| June 22, 2002 |
The complete Newsletter for the Left-Hand Path |
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The Council's Fora
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Hopefully, as everyone should know, in about 4-8 weeks the USC should be officially unleashed. It won't be hard to know when that happens because all of the annoying pop-up ads will be gone and the system should be more updated. Currently, we're working on what to give associaties and members of the USC, besides access to language research centers, magickal research, and other arcane subjects.
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Does the name make the man?
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Under some strange circumstances, debate over whether or not one chooses to use their "Christian" name online amounts to someone not being Satanic pops up again and again.
What does nomenclature really have to do with aspiration and integrity? Not much really. In the magickal system, knowing the ineffable name of something gives you power over it, and the same line of reasoning seems to be applied to mortals.
When you know someone's name, and assuming they are a tax-paying adult, tracking them down isn't very hard to do. Right now, you can even get internet software that will allow you to look someone up, and fairly effortlessly, you can find out quite a bit about them. In the internet age, do you really want everyone knowing everything about you?
Some people wouldn't mind at all, some would. Some also prefer to use names which they feel signify them more for who they are as a human being rather than their born name. Is it any less "Satanic" to do so? I would argue that really it isn't.
Perhaps the purpose is to achive a sort of integration in the system. By having your "magickal" name and your "Christian" name, you seperate yourself from the cosmos and by only using one, you will be that "one" person. Nonsense. A name adopted for ceremonial purposes is just, for ceremony. I might start calling my name Dionysus Patrem, for pure ceremonial purposes, it is only used for just that. Distinguishing yourself between groups is fairly normal, we act different around our boss than our best friend, around our girlfriend than a girl we just met, etc. Social behavior revolves around knowing how to act around whom. A skeptic, (not the new definition, but the old Greek philosophical ones), would have said nonsense, as he lived in his dog-house, but we who aspire to achieve more know that it is vain to do without a group.
So, on what rational ground can we say the use of nomenclature reflects whom we are as a person? Operate as whom you feel you really are, not as whom people tell you that you must.
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Book Review
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Today's book review is "The Unconscious Civilization", by John Ralston Saul. My goodness, I have never picked up so preachy a book in all my life. The book starts off ranting and ends ranting.
That's not to say there aren't valid points within the book. Just that the overly proselytizing attitude is annoying because it gets repetitive. The first valid point is how a structure or society is run. That is to say that you can basically boil it down to four ways: A country can be run by God, a King, a group of people, or by the citizens.
Breaking it down, a theocracy, a monoarchy, an oligarchy, or a democracy. The compelling argument that he makes is that America no longer has any rights to say that we are a democracy. We are, in fact, an oligarchy. There's a saying that in order for democracy to fail, the only thing that is necessary is for 51% of the people to figure out how to screw over the other 49%. Democracies depend upon one thing, and that is education. Each citizen, though he/she may not be a specialist, must be able to make an informed decision and know how to make an informed decision. That's the problem right there. America has become stupid.
As outlined in the book "Derailing Democracy", most of our information that we get is from self-serving companies who are getting money from big corporations. They will not dare risk losing their payments from these corporations, so instead, they choose to willfully sugar-coat and decieve the public. The ultimate goal is that the real information is controlled by a very select few, and the majority of people have no clue about it. You've probably seen more than one ad for "information that the public doesn't know..." "What only the few know to make real money..." etc., etc., etc. While the validity of such advertisement may or may not be true, what is interesting is that it's commonly admitted to in America that many people possess information which others do not.
John lays the charge down that the group responsible for this is Management. I think he's a little bit off here, but we'll go with it. You see, people who are not producing goods are useless in society. However, the truly poor don't use hardly any resources, so no blame can really be attached to them. However, the rich who are managers and don't really do anything are worse. They do not produce any goods, yet they consume massive amounts of economic goods. Thus, though we have a society where there is more than enough goods to go around, we are limited by the fact that they are being consumed by people who are not producing into the system itself.
Really though, I would go a bit further than that. There are two types of input's into a system: Production Input, (those who put out into the system), and Maintenance Input, (Those who maintain the system which makes the production). The problem is that we have too much maintenance and not enough production. Policemen, Judges, lawyers, jails, politicians, etc. do not actually produce any goods, they just maintain a system where others can produce goods. Maintenance/Production are like Supply/Demand, either they must reach an equilibrium where they are both most advantageous or the system will suffer.
Right now, with our overreliance upon maintenance, we've slowed down production considerably. We can take a few steps to alleviate this problem.
First, limit the amount of maintainence systems. Less useless rules, regulations, and maintaining systems. Meanwhile, wages across the board need to be raised. Adam Smith is often quoted in his extreme positions, but relatively few in his more sensible ones. As an example, he says that no one is losing money from high wages provided they are producing a service, rather, the "idle" are living off the industrious so that the heavy yoke is being carried by those who get the least benefit from wages!
We have produced a technocratic oligarchy, according to John Saul, and it's time to switch back to a true democratic form. I doubt Christians will read this, Saul seems to have a contemptuous attitude towards organized religions, and includes it in his diatribes. If you can skim the fat off this slim book, it's a fairly good read. I don't recommend it as a stand-alone, without supplementary readings from other books, the points he makes may be hard to grasp. Overally, about a six out of ten stars for this book.
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