Spiritual Politics in the Age of Mass Deception

I don’t know about you, but I’m having a hard time knowing what’s real these days. Those of us who spend a good portion of our lives using the internet, for work or play, are forced to wade through an ever-deepening stream of misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda which drags at our heels and threatens to drown us in whirlpools of delusion and euphoria. The early days of the internet, with its utopian vision of a democratic cyber-commons, are long gone. This vision has been replaced by a new and increasingly dystopian zeitgeist: the fear, both valid and manufactured, of authoritarianisms advancing from every direction.

The enlightened, universalist narrative of modernity has lost its luster in light of certain enduring hypocrisies, increasingly hard to ignore: worsening economic inequality, ecological devastation, colonialism, racism, gender discrimination, militarism, political instability, and so on. And as mass consciousness begins to escape, little by little, this cognitive cage, it flows in every which way, like a flood bursting its levies: questioning conventional economic “truths” but also doubling down on them; rejecting hedonistic consumerism but also seeking refuge in it; disputing mainstream science while also appropriating its name for contradictory ideological goals; striving for more egalitarian politics while also yearning for the social stability promised in the strongman’s scheming smile.

This newsletter/blog and forthcoming YouTube channel will describe how, in this time of extreme social, economic, and ecological upheaval, the death of old narratives is leading to the birth of new ones. Yet not all of these new narratives have arisen organically from the people themselves. It is when a forest is clear cut, when the soil is shocked and traumatized, that virulent species have the easiest time taking over. Though mass consciousness is indeed attempting to reject old story structures made by social and economic elites, many of the most popular “new” stories are, paradoxically, simply clever rebrandings of the status quo.

Since the early 20^th century, social and economic elites have been perfecting the art of psychological manipulation through mass media and new communication technologies. Their methods are increasingly sophisticated and shockingly effective, even on those who believe themselves to be immune. It is why I often call these first few decades of the 21^st century to be the Golden Age of Propaganda. The internet and its familiars—social media, corporate entertainment, surveillance capitalism, the Silicon State, Big Data, algorithms and artificial intelligence, conspiracism, etc.—are being expertly exploited in the service of class war (that is, the war that the ultra-rich have been waging against everyone else for the last five hundred years). Though their tools and storylines are new, the aims of the ultra-rich are the same as they’ve always been: complete social and economic control.

Of course, this information will not be new for the majority of you who are reading this. You and I may identify as critical thinkers who reject mainstream media narratives; who question authority; who seek out radical new ways to think, feel, and envision the future. Therefore, you may be tempted, dear reader, to stop right here, convinced that you are immune to the propaganda described above and so have little to learn from the revelatory research I will be sharing. There you would be wrong. For this is not simply the Golden Age of Propaganda. No, my friend, this is also the Golden Age of Sorcery, and the modern tools we’ve relied upon to help us differentiate true from false, real from unreal, science from magic are losing their potency. It is my assertion that the most effective way to protect ourselves from this manipulation is to understand it as sorcery—an insidious art wielded beyond the confines of rationality or realism—and to conceptualize our defense against it as magical protection.

In future articles and videos I will describe in more depth what I mean when I use the word sorcery in this context. As a political radical and scholar with mystical proclivities, I ground my research, theorizing, and activism in the social sciences, specifically political and economic anthropology, religious studies, political science, critical theory, as well as ecology. As a spiritual seeker myself, I also bring an embodied understanding of spiritual seekership and magical practice. The entanglement of well-respected social theory and occult knowledge is far broader, older, deeper, and more powerful than most people realize in either political or spiritual circles. In fact, many philosophers from Marx to Horkheimer & Adorno to Stengers to Couliano and more have conceptualized the machinations of modern authoritarian power as malevolent magic. It is from this perspective that I believe useful frameworks will arise to help us understand, resist, and dismantle the totalitarian agendas of economic and political elites. I am particularly focused on educating my fellow spiritual seekers about these dangers, for during my research I have discovered that our subculture is specifically targeted by and vulnerable to conservative propaganda. I will explain my findings in greater detail in future articles.

This insidious interweaving of occult practice and political strategy is already resurgent and tugging the tides of mass consciousness, though its effects remain unseen and unseeable by the majority of us moderns. Until this point, there have only been two groups of people who see this political sorcery occurring, understand it, and attempt to either describe it or direct its power: the authoritarian far-right, and the social scientists who study them. The goal of The Enchanted Revolutionary is to help the rest of us see this new sorcery where it occurs, to develop counter-spells against it, and to helped the oppressed gather our collective power to fight back against this rising wave of global totalitarianism.

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