16 April 2013
Sun: 27' Aries Moon: 14' Cancer
Psychologists and sociologists have been trying for decades to understand "the mob mentality." Usually they study it in negative terms: preventing riots and so forth, but occasionally it gets applied to wider social movements. It does not make sense, how one can get a handful, dozens, hundreds, millions, a whole nation, behind a concept that none would consider on an individual basis - and yet it can be done. History has borne out the devastating consequences of the misuse of this power. We see it daily in the insanity of the badly misnamed American "Tea Party," although to be fair there is also a good dose of schitzophrenia there that should be addressed in another post. And yet, the problem of the "mob mind" might well be best understood as both elementary and elemental.
Magick has been defined by Aleister Crowley as "The art and science of causing change in accordance with Will." There is a kind of magick in the "mob," or the "herd." Great potential, usually not utilized until something - and someone - ignite a catalyst for change. It is usually the someTHING that happens, affecting the right someONE, and the firebrand is lit. Then the torch passes if ti finds a conductive medium and it keeps passing as a wildfire through the treetops until either the mob succeeds in its change or it burns itself out. It might be contained, with immense expense and effort, but never truly controlled until the last ember burns itself out.
And yet the mob is also Water in its manifestation, in that it can be relentless, destructive even to itself. It is a stampede. To harness it is treacherous. To halt it, more so. But even a mighty flood must cease eventually also.
Two opposing energies - Fire and Water - manifested in the same moment, in the same entity. Perhaps this is the paradox of the mob. (Perhaps they unite in the physical manifestation of electricity? It is said that a large group of like-minded people does have an electricity to them...)
Today I see mob mentalities forming everywhere: I will focus my attention on the ones around the GMO issue. Full disclosure: I am very much against genetically-modified products. The great benefits they were supposed to bring the world have not rolled out for anyone but the manufacturers: the claims of safety around them come without full testing from their manufacturers, chief of which is Monsanto, and Monsanto has a great deal to lose in this. So much so, in fact, that they lay out enormous amounts of money to buy scientists, lawyers and politicians as both investments and insurance on the even more enormous piles of cash they rake in.
But there are three "mobs" forming here, if you will: the anti-GMO crowd, the pro-GMO crowd, and those who "DKDC," don't know and don't care. That last is more of a herd, unaware of its power as a group, unwilling to move unless provoked by something more dangerous than any one of its individuals (and then only as far as necessary to escape the immediate danger), unwilling to act in defense of its vulnerable members.
I am unsure what lit the fire under the asses of the GMO crowd, what served as the catalyst for their transformations from pro-GMO or DKDC. Perhaps it was individual stories and experiences here and there, like my sister whose son is autistic. (The GMOs didn't cause J.'s autism, but they do aggravate it. When he is on a strict organic diet he is high-functioning, at the top of his class, sweet, communicative and aware: on GMO food, he backslides and loses almost all ability to function in the world.) Perhaps it is Monsanto's own dark history: http://gmo-awareness.com/2011/05/12/monsanto-dirty-dozen/ lists off twelve products made by Monsanto in the last fifty years that have all proven very popular - and very dangerous to use. In many cases, internal memos reveal that the corporate heads knew exactly how toxic their products were/are and chose to whitewash it. Saccharin, aspartame, Agent Orange, Roundup - the list is extensive. The list of known health side effects is even more so: 94 conditions linked to aspartame alone.
Whatever it is that acts as the catalyst, it feeds a collective wave of growing horror, as evidenced by country after country slamming its doors , and on Saturday, May 25th a March Against Monsanto will be held across the US and the world.
Two people working together in magick are more powerful than one, properly directed. A circle is much more powerful than two, properly directed. A mass circle can have unbelievably massive results far and away beyond the cumulative power of the people involved: somewhere, if magick could be quantified, it transforms from cumulative into logarithmic amplification - but there must be a focus. This was the great failing of the Occupy movement, though also its inherent political strength: in not naming a common goal, a group focus, it endured ferocious attacks both physically and on the air. Yet that same failing was a foundational weakness that allowed much of the truly transformative POWER of the millions of people behind it both physically and mentally to fade away.
There is no such ambiguity with the March Against Monsanto. The very name screams it. So now, the mob of "DKDC's" - the do-nothings - will be caught as they usually are in the battle between the fors and the againsts. The againsts are a grassroots movement - yet a grassroots was able to overcome the problem of racism in America just enough, just long enough, to put the nation's first black family into the White House - and then to KEEP them there. The are armed and armored with small change, with history, with hope and fear both, yet the majority of those planning to march, I would suspect, are people who never thought they'd take to the streets in a public demonstration before the catalyst hit them. Deep down, the motivation behind all of that... is love. The magick of their Will and their resources will be put to the test against the magick of the corporation whose existence is at stake, and against the money it uses to express its Will.
You see, business made a dire mistake when the corporation was invented. It is a thoughtform, nothing more, nothing less, but a thoughtform invested with physical reality through belief, law, lobbyists, and the people who sit its governing board as its legal representatives. That thoughtform takes on a life of its own through the people it employs - in many cases consumes - to keep itself alive and functioning, and through the people that see it and take it as reality (buy its product).
The thoughtform that is Monsanto has become not only parasitic in nature - taking and taking, while giving nothing back - it has become predatory, even viral in its spread. Nature never made that: a virus with a Will, with awareness of what it was doing. The fusion of a Will - the awareness of reality and the desire to change it in some way, a trait belonging to the living - into the mechanical corpse called a corporation is a deadly Frankenstein.
This Monsanto Frankenstein has the technological power to reshape the very building blocks of life, but not the strength or the ability to control those changes, and neither the wisdom nor the capacity nor even the desire to do so responsibly. It does not do so because it needs to, but because it can grow bigger that way, and considers only its own profit in the process.
And so we stand, the mob of enraged peasants at the gate of the castle, ready to storm the walls and destroy the monster and the men who as its legal caretakers keep it alive, before it can destroy all of us. Somehow, I do not think this monster is misunderstood in the least.
It will be interesting to see whose magick proves stronger - that of the insane doctors and their legal keepers that created this monster, or the magick of the peasants to destroy it. Perhaps I should run the chart for the day of the March, just to see what currents are in the air... I very much see the effects of Pluto churning through Capricorn here, bringing to light the poison and the corruption that lies at the heart of the great agribusiness industry that forms the core of the modern world's food production system.
But I am left with the somber warning in my mind, clear as a bell - history is like the spiraling of the DNA double helix itself, it does not repeat... but it does rhyme. Whomever wins this battle, you cannot kill an idea.
Sun: 27' Aries Moon: 14' Cancer
Psychologists and sociologists have been trying for decades to understand "the mob mentality." Usually they study it in negative terms: preventing riots and so forth, but occasionally it gets applied to wider social movements. It does not make sense, how one can get a handful, dozens, hundreds, millions, a whole nation, behind a concept that none would consider on an individual basis - and yet it can be done. History has borne out the devastating consequences of the misuse of this power. We see it daily in the insanity of the badly misnamed American "Tea Party," although to be fair there is also a good dose of schitzophrenia there that should be addressed in another post. And yet, the problem of the "mob mind" might well be best understood as both elementary and elemental.
Magick has been defined by Aleister Crowley as "The art and science of causing change in accordance with Will." There is a kind of magick in the "mob," or the "herd." Great potential, usually not utilized until something - and someone - ignite a catalyst for change. It is usually the someTHING that happens, affecting the right someONE, and the firebrand is lit. Then the torch passes if ti finds a conductive medium and it keeps passing as a wildfire through the treetops until either the mob succeeds in its change or it burns itself out. It might be contained, with immense expense and effort, but never truly controlled until the last ember burns itself out.
And yet the mob is also Water in its manifestation, in that it can be relentless, destructive even to itself. It is a stampede. To harness it is treacherous. To halt it, more so. But even a mighty flood must cease eventually also.
Two opposing energies - Fire and Water - manifested in the same moment, in the same entity. Perhaps this is the paradox of the mob. (Perhaps they unite in the physical manifestation of electricity? It is said that a large group of like-minded people does have an electricity to them...)
Today I see mob mentalities forming everywhere: I will focus my attention on the ones around the GMO issue. Full disclosure: I am very much against genetically-modified products. The great benefits they were supposed to bring the world have not rolled out for anyone but the manufacturers: the claims of safety around them come without full testing from their manufacturers, chief of which is Monsanto, and Monsanto has a great deal to lose in this. So much so, in fact, that they lay out enormous amounts of money to buy scientists, lawyers and politicians as both investments and insurance on the even more enormous piles of cash they rake in.
But there are three "mobs" forming here, if you will: the anti-GMO crowd, the pro-GMO crowd, and those who "DKDC," don't know and don't care. That last is more of a herd, unaware of its power as a group, unwilling to move unless provoked by something more dangerous than any one of its individuals (and then only as far as necessary to escape the immediate danger), unwilling to act in defense of its vulnerable members.
I am unsure what lit the fire under the asses of the GMO crowd, what served as the catalyst for their transformations from pro-GMO or DKDC. Perhaps it was individual stories and experiences here and there, like my sister whose son is autistic. (The GMOs didn't cause J.'s autism, but they do aggravate it. When he is on a strict organic diet he is high-functioning, at the top of his class, sweet, communicative and aware: on GMO food, he backslides and loses almost all ability to function in the world.) Perhaps it is Monsanto's own dark history: http://gmo-awareness.com/2011/05/12/monsanto-dirty-dozen/ lists off twelve products made by Monsanto in the last fifty years that have all proven very popular - and very dangerous to use. In many cases, internal memos reveal that the corporate heads knew exactly how toxic their products were/are and chose to whitewash it. Saccharin, aspartame, Agent Orange, Roundup - the list is extensive. The list of known health side effects is even more so: 94 conditions linked to aspartame alone.
Whatever it is that acts as the catalyst, it feeds a collective wave of growing horror, as evidenced by country after country slamming its doors , and on Saturday, May 25th a March Against Monsanto will be held across the US and the world.
Two people working together in magick are more powerful than one, properly directed. A circle is much more powerful than two, properly directed. A mass circle can have unbelievably massive results far and away beyond the cumulative power of the people involved: somewhere, if magick could be quantified, it transforms from cumulative into logarithmic amplification - but there must be a focus. This was the great failing of the Occupy movement, though also its inherent political strength: in not naming a common goal, a group focus, it endured ferocious attacks both physically and on the air. Yet that same failing was a foundational weakness that allowed much of the truly transformative POWER of the millions of people behind it both physically and mentally to fade away.
There is no such ambiguity with the March Against Monsanto. The very name screams it. So now, the mob of "DKDC's" - the do-nothings - will be caught as they usually are in the battle between the fors and the againsts. The againsts are a grassroots movement - yet a grassroots was able to overcome the problem of racism in America just enough, just long enough, to put the nation's first black family into the White House - and then to KEEP them there. The are armed and armored with small change, with history, with hope and fear both, yet the majority of those planning to march, I would suspect, are people who never thought they'd take to the streets in a public demonstration before the catalyst hit them. Deep down, the motivation behind all of that... is love. The magick of their Will and their resources will be put to the test against the magick of the corporation whose existence is at stake, and against the money it uses to express its Will.
You see, business made a dire mistake when the corporation was invented. It is a thoughtform, nothing more, nothing less, but a thoughtform invested with physical reality through belief, law, lobbyists, and the people who sit its governing board as its legal representatives. That thoughtform takes on a life of its own through the people it employs - in many cases consumes - to keep itself alive and functioning, and through the people that see it and take it as reality (buy its product).
The thoughtform that is Monsanto has become not only parasitic in nature - taking and taking, while giving nothing back - it has become predatory, even viral in its spread. Nature never made that: a virus with a Will, with awareness of what it was doing. The fusion of a Will - the awareness of reality and the desire to change it in some way, a trait belonging to the living - into the mechanical corpse called a corporation is a deadly Frankenstein.
This Monsanto Frankenstein has the technological power to reshape the very building blocks of life, but not the strength or the ability to control those changes, and neither the wisdom nor the capacity nor even the desire to do so responsibly. It does not do so because it needs to, but because it can grow bigger that way, and considers only its own profit in the process.
And so we stand, the mob of enraged peasants at the gate of the castle, ready to storm the walls and destroy the monster and the men who as its legal caretakers keep it alive, before it can destroy all of us. Somehow, I do not think this monster is misunderstood in the least.
It will be interesting to see whose magick proves stronger - that of the insane doctors and their legal keepers that created this monster, or the magick of the peasants to destroy it. Perhaps I should run the chart for the day of the March, just to see what currents are in the air... I very much see the effects of Pluto churning through Capricorn here, bringing to light the poison and the corruption that lies at the heart of the great agribusiness industry that forms the core of the modern world's food production system.
But I am left with the somber warning in my mind, clear as a bell - history is like the spiraling of the DNA double helix itself, it does not repeat... but it does rhyme. Whomever wins this battle, you cannot kill an idea.
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