A friend in my local community recently shared a post on social media about the new world war that is already occurring. It was alarming, it was triggering, when I read the headline, I immediately felt the little pulse of adrenaline that got my palms sweating and my heart beating faster.
But it’s probably not what you’re thinking. The war is not one between fundamentalists and modernity, not a war between fascists and the rest of the world, not a war between western and eastern countries, though all of these could considered to be symptoms. The war, as told in this post, was one for your mental space, and the weapon is fear.
It’s funny when you notice a zeitgeist working its way into the collective consciousness. I’ve actually been thinking about writing a post about fear for some months now, and then a friend shared this one. I didn’t get beat to the punch (anyways, that competitive mindset is just boring to me), I was happy to see other people thinking about this, and taking the time to write about it. It means that as a culture, there are a lot of us thinking about it, that our collective unconscious isn’t steered in the single direction that we’re all lead to believe by mass media. It’s a difficult pattern to fight against though, I forget how absolutely saturated people are in the negativity that is vomited from tv, almost constantly.
I just returned from a visit with my family in the midwest. Their TV’s are never off, and they’re usually tuned to cable news. I thank the gods that they’re not so gullible as to be sucked into Fox News, but I don’t see what CNN or any of the rest do as being so much better. It’s just a matter of degrees. What I can report back is that they are saturated in messages of fear. Because of the constant threats that are being reported from Daesh, from all of the drug ads that solve problems that you never knew about and have side effects that are nearly as bad, to local crime stories that are reported from other cities hundreds of miles away because it’s a slow news day locally. War is peace. If you’re afraid, and you should be, then you need to buy these products. When capitalism is under stress, companies have to create ways to get you to keep buying. And the best motivation anyone has ever come up with to move products? Fear.
Fear is how the occupier takes land, it’s the tool of gentrification. Fear was colonialism’s most effective weapon and is ever present within its progeny, imperialism. Fear is something that motivates us all in one way or another. Some use it as a weapon, some live with it as a blade hanging above their necks.
This is an age of neo-neocolonialism. We’ve run out of physical space, but the information age has perhaps inadvertently opened up vast new swaths of land for the rapacious and greedy to occupy, and it’s all in your mind. As I assume most who read this blog are fellow practitioners of magick, I make an appeal to you on those grounds. Don’t accept the lens handed to you by the 1%, the patriarchy, capitalists, imperialists, fascists, the overculture, the man, or however you identify it. Don’t accept what Facebook feeds you.
We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are.
-Anaïs Nin
If we continue to allow ourselves to be othered, and accept the conclusions of those who assume power, then they’ve won. Then the world cannot change, and you are a tiny speck of infinitesimal dust upon the maudlin face of the end of humanity.
But, if you believe, as I do, that magick is possible then take the most revolutionary of actions, the most magickal act you have available and reclaim the lens of perception. Spread the message of what you see and negate the negative, defeat the defeatist, change the world by beginning with who you allow to define what it is.