Glen -
A fascinating question as usual and I appreciate the extra background
you offer below. I've contemplated your central conundrum ("the
apparent contradiction between fascism and individuality") for most of
my life, both from the inside and the outside.
I was raised among the ?natural? individualism which comes from
rural/frontier culture where the value of autonomous agency and
independence had obvious value while at the same time, the ability to
engage in short and long-term cooperative/collective endeavors could
magnify and leverage those advantages. There was a dynamic tension...
As I moved into more and more urbanized and collectivized contexts
(cities, regional industrial contexts, university, professional
organizations, scientific institutions, etc.) I felt there was an
illusion of advantage given to participation in the shared
identity/values implied but it was somewhat enforced by
in-group/out-group logic which (dis)advantaged (non) participation.
With a little perspective of age/hindsight, I realize now that it was
not nearly so simple, and that there were in fact plenty of *advantages*
(carrots) to subsuming my identity, my will, my agency, my ideations to
"the collective", not just alienation and punishment (sticks) for
failing to participate or at least "pass"...
I now live somewhat by the assumption/belief that my "self" is something
of a contrived illusion, but an autopoetic one. Somehow, it seems that
the emergence of self-awareness on top of basic consciousness promotes a
strong identity boundary with an acute self-other response at many
levels (from the immune system to systemic racism to rabid
nationalism). My main way of resolving this is through the pop-Buddhist
alone/all-one duality reflection and a sense of soft, multi-scale
scoping of "self".
I know you have expressed an allergy to poetry but for others (or my own
virtue-signal satisfaction) here is one I literally was writing for
entirely different purposes which I think is perhaps relevant:
The Autopoetic Self
/Crafting the self's essence,//
//a mental festival, an inner dance,//
//clouds of consciousness,
fossilized memories//revisited and refreshed.
//
The self, a story shaped, constantly askew.
For the self to survive,
it must paradoxically,
dance the /danse macabre/' *
*(pronounced Mac-Abrey for the purposes of this poem)
/
Steve Smith, October 2023
On 10/1/23 7:36 AM, glen wrote:
It's been awhile since I've run across a new-to-me cult. But 09A
certainly qualifies as a meaty one:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/28/new-york-satanic-cult-764-fbi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Nine_Angles
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1057610X.2023.2195065
I can't reconcile the apparent contradiction between fascism and
individuality. I guess the closest some analysts come is to suggest
that they're only aligning with the fascists, for now, to bring about
the end of the current aeon and the colonization of the galaxy.
I guess it reminds me of the "no enemies to the [right|left]"
rhetoric:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/30/conservative-christopher-rufo-florida-twitter-debate
But otherwise, O9A's ... "beliefs and structure" seem incoherent
enough to write them off as just too stupid to care about. However one
author nailed it in saying that there are plenty of both
impressionable and antisocial people using the internet, susceptible
to the "sinister" allure, to cause real damage.
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