Conjuring the Liberal Geist
What we can do as a siblinghood to stave off the Egregores of Decadence, Control, and Nihilism.
In a prior post, we discussed three types of evil: Luciferic, Ahrimanic, and Sorathic. In this article, I would like to discuss what the Grey Robes must do to keep it in check.
With all due respect to Lucifer, Ahriman, and Sorath, let’s call these three forms of evil Decadence, Control, and Nihilism for conceptual ease. Elsewhere, we have referred to genera called Egregores because they are mind viruses (memeplexes) with the power to direct mass behaviors. This makes them seem like entities with agency.
Demons, devils, egregores. Some faith traditions personify—or perhaps monstrify—these entities, because doing so helps people reckon with what might otherwise be elusive, or worse, found within us all by degree. We have said that confrontation allows us to see monsters in our Shadows and, perhaps, like Milarepa, to learn from them.
As importantly, we must reinforce the concept of an Egregore, because it evokes the sense that Decadence, Control, and Nihilism can take over the minds of the many.
The Cybelian lynch mob is named after the Greek goddess Cybele, who falls in love with her castrated grandson Attis, whereupon she is forced to roam the world with an army of embittered, sexless eunuchs in tow, as a kind of apocalyptic zombies of antiquity. The Cybelian lynch mob is quite simply the price we humans pay for long periods of peace, stability, and growing surpluses.
—Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist, from Process and Event
In “Three Evils and Dark Dialectics,” we explored how Decadence and Control can spawn Corruption in unholy union. Said more simply, when Mama Money and Papa Power find each other, they are at odds until they realize they are stronger together. As the people see an increasingly hopeless situation, laboring as managed herds for the corporate state, what starts as a justifiable spirit of opposition can turn into Nihilism. Sorath gets what he wants by letting Lucifer and Ahriman collude.
I have called arguments and egregores in opposition to happiness, harmony, and prosperity “Dark Dialectics,” especially in the Introductory Course, which paid subscribers can access.
In the Grey Robes Course, we also discuss balancing psychosocial forces. We refer to the Elemental Drives: masculine and feminine crossed with Eros and Thanatos, which you can read more about here:
Creative Destruction as a Spiritual Practice
The Elemental Drives are energies that must be kept in balance. But the balance practice always starts within.
Don’t forget that there is good in balance and virtue in practice. Still, that makes all of this even less Manichaean. We might characterize Decadence as excess Eros Feminine, Control as excess Eros Masculine, and Nihilism as excess Thanatos Feminine and Masculine combined. Sorath’s duality lies in the desire to destroy the human spirit and then the human body, bringing an end to civilization and eventually an end to all humanity.
Practice Beyond Good and Evil
If we understand “good” as negating the evil three, it’s unclear what good looks like. We noted that Luciferic and Ahrimanic evils seem to lie in opposition. But not quite. The urge to control is opposed to wantonness in a manner of speaking, but we would have to explore the possibility of Platonic polarities or Gnostic extremes.
Only superhuman entities would be capable of:
Saintly good. Humans would be disposed to control all impulses, resist earthly appetites, renounce freedom, and never question authority.
Angelic good. Humans would be disposed to govern in wisdom, circumspection, and virtue without succumbing to power’s temptations.
Deific good. Humans would be capable of ex-nihilo creation and never see value in destruction or accepting the cycle of endings.
What we have called Grey Dialectics—a synthesis beyond good and evil as defined by the above, yields something like this:
Self-sovereignty. Freedom and Virtue in balance
Order. Protocols and Processes instead of power
Generativity. Innovation and Growth within limits
Without deeper analysis today, we might argue that this 1, 2, and 3 synthesis yields a distinctly human set of values that take on the character of Natural Law.
The Liberal Geist
A group of imperfect humans came together in the eighteenth century and set out the contours of an imperfect doctrine, which we called liberalism.
Liberalism’s enemies have characterized the doctrine as atomistic individualism, thus insufficiently communitarian, but liberalism was never meant to discard community. Liberals, variously, have held that a community can only self-organize through the motivations of individuals with common interests, needs, and practices.
We tip our hats to Tocqueville, who once saw this in a people.
If the Luciferic, Ahrimanic, and Sorathic evils are Egregores of Dark Dialectics, to heal the world, we must move to Grey Dialectics and hasten a liberal renaissance. Such a renaissance will resemble past liberalism, transcending and including vital elements, but adding important values and insights—ancient and modern.
Virtue, almost forgotten, is the original moral practice. While the Platonists can aim at perfection and always miss, we will wait to catch them back here on Earth. Together, we will practice, always practice—like one does music or martial arts—hoping to expand our self-sovereignty and influence. The more we practice together, the more we conjure a Geist that can contain this dark three.
There is no vanquishing the Trinity of Evil as long as we’re human, situated in our physical bodies here on Earth. But practicing virtue, radiating self-sovereignty, and conjuring our Geist promises a renaissance—an Empire of the Mind. Such is the part of the counter strategy that we can begin today.
What remains is a central strategy that puts politics at the periphery—politics is, after all, just more worshipping in the Church of State. Instead, we move the locus of our energies to subversive innovation and subversive communication, underwritten by our solidarity within the Twelve Dimensions of Siblinghood.
Counterstrategy
Perhaps some would want us to become Christian soldiers marching as to war. But our strategy must be broadly syncretic. We need all people of conscience to fight against these evils. A morally informed but decentralized global order will integrate aspects of different faith traditions and take wisdom from each. Theocratic aspirations will undermine this unity as demands for conversion and conformity under a single Church (or Caliphate) give The Evil Trinity exactly what it wants.
This does not mean we cannot labor alongside one another against The Evil Trinity. Instead, it is important to acknowledge that we are neither saints nor angels. And we can operate with strength, hope, and optimism as we face evil together.