Category: futurism
Did Aleister Crowley Predict That Donald Trump Would Become a Great Man?
Aleister Crowley, love him or not, saw further beyond than almost anyone. He skewered the establishment of his day with his withering sarcasm and wit, and established himself as one of the premier iconoclasts of all time. The mind boggles at what a genius like Crowley would have made of our modern age.
This article discusses the applicability of one particular quote of Crowley’s to the rise and rise of Donald Trump, namely:
The essence of independence has been to think and act according to standards from within, not without. Inevitably anyone with an independent mind must become “one who resists or opposes authority or established conventions”: a rebel. If enough people come to agree with, and follow, the Rebel, we now have a Devil. Until, of course, still more people agree. And then, finally, we have — Greatness.
This “essence of independence” has a paragon in our culture today: Donald Trump. Let’s take this quote sentence by sentence.
It can’t be denied that Trump acts according to standards from within: indeed, this is one of the reasons why he has caused so much consternation. There are no gurus or mentors who can be examined for clues as to Trump’s influences, and he is not an ideologue of any known stripe.
Because it’s so difficult to slap such a label on Trump it’s obvious that he must be a highly free-thinking man. But, as any free-thinking person reading this article will know, to think freely is to incur social pressure intended to force you back into the herd.
The agents who exert this social pressure are the extremely powerful men and women of silver, and they are the authority in the sense that they control the media and the government and therefore are the psychological programmers of the populace.
Trump was firmly in the ‘rebel’ stage when he first announced his presidential bid. He was laughed at, like teenage rebels tend to be. Not taken seriously, a clown, a buffoon. The purpose of all this social pressure was to bring Trump back to the herd, to coerce him into bowing the knee before the masses.
He refused, and won the Republican nomination. The Hitler comparisons began – Hitler being perhaps history’s prime example of an independently-thinking politician. Because Trump won’t be cowed by the bleating of the masses, the logic went, he would inevitably start another world war.
That Trump was self-funded, and thus able to act independently of the money men who seek to make all politicians into whores in exchange for putting them on the throne, was made out to be a negative. It was as if, by not grovelling before those who had set themselves up as the powerbrokers, Trump had committed a heresy.
This was the moment he transitioned out of rebellion and into devilry. Every single day, the New Zealand media had a headline piece about how Trump was evil and if he became President we would definitely all die in nuclear hellfire.
As we now know, even this didn’t stop him, or the Trump voters. Donald Trump duly won the Presidential election by a considerable margin, and in doing so set himself up for greatness.
One might argue that, in becoming President of the United States that Donald Trump has already achieved greatness. However, a look at the recent alternatives for the role – Hillary Clinton, Obama, George W. Bush, Mitt Romney – tells us that the standards are very low indeed.
Certainly with the world being a powderkeg right now, Trump has an unprecedented opportunity for greatness. Whether he takes it is a matter of Fortune and Will.
Why There Always Has Been War And Always Will Be War
It’s as simple as looking at a yin-yang, and knowing that the yin represents chaos and the yang represents order. Keeping in mind the Fifth Hermetic Principle – the Principle of Rhythm – we can surmise that it is true of order and chaos that “the measure of the swing to the right is the measure of the swing to the left.”
In a Taoist sense this is to say that an excess of order, by its very nature, leads to a minuscule element of chaos arising within it, which grows, and soon takes on a momentum of its own, only to itself crystallise from a tiny seed into order, and ever more rigid order, until the cycle begins anew.
Too much masculinity in the alchemical world is represented as fire and iron, and these stand as metaphor for how too much masculinity in the physical world leads to violence.
An excess of masculinity is like fire when it has too much energy because it causes violence which burns flesh and sears souls, and is what the ancient physicians meant when they diagnosed a person with a choleric personality.
It is also like iron when it imposes too much order because it is harsh and cuts mercilessly, and when it breaks down it shatters, as with an excess of masculinity one loses one’s ability to yield and to withdraw and breaks like a tree that cannot yield to a storm.
This is evident in the natural world even when one looks at biological life in the simplest way. A seed that sprouts and begins to grow towards the light must eventually break the surface if it is to survive (for a literary description of this phenomenon see Chapter 21 of Anna Nilsen’s Writing With The I Ching: Biting Through).
As below, so above: the world of men is no different. If a person observes the current order of the day and finds it unworthy of continued existence, then – if they are intelligent – they will soon come to appreciate the degree to which, and the vigour with which, the established order maintains itself (indeed, that’s all that order is).
But like the rising yin, the desire to break the established order – once it takes hold – grows ever more powerful by virtue of its position within nature. As the dusk darkness consumes ever more of the light, so does the chaos dissolve ever more of the existing order, until it breaks through and imposes an order of its own.
If you look at the current state of world history, there is an established Anglo-American order, which has dominated world affairs for about 200 years. This order is generally known as ‘The West’, because it represents the powers on the Western side of the world when viewed as a chessboard.
This world order arguably began at Waterloo, when the then wielder of the Spear of Destiny – Napoleon Bonaparte – was defeated in battle and the First French Empire sundered.
The nature of yang is to decline into yin – we know this, and already it’s possible to observe an America in cultural decay. Already the American Empire has degenerated in certain ways further than any empire in history, with the most recent 50 years giving us everything from Charles Manson and Ted Bundy to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
The nature of yin is to rise into yang – and this can be observed with the awakening of the sleeping giants of China and India. These countries were poor and were always going to remain poor as long as they were too corrupt to organise any meaningful invest in the human capital of the young. This was how it was when the Spear of Destiny was held in Europe, but now, as it crosses the Pacific, the East is awakening.
There is every chance that a rising Eastern power that wants its place in the Sun will naturally come into conflict with the established Western one that wants to hold onto power. Indeed, many believed that the Japanese action in the Western Pacific theatre of World War II was this event playing out (this column is far, far from the first to suggest it).
The collapse of the established order is not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. The established order never collapses peacefully (observe adult male elephants for an analogy in the natural world).
Therefore, war is a fundamental aspect of life, and always will be, as long as there are masculine and feminine.
Our Relationship With Information Has Fundamentally Changed in a Quarter-Century
The greatest selective advantage that the human creature has over its competitors is an unrivalled capacity for intelligence. This manifests as an ability to make use of information. Few are aware of it, but the human relationship to information has undergone a revolution over the past 25 years – and it has implications for our conception of intelligence.
It used to be that there was a shortage of information. Now there is a surplus. In many ways, this has been a good thing. In some ways it’s had strange implications.
Some of the ways it is good are like the way creatures that have adapted to a shortage often find themselves thriving when there is a surplus, such as athletes who have trained at high altitude where there is a shortage of oxygen.
It has meant that researchers and academics now have it easier than ever. Instead of relying on a librarian or punch cards, researchers can put a regular expression into a search engine which has crawled all the papers in their field (or subset thereof).
In fact, most people have in their pockets instant access to more information than physically exists in the largest library in the world. This is fairly straightforward, and not as interesting as the ways in which it is strange.
The strangest implication of our new relationship to information is that it is no longer about finding rare nuggets of truth among fields of irrelevant or easily dismissed information. Now it’s about knowing how to distinguish those nuggets of truth from nuggets that might look or sound very similar but which might really be full of falsehood.
Becoming educated about a subject used to be like finding diamonds among rocks – now it’s more like sorting the wheat from the chaff.
Being correct is now no longer a question of having money to buy books or to hire a learned tutor and having a good enough memory to recall what one has been told. Now it is a question of gullibility.
Take climate change as an everyday example. Determining the truth of this isn’t as simple as just finding out what the foremost expert thinks.
Who are the foremost experts on climate change, and why? And why does one set of supposed experts disagree so fundamentally with another set of supposed experts? If the experts are unified on climate change, how is that different to when they were unified on homosexuality being a mental illness? How much of the consensus is groupthink?
And what is the extent of politics on the science of climate change?
Questions like this once didn’t need to be asked because there was no way of propagating enormous amounts of dis- or misinformation like there is with the Internet of today. Often things were as simple as finding the nearest university professor who had an interest in the subject, and that was as good as one could hope for.
Dealing with this change is difficult because it requires an entirely different set of mental skills. The new paradigm prioritises nuance and probability over revolution and absolutes. Shades of gray instead of brutal black and white.
One now has to be more streetsmart with research, and accept that politics has a much greater influence on science – especially the soft sciences – than most would dare admit. Today’s climate change debate appeared in the previous generation as the debate over racial intelligence, and in the generation before that as the debate on the medicinal value of various psychoactive drugs – two other subjects where finding the simple truth is impossible.
To some extent it doesn’t matter: the sort of person who didn’t read books nowadays simply doesn’t educate themselves with the Internet instead. You can’t make gold out of shit.
But to a large extent, intelligence is different to what it used to be. It is no longer a simple question of storing, retaining and reproducing information like a biological hard drive, but a question of identifying the most likely claim to correctness out of a number of plausible competitors, like a knight choosing a blade from an armoury before battle.
This may mean that the kind of person we consider to be intelligent now may not be the same kind of person that we will consider intelligent in another quarter-century.