Weird Metaphysics and Throwing Stoners

by Gattsuru — on

(rerun) context, in context

Yall no offense but who the fuck who’s worth listening to has “Weird metaphysics” and is this or is this not synonymous with “took too much LSD at some point in their life”

To kill the buddha, Alan Moore claims to worship a snake puppet and that the thematic magics in his works are part of a bigger effort to alter the world, and is a Labour Party Occupy Movement tagalong – not that these are wrong positions, but they’re a little Your First Political Actioneering, and they show up when they're least expensive. So you get Promethea as the story of ritual magic bringing both the literal and figurative Apocalypse, with an explosion of creativity and spirituality and the living speaking with the dead… and it mostly ends up with brighter background colors, the Las Vegas solution to prostitution, and someone’s dead dad giving a less confrontational version of Baptist theology. That’s the point, both explicitly from a character and implicitly with the continuation of the Weeping Gorilla advertisements. Having revelation and Revelation as a process rather than an event isn’t nonsensical, but without anyone being further along the slope it comes across as if all one need for Utopia is the hippy college town.

And while he’s got business principles, yes, their foundation is the same cement as Bill Watterson’s beliefs. But we don't have an atrocious Calvin and Hobbes film.

From the other direction, Ayn Rand’s strong commitment to individuality may have given her unusual insight on tolerating (in the strict literal sense) homosexuality at a time nearly no-one could, but I bring that up because it was unusual. By contrast, her treatment of Native Americans did not get even the most trivial compatibility pass for her ideological axioms, and as a result left her with a worse model of the world than Richard godsdamned Nixon. It’s not even the only such place where she hit such limits.

I bring these two up not because they’re unusually bad, but as relatively well-known. I could suppose you could write them off as having had too much LSD (or speed, in Rand’s case), but they are worth paying attention to. At least, their works are interesting; if there’s any truth to their claims, it’s hard to understate how important they’d be. It’s just that the limitations raise doubt on that Truth thing.

To be fair, there’s a lotta Weird Beliefs that don’t impact normal life or even abstract far-off questions that much, or only impact some really limited spheres. The Wiccan who spends thirty minutes talking about what grade of tumbled quartz is necessary for a given charm and immediately segues to the less obvious ramifications of the threefold rule could not only be compatible with but demand certain matters like reduced foreign wars, and not actually have any intellectual inconsistencies with Clinton’s Tax Plan. Therianthropes probably should have really strong feelings on animal cruelty laws, the Endangered Species Act and meditation, but it’s not exactly a grand theory of everything. Sometimes the reality-proof walls come standard.

And consistency is hard, and a constant battle.

To be a little less fair, it’s also understandable if someone might not want to spend all their Wierdness Points on politics, given the low rate of return and high cost. There’s a lot to be said about Goldwater or Corbyn, but little includes “nice” or “impactful”.

The flip side to that is “compromises from espoused ideals for effective politics” is just a roundabout way of saying “lying”, and not even a noncentral or sympathetic case. Worse, it’s hard to tell, from outside, which face is the mask. Moore’s clear and direct in saying that his snake puppet god is made up, but he at least makes motions of it being meaningful despite that and pretends this whole complicated array of anarchism. It’s merely disappointing if the fan of Crowley’s sex magic can’t spare the political capital to criticize Labor censorship of BDSM, or if the sharp opponent of institutional guilt loaded on the innocent doesn’t want to alienate political allies stuck on childhood visions of cowboys and Indians.

The absolute most deadly strike against their ideologies is if those failures are the real thing. That the quirky anarchist or steel-willed individualist are merely appealing fronts. Underneath the costume, that there’s nothing but a petty sociopath quick to determine those who have something she wants are animals, or a Community Support Officer shouting “oi, show me your porn license, bruv!”


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