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Alice Adora Spurlock's avatar

Hi. Mage here. Practicing for about 35 years. Love most of your work, and like a lot of Thelemites I’m a big Blake fan, but one quibble on a point of occulture fact: chaotes don’t usually care very much about the “collapse of the west” or any other political agenda unless that is the paradigm they are “playing” in at the moment. As far as I have ever been able to tell, chaotes as a tradition don’t really care about much except the “free play of belief” and usually very basic practical magick (sigils, servitors, stuff like that). They do have a form of mysticism classified as “yellow magic” by Pete Carroll back in the day, but it’s usually just a mix of psychodynamic and cognitive psychology dressed up in sigils and Austin Osman Spare rhetoric about “atavisms” and the like. Pete Carrol once said that when he heard the word “mysticism” it made him want to “reach for a loaded wand” (and there was much oohing and ahing over how edgy that was at the time…it was the 90s, after all).

I think you might have chaotes confused with Discordians, who did have a whole “immanentize the eschaton” trip, especially back when Robert Anton Wilson was still alive and writing, but they don’t really exist anymore as an active tradition (partially because the whole notion of “Operation Mindfuck” has been generally recognized as deeply unethical).

There are connections between the traditions and communities, but their approaches are usually very different. Chaotes usually consider themselves to be Very Scientific (two of the biggest early chaos magick authors were Pete Carrol, whose background is in physics, and Phil Hine, whose background is in psychology), while Discordians are (were) just as likely to sneer at science as use it in their metaphysical theories.

Now, in a sense both have a common root in that they are epistemological nihilists, hence the whole “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” schtick. But only Discordians operationalized that through Operation Mindfuck as a form of psychic terrorism. Your average chaote can be anywhere on the political spectrum, but almost all people who tend to identify as Discordians are some variety of anarchist.

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Bryce H.'s avatar

On the connection between Trump and Positive Thinking, John Oliver said: “He’s like if the Secret actually got into the wrong hands!”

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