Ascending The Tower – Episode XII – “The Horrors of Real Magic”

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1. AntiDem December 28, 2015 at 11:17 pm

   I was thinking about why reactionaries are attracted to esotericism at all when it occurred to me that since the Modern era kicked off in the late 15th century (I believe that four things got it going:the fall of Constantinople, the discovery of America, the development of firearms, and the invention of the printing press), the central driving force behind Modernism has been to make communication easier and knowledge more widespread. Protestantism kicked off on a wave of sentiment that said that any man was just as able to interpret the Bible as the Pope was (Note that this would have been impossible before the printing press: How would they have gotten Bibles to interpret at all?). But then, of course, once everyone has equal access to knowledge, what is the excuse for not giving them equal access to power? On this sentiment came the Enlightenment’s revival of democracy. And if knowledge is good, why wouldn’t you force people to have it even if they didn’t want to? From this came free, mandatory public education. And isn’t more knowledge always better? From this came mass media. How about 24/7, from a supercomputer in your pocket connected to a global information network? From this came the internet.

   Aces, right? Well, maybe not. It turns out that no, ordinary people really *can’t* interpret the Bible as well as the Pope, that Plato was right about democracy collapsing into libertinism and financial ruin, that the public schools are a dismal formality that teach fashionable propaganda when they can be bothered to teach anything at all, that the mass media is a sewer pipe of degeneracy run by a hostile alien thede, and that the internet is mostly something used to watch movies on Netflix, to look at mindbogglingly dirty porn, and to post pictures of your lunch on Facebook. So I get it. The “let’s make knowledge accessible to everyone and things will be great” project has been an abject failure. None of it could, did, or ever will create a whole race of philosopher-kings.

   That said, we hardly need to go out of our way to be esoteric. If you count literacy as the ability to read a Bennigan’s menu or the setup instructions for an Xbox, then yes, America has very high literacy (though falling quickly). If you have any higher standards, then America is a shockingly illiterate country. Just writing at the level expected of university freshmen a century ago will be enough to leave a large percentage of people in the dust.

   So yeah, I suppose I get the appeal of esotericism, but it’s still not something that concerns me all that much. It’s like activism – we don’t need to do anything to push the current system off a cliff – it’s driving itself there, and keeps stomping harder on the gas every year. And we don’t have to *try* to be esoteric, we just have to talk to each other in a way that would make Dr. Lexus tell us that we talk like a fag.

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