This is a rough and dirty translation of a piece written by comrades from "groups against capital and nation".
Original here: https://gegen-kapital-und-nation.org/eine-kritik-von-glauben-aberglauben-new-age-esoterik-okkultismus-feng-shui/
When the moon is in the seventh house...
Supersensibility has been booming since the 1980s. The market is broad and differentiated. A lot is promised: life support, religious meaning, health, prosperity, knowledge about the future. The more traditional forms of superstition have never died out, such as astrology, witchcraft, witchcraft rituals or table-turning and dowsing, which is now very popular with young people.
There are also the more established forms of religion such as evangelical Christianity, Buddhism and anthroposophy. In the 80s, many new religious and quasi-religious forms of the atrophy of consciousness came onto the market. On the one hand, there are hundreds of obscure theories about how people should eat properly, dance, and organize themselves (because of life energy), which stones or plants or meditation techniques show you the way to yourself. On the other hand, there are institutionalized religious communities such as Scientology and Pentecostal churches. There are congresses, lecture tours, seminars, an unmanageable number of books, CDs, cassettes and esoteric knick-knacks (incense sticks, pendulums, mandalas, fairy pictures, etc.) from the various healers and teachers.
"Magic is the art of making money out of superstition" (Bierce)
This is the first and most shallow criticism that can be made about it. Of course, it can easily be proven how much money the various gurus, healers, prophets and fortune tellers make from the whole thing.
That's what they do, and sometimes that may actually be the only reason they do their business. But this theory of “priest fraud” is not a sensible criticism of religion. The idea that people with hard-nosed calculations screw over other people in order to exercise power, get wealth, or even just validate themselves is a conspiracy theory. Something like that does exist, but as a rule people need a “good” explanation for their respective practice, which here only means: an explanation that makes sense to themselves.
“The world wants to be deceived” is also one, but people mostly have it with religions and pseudo-religions (1) dealing with persuasionists at both the guru and believer levels. This also explains some pious deception: In order to spread the faith to which people adhere, some resort to deception and suggestion. And even the most sophisticated and cynical profiteer will usually calm himself down by saying that it has to be of some use to the people, otherwise his followers wouldn't follow him.
"Religion is opium for the people" (Marxism-Leninism)
A criticism that is particularly widespread among leftists is aimed at the alleged social function of esotericism etc. Many (2) never tire of exposing the reactionary content of many esoteric theories. There is actually a lot that can be said about this, including why there cannot be left-wing esotericism and why esoteric social criticism is per se anti-enlightenment and anti-emancipatory. Nevertheless, this view makes it incredibly easy: because it should make everything clear. Esotericism and many other things are not critical thinking, they support society as it is, so it is clear who can only have an interest in it: capital, or a little more vaguely: the rulers.
On the one hand, this is wrong because the old left-wing belief "If it's useful, it's done" is no good. People have to prove that someone is “behind” something. (Although the belief that the world of freedom and private property can best be explained by exposing and publishing all hidden things and previously unpublished sources is based on the conviction that the nonsense and its justifications will be withheld from the people. It is not so).
Anyone who believes that the capitalists meet every Thursday to come up with evil diversion theories is already practicing conspiracy theory and not asking themselves who believes what and why. But that would be an interesting question: Why do people believe? The interests of priests and rulers provide no explanation for this at all. The usual forms of left-wing esoteric criticism provide no answer to this. They limit themselves to explaining who met with whom and when, which lunar node theory was adopted by which theorist, whose successor was in the NSDAP, which is why everything is now clear.
On the other hand, the functionality of esotericism, occultism, etc. for the capitalist system is quite indirect. As God and Marx know, there is no shortage of ideologies and the supernatural turning of the workforce is only harmless as long as it remains limited to the private sector. The salesman who commutes, who he convinces to buy a vacuum cleaner, the mechanic who asks the stars where the screw goes, the programmer who relies on her dreams when programming - they are all rather dysfunctional characters. So: The connection between spinning and domination isn't quite as simple as that.
"Religion is the opium of the people" (Marx)
By this, Marx meant that religion was a method of coming to terms with the unpleasant conditions. In the sense that it provides comfort and meaning that civil society does not provide. That it is people's interested self-deception about the social conditions they themselves have created. That was somewhat true in Marx's time, and is still partially true. Religious theories provide a calm assurance that powerful entities are on the move and nothing happens without meaning. Some people may find that comforting. More on that later.
Nevertheless, the drug Marx chose in particular doesn't quite get to the heart of the matter. Opium dulls and leaves one lethargic and disengaged. It could rather be said that esotericism is the cocaine of the bourgeois subject. The various forms no longer enable mere acquiescence, but rather active, conscious overcoming of all the constraints of civil society. Adorno already pointed out the relationship between astrological advice and popular psychological success techniques. And that, in addition to a criticism of everyday thinking, is also the key to explaining this type of thinking.
Back to the Middle Ages?
"Not only in the farmhouses, but also in the skyscrapers of the cities, in addition to the twentieth century, the tenth or thirteenth century also lives today. Hundreds of millions of people use electricity without ceasing to believe in the magical power of gestures and incantations. The Roman Pope preaches on the radio about the miracle of turning water into wine. Movie stars run to fortune tellers. Airplane pilots, who control miraculous mechanisms created by man's genius, wear amulets under their sweaters. What inexhaustible reserves of darkness, ignorance, savagery!" (3) wrote Leon Trotsky in connection with National Socialism.
And even if this was a relatively clear-sighted statement for his time - after all, what is at stake here is the consciousness of people and not just being, of which consciousness is supposedly only a reflection - the theory that Trotsky is making about superstition is still wrong. He sees magical ideas as a remnant of pre-enlightenment, i.e. pre-bourgeois times. Precisely as a remnant from the time when people did not yet understand the connections between nature. But just as modern anti-Semitism is not simply the continuation and continuation of medieval hatred of Jews, modern superstition is not the same as the superstition of earlier eras.
There is a difference when a farmer has his cows "dewitched" because, in his ignorance of the interrelationships in nature, he fears that he will face certain death from starvation due to black magic. Or whether his modern descendant uses the same technology because modern veterinary medicine has been of no use and he is afraid of not being able to keep the contracts with the dairy and is therefore grasping at the last straw. The spells may be the same, but what they mean for those involved, what significance they have, is different.
"At earlier stages, superstition was, as always, a clumsy attempt to deal with questions that could not have been solved in any other or more reasonable way at the time," writes Adorno (4) and by this means that today esotericists, occultists, New Age followers, etc. are falling behind the level of knowledge about nature and society that has already been achieved.
Myth, enlightenment, instrumental reason
In fact, religious mythology and magical ideas are attempts to explain the world. When people no longer began to experience lightning or rain with incomprehensible horror, but instead turned them into living beings, later into the actions of gods who could be appeased with sacrifices, they tried - in a wrong way - to control their living conditions. But in a world of lightning rods and irrigation pumps, that can no longer be the case.
When people want to know a thousand times what their future life will look like, when they want to defend themselves against earth rays and negative energy, when they discover illness as a "way", and they ask about the right therapy to become a successful, happy, healthy person, then a lot of people ignore the cause-and-effect principles they normally know apply. They assume nothing but other causes for effects that they would like to have. But is magical thinking really so distant from everyday thinking?
"Whenever I'm in a hurry, all the traffic lights are red" -- Who hasn't thought this or a similar sentence? The theoretical premise of this and similar wisdom is the idea that you are the center of the world and your own actions and thoughts determine how the world reacts to you - that is, you make yourself the master of the world. By the way, even if you make yourself a victim of all the evil conditions, because the malicious reaction to traffic lights, etc. is only a reaction to someone. Of course, everyone actually knows that this is not the case. And yet the fear lives, (5): And that is a translation of social conditions.
In these, the majority of people play the shabby role of a means to ends that harm them. But all the constraints they submit to, they translate as opportunities that present themselves to them. The competition on the job market as an opportunity for a good job, the competition on the housing market as a chance for a nice apartment, etc. "Everyone is the maker of their own luck" is the malicious compliment. Of course, that's not true at all: without exercising one's own will, without submitting to all the regulations and rules that apply in the bourgeois world, people actually don't even get off to a good start - but that doesn't mean that they are willing to perform and adaptability would only guarantee someone, to get a job.
Such sayings, such as "if you want a job, you'll get one", are essentially magical thinking because they cross out the difference between the real world and the contents of your head. However, this is not an infantile phase, as people might believe following Freud, but rather a very active adjustment of social conditions. "It's up to me what becomes of me" is a powerful message for people who in reality have no power over their lives - because it's not up to them whether the economy has enough jobs or their state starts a war in which they have to risk their lives, etc. No matter whether it results in the wisdom “I am a loser” or “I am a winner” - it reconciles you with circumstances in which you have to prove yourself in order to be able to live to some extent.
This brings us to the supernatural, psychological or other life support offers. They promise to help you shape yourself into a successful person - whether through spiritual balance, through the use of knowledge about the future, through the strength that positive self-assessment gives, or even just well-being through food combining. A culmination of these thoughts is the hope of using certain magical practices, meditation techniques or talismans to force the world itself to allow you to be successful, not just for the Macumba cults in Brazil, to nevertheless assert themselves as masters of the natural context. People today practice the illusion of free control over the conditions and means of their existence by presenting their living conditions as an independent foreign power, and their control over them as an irrational reliance on communication with this power; and they practice this as a special sphere alongside and separate from their normal everyday life and its desperate arts of survival. They nevertheless assert themselves as masters of the natural context. (6) This means that all modern religions prove to be products of the very society at whose crib the Reformation was. This was the appropriate religion of capitalism with the discovery of the conscience-stricken individual who should take care of himself because of original sin and worldly success.
"Success can be bought" (FAZ advertising)
"Nobody feels stupid because ultimately faith is a private popular desire and religion is a large citizens' initiative of nothing but American children of God" (7) Even if nowhere else has the conclusion of Protestantism been drawn as radically as in Calvinist North America, the sentence applies to most religions today: They are no longer reconciliation with the supernatural, but rather a suprasensible success strategy for individuals. That means they have a very secular purpose, no matter how authoritative and traditional they appear to be.
The old men, whether it is the Bishop of Rome or the Dalai Lama, work less with the fear of hell or bad reincarnation - even if this fear is certainly present. Just because almost all bourgeois subjects are convinced of their own immortality, because they cannot imagine simply no longer being there - precisely because it is part of bourgeois subjectivity, to assert oneself as the purpose and center of the world - the fear of the afterlife still moves people today. But what is more important is whether religion is an attractive way to interpret the world and one's own efforts to survive. The reason for being religious today is less unquestioned tradition and convention still endowed with social power - even if these reasons have not yet died out - but rather the striving for individual mastery of the world.
"It's good that we compared"
This also accounts for the rather arbitrary character of modern religious decisions and the simultaneity of beliefs that are actually mutually exclusive: the supermarket of gods, forces and techniques offers something for everyone - in case of doubt, people simply put together the religion themselves: Catholics use contraceptives, Protestants send their children to "Waldorf schools", Muslims combine food and drink alcohol. The less stable the religious community is, including the catalog of stupid regulations that go with it, the more confused, colorful and contradictory the shopping list of religious nonsense that an individual puts together can be. Fanaticism is therefore also an exception in the esoteric scene. Everything is an approach and an offer, mainly for
The ennoblement of being with meaning
And some people actually feel better with it. Because there is the reassuring feeling of not simply being a dependent variable of unreasonable circumstances, but rather the master of one's own fate, even if only by reconciling oneself with higher powers. But even if success and health are lacking, the conviction that a secret plan is taking place can provide the calm certainty that nothing happens without meaning and that, on a higher level, an explanation can somehow be found for all the cruelty and nastiness of the modern world.
"Illness as a path" - isn't it a nicer feeling that your own cancer has shown you this or that aspect about life or yourself than the idea that cancer is a malignant, stupid cell change that torments you? That it doesn't bring anything good with it in any way and will also kill you? There is so much bad that has no good, and even in a sensible society people will slip in the bathtub and break their neck. The transfiguration of even the worst vulgarities into an event that ultimately makes no sense bears disgusting fruits.(8) Esotericists still find a world-historical meaning in the Nazi extermination camps: If the previous life always decides what a person is reborn as, then it was probably karma for the people who were gassed that made them victims of the Nazis' racist extermination program. According to this brutal logic, it is up to each person what happens to them. And the perpetrators are then only executors of the powerful fate and not fanatical supporters of a state program.
"Ommmm" - meditative calm and the turnover time of human capital
What appeals to many people about esotericism, the various vulgar philosophies, and Far Eastern religions is the promise of bliss and finding peace. Because all the stress-stricken people who are repeatedly gripped by the feeling that they are running out of time, and that their whole life is filled with anxiety, often have the ideal of "a person who is totally saturated; a state in which no specific purposes can be realized anymore because the individuality as a whole is affected and comes to rest... a philosophy for everyone that is at home in the private sphere, in front of which every single act and every completed enjoyment is very logically put to shame as 'merely' very partial and a fleeting pseudo-satisfaction" (9).
And this ideal of deep satisfaction through complete lack of need, as represented by Buddhism, for example -- very suitable for a society in which there is little -- is also quite attractive in a society like the one here, in which many struggle with the constraints imposed on them and still manage it more poorly than well. Giving the limitations of your own needs and desires a higher meaning can be quite attractive.
This call for complete indifference to one's own performance in the competition is all the more relaxing and comforting the higher the demands are. In the last twenty years there has been an awareness that that everyone has to view themselves as “human capital” and must plan the optimal use of their own time and energy. Everything is dictated by the dictates that time is money and that lifelong learning and the willingness to adapt to new challenges are required. It is suggested to people that their success depends on their willingness to perform, on their commitment to their own utilization as useful workers. And this is increasingly expanding into the leisure area, which is sometimes no longer distinguishable from the work process. The feeling of no longer being able to calm down, of missing something, of no longer being able to cope with the various necessities - all of this may make it seem attractive to sink deeply into yourself.
Supersensibility as a critic's phrase
A whole series of leftists and ex-leftists have discovered the supposedly socially critical potential of esotericism. The finding is that “male” rationality is destructive; It tries to dominate nature and man, and by allowing only the understanding and reason, it causes man to wither away. The effects of this domineering, objectifying approach can be seen in the destruction of nature, in the destruction of sensuality, in the conditions that cause illness.
This plea for esotericism is unintentionally funny. Because the people in question did not arrive at their criticism and their reasons for advocating spirituality through visions or supernatural messages, but rather the effort of their much-maligned intellect gave them the crazy idea that feeling is better than thinking. This is a result of thinking, but wrong thinking. Because it is not reason that ensures the everyday destruction of the natural foundations of life, but rather an unreasonable social order in which the satisfaction of people's needs is only a means, not an end.
Even the swastika was just a mandala
The connection between esotericism and fascism has now come into focus. It is no coincidence that the Nazis were fond of the occult and non-Christian religious practices. On the one hand, this is not surprising since the longing for pre-Christian barbarism in the Celtic and Germanic cults is common to both. The rejection of Western civilization as the supposed embodiment of the Enlightenment - which Western society really is not. What both have in common is the rejection of the idea that people can organize their lives together sensibly and do not have to be dependent variables of external circumstances.
Secondly, what they have in common is the willingness to believe in the secret work of higher powers (good and evil) and to want to explain the world through secret knowledge.
The third point of contact is the absolutely affirmative ideas about God and the world that confirm the existing society. Nevertheless, it is too easy to simply equate esotericism with fascism or right-wing extremism. But that is not necessary for a proper criticism of this nonsense.
Footnotes
1 This includes beliefs that are religious in content, but do not lead to a developed religious system or whose followers are not committed to any religion or 'philosophy', but believe quite syncretistically in elves, water veins and the life energy Chui, without to take care of the compatibility of their beliefs.
2 Jutta Ditfurth and Peter Kratz are examples of this.
3 Trotsky, Leo: Portrait of National Socialism. In: Trotsky, Leo: How is the Nazis beaten?, p.297.
4 Adorno, Theodor W.: Second-hand superstition. In: Collected Writings Vol. 8. FfM: Suhrkamp 1997, 157.
5 The most modern form of this fear finds expression in films like “The Matrix” or “The Truman Show”.
6 Imperialism III. Munich: Results 1981, No.6, p.255.
7 Imperialism II: The USA - World Power No.1. Munich: 1981, p.105.
8 The relationship between blown esoteric worldviews and anti-Semitism will not be examined here. In Germany, this kind of thing definitely meets the insulted nationalism and the longing for reconciliation with one's 'own' history.
9 Psychology of the bourgeois individual. Munich: 1981, p.79.
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