YULETIDE MISCELLANY
feat. Ted Bundy, Chuck Norris & Music Festivals
(This is a friendly year-ender with an audio version for paying subscribers — to hear the soundtracks and happy peculiar intonation with which this was composed. The following image of Chuck Norris, superimposed on an Escher staircase, will make more sense after you’ve read or listened to this whole piece…)
I. THE OTHER TEDS
His name was Ted.
Most of us know the story. Ted had a depraved (actually depraved — not in a cool way) 1970s killing spree in which his broken brain was a vessel for the gruesome demonic pathology we call “serial killer” to prey viciously on young American women and further shred our delicate social fabric.
Ted Bundy was a sadistic murderer, rapist, cannibal, and necrophile. The tales of his perversity have been recounted for decades. Yet there is one perverse element of the story that is often overlooked. It goes like this:
When the police released his name to the public (asking them for help) tips flooded in by the hundreds. All but one of these Teds was a false positive. So who were the rest? Women reported their sons, husbands, boyfriends, brothers, and fathers. Lots of women did this. They apparently suspected their close male partners of being literally the most atrocious human in the world.
Why? Obviously, their reasons were mixed. Some women were just trying to be civically helpful. Others were plain terrified of a monster. A few must have had their own worryingly abusive partners whom they suspected for good reasons. Some women, no doubt, took a dark pleasure in imagining themselves intimately involved with extreme dark masculinity. And maybe some were active sadists trying to harm those dudes.
We never hear about those dudes.
I have always wanted (always I tell you!) to see a streaming documentary series called The Other Teds. Each episode would tell the story of one of those many men whom women had offered to the police as potentially the vilest creature on Earth. Each man has a different story and a unique character. Each woman had a different reason. I would watch at least three episodes.
My reason for mentioning this silly idea is because there are things we typically overlook when we discuss the obvious danger of mass predators. The danger is so great, and the details so perverse, that we usually neglect to critique the weird aspects of our conventional social psychology. In contrast to these anomalous villains, we feel normal and justified in our everyday attitudes.
The infamous problem of the Serial Killer’s Neighbour is one example. The neighbour says, “I’m shocked. He was such a nice normal guy. He used to smile at the post office and wave from the street corner.”
Really? Did he smile and wave? What a high bar is being set for validating community members! What mastermind could hack such a foolproof vetting process? In addition to the monster, we should also be judging our everyday sense of normalcy.
We luridly watch documentaries about manipulative cults but seldom inspect the fact that we are raising our children to be needy, gullible, and unable to discern viable religious alternatives from horrific brainwashing traps. We use ideas like “the irresistible charisma of the leader” or the “praeternatural cleverness of the killer” to assuage ourselves from any responsibility we have for breeding and educating generations of naive believers…
Now, he said covertly, if you’ve made it as far as this paragraph, I have a confession to make. You probably think I’m about to do a deep dive into the philosophical, spiritual, and developmental extensions of our uninspected cultural norms. That would be a great substack article. It could end with an investigation into our instincts about deception and the ways in which we must tweak these for an emerging age of AI deepfakes — just as we had to tweak them in response to our collective cultural awareness of serial killers and cults.
I made notes for that article last January. But I never wrote it.
And it is not the only one.
II. THANK YOU & HAPPY WINTERLIGHT
As I write these words, it is the end of 2024. What a year! Etc. Among the many articles that I have contemplated, written, and hyper-stylized for you this year, there exist other stubs, notes, half-fleshed-out notions, and fractional essays that I put aside for one reason or another.
Rather than carry these forward into the New Year, I resolved to present a collection of “small tastes” of what these articles could have been. This will satisfy my interest in these topics, and present you with some seed-ideas, while at the same time clearing the deck so that we can both start freshly together in the New Year.
Merry Christmas or Solstice if you’re into that sort of thing. Happy Winterlight. Perhaps even Happy Snippidoo — which is what I call the fractionalized and distributed notion of a quantum Christmas that surprisingly occurs at different times of the year and varying degrees of intensity.
Let’s have a very new year.
III. METAMODERN MUSIC FESTIVAL (M3F)
People send me their songs. People are out there making music that combines new & classical tools with new & classical sensibilities.
An interesting young man built a soundscape for my ICON 2024 talk in Denver. It was a shifting mix of trance genres that interwove with acoustic fragments of my own commentary. The Metamodern Spirituality Labs often feature ritual quasi-chanting and short spontaneous jam sessions. I would love to have an onsite “wisdomwave DJ” who kept feeding live talks and conversations into an ambient ongoing and evolving soundtrack.
Earlier this year I had a great conversation with the lead organizer of RESPOND who was wondering whether to do a follow-up event, pivot to doing another Emerge conference in Germany — or just let it all go to focus on his music.
Why not combine them? I asked.
A metamodern music festival! I said.
Here are some suggestive things to consider:
Digital media theorists since McLuhan have suggested that the network civilization will be more acoustic (rather than visual) in their neurological and cultural sensibilities.
Meta/Integral/GameB people are already consuming, responding to, and thinking via their favorite music.
Many people across our networks are amateur or semi-professional musicians.
Our events and discourse typically under-serve the sonic dimension in favor of verbal theory, visual art, books, dialogues, etc.
Music events are immersive and highly engaging to populations outside our networks.
The philosophy of metamodern or 2nd tier music has barely begun.
Putting all these together it appears there is a real possibility that our scene could generate an event of this kind. The first practical step we can take toward manifesting a M3F is…
IV. THE QUEER HORROR OF INTEGRAL POLITICS
Bryan Fuller’s documentary mini-series Queer For Fear (2022) reveals several elements that are pertinent to integrative, coherent pluralist & futurist politics.
The 2024 US election revealed (yet again) how easy it is for liberal centrist elites to misjudge the population and lose to weirdly eager and perversely anarchic “populists” whose legitimate grievances often seem secondary to their barely concealed glee about indulging aggressive, exclusionary, lucrative, irrational, and overly-simplified impulses.
A significant part of that political energy is attempting to come out of the closet about such enjoyments — which are widely regarded as obscene. This is similar (but not identical) to the situation of queer directors, writers, and performers in the horror cinema of the 20th century. People who are conflicted, ambivalent, and secretive about their monstrous nature are always looking for an emancipatory moment in which to finally “own” their repressed desires and pleasures.
Of course, every culture is a bit reckless, xenophobic, and neo-traditionalist. Just like every culture secretly tortures its prisoners and performs clandestine operations that would upset the general public. But what does it mean when people start professing a pro-torture, pro-insensitivity, anti-knowledge attitude? And what does it mean when politicians begin succeeding socially by making all of this subterranean material newly overt?
The dynamics of concealed values, para-social enjoyment, and obscene inclinations are almost never broached in discussions of integral politics. But they do come up at the intersection between queerness & commercial entertainment.
The most common pattern of integrative Meta-Politics or Developmental Politics is:
take people’s public confessions of their values seriously
create policy & theory that combines several of the major types of values
create think tanks, discourses, and alliances that demonstrate a “new policy ethos” spanning these major value blocs.
But what if the values that we are integrating are not people’s deep libidinal and true behavioral tendencies but only their aspirational “face values?” What if they value things that they are not saying because they know it would sound dangerous or upsetting? What if an analysis of the meta-space around people’s value-claims is needed in order to see whether (or how) people are getting off on the social positions they claim to hold? And what it means when these hidden values start to bubble up.
Let’s see how the half-concealed, half-emancipated presence of socially obscene values plays a role in election outcomes. And how we can make that work for us rather than against us…
V. HOOR-PAAR-MA’AT
That’s a funny-looking word. It is ultra-niche. It combines two neo-occult concepts that each claim to be the central archetype, and quintessential spiritual vibe, of the currently emerging human epoch.
Are we in the Age of Ma’at or Hoor-Paar-Kraat (aka Harpocrates)?
Famously, the iconoclastic and disreputable British philosopher, poet, occultist, mountain climber (and possibly secret agent) Aleister Crowley received eerie revelations of a “New Aeon” beginning in 1904. Not exactly the Age of Aquarius but rather the Aeon of Horus. More specifically an entity called Heru-Ra-Ha who subdivided into the qualities of Ra-Hoor-Khu & Hoor-Paar-Kraat.
It’s complicated.
Basically, it says that the patriarchal age of the Martyr God is over and we are now entering an epoch for the childish warrior/raptor who does not believe in separateness, sorrow, pity, or a generally shared moral code. Other, that is, than the code:
DO WHAT THOU WILT SHALL BE THE WHOLE OF THE LAW.
LOVE IS THE LAW. LOVE UNDER WILL.
Followers of this current of spirituality are called Thelemites. But one lodge of Thelemites was run, for a while, by the Canadian mystic Charles Stansfield Jones. Eventually, his relationship with Aleister Crowley (as well as his sanity) got messy. After the old man’s death, Charles “Frater Achad” Jones declared that the Aeon of Horus had already failed and was being preempted by the Aeon of Ma’at — the Daughter of Justice.
So, being of a perversely good humor, I combined these two claims into the funny word Hoor-Paar-Maat. And it turns out I’m not the only one to have this strange impulse. Several “temples” are dedicated to combinations of these two forces.
It makes sense. Looking at the leading edge of culture, spirit, and thought today, we find it is represented by a wildly individualistic, hypermodern energy of erotic indulgence, sacred personality, and implausible transrational victories. Perhaps we could call this the right wing of the new Aeon.
But we also find our new era represented by a widespread interest in restorative justice, ecological justice, social justice, the uprising Solar Goddess, the coming of balance, Gaia, and the feminine in all of us.
Welcome to the double current.
Here’s what that means for you personally…
VI. WHAT IS A STORY?
In early autumn of 2024, I was invited by the Transdisciplinary Leadership Review team to attend a conference on Regenerative Financing. It was part of an attempt to build an ethical and economic alliance between the Greater Toronto Bioregion and the work of Joe Brewer. What stood out to me from the event was just how often I heard people mention “stories.”
What we need, said everyone, is a new story.
The collective social action and money would follow the story. And I hear similar claims in many districts of the liminal web. Smart people are always musing on how a metamodern or integral spiritual-planetary narrative could generate the mythic marketing power of traditional narratives without losing the gifts of modern rationality.
I don’t disagree — but I do advise caution. In a world of advertising, full of people trained on reading books, it seems a little too easy to imagine that the most important thing is to compose and promulgate a narrative. But at that conference, I realized something even more basic:
I don’t know what a story is.
Not a single person who said “story is the most important thing” bothered to tell me what is a story. Is it plot events? Word-based vibes? The haunting implication of a world? Maybe a trance created by tracking imaginary characters exposed to alternating positive and negative outcomes? Can a question be a story? How are the boundaries established between two different stories? Are stories rooted in memes rather than genes (a la Dawkins) or does the power of story exist only in those memes that extend the evolutionary project of the genes (a la Peterson, Weinstein)?
Is this a story: Coke is It.
What about:
Make American Great Again
Jaws III: This Time It’s Personal
The boomer mythologist Joseph Campbell believed there was a single universal story structure that he called “the hero’s journey.” Since then we have added the heroine’s journey, shaman’s journey, monster’s journey, etc. And Campbell’s work gave rise to more nuanced variations like Dan Harmon’s “Story Circle.”
So let’s assume that the portal that leads to the definition of Story is located vaguely between structure, action, character, vibe, trance & world.
What do we find at that spot? Well, the most obvious thing is…
VII. HSHCO (Highly Sensitive, Highly Capable, & Overloaded)
I am a surprisingly competent invalid.
I am also a pretty calm hysteric & benevolent rage-aholic who refreshes himself with tactical nervous breakdowns. And I am not alone. Our communities are decorated with people who exhibit tremendously positive qualities that oscillate with anxiety attacks and emotional overwhelm. Most of our people are some kind of Hypersensitive Person.
We have individuals whose bandwith for creative problem solving, global insight & radiant presence is almost superhuman — until they suddenly cannot do the simplest fucking things. This is good. This is interesting. We have not paid enough attention to it.
There are at least three benefits to being this kind of oscillatory being:
1) To cultivate high-trust subnetworks within the general field of transformational, developmental, and regenerative communities, we have to learn to observe, embrace, and support each other’s limits. We cannot fully trust, and therefore cannot fully participate in, networks in which we are always trying to appear as our superior and most leading-edge selves. We have to risk the exposure of our mess, oscillations, and overwhelm if we want to bring forth the deeper layers of our intimate heart and bonding potential to get involved.
2) To prevent the accretion of exaggerated guru hierarchies and potentially abusive authoritarian dynamics, we must intelligently expose our raw human strangeness and idiosyncratic personal needs. If we do not do this, then we end up trying to meet those needs covertly while re-creating the age-old problem of becoming a distorted hero image in the eyes of others.
3) It may be the case that the “Being” who is present in our most intense transpersonal moments, requires us to move back and forth across its membrane — bringing it more nutrients for transfiguration. The fantasy of an endless, invulnerable steady-state illumination often results in ascetic, dehumanized adepts who do not connect the Higher with the Lower through personal and interpersonal shadow exploration. Maybe they fail to truly serve the divine engine that is transforming the Cosmos.
So basically, if we are working and engaging with the forces of the world, we will be tempted to take up too many simultaneous & diverse tasks. This is good. We need to do a lot and keep growing by pushing our edges. We also need to become dormant to recuperate our natural balance and assimilate our leading-edge practices. And we need to honor the exaggerated sensitivities that are often the motive for (and sometimes the result of) developmental life-paths.
To help ourselves and each other get better as these oscillations between hyper-performance and collapse, the one thing we need to start doing is…
VIII: VALERONICS
Valeronics means the electronics of value. I made it up. Forget about trite questions like “What are your values?” or “Do you believe the universe is fundamentally value-laden or not?” Yawn. Let’s talk about the mechanisms, applications, and circuitry of evaluation.
I know many people for whom it is crucial to affirm the radical worthiness and value-enhancing qualities of Reality Itself. I have had more than my fair share of experiences in which my entire perceptual and cognitive field was super-saturated with a sheer valuableness that exceeded my explanatory capacity and merged with my most basic intuition of being.
But so what?
There are lots of possible stories about where that experience comes from and what it means. And I don’t particularly believe (sic) that what we believe about the universe is fundamentally significant. I think “primordial valuableness” is something we can (and should) experience whether it is intrinsic to the Cosmos — or not.
Actually, we can never tell. My ability to encounter reality cannot escape from value. Sure. It goes down at least as far as I do. But all I know is that I can’t know it any further than that. It could still be local. Or a trick. And that’s fine.
Can value be produced by a value-free system? Can morality emerge from immorality? Maybe! The epistemic humility doctrine here is that we cannot get outside the system to conclude either way. So let’s forget about these kinds of non-questions and look at something much more interesting: the circuitry.
How do evaluations work?
He who despises himself still honors himself as one who despises.
-Nietszche.
That quote suggests that our experience of value exists even where we are evaluating the situation as being valueless. The diagnosis of insufficient value depends on our access to the value spectrum. We have contact with maximal value such that we can say that this or that circumstance is negligible by comparison. And the trick to increasing our access to the pre-existing reservoir of maximal value-feeling that is active in our evaluation circuitry is…
IX. BENEVOLENT ENERGY VAMPIRES
Colin Robinson is an “energy vampire” featured on the comedy series What We Do In the Shadows. How does Colin Robinson steal your vitality? He does it by droning on about stuff nobody cares about. There is a lot of truth to that.
Typical energy vampires are like narcissists. They are enclosed in their own world and sealed off from anyone else’s experience. It isn’t necessarily connected with negative content. We think about narcissistic rage, but a sweet little old lady telling you about her grandson at the bus stop may leave you drained, incoherent, and ready to kill yourself. It happened to me.
But there is another kind of energy vampire that wants to intentionally engage in, and feed upon, “subtle energy exchange.” The iconoclastic 20th-century kundalini yoga teacher Swami “Rudi” Rudrananda described spiritual growth as an endless process of getting stronger, surrendering internal resistance, and engaging in mutual energy feeding.
The practices of “communion” or “satsang” are widely discussed in spiritual communities. I did a whole discussion series about it. There is a lot we don’t know about how human beings influence each psychologically, energetically, and at the phenomenological layer of consciousness and identity.
How much of what goes on “beyond verbal instruction” is psychosomatic? And does that mean it is useless or essential? We certainly do tend to become like the people we hang around with.
But if we take subtle energy seriously, or at least as a good metaphor for complex processes in us, many people start thinking that they can open to receive more or higher energy from God, Goddess, the local environment, or other beings.
The interesting thing is that this — unlike dealing with a self-enclosed narcissists — does not tend to result in the “other beings” feeling depleted. Usually, they feel energized. This kind of feeding is intentional, subtle, somatic, imaginal and edifying.
Many people with shamanic, or organically religious, predilections congregate around vampire fiction and the notion of a special “extra” kind of interpersonal feeding that results in a slowly accumulating growth-of-being and altered perceptions.
The most basic practical principle of a righteous tantric Vampirism is…
X. WHAT HAPPENS WHEN CHUCK NORRIS DOES ALL THE PUSHUPS?
You may have heard the following joke:
Q: How many pushups can Chuck Norris do?
A: All of them.
My first intentional experiments with mental concentration came from my haphazard, childish attempts to “become a ninja.” This impulse was inspired by old Chuck Norris movies with which I accidentally came into contact. Chuck was a folksy theatrical martial artist who starred in many films and television programs before slowly morphing into a strange attractor of the meme-space. Like Elvis, Babaji, Uncle Sam, the Wandering Jew, or JR “Bob” Dobbs, Chuck Norris became legend.
But it is a peculiar form of being legendary. Funny, yes, but it also captures a whole series of logical contradictions. As if the meme itself was a mythic placeholder for conditions that max out the applicability of our ontological categories. Yeah, you heard me right.
We could argue that this is simply a relic of a pre-rational inconsistency and that modern discourse is always in danger of slipping back into a mentality that, although humorous, is indifferent to the functional principles of reasonable symbolic exchange.
But is it all on the “pre” side of the pre/trans fallacy… or could there be a little “trans” in there too?
Metacognition requires us to be able to say, see, and feel: “Yes, but also no.” And the koanic logic of transformational spiritual practice pushes us toward the miraculous states where reason persists despite the apparent breaking of the rules that hold symbolic worlds and justification systems together.
Is there a cultural need for such a role? Do we naturally cultivate semantically overloaded signifiers to show ourselves something important about how antagonisms-within-rationality allow access to factors outside Reason? And is this needed in order to restructure the paradigms of logic in which we are operating?
Elon Musk, interviewed years ago about his founding of the Boring Company (to revolutionize the boring of holes) said, “Not many companies make these machines. We decided to order one to see if we could improve it. We waited and it didn’t arrive. And it still didn’t arrive. It was like Waiting for Godot. But eventually, it arrived.”
WHAT?
The entire definition of Samuel Beckett’s existentialist play “Waiting for Godot” is that he never arrives. How can that be true if he also… just arrives. It is like counting to infinity and then adding one more. Is this how Elon Musk views the world? Is it madness? Or does it show us something about how he (and others) have been so successful in violating the assumed structural principles of society, progress, and decorum?
Let’s do a fun, deep dive into the principles that make the violation of impossibility into a useful personal capacity.
The first thing is…
See you in 2025.