John Michael Greer | Political Sorcery, Will, & Weaponized Magic

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00:51 Which means you'll unfortunately never hear my voice again. 1930s President Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed the nation through a series of radio broadcast known as the fireside chats His aim was to reassure the common man that our society would recover from its troubled times. I'm Greg Carlwood Rock me like a hurricane, Hireside Chatters. How we doing out there? From sunny San Diego I'm Greg Carlwood and as crazy as reality has gotten it's important to remember that we didn't get here by accident the sorcerers of social engineering and magicians of media magic have been working for decades to get us right where they want us

01:50 Poorly educated, addicted to the system and oftentimes cheering on our own demise as the political class have kept us divided derailed and distracted from our own slowly declining standards while whispering in our ears that everything is gonna be just fine. If you were paying attention, we've had many years where it didn't matter who you voted for. You got more of the same globalist and corporate-friendly policies And while some of us don't see the fruits of the Trump presidency really being much different From the start of his campaign right on through to the end of his presidency It was certainly an era of strange energy And even though you can see elements of magical working within any political campaign, from the logos and symbols that are carefully crafted for them to the mantras and slogans chanted by their supporters. The 2016 election in the following years saw magical manipulation attempts taken to new heights

02:44 4chan users playing around with meme magic and hyper sigils drenched in synchronicity and watching cause-and-effect first hand as the Clinton campaign tanks right after she publicly denounced the 4chan frog god. The holding of someone like Marina Abramovic under the microscope, And four years of chatter about liberal binding spells from the Magic Resistance in Witches for Hillary From the election right on through to postpartum impeachment Regardless of which side of it all you come down on, there's no doubt that magic as a theme has been more potent and paid attention to than any previous time I can recall. And these are the topics discussed in one of the latest books from John Michael Greer entitled The King in Orange- The Magical and Occult Roots of Political Power

03:31 He's been our guest here once before, but for the unfamiliar John Michael Greer is a highly respected writer blogger and independent scholar who has written more than 70 books including The Long Descent Circles of Power and the award-winning New Encyclopedia of the Occult. He's an initiate in a variety of hermetic masonic and druidic lineages and he even served for 12 years as Grand Arch Druid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America He's one of my favorite people and that curious crossroads between magic and politics is certainly something I'm psyched to explore. The prolific, esoteric author of parapolitical goodness Master Magician and the grand arch druid of the digital age John Michael Greer welcome back to The Higher Side Thank you very much for having me on again

04:18 Yes yes i am such a fan of your work and to have you here for any reason is a real treat but I'm sure it's no surprise to this audience that when the publisher sent me The King in Orange my knee-jerk reaction was that, because it's you i had to read and you got me is really good covers a lot of ground and its true that in our lifetimes where do we see the magical toolbox most applied america well advertising and politics right.

04:54 Those are the two most visible places. Yes, and for people who maybe don't quite see it talk to us a little bit more about this overlap what are the most potent magical tools we typically see during election season? Okay, let's start with a basic definition of magic here because a lot of people you mentioned magic to them and they think oh Harry Potter No Harry Potter has as much to do with real magic as young Frankenstein has to do with real science. Okay And so Magic was defined by Dion fortune who was one of the major theoreticians of magic in the 20th century also a crackerjack practitioner as the art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will.

05:39 Now, if that doesn't sound like lightning bolts streaming out of a magic wand you're starting to get the idea. Magic is the art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will we can see that at work very effectively take a standard bit of modern sorcery let's say a billboard advertising fizzy brown sugar water Of course it's not what they call it but well you know what I'm talking about That's all it is It's fizzy brown sugar water Well rot your teeth and empty your wallet And that's all it does But that's not what they're showing on that billboard, as you well know. What they're showing on that billboard is three or four people young handsome and pretty dressed in a style appropriate to people who have some money in their pockets all of them having a grand time in some kind of attractive setting and all of them are clutching cans of fizzy brown sugar water now

06:34 What's the point of this, rationally speaking? Nothing. But magic does not work with the rational mind it works with the deeper non-rational layers in the mind you look at that billboard and You get the image in your mind that if only you had that can of fizzy brown sugar water you would be handsome or pretty as the case may be you would be well to do you would have these fun friends around Around you, you'd be in this fascinating location. You'll be having a grand time. Absolute nonsense of course! But that's what sticks in your mind So the purveyors of fizzy brown sugar water have been doing that since day one Of course That's the way they sell it That's the way they get you to spend money on something that tastes rather less good than carbonated prune juice And it works

07:20 The fact that fizzy brown sugar water is a major item of trade these days shows you just how well that kind of thing works. Now, let's take the same thing and apply it to politics because it applies to politics. Let's say you're trying to market a washed up political hack who has no original ideas, no charisma, no particular good reason why people should vote for her but she wants to be president. Her name, of course, is Hillary Clinton How are you going to pitch this to the voter? You're going to do exactly what her flacks and flunkies did. You're going to come up with the logo Hillary, erasing by the way they named Clinton so people didn't think of Bill Clinton in the cascading scandals at that period. You're going to show all of these pictures very carefully taken to make her look interesting, to make her looks thoughtful. You're gonna splash these all over the place. You're gonna have the logos. You're gonna have the slogans

08:18 I'm with her, all this kind of stuff. It's all cheap sorcery and the reason i call it cheap sorcery and we can get deeper into that as we go but magic varies depending on how broadly aimed it is if you're trying to influence your own life you can be very subtle You can look at specific psychological triggers in your own life, you can do things to focus in one way or another, you can actually do some very elegant stuff and change your life very dramatically for the better if you choose to. If you're trying to influence a country of 400 million people, you don't have that freedom. You have to splash all these lowest common denominator things. You have to go for the cheap sorcery or you have to go for these thought stoppers and bland plastic logos if you don't have a product worth selling. That's the only way you can get people buy it." And so we saw that

09:14 in immense detail, endlessly repeated. Not just by Clinton of course during the run up to the election everyone thought it was going to be Clinton versus Jeb Bush and both of them did exactly the same things Clinton had her Hillary jeb had his jab and they were you know nothing equally blend sound points. Making equally bland noises striking equally planned poses trying to convince the voters that they will be a little less of a total failure and disappointment than the other person right and i'm curious who

09:53 knows what they're doing and how much of it is subconscious like other people involved who would call it magic i mean it doesn't seem like its to extreme the say even beyond just getting votes during election season this system has kind of weaponized magic against citizens in a lot of different ways or not curious if there's anyone at the top their who, is aware of the principles of magic and exactly you know how they using. Oh, they have definitely if you read books on public relations. If you read books on advertising and so on and snoop around a university department of communications, you'll find a fair knowledge of the kind of bargain basement understanding the sort of thing that I described a moment ago as cheap sorcery. They have a very clear idea of how to look for emotional hooks, how to find desires that you can manipulate and distort

10:47 to make people think that Zebrone Sugar Water or Hillary Clinton, or any other tacky low-quality product is really what you want. Or at least it's close enough that you're willing to buy it? There is a gap between that and the kind of understanding you'll find in serious works of magic because serious works of magic don't just work on their lowest common denominator basis whereas advertisers have to. So I don't know whether they have any clear idea of the positive dimensions of this stuff, how we can use this on yourself in a constructive fashion to become smarter, to become more focused, to achieve your goals. Certainly they show no sign of doing that in their own lives. If you look at the lives of the rich, the famous, the powerful, if you look at the same cascade of failures as everyone else

11:39 You don't see people who are self-actualizing. You don't see people who are breaking free of their psychological programming and doing something amazing with their lives, you see Bill Gates. Yeah and Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos both guys going through divorce some say for financial loophole reasons but I also wouldn't be surprised if their lives aren't all that happy in love filled either I don't know i'm not a psychologist only play one on tv but if you look at the recent photos of belinda gates in the last couple of years she looks miserable, right now that all herself really you know she really looks profoundly unhappy and i think probably.

12:22 Admittedly, putting up with Bill Gates is probably a major challenge for anyone. But I don't think that her life has always cracked up to be despite all that money. And so that leads me to think that in fact all these people have Are the principles of cheap sorcery all they have are the ways of manipulating people. They don't have a liberatory dimension they don't have the self actualizing dimensions aspect that magic that enable you to become something new and be into something amazing with your life and that's really sad, perfect course though. Right yes and brought examples like soda marketing and political campaigns i mean those are great for people to kind of start wrapping their head around magical thinking but i am curious what your thoughts are on the highest level of sophistication that we might see in terms of cultural manipulation through magical means me how deep does it get house sophisticated doesn't get

13:24 It gets very deep. How sophisticated? That's a complicated question Most of the really powerful cultural magic you see right now works by exclusion. It works by shoving things out, and that's actually a very subtle technique. You'll find that in your own life if for example if you're trying to achieve something, if you can exclude the thought of failure and just focus everything on the goal, you have much better chance of succeeding. What these folks are doing however is excluding any ideas that would suggest the world is not what they say it is that life is not what they say it is, and that maybe they're just manipulating you so they can get rich and powerful. And so ideas like those that we're discussing right now are among the things that get very forcefully excluded from respectable discussions, respectable periodicals and publications and websites

14:22 if you happen to be, as I am a practicing occultist. If you're into this stuff very deeply it's really charming in a certain odd way to go to say mainstream news website or something really plastic and bland like the BBC website for example and then go elsewhere where people are actually talking about the inner structure of what's going on and that gap huge gaping holes and what's going on in the world that the BBC is not talking about. And it's not that they're using propaganda to say, well this isn't happening, they are just erasing it. There's a lot of that going on right now and of course that has been standard practice for long time, that one of basic ways

15:06 keep manipulative sorcery work but there's more of it now the news has gotten really bland late i don't know if you know other than screaming up the current virus panic. And do this to be afraid of not to be afraid of the various things being trotted out but it's very planned You have these major media outlets that are basically doing tabloid personality pieces. And here's this heartwarming story about, you know nine year old blah blah blah as though there is no actual news going on and so I think one of the things we're seeing here is a very relatively sophisticated use of magic distraction

15:44 keep people thinking about the heartwarming nine-year old and the 14 things that are going to kill you next Thursday if you don't keep buying products and voting for the same failed candidates, they're really having to do a lot of distraction these days. And that itself is interesting thing to watch. Right right and that is a big part of the book just that what this trump energy tapped into was this big welling up of conflict between what you define as the wage class in the salary class and that.

16:21 Is something that for many years is like just talk about anything but this talk about race talk about gender do not bring up this class issue and he brought it up because he was throwing a hail mary pass because maybe you needed that and man did it stick in agree with you that that is, a big part of it and as you say this media cycle they have to have a new panic because now the bad energy is out there it seems like. They will do anything to not talk about it tell us about that thing i don't wanna talk about. Okay let's start with that basic notion of classes these days people talk about class is the think who marxism which you know is really rather sad because marks took, other useful set of categories and made them stupid we can get into that later if u like

17:11 What I am noting in my book and the analysis that basically drives this is different groups of people have common interests based on various things. We have gender, we have race or ethnicity would be a better label for it. We have religion, we have all these things but also very importantly look at how do you make your money? In the United States these days it's mostly one of four things. It's either investment You have invested money from which you get regular payments of dividends or what have you. Your investment, we can call that the investment class. Or you get a salary with benefits call them a salary class, or you get an hourly wage with usually no benefits. That's the wage class or you get a government welfare payment and that's how you make most of your money. That's welfare class. Those four classes — the investment class, the salary class, the wage class, and the welfare class — people in each of those classes have a lot of interests in common. They have a lot of experiences in common. They represent significant divisions of American society

18:12 And the more you pay attention to these, the more you realize how much talk is being used to distract people from that simple division. Now there's a history to that and it's a fairly recent one. I imagine everyone of our listeners remembers the Occupy Wall Street business a number years back. There was all this talk about how the investment class and the upper end of the salary class were raking in immense profits while everyone else was losing ground at a horrific pace. That scared the bejesus out of Wall Street and the wealthier generally, and it was immediately after that you'll notice historically... You'll notice that's when we had critical race theory, we had critical gender theory, we had all this fixation on everything but classes. Don't talk about income disparity, talk about race

19:05 And so that has been the basic distraction for the wealthy. You notice how many of the people who are pushing race agenda right now, they're not people of color? They're very well-to-do white folks and they're doing it so that people don't look at them and say yeah, where do you fit in terms of who makes how much money Where do you fit in terms of these class divisions that I've mentioned? Now, let's take it another step. Take those four classes – the investment class, the salary class, the wage class and the welfare class over the last 50 years say how have they done what happened to them what has been their process in history okay

19:47 The investment class actually has had a little bit of rough road because, I mean 50 years ago you could actually get decent interest on the CD. Nowadays it's fraction 1% usually but I remember when you get 10%. 50 years ago, they have managed mostly by manufacturing strange new investment things. You have investment bubbles like the cyber currency business but there's all kinds of stuff like that going on to kind of keep them well-fed. The salary class has done extremely well. Salaries keep on ratcheting up every year benefits become more elaborate. The bottom end of the salary class loses a chunk every so often but you know they get thrown out

20:28 The welfare class is still trudging along where it was 50 years ago, standing in lines going through the more than full-time work of dealing with an intrusive federal bureaucracy and endless restrictions and being isolated by various ways from full participation in international life. The wage class That's the big one because over the last 50 years, the wage class in the United States has been destroyed. Fifty years ago if you were wage-class, you had one wage-class salary and a family of four, you could afford a home, you could afford a car, you could afford three square meals a day, you could afford healthcare, you could afford all the necessities of life and maybe even have a little leftover to buy some Christmas presents for your kids, okay? Now if

21:11 If you're a family of four with one wage class income is living on the street. There has been an immense collapse in the standard of living, the wage class in this country over the last 50 years. It is the biggest, most explosive and the most unmentionable political fact of our time. And that's the reason that Trump got into the White House Yes and i really did love the book but you are kinder to trump then i probably would be but that's fine with that fear that you mentioned at the top when occupy did get all that energy well is it possible that a plan was crafted to channel that occupy anti party energy into a political cul-de-sac because i operate from this position that politics are so controlled,

21:59 for the people pulling the strings, there are no surprises. So is it possible that after this long string of even globalist policies that they sense the anger and frustration welling up and said let's give them four years of this reality star troll? And they'll be begging us for business as usual which is kind of what happened isn't it? Well except it isn't yes we got a reality star troll as president Yes, he came out of the rich class. I'll talk about that in historical context later But the result was not that people in general were begging for business as usual, quite the contrary. We have a country that's much more divided than it was. We have a country where it's much more divided on class lines than it used to be and we certainly have the salary class desperately begging for business as usual. They want the boot in their face at this point. You have important elements of the welfare class, ditto. You have important elements of the investment class who are still laughing all the way

22:59 But you also have, at this point entire states that are practically in revolt. You have Florida, you have Texas and half a dozen other states that are busily adopting what we might as well call Trumpista policies right now. You have half a dozen Republican figures from the populist end of things who were very clearly gearing up to run for the presidency on a Trump ticket In twenty twenty four so if in fact they were planning on for years of reality tv troll and then everyone would be tired of it. They massively miscalculated but i don't agree that nothing is ever a surprise one of the things that got my analysis here, isn't awareness that the rich can be very stupid

23:44 Partly, that's been as a young person growing up. I knew a lot of people who happened to run in certain circles that attracted some people who were the children of wealth and in some cases very substantial wealth. These were people who are too dumb to get out of the rain. They had been taken care of they had been pampered they had had people running around after them to wipe their noses at every moment and they literally have no idea how to live without constant help this is our ruling class They're not as smart if they want you to think they are and so. It is entirely plausible that they might have decided, well you know if we just run this Trump thing past them that everyone will be so horrified but it didn't work that way. And I think you're going to find that in the years ahead as the populist movement to which Trump gave voice becomes more and more of a force in the political scene as becoming on local and state level that the existing order isn't going to have to adjust its policies dramatically

24:47 Will the same people, by and large keep the same amount of money in the same amount of control? Of course. That's normal for a complex society but will the policies that have devastated America's wage class remain fixed to the way they were until 2016? That's already changed And we're likely to see further changes and possibly some fairly dramatic ones as the existing structure has to morph, to deal with increasing pressure from a variety of sources. Well those are good points and you do talk a lot about the democrats and the globalist inability to own up to anything in there never gonna say that well out of the problems now are results of our previous policies and maybe that's why people are angry so they do spin it as saying all trump supporters are

25:41 rude, crude racists because they will say anything to not admit that maybe there is real anger from the wage class that has been squeezed. And I'm definitely with you there. Yeah exactly well the thing is right after the 2016 election at that time I lived in the North Central Appalachians. I lived in flyover country and one of the things I did was I talked to a lot of people who voted for Trump it was not hard to find them This was in a county that usually votes Democrat, 70% Trumped that in the 2016 election. It's an area that has had to deal with basically no jobs since offshoring got rid of the local factories in 1970s so it's understandable but I asked them why did you vote for Trump? These are people who know these are people who

26:29 I mean, in terms of like well were they all racist? No they were not. I knew some who were! I know a couple people who i have good reason to think we're actually card carrying members the Ku Klux Klan But I also know people who were involved in chasing the clan out of town when they came on a recruitment drive. OK, so the usual media slur does not qualify here is what I heard from people when they said, OK, this is why I voted for Trump number one was the danger of war People on the left, people in the Democratic Party have been trying to erase since the election happened just how bellicose, just how much saber-rappling Hillary Clinton did. The woman who was responsible for the civil war in Libya, the woman who is responsible for so many other human rights violations... She was talking about forcing a no fly zone in Syria and the teeth of the Russian Air Force. Bright idea!

27:26 In flyover country, this is not a joke. In flyover country most families have somebody in the armed forces because that's the only way you can get out and get a college education to do something like that okay? Do something better with your life." And so people were lifelong Democrats who listened to Hillary Clinton rattling her saber and boasting about being responsible for the assassination of Muammar Gaddafi and so on, and was going if I vote for her my kid is gonna come back in a body bag. Not only that they were probably right. So they voted for Trump. That's That's thing one. Thing two was the Obamacare disaster, with all the spin and all the media noise about that, the flat reality was for many people... I'm just one of them, okay? In order to get the lowest quality plan available in this data at what time planned with a $6000 deductible and 40% copay, I would have had to pay more per month than my mortgage for this useless

28:23 That was affecting millions of people. Those who weren't in the salary class and so their employer didn't pay for it, and those who weren't in the welfare class and the government didn't pay for it they were getting screwed! And nobody in the media would talk about it. And nobody in the campaign would talk about except Donald Trump, he said we're going to eliminate this so millions of people voted for him for that reason. Okay, think three jobs course this is the one that everyone flips out about because The United States economy has come to depend on driving down wage class wages to the starvation level. That's how we balance our national books, by offshoring jobs thus getting – you know, driving down the availability of jobs by inputting illegal immigrants not legal ones. Legal ones can bargain. Legal ones have some rights

29:15 They bring in illegal immigrants because they have no rights. And if they give you any trouble, you drop a dime to La Migra and they're gone the next day so they can be used drive down wages to starvation levels. And of course, the third aspect is metastatic government regulation all this regulation whether it's supposedly for the environment or possibly for something else it benefits big corporations at the expense of small business talk to anybody who runs a small business and you will get an earful And small business generates more jobs than the big corporate firms do, dollar for dollar. So all three of those were responsible for getting rid of jobs and driving down the availability of jobs and leaving so much of America in a state of poverty and misery. Okay? Those three...and then fourth was from another round to Democrats who were incensed by the way the Democratic Party ripped off Bernie Sanders

30:07 the way they rigged the nomination campaign so that Hillary Clinton got the nomination. If it had been honest, I think we all know Bernie Sanders would have been the nominee in 2016 and I think as indeed they did he would have wanted to walk, he would've easily beaten Donald Trump But because Hillary Clinton had her attack of ambition, and because the Democratic Party leadership did not want somebody like Sanders in office. They wanted their nice compliant corporate flax they screwed him out of the nomination. And an enormous number of people that I knew, a large number of Democrats were going if we sit still for this, the left wing of the Democratic Party is permanently irrelevant. They're just gonna keep on running one corporate flack after another and say vote the party not the person. So those are four reasons that people I knew actually voted for Donald Trump

31:04 None of that, of course made the media because nobody in power wanted to talk about those four things. So instead it was racism. It's all got to be racism And they've just kept it up ever since. In fact, I'm collecting bad reviews from the King and Orange by the way, Publishers Weekly had a great one where the little person was going well this is rehashes the same excuses for voting for Donald Trump you could tell little person had literally gotten about six pages into the book and then flung it across the room which to be honest if the reaction I wanted Yeah you know the kind of corporate stooge's who work for public weekly are not the people at whom this book is aimed to people who can think. Yes yes,

31:51 And I like what you're saying there. Yeah, those do seem to be the good four categories of major reasons that people voted for him and in terms of regulations like that was the theme of 2020 and is a lot of people's concerns now when it comes to the coronavirus mania and the vaccine mania people are worried about what they're going to be able to do, what rights they'll have to travel? And it is funny how a lot of this has benefited the corporate class and investment class and funny how is only the small businesses that really close nothing corporate in my neighborhood clothes it was just the farm to table restaurants, the farmers market all that kind of stuff. Exactly exactly yeah this isn't about the regulatory state the big boys can always hire lobbyists and lawyers and they can hire firms to find all the loopholes there great at

32:48 They love government regulation because it allows them to squeeze out their competition. Whereas, yeah the small restaurants, the family run firms, the farmers market all this kind of stuff suffered horribly during the coronavirus panic And that should be a major clue to people when they're analyzing what is going on it's like funny how its only that wage class and the welfare class in just, people without power who do all the sacrifice same with change as you talk to her we could talk about that for a long time yet watch the number of celebrities

33:25 who fly in their carbon-spewing private jets all over the world to talk about how working class guys who mine coal are responsible for everything that's wrong with the climate. It's really quite funny to watch, right? The only thing funnier is if you actually confront them about their own carbon use back during the whole peak oil business... I made a habit of doing this and watching him squirm Or get angry, get belligerent pound the table because their lifestyle as far as they were concerned. Their lifestyles non-negotiable everyone else has to give up so that they can keep on using it as much carbon as they want Oh right absolutely and then there major corporations are doing the majority of the damage Nestle's stealing water from California when we have a crisis I mean its always

34:18 Really the corporations are the ones who have the resources to actually do this serious damage there is a pretty powerful machine and really make it then i think takes like the full weight of major multinational corporation like coca cola or something, or the oil industry as opposed to how much water i put on my garden. Well, individual choices can add up but it takes a lot of individual choices to add up even a small corporation. So yeah you get this kind of nonsense eternally There's a lovely little Latin tag that used to be used for people like private investigators and so on. Cui bono? Who benefits, to whom do the goodies go? Okay. Always ask yourself cui bono who gets the goodies. And when you're looking at a situation and especially in media hoopla whether it's the virus panic whether it's global warming who is benefiting from the measures that are being proposed now

35:18 This does not mean that there isn't necessarily, there aren't problems. I mean the world is full of problems. There's a lot of damage that has been done to the climate and ecology and you know people do die from the current virus but look at those and say okay to what extent we have disaster capitalism? To use Naomi Klein term. To what extent do we have disaster capitalism work here find a disaster and find a way to market yourself as the solution especially when your cause. Yes I've heard you also talk about how the system reinforces itself with loyal servants in the pipeline and what can be said about that about this university pipeline and just why we never really do get any sort of radical outsiders in positions of power it's very comfortable path for these people.

36:08 Okay, every hierarchical society, every authoritarian society depends on having an endless supply of flunkies. And they tend to have all kinds of titles but what they are the servants, the lackeys, the toadies and flunkies of the very rich. And you have to have them to run a complex society And the usual way of doing it to establish some kind of educational system that works as a filter because they think you do not want. The thing you absolutely don't want if you were a ruling class, if you want to have a nice comfortable life where your flunky scurry around making everything nice for you and you just sit in collect the wealth

36:54 you need to make sure that none of the people in the flunky class have any ideas that might destabilize the system. So, the way you typically do that is an educational institution and in the United States, that's done by the universities and especially by the top-level universities with things like the Ivy League and so on And that's what they are. They're filtration system, you get into it... How do you get into a good college these days? You get into a good college by going through a grueling course of completely reshaping your life starting an elementary school. You have to take all the right classes, have all the right hobbies, engage in all the right activities, do everything so that you can jump over that bar and get in

37:37 That's your goal. If you want to be in that circle of wealthy flunkyhood, that's what you have to do and there are millions of kids who are trying to do it all the time. They want that wealth or they're taught...they're told you need to do this. Their parents typically will often pressure them into it but this is what they do. They literally make their lives nothing but what the campus recruiters want And once they get to campus, if they themselves come from money, they literally cannot flunk out. We all recall I think the stories that circulated from George W Bush's college days where he was simply drunk and lazy most of the time and they hired people to go take his tests for him and so on. That's standard. If you're one of the ones who is coming in from outside from an upper middle class standpoint, you can't afford that

38:27 Every moment at college is spent position yourself jockeying for the hope of breaking through into the circle of lunkied and. It happens to a significant amount others get excluded one of the major factors in how many days of course the whole driving force behind the woke. Business is precisely that it's a way of competition if we ever choose simply with playing your absolute loyalty to whatever the convention was and happened to be this week, And so it's very popular on campus because that's how you show that once you are hired by your corporate masters, you will say and do whatever they tell you.

39:08 So it's a very effective, very popular. But the thing is before there was woke, there was politically correct. Before there was politically correct, there were other things. There's always some set of behavioral demands, some set of demands and belief where you have to demonstrate that you're willing to believe they're totally absurd in order that your future masters will know that you will do whatever they tell you to do. And so you have this filtration process. The danger to the system, of course happens because there are always more people who want to get into the circle of flunkiedom than there are slots for. And in a society like ours, for various complicated reasons, the number of people who were getting the education and getting the preparation and training for those positions, who end up not getting them?

39:58 that number goes steadily uphill with each year that passes. We have, of course the universities who are trying to amass wealth they're non-profits not for their administrators they're not and by maximizing people saying that every American child should go to university and if you want to be a garbage man you have to get a master's degree in waste management or what have you great welfare program for college professors You have this expansion of the pool of potential flunkies and you have increasingly on the one hand people who don't make the cut. On the other hand, people choose not to make the cut who say I'm not going to do this i can't stand this any longer

40:43 And they are high explosive. A lot of what went on during the 2016 election and a lot of the ferment that is still underway now is caused because there's so many people who have that managerial training, they have that kind of background, they understand the distribution power in our society and their second, either they're not willing or not able...the flunky thing is not a path they're gonna follow And so they become a dissident factor. They become potential leadership for alternatives normally when you have a major revolution, whether it's violent or otherwise. It's because of class of that kind has built up and we've got a huge one right now

41:27 Well said cheers to a lot of that and it seems like maybe they're not being enough seats at the tables are happy accident for the rest of us you don't have a ton of power because those people who had a little bit or were on the cusp of it does would be our imperfect allies if we really wanna get any kind of change. Oh yeah, and in fact thats normally what happens you see it doesn't happen fast and I dont think were gonna see quite yet but but typically what happens to a society in that kind of situation. And especially if the ruling elite is carrying out policies that are self-defeating, that are destroying many people's lives, that are driving lots of people into poverty and misery. And because as I said, the rich are not a smart as they want you to think this normally happens. France is a great example. France before the French Revolution, you had the nobility and you had the king and you had this vast number of people in the upper classes who were

42:24 convinced of their own superiority to everybody. And they were completely clueless, and they were playing their power games back and forth, and they had their vast armies of flunkies, and there were all these other people who failed at flunkiedom many of whom ended up becoming major figures during after the revolution And what happens is that as the country runs itself into the ground, as France say ran itself into bankruptcy. It ran itself into...because there was major problems between too much government spending and the wealthy didn't want to pay enough covered taxes does sound familiar and problems with endless overseas involvements with military

43:06 and huge defense budgets. Again, we're kind of in familiar territory here. France in the run-up to 1789 was running on fumes. And what happened was a lot of the people among the category of imperfect allies ended up making common cause with the common people because they were saying this is going to fall, this is gonna blow to bits and how are we going to pull anything out of it? And that's what set off the French Revolution. You had people who had the managerial know-how, who have these skills, who aligned with the interests of a common people, who took control of the National Assembly after the Parliament of Paris was summoned and who seized control over country

43:53 And the aristocrats were just going, because they had no idea what to do. Now will we see an identical set of events? Here I have no idea. There are many different ways that major change can happen but it can happen and it does happen. One of the things I would remind our listeners is that United States has had this same system of government in place longer than almost any other country on earth It's very, very rare for one system of government to remain in place for a couple hundred years. The only two that I can think of that have had the same system longer are England and Iceland. And England had its civil wars and revolutions a little before we did

44:39 Let's see, 1688 was I think the last major revolution in England. But we'll see how long they hold out but certainly here in the United States...I have a lot of respect for the Constitution it's a good document but things have run into very counterproductive directions. We are any pre-revolutionary situation now and how that sorts out how we see the necessary changes which will happen but how does come about is a really interesting question. Right yes it very much is but there's some potent energy out there for sure and to get back to the meat of this latest book as you say mad magic was a theme of the trump era like none other than i can remember on both sides people were very vocal about their utilization of,

45:28 Is it Eric tools from silly for chan chaos magic to liberal tear fuel binding spells of the magical resistance but how would you compare and contrast their magical strategies and their effectiveness. Okay that's a question by the way what start with the chance, Many of our listeners will know but some may not. The chants started out as a set of message boards, originally mostly about anime and video games and they started out on just little places online where people could gather together and talk anonymously and it just kind of snowballed from there

46:10 Of course, they were interested in Donald Trump if only from the sheer parodic value of a reality TV star and wrestling promoter running for president. But of course, a lot of people who are on The Chans were on The Chans because they were members of the excluded classes because they were people who did not jump through all the hoops to end up heading on the road to flunkiedom Many of them, not all but many of them were living in mom's basements because you know in our society and recent years the normal route to adult independence had been slammed shut. There aren't enough jobs, rents are way too high. You know the picture as well as I do. So here they are sitting in mom's basement next to the washing machine typing frantically into a computer because that's all they have to do with their time there is no jobs to be had and they're angry

47:01 willing to embrace different ideas about the world. They want to shock, show me a teenage boy who doesn't want to shock his mom and I will be looking for the little rubber tab that shows me he's an inflatable doll." So we have these guys. And on one hand they started getting really interested in Donald Trump. Of course they were deeply into memes They didn't quite invent memes, although they invented some of the most famous ones. Lolcats were invented on 4chan. So yeah we're talking major meme factories here and then somebody I don't think anyone's been able to figure out who because again these posts are anonymous somebody started talking about a particular tradition of magical practice called chaos magic now chaos magic bit of history here

47:48 Because magic and the modern sort of industrial society worldview are so greatly at odds, every generation or so somebody says let's come up with a system of magic that fits within the narrow worldview in the industrial world. That'll be modern and up to date and not burdened with all this superstitious blah, blah, blah. And the latest version of that is chaos magic. And it's basically a magical tradition stripped down to the point that it more or less fits within the worldview of modern materialist industrial society. I'm not a great fan myself if you will. Chaos magic has light beer and I like McGinnis but there are a lot of people who use it. It is a simpler method than many

48:33 and it can be effective. And being a simpler method, and being entirely within the world view of modern industrial society is fairly easy to learn you can get quite a bit of basic competence relatively quickly And so what happened with the Chans is you had all of these people who were increasingly pro-Trump, partly because they wanted to stir things up. Partly because some of them actually liked Trump. Partly because they loathed everything that mainstream stood for and Trump looked like a good brick to throw through the window. There were many different reasons but they started doing

49:12 Chaos magic spells to try to boost Trump's chances of winning the election. This at a time when nobody thought Trump had it shot even at the nomination, and now there were many factors behind the fact that Trump suddenly burst out of the pack of Republican candidates, seized lead kept it and took the nomination in a walk But I think we need to consider the possibility that maybe all of these mostly young men, some young women who were hard at work doing me magic may have something to do with it. Now as we get further on things start getting weird and part of the reason i end up writing a book was watching

49:57 strange things happen. Carl Jung, the psychologist had this lovely term synchronicity. Synchronicity is a meaningful coincidence There's no rational reason why these things should have happened at the same time, but they did and they make sense. That's a synchronicity." He argued — and Wolfgang Pauli who won a Nobel Prize in physics who helped him write the book on this subject also agreed with us by the way — that synchronicity is a real factor. It exists not just as a segment of our minds it exists in the cosmos and it is important as cause-and-effect

50:33 And there were certainly plenty of synchronicities to be had once the chaos magicians of the Chans piled into or on casting spells on behalf of Donald Trump. So, first of all we all remember Come on the frog the cartoon frog that they have a pet in the front already been adopted as the chance mascot because he was a slacker, you just feel good man. And so he's been adopted to their mascot and of course they had also adopted the term tech complicated story involving the Korean language and World of Warcraft, and for some reason, Kek-kek-kek as a stump for laughter had become a buzz phrase within the chants. And then somebody found out that Kek was the name of an Egyptian god, and the Egyptian god was an anthropomorphic frog like Pepe

51:32 Every time people started bringing up, Pepe the frog and Kek the God and Kek kek kek is laughter. Synchronicities started piling up and pretty soon folks were going this is really weird! And it just went from there they had one of these things after another one of the great examples One of the projects that the chaos magicians took as one of their goals during the election campaign was to make Hillary Clinton collapse. You remember, there were all those rumors that she had some kind of undisclosed health problem and they wanted her to take a tumble? And so they were piling on energy and building up all these memes trying to focus on either Hillary Clinton was gonna go down in the middle of public setting

52:24 And so September 11th, 2016. There she is making a speech at the site of the Twin Towers and she talked about Pepe the Frog and the whole business around The Chans and the chancers were going publicity for us And she walked out of there and went to her SUV, and down she went. Down she went! And they had to haul her as the saying was like a side of beef into the SUV and drag her away all while insisting that nothing had happened even though it's on video. So

53:07 As that was happening, another anonymous poster to one of the chans posted this thing. Guys look what I just found! It was a Euro-pop song from the 1980's called Chateau Lay. It had a cartoon frog with a magic wand on the record and the band name was P E P E with periods Right. That's a synchronicity. Yeah, it was wild! And so these people are going okay, Keck the Egyptian god has given us his seal of approval

53:47 obviously, all out magic for Trump. And they did and maybe that had something significant to do with the way in particular and crucially not so much Trump or even the voters but the way that the Clinton campaign bungled its run for the presidency. I mean, I've been watching presidential campaigns since Richard Nixon was elected in 1968. I have never seen a more incompetent political campaign Just as one example. The Clintonistas were pouring lots of money into running events and advertisement in Chicago. I mean, they could have nominated Zippy the Pinhead and he would have won Chicago. Chicago always votes Democrats. Chicago votes Democrat even if you have to throw voting machines at the bottom of Lake Michigan like Richard Daley did to get JFK into the White House. It was a complete waste of money. Meanwhile, of course, the crucial battleground states of the upper Midwest were being

54:49 is serenely neglected. And even though the people there were constantly calling headquarters going, we need more money, we need more people Trump is gaining and they were just being said your anecdotes are disapproved by our data well guess what? So I think what we have here in so far as the magic had effect it had effect by making The Clinton campaign unusually stupid making them miss what were obvious threats to their candidate and just bumble their way through to the election. And the rest was history." So that's the story of what happened on the Trumpista side, and the interesting thing is that what happened afterwards didn't really change them much. The synchronicities wound up you didn't see any more

55:37 I heard from people, I'm fairly well-known as a teacher and writer on magic. And so I heard from people on that side of the magical scene or the political scene rather who were going where do I learn something more than chaos magic? So I said read this book, read this book, read this book, do these practices. So I know there were people who are getting more serious into magic but that just kind of quieted down and this is when we get into the magic resistance. Now, the magic resistance started out with immense advantages for at least the last 150 years or so. Occultism in America has been primarily left-wing not entirely you've got moderate middle of the road and conservative magical things but on the whole majority since the days of the Theosophical Society, the majority of people in America interested in occultism have been on the left politically. In 2017 as these shock waves from the election died down

56:34 except, of course they didn't. But as 2017 dawned you had all of these people in the Wiccan scene, the vast majority of whom were way over to the political left. You had all those people in the feminist goddess worship scene which is almost entirely on the left or was until the recent hoopla around the transgender issue. You had all of American Buddhism which includes by the way some fairly serious metaphysical hardware that was primarily the left. And all of this sort of broad penumbra of American folk magic, an enormous amount of that was concentrated on the leftward end so they had him this immense advantage in terms of people who knew what they were doing, people who had a solid magical background and so when it sank in

57:22 Clinton had, in fact lost the election that they were gonna get four years of Donald Trump and that magic had been one of the things that might put him there. Of course an enormous number of people from leftward end of this spectrum who have some magical background piled into no we're going to do a magic resistance, we're going to stop Trump. And it was much larger, much better organized, much more thoroughly equipped with technique than the chaos mages of The Chance And yet, its results were extremely equivocal. It is true that Trump lost the 2020 election. It was a very narrow election and there were all kinds of factors going on. We don't have to get into some of those factors right now

58:10 But so many of the things that happened on the way up to that, the magic resistance would announce they were going to do this working to do blah, blah, blah. And of course it was splashed all over the medium and splashed all over various internet things and then it would fizzle sometimes embarrassingly so probably the ultimate example was when Brett Kavanaugh was facing his confirmation hearings in the Senate to become Supreme Court Justice The grandpandjandra of the medical resistance announced loudly that Brett Kavanaugh was not going to become a Supreme Court justice, and they were going to stop him. And they splashed all of these magical workings across again the internet just stopped Brett Kavanaugh the day after that announcement was made. The remaining opposition to his candidacy in the Senate collapsed and he was approved and sworn in without further difficulty." Clearly something went wrong

59:07 Another great example, the magic resistance tried to catch this big whammy against the NRA. And the following month, the NRA raised more money than it has ever raised in any month before or since again Something went wrong here Now actually if you look at in terms of classic magical philosophy It is very easy to see what we're on there are some basic rules and magical practice and if you understand these you can do effective magic. If you don't understand them, you're going to have a much worse chance and if you ignore them and do the opposite, you're gonna fail. Magic is not foolproof and it's not omnipotent if you do not do a very good job of following the rules in doing that right way, it will blow up in your face. Rule number one, okay? Eliphaz Levi, the guy who launched the modern magical revival back in 1854

1:00:03 Summed up the four magical virtues to know to will to dare and to be silent That fourth one is crucial You keep your mouth shut about your magic if you're playing a poker game And you show your hand everyone else at the table. You're gonna get your clock cleaned yeah If you are a military commander and you announce what you're going to do to defeat the other side, the way American military commanders keep doing in Afghanistan have you noticed? We're going to do a surge. Okay, the Taliban make a note and put it on their calendar. You lose!

1:00:39 That was exactly what the Magic Resistance did when they published their ritual workings in detail, in advance all over the internet. Anybody who disagreed with them like those Chaos Mages we were just talking about could look at the ritual pick out the vulnerabilities and do targeted rituals to mess with their magic It's not difficult if you know what you're doing it's quite easy and if your rituals are sloppy It's a target-rich environment and you can usually mess somebody over really comprehensively. So, over and over again that was something that the magic resistance kept on doing. They kept on making this big splash announcing all the details of the rituals and da-da-da-da-da-da... And their rituals kept failing. Point number two if you want to succeed in a magical working

1:01:34 singularity of focus is essential. If you try to change everything at once, you won't do anything. It's like any other forms of pressure if you can put all your pressure on a single point, you make something happen." Okay? And this is true even in very simple sense people come to me again as I said, as a teacher of occultism and people come to me and say, well, I want to get rich. I want to make $1 million. See nothing gets easier Nothing is easier. All you have to do to make a million dollars, is make making that million dollars the only thing that matters to you The alarm rings at five o'clock in the morning You're up out of bed and your first thought is okay How am I going to use this day to make my million? Every moment you're going along there saying okay how can add to our money you look at what's in your wallet That's not to be spent each of those bills Is it tool you can use to make more money if you approach the world that way

1:02:27 If you approach every moment of your life going, okay how am I going to exploit this to make money? You'll make your million. You'll make it faster than you can imagine. Now, you're gonna have to give up a lot but that's the way it works. People fail in life because they try to do too much at once and especially because they tried to do two contradictory things at once. They tried to say, make $1 million and spend $1 million at the same time. No such luck! So you have to have unity of focus This is one of the things that the magic resistance completely failed to do. The classic example was there's a witchcraft store in, I think Brooklyn in New York and they announced they were going to this big working and it just in the back run up to the break having nothing. There was this big group magical working And they told all the attendees To bring all Of their own intentions All of the things they were upset about because they were gonna cast as one big whammy to take care of all of it at once

1:03:26 At the time, I posted on this on my blog and I said, Brett Kavanaugh has nothing to worry about. And of course he didn't. You have to have unity of focus or you don't succeed. So those are two of the things. And then the third one is simply that magic isn't art and science. It requires skill. There are things that work in things that don't your ritual structures You know there are certain things you need practice to be able to do effectively. The magic resistance focused all the way through on money slope stuff, things that anybody can do. Things that you need no practice, no training, no experience, no skill what they were doing is basically doing these rituals where people make themselves really really angry about what the bad orange man has done and then sort of fling their anger at something okay?

1:04:21 That's weak. That's very, very weak." And because they were doing these sloppy rituals and on a far too broad range of subjects without any basic operational security at all, they got their clocks cleaned. You know it is true that Donald Trump narrowly lost the election in 2020. He's making noises about running again in 2024 so it's not as if they got rid And the election was not a resounding victory for the Democrats as loudly as Nancy Pelosi insisted, no we have a mandate. They've lost what? Nearly a dozen seats in the House and

1:05:04 It was not, basically as far as I can tell both parties lost. So the magic resistance may have had some influence on that they may have helped the Democrats do better than they otherwise would have but in terms of what they could've accomplished given how many people they had and so on it was a miserable failure now The question is why? Why, given all of these people who have a background in Wicca or other forms of occultism? The fact that they have just all these people. The fact they have a passion and desire to change things. Why did they ignore all the principles of effective magic to do this doomed-to-fail posturing all over the internet?" And the answer to that is, of course, virtue signaling

1:05:50 If you belong to the salary class at a time when the number of jobs begin to shrink down, at a time when your access to that inner circle of flunkiedom with all of its perks and privileges and money is maybe getting a little tight. Virtue signaling is not a light thing. Virtue signaling how will show your loyalty to the system in the hopes that you can get into the circle of flunkies? And so the whole point of the magic resistance was a vast thundering array of virtue signaling by people who are trying to say I am loyal, I believe. I won't question even the most ludicrous nonsense the corporate system spews

1:06:30 Pick me that is so true that's my exact problem with a lot of those kind of people that i've interacted with them and not just nails it. Unfortunately i had to deal with so many of them at this point, even if i had tried not to notice what was going on i really didn't have a choice in the same thing as many of these people could do great things for their lives But as long as they're stuck in believing devoutly in the conventional wisdom, as long as they're stuck in this mindset where the only life they are willing to accept is one of being a servant to the corporate beast. No! They aren't going to do anything

1:07:12 Yes it really had a choose me master kind of tone to it and i do think this is a great analysis of the magical layer of what went on which i think is so much more interesting than the political layer because as a case study in magic, case study and cause-and-effect in mass probably the best one we have in the western world. In my lifetime just because there was intention on two different sides of the line you know put in the magic it's pretty rare and reference to a lot of this stuff i just had a quote here that i think sums up pretty well be say the magical workings of the alt right have the effects they did because so many of those workings focus with laser intensity

1:07:55 on one task at a time using one hyper sigil at a time with a simple appropriate symbolic pattern at its heart. The workings of the magical resistance by contrast went out their way to avoid doing any these things Read the rituals in Magic for the Resistance by Michael M. Hughes, for example and in most of them you'll find a laundry list of intentions, a hodgepodge of incoherent symbolism and a set of ritual actions with no particular relation to each other that does not make effective magic well that's exactly what you been talking about and the kind of analysis i'm interested in because obviously even people who call themselves career magicians can end up not being very good at it and, it seems like there might be some lessons in there for the rest of us when it comes to putting some magical potency behind our own will right. Oh absolutely absolutely your rate that this whole scene this whole business has been

1:08:55 It's certainly been the most spectacular demonstration in my lifetime of magical conflict as a learning. You have to go back to the Second World War to get anything comparable, so that's a good one too. But yeah, one of the principles of magic that too few people realize is that magic is everywhere and in all things. We are all of us constantly doing magic. The point of learning occultism is that you learn to do it consciously rather than deliberately for the reasons you want not unconsciously accidentally and getting your own way a really simple example how many people when they want to do something will spend

1:09:32 How is it a time doing negative self talk oh i can do that oh its probably too hard they're basically doing magic against their own intentions. Okay the building up a state of consciousness of failure and there are reasons why we are taught to do this, by the media, by our schools and all this kind of stuff. But those aren't too difficult to figure out because people who are weak and who fail are much easier to govern. If you stop and say okay here is my life what do I want? What are the things that I want to achieve whether it's making a million dollars whether it's making a good relationship with somebody pick one

1:10:22 Not the whole laundry list, you can get to the other ones later okay? Pick one. Figure out what are my obstacles and start by looking at yourself basic rule of magic nine times out of ten You are the main source of your problems. I know it's harsh It's harsh to say that but it's true It was certainly true for me And so you look at figuring out what your problems are, how are you getting in your own way? How were you interfering with things you've learned some of the basic tools and magical action or you simply Start changing things in your life and watch what happens. And you can, if you take things one at a time focus on them and look at everything in your life and go okay here are all these different things going on my life how can I make everyone of them point toward this thing that I want to have happen?

1:11:11 What am I doing that distracts me from that? What am I doing that is preventing me from that?" How can I change these things? These are simple strategic things that anyone can do without putting on a funny hat and waving a wand around, but they are of the essence of magic because the keys to magic are will and imagination. If you have strong will focused toward a single game and vivid imagination allows you to build that image in your mind move toward it and perceive how you're getting in your own way understand how you can change. Imagine different ways of living a different way so doing things nothing can stop you wow i mean yes that's pretty motivating talk right there and in terms of just magical culture me obviously magic is just a part of reality no subculture has monopoly on it but this a culture we could say,

1:12:07 It to me and not really that it's my own but it seems like its supposed to be a counterculture so the suckling at the corporate democratic globalist is really just sad because i always thought it was about taking the power back being an individual empowering yourself rather than sucking up to the machine so it's really ironic that we are seeing that in the modern day well i would say first of all It used to be. It used to be that there was a lot of taking back the power, there was a lot of focus when the neo-pagan movement was lively and creative and growing rather than fading

1:12:48 there was a lot of very countercultural consciousness in it. And a lot of people were very aware of the ways that both parties and the entire establishment, and the entire corporate system were manipulating abusing people. But it very often happens when a counterculture becomes old when it starts to fail — I'll get to that but that has been happening in the neo-pagan scene — that is sort of crumples and goes back home demain like Like the hippies we all recall that well i recalled it in there and they're in glorious ladder face many of our listeners may not have been around then but you know the hippies counterculture we reject the corporate world we reject all these things were gonna go out live in a country and did that do that to that anyone happened.

1:13:34 What happened was that most of them, once they'd finished getting it out of their system and they finished their college years or specifically when the draft got removed and they no longer had their incentive for hiding out in the country. They went then they cut their hair and shaved their beards if they had them or their legs depending on gender. And they got nice corporate outfits and went to work for the man This kind of thing happens all the time because a counterculture, it's very hard for counterculture to sustain itself especially once it becomes popular. And of course hippie like the neo-pagan movement both of those became popular they became mass market you had major publishers and major media outlets that were feeding them and feeding off them

1:14:17 And so they gradually sort of drifted into an alliance with the status quo. And then as the numbers began to drop, and in the case of neopaganism that started about 2007... That's when the Neopagan and New Age movements both peaked by the way around 2007. As the numbers declined and things just sort of wound down, yeah, they kind of sold out. I think one of these things that we may well see over the years to come is the collapse of most of what's left Pop culture neo-paganism. It's been in rapid decline for many years now some of the biggest old pagan festivals have shut down The little wicca stores that used to happen in you know every other urban neighborhood most of those are gone now But the rest is going to go away I think and one of the main reasons, is the failure of the magic resistance

1:15:08 You know here they were going we have this immense power except they don't if you don't do magic competently it's not gonna work for you and so. To some extent, that's disappointing. On the other hand, it does mean that as pop culture moves on to something else, those of us who are seriously interested in occultism we have to deal with fewer people who are trying to Harry Potterize everything. There was a lot of that in The Magical Scene I've long since lost track of the number of times that I would have to sit down people and say no

1:15:44 You don't have to have a one with a piece of some non-existent creatures body part inside it. No you can't go on the grammatical and have miracles happen no this is not what magic is about, And as for the last fulfillment of the interview dance we do let me ask you about the other things you got going on and how you have at least two other books that have come out or going to come out this year and what can tell us about your writing projects in which are working on next, oh man it's been busy i'm trying to remember which of my books are due out this year i have a bunch of stuff in the field i have. A couple of books on practical cultism coming out

1:16:28 Well, there's a new version of my Oracle deck, the Sacred Geometry Oracle which finally is being done right. The earlier edition was butt ugly. There is the book The Way of the Golden Section which is a manual of basic occult training very good for beginners. Let's see... Inner Traditions is gearing up to do a book on astrology talking about what it means now that Pluto isn't not a planet anymore and that actually does mean something astrologically Also, of course I've just finished a whole bunch of fiction. A series of novels The Weird of Hali is seven volume series and there's some other novels woven in which are set in a kind of HP Lovecraft universe turned upside down the tentacled horrors of the good guys

1:17:13 And you don't want to meet the bad guys. So I've got a lot of stuff coming out, best way to keep in touch with that is via my blog www.ecosofia.net or your favorite online or full service bookstore. Right on and you also do have a Patreon that focuses mostly on astrology right? I do Patreon and Subscribestar, both. And yeah that's an astrological thing. What i do is what's called mundane astrology which is the astrology of politics. And I do predictions for the United States in Great Britain based on quarterly ingress charts and also eclipses and other things of that nature so yeah that's a going concern as well. You got a lot of lines cast out in the water as they say! Yeah well you know these

1:18:01 These days one of the things you have to do to collapse and avoid the rush is have a lot of different income streams So if one of them gets disrupted, you're still gonna be fine. Yeah Well lots of time without that TV too so it helps yes well great man This was a lot of fun always a pleasure You know a lot about a lot and it's clear that you've taken the time To really think through all your positions and stuff and that's really nice to see thank you Of course thanks for your time and your work I have very much enjoyed being on. Look forward to our next show. Cheers, keep doing what you do man until then. Abracadabra people! One of the greats John Michael Greer. I really never get sick of listening to him always a pleasure to pick the brain of the mighty JMG

1:18:51 But I did feel the need to say something at the top of the show about how i really was not too excited about analyzing the political landscape of the past four years, why people voted for Trump and all that sort of stuff that is still constantly being discussed to exhaustion. I want to look forward not back and I want to focus on our individual lives rather than the big political circus But when I got the book and started looking at the political microcosm as just something to study from a magical potency perspective, then my attitude shifted. That is when I saw something that would peak all of our curiosity...and I hope it did! There were coordinated groups on both sides engaging in very open and public magic in that 2016 election cycle

1:19:43 And I do find that to be one of the unique things about it. I didn't even really see that in the last one, so its not like this constant upward momentum. I do think the 4chan folks tapped into something. The synchronicity was off the charts. I remember talking about at time and it seemed kind of like a flash in the pan, something temporary They rallied behind an intention and once Trump was elected they didn't really care about much else It seemed like they wanted to see chaos, they wanted to see politics be turned into a joke. And these people didn't care to engage in the same activities the same way in the second term because it really wasn't about being Republican and liking Trump at all if you ask me. It was like a let's follow this thread and see where it leads kind of thing. Let's see if we can make the improbable probable

1:20:42 And so just looking at both sides from a magical potency perspective, just like a lot of activities if you're consciously trying really hard. If you really build up the stakes to be higher than they are and you choose some weird hill to die on I think success is harder to achieve then when your in that effortless flow state We see it in sports all the time. The more you try, the more worked up you are, the more nervous you are and you just aren't loose. That thematically matches what I think the 4chan people were doing compared to magical resistance So that stuff is interesting to me and we have to have people out there using magic to even get to analyze it

1:21:34 It's hard to fine tune our own gauge for what works magically and what is the most effective without some sort of examples to compare and contrast. And from that perspective, I think John wrote a great book, sussed out some really important stuff, and made something that i thought was over pretty engaging So in summary why did some of that magic seem to work and other spells didn't? Narrow collective attention on a well-defined goal and a focus on building your own side up. That resonated with me a lot Leave the attack magic alone Even with Power of Eight in tension, we talked to Lin about the blowback effect It seems like you get what you put out and so you better be putting out positive vibes not negative ones I don't know how The Elite gets away with it but for The Individual it seems like You're gonna catch what you cast

1:22:34 So the goal was to try to keep the conversation focused on The Magical, but I had to at least let John frame up his thoughts on the politics of it all. And I do agree with his reasons for why and how Trump captured so much passion. It's a way better analysis than most people on the left who won't look in the mirror. I just suspect that it wasn't organic We had a choice between Hillary Clinton and someone who was on the guest list at Clinton fundraisers and Clinton family weddings, playing mortal enemies on the stage. Call me cynical but that about sums up my thoughts. JMG would say that Trump kept more of his promises than any other president in decades and the truth is that is a low bar I think we can both agree that it's not hard to achieve that

1:23:27 It's like being the world's tallest midget. But I still don't see it, and didn't want to ask because i didn't want to go further down the road of politics and policy than we had to do right by the book subject matter but im more inclined to think that uneducated poor desperate people put their faith in a false messiah that didnt really move the needle for them at all in 4 long years time It felt like those people were thrown just enough scraps to keep the faith, but that's about it. Four years is the entire duration of a high school or college career! Couldn't you do A LOT in that time if you really wanted to? I think these politicians are masters of energy capture and i think they knew what they were doing taking all that energy and putting it with someone they knew

1:24:20 would be an energetic political cul-de-sac. They're not stupid, they know that over half the country is extremely frustrated with the lack of progress and the complete erosion of their financial standing! And I think they just took advantage of that but either way it is still refreshing to hear someone talking about wage class devastation I was also happy to hear him talk about how an authoritarian system depends on an endless multi-generational supply of lackeys, and how they set the system up to get them. And there seems to be no greater threat than a lackey scorned. But that's true people with resources and some knowledge of how it all works who are willing to burn it down. I see how those people are instrumental in big systemic change

1:25:15 I also will say, if i'm being honest. I didn't hate throwing a little shade back at a certain someone who spent way too much time throwing a little shade at me in the Twitter sphere Happy accident let's call it Hey! I just asked the questions based on the books of our guests so it wouldn't even be in the conversation If John didn't think it was worth writing about Once we did justice to the book, we got to open it up to more practical magic and the mechanisms under the hood advice for the individuals all that kind of good stuff. In The Plus Show we talked about what happens when countercultures go mainstream cultivating stronger will and imagination? The best magical techniques for busy people to work into their lives why mindfulness meditation is more tranquilizer than useful tool

1:26:07 the relationship between archetypes and reality, how to use a knowledge of archetypes to navigate the current mess why so many people aren't ready to move on from the pandemic era and very important how to avoid falling through the coming cracks in The Big Machine. I thought there were a lot of things in this interview that were pretty interesting that I've been thinking about a lot lately so I hope you can agree Sign up for Plus if you like what I do and want to get the second half of the shows as they're designed to be. If you want more Magic Talk, also let me know because i definitely do! It's been a bit too long since we focused on that but there's a lot going on in the world either way thanks for listening absolutely take that advice of focusing on yourself and your own path and don't spend too much time trying to block the path of others And if you stop letting the glass screens get you so worked up

1:27:05 and you work on yourself instead of worrying about the things outside of your sphere of influence, then you'll also be best equipped when tough things are thrown your way. Right? That's the way I see it but...I wish you the best! I'm gonna get out of here have a good one i'll catch you next time with the return of a guest from many many moons ago that people have been asking for but until then I've done my part Your move, manipulators of fears, political puppeteers and social engineers. You're fuckin' doomed. I decide to watch out, hide and lie We can't stay out in the light Can't stand to fight I exercise my own brain to do the time

1:29:44 I ain't gonna take none of your foolin' around.