Real Worlds of Imagination, Collapse and Chaos
William Blake on tools for a time of turbulence
It’s become a commonplace that liberals are struggling to understand contemporary politics. Individuals such as Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin escape rational analysis. These presidents don’t obey the rules when it comes to international relations or the post-war settlement. Commentators harrumph.
I needed an alternative framework of comprehension and a different mode of analysis - which led me to William Blake, first via the work of Gary Lachman.
The historian of esoterism’s book, Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in The Age of Trump, is especially helpful. Lachman leads readers across a web of connections from the populist loathing of government by free markets to the dark arts of occult philosophy.
These are little-discussed dynamics today, though the links are longstanding. They reach back through the nineteenth century and the role of theosophists like Annie Besant in Indian independence, to the sixteenth century when the alchemist, John Dee, conceived of a “British Empire” - a phrase he coined after conversing with an archangel.
Lachman noticed that key players in both Trump and Putin’s camps reference similarly strange and unexpected ideas, though they run a specific logic: a will to power that draws on what is called New Thought.
This is the doctrine of manifestation. It teaches that if someone has an ardent wish, they can, through the power of intention, cause it to happen - and the belief is widespread, selling books by the million, often under the radar of the bestseller lists. One of the most successful recent franchises is Rhonda Byrne’s series, The Secret. Also called Mental Science and Science of Mind, it’s best known form is the Power of Positive Thinking.
Donald Trump was deeply shaped by this outlook, having been raised in the church led by Norman Vincent Peale, author of the eponymous book published in 1952 that is still a big seller. And the American president’s rhetoric is full of Pealean clichés. He insists that he’s “a winner”, he “thinks big”, he’s a “can do man”. He loves being called the “Daddy” and doesn’t pussyfoot with the “loser” establishment.
Now, you might think that positive thinking is ethically dodgy and straightforwardly deluded when it comes to the actualité. But Lachman’s point is that such convictions are beside the point. New Thought is at play in contemporary politics and, furthermore, it has explicitly malign variants.
This is where chaos magick comes in. Its advocates deny there’s such a thing as truth. They set havoc as a goal and strive to perpetuate revolution. In its political form, chaos magick mixes with a detestation of the West - a civilisation said to be decayed and crumbling, best aided by accelerating decline.
For myself, I fear that others have joined in this game. The power is enticing. I’m thinking of those who begin their analysis of contemporary troubles with remarks about the inevitable folding of human society, perhaps the collapse of human civilisation - even ramping up to the end of the species. Anything to ride the energy.
These latter figures will cite science as if the evidence is beyond dispute, but scientifically, the grounds for apocalypticism are slight.
For example, it is perfectly possible to be convinced that the climate is changing, possibly quite fast. But from that does not follow what will inevitably unfold.
The forgotten difference here is between measuring and modelling. Modern science is unsurpassed at the former but as likely to make mistakes about the latter as it always has been. Error bars, unknown unknowns, and the reflexive impact of predictions on the systems described. These externalities are the big players when it comes to what happens.
I learnt this lesson when I was writing about Y2K in 1999. My teacher was a year spent penning features about planes falling out of the sky and networks shutting down as the clocks clicked to zero. You couldn’t find an expert to say otherwise. Then came the new millennium. Not a single issue was reported.
This is not to be against experts but is to recognise that collapse and chaos are powerful motivators, for good or ill. They are proxies for religion in a secular age. I get the sense from Lachman that Putin is more calculating than Trump, for whom chaos is a habit not a tool.
A thousand internet voices are skilful users of the psychology, too, promising guidance through the apocalypse. The associated rhetoric is not driven by economic hopes and material aspirations, but by less conscious, more powerful forces such as a desire for dignity and self-esteem, or a fear of the future and need for certainty. A bad outcome ensured offers relief, too.
All are de facto adherents to the conviction that “thoughts make reality”, to quote a central tenet of positive thinking. So how otherwise to respond?
What we need is to rethink the nature of the imagination.
The problem is analysed by William Blake. He spotted that the imagination has been repurposed in modern times. Instead of being a divine power, shaping the whole of creation with which human beings can collaborate, the imagination has become a private possession. In the philosophy of figures like John Locke and David Hume, the human psyche is reconceived as a muddled generator of fantasies that are projected from skulls onto a dead world, and in need of discipline by reason.
But reason has been found wanting. Unmoored fantasies have held sway. The upshot is that today we live with a combination of distrust in reason’s saving power and a widespread conviction that the imagination is little more than a means to manipulate or entertain.
Blake responds differently. He offers a kind of training for the imagination that can wake up awareness of its divine origins. We live in a flow of vitalising spirit, in which the lasting powers are good and true, and to which we might grow in service because the greatest part of ourselves dwells here. “Imagination the real & eternal World of which this Vegetable Universe is but a faint shadow,” Blake writes.
In other words, the imagination shapes worlds and what we perceive of things. This is close to the teachings of New Thought, of course, but with a radical difference: the human psyche is connected to, not substituted for, the divine source.
This fundamental reframing also points to a kind of collapse that matters: the collapse of the isolated individual into God - a process that, variously described, is the essence of the spiritual path. As Blake prays: “Annihilate the Selfhood in me, be thou all my life!”
I suspect that dwelling on the fear of material collapse is a displacement of the spiritual teaching that life is found in losing it - the displacement arising from the secular worldview that features lonely humans lost in the cosmos. There is no Love calling you through your desire to live; there is only the threat of loss.
Blake’s spiritual analysis is key. Fill your consciousness with chaotic tweets and troubling headlines: lose touch with meaning. So instead, track a path “Thro Chaos, seeking for delight & in spaces remote, Seeking the Eternal which is always present to the wise.”
There is an alternative to the alternative: “To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought.” And for Blake, these worlds of thought are not shaped by collapse or chaos, but by “Eternity, Ever expanding in the Bosom of God.”
Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination is out in the UK and will be published in the US in September.
On the connection between Trump and Positive Thinking, John Oliver said: “He’s like if the Secret actually got into the wrong hands!”
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.