Quotes

Take the CEO of Aetna Life Insurance, who makes $23 million a year in salary alone. He’s one
of the guys who is going to be running our health-care program if Clinton’s plan passes.

Suppose you could convince him that he ought to lobby against having the insurance industry run the health-care program, because that will be very harmful to the general population (as indeed it will be). Suppose you could convince him that he ought to give up his salary and become a working person.

What would happen then? He’d get thrown out and someone else would be put in
as CEO. These are institutional problems.

Q: From an outsider’s perspective, what you call “chaos magick” has a lot of rules, discipline, and order involved, and doesn’t seem very chaotic at all. What would you say to such a person?
A: I differentiate sternly between Chaos and Entropy. Only highly ordered and structured systems can display complex creative and unpredictable behaviour, and then only if they have the capacity to act with a degree of freedom and randomness. Systems which lack structure and organisation usually fail to produce anything much, they just tend to drift down the entropy gradient. This applies both to people and to organisations.

The alchemists, who in their own way know more about the nature of the individuation process than we moderns do, expressed this paradox through the symbol of the ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail. In the age old image of the ouroboros lies the thought of devouring oneself and turning oneself into a circulatory process, for it was clear to the most astute alchemists that the prima materia of the art was man himself.

The ouroboros is a dramatic symbol for the integration and assimilation of the opposite, i.e. of the shadow self. This feed back process is at the same time a symbol of immortality, since it is said of the ouroboros that he slays himself and brings himself to life again, fertilizes himself and gives birth to himself. This is much like the cycle of the Phoenix, the feminine archetype.

Ouroboros symbolizes The One, who proceeds from the clash of opposites, and therefore constitutes the secret of the prima materia which unquestionably stems from man’s unconsciousness.

‘These premises have been cursed by black sorcery. The curse has been activated according to correct rituals. This institution is cursed because it has oppressed the Imagination & defiled the Intellect, degraded the arts toward stupefaction, spiritual slavery, propaganda for State & Capital, puritanical reaction, unjust profits, lies & aesthetic blight. The employees of this institution are now in danger. No individual has been cursed, but the place itself has been infected with ill fortune & malignancy. Those who do not wake up & quit, or begin sabotaging the workplace, will gradually fall under the effect of this sorcery. Removing or destroying the implement of sorcery will do no good. It has been seen in this place, & this place is cursed. Reclaim your humanity & revolt in the name of the Imagination— or else be judged (in the mirror of this charm) an enemy of the human race.’

I know you all like football. I know a lot of people like football. I know it’s fun and culturally important and for some reason people identify incredibly strongly with Their Team, many to unhealthy levels. But it’s football. It is just football. Feeling personally devastated because someone you trusted made a really terrible decision is one thing; being personally devastated because your identity is so wrapped up in your team that the idea of any member of that team being punished for covering up child rape strikes you as fundamentally unfair is another thing. It is something that should make you seriously reconsider your identity and your values. Being really good at coaching football doesn’t absolve you from looking the other way when you hear about child rape; it doesn’t absolve you from encouraging others not to report child rape to the police.

Take a walk through any big city. Do you see anything that needs improvement? There are huge amounts of work to be done, and lots of idle hands. People would be delighted to do the work, but the economic system is such a catastrophe it can’t put them to work.
The country’s awash in capital. Corporations have so much money they don’t know what to do with it – it’s coming out of their ears. There’s no scarcity in funds – these aren’t “lean and mean” times. That’s just a fraud.

Orias – The 59th spirit is named Orias. He is a great Marquis and appears in the form of a lion, riding on a mighty horse with a serpents tail, holding in his right hand two great serpents hissing. His office is to teach the virtues of the stars and to know the mansions of the planets, and how to understand their virtues. He transformeth men & giveth dignities and prelacies and confirmations & the favour of friends & foes. He governeth 30 legions of spirits.

But we must be on good terms with all the living things of this world. This is the reason why we must talk to plants we are about to kill and apologize for hurting them; the same thing must be done with the animals we are going to hunt. We should take only enough for our needs, otherwise the plants and the animals and the worms we have killed would turn against us and cause us disease and misfortune.

EVERYWHERE IS MY TEMPLE
ALL THE WATERS OF THE EARTH ARE MY ALTAR
AND ALL THAT LIVE AND DIE ARE SUBJECT TO
MY EVERLASTING CONTEMPT AND ADORATION
IN EQUAL MEASURE.

So in the twentieth century, there’s a major current of American thought-in fact, it’s probably the dominant current among people who think about these things (political scientists, journalists, public relations experts and so on)-which says that precisely because the state has lost the power to coerce, elites need to have more effective propaganda to control the public mind. That was Walter Lippmann’s point of view, for example, to mention probably the dean of American journalists-he referred to the population as a “bewildered herd”: we have to protect ourselves from “the rage and trampling of the
bewildered herd.” And the way you do it, Lippmann said, is by what he called the “manufacture of consent”-if you don’t do it by force, you have to do it by calculated “manufacture of consent.”