Careful What You Pick Up at the Dream Emporium (Repost)

Originally published June 7, 2023

I've had Schwab et. al. on mute for about a year. Inspired by #corngate, I returned to review the "Schwabstack" and furnish you with the unsolicited impressions of the lemurian gaze.

I do not know if Schwab thinks the moon landings were faked or if 'space isn't real.' It's not germane. He operates at a higher level of this discourse than helios and other 'esoteric' vendors of 'final redpills.' They are lesser coalers farming engagement from a digitally mounted dramatology. Both poster and audience are 'in on it', as it were; on reflex they slip into the frame of the 'conspiratorial whisper.'. A vigorous pantomime is highly stimulating, and stimulation is the sine qua non of the attention economy. It's a kind of undiluted mindrape that I have seen rot the mind of more than one Sensitive Young Man. "The archons are conspiring with the chthonic forces of profane scientism to enter the world through the Hadron [Hades] Collider, and furthermore-". 

Some claims might be locally true, or true by way of the 'stopped clock' principle, but they are always pared with a pseudo-explanatory framework which confers no agency, and which induces mildly schizophrenic thought-forms. No thanks, I'm White. 

Schwab may indulge in such ploys from time to time as marketing flourishes - he is a 34k account after all. But they are not the central elements of his by now extensive oeuvre. I haven't read every piece, nor do I plan on becoming his paypig. Yes, if the herd want to find out what the Kabbalistic Jews are up to, they will find a rather "gnostic" paywall in the way. There is an exquisite pleasure in knowing what others are said not to know. It doesn't invalidate what he says; I will deal with your Arguments, fren. I shall flesh out the irony of exclusive insights into exclusivist visions over the course of this piece. 

Schwab has subtitled his blog with the heading 'Counter-History, High Strangeness, Fortean Research.' They are labels associated with inexplicable phenomena and "ufology." In more prosaic terms, he is interested an anthropology of elites relating to the plastic power to shape, synthesize, and define the parameters of the received world. Further, he can be characterized as a counter-hegemonic in orientation. There's an intimation it's all a little spooky. Schwab does not approve of elites and their schemes anymore than mainstream anthropologists approve of "appropriation" or "erasure" of whatever primitives they are currently deriving their authenticity fix from. 

Post after post deals with an endless rabbit-warren of connections between "evil agents" and their profane ideas; a veritable bad infinity. He has a dizzying array of milieus to sift through: theosophy, kabbalah , cybernetics, Rosicrucianism, Masons, intelligence agencies and so on. 

Schwab's output and behaver fits the description Randall Collins provides (Interaction of Rituals Chains, p. 359) of the idiosyncratic autodidact (italics mine): 

Persons both at the very center of intellectual networks, and those in firm positions as modest followers, may well be introverts, in the sense of spending much time in solitary bookish pursuits; but both the stars and the followers are highly socialized by the intellectual community. They are for the most part neither alienated nor rebellious nor idiosyncratic introverts." Truly idiosyncratic intellectuals are found in other network locations. These include many persons on the outer margins of intellectual networks, especially autodidacts, operating far from the regular transmission networks of the field's cultural capital, assembling a checkered combination of teachings remote from the current centers of intellectual advance. The autodidact chooses his or her own readings, more or less accidentally according to what comes along, and this can lead to a combination of intellectual positions from widely ranging fields and historical epochs. Their ideas are often genuinely idiosyncratic, although many of them are simply followers of positions that had their heydays in previous centuries (modern-day occultists are typically of this sort). A person who builds an intellectual identity upon this kind of random access to cultural capital is unlikely to meet much success in the stratified networks that make up the intellectual world; and this experience may make them not only idiosyncratic but alienated-individualistic and proud of it, sometimes belligerently so. This kind of intellectual introvert may be combined with other types, depending on the social conditions that come into play. He or she may become a solitary cultist, satisfied with one's own idiosyncrasy; or by bordering on mobilized political movements, become a terrorist or serial killer. 

I'm not in the business of deboonking. The figures he places under the microscope propound roughly globalist ideals, and may inhabit, or did inhabit, influential positions. Hungarian professor and "systems-theorist" Ervin László is one example. He wants to change the world with 'conscious evolution.' You guessed it - that would NOT be with borders and the inalienable right to say the N-word. He "helped to promote the repackaged Rosicrucianism his fellow transhumanists call “conscious evolution” with his ‘The Consciousness Revolution’. László describes an assemblage of NGOs promoting sustainable development, using the Internet." 

Schwab soon gets out of his depth. If you are going to talk about Jewish mysticism, it might be worth mentioning it was interpolated by Hellenic notions of a more real world beyond the earth-bound horizons of first century Judaism. These same world feelings gave rise to Aristotle and Plato, whose ideas are subsequently unified with the Christological reception of the Apostle Paul's messianic interpretation by the Roman Church. 

Schwab splits things into that which is simple, organic, and of God (the Christian one, so far as I can tell) on the one hand; and the artificial, complex, globalist, and "wicked" on the other. He commences a scattershot auditing of history, sorting items into one of two columns. Yoel Roth goes in the naughty box. OK. So does Durkheim. The RAND Corporation is there as well. Evola is cited approvingly despite idealizing a fashy version of initiatic orders and being a sex magik enjoyer (imagine if details leaked about Soros practicing weird rituals). Instances of Christianity, or more specifically, a truly transcendent order of things, find favour. And who is to say where Sir Thomas More, with his rather grim, but eminently Catholic conception of Utopia, ends up? 

Schwab might be right about particular "facts." Nor can I say he is wrong (or right) because of his conception of capital T Transcendence. Whether it is true or not has no bearing on what counts in the here and now: an actionable vision in view of what is before us. His 'takes' lack integrity. They do not lead to an integral understanding. They're not so much dishonest as debilitating. The material coalesces  from the disparate eddies Collins mentions above, all of which defy coherence. I don't agree knowledge is wholly "socially produced", but it does require a stabilized personality base. Few can impose an effective sense making discipline on themselves without external pressure to do so. Hence, while the academy may be ideologically distorted, the vast majority are still not strong enough, in themselves, to truly operate outside it.  

We have been ushered into a world in which a myriad manipulations define history and the present. It's really Schwab's brain. Smothered, enervated, subjugated, we struggle to achieve a minimal cognitive mapping beneath the crushing weight of the alchemical, the gnostic, the techno-cybernetic-dystopian hellscape. The best we can do is register our vanquished status with a transcendent guarantor. "This too shall pass"...perhaps. 

To adopt such a conceptual horizon is gay and unworkable. It entails a refusal to reckon with the always-already undulating dynamics of life. There was never a time when the force field in which man finds himself allocated virginal reality, unsullied by the will. Man's plastic powers do not stand apart from nature. Nor does complexity, from which man emerged. Conspiracy is the idea of breathing together. The breath is spirit. You can feel it. Man, as a spiritual being, conspires. Hypostasizing scheming, plotting, planning into a web of specific acts and outcomes exacts a stultifying toll. It necessitates the counter-hegemonic stance: ressentiment. "We, the peasants," are corralled by Big Ooga Booga. Wake up. 

Incessantly outlining a patchwork of evil agents returns us to the irony of revealing 'wrong revelation.' A paralyzing analytic mode makes you the sucker. The current ruling stratum act on their base, anti-hierarchical antagonism. The retarded, degenerate ideas tallied by Schwab are an epiphenomenon of this momentum. While ideological notions may also incite in their turn, the cycle always begins with psycho-dynamic movement. 

In sum, there is a lot more at stake than mere ideas or facts when investing a discourse or literary account. The fundament of who you are is engaged through the evaluative presuppositions, the undiscussable frame between you and the author.  

"Evaluations, in essence, are not values but ways of being, modes of existence of those who judge and evaluate, serving as principles for the values on the basis of which they judge. This is why we always have the beliefs, feelings, and thoughts that we deserve given our way of being or our form of life."- Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy