Behind the petty facades of the everyday, behind the numbers around us, the prices and wages and statistics, behind the logos and corporate sigils, there lurk dangerous chimerae, egregores, and gods.
These gods are new American gods—which we seek to export and convert—our national spirit that we try to foist upon others, the Mickey, the McD, the soda, the movie stars, the t-shirts—these are intelligences. They are strange, dangerous, cranky things.
They are the outlying egregores, the thought-gods that the fans, users, consumers, believers create, empower, and inhabit. These are the most visible aspect.
Day to day manifestations of these things—“gods” is a crude approximation—daemon is perhaps a better term.
They are akin to lares—
The community manifestation.
The belief and its momentum in the community. But these are organizing intelligences—seeds, kernals, abstracts.
Number-—for example—has several core concepts and a single core Idea or Principle. These are the ontological spirits, the potentiality that actualizes, that which causes Quantity and Iteration and Numeration. As people become beholden to Number and Numeracy, a chorus and court of related intelligences emerges. Consumerism, in turn, strikes an alliance, and ambassadorial courts emerge. What I’m talking about is tracking memes and ideas and semiotics at the occult/spirit level.
But these intelligences have real servants and priests. Number desires counting and accounting, for example—and those who serve It contribute their belief to help actualize and police it in the Real. The egregores and lares in this regard emerge as the community acceptance of the concepts. No one questions Number because it’s so omnipresent/universal. Value and numerals must be assigned and can be assigned. Numbers of likes, friends, wealth, posts, shoes, etc. But the other things—the logos, the computer entities, the cultural mores and names that support them. A kind of capitalism/consumerism/computerism, codified and preached in ____, for example.
Some of these intelligences are derived from older gods and daemons—the Father and Patriarchy have adapted and appropriated and recruited from the new gods.
Indeed, the ______ are a good shorthand for the Organizing Principle—
Some may work alongside subtler, less obviously “bad” forces—like the Church and Father and Number and Corporatism—but there are tugs as one god seeks to expand its scope, replace Christianity entirely with Kardashian and iPads and so on.
The old foes[*] are mostly behind these intelligences and their courts, but while it’s tempting to rail against them, it is better to subvert, weaken the idea. If one must expose, one should have another cast the stone. We are dealing with subtle, abstract realities intersecting with the corporeal and the social. While throwing a stone into the water might upset the flow and surface, you are likely to splash yourself (and others): better then to let someone else throw the stone or to call attention and be subject to the backlash.
But, one has to recognize and resist mindless service to these daemons. Be mindful of the pantheon you associate with.
But we are dealing with complex networks of associations, rhizomes rather than strict hierarchies—but there is corruption…
But that corruption is of the slow, subtle, banal variety, not some super-villain.
—But what about the Future?
Is the Future the “Real” Threat?
The Future—Prophecy & Ruin—
Entropy, pre-destination, inescapability,
No free will or choice—only the certainty that it will be worse than today.
Everyone wants an Apocalypse—
And Ending—because we hate and fear the Future. Apocalypses are the Anti-Future: they end the Future we foresee and can’t see how to escape from.[**] And they reflect a desire to escape/end the Present. In a way, Apocalypse is an escape to the Past. But then, is it the Future to worry about, or the belief in Apocalypses. Both deny agency and free will—Apocalypses tend to favor Ideologies. For Future conspires with Apocalypse—one is the obvious hobgoblin while the other is the con-man who has the solution to that hob.
[*] Whoever floats your boat.
[**] Like global warming, the end of white people running everything, the end of rare earth metals, whatever.