Marginalia and Religious Ethnography Botched: Another Interview with Keith418 on Hegel, Religion, Occultism, and Political Ideology

This is the second interview in a series with Keith418. The first one is here.  Keith418 is one of the most controversial figures in modern Thelema.  His interviews on the defunct Thelema: Coast to Coast were often rigorous and demanding, yet highly contentious.  Keith418 has also documented thinkers on both the radical right and the far left often comparing those thinkers to the problematic thought in the Occult community.  The parallels are discomforting to all involved. This interview goes into territory of both my interview series so it will be considered part of both.

Skepoet: I suppose we should discuss much of from our private discussions.  Your interview is one of the most referenced on my site and generated a lot of controversy among the Thelemites I know.  Why do you think this is?

Keith418:  There is a certain kind of person involved with Thelema who just gets excited about ANY mention of magick, Thelema, or Crowley they happen to come across. The mere mention of these subjects is something they seem to find somehow validating – usually no matter what the context. I suspect this phenomena is in effect here. I also think that there is a great deal of tension that exists around the question of whether Thelema really is about egalitarianism and altruism or not. Anyone who pokes at that problem, or contradiction  - however you want to characterize it – is going to draw some notice.

The secret fear many people seem to have is that, try as they must, Thelema just cannot be rehabilitated; that it is intrinsically “dangerous” – and “dangerous” in all the ways that nice, PC, middle class people would judge something to be a threat and a danger. The Thelemic community loves the people who lay that inarticulate, but still palpable, fear to rest just as it despises the people who reinvigorate their anxieties and who summon their worries back into new forms. They hate being reminded of their conflicts.

This community really is very thin-skinned – which I think it a mark of its basic fragility; a kind of fragility that reveals itself in denial and in organizational and personal turmoil created by its astounding degree of ongoing and epidemic cognitive dissonance. This sort of sensitivity to criticism and analysis means that anyone who consistently points to the community’s problems and short-comings is seen as a pariah. When you combine that with the usual unwillingness to look at class and the limitations it places on people, and the way it is often so determining, I can’t say I really shocked at the reaction. I’d be more surprised if it didn’t get that reaction.

Skepoet: You and I have been talking about despite at the anger at the “system” very few people are willing to look at the problems of middle class values themselves.  For example, you and I both have been openly musing on whether #Occupy wants to move beyond the prior status quo or just get bribed back into accepting it.   There seems to be a lot unaddressed in the we are the 99% slogan for all its strengths. What is your current take on this?

Keith418:  On the one hand, the ’60s left protests were very much about fighting against the middle class – its prejudices, its conformity-orientation, its lack of life and constriction. Youth advertising plays into that – the pendulum in Americans advertising invariably swings between the laboratory and the carnival. The status quo is mom and dad and their boring, authority positions and values. But how does one craft a criticism of the middle class – and its banalities and trivial preoccupations – in the wake of the counterculture of the ’60s and
’70s? Does one reiterate it and seem dated? Or does one craft some new critical approach? If the middle class is under attack from the banks and from globalization, then is it an ally to the cause? Or still an
enemy?

A friend noted that the current movement seeks to save the people of the middle class, but not the middle class itself per se. I see what he’s getting at here, but I think this twist sidesteps the question.

Skepoet: Recently I read something you wrote a few years ago comparing Herbert Marcuse to James Burnham. In brief, why do you think these two thinkers are really important to revisit at the moment?

Keith418:  Both describe the way ownership no longer necessarily means control – that control has passed to highly trained managers, bureaucrats, consultants, experts, and other forces that go beyond mere ownership- as it has been defined in the past. How do we manage the managers? Who, in the end, manages them? Do the managers manage themselves? There is an incessant push, that both writers noted, towards giving this layer more and more decision-making power and authority. On the one hand, there is the fear that they will abuse this power. On the other hand, these same figures promise to give us what we want and sustain what we have. In a highly technologically advanced society, with a dense population, this managerial class rises to the fore – either through government, through corporations, through academia, through the media, through non-profit groups, or through blurry and complex combinations of all of these fronts.

Often managerial forces subvert the “political.” Political choices become replaced with a managed process governed by experts. They make the choices and we go along with them. Do people want more politics? Or do they want to, instead, sit back and let this class provide for them and cede power to it in the process? On the one hand, there is a kind of weariness associated with political demands. Being politically active and informed takes work and requires sacrifices. Isn’t it easier to just let the managers handle it? The managerial elites often project themselves as disinterested parties who have attained a measure of scientific objectivity. This can’t be accurate, but their power depends on people believing it’s true and trusting them.

I don’t see a criticism of the managed society developing on the right or on the left. Instead, people pick vaguely defined managerial forces they wish to see prevail, but the structure and core operating beliefs
of these experts is seldom acknowledged or challenged. Many people on the left just want more humane and caring management – which is quite a different demand from that of the people themselves being allowed to make the most important decisions that effect their lives. There are those on the paleocon right who evidence a kind of cranky antipathy towards the managerial elites, but these folks still don’t seem truly ready to abandon the technological society these same trained experts have provided for them. The neocon right has always cultivated its own managers and think tanks and has always been quite ready to enjoy what a “big government” made of empowered managers can provided.  For both the left and the right, taking power back from those they have ceded it to will take effort and energy. Who is ready to start that process and what sacrifices will they make to get there? The alternative is just to insist on better management – and not to attack and question the power and role of the managers at all.

Skepoet: Would you say that right and left are largely irrelevant positions?

Keith418:  Well, even if I did, what would be gained? Why do people still cling to these terms and think and act as if they were, indeed, still profoundly meaningful? Since the ’60s – I’m thinking of Karl Hess and
even before him – many have tried to point out differing, and more determining and accurate kinds of dichotomies. Centralized vs. decentralized approaches, authoritarian vs. individualistic choices,
top-down vs. bottom up styles. Why, after all this time, do people keep using “left and right”? What is concealed, what unrevealed truth is carried in these terms that continues to prevent their exhaustion?

I once, quite by accident, incited a distant supervisor to lecture me – harshly – about the “correct” use of these terms. He was more adamant about what constituted the “real left” that he ever was about any work related issue we were dealing with. I think this speaks to how the terms still have meaning – even if we wish they didn’t and would seek to replace them.

Skepoet: What do you think remains unresolved at the core of the idea of left and right then as the fact that categories do not seem to leave us would indicate?   In my mind, when categories won’t go away despite the existence of more precise semantic categories, there is something unresolved at the core of the idea. Perhaps I am wrong about this, but I suspect you approach this similarly, although it may be for different reasons.

Keith418: Well, what are the origin of the terms? They go back to the days of the French Revolution. What remains unresolved from that point? What questions were asked then that still haven’t been answered – and which our political definition still, somehow, entail? I am reminded of the apocryphal story of Zhou Enlai being asked about the effects of the French Revolution.  It was, he was said to have answered, “too soon to tell.” Even if this wasn’t what he was referring to, the essence of this response is still both haunting and illustrative.

To me, these terms represent differing sides on the nature of the dream of shared human life, the great motivating metaphysical dream that floats above us and lives through us as we seek to create a world
for ourselves.

“A waning of the dream results in confusion of counsel, such as we behold on all sides in our time. Whether we describe this as decay of religion or loss of interest in metaphysics, the result is the same; for both are centers with power to integrate, and, if they give way, there begins a dispersion which never ends until the culture lies in fragments. There can be no doubt that the enormous exertions made by the Middle Ages to preserve a common world view exertions which took forms incomprehensible to modern man because he does not understand what is always at stake under such circumstances – signified a greater awareness of realities than our leaders exhibit today. The Schoolmen understood that the question, universalia ante rem or universalia post rem, or the question of how many angels can stand on the point of a needle, so often cited as examples of Scholastic futility, had incalculable ramifications, so that, unless there was agreement upon these questions, unity in practical matters was impossible.” – Richard Weaver

Occultism – if it’s about anything – is about exploring the nature of these metaphysical dreams. It means revealing them – to the extent that they can be wrestled from concealment through struggle – and discerning the ways they shape us and the events around us. Magick is – at times-  about summoning into being the myths and mythic, heroic figures that inhabit, fulfill, and direct the dreams and represent the ideals. Nothing, so far, has been so climatic as to provide alternatives to the terms “left” and ‘right.” Isn’t this more remarkable than anything else?

Skepoet: Do you think that the question of metaphysics is “mystified” and assumed?  You and I have talked about class as one of things people are hesitant to truly discuss, but I would say metaphysics is more profoundly avoided as if its nonsense.  Materialist metaphysics does have implicit assumptions and there are different versions of it.   When a philosophical or religious tradition won’t look at metaphysics, I often feel like they are trying to hide an axiom. 

Keith418:  People can try to avoid looking at the origins of their values, but it’s seldom an effective way to go through life for anyone who wishes to be really deeply engaged – or who even just want to know what they are doing without being taken advantage of.. The folks I know who refuse the metaphysical investigations, but who see themselves as “politically involved” anyway, are just partisan hacks. Partisan hackery is widespread, but it’s increasingly pointless and meaningless. It’s become something like sports fandom. People cheer on one side or the other, but it’s a ridiculous, mindless, empty exercise.

The brighter of my friends on the left follow Hegel is seeing that the governing metaphysics of left politics is nothing more than a secularized Judeo-Christianity. Hambermas says the same thing explicitly.They acknowledge Carl Schmitt’s dictum that all salient political ideals are secularized theological principles. If people deny this… Well, what can be done with them or said about them?

Why would anyone want to hide an axiom? Is it because we can no longer share the irrational faith that these axioms depend on, when we still desperately need the axioms anyway? Is it because beliefs about the nature of human beings as “rational animals” have been exploded, but that we are still operating as if they haven’t been? Can science and reason still bail us out of the mess that that science and reason have, in many ways, created? If this really worried you, would you, want to discuss and examine the axioms?

“Modern rationalism rejected biblical theology and replaced it by such things as deism, pantheism, atheism. But in this process, biblical morality was in a way preserved. Goodness was still believed to consist in something like justice, benevolence, love, or charity; and modern rationalism has a tendency to believe that this biblical morality is better preserved if it is divorced from biblical theology. Now this was, of course, more visible in the nineteenth century than it is today; it is no longer so visible today because one crucial event happened around 1870-1880: the appearance of Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s criticism can be reduced to one proposition: modern man has been trying to preserve biblical morality while abandoning biblical faith. That is impossible. If the biblical faith goes, biblical morality must go too, and a radically different morality must be accepted.” — Leo Strauss

Strauss is correct here, and it has grave implications for the left. You can understand why this is true even without being a Straussian.

Skepoet:  This brings me to a question: Do you think the fear of “capitalism with Asian values” that Zizek has been speaking about recently or the old Trotskyist fear of Mao  made this apparent?  Or is there something else going on there.   I have noticed that both Zizek and Badiou have explicitly defended the Christian tradition in the past few years making many of my leftists friends nervous, yet they see the first universalist vision in Saint Paul. (I don’t, actually. I see it in Mahayana Buddhism, but that’s a different story).  Yet there seems to be a profound uncomfortableness with “Asian” leftists like Pol Pot, Mao, Ho Chi Min, or even the modern Naxalites. Do you see this as related?  Furthermore, do you see any trends in the occult community that parallel this? 

Keith418:  I’ve always thought that the Trotsky people were susceptible to varying kinds of ethnic chauvinism. This isn’t uniformly the case, but any resistance to looking at non-western ideas and values is going to be problematic. After having been the oppressors in a colonial situation, it’s ironic to see Westerner’s worried about themselves being colonized – or too influenced from ideas originating in the Third World.

The European Enlightenment still under-girds the nature of the left and its definitions and assumptions. How can clinging to these models, insisting on their applicability and righteousness not, in some way,
turn into something that looks like chauvinism? Is this a bad thing? Or is it a natural expression of a given people and their history and experience? Is it ironic given that these same ideologies purport to
share an internationalist perspective?

People’s inner conflicts and cognitive dissonance becomes most acute when they try to reconcile, or simply live with, contradictory metaphysical principles. The Marxists of the ’60s were all about heightening the contradictions. well, is advancing and strengthening he contemporary welfare state revolutionary, or is it reformist? Are current leftists eager to spot contradictions – or are they eager to avoid recognizing them? I think the intellectual rigor of the left declined with the advent of identity politics. I would be heartened again to see people looking at the contradictions that multiply around us, but I fear few have the stomach for it at this point.

Skepoet: We have talked about Buddhism as a kind of soft-cultural capital before, but there is a movement of the Baby boomer left that ran to those ideas when Mao and Che didn’t work out for them.  However, this has given Buddhism of the Western convert in America a particular flavor that ignores a lot of more conservative teachings on say sexuality.  I see in both a want to psychologize everything. What do
you think is at root here?

Keith418:  I think psychologizing anything speaks to certain, needs, obviously, but there is a lot of room to judge varying  psychological interpretations of, say, politics. For example Paglia posits:

“Modern liberalism suffers unresolved contradictions.  It exalts individualism and freedom and, on its radical wing, condemns social orders as oppressive.  On the other hand, it expects government to provide materially for all, a feat manageable only by an expansion of authority and a swollen bureaucracy.  In other words, liberalism defines government as tyrant father but demands it behave as nurturant mother.”

This is certainly a psychological analysis, but it’s not one my friends on the left often appreciate. We can find ways to probe their psychological needs that will make the Buddhists you are talking about profoundly unhappy, can’t we?

Skepoet: To focus back on Buddhism: Egalitarianism seems radically at odds with the very notion that there are Enligthened beings. In that, it seems interesting that the forms of Buddhism popular in the Europe and in Asia are largely forms where this is either extremely emphasised to the point of seeming unattainable as in some Tibetan Buddhist guru-worship or is frankly denied as still being possible such as Pure Land Buddhism.  This move is even more hollowed out in convert Buddhism which seems to reactively put an more egalitarian spin on the Pali cannon.

Do you see this as a linked contradiction?

Keith418: I think they’d make the argument that everyone has the “potential” to be Enlightened. This is an “equality of opportunity” argument. We are all equal in “potential” and if we all don’t take advantage of that potential in the same way, or at the same time, who cares? But the difficulties arise when we ask why that potential – so often proclaimed and insisted on – isn’t more in evidence. Modernity is really about lowering the bar. If everyone is already a Buddha or an adept, then why seek after Enlightenment? Why bother with any of it at all? What is more noxious to egalitarians: the idea that there really are Enlightened beings (whose very existence gives lie to their pretenses), or the easily observable fact that everyone isn’t as wonderful as they claim?

We run smack into modernity – and earn our contemporaries disdain (or worse) – when we seek to reverse course and raise the bar. Start demanding excellence and insist on higher standards and watch what
happens. The neopagan and magical bitterly resent anyone who resists the call to lower the bar. This is why beginner books and “dumbing it all down” are seen as so necessary.

On the other hand, only the strong can protect the weak and if everyone’s opinion is equally valuable, then we may well need authorities more than ever – to help us correctly choose between all the “equal opinions.” Goethe once declared, “I too believe that humanity will win in the long run; I am only afraid that at the same time the world will have turned into one huge hospital where everyone is everybody else’s humane nurse.” Does the left really want this hospital?  If so, it will need elites to run it and manage it. This,to me, is the Hegelian Endstaat. Thanks, but not thanks.

Skepoet:  Well, I am not entirely a Nietzschean, I think his genealogical approach could be useful here: Why do you this lowering of the bar happens?  Is it universal to universalist ideas?  For example, earlier I said that I think Mahayana Buddhism was the first attempt at a universality in religion in a real sense, but it also eventually generated ideas like “Buddha nature” and the non-contradiction of samsara/nirivana.  Do you think modernity and the radical Enlightenment was undone by this same sort of impulse?     How do you see this play out in the OTO for example?

Keith418:  You can’t harmonize anti-Enlightenment and Enlightenment ideologies without one side losing – and I said, this seems to be a zero-sum game.

“The classics thought that, owing to the weakness or dependence of human nature, universal happiness is impossible, and therefore they did not dream of a fulfillment of History and hence not of a meaning
of History. They saw with their mind’s eye a society within which that happiness of which human nature is capable would be possible in the highest degree: that society is the best regime. However, because they saw how limited man’s power is, they held that the actualization of the best regime depends on chance. Modern man, dissatisfied with utopias and scorning them, has tried to find a guarantee for the
actualization of the best social order. In order to succeed, or rather in order to be able to believe that he could succeed, he had to lower the goal of man. One form in which this was done was to replace moral
virtue by universal recognition. The classical solution is utopian in the sense that its actualization is improbable. The modern solution is utopian in the sense that its actualization is impossible. The
classical solution supplies a stable standard by which to judge of any actual order. The modern solution eventually destroys the very idea of standard that is independent of actual situations.”
- Leo Strauss

Thelemic organizations are caught between the contemporary impulse to lower the bar, and Crowley’s elitism and his insistence on severe self-discipline and actual attainment. Guenon would note that these desires for equality propel the fall from metaphysics into mere religion. Religion’s emphasis is on morality and emotions – not thought or even real action. Any idiot can be religious and plenty of idiots are. The morality in the Thelemic community becomes a herd morality – it validates the group and its needs rather than the individual. Some in the Thelemic community keep insisting (contra Crowley himself in “Magick Without Tears”) that Thelema is a religion and I suspect they are responding to the modern need to lower the bar in the way Strauss means.

Thelema itself contradicts the Hegelian desire for universal recognition. If this is true, it is impossible to simultaneously work for a Thelemic future and struggle for a left-wing Hegelian one. This conflict is critical, but most are missing it.

Skepoet: Looking at Hegel for a moment: what do you think has happened to the right Hegelians?

Keith418: Are the neocons right hegelians? What about Heideggers lecture on Hegel in which he declared that the Hegelian project was realized in 1933?

Skepoet: I thought most people who like Spengler would consider the neocons “left hegelians.” Anyway, let me rephrase the question. I was reading an article on Hegel’s relationship to Hermeticism, and it seems to me that Perennialists are partially Hegelian in their attempts to reconcile the world religions.   Do you see this as sort of right Hegelianism or am I strenching here?

Keith418: “The universal substance, as vital, exists only so far as it organically particularizes itself.”- Hegel

Is this a “right Hegelian” truism or a “left Hegelian” axiom? How would someone like Guenon see it? And how particular do we mean? What’s the test?

Skepoet: Hard to say, honestly. Perhaps I am applying political categories where they don’t apply. Guenon seems to be operating with a concept of the universal manifesting int the particular, and in that sense, it would be in the universalism inherent in Hegel and almost dialectical, but that is perhaps a weak sense. 　

Recently,I have been thinking on the religious left and the religious right.  It seems like the real functioning belief system is not the religious element, but the political one as if the political bent was the true religion.   Do you see this in various stripes in the Occult community?  Any variants from the standard middle class liberal or libertarian bias?

Keith418: Has politics replaced religion? This is what happens with secularization. On the other hand, the underpinnings of both right and left remain religiously grounded – the informing metaphysics guiding the politics originates in theological concepts.

I think the occult community bends with the winds emanating  from the larger culture. Though this is the opposite model of the one advanced by conspiracy theorists, who see occult forces and actors operating
behind the scenes, it is nonetheless true – even for the leaders of the Thelemic community. Friends have noted, quite uncannily, that they tend to unconsciously imitate whoever the current American president
is.

Many of the OTO people I know accept liberal-left ideas as simply as a priori “common sense” – or see this set of values as simply “what everyone knows to be true.” They are utterly nonplussed when you try to get them to see these sets of beliefs as an informing ideology. They are very reluctant to question their own liberal political values – all the while attacking, you know, “fundamentalists.”Very, very few of the libertarian Thelemites I know stay true to libertarian beliefs under pressure. After 9-11, they all became neocons and forgot their libertarian ideals. This is why I would say that a libertarian figure like Ron Paul has almost zero support among Thelemites. Obama remains far, far more popular.

Skepoet:  You have commented that you think post-Enlightenment humanism has a limited conception of man?  Would you like to go into that? Furthermore, do you see it being tied into the tacit metaphysics
underlying all of this?

Keith418:  The Enlightenment saw man as the “rational animal.” If this isn’t true, then what is our new definition?  Most political thinking retains this central definition and basic understanding. The
post-Enlightenment period hasn’t grappled, enough, with getting past this. To do so, people fear, would mean abandoning the pillars and central values that inform our shared life – equality, democracy, etc.
Metaphysics, at its best, reveals news way to go. The occult community, at its worst, stands at the door and balks.

Skepoet:  I have been thinking about this in Zizek’s recent discussions of human rights being both formal and illusory.  Do you see the rhetoric of human rights as sort of a lingering theological view in a secular quise?

Keith418:  Yes, and this is what Alain de Benoist says over and over again. His recently translated book on the subject goes into this subject in depth. On the one hand, “human rights” seems to us to be this unquestionable bedrock. When examined, on the other hand, it’s all thinly disguised theology. Benoist points out that it’s become the new way to dominate the Third World. First we had to subdue them to bring them Christianity. Then it was “progress” – and then more explicitly technological progress; the benefits of Western rationality. Now it’s all about “human rights.” The end result is always the same, isn’t it?

No one can question appeals to human rights without putting themselves outside of humanity itself – to be skeptical about these justifications is to be a monster and inhuman. No one can argue with a monster. Monsters just need to be destroyed. The theological privileging of those making appeals to “human rights” is palpable.

Skepoet:  Anything you’d like to say in closing?

Keith418:  “Optimism is only a concealed pessimism, a pessimism that avoids itself. In this age of the convulsion of the entire world pessimism and optimism remain, in the same way, powerless for what is necessary.” – Heidegger

“We want to repose, to be at peace with our fellows whom we love, who misunderstand us and for whose love we are hungry. We want to make terms, we want to surrender. But I have always found that, though I could acquiesce in some such line of conduct, though I could make all preparations for accommodation, yet when it came to the point, I was utterly unable to do the base, irrevocable act.” – Crowley

Marginalia on Radical Thinking Series can be found here, here, here,  here,  and here.

Religious Ethnography Series can be found here, here, here, here, here, here,  here, here, here, here,  here  here, here, and here.