One of the most pernicious features of contemporary ideology is a widespread and instinctive distaste for people and projects that are both intelligent and kind at the same time. It is acceptable to be intelligent and cold, and it is acceptable to be kind and dumb, or at least anti-intellectual - but cross the signals in the wrong way and people will hate you.
Why, exactly? Because of THE ARMISTICE OF VARIZEN, the techno-cultural atmosphere that we breathe. It’s imbued with something like a low-level ideological radiation designed (although it has no designer) to inhibit people from really being free, really thinking for themselves, really being autonomous and having true compassion. Its role is to make people more vulnerable to the power of suggestion, less able to step back and take a good look at the totality of their lives and human history, more likely to be fixated on beliefs (especially political beliefs) that they don’t really understand and can’t really defend, unaware that they’re rehearsing a script that keeps them safe in whatever particular herd has raised them.
Where is the radiation coming from? The same hegemonic power structure that foregrounds identity politics while sweeping the issue of class under the rug, associates ‘freedom’ with dissolution, self-righteousness and the refusal to take responsibility (when in fact freedom is the opposite, the ability to take responsibilty even for what you have done unconsciously, or even for what has been done to you, and to affirm it). I don’t particularly think that the responsible party is a cabal of illuminati who are feeding disinformation into the system. It’s more acephalic than that - there’s no central planning responsible for it, and it isn’t a set of clear ‘ideas’, it’s more like a blind spot or a pressure point: like a sign that only the unconscious can read, that says “stop here, think no further”, triggering a conscious reaction of anger, rage, blame, scorn, ridicule.
Though in there somewhere is also the inertia of certain ideas that in a different form and a different time were genuinely emancipatory - in the context of casting off the shackles of pre-modern religious consciousness, or the conformism of pre-summer-of-love mass culture - but which currently only serve to sustain a world order that the true life-blood of humanity has already outgrown. This life-blood belongs to a body that does not exist yet - the awakened Albion, Adam Kadmon, the resurrected Jesus, the Shekinah. We would be able to channel it, create a path of circulation for it, and gain true nourishment, if only we were able to wake up from the dream of contemporary culture and politics.
Waking up involves, among many things, being able to contemplate and savor the antinomies - the conceptual or ideological contradictions - that suture the horizon of of acceptable discourse in the present. A major example of this is the antinomy between religious ascesis, and in particular channeling the love of Jesus Christ, on the one hand, and a radically emancipatory attitude towards social politics, in particular affirming the dignity and rights of non-conformism regarding gender. sex and family. Another general antinomy is that between aesthetic traditionalism - the appreciation of great works of art in the Canon - and transgressive cultural excess involving volume, noise, desecration, low-attention span, abjection and so on. I know very few people who identify with one of the poles (of either of these antinomies) who are able to conceptually or libidinally grasp that the opposite pole isn’t evil. But the world-spirit knows that the dynamic resonance between the two poles is what will generate its new body.
The famous and ever-present controversy around what I do and say - which has dissipated somewhat in recent times, but is still very much there - stems from the fact that I always seek to occupy this place, which is basically a culturally illegal zone. It makes people nauseous, enraged, it sickens them only because it is the antidote to a poison that nearly everyone with a TV or internet access has been drinking since the 80s. The feminization and queering of metal, the clash between the musical aesthetics and ethics of German Romanticism and underground DIY or the American music industry (the distinction between these latter two effectively disappeared 20 years ago). These things cannot be appreciated in the plural, at least not at the present time. A scene can never form around it, it is always and only directed towards the individual, it is a one-on-one conversation between the object within the subject (that which I channel without really understanding or knowing why) and the subject within the object (the inner potential awakened within someone to whom the project means something, guiding them towards their own individuation - which means ultimately, hopefully, away from being a Liturgy fan).