up joining a fraternal lodge here in the United States and realizing that there was this whole world of stuff in the Golden Dawn Papers, which I've been studying for quite some time, that I simply didn't understand because I didn't have the experience of being involved in a lodge. And so that book came out of that. Very often. That was before you became a druid then? Yeah. That one was published in 1998. Hmm.

And I was initiated in... Actually, I had just gotten involved in the Druid because I was initiated into Obad in 1994. And I was still very much in the middle of the training program. I was juggling several other things as well. I don't have that much of a social life. I have your Druidry handbook. Yeah. But let me give people an example here so they understand what I'm talking about. Monsters, an investigator's guide to magical beings.

Learning Ritual Magic Atlantis Ancient Legacy Hidden Prophecy Pagan Prayer Beads

The elemental encyclopedia of secret societies, the UFO phenomenon, secrets of the lost symbol. I believe you're floating with the kind of Da Vinci stuff there, Da Vinci core stuff. Yeah, that was actually the secrets of the lost symbol. They took my new encyclopedia of the occult and they pulled every article out of it that referred to anything in the Dan Brown book, The Lost Symbol, and published it. And I don't

I don't mind. I made an enormous amount of money out of that. No, it's a smart move from the suits. Yeah. It was ready cash when I needed it, but I had very little to do with that. But obviously there's a lot of ecology stuff, right? Because you care about the earth. For example, the blood of the earth and essay on magic and peak oil. We have, you had something here about, where is it?

Anyway, you have Gnostic Celtic Church. Yeah, here, Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth. Here's one you did mention, Apocalypsa, History of the End Times. I mean, is there anything, is there a red thread? I suppose all of them have an esoteric outset. Well, it's more, ooh, this interests me. Like my shows. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they all, they're...

There's always going to be some esoteric dimension to them simply because I've been involved in occultism since I was a teenager. But many of them don't actually focus on that. The book on Apocalypse, that was a response to the 2012 hoopla. It was going, come on, people. The world is not going to end in 2012. And here's why. Let's talk about 100 previous ends of the world that didn't happen. Yeah.

there's the books like... And the end of the world happens every day for some of us. Exactly. The world is always ending and always beginning. And it was just toddling along its way. That's very Kabbalistic. Yeah, but I had, you know, books like The Long Descent, Green Wizardry, The Retro Future, and then there's my fiction. Right. Yeah.

Right. And some of that is newer and therefore better, right? Yeah. Yes. Basically, I finally learned how to write a decent novel. Hmm.

Basically, all of the old fantasy novels, those are long gone. I have not tried to redo them. I finally wrote a science fiction novel titled The Fires of Shulshah, which got picked up by a small publisher. It's on its third publisher now. Well, it will be as soon as it's reprinted. But I ended up doing some science fiction, some ecological science fiction, then a whole series of fantasy novels based on kind of taking H.P. Lovecraft and standing him on his head.

And fiction is great fun. I enjoy it. There's an esoteric element in that also, of course, but it's mostly just a lot of fun. Yeah. I see many of your esoteric books are published by Llewellyn or Llewellyn or however you pronounce that. Yeah, Llewellyn. Yeah, Llewellyn was the first publisher who picked me up. And I don't do a lot of their stuff now. I'm mostly doing stuff with Eon these days.

There's one book here that makes me wonder. How to Become a Mage, co-authored with K.K. Albert, Sean Lewis, DBRC, and one of the people in the tradition I'm working, Josephine Pelladon. Oh, you're in? Okay. What on earth? Okay. I didn't write that. I wrote a foreword to it. Pelladon's book, I'm not going to, my parents' pronunciation is horrible. Pelladon wrote a book, How to Become a Mage.

Okay. Right. K.K. Albert translated it. Jean de Béacy corrected the translation. Oh, my God. Is this Pelladon's book in English? Yes. That's what it is. I didn't know it even existed in English. Yeah. Yeah. Guess which one is the next I'm going to get. Okay. There you go. I am very slowly, as time permits, working on a translation of his first novel. Oh, right. Le Vie Suprême, The Supreme Vice. Mm-hmm.

This is a novel that convinced, oh, come on, I'm going to forget his name. But it was a big deal in the French occult community. Jean Delville? No, come on. Stanislaus de Goethe. Ah, Goethe, right, right, right. Stanislaus de Goethe read The Supreme Vice and went, wow, there really is something to this magic stuff. Hmm.

Yeah. I guess fiction can... Oh, yeah. Fiction can do it. I hear that the relation between... I hear that Theodore Royce looked up Crowley after he read one of his fictions. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And accused him of revealing secrets. At least that's what they say. Yeah. No, the thing is... Well, I mean, think of Dion Fortune's magical novels, which he wrote with the intention of communicating the experience of a magical initiation. Yeah.

So fiction is powerful stuff. But yeah, the Supreme Vice is glorious. It is lurid. It is, it's lurid. It's really colorful. And that's a current project you're doing now. It's, this is one that I'm doing kind of in fits and starts as time and time and other circumstances permit. I don't think it's ever going to be a, a bestseller or anything, but it's fun. Yeah. Peladon's prose is amazing. Yeah.

So we gave a shout out to the fiction and the vast, but we also have to mention that you have at least have 11 books about economics and politics, just for those who are more interested in that aspect. Oh yeah. Yeah. I've got a bunch. I write on all kinds of things. Yeah. So where can people find your stuff?

Okay. My books are for sale with any of the usual publishers and distributors. Your favorite online or brick-and-mortar bookstore will be able to get them. I blog weekly at ecosophia.net, E-C-O-S-O-P-H-I-A.net. And ecosophia.dreamwith.org is in my Dream With journal. And, yeah, so...

So ecosofia.net or ecosofia.org? Dot net. Dot net. Somebody else got dot org before I got to it. Ah, somebody else. So don't go to org. Yeah. Go to net. So, but yeah. But if you just frankly, my name is distinctive enough, if you just type in John Michael Greer to your favorite search engine or bookstore or what have you, you'll get me.

You haven't started, I guess it's because you're so loyal to the writing medium, but you haven't started going oral like so many do these days. I prefer to write. Good for people like me. Also, if you're doing something like doing it audio or doing it video, it's much easier to edit things.

When you're writing. Yeah. And so, because my style of writing, I'll come up with the first draft and then I'll work it and rework it and look over it and set it aside for two weeks

and take it out again and go through it again and rewrite it some more. And I take it through several changes like that before it finally gets to be what I want. And you can't really do that in a visual or auditory medium. No, it takes too much time. Exactly. I can attest to that. Here's a title I just have to throw out. It's hilarious. Apocalypse and Not. Everything you know about 2012, Nostradamus and the Rapture is wrong. Yes.

And that came out in 2011. That's right. That was the American edition of the book that was issued in Europe as Apocalypse. I think the publisher didn't think people would recognize the reference to the movie Apocalypse Now. Right, right, right. No, of course, that's a legend. People should know that. Oh, you'd think. Publishers.

Here's a fiction title I'm enticed by, A Voyage to Hyperborea. Yes, that's one of my tentacle novels. And one of the newer novels, right? Yes, oh yes, very much so. That's part of the series of books where I took H.P. Lovecraft and stood him on his head. And the Hyperborean question is heavily based on the writings of Lovecraft's friend Clark Ashton Smith, one of the great American fantasy writers of the early 20th century.

Generally, in those books, I had a hell of a time. And just having fun with tentacle horrors. But you turn him on the head in other ways, too, because wasn't Lovecraft concerned with Antarctica? Oh, yes. Here you are seeking the Arctic in history. Here we are in Greenland, yeah. But again, that was a reference to...

That was a reference to Clark Ashton Smith, who put Hyperborea where Greenland is now. Right, right. But, yeah, it's just all these Lovecraftian things about these horrible tentacles of ancient gods. And I'm thinking, hey, I'm an occultist. I deal with ancient gods on a daily basis. They're not that horrible. And you have Lovecrafts writing about these sinister occultists.

doing their weird rituals. Well, you know, that's me. So I figured I'd do a set of novels. I originally thought I was going to do one novel from the point of view of the cultists and the people, the folks with the tentacles and so on. And it spun out into a series. And it was a lot of fun. There's a lot of occultism woven in there and a lot of references, a lot of Easter eggs from Lovecraft. And it was a delight to write.

super super okay it's been an absolute pleasure having you on today John thank you I've enjoyed it also are you game to coming back at some point yes definitely I'll keep in touch then sounds like a plan yeah okay give my regards to your lovely wife she was very good in setting this up and forgive me for talking so much

but you triggered my enthusiasm. Not a problem in the world. It was a lovely conversation. I will look forward to our next one. So great. Stay in touch then. All the best. God bless you. Take care now. Bye-bye.

And there you have it. Now, these days we are releasing all our election-related, social, realistic, tangenting politics episodes in order to get them out before the election. I think even though we are discussing the last or the 16th election in this episode, I think people are still at it.

Although maybe it hasn't received as much attention as now. I do see a similar worshipping cult around Kamala as I do Clinton. But on the other hand, you know, yes, all politicians are fake. But Clinton was much better at being fake, in my personal opinion. I perceive Kamala as too transparently fake. It seems to me she has a hard time hiding it.

She's just a poor actor, I think. So that kind of prevents her from getting as big as a following, as big as a cult as Clinton did. And it's so transparent that it's all manufactured from the top. The enthusiasm around her, it seems almost non-existing at the ground. Of course, it helps that she didn't even win an election. She was selected, unlike Clinton, who actually...

Although with the help of rigging and fraud, as proven in courts, of course, the courts famously said that DNC is a private company, so they can do whatever they want. They can cheat, rig, tamper. It's up to them.

Obviously, the same would be true for the Republicans, also a private company, but they're stuck in their more fair primary system. So it's actually vulnerable to be taken over by the people's voice, by democracy, which it was in Trump's case.

majority voted him forward and that's what the elites don't like. They don't like it when the plebs choose someone they haven't approved. So, whereas in Trump's case, he's had a steady following. In fact, I think actually many has abandoned him of his original followers, but those who would probably fairly be judged as far-right. Instead, he has picked up a lot of new followers

followers, maybe not so much of a cult as just everybody who's against the system is now stacking the forces behind him, it seems. Maybe begrudgingly since Kennedy dropped out. Now I think it's more about, it's not so much as let's throw a fire torch into the system as it is

Let's, as we need a crazy rich narcissist like this to stand up against a man. Like a large ditch effort before the machine seizes everything. And I think there's something to that because Kamala, who did in 16, push for complete censorship of the Internet. She wanted to criminalize free speech programs.

Now, of course, she's not alone. And of course, this isn't her idea. That force is huge. And it's those behind her who supports that. She hasn't talked about it in this election, but that's because they now know we're not ready yet to accept the rationale behind the excuse to get rid of the US Constitution's First Amendment. Although it's just a skeleton now, whatever's left of it.

Yeah, so it's hard to tell to which extent this magical warfare is raging in this election, but maybe they don't get that much attention. Maybe they have taken the advice of going underground. But in any case, I am reminiscent of a few quotes.

For example, there is one that goes like this: "The political world is inextricably linked to the occult. The art of politics is the art of illusion, deception and manipulation, all tools of the occult practitioner." And the Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okre said: "The magician and the politician have much in common. They both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing."

And as you will learn in another episode in this series, we're trying to get out in time before the election, maybe the most important one, which proves scientifically election cheating. Not just what happened in the case of Robert Epstein, who also proved it, but that was on the hands of Google. That's manipulation.

exterior manipulation, but you have systemic cheating proven. And don't take my word for it. Look at the science which will be communicated to you in our episode called The Science of Election Rigging. Okay? Then after that, listen, check the evidence, and then you can criticize that assertion. Okay? I didn't believe it myself until I...

I mean, I wasn't sure I was agnostic, but now I'm convinced there was and there will be again. And that brings to mind the famous Stalin quote, or actually it's attributed to Stalin, but there's no proof he ever said it. He could have said it probably. He probably agreed. And it goes like this. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.

Of course, that could be that they decide that the people who cast the votes will come through, but also not. And finally, I'll read to you something in our guest John Greer's own words. My writing is informed by a persistent skepticism toward the grand mythology of our time, the faith in perpetual progress.

I grant that nowadays we're better than any earlier age at making the kind of gadget we happen to be better at making and therefore consider important. So, that hardly justifies the common modern notion that all older ways of envisioning the world are nonsense because they disagree with ours. Thus, my work is deliberately retrospective, even anachronistic.

like dumpster divers on the mean streets of a modern metropolis i walk the back alleys of intellectual history picking up discarded treasures much of this salvage work offends today's notions of common sense

But few things show more clearly through the history of ideas than the mutability of such notions and their unstated dependence on agendas of prestige and power.

A willingness to challenge prejudices masquerading as common sense is central to any attempt to meet the great need of our time, the re-enchantment of the world, what the poet Weeby Yeats called the revolt of the spirit against the intellects.

The Estebel and another episode wraps up. Thanks again to my guests. Thanks to you for liking, sharing and supporting our show. I've been your host Al, sincerely signing off in the words of Shakespeare. There are more things in heaven and earth than I dreamt of in your philosophy. Be seeing you.

Who is number one?