The International Religion
A series on the Posthuman Creed
I have been meaning to write about the values which define the West for some time. In this post I present an introduction to what might be termed the Posthuman Creed, a system of ideas and beliefs which are supplanting those of our foundational Christianity.
The new civilisation for which our managers are preparing requires a religion of sorts. I will attempt to show that this creed is not limited to progressives, and nor is the ambition of a global technological managerialism confined to the West.
In this first instalment I will examine one aspect of the International Religion, investigating the origins and function of a cult which makes Green self-sabotage such as Net Zero an article of faith.
What has happened to the West is difficult to compass. Decline is not sufficient to explain the deliberate deracination which accompanies advancements in technological managerialism.
Though the human dimension of life is undeniably degraded by the embrace of this current, it is not due merely to the destruction wrought by the destructive myth of Progress in action.
The cultural and spiritual vandalism of human scale life is undertaken in the service of a litany of morally inverted virtues. This could be described as the articles of faith of the secular religion. It is international in its ambition, and seeks to supplant every genuine belief of significance and nourishment with itself.
Our predicament is defined by redefinition. What is clearly junk food-for-thought is framed as wisdom. Placeholder memes are promoted in place of explanations based in experience. In order to help you not to go mad, I have made a list of the contemporary canon. This is the Posthuman religion, whose blasphemy is punished with cancellation.
The argument that religion has been continued without God has been best explained by John Gray. In his Seven Types of Atheism, Gray shows the limits of Liberalism in practice, as against its limitless and utopian self belief. It is a system reducible to quixotic ideas which gainsay reality. Gray’s book is more of a demolition of this religion of man than that of God, and for this reason his book was described by Terry Eagleton as “intellectual genocide”.
Some ideas deserve death. Here are a few more.
The most dangerous aspect of the fantasists who rule us is their power. That they are fantasists is demonstrated by the beliefs which they advertise and by whose often bizarre consequences we are expected to live.
The example of the apocalyptic cult which has been fostered around environmentalism is a prime example of the combination of the irrational with political power.
To open this question is ask another - how does a putatively rational, atheist and materialist Liberalism come to believe in fantasies?
The rationalist position is that man’s Reason is supreme and perfectible. The track record of his history supplies a contrary argument. Secondly, the idea of moral and intellectual progress is a myth which relies on some unexplained force, or telos, which guides our history in an ever rising hypotenuse of uplift.
The combination of this reverence of Reason and the myth of Progress is a giddying cocktail of self aggrandisement. Its evidence is nowhere, but stirs powerful forces within. This I think is the explanation for the hysterical fundamentalism espoused by the champions of Reason. It is a cult of the human self, animated by radical passions.
There is an irrationalism to the nature of crowds which was explored by Elias Canetti. In Crowds and Power he argued that the crowd offers the individual a bargain. The self is surrendered in sense, but magnified in sentiment. Secondly, the burden of individual responsibility is dissolved. A mob brings both relief and emancipation. It removes the duty of reason, and electrifies us in an oceanic ritual of shared emotion. To participate is to be a part of something greater than ourselves. The crowd releases the irrational into the world, whose uncertain case finds safety in numbers.
The invocation of strong feeling around environmental responsibility has obvious correspondences to a religious cultural code. It is impossible to recycle plastic as its variety defeats any profitable reuse at scale. Most of our plastic is therefore recycled into fire, after being transported to Asia. This explains some of the vast plastic islands in the oceans.
At home, you may be deemed a fiend for failing to place the correct item in the right bin. Whilst the metal is useful, the plastic will be shipped abroad on diesel-fuelled container vessels to be thrown into the sea or incinerated.
This has been the case since the beginning of the recycling craze. It is difficult to establish how much plastic is recycled because reality embarrasses the ideology.
One solution, mentioned in the linked piece and elsewhere, is the transition to a circular economy.
The aim to produce an economy without waste is an admirable one, but it is beset by two limitations. One, that the reprocessing of much waste is impractical, and two, that the rapid transition to such a model would collapse entire societies.
In the EU funded initiative linked above, it is announced
The mission is to make Finland a global leader in circular economy by 2025 and promote the objectives set in the EU Commission’s Circular Economy Package.
The project started in Finland in 2016 at the initiative of SITRA. The first roadmap was published later that year. The road map’s second edition “The Critical move”, published in 2018, updates Finland’s plans to reform its economic model to ensure successful sustainability.
Finland is the site of the closed loop economy of the future. It appears to be doing well, according to the media. In reality, this model turned out to be a complete fabrication.
When have we ever heard of scientific modelling being suspicious? To trust The Science is the duty of rational thinkers, whose adhesion to this principle, and to all the the other aspects of the international religion, is not about morality but self congratulation. It is to assume the height of being right.
The Science, being distinct from science, is fake. It is made up of models and arguments designed for a specific purpose. Strong feelings are attached to these models of reality, which charges them with the power of totems. It is taboo to question them. This is not an accident.
Professor Mikko Paunio is a scientist. His work includes public policy advice at state level, and he has consulted on various projects germane to public health both at home and with organisations such as the World Bank.
He contacted me because my remarks about Davos had caught his attention. I spoke on video about the reason Klaus Schwab selected the eponymous “magic mountain” for the site of his project of technocratic fantasy.
I would advise the reader never to consider opening a book by Thomas Mann. He wrote The Magic Mountain, whose brooding prose immortalised a sanatorium at Davos where various people gathered to indulge a series of increasingly bizarre delusions.
Davos, the setting of Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain), was a place of recreation and relaxation, where people took in clean mountain air to restore their health and recharge their minds. Schwab wanted participants in the European Management Symposium to feel relaxed enough to speak frankly, while maintaining camaraderie of purpose and mutual respect. This became known as the “Davos Spirit”, still the hallmark of all Forum gatherings.
Source - World Economic Forum - History
The phantasmagoria of Thomas Mann’s book seems an odd inspiration for a conference of billionaires and world leaders. A Time review of Mann’s book from 1927 suggests a deeper meaning to the “spirit of Davos”.
A Mortal Fairyland
In the sanatorium, a high and chilly retreat, the perspective of life changes…
With death for a background, massive and eccentric as the high Alps, the caperings of man seem puny by comparison. The idiotic decadence, the absurdly microscopic preoccupations of humanity are emphasized by their isolation.”
The perception of humanity as trivially occupied when considered from the lofty heights is one which is not restricted to Thomas Mann, or to Goethe
Viewed from the heights of Reason, all life seems like some malignant disease, and the world a madhouse
It is a perspective which arguably typifies the whole technocratic position, being a misanthropic fantasy of supreme power granted by the magic of technology.
Professor Paunio, in a remarkable essay, argues that the combination of the esoteric and the occult drives the fantastical policies of organisations such as the Club of Rome and the World Economic Forum.
In it, he says
The current dominant religion of Western industrialized countries, i.e., nature pantheism is based on esotericism and occultism, and has been promoted in the Club of Rome, the World Economic Forum and in the UN for decades.
To claim that the World Economic Forum is a dangerous religious cult is a remarkable statement in itself, but it is one for which Paunio supplies ample evidence.
In a 2015 book The Green Lie, Paunio
….made the observation that a large part of the activists of the neo-Malthusian Green anti science movement were attracted to anthroposophy or the more original occult thought, i.e., theosophy.
He cites the example of two Green League members. The first was Vice President of the European Parliament Heidi Hautala, who was also the editorial secretary of a theosophical magazine Ruusu Risti. The current foreign minister of Finland Pekka Haavisto has expressed fascination with the work of occultist Rudolf Steiner.
Yet the connection with occultism and the Greens reaches far beyond the fabricated economic template of the nation of Finland. The notorious Club of Rome, whose launch saw the 1972 publication of the neo-Malthusian Limits to Growth, was founded by an Italian whose adhesion to the occultism of Theosophy was no secret.
The founder of the Club of Rome, the wealthy Italian industrialist Aurelio Peccei, was an occultist and esotericist.
Aurelio Peccei’s 1977 book, The Human Quality, reveals his worldview based on Theosophy and the discovery of the inner self… According to Peccei’s understanding, the crisis of humanity is related to man’s inability to understand his role in a changed world…
For Peccei, the solution to global problems can be found inside man and not outside him. The change that takes place from within a benevolent, albeit destructively behaving person and the spiritualization of his human image, contains the keys to the solution.
A Beginner’s Guide to the Occult
So much of the international religion, from environmental alarmism to the adoption of mass media memes, makes effective use of the emotional charging of symbols to reach into the minds of the population. This is both a staple of advertising - or propaganda - and is a well known occult practice. An image is created to be infused and reinfused by strong feeling. It is a means of effecting change in the world through an esoteric and occult process. Broadcast on a mass scale, the zone of operation is the personal and hidden sphere, producing a strong attachment in the target to the symbol on display.
This is a technique which is common in occult practice and is used to “achieve change in accordance with the will”, which is the definition of “the science and art of magick” accepted widely by its users.
Called “the Yoga of the West” by notorious occultist Aleister Crowley, it is a practice which claims a heritage reaching back to Ancient Egypt.
It is now generally acknowledged that the Egyptians, amongst all ancient peoples, were the most learned in the occult sciences of Nature
Manly P Hall Freemasonry of the Ancient Egyptians 1971
This is a system intended to replace the divine with Man, and has been described as “Godmanship” - its ultimate aim being the elevation of the individual through the empowerment of the “inner self” to the status of a god. To the occultist, god is an aspect of this inner self = to be discovered by intense navel gazing. It is the acme of self worship, replacing the external world with an inner universe of intoxicating fantasy and desire.
Aside from the obviously Satanic dimension of replacing Christ with a narcissistic dream, this is a philosophy of further substitution. In practice the real world is subordinated to that of the imagination, and is one which can be manipulated by the concentration of desire upon a given symbol.
The inner world, the spirit world, the world of eroticized desire - this to the occultist is the real reality. It is a modus vivendi which demands the individual uses concentrated emotion and willpower to replace the real world with whatever they want in its place.
This tradition was popularised in the 19th century by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, a Ukrainian mystic and proven fraud whose exposure by John Nevil Maskelyne did nothing to thwart her popularity in fashionable society.
Her appeal was widespread and most major figures in occultism credited her as an inspiration. After Blavatsky came the Golden Dawn, followed by Crowley himself, who left to start his own occult religion.
One follower of Crowley repeated the trick of his tutor and started his own cult. That was L Ron Hubbard, whose immensely lucrative pyramid scheme describes its expensive brainwashing system as “study tech”.
From Blavatsky’s parlour-room vernissage, through the ceremony and ritual of the Golden Dawn and other forms of occult Freemasonry, to the huckster enlightenment of Scientology, the occultists have exploited an infatuation with becoming alternately infused with nature worship and a technologically accented fetish for futurism.
The offer of being more than human is the main component of this fool’s - or Devil’s - bargain. To hand your mind, your inner self, to these dubious systems is to forge a new you, a candidature for the posthuman future. It is a promise of transcendence - an escape from the bonds of consensus reality as well as from the confines of the former self. It is a promise of liberation which ends in chains.
Occultism at the UN and the WEF
Paunio provides a compelling connection between these occult beliefs, their practitioners, and the adoption of radical environmentalism by organisations above state level.
Early on, Klaus Schwab recruited the by far ever most influential unelected UN environment official, Maurice Strong, a wealthy, un-educated Canadian industrialist (1929–2015), to head the WEF foundation. Maurice Strong was THE central figure in pushing forward the sustainable development agenda since the UN’s first environmental summit in Stockholm in 1972. He was also an inveterate occultist and esotericist.
A website dedicated to his legacy says
Maurice Strong has played a unique and critical role is globalizing the environmental movement.
The evidence for Strong’s occultism is furnished by a 1990 article written by a Canadian journalist who stayed at Strong’s Colorado ranch for a week. Called Baca Grande, Strong claimed he bought it as a mystic had told him
The Baca would become the centre for a new planetary order which would evolve from the economic collapse and environmental catastrophes that would sweep the globe in the years to come.
Titled The Wizard of The Baca Grande, it reveals that Strong witnessed a burning bush which he took to be a sign that he was chosen to save the planet.
How would the planet be saved - from mankind?
Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized nations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring this about?
The evidence for Maurice Strong’s occultism, and for his personal fantasies of using the World Economic Forum to stage the collapse of the industrial economies, is conclusive. Here is a link to a transcript of the interview, which details the building of a vast New Age settlement as a nexus for the “spiritual awakening” Strong believed was necessary for the salvation of mankind.
His wife Hanna described “the Baca” as a prototype for the New Age post apocalyptic cult that Strong wished to institute, following an engineered collapse.
"Maurice is out there, trying to save the world. He's out there, speaking, his diplomacy, his global visions. But you've got to have examples. There have to be places where his ideas come to earth. His is the macro - the world. The Baca's the micro. If there's a glimmer of hope for the future, that's what this place is about."
The article concludes with a revealing passage in which Strong describes a “novel” he keeps intending to write. It is a revelation, detailing the interplay of fantasy and reality, of dreams and of deeds, which characterises the occult inspired climate movement to this day,
"This group of world leaders," he continues, "form a secret society to bring about an economic collapse. It's February. They're all at Davos. These aren't terrorists. They're world leaders. They have positioned themselves in the world's commodity and stock markets. They've engineered, using their access to stock exchanges and computers and gold supplies, a panic. Then, they prevent the world's stock markets from closing. They jam the gears. They hire mercenaries who hold the rest of the world leaders at Davos as hostages. The markets can't close. The rich countries..." And Strong makes a light motion with his fingers as if he were flicking a cigarette butt out the window.
I sit there spellbound. This is not any storyteller talking. This is Maurice Strong. He knows these world leaders. He is, in fact, co-chairman of the council of the World Economic Forum. He sits at the fulcrum of power. He is in a position to do it.
"I probably shouldn't be saying things like this," he says.
But Strong did say things like this, and he believed them. Inspired by his New Age occult beliefs, this is the man who “globalised the environment and climate change” cult.
The Logic of the Irrational
The Satanic point of view is served well by the replacement of reality with a sensational solipsism. It articulates a vengeance upon reality, making of the individual fantasy a project of destruction inspired by resentment and the uncontrollable emotions liberated by the delimiting of desire.
The politics of fantasy are everywhere and nowhere. The ideology which rules us is one whose many totems have achieved an equivalence in nonsense - they describe a world which does not exist.
Populations are being trained by mass media to being incapable of recognising the obvious, whose mention is increasingly taboo. What is to be real are the totems of this cult. Earth worship, human uplift through desire, the flights of fantasy of technophiles and hedonic nihilists.
It is a polity of the invisible, this future democracy. The force of this current is to direct people to seek their answers within themselves, to reimagine life as an endless experiment in fancy. The destruction of social, cultural, family and religious bonds and the dissolution of nations leaves the individual with nothing to cleave to but their imago - an idealised self image whose curation becomes the only possible expression of their power and is the sole remaining locus of identity. Being as nothingness, you might say.
I have planned a series of posts to expand on the theme of the International Religion. This is a portmanteau term for the mandatory beliefs which are advanced through the mass media. Presented as the fruits of progress, they function as a substitute for Christianity and for the settled customs, traditions and culture which resulted from the human scale civilisation whose destruction is the goal of Posthuman technocrats.
“the replacement of reality with a sensational solipsism” indeed
I find is a little hard to believe that any of the truly materialistic manipulators TRULY believe in anything esoteric, it would blunt their ego to have to give credit for anything to an outside power.
I like Rudolf Steiner's and by extension Maria Montessori's ideas on child rearing and pedagogy, they sound child centred and fair.
Perhaps a simple test of good goals and laws would be to always test how it would feel to be on the loosing side.