aesthetics as moral imperative
at one point, you realize that no ideology can be good or bad by any standard but its own, because that's what ideology does. it furnishes a goal or an ordered set of values, and may or may not come with a side of rules and dogma.
ideologies might be fruitfully considered to be organic entities that, like all other entities, attend to their own self-preservation. to that end, they enlist us to propagate and preserve them, and offer us moral benediction and material gain should we comply. it is easy to consider a personality to be a type of ideology, or vice versa; the ideology that encompasses and suggests my true way of life is implicit in my personality, as 6 is implicit in 3+3.
the past several hundred years have furnished us with a meta-ideology that pits our egos against, as it were, off-the-rack ideologies in general; we see this spelled out literally in the philosophy of slavoj zizek and implicitly in the writing of timothy leary and robert anton wilson ("think for yourself, shmuck!"), and we see an attempt at a formulation of this meta-ideology in "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law". we are left with this vision of enlightened amorality, enlightened self-interest; we are left with the goal of existential liberation from malign agents. it is irrelevant whether these agents are conceived of as malignant ideologies, demons, or flesh-and-blood spooks.
it's a meta-ideology that is very wrapped up in individualism; it simply makes no sense unless you posit that the entity that calls itself "i" is a real, unique thing with an ineffable, indefinable essence. people simply tend not to jump on the "anti-ideology" ideology if they conceive of themselves essentially as totally replaceable parts in a larger machine. therefore, people who subscribe to this meta-ideology tend to spend a lot of thought-energy on the difference between themselves and other people. referring to people who you see as being in the thrall of this or that ideology (unlike yourself and your friends, of course) as "normals", or similar, is the order of the day.
as this meta-ideology began to permeate the mainstream over the last two hundred years, we saw a very interesting thing happen: the arrival of a counterculture that was accommodated for by the monoculture. now, the thing about monocultures is that they do not accommodate, they absorb and synthesize. therefore, this apparent counterculture (where'd you hear about jack kerouac for the first time?) is a controlled opposition of sorts: this the place for those of us who've woken up and realized how bullshit society is and how unique and special we are for realizing it. we would not be here if it presented itself as part of the monoculture, but the marketplace of ideas demands that the monoculture supply what the people want. if what the people want is a safe space to bitch about normals, then by gosh, the people will have it. quite simply, if the monoculture knows about you, you're part of it. if they've got a name for you, you're a marketing demographic just like any other. "the counterculture", as long as it's a concrete, real, tangible thing, is just the monoculture for contrarians.
let's do the thinky-twist and apply our own ideology to itself. what if this spiritual pressure, this goal of existential escape, this unspoken valuation of being different and the desire to realize your own difference, is yet another bogeyman? what if the anti-ideology ideology is just as parasitic as any other?
well, when we phrase it like that, it seems obvious. the implication is beautiful: if ideologies are neither bad nor good, to be neither shunned nor celebrated, then our relationship with them can be purely pragmatic. we may play with ideology in precisely the same manner as a goetic conjurer plays with demons.
well, how do goetic conjurers play with demons? let's ignore the wash-outs and the faliures and focus on the success stories. what do they have in common?
they are very, very cautious, taking "measure twice cut once" to kind of ridiculous extremes. they research exhaustively, knowing that the true significance of any piece of data will only reveal itself in the fullness of time. they are respectful and professional with the spirits they work with, performing as much of the operation as possible on the spirits terms. their own personal preferences are completely secondary.
i'd like to raise the possibility that the great ideologies of the present day are even more tenacious and conniving than goetic demons, and require even more wherewithal to engage with on an operator level (rather than a meat-puppet level). in turn, while successful demon work can feel like you've got your own personal intelligence agency running around behind the scenes making life easier for you, successfully working an ideology places you right on the cutting edge of whatever social/cultural current you like. maybe the syncronicities don't line up quite as spooky, but the narrative flow gets as big and profound as you want it. you can speed it up and slow it down, change genre mid-stream.
one cannot (should not?) be a spirit-worker if one is anti-spirit. this is why those of us who want to work with ideologies need to keep them at a friendly arms-reach, not just dismiss them. and this is why those of us who want to operators on the level of ideology should not be anti-ideology. think of it this way: for us it's meta-programming and it's hard as fuck; for them it's just regular programming and they do it automatically. the great work of magick, complete self-transformation, is the basic essence of ideology. it should be obvious why we should want a piece of that action.
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