The Edge

Political gnosticism, Lovecraftian anarchism, and democracy in Carcosa.

via LG-Design.

I almost slipped, there, for a minute, after the election.

Not back into my old habits—getting sucked into the outworld tournament of Mortal Komment, blowing lines of political rhetoric at 3am, throwing paragraph-length haymakers at virtual opponents. (Not all the way, at least. That only happened briefly.)

This was something different. For the first time, as an adult—possibly ever—I felt something like political optimism.

Not because Trump will be in charge of running the government. That’s an obvious disaster. But as far as the available menu of terrible options, this seems like the best possible scenario.

The majority of possible outcomes were almost guaranteed to end in a national crisis on Election Day, largely because of the mainstream media’s conduct over the past eight years.

Any pretense of objectivity went out the window when the liberal media—and it was explicitly the self-appointed liberal media, from 2016 onward—decided it had a moral imperative to stop Trump at all costs. Outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC, and CNN bet the farm on their ability to depose Trump by wrenching public opinion in the right direction. Unfortunately, “stop Trump at all costs” inevitably meant “protect the Democrats at all costs.” Legacy-branded editorial boards imagined people simply wouldn’t notice this obvious bias, or if they did, had such high regard for journalistic institutions that they would unquestioningly accept it.

When their strategy began to fail—with Trump prevailing in the face of relentless criticism and isolation, multiple impeachments and criminal trials—the media had an opportunity to change its role. Journalists could have returned to unbiased reporting and straightforward investigation years ago, quietly and without fanfare. Once it was clear that Trump would be the nominee in 2024, commentators could have toned down their rhetoric. They might have been unable to win back the public’s trust completely; still, they could have boosted confidence in the Fourth Estate’s capacity to treat both parties with equal suspicion—to report on the election as objectively as possible, and to advocate for a peaceful transfer of power, no matter who the victor was.

They didn’t.

So we went into Election Day in a state of maximum hysteria. Violence and insurrection were assured. There was an implicit guarantee that the press would scrutinize the Republican performance while protecting the Democrats. Trump was Literally Hitler, and in an effort to stop Literally Hitler, electoral fairness—the very thing Literally Hitler was supposedly threatening—had to be sacrificed.

The media burned the metaphorical village in order to save it.

And so there were several near-certain disasters looming on Election Day:

• In the event of a narrow Harris victory, the country would immediately go up in flames. Republicans had been primed to expect a rigged election. That might have been factually dubious—but again, who could they trust? The Democratic Party and their partners in the media explicitly stated, over and over, that they would do anything to stop Literally Hitler. If they genuinely believed that January 2025 would see tank battalions streaming into the Canadian lebensraum, why draw the line at covert election interference¹? Even if there had been a determined investigation of possible fraud in 2020—in a scenario where Democratic Party chicanery was exposed, it’s too easy to imagine liberal commentators responding with an immediate about-face, and claiming this as a valid tactic for stopping Literally Hitler. How could election observers guarantee the results of another too-close-to-call Democratic victory without adequately addressing concerns about the previous one?

• Even a blowout Harris win (if such a thing were ever possible) would result in months of scrutiny and uncertainty. Again—if half the electorate can’t expect faithful reporting on any irregularities, what would inspire confidence in an outcome blatantly supported by the (again, self-appointed) liberal media?

• A narrow Trump victory—even a clear victory in the Electoral College—would pave the way for the Democratic/media partnership to challenge the results. This would have been indefensible because of the obvious double standard². Any attempt to overturn the results would unquestionably end in political violence.

• A Trump victory with the electorate divided along the expected cultural-identity divisions would leave the Democratic/media establishment politically defeated but rhetorically triumphant. The subsequent four years would be a purgatorial do-over of 2016: endless recitations of the Literally Hitler narrative; one abortive “This time we’ve got him!” procedural skirmish after another; a paternalistic media parade of war criminals, extraordinary-rendition spooks, private equity ghouls and xanned-out pop stars, assuring the American public that the forces of moral purity would soon prevail over Evil Incarnate. Four more years of didactic waterboarding would break the spirit of even the most stalwart political independents. Democrats holding off an electoral rout in 2024 would only postpone it until 2028, without a substantive change in tactics—and why change, if they’d just won another moral victory?

We dodged all those (potentially literal) bullets. Instead, what we got is a moment of apocalypse: while things might be grim at the governmental level, we’re now in a genuinely populist moment at the grassroots level.

For now, the country is free from top-down narratives of division. It turns out that—surprise, surprise—voters don’t always act out of blind loyalty to some prescribed demographic category. Politics is not just an endless recursion of the same bitter prejudices. People are much more concerned about material conditions; they’re able to make practical calculations, and willing to join provisional coalitions on the same side as their supposed enemies.

This apocalypse also revealed the moral emptiness of the “progressive” authors responsible for those imposed narratives. Following the electoral results, it took hours for the standards of acceptable discourse to fully and visibly collapse on live television. After decades of hectoring audiences about the evils of racism and sexism and bigotry, assuming the battles lines were clearly drawn between the forces of Good and Evil—as soon as the colors on the Big Map shifted against them, the (one more time, at risk of overemphasis, self-appointed) liberal commentators began their own version of machine-gunning battlefield deserters. They brazenly described people exercising their democratic rights as the cognitive failures of particular groups. White women, black men, and the diverse assemblage of cultures formerly known as “Latinx” refused to act according to the interests assigned to them; therefore, they were morally or intellectually inferior, and should be exiled from politics³.

This whole thing has been a sham.

The bad news is that we’ve more or less arrived back at the beginning: with a republic, if we can keep it. Once again, we find ourselves ruled by a bunch of aristocrats, profiteers, and warmongers, almost all of them driven quietly insane by snorting too much wig powder in social isolation. The country is still a sometimes-dangerous frontier. The interests of competing groups don’t naturally align. Negotiating these realities is the work of careful cultural diplomacy.

But at the very least, we—the people—have a chance for that diplomacy to happen. Maybe we can start to have some honest conversations about where we live and what we need, and where we go from here.

The good news, uniquely revealed by this apocalypse, is that we are not as divided as we were led to believe. That’s not to say that racism and sexism and structural injustice aren’t very real and very prevalent. However—we now have proof that the victims of repression are fully capable of acting in their own interests, putting aside their grievances, and uniting with their cultural rivals against a shared enemy: rich dilettantes who try to dictate what’s good for the peasantry, while otherwise ignoring them.

God Bless America.

It’s a genuinely democratic moment. For the first time in my adult life, engaging in politics doesn’t feel like crossing a minefield of apologetics and recrimination. We’ve been operating on one set of political theories for the past two decades or more. Those theories have demonstrably, spectacularly failed to produce a more progressive outcome; in fact, they’re proving to be inherently anti-democratic.

We can’t rely on the government or the media to sort this out for us. We have to do it ourselves. We have to meet people where they really are, make an effort to understand their perspectives, and communicate our values in an appealing way—without using secular theology to browbeat those who don’t immediately agree with us.

We have no choice but to start engaging in genuinely democratic politics again.

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So I had my initial fit of optimism, and now I’m starting to think about what the realities of this apocalyptic moment actually look like.

A recent conversation between

Peter Clayborne

and

Elle Griffin

(my one-time “nemesis”) reminded me that I am, fundamentally, an anarchist: not in a revolutionary, smash-the-State way, but as a philosophical starting point for thinking about how to organize society.

Peter has done yeoman’s work articulating the historical and intellectual pedigree of anarchism as a political philosophy. I’m still working my way through the literature—not really qualified to define anarchism in an academic sense. If you’re interested in anarchism as something other than black balaclavas and molotov cocktails, Peter’s excellent

Anarchy Unfolds

publication has tons more information than I can provide here.

Anarchism, for me, is a practice of political gnosticism: an awareness that the visible forms of social (dis)organization often conceal a deeper reality, demanding that we continually peel back layers of misapprehension to find what really unites and sustains us.

For those who aren’t familiar with the original concept of Christian Gnosticism—it contains many different frameworks of mysticism within the Abrahamic Mythos. One central concept was that, contrary to the claims of dogmatic Christians, the God of the Bible was not the Ultimate Divinity. The entity who created the physical world was the Demiurge: a jealous lesser god who resented the power of the Monad, the true Eternal Becoming, and built the material world as a prison-kingdom to rule over.

While Gnostic sects differ on some of their finer theoretical points, they see a baseline skepticism as vital for spiritual development: if the Demiurge is bent on keeping humans imprisoned in materiality, how could the spiritual seeker recognize genuine transcendence? Each apparent breakthrough in perception could simply be another layer of illusion. Even if the Monad appeared on the other side of physical death, congratulating the mystic for fully escaping the Demiurge’s clutches—it could be just another trick.

This essential paradox puts the Gnostics in company with certain schools of Buddhism, Hinduism, Greek Neoplatonism, and many forms of indigenous shamanism: within a limited human frame of reference, there is no way of knowing how many realities a mind can travel through on its quest for understanding. Always pursue the Good without being too credulous. Separate reverence from attachment. Push beyond the realm of appearances, again and again, and keep going.

A gnostic attitude seems invaluable for living in modern society. We are, indisputably, subjects in a kingdom of illusions. It’s practically impossible to measure the depth of the artificial reality that separates us from the real sources of power. In light of this, without getting into the normative ideals of political anarchism—on a purely epistemological level, the only sane response seems to hold that all forms of authoritarian power are insufficiently democratic and therefore illegitimate.

All governments are authoritarian systems. Any permanent authoritarian system will eventually collapse into corruption, dysfunction, or self-serving repression. Democracy is a process, not an institution—just one way of forming an authoritarian system. Between moments of popular participation, even a democratically-elected government will become authoritarian by design; the only theoretical advantage to a democratic system is in limiting the duration and severity of top-down control. Ideally, democracy creates a failsafe that can peacefully dissolve and reconstitute the government, in case it becomes too repressive or too dysfunctional.

Realistically, in the modern world, a truly democratic government is impossible.

Democracy is indispensable as an ideal. In practice, it depends on a balance of three things: institutional responsiveness, rational actors, and reliable information. These three components might be available at the community level, which creates the illusion of participation in larger systems. Political observers can speculate about the vicissitudes of rational actors and institutional responsiveness; this occupies most mainstream political discourse.

But the fatal flaw in effective democracy is a lack of reliable information.

When it comes to a state or a country, or even a medium-sized city, we’ve fallen victim to a problem of scale. The bureaucratic and logistical systems undergirding our societies have simply grown too big and complex for ordinary citizens to understand, even without accounting for deliberate concealment and manipulation. Reliable information for anything beyond the most basic decisions is outside the reach of the electorate; without it, questions of rational action and institutional responsiveness are moot.

The corpus of publicly-available information is baffling enough. How many people know who their state representatives are? What do campaign contributions tell us about which private interests are supporting which politicians? Who’s in charge of the power station, or the sewage treatment plant, or the garbage collection? How are small-business interests reflected in the local economy?

When it comes to geopolitics—which billionaires have lunch together, and what do they talk about within the confines of their own private clubs? Who keeps track of the international rivers of dark money that flow just beneath the surface of our democracies? How many voters understand what JSOC is and how it functions? How many have studied the architecture of parallel governments created by Continuity of Governance plans, and the ways those structures have evolved over time?

Beyond the borders of these already-complex systems is the twilight world of parapolitics. Who’s the most politically influential criminal in any small town? Who’s the most corrupt law enforcement officer? Are they the same person? If not—when and how do their interests align? We try to tell ourselves that these dynamics are the realm of fiction; if they are real, they happen somewhere else. But these figures exist in even the dustiest rural towns. Just because they go unrecognized by their neighbors, doesn’t mean they’re not there.

Those relatively modest fiefdoms of corruption overlap with zones of serious darkness. International criminal organizations sit comfortably alongside their democratically-empowered counterparts. Foreign policy is shaped by underworld economies. Details of state-sanctioned criminality often appear as footnotes in news reporting—if they appear at all. Extrajudicial murders and assassinations happen in broad daylight; few people try to understand their true significance. Although many parapolitical theories dismissed as “conspiracy” have uncomfortable elements of truth, the lengthy process of separating fact from fog is too time-consuming for most people. Governments have every incentive to keep their secrets to themselves, unless directly challenged—and even then, investigators who ask too many questions frequently end up unlucky.

An entire literary history of propaganda is freely available to the public. We know governments have means and motive to shape popular perception. These state-sponsored campaigns are designed to thwart democracy: withhold reliable information, publicize false narratives, and keep the commoners in a state of irrational, emotional urgency. The only counterargument against this anti-democratic force has nothing to do with its potential; rather, it amounts to flat denialism: “It doesn’t happen here; if it did, it was a long time ago; if it’s still happening, it’s not effective, because people are just too smart these days.”

Then there is a level of international parapolitics that beggars the imagination of 99.99% of the world’s population. At this level, an organization with a name like “The Illuminati”—its sinister plans written under branded letterheads, a mailing address at some dark Gothic castle—is a gauche pantomime, not to mention completely superfluous. Those at the very top of the global pyramid simply see the world on a timescale that is geological compared to the everyday fortunes of working people. These are the true princes of the air. The world comes to them. The axis mundi manifests wherever they alight. They’re the scions of ancient, tectonic dynasties. They regard the likes of Gates, Bezos and Musk as nouveau-riche upstarts. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are deck hands. The Bilderberg Conference is a holding pen for punters who can’t get inside the real velvet ropes.

Raw power can be measured in dollars, but an entirely different kind of power is conferred by institutional memory: the ability to pull hidden levers at auspicious moments—levers built into the substrata of modernity’s machinery, forgotten and invisible to all but a handful of people.

These are all true things.

We dismiss them as “conspiracy theories” because the world they describe is, frankly, horrifying. Most people would rather not think about how little control they actually have over their lives. The scale of these powers and principalities is Lovecraftian. The non-Euclidian geometry of the Rothschilds’ existence threatens the sanity of a regular wage earner. From that altitude, everything we cherish looks like grains of wheat on the threshing floor. Trying to parse the intricacy and magnitude of real power puts us beyond the realm of rational analysis. The familiar trope of the yarn-tangled cork board is often played for laughs, and yet anyone who genuinely tries to map the connections between public entities and hidden interests—even at a rudimentary level, without plumbing the true depths—genuinely risks losing their mind.

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There is an Edge in these inquiries: an event horizon beyond which all sense of perspective, certainty, and safety falls away.

I don’t know exactly where that Edge is, thankfully. But I feel like I’ve come close to it.

Lovecraftian horror is a good reference, because it draws on the same terrors of scale; more importantly, it accurately describes the contemporary nightmare of a failed Enlightenment.

Modern people put enormous faith in the redemptive power of the Truth. We’ve been trained to believe that rationalism is limitless: there is nothing that can’t be analyzed, understood, and subsequently controlled—at least theoretically, if not practically. Our heroes are the diligent inquirers, the scientists and reporters and skeptics who keep doggedly pursuing the evidence in logical fashion, expecting some undeniable benefit from their conclusions. If some is good, more is better; the more we know about the universe, the better off we are.

Lovecraftian fiction (as well as Lovecraft-adjacent dramas like Season 1 of True Detective) posit the opposite: what if the process of discovery leads inexorably to shrieking madness? The protagonists in these mythic narratives aren’t empowered by rational inquiry; they’re destroyed by it. They’re prisoners of their need to understand. They can’t look away. Can’t stop digging for deeper understanding, even as they realize it will strip away the last of their humanity.

What if the Truth is that we’re living in a waking nightmare, at the mercy of entities beyond our capacity to understand, let alone defeat? What if there’s no escaping the prison of the Demiurge, or the domain of the King in Yellow? What if rationalism—the assuredness of a sensible, humane, God-granted Order—is the very thing that will drive us insane when it smashes into the black bedrock of reality?

What indeed?

It’s a practical concern: how does a person handle the cognitive dissonance between the ideals of a democratic society, and the painfully visible inhumanity of real power on the surface of the world, to say nothing of the dark tunnels underneath it?

Democracy depends on rationalism. If we can see the contours of that Edge—the real, hard limits of our ability to rationally understand the world—then democracy is a game of checkers on a chessboard’s single square.

Recognizing this, how do we reconcile the optimism of a potentially hopeful moment with the fatalism of existence within a brutally indifferent machine?

For one group of people, that moment of optimism happened before Election Day; for another group, it happened after. But for myself—poor cynical sinner that I am—I expect we’ll all end up together in the same place, sooner or later: confronted with a system beyond our control, at the mercy of forces we can’t understand, trying to eke out an existence without falling under the terrible gaze of the Great Old Ones.

This is not a prescription. I wouldn’t want to rob anyone of their optimism. If you think this is all paranoid, overcaffeinated, hyperbolic nonsense—you’re right. If you still believe in the promise of democratic politics, by all means, go on organizing and voting and writing your representatives. Somebody needs to keep the faith for the rest of us. Maybe some of it will work.

But this is why I Don’t Talk About Politics anymore, despite these occasional tumbles off the wagon: I’ve already been close to the Edge, and my optimism lies in a different direction.

Although Lovecraft’s horror stories are a good reference, the author conjured his horror by chaining his characters to a modern epistemology: when rationalism failed, his protagonists could do nothing but fall into the abyss.

That’s not our reality.

The point at which rationalism fails is the magisterium of applied metaphysics. Meaning isn’t an object to be discovered, a thread of yarn that terminates in a frayed end. Meaning is a force that can be channeled in ways that extend beyond the material world. That’s what art and religion and magic and mysticism are meant to do. Rather than a childish diversion to the grown-up work of civilization, a supra-rational mythic awareness is the net that catches us when everything else falls away.

The optimism of the Gnostics was not that the Demiurge could be defeated: it was that humans, in spite of their imprisonment, still retained a spark of Divinity. This divine spark allowed them the possibility of escape—meant that they were, in an elemental way, already free. The Demiurge’s tyranny could never be complete. The Gnostic idea of emancipation inverted the outward pursuit of physical freedom. In trying to expose the Demiurge’s lies, the Gnostics weren’t counting on a principled appeal to cosmic justice, as if the bailiffs from an even higher dimension would show up and drag the old crook away; once the mystic recognized that the cages of materiality could only contain crude matter, they would understand that their participation in the true reality of Creation was already guaranteed. In fact, they had never really been imprisoned at all.

I wouldn’t want to rob anyone of their optimism. But I suspect that more and more of us will catch a glimpse behind the curtain in the years to come, whether we want it or not. The project of healing that cognitive dissonance at a civilizational level—and hopefully co-creating a beautiful world, in defiance of the very real and terrifying forces that threaten us—is a different kind of work.

So I’m going back to Not Talking About Politics again.

And so help me God, I’m going to get some sleep.

1. It’s officially been proven that this incredibly irresponsible rhetoric, which produced a genuine mental health crisis in millions of Americans over the past eight years, was pure electoral propaganda: why else would Joe Biden invite Literally Hitler to the White House and validate the coming Fourth Reich? It’s not a requirement. He could have refused to meet with him. If Biden believed everything he said for the past eight years, there’s only one other explanation for Trump’s cordial visit to the Oval Office: Biden forgot that John Candy died in 1994, and mistook Trump for the star of Uncle Buck.

2. This fundamental hypocrisy is even more obvious now: many of the same people who claimed that questioning the 2020 results was tantamount to treason—and attempted to have independent commentators deplatformed for daring to cast doubt on a presidential election—are now shamelessly voicing suspicions about the 2024 results, and supporting near-identical conspiracy theories. Exactly as they did in 2016, when questioning election results and claiming an illegitimate presidency was, again, patriotic.

3. While exit polls have definitively disproven almost all of these narratives, this kind of gross prejudice should never have been a temptation in the first place, for the self-appointed standard bearers of civilized progressivism.