Must All Wisdom be Perverted for it to have Mass Appeal?
The occultist’s paradoxical longing for social transformation
One of what are likely the few known occult truths is worn on the occultist’s sleeve, as it were: the word “occult” means “hidden from view,” which raises the question of whether we should ever expect to see genuine wisdom go mainstream.
By “occult,” I don’t mean magic, astrology, or the paranormal, but mysteries “beyond the range of ordinary knowledge or understanding,” or secrets “disclosed or communicated only to the initiated.” Philosophy is occult in those senses.
To be sure, as the political philosopher Leo Strauss pointed out, modernity is largely a matter of democratizing information, of revealing subversive insights that were once kept hidden behind layers of esoteric obfuscation in the ancient and medieval periods. The internet and social media spread information like wildfire.
But that hardly means that all the information is equally well-digested. We each have only so much bandwidth to credit or what we encounter. We distinguish, for instance, between the trivia that float on the surface of consciousness, and the profound convictions we hold at the center of our being, the principles that give our life meaning.
Societies, too, have their limited bandwidths, as entailed by Pareto’s 80–20 rule: 20% of causes are generally responsible for 80% of the results. Hence, social discourses and the arts are dominated by superstars like Taylor Swift. The output of a minority of content producers takes up most of our collective bandwidth.
Likewise, the corporate media’s Overton window crowds out ideas that the establishment deems beyond the pale.
Even if mainstream culture were to encounter, process, and broadcast some profound ideas, this wouldn’t mean that the masses would properly digest those ideas. On the contrary, the truth can hide in plain sight. As Jesus said, pearls can be cast before swine. What’s a pig to do with pearls? Similarly, what’s mainstream society supposed to do with subversive wisdom? Our mental filters marginalize intrusive possibilities to protect our degree of contentment and our social standing.
Moreover, as I explain elsewhere, the act of mass-processing information is likely to degrade and to distort an occult insight, to repackage it in terms that are more familiar to those who lack discipline since they haven’t dedicated themselves to esoteric or countercultural practices. Most folks aren’t monks, gurus, philosophers, or bohemian artists. They’re not seekers, misfits, or ascetics. They just want to be happy as social functionaries, raising their family, earning an honest living, abiding by the law, living and letting live.
The prospect of enlightenment would be practically terroristic in its social implications because the ultimate truth in life is bound to seem inhuman, which means it will contradict the flattering portraits of us that mainstream society purveys. This is just to say, though, that the occult should conflict with social conventions, which again is what “occult” says on its label.
What’s truest about the occult, then, and thus about spirituality, philosophy, existential inquiry, neo-shamanism, and artistry is that these truths and practices are likely to be fit only for a minority, not for the majority. At best, the majority is liable to accept exoteric, junior versions of existential insights.
As I explain elsewhere, the occult endeavor that seems most indispensable is that there are inner techniques to go along with outer ones, ways of transforming ourselves and our perspectives, not just technologies for domesticating the wilderness.
Here, we can’t fail to notice that this search for inner techniques seems, at first glance, to have gone mainstream after all. The self-help movement, positive psychology, and a plethora of cults and gurus on social media all address this question of how we can improve ourselves to be happy and to get what we want out of life.
But applying what we’ve just concluded, about the unlikelihood that authentic, unvarnished wisdom would ever go mainstream, we can infer that these mass movements are impostors. In so far as self-help therapies tend to be consistent with neoliberal consumer lifestyles, for instance, they’re not genuinely spiritual or existentially revelatory. On the contrary, anti-spiritual institutions and predators co-opt revelatory insights and practices, turning them into commodities that help deceive us.
This is what Ryan Holiday does with Stoicism, for example. Indeed, the self-help movement teems with charlatans who offer capitalism-friendly advice on how to be good consumers, never posing the meta-questions about the spiritual merit of this entire social order. These movements are comparable to what passes for conservative Christianity, as in the kind that finds itself endorsing the cesspit of Trumpism. The Nazis pioneered this exploitation of occult symbols, jargon, and poses. And again, Jesus warned that “false messiahs” would mislead earnest seekers.
Then there are the pseudoscientific, crank aspects of fake occultism, the deranged cults of personality, unfalsifiable conspiracy theories, and fan clubs of the paranormal.
What intrigues me here, though, is that genuine spiritual (existential) revolutionaries wouldn’t likely be content with the fatalistic scenario. They’d be inclined to spread their message, to help discipline the masses to immunize them against the charlatanry and parasitism that free societies exacerbate. But these outsiders would understand that there are enormous obstacles in their way. Why even bother sending the truth out into the ether when it’s bound to be lost to oblivion or to be perverted for popular consumption?
Is there a pathway towards mass enlightenment, a realistic descent of “God’s kingdom” that currently hides in plain sight as the availability of occult insights?
Russian Marxists confronted this problem, and they expected that a vanguard of revolutionaries could overthrow the unenlightened social order. Yet look at the long-term results of the Russian Revolution: brutal dictatorships and kleptocratic oligarchies in Russia, China, and North Korea. Even if the early communists had noble purposes, the sheer act of going mainstream is bound to disappoint in “spiritual” terms.
Of course, if the earliest Christians could have foreseen the imperial transformation of totalitarian Christendom in the West, they’d have been appalled. Jesus’s counter-cultural movement became anti-Christian, a politicized, godless, but ever-so popular institution.
Artists face an acute form of this sell-out phenomenon. Paradoxically, they may long to go mainstream, not just to pay their bills but because they believe their message deserves to reach a wide audience. To have a vision is to be inspired by it, which means the visionary wants to spread the word.
But artists are likely to fear that immense commercial success kills creativity, that artistic and business purposes are antithetical to each other. There are many cases in which the artist does his or her best work before the artist triumphs in commercial terms and succumbs to the capitalist and political incentives that govern a mass movement.
Perhaps there’s a sweet spot just at the beginning of mainstream coverage, though, when the artist has begun to “blow up,” but before the audience’s ravenous expectations capture the artist’s sensibilities. Think of U2’s “Joshua Tree” or “Achtung Baby” albums, in the Goldilocks period, after the band had outgrown its initial punk influences, and before it had succumbed to the luxuries of superstardom.
In any case, the occultist, that is, the spiritual seeker, philosophical visionary, or artistic prophet is likely to long for social transformation while recognizing the dream’s futility. This paradox is what makes for the never-never quality of apocalyptic literature. The apocalyptic reckoning of humanity is always just around the corner and yet it never arrives, so the existential insiders can only long for what’s so near and yet so far.
The irony here is itself a sign of truth, in my view. Profound understanding could never be easily obtained, especially without sacrifice. We must “carry our cross,” which means abandoning profane social expectations to pursue worthier endeavours and to avoid disgracing ourselves by participating in mass folly and carnage. Consumerism is the depth of mundanity, so that the lack of mass enlightenment seems as inevitable as the stages of nature’s cycles.
We can barely imagine the end of capitalism because the masses speak with a louder voice than any idealistic visionary, and the masses don’t want enlightenment or great art. But should a pig’s self-assessment be trusted? Do we know what we really want if we lack much of an inner life so that we have no true self even to confront?
How to get from here to there, from the dynamic countercultural movement to mass inner transformation? Must we rely on industrialists to keep advancing our technological environments, forcing us to adapt to that outward progress? Are we likely to approve of the sort of folks who are most liable to live with godlike technology when they haven’t fortified themselves with critical thinking and creative skills? The writing is on the wall when the smartphone is known to turn us into creeps and infantilized cravers of the most superficial “contents.”
Should the neoshaman dare to descend into the fallen world, or is the hero’s journey vain? Should the enlightened be content to dwell as lone, bemused buddhas, without sullying themselves by engaging the hoi palloi?
Of course, I don’t have the answers. But if I did, would there be a point of sharing them?
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