This is another short essay from around 2001 that is still utterly current, even more so in view of the rise of divisive rhetoric in our current politics...
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I cannot stress enough the importance of staying within our language, and resisting the cynical postmodern slide towards not caring about language, regarding it as all indifferent, getting trapped outside it. We can't really have any experience of our will if we're trapped outside our power of speech, if we never think before speaking, if our speech-patterns our thoroughly mechanised.
For most people nowadays, speech just scuttles along, as if on its own. Is there an antidote? One slightly surprising way is in reconnecting with folk-poetry and with pre-abstract thought. For it is abstract speech and thought that has gradually separated us from what we say. The next stage down that path would be the fully-computerised world. It is also the only way to safeguard freedom. For 'charismatic' speekers are, absolutely without exception, people who have no freedom of thought or speech, but enough pent-up energy to infect others with their own death-saturated speech-patterns. So, when some orator makes a speech to the effect that 'things are sliding and something must be done', they are using the power of pre-verbal suggestion in combination with emotion-laden theory. In other words, 'magic'. You can combat this by saying (eg) 'are things sliding? Must something be done? If so, what?
This power of emotional-programming, which plays on very deep prejudices and fears, has sometimes been exploited quite deliberately. A very ready example is Francis Bacon, who created the emotional settings on which English-speaking Prptestant civilisation has run ever since. Like a true Renaissance Magus, he set out to work directly on the emotions, through moralistic and religious language specifically aimed at creating a certain sort of person. This technique is often used in what I call the 'laughter-cards' method. People can be so indoctrinated that you only need say a certain word to evoke the experience, eg 'occultism' etc for any number of 'loaded' words. People are kept firmly out of contact with their own mental processes, especially by the 'scientific' attitude of disconnecting. Therefore they have no idea what is being done to them.
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I cannot stress enough the importance of staying within our language, and resisting the cynical postmodern slide towards not caring about language, regarding it as all indifferent, getting trapped outside it. We can't really have any experience of our will if we're trapped outside our power of speech, if we never think before speaking, if our speech-patterns our thoroughly mechanised.
For most people nowadays, speech just scuttles along, as if on its own. Is there an antidote? One slightly surprising way is in reconnecting with folk-poetry and with pre-abstract thought. For it is abstract speech and thought that has gradually separated us from what we say. The next stage down that path would be the fully-computerised world. It is also the only way to safeguard freedom. For 'charismatic' speekers are, absolutely without exception, people who have no freedom of thought or speech, but enough pent-up energy to infect others with their own death-saturated speech-patterns. So, when some orator makes a speech to the effect that 'things are sliding and something must be done', they are using the power of pre-verbal suggestion in combination with emotion-laden theory. In other words, 'magic'. You can combat this by saying (eg) 'are things sliding? Must something be done? If so, what?
This power of emotional-programming, which plays on very deep prejudices and fears, has sometimes been exploited quite deliberately. A very ready example is Francis Bacon, who created the emotional settings on which English-speaking Prptestant civilisation has run ever since. Like a true Renaissance Magus, he set out to work directly on the emotions, through moralistic and religious language specifically aimed at creating a certain sort of person. This technique is often used in what I call the 'laughter-cards' method. People can be so indoctrinated that you only need say a certain word to evoke the experience, eg 'occultism' etc for any number of 'loaded' words. People are kept firmly out of contact with their own mental processes, especially by the 'scientific' attitude of disconnecting. Therefore they have no idea what is being done to them.