Thoughts on magical thinking, bolos, and a great collective education
Chatting with my friend Ben re: the above
Last week, I posted a post called “Magical Thinking Is Good”, about why it’s good to act on your dreams, especially when you’ve stress-tested the idea through various means: talking to those who are more experienced, running smaller experiments, writing about it publicly, etc.
And I was surprised to receive this wonderful comment from my friend, Ben! Ben is an artist, painter, and writer, and he currently lives with his partner in Berlin. He also writes a newsletter called BB’s Thought Jewels.
Below, Ben shares his thoughts about magical thinking, bolos, and how we might arrive at a completely consensual, mostly communist future social order.
Below Ben’s note, I share my reply.
dear alex,
this is the first really long response I’ve written on substack. Maybe in a way, it’s meant to be a reflecting thought jewel to your thought jewel: this post, which I’ve read twice and am still thinking about. Before getting to some hard emotional connections, there’s some maybe-interesting reflection on causes and magical thinking that might be interesting. According to the definition you site, magical thoughts involve the belief in a causal connection between so-called “unrelated events.”
So much hinges on what we mean by cause. For the writers of this definition, and for most “hard headed” people, most skeptics, cause only involves two of the four classical aspects - just material and efficient cause, but no formal or final causes. Because if you start to think about final causes -- about the direction where everything is heading -- then there are no unrelated events, because all events have some sort of hard to understand but real finality Teilhard De Chardin called this the omega point; when the spiritual evolution of reality, the noosphere, lead to the divination of reality itself.
And from this cosmic angle: everything is everything! But the limited/modern causality won out because it was so ruthlessly efficient. Everything becomes limited, clear, distinct, a billiard ball linked to another billiard ball, or better yet, linked via a charmingly complex series of bank shots and reversals...
so magical thinking means one thing to old materialists who believe in limited causation, and it means another thing to new materialists who admit formal and final causation. Once you have forms, you can do scientific astrology again, can do so much scientific work that’s forbidden by the current system....
but this is all still in the may-be interesting area. Now I want to talk about emotions and connections. I would like to live in your forest bolo for 2-3 months a year, and then 2-3 in another, maybe a city one, then 2-3 in a mountain hermetic bolo, then 2-3 in another city, with no rhythm, but just an onwards nomadic journey.
bolo - consensual communism - infinite politics: these are words that can connect what you are doing to what i am doing.
but there is one difference between what you’re doing and i’m doing that seems important to highlight, because it feels so urgent and annoying to me. This is the scapegoating of an oppressor entity, and the situating of politics along an axis of oppressor-oppressed, and more deeply, the utilization of a violent metaphysics. Such violence so so basically common and normal that it feels weird and nude to talk about, but there’s some spirit which calls me to speak about this.
Arnold Kling distinguished between three political vocabularies: conservative, libertarian, and progressive. Each is organized around a polarity favored/unfavored: for conservatives, ‘civilization/barbarism’ for libertarians, ‘freedom/coercion” for progresives, ‘oppressed/oppressor’ Each of these presumes some underlying violence being done, which is (a) factually true about the contemporary actual moment (b) but not true for all future moments - that is, it is very easy to imagine a completely consensual, mostly communist future social order.
But this order would arise not through an apocalypse, but a complexification; an increased diversification of forms available to people, more names, more identities, especially collective identities, corporate identities within corporate identities within corporate identities.
many felt similar in the 19th century and they went into the woods to form new communities. why did these new communities always lose to the life that city offered? Stadtluft macht frei: city air makes free. In the city, the city that once existed and still does, you loose essential attributes and gain performative ones; you become how you act, create new capacities, learn. This has many more possibilities than life in the Phalansterie.
But now the two can be one: life in the forest can be part of a life that can involve life in many cities, everywhere; again, not an apocalypse, but a great collective education and extremely well-designed re-configuration; wholly through consent, happening, somehow almost without notice, but with much exhalations.
-b’b’b’b
Ben! I have many thoughts on your reply here, and I'll reply line-by-line here.
"so magical thinking means one thing to old materialists who believe in limited causation, and it means another thing to new materialists who admit formal and final causation. Once you have forms, you can do scientific astrology again, can do so much scientific work that’s forbidden by the current system...."
So I guess the questions is, "how do we provide people with new forms?". What new cultural forms are possible with, or even necessary because of digital tech, and the now-culturally-impoverished public spaces of the West? Web3 thought that it could solve this, but as soon as the funding got turned off, so did the enthusiasm and vision in that space. Blockchain is still too esoteric for most, and it's not really even useful yet to anyone but crypto speculators.
I think your commitment to creating institutional performances is powerful, and the podcast work you've created. People *crave* spectacle nowadays, as capital has all but bought out the existence of any real counterculture in US and the West.
I don't have any answers to providing new forms, but maybe it's being a part of a bolo-movement that is memed into existence through media, memes, institutional performance, crowdfunding, and very strong visions of a bolo future.
This reminds me of Ant Farm, what do you think of them?
"I would like to live in your forest bolo for 2-3 months a year, and then 2-3 in another, maybe a city one, then 2-3 in a mountain hermetic bolo, then 2-3 in another city, with no rhythm, but just an onwards nomadic journey."
The place I am going in January, CABIN, is building this network, where people can choose to live nomadically like this if they want to. Right now, their properties are mostly in rural areas and in the US, but they are partnered with the Radish intentional community in Oakland, and they are working on starting places in Puerto Rico and Portugal. I'll be writing about it on the blog here, and I'm sure we'll talk about it while I'm there.
If you to dig in, their Litepaper and their Mirror blog are good places to start.
"but there is one difference between what you’re doing and i’m doing that seems important to highlight, because it feels so urgent and annoying to me. This is the scapegoating of an oppressor entity, and the situating of politics along an axis of oppressor-oppressed, and more deeply, the utilization of a violent metaphysics. Such violence so so basically common and normal that it feels weird and nude to talk about, but there’s some spirit which calls me to speak about this."
I think you're right. Perhaps I do have a "violent metaphysics". I definitely often lapse into angry fugues about living in a system where I have to struggle to survive. Seeing the world in this way feels real and honest to me, especially as stochastic terrorism increases and right-wing terrorists become more emboldened in this country, and the police and politicians condone, or even encourage these fascists.
But you know, maybe this is just one perspective that can exist in the complexified, multivalent, communistic order you propose. That sounds good to me.
It seems the Koch’s and the Rockefeller’s too have a vision of “A New Pluralism”. Not sure what to make of that, but I don’t like it.
"But now the two can be one: life in the forest can be part of a life that can involve life in many cities, everywhere; again, not an apocalypse, but a great collective education and extremely well-designed re-configuration; wholly through consent, happening, somehow almost without notice, but with much exhalations."
I agree. While some may seek to abscond to rural areas to revert to pastorality, I think the synthesis between moving between city and rural is ultimately more powerful, at least with regard to transforming one's self.
I love the idea of "a great collective education". What other great collective educations have happened in history? I recently learned about Nicholas Roerich, and how, in the 1900's he helped to create a great collective education in Russia's arts and academic institutions to transform Russia's ability to train and produce world-class artists, and to preserve it's own artistic heritage.
What material conditions can be exploited to bring about this great collective education and re-configuration? How can it spread virally/memetically?
thank you, Alex, for a post that included both Roerich and Ant Farm; putting them together makes something click. Still an un-nameable something. Even when faced with violence, the ontology of love seems still wise -- I don't regret being friendly to my captors, even if they denied me insulin, the friendliness surely helped. They are part of god too, even if they are part of god acting in strange ways.
Identifying a certain direction, ideology class as the 'enemy' may seem more sophisticated than targeting an ethnicity or religion, but it still involves the same scapegoating friend-enemy making. And if you or anyone else wants to see people as evil oppressor vampires, you can -- i certainly have no power, only am words on the internet making some case for our shared existence here, Kochs and all.
But lets get practical: as a contribution towards the project of buying some property together, in my taste by the waterline, but it could be elsewhere, i’m an anywhere dude, maybe not turtle island, but also, flexible, let me propose an activity: I propose eight articles connected to TTSOE and you suggest eight thought jewels. Then you write the TTSOE and I do the thought jewels and we cross promotion and these articles make us so successful on substack we can buy an island in miami! (that was humor at the end, or attempt at such) ok, here’s my list of eight things that should exist:
(1) cooperatively owned vacation housing where you can cook in, so the kitchens in these apartment get stocked, there’s collective recipes, it’s an apartment in a city with great markets and foodways....like airbnb, but instead of being a disgusting creepy anti-social anti-aesthetic capitalist startup (airbnb....my scapegoat?) -- it’s a pro-aesthetic prosocial cooperative.
(2)
large centers for people to live who need to do drugs all the time; they can consensually, safely, and comfortably and privately get high and be supervised, and then also be offered free consensual holistic and compassionate recovery protocols, at their consent.
(3) you may disagree, but a form of wokeness that is not tied to essential identity, i.e, one that recognizes that who we are is situational, performative; creative -- i called this ‘hyperwoke’
(4) this is related to (1) -- but collective kitchens in cities for people to come and learn to be better chefs together. I proposed this in the german context as the ‘gastronomisch gemeinschaft’ (gaygay) but it also could have a less tuetonic handle.
(5) a website that features highly addictive mind deepening contextual news at different scales, from headline to picture to longform text - think drudgereport but with the goal of deepening internal attention ecologies.
(6) ‘self-dialog’ - a way for people to use writing, maybe a chat-bot, to do a form of self-IFS work; that is, figure out their parts and then get in touch with them in a friendly and fun way.
(7) an app that lets you makes art/symbol history and symbol history addictive.
(8) another app, a social media one, one that lets you learn languages in an osmotic and creative way, with other people, making stuff in a new language, just the way you learned your first language (see, krashen, input hypothesis)