A TALE OF TWO WIZARDS
“Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. Matter is spirit reduced to point of visibility”.
“Time and space are not conditions in which we live, but modes by which we think. Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, determined by the external world.”
Albert Einstein.
In 1974 as the official Wizard of the World University Service in Australia I sought exile in the remote islands of New Zealand in the city of Christchurch. I could prepare there for my imagination experiment whilst feeling at home in this highly cultured city. Christchurch was founded just over a century before by Anglican gentry and craftsmen of the mid 19th century Romantic movement escaping from the increasingly ugly, industrialised and conflict-torn Europe.
The indescribable Wizard of New Zealand is an artistic creation. Since the early 1980s I have been recognised by the professional association of NZ Art Gallery Directors as the world’s first ‘Living Work of Art’. Like The Doctor in his Tardis, as The Wizard I live as often as practically possible in a unique hypothetical scientific universe which is open to falsification and which I created for myself whilst at Melbourne University. Like the Tardis, it ‘appears’ physically small on the outside but ‘appears’ much larger on the inside. Magicians are experts in deceptive appearances. Among other inexplicable things, I have carried out a string of highly publicised rain dances in NZ during droughts, with no failures. Like Einstein, I have too much imagination and common sense to be a materialist and have no egotistical need to be immortal, so no socialists, capitalists or priests will be able to understand and consequently predict the reasons for my actions. Like the exiled Prospero, I am living on a really remote island that is still part of the partly-free British Commonwealth. I am embedded in an immaterial social matrix protected by a thicket of carefully-pointed laughter which allows child-like people to pass through, but punctures the egos of unimaginative hostile intruders.
I became instantly famous in 1974 for my Ciceronian oratory delivered with an English sense of humour and absurdity, whilst speaking from a ladder in Cathedral Square. I was reviving the ancient tradition of Free Speech in the Public Square. My topics included pointing to the carefully hidden demonisation of the British Empire (now renamed the Commonwealth) a very pragmatic form of world government but greatly weakened by their lone stand against the powerful Nazi war machine. This important part of recent history was even then being minimised or dropped from NZ history text books. The United Nations Organisation, a purely managerial global institution not a government, had provided cover for the USA and USSR to promote propaganda to break up the cultural and emotional bonds binding the Commonwealth together whilst doing their best to acquire British ex-colonies for themselves by corruption or violence. I emphasised the comparative trustworthiness of the British Constitutional Monarchy as a form of self government that provides much needed stability and emotional empathy. Compare this with republics run by ideologically obsessed political parties so keen to win power that they use the mass media to create hatred of their political opponents and to make promises they cannot honour. I also used humorous exaggeration to expose the recent growth of true sexism as intolerant intellectuals in the education system and mass media were demonising and demoting men and flattering and promoting women regardless of their individual behaviour and talents.
Life imitates Art far more than Art Imitates Life
This statement by Oscar Wilde is more accurate than most people realise. The magical technique of Wizard of New Zealand is aimed at gradually altering both appearances and consciousness It is based on a synthesis of the fundamental and evolving values of love, logic and levity, rapidly shifting to and fro between innerspace feelings and outerspace hypotheses, or from consciousness to appearances. I also switch rapidly from active intentions to responsive intentions. Not Triumph of the Will’, not even Triumph of the Won’t, but Triumph of the Maybe! The spell I point to as my material bedrock for all cases of false appearances, is turning the physical world up-side down and then inside-out by the simple trick of making a conformal inversion of the existing man-made mathematical coordinates of the model used by the physical reality controllers. The ‘appearances’ remain exactly the same, but the world has been radically psychologically, socially, and culturally transformed with great consequences. Pure mathematics and linguistic structures are art forms like music, but mathematics and verbal formulae can be used as tools or operating systems for both good and evil human purposes. If there is no absolute truth, not even an absolute frame to the universe, then we have to use our reason to try to get ‘nearer to the truth’, and combine this with ethical pragmatism and creating the most beautiful and harmonious pollution-free environment.
For cultures whose economies are based on farming and do not practice much trading, the hypothesis that the Earth is flat combines both appearances and cultural reality. However, as soon as trading starts to dominate and more and more travellers notice the changes in the sun’s elevation at noon, together with changes in temperature experienced as they travel north or south, the Earth began to be understood to be a sphere with the sun circling around it. Eventually the great agricultural civilisations became more and more materialistic and were trading around the globe and founding colonies. The separation between appearances and cultural reality that consequently occurred began to create more and more cognitive dissonance between truth, beauty and goodness.
Economic determinism based on usury, which religious institutions traditionally opposed as evil, began to replace religious determinism, and the cognitive dissonance that followed led to the wars of the Reformation. The old geo-centric models of the cosmos still worked well enough for navigation but the required mathematical calculations and models were ugly and bore no resemblance to common sense mechanics. The Church split and after a long and bloodthirsty war Europe was divided between Catholic Christendom and Protestant nation states. The latter, who were in the process of becoming secular military-industrial cultures, eagerly embraced the new mechanically-driven clockwork universe of Galileo and Newton, where the Earth and planets circled round the Sun. The appearance remained the same but the maths-based heliocentric materialistic model, although much more rational and more beautiful itself as a thing, was created by rigid reductionism and divorced from both human and divine reality. Consequently it was completely lacking any ethical or aesthetic meaning. A strong faith in Science was needed to defy the appearances so radically. Nature and Science were now completely divided.
By the 18th century, natural philosophers (later renamed ‘scientists’) had replaced religious theologians like Thomas Aquinas. God the patriarch and faith in His material creation, was replaced by Nature (which was both material and matriarchal) and by faith in redeemable credit notes and money. Only metal coins bearing the image of the divinely ordained issuer, retained the connection between faith-based consciousness and appearances. Banks protected by armed governments issued earthly credits to replace the heavenly credits issued by the much weakened churches.
Western Civilisation suddenly lost confidence in itself following the cataclysmic loss of life in the American Civil War aimed creating a single nation by brute force, and particularly in the First World War which was really a European Civil war between related royal families which Albert and Victoria were well on the way to uniting but which failed when both Prince Albert and the new Kaiser suddenly died young.
Bourgeois individualists who flourish in competitive capitalist cultures falsely belief that human beings have minds of their own. Such people do exist. The classical Greek term for one is ‘idiot’. Consciousness, as opposed to focussing on a task requiring mental concentration, is intrinsically reflexive. However, in brainwashed totalitarian societies and in panicking crowds it can be both contagious and non-reflexive. Psychologists call this phenomenon a collective psychosis. They are commonly found today in semi-isolated specialised environments like political parties, religious cults and university humanities departments, where individuals reinforce each others madness. There are also individual mad cases who are completely cut off from collective consciousness. Psychologists refer to them as psychotics. They are true believers and even blindingly obvious facts cannot alter their dogmatic hypotheses. Some of these cases are a result of brain damage.
In the 1960s, early in my in my studies of sociology and psychology, I was jolted out of my belief that I was an autonomous individual with a mind of my own, when I was introduced to role theory. I had always enjoyed escaping from the predictable and prosaic narrative of my own time and place. I had been a devout reader of imaginative narratives and was punished scholastically at my state secondary school for preferring to read Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Milton, the Elizabethan playwrights and more recent fantasy and science fiction, to the neglect of the set texts of the curriculum based on economic development and physical welfare as absolute values. Role theory not only demonstrates that we are not individuals at all but actors in dramas, but also describes the process of ‘pretending’ that is the transition to a new role or role-set. Actors and confidence men can transition smoothly from one role to another and in a crisis, like the death of a spouse, a resilient mother can often take on the relative parts of her ex-husband’s role-set fairly smoothly. As a teenager I had enthusiastically taken on the roles of boy scout and air cadet to bring some balance to the mechanical roles I had been allocated at school. I also treated attractive girls with great caution for fear of premature matrimony and family life for which I was completely unprepared.
Although related, involuntary identification with another, whether positive or negative, is not the same thing as developing new roles and, unless restricted to sensible hero worshipping, identification is potentially psychopathic. Later studies by ethologists of the functions of innate release mechanisms in all animal life should be wider known by the general public especially in a world of brightly lit screens, gigantic coloured posters and emotionally arousing music. However, today this deviant behaviour is being not only tolerated, but rewarded with status and power by nihilists aiming to deconstruct whole communities that they have been taught to hate. It has become an essential aspect of their woke collective psychosis. As I understand it the meaningless but hugely motivating concept of ‘woke’ represents a point of consciousness where the individual in the increasingly globalised nanny state will do, say, or believe anything no matter how cruel, rude, or absurd to avoid being thrown out of the nest and forced to become a mature, functioning, human being.
I hope this brief survey of my understanding of some of the important psychological and social foundations of human life is preparation enough to explain the dramatic changes in my personal roles that took place when I was carefully creating a more integrated and pragmatic life style for myself between 1967 and 1971, This was when I began what can best be described as ‘cultural engineering’. It is obvious that my choosing the role set of a wizard and then taking the necessary psychological, social, and cultural steps to properly actualise the role, is an unprecedented event in our military industrial civilisation. The first step was to integrate the role into the cultural institution which currently trains students and legitimises professional roles, the university. I realised that this was not going to be easy. Over three centuries utilitarian ‘hard’ sciences, have been rising in status to completely dominate universities whilst increasingly ridiculing and marginalising theology, philosophy and the classics. It is a source of great embarrassment that the hard sciences had their origins in the now ridiculed but once feared forbidden sciences of astrology, alchemy, and numerology. These occult sciences had integrated both subjective and objective studies of reality, both inner and outer space. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries previously tolerated practitioners were in danger of being imprisoned or killed for dealing in knowledge forbidden by the puritan Protestant Churches in particular.
Until the twentieth century academics were not expected to experiment with consciousness, only to observe, describe and manipulate material phenomena. The overall cosmological paradigm was that the real universe was a kind of mechanism made up of material ‘things’ in space. Animals were programmed by minds acting as punched cards and driven forward by forces identified as either divine or stochastic. In spite of the criticism of the philosophers Locke and Hume, mechanical ideas of ‘cause and effect’ reached by experimentation were applied retrospectively and erroneously, especially by social Darwinists. This what the brilliant geometrician, pragmatist and process philosopher Whitehead calls the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”. The result was that the only important analytical comments about the workings of human consciousness were being made outside the universities by playwrights, essayists, novelists, poets and other amateurs. The influence of the towering romantic figure of Goethe, who was both magician and scientist as well as literary master, reached into many different disciplines. My own field of sociology was divided between objective, mechanistic economic determinists like Marx and social Darwinists in general who were in the ascendant, and those few teachers who, influenced by Max Weber and Carl Jung, (both greatly influenced by Goethe) took account of subjective, non-utilitarian, epistemological motivation.
Private experiments in both matter and consciousness sponsored by wealthy intellectuals were already taking place in the eighteenth century. In the salons, men like Mesmer were experimenting with hypnotic suggestion. On his private estate Pavlov established a laboratory and experimented on conditioning the emotional responses of domesticated dogs. This was a significant departure from using operant or instrumental conditioning which is limited to studying and encouraging learning. Together with human selection of plants and animals, this was the key science of both agricultural and industrial civilisations.
When Sigmund Freud, a university trained medical professional, took an interest in consciousness, the rational Newtonian model of the universe was already being shown to be false on all sides. Freud hypothesised what he called the unconscious, which to him meant not just forgotten learning or subconscious habits, but damaged consciousness which had been supressed and deformed. Rather like Plato, who hypothesised a conflict between the Real and the Ideal, he also believed that conscious reality was shaped by conflict but now between the Reality Principle and the Pleasure Principle, and finally at the deepest level, between a life wish a death wish.
The transition from zoology to ethology in the late twentieth century drew attention away from animals as conditioned ‘things’ with functioning parts, like machines, to the reflexive behaviour of beings with intentions who were experiencing psycho-social interactions in ecosystems. This is an enormous change of awareness. Karl Lorenz, a pioneer in the field of animal behaviour, and Carl Jung a pioneer in a less ethnocentric and less anti-theistic form of Freudian psychoanalysis, found themselves in agreement on the nature of inherited non-conscious awareness. This evolution of consciousness (which Teilhard de Chardin called involution) had to be hypothesised to account for evolution of behaviour.
After the Second World War it was noted by psychiatrists and social psychologists in North America and Western Europe that a major dialectical shift from identification with objective reality to identification with subjective reality was taking place in the collective unconsciousness of western civilisation. In terms of overall mental environments it has been said that the typical neurosis of the capitalist achievers of the 19th century, driven by hatred of complacent non-achievers, had changed to the socialist narcissism of consumers desperate to please their peer groups, driven by hysteria and self-loathing and paranoia which is directed at non-conformists. The American exceptionalists’ American Dream was becoming replaced by the inevitable artificial intelligence of the communist Chinese Nightmare. This is culminating in the increasingly obvious ‘woke’ melt-down of both rationality and imaginative expression. Objective social engineering policies were already being transformed into narcissistic subjective feelings of self-righteous victimhood where all the blame is put on others. This dysfunctional psychological process is well described by Jung in his theory of the Shadow as projection. The Frankfort School of intellectual academics supported by compulsory taxes had become pure nihilists. Like the power-driven Jacobins in the French Revolution and Bolsheviks in Russia they were fanatically devoted to the demonisation and destruction of the achievements of Western Civilisation in the fields of truth, beauty and goodness.
This is the moment in history/herstory/mystery when my existentialist Fun Revolution provides a possible way out. It does not even have to succeed. It is subtly ontological and taking part is its own reward. I am ready at this point as both wizard and social scientist to take the mentally balanced reader to the ‘limen’ or threshold where the two interact to show them what can be done to avoid impending chaos or totalitarian dictatorship. I have elsewhere given examples of my own transformative actions to produce aesthetically based reform rather than to increase ugly cognitive dissonance by boneheaded resistance. Practicing magic (even vulgar salesmanship or political propaganda) is a craft that is more like creating a work of art than a technological invention.
An example of using a semi-fictional narrative to transform belief in both criminal and insane narratives in contemporary culture. The reader is invited to attempt to distinguish between fact and fiction in this narrative or what I prefer to call mythodynamics.
Once upon a time or in 1971 AC, unknown to the University Wizard in Oz (Australasia), a rival wizard on the other side of the Earth had been preparing since 1971 to take over the world. The victory of managerial banksters over the world economy of the crony capitalists’ in 2008 had suddenly increased his power. He is the complete opposite in appearance, character, and ‘will to power’ of the wizard of the World University Service. Jack, as he is known to the public, is a psychic manifestation of Dr Who in the popular BBC television series which began in the early 1960s (and is still going in a revised woke form). In this semi-fictional narrative Klaus Schwab is the incarnation of ‘Davros’ the creator of the Daleks. This rival wizard wears the mask of a management consultant with his own ‘stakeholder’ magic trick of using fake altruistic ‘management speak’ to transform objective investors using real money to create real productivity, into subjective ‘stakeholders’ devoted to subjective social policies negatively related to economic reality.
Davros set about recruiting ambitious young would-be politicians who could be persuaded to support the social policies that suited his personal globalising ambitions. They were trained in his personal management school in the Swiss mountain resort town of Davos. Apart from the ‘coincidence’ of the place name, this rival wizard, who physically resembles the fictional Davros in television series, gives lectures and is linked himself electronically with all his obedient students who become spellbound cult members. These are of course the Daleks in this narrative.
Influenced by American management theory, Davros has upgraded the old model to create a new narcissistic Dalek 2.01 monster. Like the old neurotic communist and fascist 1.01 style models they are still only capable of zero-sum thinking and have a similar impenetrable covering over their heartless, infantile and crippled personalities. However, the new Dalek 2.01s have been given sophisticated HR instruction by psychologically-trained capitalist salesmen who, in the first half of the 20th century, honed their skills in doing their best to transform America, a country of hard working entrepreneurs, into greedy, sensually-corrupt consumer society. His programmed Daleks 2.01s now wear expensive clothing, smile a lot, and “deeply sympathise”, whilst they are politely cancelling (exterminating) their critics. Having no deep sense of humour, they are easily provoked.
All Davros has to do is to broadcast his evil algorithms electronically to those particular woke stooges he calls “stakeholders” and “young global leaders” and their emotions go haywire, their brains are no longer their own, and they start fervently believing whatever nonsense he tells them to believe. He calls this “re-imagining” even though he himself is completely humourless and shows no sign of having any imagination at all! All he has is a need for vulgar bourgeois respectability, a worship of artificial intelligence, and a deep hatred of real passionate human beings. He is the epitome of James Burnham’s prophecy, made during the Second World War, that bureaucratic managers were about to take over the world from risk-taking Capitalist entrepreneurs who had earlier taken over Europe from beautifully attired Medieval kings and queens who fought each other mainly for honour and glory like highly competitive sportsmen and sportswomen.
Now Davros and his allies; the world’s plutocrat elite, global corporations with no ethics or loyalties, UN bureaucrats, and the Han Chinese dictator (who combines the worst elements of communism and fascism) are preparing for what he calls his Great Resetto reduce the still partly-free capitalist middle classes to unwilling serfdom. The rich will rapidly get richer and consume more and more, whilst the poor will rapidly get poorer and consume less and less.
With the help of older, well-heeled, influential, and spiteful left-wing progressive ‘self-haters’ in the still partly free and responsible British Commonwealth democracies in particular, Davros’ brain-washed cult followers, have already been inserted into many vital political positions. Davros’ main ally in his ‘Great Reset’ master plan, is the Chinese Communist Party, which now controls important departments of the bureaucracy of the United Nations Organisation. Like their supreme leader, life-time dictator President Xi, the CCP are still old model neurotic Daleks. Their robotic leaders don’t approve of HR training and didn’t get where they are by being sensitive or caring. Davros himself bears a striking resemblance in both appearance and mannerisms to the ex-Nazi managerial consultant Dr Strangelove in Stanley Kubrik’s serio-comic film about the end of the world brought about by naive political stupidity.
Since 1971 Davros has had his operations centre in the banker’s fortified paradise of Switzerland at Davos, where he rules surrounded by lackeys, like the megalomaniac Louis XIV in his palace in Versailles. The richest and most powerful are similarly summoned to the centre of his managerial web. Recently Davros addressed the great and good assembled in his lecture theatre in Davos with the following flattering words, “The future is built by us, by a powerful community, as you here in this room.” Davos is situated on a mountain side in Switzerland, already made famous by Thomas Mann in his penetrating post First World War novel of ideas, “The Magic Mountain”.
Is this all a coincidence? A determined and well-educated gentleman-detective who responds to gut feelings would be very suspicious. Davos and Davros and Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain and a madman aiming at world domination using a new AI technology, are just too much! True or false it makes a damn good thriller, and the end is coming nearer and nearer.
Synchronicity
But wait! There’s more! In the same year, 1971, after a few years of social experimentation on Australian campuses, the newly-appointed Wizard of The World University Service, known to his friends as Jack, was employed by the Union of Melbourne University to introduce his new existential process cosmology in his own department on campus. That year he also formed an existential erotic bond with Alice his current fiancee and partner in his attempt to form the long sought alchemical androgyne. 1971 was the same year that the wizard Davros, opened his World Economic Forum in Davos. That same year Davros married Hilde who works closely with him. Just more major coincidences? Still nothing to see here?
What if our understanding of reality is still seriously flawed towards the objectively ‘verifiable’ and materialistic hypotheses adopted in the late 17th century Enlightenment with its horror of magic and its monotheistic religion of original sin, puritanical self-hatred and redemption through hard work? The neurotic and puritanical historical narrative of Western civilisation that insisted on the absolute value of ‘material development at all costs’, led us into the blood bath of the First World War. The consequence was that the best religious and scientific intellectuals lost much of their self-confidence and credibility. Power-hungry mob orators rose to fill the vacuum of meaning to create new political parties whose only aim was to win elections whatever it took. Their aim was to use ill-informed mobs to destroy the old elites and to found a new economic world order where the matriarchal Nanny State would look after everyone from the cradle to the grave. Mass media journalists and educators in the state bureaucracy worked hard to discredit and destroy independent schools and independent news media who fostered independent opinions. Extended families and voluntary self-help communities collapsed. Women’s liberation began to destroy the increasingly vulnerable nuclear family. The totalitarian welfare state triumphed and began turning their emotionally-conditioned, brainwashed citizens into children in day care centres. Bossy health and safety Nanny Rules OK?
Breaking the Rules of the Game, the rise of criminal mastermind
Since the end of the First World War, criminals and sado-masochistic revolutionary thugs were increasingly being feted as anti-heroes as the rigid cosmology of the mechanistic scientists melted down with the new reductionist scientific theories of relativistic and subjective morality, quantum mechanics, and physical relativity etc. The end of a real objective universe followed the realisation that there is no such thing as any stabilising absolute frame. The centre cannot hold. God died when materialists took over the academies, marginalised the arts and ridiculed non-materialistic ethics. Nature died when the reductionist physicists took over the expensive laboratories of the military industrial state. No real atomic building blocks, no real size, no real space, no real centre, only an unreal Big Bang. Certainty of the reality of the already god-less objective world also collapsed under the increasingly rigid mental obsession with a fragile subjective psycho-socio-cultural world of easily triggered subjective feelings. Biological men can call upon the coercive powers of the state to force people to act towards them as if they were biological women. Subjective belief is triumphing over objective reality. People who identify with or blindly hate what Jung calls the shadow, are all around us now. Time to make experimental subjective and objective psychology, sociology and anthropology the most important sciences taught in our institutions of higher learning. The hard sciences did not deliver utopia although they did raise material living conditions but they also put terrible weapons in the hands of madmen. We must also purge psychology departments from acting as the providers of tools for advertising men whose unscrupulous greed created the corrupt and self destructive consumer society which is poisoning the Earth.
Heroic Culture found amongst the Non-intellectualised Masses
In the moral vacuum produced when the meaning of life is no longer regarded as a question worth debating at length by intellectuals, monsters appear, as in the famous etching by Goya. Pandora’s Box been opened, but after all the demonic forces had emerged hope finally appeared. Narratives featuring evil criminal master minds with heroes thwarting their plans in the nick of time, have now come to dominate popular dramatic fiction. Since all human beings live in narratives, many fictional characters have become more real to us than historical figures. This has always been true, particularly in Persia and Britain where the romantic fiction initiated by Ferdowsi’s ‘Shahnameh’ and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s ‘Acts of the Kings of Britain’ and their successors has literally preserved ancient romantic stories and verbal intricacies whilst providing much of the heroic cultural scenario that arose again and again in these geographically distinct regions following brutal invasions. In the English speaking world, heroes fighting evil bullies from Caractacus and Boadicea to Alfred the Great, Brian Boru, and Hereward the Wake, are remembered and celebrated. When the records are missing then Arthur and Merlin, Robin Hood and the Scarlet Pimpernel are brought into being. During the Second World War when Britain was about to be invaded by the Evil Nazis, the whole nation called on the inspiration of their past heroes and a living man, Winston Churchill, with all his failings, joined the ranks of the immortals like Alfred the Great. Villains panic easily, threaten that catastrophes will follow unless their commands are obeyed without question and have a serious sado-masochistic relationship with their subordinates Heroes are charming, wise, and resourceful, manage on the smell of an oil rag, enjoy having fun, and lead by example. But they are frequently obliged to go it completely alone. Nature imitates art especially in times of crisis.
Other more recent artists whose stories have blurred the line between fact and fiction include thriller writers like Conan Doyle who created the grumpy arch-villain, Professor Moriarty, and his nemesis, the excitable intellectual, Sherlock Holmes. German Expressionist film makers created the immensely popular Film Noir tradition which started in 1920 with Robert Weiner’s “Cabinet of Dr Caligari”. The tradition is even stronger today. In the years leading up to the seizure of power in Germany by the National Socialist sado-masochists spellbound by Adolf Hitler’s angry oratory, Fritz Lang, created a series of thrillers centred around a master criminal, Dr Mabuse. Initially inspired with the help of an Ouija board, Sax Rohmer wrote stories about Fu Manchu, a mysterious oriental master-mind intent on world domination. He was opposed by Wayland Smith, a dogged gentleman with a military background. Interestingly things change when transposed into a different subculture. Fu Manchu’s mercurial intellect resembles that of Sherlock Holmes and Wayland Smith is more like Dr Watson his loyal sidekick. Since the early 1960s, a series of British film thrillers featuring a sexually irresistible and impeccably mannered MI5 spy, James Bond, have proved immensely popular. The Queen herself appeared with the current James Bond actor in a television promotion for the Olympic Games. She apparently parachuted out of a plane for the opening. Shortly before her death she shared a scene with Paddington Bear where she revealed that she keeps marmalade sandwiches in the mysterious handbag she always carried with her. How important are appearances in determining cultural reality. Can we ever live in the clear light of reason free from shifting appearances?
Where do truly great artists stand following the collapse of centuries of European culture during the 1960s. A master of blurring the boundaries between objective and subjective reality is the film director Federico Fellini. He had been suddenly enriched by the success of his controversial film, ‘La Dolce Vita’. The narrative of this film concerned unscrupulous paparazzi and the corruption and madness of the wealthy elite in Rome. His next film, ‘8 1/2’, made in 1963 is about a successful director trying to make a big budget film with script writers and his backers in disarray. His attempts to understand and relate to women are becoming increasingly contradictory, moreover he has lost all belief in the meaning of life and cannot concentrate on his work. The audience identify with the charming but confused hero of this stunning docudrama, who is obviously a projection of Fellini himself. His final response to the cultural upheavals impacting on him, is to return to self-love and the simple thrills and pleasures of childhood, especially magic, happy marching music, and clown-like play. In later films, with the help of his innocent-child-like wife he makes great strides in his attempts to understand women. Later in that creative decade, the 1960s, such Scifi fantasy films as ‘Barbarella’ and ‘Zardoz’ dealt with radically different views of the major topics of female sexuality and male immortality that no serious films could possibly handle.
The deepest impact on my imagination made by a writer has been the anglophile Argentinian author Jorge Borges. His short story “Tlon, Uqbar and Orbis Tertius” written in 1940, gradually and convincingly turns the rationality of common sense as objective realism inside-out by taking Bishop Berkeley’s subjective idealism, which cannot be shown to be false, as ‘subjective common sense’. The Wikipedia article on this short story is a must read. As a sociologist using ideal typology in the 1950s and 60s, I was already greatly influenced by Max Waihinger’s recommendation of the use of “useful fictions” to live by. I aimed at combining objective realism with subjective idealism and keeping them from destroying each other. I set up Truth, Beauty and Goodness as my transcendental values and pursued them with Logic, Love and Levity whilst overcoming obstacles with useful fictions concerning identity. I learned to adopt existential Fun as my touchstone for pragmatism after studying Johann Huizinga’s “Homo Ludens” whilst reading for a doctorate in the Sociology of Art during the 1960s.
Publishing my Postmodern Process Cosmology in 1973 to explain my unprecedented cultural engineering whilst at the same time establishing the culturally authorised role of ‘Official Wizard’ in both university and political institutions, are examples of my skill in balancing these contradictions. Inverting the use of mathematical formulae by the disciples of Descartes to measure and objectify outerspace, enabled me to turn the physical universe inside-out in a way that Bishop Berkeley would have appreciated. This was accompanied by the publication in my 1974 Nonsense Almanac of a systematic numerological proof that the time and place of my birth were not chance at all. According to the given magic numbers of 7 and 12 that I supplied to a mathematician who used factor analysis which could be applied to anyone, the time of my birth took place at odds of 36,525 to 1 against, and the country of my birth at odds of 190 to 1 against. This friend of mine acted out the role of numerologist to confound the use of completely unsystematic use of mathematics based on biblical texts to fool simpletons into joining fanatical religious cults. Isaac Newton himself spent years searching the Bible for numerological proof of the destiny of the Lost Tribes of Israel. Years later I had a friend in Christchurch, Denis Dutton, who set up a world-renowned website for the arts in the early days of such resources. He was an academic art theorist at Canterbury University and was a genuine skeptic fearlessly exposing religious con-artists. He studied my five successful rain dances in NZ and Australia and announced on television as Chairman of the NZ Skeptics, that I was the only man he had ever come across who was actually performing real magic.
“Nature Imitates Art far more than Art Imitates Nature”
This statement by Oscar Wilde is not so ridiculous as it may seem. Talented creative artists have in the past altered cultural reality and the appearances that change with it. Howard Bloom, the brilliant American literary critic, in his book, “Shakespeare, The Invention of The Human”, makes a convincing case that through his popular plays Shakespeare who was at the cultural centre of the marginalised renaissance community of England, made significant changes to human personality itself, especially amongst English speakers. The romantic Scottish culture with its bagpipes, kilts, haggis, and clan honour systems, was almost entirely the creation of the romantic novelist Sir Walter Scott. He even dragged George IV into his show to persuade the mainly ‘mongrel’ British elites in the Scottish lowlands that it was respectable. Victoria and Albert themselves came under the spell whilst most other members of the inter-related European aristocracy were being attracted by the aesthetics of grim, authoritarian, Prussian military glory.
Much of the interconnected civilised world is now living in an ugly, depressing and Dalek-policed false ‘truth construct’ created through top-down management-speak ceaselessly beaming through the mass education and mass media institutions. We are informed that these electronic algorithms permeating the macrocosm will eventually manifest themselves materially in the microcosm through individual neural inserts, like the green spectacles worn by all the citizens of the walled city of Oz. Davros even boasts about this in his World Economic Forum websites. The best prophecy of of what is to come without the intervention of a prelapsarian wizard, is in my opinion, “That Hideous Strength”, written by C.S.Lewis in 1941.
In my current but rather inactive role as a government-appointed wizard, I am a conflation of intellectual jester at the court of academia; improvising actor-manager in the theatre of the world or global village; disruptive ego-tripping ‘living work of art’; and would-be ‘levitating shaman and holy fool’ providing community therapy. As an example of my rather round-about, post-modern writing style, my essay “Build Back British” is blatant Tory history writing. Whigs will hate it. It’s a Great Reset but unlike that of bureaucratic planners it looks forward to a Great Leap Backwards. My propaganda exercise makes use of both psychological and sociological theories to support a radically new ‘inside-out’ and non political-economically-determined form of cultural imperialism. Nations wishing to join and become willing colonies rather than being forced to become colonies of other unpleasant and boring rival political empires, have to share the freedom values of the central power and must apply diplomatically to be accepted. In other words, something like the current voluntary British Commonwealth. In my proposal for a new post-modern, post-imperialist existential empire, political parties, whose only ideology is progressive economic determinism stripped of all reason, beauty and ethics, would be subordinated through ridicule and the use of aesthetically displayed status which I consider to be the most powerful social human motivation of all. The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, and later Funeral, were perfect examples of truth, beauty and goodness, and spellbound over four billion people throughout the world. I was driven to make the case for this proposal in order to counter the current widespread and blatant anti-British propaganda of rival, puritanical covert-imperialists with ideals that, if carried out, will cause millions of deaths.
My essay, “Build Back British”, is a rough guide to different types of both overt and covert imperialism and their historical antecedents. It was also written to act as an explanation of my lack of interest in the petty ideologies and strategies of other candidates than myself in the 2022 Mayoral campaign in Christchurch, a city founded in the 1850s by craftsmen and highly-cultured English Romantics. I am more concerned with the mental health and spiritual despair prevalent in my city, which is currently an oppressed and badly governed ‘colony’ of the semi-communist New Zealand Government. This arrogant and heartless ‘internal empire’ centred on Wellington and it’s huge incompetent bureaucracy full of ‘bullshit jobs’ is deliberately causing us great economic suffering, especially amongst the most vital industry of all, farming. Using their monopolistic control of government agencies, including compulsory secular education, and now, (through lavish paid self-advertising) all the cash-strapped printed media, they have demonised the imperfect but world-improving British Empire, (which laid the foundations of our independent sovereign nation). They describe it as an evil oppressor and they are introducing disgusting inverse-racism to divide, confuse and distract decent people. Loyal to the values of the founders of our city, I set myself up in the hope of being ‘crucified’ by the local woke controllers of cultural reality. As the non-commercial, non-party-political, and non-sporting Icon of New Zealand since the 1970s, I was expecting to enjoy every minute of it. So would most of the people in the world, if they could get to hear of it. There had already been reports in the media in Europe that the Christchurch City Council were ashamed of their cheeky non-woke wizard and were cancelling his humble honorarium as their Wizard in Residence for promoting “the wrong vibe”. It was going to be an unusually dramatic and comic narrative.
Move on. Nothing to See Here!
Alas, there was a deafening silence. Not a single journalist, and I approached many, even mentioned the spectacular news story that the only officially-appointed National Wizard in the world, colourful icon of Christchurch and the best known and most provocative open-air speaker in the country for fifty years, having previously avoided local politics, was standing as a candidate in the Mayoral election. I was prepared to be mocked as an unrealistic fool. The other completely conventional and previously unknown front-runner candidates with a hundred times the money I could afford to spend on personal propaganda, also got all the media attention. The globalist’s fix was in.
As I finished typing the last words of this provocative peroration I discovered that the BBC, last bastion of freedom during Nazi-occupied Europe, has altered their 1963 video of one of the first University Challenge programmes they broadcast and which had became hugely popular. Previously, as Ian Channell (my old civilian name) a sociology student at Leeds University, I was seen and heard being the first to hit the buzzer to answer many of the ‘starter questions’. My quick reaction time gave the Leeds team their first victories. In the recent BBC documentary about University Challenge, this same clip is shown, but it has been edited to make it appear as though someone else is giving the correct answers. Except from an article in the English ‘Listener’ many years ago, there has been no mention at all of the current official Wizard of NZ’s notable participation in the first University Challenge matches, yet many conventional commercial television entertainers have boasted of their appearances in the series. Move on, nothing to see here.
Since 1999 there has been no mention on any official website in NZ, even those devoted to tourism, that there is, or ever was, an official Wizard in NZ. The Eye of Sauros in the form of top-down surveillance reaches the far corners of the evil empire of my arch-rival, Davros. How long can his frightened obedient media slaves keep the existence of a powerful rival wizard a secret from the world? I can be found most days in the centre of the city wearing my pointy hat and cheerfully meeting and greeting everyone who looks friendly. I bless the tourists who fill the passing trams and love to chat with people who are interested in what I am doing and who enjoy a good conversation. I stick out like a sore thumb and I have been around the city for fifty years. The spells of the reality controllers of New Zealand that are supposed to make me disappear are only partially effective.
Whose vibes will triumph in the end? Davros, the authoritarian dalek master, or Jack, the wise old fun-revolutionary, loved by the general public and whom all daleks have been instructed to deviously exterminate? Even with his complete top-down control of all the information resources of communist Russia, Stalin the chief bureaucrat, and obviously Schwab’s role model, was unable to make his rival Trotsky disappear from history. His old shaky hands are still on the controls of the top-down disinformation flow of deadly, panic-creating algorithms. As a trapper not a hunter, since 1969 (when I was recognised as their Wizard by the World University Service at their Annual General Meeting in Hamburg) I have been busy laying fun revolutionary traps for conformist zero-sum thinkers, especially bureaucrats, management consultants, and human-relations spin doctors.
Belief in Objective Reality progressively displaces Subjective Idealism
During the Agricultural period of human culture, religious subjective reality was transformed by verbal, aesthetic and emotional triggering ‘spells’ into common-sense objective reality by intellectual religious virtuosi. Objective ‘utilitarian’ selective breeding of animals, plants and aristocratic-warrior humans progressed considerably during this period. However, in Europe during the rise of the materialistic enlightenment which followed the catastrophic religious wars of the Reformation, the destruction of religion as the ultimate cultural identity controller began to accelerate. In its place came Cartesian objective reality which assumes that the observer is a kind of unpolluted lens into the working of nature as a mechanism. The observer has no inner life he is kept free from pollution by manipulating divine Pythagorean mathematical explanations. This drastically diminished the role of subjective idealism. The perfectly rational subjective hypotheses of Bishop Berkeley were regarded as irrelevant and possibly mad. Practitioners of traditional magic, like Kepler, who had laid the foundations of modern science, were persecuted or, like Newton who was a numerologist, had to keep their work hidden or ‘occult’. Common sense lost its connection with past traditional practice and became instead an obsession with the realisation of a future Utopia through puritanical striving. Usury was no longer regarded as evil by theologians, and so existential explanations of the meaning of life weakened and were replaced with waiting for a future reward. Belief in an afterlife and in the revolutionary Coming of the Kingdom of Heaven was no longer a common-sense expectation and was replaced by new common-sense dreams of sophisticated health care and retirement in a luxury serviced apartment by the sea. A kind of living death.
Belief in Subjective Idealism returns to destroy a Civilisation based on Objective Reality
The destructive bloodbath of the First World War brought massive disillusionment. Puritanical modernists turned on their parents simply for being out-of-date and were absorbed by juvenile peer groups. Subjective theology and faith in transcendental meaning had already been discredited by Objective Realism and scientific reductionism. Reductionism itself was mistaken for meaning and became deconstruction for its own sake. Without recognition of context or ecology it enabled the Enlightened industrialists to exploit the beautiful natural world to make rich men richer and give warlords even more lethal weapons. Deconstructing a self-creating and self-correcting cosmos unto an observable unloved thing is satanic. Where is the love, the existential joy in being, and the respect for all life that the hunter gathers exemplify? The original Agricultural revolution was based on the egotistical desire for immortality of any kind, which is a crime against being. Add ‘ownership’ of land and ‘ownership’ of human beings and animals combined with salvation by worldly success, and the stage was set for the death of faith. Without faith, despair sets in. Truth must be repressed to become deliberate lies for money, power or sheer spite. Beauty becomes iconoclastic, politicised, utilitarian and repulsive. Laughter at the folly of human pretension is severely punished and playfulness without commercial exploitation is marginalised.
What happens today when a ‘trans’ man, who represents less than half of one percent of the population, declares that he is a woman in terms of his own subjective idealism? Objectively verifiable reality has been the basis of our materialistic universe since the Enlightenment and his organic being is obviously male in terms of that science-based reality system. An individual who declares that he believes that he is god, or a fictional character or a chicken, is treated as a sub-human. He (or ‘she’ for nit-picking pedants) is treated tolerantly if harmless and minds their own business. But they are restrained if they insist that others must treat them as if their subjective belief is more real than the more conventional beliefs of others. With the endorsement of the World Health Organisation woke governments all over the Western world in particular are rushing to legally punish those who refuse to treat such deluded individuals as anti-social criminals when they deliberately abuse the norms of civil society. Some them may be fakers with criminal intentions. Lawyers in the highest courts in the land look blank and start talking gibberish when asked to provide a legal definition of an adult human female. The compulsory census, the ultimate objective measure of the nature of society at a specific time, has become meaningless since one of the key sources of information, sexual identity, can now be chosen at the whim of the respondent.
For over a hundred years Reductionism has been seen by our educational institutions as the path to truth, and became an ‘inverted meaning system’. Bourgeois individuals are believed to be more real than their roles in society, physical bodies more real than the whole behaving organism of which they are a part, individual organs and genes more real than the biological organism as a whole, the molecules in a cell more real than living tissue, and particles more real than the molecules and atoms they interact with. Finally, the origin of the universe, the purely subjective Big Bang, is believed by all scientists to be more real than the purely subjective Heavenly destination all true cultures reach for and evolve towards. We are currently trapped in a global totalitarian ant-heap ruled by control-freak wizards like Schwab and his woke cult followers.
I concluded fifty years ago that our civilisation urgently needs a Great Reset and did my my best by being appointed cosmologer by Melbourne University and creating a falsifiable, post-modern, existential cosmology. I published this in 1974 before coming to New Zealand to start playfully teasing the fools and crooks whose desire for money and power over-rules every other value. Turning everything upside-down and inside-out for fun is the path or the Dao I chose in 1968 and have been pursuing with dogged determination ever since. Nothing is perfect. Don’t tune in and drop out. Tune out and drop in. Let go and be sucked up into the heavenly vacuum.
As the first state-recognised Living Work of Art in history, I am casting an aesthetic spell on Klaus Schwab to transform him in the public eye into Davros, an evil wizard and my great rival. I of course am more like the wise-cracking Dr Who lives in a slightly different universe and whose actions are frequently unpredictable and even irritating. Schwab has accumulated a spellbound cult-like following of mentally retarded but highly ambitious Young Global Leaders whom I have cast in the supporting roles of zero-sum thinking Dalek exterminators.
Angry political confrontation with programmed woke daleks, or watching horrified from above like an ironic minor deity will only confirm Klaus’s belief that he is the centre of managerial universe of woke supremacists. The only way that this ballooning nightmare of the WEF can be stopped is through fictional action in what most successfully educated people have taught to believe is the real world. The wind must be taken out of their sails through effective social ridicule which impacts on their unguarded subjective self-righteous certainty before they implement their Great Reset. Fun Revolutionary warfare eats away at their absolute certainty that they are going to solve all the problems that were created by generations of self-confident fools like themselves. The spiritual battle is with what Jung describes as The Shadow. When self awareness is lacking, all one’s evil intentions are projected shadow-like outwards onto others who are usually fairly sane people who just want to be left alone to mind their own business. Passive aggression is a common form of bullying today. Attacking or even criticising such individuals for their cruel behaviour enables them to take on the role of victim so that, charged with moral outrage, they can avoid responsibility for their actions by attacking you without any coherent reason.
These two forms of identity, subjective and objective, when carefully cut and spliced create an intellectual tsunami of subjective nonsense where the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity. The only way to stop this chaos is to play them at their own game. You don’t need to believe, just pretend, keep a straight face, and watch the results. Once this is done, and we realise we have all been conned by an evil wizard using management speak, I could set in motion my completely original synthesis of the subjective aspects of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Northern European romances and British Israelite history, set within an objective political economic narrative acting as ‘the rules of the game’. The game is essentially an existential binding together of Truth, Beauty and Goodness. No separation of means and ends.
As I write this today, the British sovereign, who can trace his ancestry, partly objectively and partly subjectively, back to the House of David, is getting ready to be anointed and crowned whilst seated on the Stone of Destiny, or La Fail, as were the ancient kings of Israel, Ireland, Scotland and England. Tongues will need to kept in cheeks until the fun level of existential being rises high enough to synthesise and balance the subjective and objective aspects of being. Try and find a government that is not based on useful fictions adopted to provide motivation and commitment? This would a good starting point as the heads of the woke idealists will explode and they will lose control of their dream of political power. Once this task is completed, we can make use of the Book of Changes and the honest subjectivity of the Daoist masters to unite East and West in the useful fiction of the Dreamtime in the magical cosmology of our sane ancestors, the heaven-seeking, existential, hunter-gatherers, and encouraging our shamans attempts to ascend the cosmic axis.
