This blog is a Philosophical Notebook (points for those who get the reference). This will be where I try to sew together the disjecta membra of my mental concerns - revolutionary socialism, folk parapsychology and literary/narrative/media studies - into a guide to action for social, political, psychological and cultural revolutionaries. It will be a place for "thinking out loud" - if anything in here were "ready for prime time", as the saying goes, then it would be published in a more salubrious location and under my real name (so I could get all the kudos).
To some extent, what Karl Marx did for economics from 1851 onwards, I want to do for the sciences of human consciousness - psychology, narrative studies, and what R. A. Wilson calls "metaprogramming". No-one ever accused me of being unambitious. But the goal is to create some suggestions for action which can be tested in practice and work, outside my own personal reality tunnel. As Starhawk said, most of reality is created collectively and can only be changed collectively. In this, she was reproducing the insight of Lenin that ideas are real forces but only when they seize the masses.
I intend my musings around here to be unorthodox, to say the least. Revolutionary socialists and practitioners of what is usually called "the occult" have a long and justified history of mutual contempt. But the place where - I think - the two worlds collide is that they both claim to be theories of consciousness. And the question of how we change consciousness is - as everyone agrees - the question of how we change the world. But as Marx turned Hegel's idealist dialectic on its head, I want to see whether it's possible to turn the insights of "magick" compatible with a materialist view of the world.
In the modern era of science, techology and mass communications, Marx's materialist dialectic offers a vital role for consciousness in changing the real-physical-material world. In that way it is no longer strictly materialist - or, rather, it includes the ideas in people's head as a (derivative) part of material reality.
I will read this again in the morning and if it makes any sense I will be very surprised. But this is where I want to go. Stick around, it's bound to be a wild ride.
Please note: postmodernists will be shot.
