DOE#2 - WORST. MASTERPIECE. EVER.
WHY THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING, DESPITE ITS EGREGIOUS FLAWS, DESERVES TO BE REGARDED AS AN EPOCHAL WORK.
This, without doubt, is a disposition quite contrary to the spirit of the Faith, which requires us to submit not only our wills, but our minds, our judgments, and all the sentiments of man to a power unknown to our senses, to a Law that is not of earth, and that is entirely opposed to the laws and sentiments of corrupt nature. Add to this that the laws of the Country, which to them seem most just, attack the purity of the Christian life in a thousand ways, especially as regards their marriages …
-The Jesuit Relations
“The Jesuit Relations are full of this sort of thing: scandalized missionaries frequently reported that American women were considered to have full control over their own bodies, and that therefore unmarried women had sexual liberty and married women could divorce at will. This, for the Jesuits, was an outrage. Such sinful conduct, they believed, was just the extension of a more general principle of freedom, rooted in natural dispositions, which they saw as inherently pernicious. The ‘wicked liberty of the savages’, one insisted, was the single greatest impediment to their ‘submitting to the yoke of the law of God’. Even finding terms to translate concepts like ‘lord’, ‘commandment’ or ‘obedience’ into indigenous languages was extremely difficult; explaining the underlying theological concepts, well-nigh impossible.”
-David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, Ch. 2/ Wicked Liberty
HEY FOLKS!
Okay, so today we’re going to be studying Chapter 2 of The Dawn of Everything, which is called Wicked Liberty.
This chapter is by far the best part of The Dawn of Everything. For an anarchist such as yours truly, it’s nothing short of elating. If you read just one chapter of this book, read this one.
It is very similar to a 2019 essay Graeber published before his death in a French anthropological journal, which I recently translated into English for the first time.
What’s so great about Wicked Liberty, you ask? Well, basically it proves that anarchist ideas inspired the European Enlightenment, which in turn led to the French and American Revolutions. It goes a long way to restoring anarchism to its rightful place in world history.
It also proves that anarchism, which emerged during the European Enlightenment, can be traced back to indigenous cultures from the Eastern Woodlands of Turtle Island. It now has a much stronger origin story. Previously, we believed that it was created out of the imaginations of revolutionaries who took the ideas of the Enlightenment through to their natural conclusions. But now we know that it came from actual stateless societies which had lived in harmony with nature for countless generations. It will now be much easier to introduce anarchist ideas to skeptics in a way which will make sense to them.
(To be fair, there were also other influences on anarchism, such as anabaptism, romanticism, Sufism, and various heretical Christian sects, including of the Brethren of the Free Spirit.)
If you think that I’m projecting when I call these indigenous societies anarchist, I’m absolutely not. Indeed, they were much more anarchistic than any punk alive today, as I will show.
I will give you some examples drawn from the The Jesuit Relations, a series of books produced by Jesuit missionaries in New France (now Quebec). These are first-hand accounts of Turtle Islanders written by French missionaries who had lived amongst them and learned their languages.
As Father Lallemant noted of the Wendat in 1644:
I do not believe that there is any people on earth freer than they, and less able to allow the subjection of their wills to any power whatever – so much so that Fathers here have no control over their children, or Captains over their subjects, or the Laws of the country over any of them, except in so far as each is pleased to submit to them. There is no punishment which is inflicted on the guilty, and no criminal who is not sure that his life and property are in no danger …”
Father Le Jeune confirms the assessment:
They imagine that they ought by right of birth, to enjoy the liberty of wild ass colts, rendering no homage to any one whomsoever, except when they like. They have reproached me a hundred times because we fear our Captains, while they laugh at and make sport of theirs. All the authority of their chief is in his tongue’s end; for he is powerful in so far as he is eloquent; and, even if he kills himself talking and haranguing, he will not be obeyed unless he pleases the Savages.
Another goes even further:
From the beginning of the world to the coming of the French, the Savages have never known what it was so solemnly to forbid anything to their people, under any penalty, however slight. They are free people, each of whom considers himself of as much consequence as the others; and they submit to their chiefs only in so far as it pleases them.
Still another:
There is nothing so difficult as to control the tribes of America. All these barbarians have the law of wild asses, – they are born, live, and die in a liberty without restraint; they do not know what is meant by bridle or bit. With them, to conquer one’s passions is considered a great joke, while to give free rein to the senses is a lofty philosophy. The Law of our Lord is far removed from this dissoluteness; it gives us boundaries and prescribes limits, outside of which we cannot step without offending God and reason.
There you have you, folks. And that’s not coming from someone like me, who might be accused of being biased. This is coming from Jesuit missionaries who are trying to demonstrate the superiority of European culture in order to convert Turtle Islanders to the Catholic faith.
There are hundreds of accounts in the 71 volumes of the Jesuit Relations which will confirm that anarchist forms of social organization predominated throughout Turtle Island prior to the arrival of Europeans. That’s a historic fact. If anyone wants to debate me on that point, hit me up. I’m perfectly prepared to defend it.
Now that we know that classical anarchism can be traced back to the intellectual tradition of Turtle Island, we don’t have to worry that we might be projecting our ideas onto indigenous peoples by calling them anarchists.
Quite the contrary - those ideas came from Turtle Island, which means we’re not projecting. In all likelihood, that means that we could learn a lot about the different ways that stateless societies function in practice by studying the ethnographic record of those societies.
Furthermore, we now know that the reason that anarchism was so widespread throughout Turtle Island at the time of contact was because there seems to have been a successful revolution several centuries earlier in a place called Cahokia, which ruled over a tyrannical empires with cannibalism and ritual murder galore. Not joking. Look it up.
So now we have a theory that the reason that the Turtle Islanders were living in anarchist societies in the Eastern Woodlands wasn’t because they were simple primitives living in a state of nature, it was because they had, as a people, at some point made a conscious choice to make a break with a tyrannical culture and create new cultures of their own. In other words, there was a successful anarchist revolution which succeeded in eliminating class oppression.
If you’d like to explore that theory, I refer you here:
If you think that I’m just making this “Anarchist Revolution Hypothesis” about the fall of Cahokia up, by the way, this theory has been around since at least the 1990s, when Peter Lamborn Wilson published The Shamanic Trace, which he claimed was partially based on the true history of Turtle Island by a member of Winnebago secret society which, it is suggested, preserves the lineage of the culture that built Wisconsin’s Effigy Mounds. It is likely that the Mounds were built as monuments to the anarchist victory over the Cahokians.
If this sounds improbable to you, it might be because you are unaware that there are many indigenous secret societies throughout Turtle Island which continue to exist to this day.
As someone who has been participating in indigenous ceremonies for over ten years, I can only say that Peter Lamborn Wilson’s account seems entirely believable to me.
Don’t take my word for it, though. Read The Shamanic Trace and decide for yourself.
IS THE REASON THAT BOTH THE HAUDENOSAUNEE AND THE MAYA ARE CULTURALLY ANARCHIST DUE TO THE FACT THAT BOTH CULTURES ARE DESCENDED FROM ANARCHIST REVOLUTIONARIES WHO OVERTHREW OPPRESSIVE REGIMES?
This is inspiring between I have a pet theory that the true cause of the end of the Mayan Empire was a successful anarchist revolution ending with the Fall of Tonina, which is why the contemporary Maya have so often been described as “culturally anarchist”.
I present my theory here:
WORST MASTERPIECE EVER
Anyway, my point is that if David Graeber’s goal was to create an anarchist history of the world, he seems to have succeeded.
A new anarchist World Story is indeed emerging from The Dawn of Everything, though it needs to be teased out. This is why I think I think the work deserves to be called a masterpiece.
It’s all there, because the book is constructed in such a puzzling way that my best explanation is that its message was deliberately scrambled for some strange reason.
If you take The Dawn of Everything at face value, it will make you less intelligent. This is why I say it is the WORST MASTERPIECE EVER.
If you engage with it critically, and really think about its claims, and are willing to do a bunch of research on the side to separate the wheat from the chaff, it will dramatically increase your understanding both of world politics and how things came to be the way they are.
The work is provides a major contribution to the emergent Anarchist Mythos which visionaries like Fredy Perlman, Peter Lamborn Wilson and Paul Cudenec have been working on for decades, because it gives us a new Mythical Anarchist Hero, one who is even more inspiring than earlier such avatars such as Ned Ludd, Mikhail Bakunin, Louse Michel, Maria Nikiforova, Emiliano Zapata, and Robin Hood.
What mythology is complete without heroes?
Before I introduce the new Captain Ludd, however, I wish to reflect about the lives of historical figures are often mythologized after their deaths, because I wouldn’t want for us to get drunk on our own mythological Kool-Aid.
In reality, Mythical Heroes are personifications of historical forces, and it’s important to remember that intellectual movements often appear in the history books as if they sprang forth from the mind of one extraordinary individual. This is the Great Man Theory of History.
The truth is more complicated, and more interesting.
DID THE JESUITS UNINTENTIONALLY SPARK THE FRENCH REVOLUTION BY SPREADING SCANDALIZED ACCOUNTS ABOUT THE "WICKED LIBERTY OF THE SAVAGES"?
David Graeber’s parting gift to the world was a Mythical Hero named Kandiaronk.
I suspect that this was intentional. In Wicked Liberty, the authors note:
Intellectual historians have never really abandoned the Great Man theory of history. They often write as if all important ideas in a given age can be traced back to one or other extraordinary individual – whether Plato, Confucius, Adam Smith or Karl Marx – rather than seeing such authors’ writings as particularly brilliant interventions in debates that were already going on in taverns or dinner parties or public gardens (or, for that matter, lecture rooms), but which otherwise might never have been written down.
I believe that we should regard Kandiaronk as a great hero, but I think that we should understand that his primary importance in history is as a living personification of the indigenous critique of Western Civilization.
Although this one one man certainly did have a major influence on world history, it is important to recognize that he was far from the only Turtle Islander to criticize European society.
Arguably, the most credit for popularizing the indigenous critique in Europe is due to the Jesuits, who unintentionally spread radical ideas by publishing accounts by missionaries about the cultures they encountered in the New World.
To understand how this happened, we need to know something about the Jesuit Relations.
According to Wikipedia:
The Jesuit Relations, also known as Relations des Jésuites de la Nouvelle-France (Relation de ce qui s'est passé [...]), are chronicles of the Jesuit missions in New France. The works were written annually and printed beginning in 1632 and ending in 1673.
Originally written in French, Latin, and Italian, The Jesuit Relations were reports from Jesuit missionaries in the field to their superiors to update them as to the missionaries' progress in the conversion of various Indigenous North American tribes, including the Huron, Montagnais, Miꞌkmaq, Mohawk, and Algonquins. Constructed as narratives, the original reports of the Jesuit missionaries were subsequently transcribed and altered several times before their publication, first by the Jesuit overseer in New France and then by the Jesuit governing body in France. The Jesuits began to shape the Relations for the general public, in order to attract new settlers to the colony and to raise enough capital and political support to continue the missions in New France. Overall, these texts serve as microcosms of Indigenous-European relations in North America.
Because one of the goals of the Jesuit Relations was meant to prepare missionaries to evangelize to the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island, its authors included detailed accounts about the societies they encountered which can be generally considered factually accurate. True accounts were necessary to prepare future missionaries for the reality that they might expect to encounter whilst doing fieldwork.
The Jesuit Relations provided detailed accounts of the counter-arguments and objections to Christian dogma that they encountered, and numerous missionaries commented on how impressed they were by the intelligence of the Turtle Islanders.
Father Le Jeune, Superior of the Jesuits in Canada in the 1630s, wrote:
There are almost none of them incapable of conversing or reasoning very well, and in good terms, on matters within their knowledge. The councils, held almost every day in the Villages, and on almost all matters, improve their capacity for talking.
Or, in Father Lallemant’s words:
“I can say in truth that, as regards intelligence, they are in no wise inferior to Europeans and to those who dwell in France. I would never have believed that without instruction, nature could have supplied a most ready and vigorous eloquence, which I have admired in many Hurons; or more clear-sightedness in public affairs, or a more discreet management in things to which they are accustomed.”
Another remarked:
They nearly all show more intelligence in their business, speeches, courtesies, intercourse, tricks, and subtleties, than do the shrewdest citizens and merchants in France.
It’s worth noting that the Jesuits were the intellectuals of the Catholic World. They were trained in logic, rhetoric, linguistics, theology, and many other thing besides. But missionaries often found themselves no match for the wit of their indigenous interlocutors.
Graeber and Wengrow note:
Jesuits, then, clearly recognized and acknowledged an intrinsic relation between refusal of arbitrary power, open and inclusive political debate and a taste for reasoned argument. It’s true that Native American political leaders, who in most cases had no means to compel anyone to do anything they had not agreed to do, were famous for their rhetorical powers. Even hardened European generals pursuing genocidal campaigns against indigenous peoples often reported themselves reduced to tears by their powers of eloquence.
It was by way of the Jesuits that Europeans were first exposed to the indigenous critique of Western Civilization, which is why some have blamed them for sparking the French Revolution, though it seems extremely unlikely that they did so intentionally.
THE COLUMBIAN EXCHANGE INCLUDED IDEAS
The Jesuit Relations were hugely popular in Europe at that time, and it’s not hard to understand why if you take a minute to think about it.
Imagine that we achieved interstellar travel and explorers were going from Earth to all kinds of different planets and encountering different alien civilizations living in all kinds of different social and political realities that we had never even dreamt of. Now imagine Netflix started producing docu-series about all these different planets and how people lived there. Can you imagine how popular those docu-series would be? Well, that’s what the Jesuit Relations were for the people of the 18th century. It’s really not fanciful to suggest that the Jesuit Relations played a key role in inspiring the French Revolution by introducing all sorts of new political ideas into European thought.
And that is exactly and precisely what Graeber and Wengrow do in this chapter. Although The Dawn of Everything fails as a “New History of Humanity” (which, to be fair, is a pretty grandiose ambition), it succeeds at completely overturning the history of the past 500 years by proving that the Columbian Exchange included ideas, and that those ideas went on to inspire the Enlightenment.
Hmm… Maybe we could call it that the Intellectual Columbian Exchange. If anarchist ideas toppled the French monarchy, is that poetic justice?
One of the things that Graeber and Wengrow do in The Dawn of Everything is attribute the spreading of the indigenous critique to one particularly brilliant intellectual - a Huron-Wendat chief known to history by several names, including Kandiaronk, Le Rat, Muskrat, and Adario.
What I believe they are doing here is mythologizing the indigenous critique by representing it with a Mythical Intellectual Hero, a type of indigenous anarchist Socrates.
Now, the truth is that Kandiaronk, who was fluent in French and travelled in France, does seem to have had a massive influence on European political thought. However, many Europeans had already been exposed to the indigenous critique before he ever arrived on the scene. Arguably, it was the Jesuit Relations which was most responsible for popularizing the anarchist ideas of the indigenous critique. The irony is that the Jesuits were opposed to freedom on principle. It’s funny how history works sometimes.
That said, I am fully on board with mythologizing Kandiaronk and assigning him a key role in the new Anarchist Mythos we are creating.
Let me be aware of what we are doing, however. By giving Kandiaronk the role of Hero, we are personifying a historical process by representing it with the character of someone who exemplifies that historical process.
Cultures do this unconsciously all the time, which explains the Great Man Theory of History. Because of the way that human consciousness works, we tend to want to tell stories about the past, and stories need characters. Therefore, certain historical figures come to represent historical forces. Mythology serves the same narratological function that history does, and the former is generally is more useful than the latter, because most people don’t read history books.
One could easily attribute too much importance to one person if one isn’t careful. The actually important thing is the collision of ideas that occurred when two cultures came into contact for the first time, which I will call the Intellectual Columbian Exchange.
It seems to me that people are afraid of mythologizing their political aspirations, which I would chalk up to an odd fear of success, from which many anarchists have long suffered.
Let’s hear what Graeber and Wengrow have to say about Kandiaronk, who they clearly intend to introduce into World History as a type of Mythical Anarchist Hero.
Writing in Wicked Liberty, they explain:
In order to understand how the indigenous critique – that consistent moral and intellectual assault on European society, widely voiced by Native American observers from the seventeenth century onwards – evolved, and its full impact on European thinking, we first need to understand something about the role of two men: an impoverished French aristocrat named Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce, Baron de la Hontan, and an unusually brilliant Wendat statesman named Kandiaronk.
In 1683, Lahontan (as he came to be known), then seventeen years old, joined the French army and was posted to Canada. Over the course of the next decade he took part in a number of campaigns and exploratory expeditions, eventually attaining the rank of deputy to the Governor-General, the Comte de Frontenac.
In the process he became fluent in both Algonkian and Wendat, and – by his own account at least – good friends with a number of indigenous political figures. Lahontan later claimed that, because he was something of a sceptic in religious matters and a political enemy of the Jesuits, these figures were willing to share with him their actual opinions about Christian teachings. One of them was Kandiaronk.
A key strategist of the Wendat Confederacy, a coalition of four Iroquoian-speaking peoples, Kandiaronk (his name literally meant ‘the muskrat’ and the French often referred to him simply as ‘Le Rat’) was at that time engaged in a complex geopolitical game, trying to play the English, French and Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee off against each other, with the initial aim of averting a disastrous Haudenosaunee assault on the Wendat, but with the long-term goal of creating a comprehensive indigenous alliance to hold off the settler advance.
Everyone who met him, friend or foe, admitted he was a truly remarkable individual: a courageous warrior, brilliant orator and unusually skilful politician. He was also, to the very end of his life, a staunch opponent of Christianity.*
A quick aside - The authors make this claim whilst also noting in the footnotes that:
Ghe official histories claim he converted at the very end of his life, and it’s true he was buried as a Christian in Notre-Dame Church in Montreal, but Mann argues convincingly that the story of the deathbed conversion and burial is likely to have been a mere political ploy on the part of the missionaries.
I’ll let the readers draw their own conclusions about this, merely pointing out that it is unlikely that he would have received a Christian burial if he had not partaken of the Sacraments. I’ll also note that the main body of the text in directly contradicted by its own footnotes.
Back to the narrative:
Lahontan’s own career came to a bad end. Despite having successfully defended Nova Scotia against an English fleet, he ran foul of its governor and was forced to flee French territory. Convicted in absentia of insubordination, he spent most of the next decade in exile, wandering about Europe trying, unsuccessfully, to negotiate a return to his native France.
By 1702, Lahontan was living in Amsterdam and very much down on his luck, described by those who met him as penniless vagrant and freelance spy.
All that was to change when he published a series of books about his adventures in Canada. Two were memoirs of his American adventures. The third, entitled Curious Dialogues with a Savage of Good Sense Who Has Travelled (1703), comprised a series of four conversations between Lahontan and Kandiaronk, in which the Wendat sage – voicing opinions based on his own ethnographic observations of Montreal, New York and Paris – casts an extremely critical eye on European mores and ideas about religion, politics, health and sexual life.
These books won a wide audience, and before long Lahontan had become something of a minor celebrity. He settled at the court of Hanover, which was also the home base for Leibniz, who befriended and supported him before Lahontan fell ill and died, around 1715.
Given how influential Leibniz was on world history, I think that’s worth noting. If anyone tries to downplay the importance of Lahontan’s influence on European thought, we should remind them that the French anarchist was a personal friend of Leibniz, which shows that the famous philosopher must have been familiar with the anarchist ideas of the indigenous critique.
I should mention here that I believe we should also celebrate Lahontan as a Mythical Anarchist Hero. If it wasn’t for his books, which popularized Kandiaronk’s ideas, they would not have had the impact on world history that they did.
Graeber and Wengrow even credit Lahontan for inspiring an entire literary genre:
All these would be rather trivial concerns had Lahontan’s books not been so successful; but they were to have an enormous impact on European sensibilities. Kandiaronk’s opinions were translated into German, English, Dutch and Italian, and continued in print, in multiple editions, for over a century. Any self-respecting intellectual of the eighteenth century would have been almost certain to have read them. They also inspired a flood of imitations.
By 1721, Parisian theatregoers were flocking to Delisle de la Drevetière’s comedy L’Arlequin sauvage: the story of a Wendat brought to France by a young sea captain, featuring a long series of indignant monologues in which the hero ‘attributes the ills of [French] society to private property, to money, and in particular to the monstrous inequality which makes the poor the slaves of the rich’. The play was revived almost yearly for the next two decades.
Even more strikingly, just about every major French Enlightenment figure tried their hand at a Lahontan-style critique of their own society, from the perspective of some imagined outsider. Montesquieu chose a Persian; the Marquis d’Argens a Chinese; Diderot a Tahitian; Chateaubriand a Natchez; Voltaire’s L’Ingénu was half Wendat and half French. All took up and developed themes and arguments borrowed directly from Kandiaronk, supplemented by lines from other ‘savage critics’ in travellers’ accounts.
Perhaps the single most popular work of this genre, published in 1747, was Letters of a Peruvian Woman by the prominent saloniste Madame de Graffigny, which viewed French society through the eyes of an imaginary kidnapped Inca princess. The book is considered a feminist landmark, in that it may well be the first European novel about a woman which does not end with the protagonist either marrying or dying. Graffigny’s Inca heroine, Zilia, is as critical of the vanities and absurdities of European society as she is of patriarchy. By the nineteenth century, the novel was remembered in some quarters as the first work to introduce the notion of state socialism to the general public, Zilia wondering why the French king, despite levying all sorts of heavy taxes, cannot simply redistribute the wealth in the same manner as the Sapa Inca.
There are so many example of these types of fictional works that Graeber and Wengrow banish some of them to the footnotes:
After a hiatus, another spate of similar plays with Indian heroes were produced in the 1760s: La Jeune Indienne (1764) by Chamfort and Le Huron (1768) by Marmontel.
In 1752, just around the time de Graffigny’s second edition appeared, a former soldier, spy and theatre director named Jean Henri Maubert de Gouvest also released a novel called Lettres Iroquois, the correspondence of an imaginary Iroquois traveller named Igli, which was also hugely successful.
Commenting on this genre, the authors explain:
The easiest way for a freethinker to get away with publishing an open attack on Christianity probably would have been to compose a dialogue pretending to defend the faith from the attacks of an imaginary foreign sceptic – and then make sure one loses all the arguments.
If you ask me, this one sentence is key to understanding The Dawn of Everything. I believe it explains why the book is so full of contradictions.
Apparently Darren Allen, who took the arguments presented in the book at face value, missed this passage. But it makes sense if you take the time to think about it.
Why would the author of Debt: The First Five Thousand Years, posthumously publish an anti-anarchist polemic a year after his mysterious death?
Well, maybe there’s a reason that the anti-anarchist arguments it makes are so weak. Perhaps that was by design, or perhaps the wild spirit of David Graeber’s ideas refused to be tamed by the “editorial team” who wished to repurpose them for the purposes of ideological subversion.
Why else would an anarchist claim that:
Egalitarian Societies Don’t Exist
The State has no Origin
Private Property has always existed
The natural form of social organization proscribed by human nature is authoritarianism
The only two possibility takes on human nature are reiterations of the ideas of Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The ideas of Yuval Noah Harari, Stephen Pinker, and Francis Fukuyama are worth paying attention to
The fact that some cultures change their social structures seasonally shows that people consciously choose their social structures (because apparently doing what is necessary for survival is proof of “conscious choice”)
A handful of Ice Age “princely burials” with ornate grave goods prove that Europeans were practicing a primitive form of statecraft thousands of years before the first evidence for states emerges
There is no agreed-upon definition of “the state”
Equality is a meaningless concept
Do you see my point? If you were trying to include as many anti-anarchist arguments as possible in a single book, you couldn’t do much better than The Dawn of Everything.
Yet a critical reading causes many of these arguments to melt away like snow in the Sahara desert. The arguments are so weak that they could not possibly have been made in earnest by someone of David Graeber’s intellect. They appear to be examples of a certain rhetorical device in which one advances one’s ideas by appearing to argue against them.
Allow me to repeat that one all-important sentence mentioned above:
The easiest way for a freethinker to get away with publishing an open attack on Christianity probably would have been to compose a dialogue pretending to defend the faith from the attacks of an imaginary foreign sceptic – and then make sure one loses all the arguments.
Now allow me to to paraphrase it:
The easiest way for a freethinker to get away with publishing a truly radical anarchist critique of Western Civilization probably would be to pretend to defend it from the attacks of an imaginary anarchist critic– and then make sure one loses all the arguments.
Is this a possible explanation for why one of this millennium’s greatest anarchist theorists would write a ridiculous anti-anarchist polemic riddled with errors, fallacies, contradictions, disingenuous nonsense, and cleverly disguised stupidity?
I think so, but at the end of the day I’m not sure how much it matters what Graeber’s true intentions were. In any case, he left us a masterpiece, albeit the WORST MASTERPIECE EVER.
That does it for today. I hope you have enjoyed this post. As always, your comments are appreciated.
Love & Solidarity,
Crow Qu’appelle
Thanks for your amazing analysis. I really think this installment is earth-shattering.
So did you ever get around to explaining what this has to do with the Bavarian Illuminati? I mean apart from the quote at the top dismissing conservative reactionary "conspiracy theories."
I'm curious.
That quote also clearly alleges the veracity of the Myth of Progress or of historical inevitability.
Interestingly, the Illuminati were formed in 1776, which would have been well after the distribution of the the Jesuit Relations; and Weishaupt was raised by Jesuits and later rejected them.
Maybe the Jesuit Relations were found in the Reading Libraries established with the (outward) dissolution of the Illuminati.
There was of course a very real Illuminati conspiracy which early Masonic but anti-illuminist founding fathers of the United States (before the throrough infiltration of Masonic lodges in said country by Illuminsm) referred to as a threat to the newly-formed republic. Does Graeber/Wengrow's dimissal simply reflect their ignorance, is it a technique like other absurd claims, or is it compliance with the conspirators themselves who use catch phrases like freedom and equlity (now "equal opportunity", "equal access","diversity" etc.) to propogate limiting and enslaving institutions of the "liberal" state and of supranational capitalism, or is there another possibility I'm missing?
Quick question: Is the magazine you linked to in the about section the only issue, and is the Nevermore substack a continuation of that? Just started reading and I have a few comments but that will have to wait as I'm working the next two days. Cheers.