What are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?
Paul Cudenec on the Three Questions that every Mythology must answer.
HEY FOLKS!
As you guys know, I’ve big on Mythos.
Personally, I believe that politics is downstream of culture, and that culture is downstream of Mythos.
As Plato said, those who tell the stories rule society.
I originally presented these ideas in Love Has Been Abolished, Whose Great Narrative? and The Inevitable Triumph of Anarchism, all of which are available in zine form.
I have built on the ideas quite a bit since then.
Starting late last year, I wrote a series of essays in which I compare Christian, anarchist, and Marxist mythologies.
The series began with a piece called The Story is Broken and concluded with Towards a Mythos of Metamorphosis.
ANYONE WANT TO HELP ME TURN THESE ESSAYS INTO A BOOK?
Together, these essays form a single body of work. I would love to turn these essays into a book, because they all the same question - how best might we mythologize the Anarchist Revelation?
We now have a solid metaphysical and moral foundation, and the question is now how we might turn our ideology into a story so that we might be transmit it in a compelling and memorable way.
WHAT IS THE ANARCHIST REVELATION?
My entire body of work is highly inspired by Paul Cudenec, who I call the world’s foremost defender of real anarchism.
If you want a basic idea of what I am referring to, I refer you to this video:
Elven years ago, he wrote a book called The Anarchist Revelation, in which he argued for the creation of a new religion based on anarchist values.
These ideas were expanded upon a year later in The Stifled Soul of Humankind.
They reached their fullest expression (so far!) in The Withway, in which he draws on Confucianism, Taoism, animism, classical anarchism, depth psychology, poetry, literature and quantum physics in order to produce a perfect fusion of spiritual and political philosophy.
I was so inspired by this book that I wrote extensively about the ideas contained therein, and I ended up conducting several interviews with Paul.
The result was a book(let) called There is Nothing More Powerful Than An Idea Whose Time Has Come, which was published by Winter Oak Press.
Since then, the philosopher W.D. James has become an active participant in the same intellectual project as Paul Cudenec and I.
His book(let) Egalitarian Anti-Modernism, which explores similar themes, was also published by Winter Oak Press, and he has made major contributions to Nevermore since.
WHAT ARE THE THREE QUESTIONS?
Much of my work over the past six months have centred on the three questions which any mythology must answer:
What are we?
Where did we come from?
Where are we going?
These are the questions that we must answer if we want to create a new culture.
As Ronald Wright put it:
Myth is an arrangement of the past, whether real or imagined, in patterns that reinforce a culture’s deepest values and aspirations … Myths are so fraught with meaning that we live and die by them. They are the maps by which cultures navigate through time.
In an anthropological sense, there is no such thing as a culture without a mythology. However, the Mythos of any given culture may well be imperceptible to members of that culture, for the same reason that water is imperceptible to fish.
The Mythos of any given culture is not seen as Myth by members of that culture, but as Reality.
I believe that if we want to create a new political-spiritual reality, we must work towards creating a new Mythos which encodes the values that we want to pass on to future generations.
I insist that the project of revolutionary political organizing is largely a matter of creating a new culture, and that creating a new culture is a matter of creating a new Mythos.
To save the world, we must tell better stories. Pretty simple, right?
And without further ado, I present (drum roll, please)…
AN INTERVIEW WITH PAUL CUDENEC
CROW - Where Do We Come From?
PAUL - We don't come from anywhere, in that we are part of the universal organism that has always and always will exist, given that time itself is embraced within its multi-dimensional Self.
CROW - What Are We?
PAUL - We, as individuals and as a species, are a blossom that has appeared on that universal tree. We are one of the ways in which the intangible Whole exists on the physical level - breathes, feels, touches, loves, thinks.
CROW - Where Are We Going?
PAUL - Ultimately, we are going to disappear, both as individuals and as a species (and indeed as a planetary organism) - at least in the limited terms of the extension of linear time. We should be humble enough to recognize that. What we can do is to be ourselves - or to become ourselves against the vitaphobic force of our contemporary society. We all know, deep down, that there is enormous potential in the human spirit, but somehow we have been cut off from that. The projection of our sense of promise onto the physical and purely quantitative level of Technik has blinded us to the possibility and desirability of an authentic progress of a qualitative and spiritual kind. Who knows where that could take us?
CROW - There is a dark history to technophilia. Italian Futurism, which was an avant-garde art movement that overlapped with anarchism, extolled a feverish, erotic excitement about Technological Progress. Many of those Futurists later became fascists. Could you speak a bit about the historic connections between technophilia and fascism? What was the relationship between the Italian futurists and anarchism?
PAUL - I suppose that what Italian futurists and anarchists had in common, initially at least, was a deep hatred for corrupt bourgeois society and all its hypocrisy. There was a desire for cleansing destruction, for a sweeping-away of everything ostentatious and ornate in the search for a certain hard aesthetic simplicity. I think that tendency still lives on in the wing of anarchism to which neither of us belongs! From this perspective, the fervent embrace of modernity and the machine is regarded as striking a blow against everything "reactionary" and oppressive in capitalist society. However, obviously we know now that it is a trap. It is no coincidence that the futurist-influenced Fascists in Italy, like the "modernising" Nazis in Germany and Communists in Russia, have all been shown (notably by Sutton) to have been funded by Rothschild-linked bankers. Industrial "development" is the basis for the extension of criminocratic control. They lend the money to governments for "essential", "innovative", and "forward-looking" schemes, at lucrative rates of interest (and involving serious levels of influence over government policy), and, at the same time, control and profit from the global extraction, processing, manufacture, and transport of the materials needed for these schemes. It's a vast racket! Ways of thinking that encourage social license for the continuation of this racket (whether 20th-century futurism or 21st-century transhumanism) are obviously very useful for the criminocracy and thus heavily promoted. Fascism and communism have been as much part of the industrial racket as the Western model known as "capitalism".
CROW - I have a question about the practical considerations regarding how we present our philosophy. If we are opposed to Technophilia, and the opposite of Technophilia is Technophobia, then we open ourselves up to the criticism that we are motivated by an irrational fear of the future. Personally, I don't deny being a technophobe. There are many manifestations of Technik, such as the gene-editing of designer babies, which just give me the heebie-jeebies. I have a gut reaction against this manifestation of Technik, and any intellectual defense of this gut reaction would be a rationalization. So I acknowledge that there is something irrational in my sense that it is morally wrong to tamper with the human genome in such a way. I am not able to be truly objective on this subject. Do you feel that we should embrace Technophobia as a label or should we attempt to present our opposition to Technik in other terms? What would be a strategic way to present an anti-tech position?
PAUL - I would say that we have to strongly challenge the idea that the future is necessarily going to see a continuation of techno-industrial expansion. We need to make it clear that it is not a question of being afraid of "the future", but of actively desiring and promoting a different future, one that is far removed from the criminocrats' preferred scenario. Likewise, we have to explain that we do not have a "phobia" regarding technology, but an understanding of what it is and how it is used by the ruling mafia. Behind our position, and our important gut feelings, is an alternative vision based on an understanding of our belonging to nature and on our wish to see humankind continue its unfolding as a healthy part of that organism. This is what we need to communicate.
CROW - Have you encountered the term downwinger?
PAUL - No.
CROW - So, the term downwinger is the opposite of the term Upwinger. Upwingers was the title of a fervently technophilic futurist manifesto published in the 1970s. I haven't read this book, but if I understand the gist of it correctly, it's a rearticulation of the Buzz Lightyear philosophy of “Up, Up, and Away!”
So the term Downwinger is meant to be the opposite of that. It also works on another level, as the political spectrum is usually organized along two axes - if Left-winger and Right-winger describe the political stances along one axis, the upwinger and downwinger could be used to describe political stances along the Authoritarian-Libertarian axis. What do you think of that? The word “down” also has the connotations of being ready for action. Could the term downwinger possibly catch on?
PAUL - Yes, why not? We certainly need to flip the perceived political dividing line by 90 degrees, so that it becomes clear to everyone that to be opposed to the centralized, life-hating, freedom-denying, valueless global system is to favor decentralization, natural ways of living and autonomy, underpinned by strong ethical or moral values. This fundamental contrast has nothing to do with the "left-right" divide.
CROW - I have long considered Jacques Ellul to be one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. It is strange that he is not better known amongst anarchists, and I think that this has everything to do with the phenomenon of Anti-Christian bigotry amongst Leftists. Jacques Ellul wrote a book called Anarchy and Christianity after his application to join the Situationist International was rejected on the basis that he was a Christian. For two reasons, I consider this a perfect example of Leftist Anti-Christian bigotry. First, because Ellul was a Protestant in a Catholic country, meaning that he was a religious minority, not a participant. Furthermore, I can discern little which is specifically Christian about his thought. Like Marshall McLuhan, who was a churchgoing Irish Catholic, Ellul kept his political and religious thought quite compartmentalized. That said, I am not an expert either on Ellul or on the Situationist International. Was there a significant ideological difference between Ellul and the Situationists, or were the members of the SI simply bigoted against Christians? And whose analysis do you think has ultimately held up better?
PAUL - Apparently, the SI refused to work with Ellul purely from anti-Christian bias, which was a great shame. He himself saw the strong similarities in their respective approaches and a convergence of the two schools of thought would have been powerful. This close-mindedness is still very prevalent in anarchist and leftist circles, as you know. Any hint of God or even spirit and the conversation is over. I very much appreciate the Situationist outlook, and particularly the post-Situationist move towards more explicit anti-industrialism and the broader understanding of the system and its machinations ("conspiracy theory") exemplified by Gianfranco Sanguinetti. A weakness with Ellul's emphasis on Technik is perhaps that it could be interpreted as a force of its own, a Frankenstein's monster that has run out of control and is continuing to wreak havoc in our world through the momentum of its own logic, rather than as the tool of the criminocracy that it so clearly is.
The links to the books are broken and it looks like a world is missing in "they all the same question".
The Empire’s technology and technik do not actually work - certainly not as advertised. Their arsenal is mostly psyoppery with a strong slathering of poisons, poop, and radiation (hence the CBRN acronym). They want to believe and many of them are so stupid they do believe their own BS. (I think they’ve brain-damaged themselves to such an extent at this point with their own poisons that many of them do literally believe their own nonsense.) Many - perhaps most - folk opposing The Empire also apparently believe The Empire’s self-augmenting bullshit. This is a problem. It’s a fucking Potemkin village. It’s mostly held up by unwitting antagonists. This is also by design. Let’s all just walk away walk away to The Withway.