The Negation of the Real
24 April 2023
If you want to impose a totalitarian system, you have a problem on your hands: reality. The real is in your way and will eventually veto your project. Far sooner, people who can perceive reality will step in and prevent you from taking society over a cliff. Therefore, the only way to install a totalitarian system is to negate the real in the minds of those over whom you would rule. This is accomplished by creating an interpretive frame that deliberately causes people to misunderstand reality, sometimes called a “second reality” or “pseudoreality,” or even a “hyperreality,” which loses all contact with reality through its images and constructions. The totalitarian system “works” and would only work in that false image of reality. In his first talk at the Mere Simulacrity conference in Phoenix, Arizona, in December 2022, James Lindsay presents the idea and mechanism of negating the real to replace it with a hyperreal simulation in which totalitarianism can be accomplished. This, he argues, enables the installation of the Esoteric cult religion needed to advance the tyranny. Join him to understand how the Secret Religions of the West have slowly brought us to the brink of this disaster.
The Gnostic Parasite
28 April 2023
In his first talk at the Mere Simulacrity conference in Phoenix, Arizona, in December 2022, James Lindsay introduced the idea that there is a long, running current of “Secret Religions” in the West. These are the Modern and Postmodern manifestations of the Esoteric Religions like Gnosticism and Hermeticism as they developed through what we might consider the Middle Age’s “New Age” period, famously codified by G.W.F. Hegel. In the second lecture in his “Secret Religions of the West” series, Lindsay explains that these “philosophies,” including Marxism, are actually mystical Esoteric cult religions posing as science, economics, and politics, and that their success in infiltrating our religions, societies, and institutions is down to their intrinsically parasitical nature. They mimic and illegitimately claim the language and structure of the things they pretend to be and bring destruction and madness into the void they create. Join him to understand not only this but how the “handshaking” balance between Reason and Faith is the only way to stop Gnosis.
As Below, So Above
5 May 2023
In the Esoteric Religion known as Hermeticism, there are a number of core principles of operation, perhaps most famously the Principle of Correspondence. It’s often worded “As above, so below,” but this is only half of the principle. The full expression is “As above, so below; as below, so above,” which outlines a snake eating its own tail as a driver of Hermetic alchemical magic. In his third lecture for the Mere Simulacrity conference in Phoenix, Arizona, in December 2022, James Lindsay explains how this principle is a driver of what he calls the “Secret Religions of the West” in an elucidating way. He contends that Karl Marx was the first to realize that the principle of correspondence must be applied from the bottom. Working on the world (as below) to change it (so above), and then the world (as above), changed, will socialize and condition people (so below) to accept the changes and make them “actual.” Marx called these two dynamics “praxis” and the “inversion of praxis,” but now we can expose them clearly for what they are. Join Lindsay to understand the mechanism behind the activism in many evils, including Marxism, Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory and feminism, Modern empire building, and even right-wing reactionary response, which plays its crucial role in this ongoing dynamic of destruction.
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New Discourses