The last weekend has been an especially and delightfully weird one in American politics. On Friday, the internet was awash with intruige over a video shared by right-wing media outlets that allegedly showed footage of a Senate staffer filming and performing homosexual sext acts inside Senate room SD-G50. That the actual source of the video is credited as The Daily Caller is in all honesty a red flag on its own, and the fact that it’s conservative media all over this story is very suspicious, but in any case the office of Democratic Senator Ben Cardin has stated that one of their staffers, Aidan Maese-Czeropski, is no longer employed. It’s been claimed by several conservative outlets that Aidan Maese-Czeropski is name of the staffer who had sex in SD-G50. So far, the office of Ben Cardin have decline to comment or discuss any details about the alleged incident.
I notice that the Republican Congressman Madison Cawford and his supporters have naturally seized on this whole story, taking the opportunity to brag about how Cawford was supposedly proven right about being invited to orgies by several prominent politicians in Washington DC. I would take this opportunity to stress that one guy allegedly is not evidence of Cawford being invited to orgies by prominent politicians. Frankly, I instinctively dismiss the notion that Cawford would be invited to anything by almost anyone in DC. I will say, it is funny that Cawford says “I told you” a year after he himself was seemingly seen doing nude thrusts with another man in a leaked video, among various other interesting incidents. But then again, to argue about hypocrisy would just be getting ahead of ourselves.
To be honest, this whole affair mostly just illustrates that the right-wing and far-right in American politics, rather than acting heterogeneously against American society and the American political establishment, actually function as its detestable and execrable superego of American society and its political establishment. They are essentially nothing more than hypocritical cops without uniforms (or sometimes with uniforms as the case may be). Think about how it was The Daily Caller who broke that story, and how afterwards we were told that Aidan Maese-Czeropski was fired from his job at the office of Ben Cardin. I think that’s the point. For all their talk of so-called “cancel culture”, much of their actual serious business consists of getting people fired for failing to abide by the normative morality of American society, or at least as they so perceive the morality of the nation. For all their pseudo-cynic posturing, they are motivated by nothing more than the belief in the organic morality of the American nation state, and in this sense their answer to the hypocrisies of American life is not to reject or transgress the social fabric but instead to police it by any means necessary, even if, ironically, such activity winds up contradicting some moral norms.
Alas, the iron grip of morality and respectability is such that if Aidan Maese-Czeropski really was the staffer who had gay sex in the Senate, he feels forced to defend himself by denying any suggestion that he would ever feel free to do it. He cannot demand that American society ask itself why it should condemn him for having or filming gay sex in the Senate, nor challenge Ben Cardin to stand by him against the reactionary policing of sexuality. The omnipresence of moral guilt is something that the Right takes full advantage of when getting somebody fired for allegedly having gay sex in Capitol Hill.
You know what the big joke is? The fact that some of these right-wingers, particularly the Republican Senator Mike Collins, deign to compare the idea of gay sex being filmed in the Senate to the attempt to overthrow Joe Biden on January 6th 2021. After all, both were “desecrations” of Capitol Hill in some way or another, so Mike Collins asks, rhetorically, “which desceration was worse?”, to imply both that having gay sex in Capitol Hill is a “desecration” and that the Jan 6 coup attempt was nowhere near as bad as someone having gay sex in Capitol Hill. As if we should be compelled to a make some moral comparison between gay sex in a Senate hearing room and a failed right-wing coup where some people tried to install Donald Trump as dictator and only managed to take over Nancy Pelosi’s computer and a candy desk. As if the American institutions of government don’t deserve to be desecrated!
What’s also interesting is the way that this all got rolled into another thing that happened this week involving a “satanic” statue erected by, as usual, The “Satanic” Temple. The “satanic statue” in question is a holiday altar piece that was erected at Iowa State Capitol in Des Moines, Iowa. This altar featured a goat-headed effigy figure (supposedly Baphomet), which they say is a symbol of humanism and anti-authoritarianism, a sign of The Satanic Temple’s seven tenets, electric candles, and TST’s official seal. TST apparently obtained permission from the state government of Iowa to put up their altar at the Iowa State Capitol. Despite this, however, statue was later taken down and beheaded by a Christian Nationalist named Michael Cassidy, who was predictably hailed as a hero by the American Right (including Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis) for his actions.
Judging by the fact that right-wing Christians are complaining about the alleged gay sex video are also complaining about TST’s altar at the same time tells me that they view these subjects as being directly connected. For instance, Jack Posobiec complained about how he says Democrats are “putting up Satanic statues and filming orgies with their male staffers in our capitols” and claims that “we are told to allow it out of tolerance”. Mike Collins lumped “gay porn in the Senate”, “satanic statues in Iowa”, “tr*nny tap dancers in the White House”, and “swearing in ceremony on [so-called] child porn in Virgina” all together as “a heck of a week for the Left”. There are a shitload of right-wing conspiracy theorists who keep talking about the gay sex video alongside the TST statue as though it’s somehow evidence that the United States is controlled by some kind of satanic elite. A lot of them literally just say almost exactly what Mike Collins said already like it’s a script for these people. Don’t me wrong, though, fuck The Satanic Temple, their humanism, and all the exploitative and reactionary bullshit that attends their whole project. I wouldn’t take them as representing Satanism in any meaningful sense. But I’m also saying that there is this moment where the Right takes two coinciding situations (and a couple others) and compacts them into a convenient narrative about civilisational decline involving satanic orgies. Fun stuff, at least if we forget the latent fascism underwriting it all.
Actually, the whole thing is a good opportunity to dare to question the morality through which we discuss the concept of orgies in passing. In this sense, I hope to diverge from the standard liberal response to the right-wing outrage, which usually consists of the refrain that Republicans the ones really doing orgies as if it matters that they did. Everything about the moral throughline that the Right presents in its outrage is in some ways reflective of the way Christians have always reacted to the concept, never mind the real presence, of the orgy, which in turn reflects the attitudes of the Roman elite to orgies or orgiastic cults. The Roman elites very frequently mistrusted and propagandized against foreign religious mysteries, especially deeming their orgiastic elements to be a form of decadence and corruption that threatened the social fabric. For this reason they banned the Bacchanalias, and then later re-established a moderated form of the Bacchanalia as eligible for public practice. Such a rationale also underlies much of the long-established hatred for the emperor Elagablus, who worshipped the Syrian sun god El-Gabal with rites that involved music and dancing, which for the Roman conservative establishment was simply too much to bear. For a time, the early Christians themselves were accused of participating in orgies among various other social outrages. Yet, over time, Christian apologists, beginning with Lactantius, turned these narratives around and framed Roman pagans as the ones who were really into orgies, leading eventually to the idea of the Roman elites having a penchant for sexual debauchery.
Although there is not, and never has been, any real evidence of any such orgies being a longstanding Roman practice, the fact that ancient Romans were somewhat open about sexual imagery and that wild orgies were sometimes a feature of Roman novels gave rise to many narratives about Roman sexuality long after the collapse of what we call the Roman Empire. Moreover, it was common practice for Roman emperors to accuse their predecessors of just about anything, including all manner of sexual deviance and impropriety, and imperial biographers like Suetonius have written outright slanderous lies against some Roman emperors. The point is obviously to reinforce the official public morality of the Roman Empire as a means of legitimating the rule of new emperors. In the end, both Christian narrative and official Roman narrative work to reinforce a public morality whose function is to control the ways in which people express themselves, not to protect people from harm. In a sense, that very morality still persists in all directions. An orgy is basically just a wild group sex party, but everywhere, people only understand orgy as being some kind of immoral frenzy of sexual excess, or a mere eruption of ontologically evil behaviour. That reflects in everyday language on other subjects, where the word orgy is only ever a negative judgement, as in “orgies of death”, “orgies of violence”, or “orgies of consumerism”. The idea to even depict orgies in artistic media is seen as distinctly shameful. And it strikes me, why do we so readily and unwittingly join hands with the Right in such moralism?
Let’s say an orgy actually did happen in Capitol Hill. Not just a couple of people having sex in a Senate hearing room, I mean an actual orgy, involving multiple politicians, happening in the building, maybe in multiple rooms of the building. What would be so bad about that? And would you dare to say what I just said, or would you keep your silence why the right-wing dominates the conversation, wielding a morality that you have assented to and ultimately bringing a fascist theocratic dictatorship down upon you as a result? Will you be exploited by your fellow humans with the help of some morality, or will you reject that moral exploitation and embrace orgies? At minimum, for as long as we still have to live with the whole system of statehood and government, I’m looking forward to the day when we see the offices of government turn into offices of carnal indulgence and orgy. If there really are orgies in those buldings, it would be their only true worth.
This should be our answer to this whole conversation. Public morality is a scam. It only exists to exploit you or to facilitate your exploitation by your fellow humans. If you have not intuited this yet from watching this whole nonsensical sex scandal, let alone the simple truth that most sex scandals are simply moments of moral panic for the ruling class, then I suggest that you figure it out soon because otherwise there is no helping you. But otherwise, if you want to have your own orgies, with people who equally desire them, don’t let anyone stop you.
I have observed for some time that even this ostensibly secular world is full of people whose greatest wish is to see someone be condemned to Hell. Very often it’s expressed simply through memes, but it can nonetheless be a genuine wish, and even jest sometimes expresses a desire or a prejudice. The modern atheist in this sense represents a contradiction wherein they reject not only the very existence of Hell and especially the eternal punishment of the Christian version of it but also the whole morality of it, as well they should, and yet harbour the hope that maybe the villains of our lives are all being punished in some gruesome hellworld or will be when they die.
It’s a hope obviously shared with Christians, even if the committed belief in any sort of afterlife (let alone any notion of the soul) is not. Of course there is sometimes in the midst of this the refrain that of course Hell really isn’t so bad in the Bible: we should keep in mind that this is only predicated on the idea that, instead of endless torture and punishment meted out by demons in a fiery underworld, it simply means total separation from God after death. So as far as Christianity is concerned, if you disobey God’s will you can take your pick of either burning for eternity or being alone in the void for eternity. Hooray. But there’s a sense in which it only really makes sense to wish that on anyone for one reason, and at base that one reason is shared by both Christian and non-Christian alike: the desire for revenge.
I’ve been exploring the work of a Ukrainian existentialist philosopher named Lev Shestov lately, out of a curiosity animated by the possibility that it might lend to the formation of an ambiguous synthesis of existentialism and anarchist nihilism, and in that respect one of his points which I find animates the observation I’m writing.
In All Things Are Possible, he writes the following about morality:
Moral indignation is only a refined form of ancient vengeance. Once anger spoke with daggers, now words will do. And happy is the man who, loving and thirsting to chastise his offender, yet is appeased when the offense is punished. On account of the gratification it offers to the passions, morality, which has replaced bloody chastisement, will not easily lose its charm. But there are offenses, deep, unforgettable offenses, inflicted not by people, but by “laws of nature.” How are we to settle these? Here neither dagger nor indignant word will serve. Therefore, for him who has once run foul of the laws of nature morality sinks, for ever or for a time, into subsidiary importance.
Or perhaps something far more salient on “moral people”:
Moral people are the most revengeful of mankind, they employ their morality as the best and most subtle weapon of vengeance. They are not satisfied with simply despising and condemning their neighbour themselves, they want the condemnation to be universal and supreme: that is, that all men should rise as one against the condemned, and that even the offender’s own conscience shall be against him. Then only are they fully satisfied and reassured. Nothing on earth but morality could lead to such wonderful results.
One of many odd things for a man credited as a Christian to say, hence the fascination. But if morality is simply an instrument of vengeance, then Hell, as conceived by the Christians at least, is the ultimate promise of revenge. The Christian God tells the human species that those who believe in him will be rewarded with eternal life in peace and bliss in his heaven, and those who do wrong or reject him will be damned forever. The elegant thing about that promise is that it both grants and defers the promise of vengeance, true to the Christian tradition of delaying gratification before the moment of eternity. The Christian God in his “omnipotence” allows sinners to exist solely in order to punish them later, and sin itself to exist solely that it can be eventually punished, for both his own gratification and ultimately the gratification of his worshippers. There is no reason for “the Good Lord” to create Hell except for this very purpose. What need is there for the daggers, and what need even is there for words, when “God” knows and can see all transgressions before the panopticon of his being and will thus, sooner or later, punish them accordingly? If one takes the Christian premise seriously, what need is there for anything other than this assurance; the implicit knowledge that satisfaction is already at hand?
The Christian notion of Hell can thus be seen as the apotheosis of morality as a function of revenge. There’s only one reason to want to believe in Hell, or, even if you don’t, hope that someone will end up in Hell, and it is to be satisfied by the thought that the bad guys are all there. At base, it is vengeance, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, and it is a vengeance that God and other powers are always all too happy to grant. But then again not all revenge takes the form of Hell, and not all revenge is granted by God, certainly not the kind that might immediately satisfy people. For the promise of Hell is still a delayed gratification, and anything that involves taking matters into your own hands (let alone turning to the Devil) just isn’t. But what of secular modernity? Nothing more than the familial inheritance of Christianity, kept alive by the sad passions that naturally dominate a society characterised by abject powerlessness, lack, and frustration.
All in all, there is something Enrico Monacelli said that I find relevant: that we should see our desires for what they really are. One day we will see our desire for deferred vengeance for what it really is.
There’s something I thought about when contemplating the drunkenness that I sought after over the holidays. I don’t see myself as a “binge drinker” in the sense that I once had some vague idea about in my youth; in fact, for a lot of my early life, the main thing I had in common with Friedrich Nietzsche was never drinking alcohol. But in the years since I started drinking, this time in particular gives me a taste for the disinhibition of drunkenness. In fact, while I tend to avoid addictive behaviours, I do prefer that my drinking would have me reasonably disinhibited. But it’s from there that I reflected on the value of disinhibition in a much broader sense.
I would maintain that in life, and in politics, you should strive to disinhibit yourself to the extent possible. By which I mean, you should be able to cut off the fetters that prevent you from accessing the experience of life or cut off the options you would otherwise have to affect political change. A person lives, desires to keep living, and so works to avoid meeting danger and harm, and yet one never entirely approaches life in the safety of the normal limits of their sensorium. For this reason, people may push themselves beyond the limits of their “normal” state, their “everyday” consciousness, perhaps even if it means bringing themselves a little closer to death, so that they might access their own freedom or possibilities of action or being/becoming. There is perhaps a certain lack that is associated with a life that does not involve some extent of disinhibition, however small, because there is a sense that disinhibition, even if dangerous, brings some sense of completion to the fulfillment of individual life, by expanding it.
In the context of ancient pre-Christian religions, disinhibition was served not just as a way, but an important vehicle for the attainment of divine inspiration. The cult of Dionysus in Greece often centered around the liberation of consciousness through an intoxication that would invite the spirit of Dionysus to posssess his worshippers, and thereby experiencing ecstasy. Similarly ecstatic states of divine possession have been attributed to gods such as Pan, Hecate, Cybele, and Ares. In some other mystery cults, gods such as Sabazios were similarly worshipped in orgiastic festivals of drunkenness aimed at communing with the god to attain a blessed afterlife. In Scandinavia, religious disinhibition was part of the cult of the berserkers and the ulfhednar, the bear or wolf-pelted warriors whose battle frenzies were linked to the divine inspiration bestowed by the god Odin. In Egypt, disinhibition via drunkenness was sometimes observed as a way to re-enact the cycle of fertility and commune with the gods through the drunken worship of goddesses such as Hathor, Sekhmet, and Bast. In Vedic India, a substance called Soma was offered to the gods and then ritually consumed in order to become inebriated from it, which was believed to lead to a state of divine inspiration as well as magical powers and even immortality.
In politics, it’s obvious that everything depends on what you’re prepared to do in order to affect meaningful change, and it would seem that allowing your hands to be tied by the norms of those in power – that what we call “liberal-democratic rules” – does not allow you to do much. Our enemies certainly seem to have a certain sense of that, but we sometimes don’t. I’d wager that it’s usually only insurrectionary anarchists who have the idea that they must act without inhibition or decree. Many Marxists, of course, have an utterly confused stance on the matter: on the one hand, the Marxist-Leninist will assert that they will “make no excuses for the terror”, to justify basically any exercise of power, and then on the other hand repeatedly chastise other radicals for any broad commitment to political violence as a means of acheiving revolutionary aims outside of their sphere. Yet even they are all too aware of the need to assert themselves against the norms of the current system. Not only this, but all leftists, when discussing things as basic as anti-fascism or the labour movement, know the same thing, implicitly. Politics is basically a condition of social war, even if few political actors are actually conscious of this fact in their operations. To disinhibit yourself here means to shed the norms that stop you from acting in full knowledge of this reality.
In the Left Hand Path, disinhibition as transgression can be seen as part of the praxis of apotheosis, even if I can recall a few modern LHP practitioners who have insisted against intoxication. Whether involving intoxication or not, moral disinhibition is the name of the game, in that the bounds of custom and normativity are, as fetters, cut away in order to access knowledge, power, divinity, the truth of the world, really everything that the adept needs to progress on their path. In Satanism, this is in many ways the purpose of inversion: shattering the laws of “God” in devotion to the dark inner principle of the universe, from which endless liberty for the soul is to be derived.
So disinhibit yourself. Get weird with it. Cut down the spectre of morality in its many forms: authoritarian, democratic, conservative, progressive, essentialist, Christian, humanist, and all alike. If you need a New Year’s resolution, you can promise to set fire to the future. Or, if you need to be modest, you need only promise to go beyond yourself in what chances you have.
I stumbled upon an article from some website called UnHerd a few weeks ago about how conservatives need to return to “core values” after the defeat of Donald Trump. The article, titled “After Trump, conservatives must return to core values” and written by a man named Peter Franklin, makes the case that conservatives should re-align themselves with the core of conservatism by abandoning Trumpian populism in favour of a kind of Platonic (or at least seemingly Plato-inspired) ideology of civic virtue. UnHerd for those who don’t know is some centrist conservative-leaning op-ed magazine whose main trade seems to be self-important cultural and political commentary on liberalism (there are good articles from them to be sure, I just have a bit of a personal distate). Although the article isn’t exactly fresh, I decided to take the opportunity to express criticism of tendencies within conservatism that I’ve always disliked.
Our author begins with an astute observation of the inconsistency between the American right’s stated commitment to Christian values and their willingness to throw their support behind a man whose actions and personality convey very little in the way of those values. His main thrust, buttressed by quotation from the Bible, is that the Republican Party, having imbibed Trump and his movement, has become stained by the apparent abject immorality of Trump and his movement, their bad company runing the otherwise “good morals” of the party (no one tell him about the fact that the same party appears to have no problem with Jim Jordan being in it), and so the key premise is for Republicans should cut off the Trump movement, or what’s left of it, in order to rebuild their moral credentials.
Now I could, of course, go into the many ways in which the Republican Party’s claim to being the party of good morals is simply false, from their enthusiasm for murderous plundering in the name of imperial expansion to their willingness to maintain a system that is entirely at odds with the religion they claim to believe in (indeed, perhaps Franklin should reflect much more on that superlative Eric Weinstein quote he cited and apply it to the official myth of Republican moral splendour), but what capitvates me is the more immediate impetus for the article itself. This article was written on the day of Joe Biden’s inaugration as President of the United States, and by that time, any reflection of Trump done by just about anyone is irrevocably coloured less by his overall record and more by his more recent association with the Capitol riots, as well as perhaps his refusal to accept electoral defeat. In this sense, Franklin should ask himself the honest question of what was such the unique moral outrage here? That some angry QAnon enthusiasts and Trump supporters invaded the Capitol building (or rather, were let into the premises by the police) for the purpose of shitposting and perhaps stealing the ballots? And yes, there may have been violent intent, suggested by the presence of weapons at the scene, but outside of that, very little destruction seems to have actually taken place. Meanwhile, last year, there were riots that engulfed many parts of the country in flames and a government building was destroyed. Now I’m confident that Franklin is much more consistent than many liberal commentaries, but at the same time one has to wonder why the objectively less destructive (which is by no means saying good) riot is more worthy of moral reflection on his political movement and the moral fibre of the country than the objectively more destructive riot.
We then come to a strange discourse concerning the relationship of conservatism to the establishment, reflecting on how conservatism used to be associated with the establishment and that now anti-establishmentarianism is moving away from the left and towards the right (both framed in bourgeois terms of course, referring to two wings of the present liberal bourgeois order rather than historical political thought). In any case here we get a sense in which Franklin’s concern for morality is defined significantly in relation to power. Think about when he says “Insiders get away with what they do and say because it’s normalised — even celebrated — by the arbiters of acceptability.”, and that conservatives should be mindful that “the cover story does not cover them anymore”. In some sense there is some point to it, in that the prevailing hegemony of a given society will favour itself and its agents over any who do not find themselves in harmony with it. But by reflecting on moral responsibility in this way, is it not possible to say that the salience of building moral comportment comes merely that it may be useful as a means to attaining power, rather than in-itself? If virtue or ethics pertain to what we do out of principle when there is no advantage, no threat, or no one watching, then virtue is of spontaneous value, it is valuable in itself, and so arguments that emerge from advantage, power, or looking reasonable for bourgeois society, are fundamentally meaningless. Mind you, as we shall see, there are some guiding axioms that Franklin presents, and we shall examine these as we go forward.
There is a key conceit of conservatism worth addressing here. Franklin states, in his criticism of conservative echo chambers, that “proper conservatism” is one that dislikes not only ideological purity spiralling but also “ideology itself”. I have seen conservatives of many stripes go and claim that they detest ideology and do not consider themselves an ideology, as though they were somehow centrists or something. In truth, this is nothing but a conceit. Conservatism is an ideology in its own right. It has core political axioms by which they believe society is to be structured around, as many ideologies do, they are defined in some sense by broad political programs and sets of assumptions that justify said programs, as all ideologies do, and it can be tied back to key historical materialist interests, namely those of the bourgeoisie, or at least the bourgeoisie of old. The only reason it doesn’t seem like they are too ideologically committed is because a great chunk of conservative ethos is defined precisely by opposition to broad or seemingly radical social and political changes.
There is a reason why conservatism in Europe looks somewhat different from conservatism in America. European conservatives have already accepted the liberal welfare state as a political reality, and in this sense part of their identity can be defined in terms of their opposition to much broader and more thoroughgoing socialization of the economic order. Americans on the other hand still have to fight just for universal healthcare to be realized, and many of the reforms that Europeans (including the British) take for granted are not only militantly opposed by the American right but also, due to their unfamiliarity in American life, become a source of anxiety that stems from the threshold between the present status quo and its alteration. But then even liberals serve the role of halting progression in this sense too, so what is the difference? The answer comes back to ideology, and the operative premise behind it. Whereas modern liberals merely oppose broad social-democratic reform because it means shifting away from neoliberal consensus in some way, even if only marginally, conservatives since the aftermath of the French Revolution have been guided by a belief that there is a timeless, eternal, supra-historical vision of social and political order whose observance and obedience is the source of harmony and prosperity (and perhaps “freedom” in some twisted Germanic reactionary vision thereof), and from which deviation is the source of degradation, destruction, and decline. It is, by necessity, not always consistent in light of their constantly shifting environment, but there will usually be an argument of this nature in opposition to broad social reforms. This claim cannot be taken as anything other than ideological, since it presents an assumed model for the proper course of political functioning and organization. Really I would say that there is no one in political thought that does not embody some sort of ideology. To say the opposite is to claim to a skepticism that either does not actually exist or is simply untenable in the face of any external pressures or experience.
Now we arrive at the subject that motivated me to write this post to start with: the “first principles” of conservatism that Franklin proposes. These “first principles” are a set of transcendental axioms referred to as Agathos (“the Good”), Aletheia (“the True”), and Kalos (“the Beautiful”), a terminiology he asserts to be borrowed from Greek philosophy. He uses the term “Platonic Triad” or “Socratic Triad” to refer to this set of axioms, though ironically such a triad was probably never actually devised by Plato or Socrates and instead was likely invented by a French idealist philosopher named Victor Cousin during the 19th century. Thus, he is speaking to concepts that were present in the Greek philosophical canon, though since Greek philosophy is by no means a unified entity they would likely have been defined differently and the subject of debate and contestation in relation to their precise meaning.
Before we get into these transcendentals individually, there is a fundamental conceit underpinning the invocation of this triad that underpins Franklin’s idea of conservative thought. His contention is that conservatism is defined explicitly by the belief that the transcendental axioms of morality are objectively real in that they transcend human experience. This is in his view what sets conservatism apart from liberalism, which in his view holds these axioms to be subjective or simply relative, a matter of opinion. It is also, contrary to Franklin’s earlier conceit, inespacably ideological, and in fact we now see that Franklin’s conservative ideology is an ideology of transcendent values, which are thus to be formatted onto human experience and societal organization. Franklin is very specific about what this transcendent status means, because he states that such a belief in transcendent axioms is excluded by the premise that the physical universe is all there is. What is implied, though not outwardly stated, is that these values stand apart from physical reality, apart from human experience, to be imposed upon both from some alien realm of spirit. Such a premise thereby invites obvious questions about the origins of these axioms, the falsifiability thereof, or whether or not they even tie back to human experience if they exist in such a fundamentally alien fashion to humanity, as is implied by their transcendent status. Indeed, in light of the obvious influence of Platonism found here, we can note that Plato’s critics have said much the same thing in objection to Plato’s theory of the Forms. But Franklin prefers not to think of it this way. Instead he only assumes that this view has been challenged, and supposedly abandoned, because it is simply “unfashionable”. Not because such a worldview may actually be untrue, but because its implications inhibit the autonomy and subjectivity of humans.
This is interesting by itself because it speaks to a broader worldview that, in my view, presents itself as absolute truth but in reality is ripe for contestation and question. Franklin obviously recoils to the thought that freedom and autonomy might actually demand that any limits be placed upon it are not valid or worthy by themselves but instead must be tested on the grounds of their salience, their moral sense, their empirically sound character, and in broad terms their necessity, and from there merit. Obviously, if morality is transcendent, then any limits on autonomy or freedom don’t need to be justified except by their conformity to a set of transcendent axioms, but even then it certainly seems to have no basis in nature or the human, since it stands fundamentally outside of the human. Thus, it exists specifically as a device by which to restrict freedom through the superimposition of a trace-manifestation of the original or natural expression of virtue in the world.
Now, onto the first of these transcendentals: Agathos, or “the Good”. “The Good” is here defined as “excellence of character”, and is to be applied to questions of leadership, “is he or she of excellent character?”. To this, I say, I’m sure Barack Obama could be interpreted as “excellent in character” by many people, but he still ordered the wholesale slaughter of countless children in the Middle East, and orchestrated mass espionage upon his own population. In this sense clearly either he was not excellent in character, at which point no US President after World War 2 could ever be described as such (to which I would indeed agree), or there is a clear gulf between “character” and the actions perpetrated in the real world. As to his own application of this axiom, we are drawn back to the subject of the Capitol riots, and it is hear that I must confess that I laughed at the author’s apparent lack of self-awareness. He asks: “Can attacking police officers doing their duty be described as good? Or vandalising a public building? Or disporting oneself in a place reserved for the holders of high office?”. I have questions of my own. What about police officers letting rioters into the Capitol Building in the first place? What about them taking selfies with them? What about a police officer murdering a Trump supporter? Or better yet, what about acting like a scene in which five people died is an unprecendented national tragedy, while ignoring the riots that engulfed America last year – who knows how many people were hurt or killed while their homes and businesses were burned and smashed? Can any of this be described as good? And I’m not done. What about arguing against stimulus relief for poor and working Americans trying to survive the pandemic, as plenty of Republicans have done? What about abetting a system in which the average American cannot be guaranteed good healthcare because they will never be able to afford it? What about lying Americans into an illegal, unjustifiable, criminal war in Iraq, as Republicans have done? Is any of this to be described as good?
There is also something to be said of Franklin’s statement that “if someone lives their life in obvious violation of widely shared standards of decency, then that really ought to put us off”. On the surface, this is eminently agreeable. But let us peel back. To what extent are the shared standards of decency we hold based on goodness, let alone on truth, and how do you know that this is the case? Evidently our discourse on the Capitol riots suggests that our shared standards of decency are, if anything, ultimately insincere and arbitrary, and that their authorship is traceable to a consensus that is manufactured by the ruling class, one which evidently sees the destruction of ordinary communities as no big thing compared to the intrusion upon reified symbols of bourgeois power.
Next, the second of these transcendentals: Aletheia, or “the True”. Here he denotes the concept of self-evident truth, from which he then proceeds to masturbate about the evils of conspiracism. He never explains why the enterprise of conspiracy theory is inherently fallacious, in light of the fact that conspiracy is in fact a legitimate category of law and hence conspiracy theory is simply speculation on the occurrence of conspiracies, he simply expects that you already agree with him. He also makes no argument for why truth is always necessarily self-evident either, why there can be nothing hidden from human eyes, that we must hence seek out upon our accord. He argues only that as conspiracist thinking becomes normalized, “debate” ceases to exist, replaced by propaganda, as though the mainstream press does not propagandize the public all the time.
He complains that unity is destroyed in the process, but the unity he seeks is nothing more than a culture in which all people conform to an unquestioned account or narrative of events. Unity based on this is not necessarily a good thing, and it certainly is not good soil for debate, since the only salience there is for debate is, ironically enough, the ground of disputation, contestation, uncertainty, disagreement, in other words division. This division is natural to the diversity we see in the free and open exchange of ideas that we like to talk about, and it is quite natural that you may put two or three people together and expect them to agree on almost nothing. To the extent that Franklin upholds the virtue of doubt, it is very clearly not towards popular or established consensus. He certainly does not embody skepticism any more than anyone else meaningfully can (as I implied earlier, there are probably no true skeptics in any fully ontological sense), and he seems to subtly chastise those who are skeptical of the efficacy of blanket lockdowns as a policy, though ironically such skepticism is quite normal in his own movement.
There is also something that can be said of Franklin’s invocation of the concept of epistemic humility. He holds this to ultimately be a conservative ontological principle because it implies a consistent opposition to radical and untested change. But does it? He equates this concept with doubt, “the homage that we pay to truth’s transcendent power to expose human ignorance”. But is it not through that very same homage that we come to question the transcendent itself? Is it not through epistemic doubt and humility, the admission of ignorance, that tells us that we cannot even be sure of the transcendent, or of God’s presence in the universe? Although it is certainly true that there can be no such thing as a truly consistent skeptic, since such a skeptic is compelled ultimately to ontological impossibilism through his own self-denial, it is also obvious that Franklin’s idea of doubt and epistemic humility stops short of the validity of his transcendentals. These, being outside of the world, are also being the question of this world, despite very clearly being human reifications of human, and thus worldly, givens. In the same sense that he implies doubt as an implacable opponent of radical and untested change, I may also submit alternatively that it implies opposition to any arbitrary impositions upon natural liberty and autonomy, and the free development of individual, as well as collective, ways of life, or an opposition to any claim for organized human society that exists because it is simply the natural order of human societies. But such thinking, I suspect, would be totally anathema to Franklin, because his transcendentals would ultimately be the targets of any thoroughgoing application of such a virtue, at least so long as they stand as means to justify the impositions he desires.
Lastly, the third of these transcendentals: Kalos, or “the Beautiful”. Here we also see a take on the interrelation between goodness, truth, and beauty that sound sensible for those who dwell in appearances and therefore in ignorance. He says “truth tells us about goodness and beauty draws us towards the truth.”. I laugh. Beauty more often than not has the power to draw you away from truth, for indeed a lie can be beautiful and wholesome whilst still being a lie, and spreading a beautiful lie is not good, indeed it is thoroughly unvirtuous. Here is a truth that is very cruel and ugly, but is true nonetheless: at any moment, you may actually die from seemingly nothing. Is it true? I see no reason to doubt it. Is it beautiful? Absolutely not? Is it good? You tell me. A truth need not be particularly noble-minded, and certainly not particularly beautiful, in order for it to be true. And ironically enough, even Christianity had its sights on this reality. The Bible talks about people despising the truth, but if truth were beautiful and glorious, who could despise that, especially if beauty is supposed to lead to truth?
Beauty, very often, can serve as an effective veneer for all manner of faults or problems. Take for example a recent story of a woman named Jewel Hernandez who assaulted her boyfriend because he apparently refused to have sex with her. She is by no means an ugly woman, so the refusal to have sex must not connect with any sort of repulsion to her appearance. The man could just have not been feeling like sex that day, but that itself seems to have set her into a violent stupor. Clearly you can meet someone who is beautiful but also unstable. Fascist aestheticism plays an often unreasonably high stress on the aesthetic element, to the point that aestheticism can be seen as central to the psychic and even political appeal of fascism. In fact, Walter Benjamin made a good observation when he stated that fascism introduces aesthetics into political life as a means of giving the masses an expression without giving them the right to change the structure of their society. Fascism thereby lays a heavy emphasis on what it deems to be the beautiful, which in their parlance is invariably married with their abstract ideas of strength, and the fascist ideal of the beautiful here leads not to truth but instead to the obfuscation of unspeakable malice and suffering. The Soviet Union, by contrast, politicizes art and aesthetics, thereby conforming art to ideology, and this was the ethos behind that witless school of art known as “socialist realism”, whose apparent aesthetic splendour, in its relentless pursuit of the glorification of the USSR, no doubt served to blanket away its precarious and totalitarian nature.
Now, this observation is very relevant because, although Franklin is not a fascist, not by any stretch of the term, and certainly not a Stalinist either, his views on aesthetics stress an intertwining of beauty and salience by rendering aesthetic choice a criteria not only by which virtue can be inferred but also the character of a political movement as a whole. This embodies simultaneously the aestheticization of politics and the politicization of aesthetics. Politics is rendered aesthetic because beauty is intertwined with truth and goodness as mutual criteria of each other, and aesthetics is politicized because aesthetics here fundamentally matters to politics in that it is to be the expression of politics. Aesthetics, in Franklin’s conservatism, is to “enlighten”, “improve”, and “inspire” in its wholesomeness, and in this regard he deems that Trumpism fails the standard of virtue by flouting the axiom of the Beautiful because its aesthetic, as communicated by their memetics and rhetoric, is vulgar, provocative, and outrageous, and by his books seeks to sensationalize rather than inspire and offend rather than enlighten. But enlightenment in itself is not something that exists simply to graciously beautify creation. Indeed, there are all too many discourses on the nature of enlightenment that hint brilliantly towards the character of enlightenment as being destructive towards illusion inasmuch as being inspirational. Indeed, while vulgarity can indeed be an alienating thing, there is also, in at least some cases, a sincerity to it that Franklin’s idea of graciousness rarely permits, since substance is never always guaranteed by form. Unbounded by nicety, the vulgarian, if he intends to communicate the truth (or at least what he sincerely believes to be the truth), will not bother with grace and form and instead aggressively preach his raw substance, and he will wish to awaken people to his views, by which we mean very rudely and boldly so. Even if we put God into the equation, I think it is fairly obvious in the Bible that God does not just politely nudge people towards his reality or his word, rather he shocks his prophets into the knowledge of God. Now, Franklin is careful to acknowledge that even in speaking profanely a person can still speak the truth, but whereas he deems it a failure of virtue in the ultimate analysis, I deem it to be alive, authentic, even heroic at times.
There, after all this, still hangs in the air a sense of the question of what Franklin is conserving. You would think this was an insane question because his objects of conservatism are clear as day, namely the three transcendentals. But when one looks at his arguments, I find that most of what he wants to conserve is the reputation of the right, by which I mean their good standing in the sight of bourgeois values. And besides, if these transcendentals are really apart from the physical world, if as is implied by his concept of what it is to be transcendental, then they are fundamentally out of human hands to preserve or alter, and we are in fact moved and imposed upon by them, since they transcend our experience. Yet, it seems this does not happen. Of course it doesn’t, since humans do not naturally conform to the transcendental, if mainly because the transcendental, in the terms that implied by Franklin, in Platonistic discourse, and in common parlance, does not exist to start with. When I say this, I do not mean this in the sense that there is not more to the world than first meets the eye. Insofar as I consider to be myself spiritually-inclined, I do indeed suspect or believe that there are concerns for which the I prefer the term “numinous” to describe (the term “supramundane” rolls of the tongue but is ultimately an inadequate definition). What I mean is that insofar as I consider philosophical materialism to be correct over philosophical idealism, I would say that, if there is only the cosmos that exists, and that this cosmos consists of eternally regenerating matter and energy in the final hand, then to speak of something exist apart from the cosmos and transcending it is to speak fundamentally of fiction, deceptive abstraction, falsity, and of a unique type of meaninglessness that is uttered, ironically, in the name of giving life meaning. I suppose then that we do arrive at Franklin’s true object of conservatism: an imagined idea of a world governed by the alien forces of the transcendental, whose mere existence overrides the autonomy of humans.
Now, I want there to be no illusions about my views on morality. Just because I reject the idea of there being a transcendental moral axiom or axioms does not mean that I think that morality is meaningless or non-existent, though my criteria for morality is admittedly an obstinate one – it must justify itself within the world. .My view of morality is that it must be something that is not rained down upon us from heaven, like manna to the Israelites, but instead growing outward from the soil, like the tree of life as symbolized in antiquity. It should be something that can develop freely by our hand, yet be held to the root and compel observance from humans. It should not be some feckless yoke upon autonomy and expression, but something that is simply shared and considered in the space of freedom and worldliness. Such a thing is very difficult to sketch out, I realize, and it is small wonder that people can default either to transcendent moral absolutism or complete moral skepticism or subjectivism, neither of which I find to be salient.
In any case, I find Franklin’s case for the “core values” of conservatism to be thoroughly unsatisfactory, and I hope I have gotten that across in the best way possible.
Pallas Athena by Gustav Klimt (1898); chosen here to represent the neoclassical conceits invoked by our author
And now, Part 4 of the big project I have about Satanism, this one concerning my own recent sense of tension about Satanism in recent months. This will not be too much like the last four posts as it’s more of a personal piece rather than an attempt on my part to unpack a subject intellectually. I will be elaborating on my tensions, dilemmas, issues and questions, or just general thoughts on the subject, through various subjects and dichotomies, so that I can get it out to my Satanic or Luciferian buddies for further discussion.
Egoism vs egotism vs altruism
If I’m being entirely honest, this has been influenced by high-profile events of last year, the reaction surrounding them, and how I feel they reflect on society as it is now. I remember when the Pulse nightclub massacre took place in Orlando, Flordia, wherein 50 people were murdered at said nightclub by a self-loathing Muslim who hated gay people and hated himself because he was gay. In the aftermath, I saw an interview with Guardian columnist Owen Jones which ended with him leaving the set and pouting like a child because they kept talking about any subject other than the fact that the victims happened to be gay and he “as a gay man” wanted to talk about it so badly. Basically, he took a 50 people getting murdered and made it all about himself and the fact that he himself is gay. That to me was inexcusable. Not only did he seem intent on obfuscating the true impetus behind the massacre, but he did it out of an identitarian sense of narcissism. For some reason I never got round to talking about that particular issue until today, but haven’t forgotten about it.
For all my egoism, at least within the context of my spiritual philosophy, I have grown tired of some individuals who care for nothing but themselves. Especially in the political sphere of things. There’s too many people who care only about themselves with regards to their vision of the country or the world, and they don’t care what anyone thinks because if they disagree with them they can ignore their concerns and impose their will on them anyway, even if they don’t like it and even if it’s only the people doing the imposing who believe it to be a good thing. Likewise, I have recently expressed sorrow over doing some things in my life solely for my own advancement, that is for the benefit of advancing to high position in a career and perhaps receiving a high enough salary from it.
And then there is something to be said of the issue of principle. Even though, as a Satanist, I might be expected to put any sense of principle to the side in favor of self-interest, and I have talked to other Satanists on this subject before over the years, but I find I am more likely to consider an outcome based on the success of a principle. For instance, I would rather be poor and free than live in a rich country in which we have no real liberty. I am sure that to some other Satanists, this is questionable. In a rich country I at least have the chance to pursue a better quality of life if I keep my mouth shut, so to speak, but in a poor country I might have less options and less money. But I would rather that if it meant I would live in a free country because I would prefer that the principle of liberty is alive. And not just for myself either: I don’t live in a free society unless the people in general share that liberty. Otherwise, there is only one person who has (or the few who have) license or permission to do what he/she wants (or they want), but there is not liberty for the all people. Is that truly freedom? Michael W. Ford, for instance, says that every deed is selfish, but I find myself questioning that at times. If I tend to put principle over other matters in certain instances, to what extent can that truly be called purely selfish? Or what about love? Emotional love I mean not simply sexual attraction. How much of love can truly be labelled a purely selfish thing?
Morality/ethics
Morality is a funny thing. I’ve always had it at the back of my mind at least, never totally gone without concern for it. In fact, I will probably write a post eventually on the subject of a conception of personal morality that I deliberate on and will plan to apply to myself consistently for the foreseeable future. But in general, the idea of any sense of moral understanding is never something I have had no interest in. In my day I have been shown examples of behavior that, by my own standards, I can’t describe as anything other than ethically or morally wrong. But then, the notion of objective morality is tricky. I don’t think I can argue that my moral principles are the absolute. For me I have had a question on my mind? What if we understood morals and ethics as something that we can base on the world around us, but that changes with our understanding of that world, and therefore it is possible consider perceiving morality similar to understanding the laws of nature, our understanding of which changes over time as we gain knowledge of the universe? Does it still make for subjective morality, or does it make for the possibility of at least barely objective morality? What I assume, though, is that it is clearly not valueless solely because it isn’t a physical thing. At which point, in any case, the real question then is the value of morality.
That said, I hate the label moralist often because it is always attached to people who wish to turn their moral compass into a code of law for all men and women to follow regardless of their own personal compass. Not to mention, the attachment to such stifling moral principles as the kind of religious values of Christianity, or at least the kind of Christianity provided conservatively religious Christians. If all moralist meant was someone who placed value on moral or ethical principles, who knows maybe I would be called that. But it’s got more baggage than that. I hate the progressive view of morality too. They think it’s either utterly malleable to the whims of some grand, immaculate, millenarian conception of social progress – that is, something is morally correct because “IT’S THE CURRENT YEAR GUYS!!” – or it’s based on almost the same religiosity and sensitivity as the kind provided by the Mary Whitehouses of both yore and modernity.
Self-preservation vs self-transformation
This is a fairly recent question, but it touches upon a key difference between Satanism and Luciferianism. Satanism is the philosophy that places emphasis on self-preservation, while Luciferianism talks about self-transformation. I have thought about it at some point, and I don’t think I have fully answered it, but there is still the question: what is ultimately more important to me? As much I have often felt that there is probably something core and essential to my personal being, and as insistent as I often tended to be only a few years ago, how much of me is really the same throughout the entirety of my life? Perhaps I haven’t discarded what is essential to me, at least as I see it, but there can be no denying that I have evolved throughout my life. I value self-preservation in the sense of preserving the characteristics that I consider integral to my personal sense of identity, but at the same time, is it not true that the self is a thing that grows and grows, constantly, ideally towards a better form? At which point, isn’t the better ideal to pursue the growth, evolution and transformation of the self into the best form that it could possibly attain?
Another main difference between Satanism and Luciferianism is that Luciferianism advocates the pursuit of a higher self. Michael W. Ford’s literature on the subject speaks of the Daemon, which is equated with the concept of the higher self. I’ve often associated the term ego with self because of the fact that the word ego literally means self. But is that all to the self though? Perhaps Lilith Aquino of the Temple of Set I think illustrates this point adequately in The Pagan Library (if that is really Lilith Aquino):
Glorification of the ego is not enough; it is the COMPLETE psyche, the entire Self or soul, which must be recognized, appreciated, and actualized.
God, and the gods
Although I am an apathetic agnostic and I don’t have much investment in the God vs No God debate, I do sometimes think about the concept of God, or the possible lack of one, from time to time. I still have yet to answer the question of deities vs deific masks and need to read more. That said, I think deific masks may be the likely view I take on rather than literal theism due to my issues with the idea of literal theism. In the end, I would value myself and my fellow Man above the rule of a literal God. Most literal deities probably want your worship more than anything else anyway. And with God, like I said some time before, I don’t care if God is real because I will probably not worship a literal God.
Although the Left Hand Path tends to be all about self-deification, I’m often at a point where I don’t like to take godhood too literally. I think I’ve often said that when LHP traditions say you ought be your own God it simply means you ought to be the master of your own life. Is a way of interpreting this, then, not self-mastery, spiritual autonomy? I suppose demi-godhood is simply the metaphor.
Hedonism vs eudaimonism
Hedonism is the doctrine that the primary value in life regarding happiness is the pursuit of pleasure, and the goal of life to maximize pleasure and the avoidance of pain. This can involve emphasis on the avoidance of negative or unpleasant experiences. Eudaimonism, by contrast, views the cultivation of happiness as dependent on self-realization and the practicing and cultivation of virtue. This can involve the development of personal strengths or emphasizing meaning and purpose as valuable to life. Both of them put the happiness and well-being of the individual at the core of their set of priorities, but differ in their conception of what happiness means for the individual.
The reason I mention this is because I have been doing some thinking on them. I feel I have seen a problem with at least certain aspects of hedonism regarding today’s social justice types. If hedonism at its root is the maximization of pleasure and the avoidance of pain and negative experiences, then what else do we call this attitude wherein the primary desire of life is to live in a world where they need not hear of anything bad? Where no inkling of negativity may penetrate the minds of today’s youth? Where the desire not to be divested of a comfortable life outweighs all other values? At the very least it could certainly be described as hedonism gone mad. I worry that such an attitude my result in my generation remaining as a generation of lotophagi – those who eat of the lotus of blissful ignorance, rather than the apple of the knowledge of good and evil that would otherwise spawn true freedom and virtue. Not only that, but I have been thinking that it is the desire for self-development and meaning that, for me, outweighs temporal pleasure, just that I think the enjoyment of temporal pleasure can be a positive thing. Perhaps that’s the issue of balance, that can answered by eudaimonism and epicurianism. Still, part of me thinks that a sense of value creates happiness in people that pleasure in the hedonistic sense can’t provide.
Revenge
An eye for an eye, lex talionis, if a man hits you on the cheek smash him on the other. For a while, this has been a troubling thing for me. It’s based on the idea of “do unto others as they have done onto you”. But I have been running into a constant theme when discussing arguments: is it right to do something to others that you think they have done to yourself or others, when you are opposed to the very idea of that thing being done to you as a principle. Like doxing. The argument against doxing is based on the premise that individuals should have the right to privacy, and not have to worry about being harassed or threatened by people who gain their information. If you are doxed or someone you care about doxed, isn’t it then wrong to dox them? If you think it’s wrong to bully people as a general rule, is it right to bully someone who bullied you? If you got raped, and you are obviously against rape, what then?
Those are all the dilemmas I have for now that are pressing and relevant at the moment. Hope I can get some comments from my LHP buddies. Peace out.
Imagine the following if you will: Madness. Injustice. Terror. Instability. Social decay. The prevalence of corruption. The general disintegration of the bonds that hold people together. Brother turning against brother, sister against sister and so forth. Complete disorder and mayhem. Rampant violence. Riots, looting, and senseless destruction. The vices of mob mentality, or even mob rule. The woe sown by dictatorships. The bloodshed of a massacre. A world ruled by malice, hatred, and hostility, with no room for love, reason, or any of Man’s brighter qualities. The general feeling experienced by an individual when he/she loses control of everything around him, particularly through circumstances or actions that send his/her life in the wrong direction. The state of living in the constant fear that you will die for no good reason. A kind of disharmony which threatens the lives of human beings (and lifeforms, for that matter).
For many people, all this is what is normally referred to as “chaos”. But chaos can be a nebulous concept. Is it that woeful plague of disharmony and terror? Or is it primordial chasm, sea or abyss before creation as spoken of in many mythologies? Or is it that force of primordial power that motivates all of existence as I once thought of it? To be fair though, I may not necessarily refer to the last one as Chaos any more now that I recognize the force I described in the Nietzschean concept of Will to Power, the Setian and Luciferian concept of the Black Flame, the force of vital existence as described by Anton LaVey, or rather the power of the Adversary as described by Michael W. Ford (which is why I have a significant interest in Luciferian and Adversarial magick and particularly in the way Ford describes it). Back in August, a friend of mine and fellow blogger named G. B. Marian discussed three terms from Egyptian mythology that refer to three different kinds of “chaos”, albeit whilst discussing a mutual appreciation of the band Black Sabbath. For him, there was Nun, Kheper/Xeper, and Isfet. Nun was the primordial state of inertia from which all things originated. Kheper was the power of transforming, becoming, and being, and was associated with the creation of the cosmos – the modern concept of Xeper is also an important part of the beliefs of the Temple of Set, referring to the power of self-awareness, freedom, and isolate intelligence. Isfet was the concept of the dissolution of harmony and the bonds forged between human beings, a state of disorder that lead the cosmos back into the inertia of Nun if left unchecked. It’s the third concept that most people would identify as “chaos”, and the concept that is part of the focus of this blog post.
Isfet also seems to refer to the concept of uncreation. This is important to remember because destruction, or what is sometimes called “chaos” can be a good thing or be carried out in service of the order of the cosmos (or Ma’at). Such constructive chaos is famously embodied in deities such as Sekhmet and Set, particularly Set who was the original protector of Ra who hacked the being known as Apep with his weapon. Speaking of Apep, the concept of Isfet as uncreation could safely be said to be embodied by Apep, for he sought the annihilation of the cosmos – with no real motivation other than for the evulz as far as I can tell. By seeking to undo everything that existed and embodying annihilation, Apep was uncreation. Apep was sort of an embodiment of Isfet.
By defeating Apep, Set drove back the forces of Isfet – the forces of uncreation, disorder, and disintegration.
Sometimes Isfet is seen as synonymous with another concept, evil. But evil can be a loaded term, moreso than chaos. Generally it refers to everything bad for the mind, soul, ethics, and life of the human being and the community at large. It’s also very loaded because the religious have always presented their own notions of “good” and “evil”, and everything outside of their dictated morality was almost always denounced as “evil”. In the Jewish and Christian mythos, Beelzebub’s only real crime was simply being a popular deity worshiped instead of Yahweh/Jehovah. Satan’s only real crime was embodying the fleshly instincts of human beings, and their ego. The only reason Lucifer was supposedly cast from heaven was that he didn’t want to ruled by Yahweh/Jehovah, and who the hell would want to be ruled by him? Most of the devils are only “evil” because they’re devils or embody certain “sins”, but I can’t think of most of them being really malevolent beyond the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic point of view.
When I originally embraced Satanism back in around June 2013, I did so based on my own instincts which I found the philosophy in alignment with. And even though Satanism doesn’t really embrace concepts like “good and evil”, and it’s purely an egoistic philosophy, I never abandoned any sort of ethical/moral concern and still felt there were some things that were simply wrong, and others were right. At least I recognized this was from a mostly subjective perspective. But I also view morality/ethics as a human desire, as much a desire as any of our other desires. I believe that out of our selfish or egoistic nature can arise a kind of natural morality – a morality not dictated as mores and commands from on high that we are compelled to obey for no good reason of our own, but rather a morality that is based on one’s own desires, own feelings, own determination of right and wrong based on both one’s own nature or drives and on human reason. And I think that most in people’s morals, the madness that makes up the concept of Isfet would be intolerable for a number of reasons, the opposing of Isfet, or that which leads to it, would be ethical and quite natural for another number of reasons. On the Left Hand Path, good and evil are usually treated as abstract concepts, specifically abstract concepts that serve only to be dogmatic, restrictive and conducive of slave mentality. It’s certainly true that the morals dictated by the outside can be that way, and often are. But I feel that in the Left Hand Path, there is room for practitioners to pursue their own kind of natural morality, to follow our own moral instincts and beliefs that arise from our own nature, for they are just as . Defying the norms, mores, rules, and Gods who we deem are unjust, we carve a path of freedom where we are responsible unto ourselves, and smite those who would threaten our life and liberty and that of those we care about (and who, in a way, embody Isfet in the process). In a sense we follow the examples of Set, Satan, Lucifer, and the other lords of the Left Hand Path.
Modern Setian tradition holds Set is either the bringer of individuated consciousness (or isolate intelligence) or the embodiment of it. He is also believed to be the Dark Lord behind the notion of Satan, thereby the oldest mythological symbol of such a concept. They both are believed represent the individuated consciousness of Man and its nature. Set shows us the power of a strong will and individuated soul or consciousness triumphing over uncreation, carrying forth the light of the sun. He may point to the individual’s struggle for survival, for personal power, for the future. Of course, that’s just one interpretation. It’s also interesting to me that Set is in some way linked to storms, and that Christian Satan (from my point of view) has links to at least one storm deity (that would be Ba’al). Satan, as Man’s egoistic self embodied in myth, and Lucifer, the Lightbringer, oppose a “God” in whom they see a new force of uncreation, a ghoul who stands against life, accomplish, and self-worth. I believe that in the Satanic, and Luciferian, traditions, we defeat the nihilisms that degrade our perception of the world and send us into retreat and embrace life, and we fight for our authentic selfhood against the doubts sent our way by the world or our fellow Man. We live as authentic, strong individuals, free men and women, pushing back the uncreation and that which we consider to be evil or a threat, just as Set does. And in our hearts, we carry forth our light of creation, as Set helps the light of Ra travel through the underworld.
The Lovecraftian character Nyarlathotep as depicted Persona 2. Something like that only less humanoid would represent Apep and Isfet quite nicely in my books.
It might be noticeable that, even as a Satanist, I still talk a lot about honor, morality, ethics, right and wrong and some such. For some, this might be at odds with Satanic philosophy, since it is common for the Satanist to view good and evil as illusory concepts (perhaps in close following with Anton LaVey’s form of Satanism).
I don’t want to be evil. In fact, I think mankind has just got the definition of evil screwed up for the worse. The only reason I feel I might be falsely tied to evil is because whatever I like is judged by the world I live in as evil. Sex is seen as evil or disgusting and degrading, when it should be seen as natural. Heavy metal is seen as evil music just because the lyrics flirt with the dark side a lot of times, but the actual music is among the most positive influences you could have in your life (or at least in my opinion it is). The occult is seen as strange and therefore evil, when in reality the occult has barely anything to do with the pursuit of evil. If you like Satan, you’re seen as evil, even though the actual Satan has killed no one in any mythological references he has been recorded in, and let’s not forget the fact that in Christian tradition it is their god who judges and “punishes” your soul and sends you to hell in the first place and not Satan. I am not in the camp of evil just because the masses have no idea what true evil is outside their spoon-fed beliefs. I just want to live as I please and conduct my life with passion, honor, rightness, self-honesty, and self-liberty. I don’t think it alienates me from Satanic philosophy, and I certainly don’t think my personal interests make me evil. If anything, I’m probably a more idealistic Satanist than many, but only because a sense of right an honor to be just as part of the fabric of my being as the forces of desire and lust, and I think I have always felt this way.
Do you want to know what true evil is? How about oppression, harassment, and manipulation of the people by those who are supposed to lead and/or protect them. Selling out your own family and friends for some kind of reward or even for religious faith. The idea that someone can claim possession over the body and soul of another human being. Defrauding people. Abuse and coercion of others. The pursuit of robbing people of their right to life and liberty. The exploitation of sexuality to produce herd conformity. The oppression of sexuality and freedom of choice for the sake of baseless political causes and false morals. Making people feel isolate, depressed, and lonely for being different, bullying them for it, or worse still making them feel like psychopaths for it when they aren’t. Leading people into lives of slavery. Killing innocent people. Killing people who are non-believers because they are non-believers. Scapegoating human beings and media because you can’t own up to your own weakness, ignorance, or twisted state of mind. The allowance of injustice and evil acts to go on unpunished. Branding children with beliefs and ideas that they did not choose and before they could make up their own minds, and making them fear eternal damnation if they don’t agree. And of course, the exploitation of innocent children for either demented pleasures or some twisted moral cause, especially to spread panic and division among the masses (a recent example of such behavior was described in detail by my good friend satanicviews).
The fact is, if you think about it, you can sense what real evil is, and it’s not sex, or Satan, or violent media, or the dark side of the force. Evil encompasses the unjust and immoral actions committed by humans, and possibly whatever sickening state of being inspires it. But do we draw our attention to the true evil? No! We make panics based on ignorance and false morals, we focus on the “evils” of sexual expression, pornography, and human sexual urges, and we do nothing but strengthen our own ignorance in service of false morals instead of fighting true evil.
This post isn’t about me. It’s about a possibility within the Satanic path that can be pursued by the Satanist. I don’t know if somebody’s already coined it or not, but this is my perspective on what Ethical Satanist might mean.
The ethical Satanist recognizes virtue and ethics as a vital part of the self and the nature of man just as much as our carnal desires are a part of our nature, is concerned with ideas of virtue, ethicality, and honor alongside generally Satanic beliefs, and bases his/her association with Satanism on ethics or morality. From ethically Satanic perspective, the ideals of Satanism are far more morally worthwhile than the ideals espoused by other religions, and any path of herd mentality and surrender of the individual self to some notion of a higher consciousness would be morally contemptible.
For the ethical Satanist, it is morals and a sense of right and wrong that leads him/her to become a Satanist. Good and evil are often seen by Satanists as non-existence to not exist, though this refers to the Christian idea of the cosmic good and the cosmic evil. Even without the cosmic good and evil, there are still the sense of right and wrong for the individual, and it would be that which leads to the Satanic path if ones moral ideals are basically those of Satanism as well. It is not about conformity to any common sense of ethics, but about virtue and the individual sense of right and wrong.
That’s my perspective anyway. Other Satanists might have a different viewpoint.
It’s been said that only a Sith deals in absolutes, but Star Wars philosophy aside there are times when you actually can apply absolutes. For instance, I feel there are moral judgement that you can make absolutely depending on your perspective, and I value the making of strong decisions free of doubt. However often times we apply absolutes in the wrong places, especially in the form of dichotomies (“if you’re not with me, then you are against me”), not working with any shades or subtleties, not even making strong decisions informed by them.
It’s also a bad idea to deal in absolutes regarding tastes, and simplifying your ideas and tastes too much is bound to create some personal unhappiness. For a while I was overconfident regarding my tastes regarding the opposite gender when I analyzed said tastes, and felt I was in danger of losing a sense of diversity that I felt I had before, and that’s never a good thing. In a different area, I believe a while ago I mentioned the dangers of trying to simplify ones own aesthetic tastes, especially to suit a goal. It narrows down the sense of diversity one has and limits one’s tastes and interests to a specific area. That’s never a good thing.
I would like to pose an ethical question to my fellow Satanists, without the intention to incriminate of course.
My question is as follows: let’s say in a future society a religion such as Christianity has gained greater authority and directly influences the state and its laws, you are offered a high position in the government. You would surely know that by accepting that position you would be supporting the power of religion to control the lives of all humans, a major threat to individuality and liberty, but the position you are offered promises increased status and a generous salary. You would surely also know that since your religion is against the ruling religion in that environment, then resisting that religion let alone revealing your religious identity would put you at extreme risk. If you find yourself in that situation, unlikely as it may be, you must choose between ethicality and desire for wealth. Would you uphold principles in defiance of that society, or embrace a high position within it just to gain greater privileges in life?
And if that’s a little too much of a weak scenario for you, then here’s another: You are working for a big company which you learn makes additional profits by exploiting innocent people or the environment around you. By choosing to stay in employment for that company and drawing a salary from them, you would be making your money by supporting a company that exploits human life, but by leaving you would be rejecting exploitation at the cost of your salary. What do you choose in that scenario?
In general, there may come times when you have to choose between standing up for your own principles and immediate fulfillment of self-interest. In those circumstances, what do you do?
Aleph's Heretical Domain 
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