Over the last century, the varied forms of cultural and social rebellion were neutralized by being co-opted — yet in this process society also changed and adapted. Mass society integrated the human liberation movements of the last centuries into the fabric of daily life, on many levels. To stay relevant, the corporate marketers and cultural programmers were forced to mimic the form and rhythm of these rebellions, to make them part of their inducements — Jimi Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner” used to sell cars, et cetera. The romantic rebellions of the past persist as the background Muzak and subliminal wallpaper of the present; radical breakthroughs in defining new rhythms of perception and thought remain as underlying, invisible pattern. The next surprising yet logical phase in this dance is for the opposition to define the desired alternative, co-opt the propaganda tools and financial instruments of the dominant culture, and redirect or reverse the momentum of the system as a whole.
Excerpted from a fascinating editorial by Daniel Pinchbeck of Reality Sandwich / the Evolver community, in a call for ‘corporate alchemy’:
1. What’s wrong today?
“I tend to see the fixation on making money that I encounter in almost all business people, even sympathetic ones, to be something like an alien parasite that has attached itself to their brain, so that they cannot help but constantly calculate situations to their own myopically conceived advantage. In a way, I feel sad for them. Personally, I don’t believe that calculated self-interest is an inevitable part of “human nature” — human nature is many things. I believe that, as the quickening pace of planetary transformation continues, this self-interested outlook will become outmoded, a kind of handicap. Of necessity, the economic system that we know is going to give way, and a new form of economy — a new type of virtual life form, symbiotic rather than parasitic — will soon be born.
Along with normal business people who have some decency but are part parasitic, there is a highly functional subset of sociopathic dominators who currently call the shots. They are the “masters of the universe” because our financial system is designed to reward the most amoral and sociopathic behavior. In a system that reduces natural resources to profit engines, the less compunction you feel about wrecking ecosystems or annihilating local cultures or mind-controlling the multitude, the more you and your company will succeed.
A certain subset of the human population is born sociopathic. In a traditional society like Ancient Egypt or the Classic Maya, such sociopaths would be recognized as both gifted and cursed, and an initiatory path would be defined for them based on their psychology, under the tutelage of dark gods such as Set or Tezcatlipoca. They would be given a defined role and function in society, but not permitted to govern it. For a new planetary culture to emerge and thrive, we will need to establish this kind of balance again.
In this interim phase, the radical, spiritual and artistic counterculture have a great opportunity to work transformation from within the “belly of the beast” of the media and the economic system. Consider this engagement as a kind of initiatory act and a magical practice, involving mimicry, rhetoric, spell-casting, the Tantric transmutation of dark matter into light force. There are a number of reasons I think this is necessary. One reason is that money functions as social leverage– those with resources are able to do things and make things happen, while those without are stuck on the sidelines.
If your work is important to society, then that society should value it in whatever ways that it chooses to ascribe value. Perhaps you would like to influence and awaken people, to change their way of thought and patterns of behavior? You should realize that most people will find you far more convincing if you are radiating health and abundance, rather than scraping for pennies. They will want to know how you pulled it off, and be more open to what you tell them.
Of course, basic health and abundance can be created outside of the money system — you can retreat from society, live in a rural community, grow food and practice yoga. Personally, considering the dire nature of the planetary emergency, I recommend engagement over retreat. Money is a basic language that our society speaks, a tool and an instrument that can be utilized and mastered, whether or not the goal is to eventually discard or transcend it. Like a novel or political manifesto, a business plan or spreadsheet of future projections is also a kind of spell, devised to focus power and catalyze human activity. Corporate icons can be considered sigils, occult symbols, that help to bind energy as well as shape consciousness into a particular form.
As an aside, I don’t think that artists or magicians can get away with forfeiting the “real world” and retreating into realms of the imagination or the “astral plane” anymore. As the graphic novelist Grant Morrison once described it to me, we are in a time when the material and astral world, Malkuth and Yesod, are overlapping and merging. This situation makes it harder for materialists, as the physical world is increasingly psychically malleable, but it also presents challenges for magicians, as the astral is becoming more tangible and definite. In such a time, magicians need to prove their powers in the world as it is, the world of being and becoming. Finding balance and financial success in this time of accelerating turbulence and Illuminati manipulation is a great opportunity for magical work. To pursue a transformative path without compromise, to master it to the point that the mainstream society abundantly promotes and supports it: that is a powerful act of wizardry, a high-wire art form.
Most importantly, the tools of the corporate world can’t be discarded. They need to be learned and repurposed.Corporations are extremely efficient machines for transforming matter and energy. We are going to need corporate managers, along with all of the skills that corporate managers have mastered, if planetary transformation is going to happen with the necessary speed and efficiency, when we consider the intensity of the ecological crisis, above all.
We find ourselves in an extraordinary moment when our media and culture are up for grabs. The myths of modernity and postmodernity have melted away, but there is nothing ready yet to replace them.Therefore most people are lost, confused, and have no idea what to do. They need direction from somewhere. Our society needs a new kind of leadership. Those who have embarked upon the difficult work of recognizing their psychic nature and integrating their own shadow material need to step forward into leadership roles, to shed their fear of becoming visible, of being powerful.
As we enter an intensifying phase of planetary chaos, could the spiritual and artistic counterculture turn the tables on the ruling sociopaths by creating new paths to success through the economic system that has been rigged against the masses? By doing this, could they help to provide a new inspiration, impetus, and direction for planetary culture as a whole? Such a movement would go beyond the absurdist rebellion of the past avant-garde — begging to differ with the poet Alfred Jarry, who noted, “When I’ll have collected all the ready cash in the world, I’ll kill everybody and go away” — to recreate society itself as an art project, according to values that are innate and universal.”
2. A way forward: transmuting the corporate form
Daniel Pinchbeck:
What I call “business shamanism” is the repurposing of the tools and instruments of the corporate culture and the mainstream economy to bring about social change, archaic revival, planetary regeneration, deeper initiation. Evolver is intended to work as a tactical device, a strategic interpellation, to open up a wedge in the social landscape for these necessary developments to take place.
” Corporations, legal entities given fictive “personhood,” are the most potent engines for planetary transformation that the human mind has devised. In this final phase of post-industrial capitalism, when immaterial production has become the main driver of economic life, the corporate form can be transmuted from poison to medicine, repurposed to transform society, from the culture of ruin to one of regeneration.
What if Walmart suddenly went completely organic, started growing vegetables on its rooftops, invested in its workers with alternative health benefits, decent salaries, and education programs? Instead of importing goods from factories overseas, what if Walmart got behind the new model of distributed open-source manufacturing and trained local welders and artisans to make original products for particular locations, using recycled materials where possible? What if they turned parts of their store into permaculture training centers while exponentially reducing the disparity between executive and worker pay? At what point would anybody have to admit that Walmart was no longer a destructive force, but had become a friend to the earth? Obviously, Walmart is not going to do this — they are publicly traded, locked into their business model. But theoretically Evolver — as well as other new start-ups — could undertake these initiatives, and much more.
Although it is necessary to fight against malevolent corporate practices, we want to transmute the corporate form. People will always need beautiful and useful things, and they will always seek out services and learning experiences that benefit their life and their soul. Fulfilling these real needs in a good way is not antithetical to some kind of revolutionary movement. In fact, it needs to be a part of any meaningful movement that arises.
The efficiency of the corporate form allows for the mass distribution of tangible goods, accessing of services, and also the spreading of new memes and social models that can be directly beneficial. I am intrigued by business techniques such as “lead generation” and “multilevel marketing” that have proven extremely effective as well as lucrative. These tools are often used in an exploitative way, but they could be repurposed for social benefit. Some version of these techniques — not the gross hard sell aspect, but, yes, commodifying the personal enthusiasm for goods and services that people believe in and care about and want to share with others — could be implemented through a network such as ours, to create abundance for the community. “
In conclusion:
“The events of the last decades show that being stridently “against” anything is less effective than collaborating to bring about the alternative. Street protest is still possible and sometimes useful, but direct protest tends to feed power to the police, who develop ever-more sophisticated techniques of crowd control. Before protest can be incorporated into a strategy that leads to a true victory, there needs to be a tangible social alternative available, at least as a blueprint, and a method for implementing it that is understood by a critical subset of the populace. Otherwise, as the post-Communist history of the former Soviet republics shows, liberation can quickly give way to new patterns of domination and gangsta rule.”