Taking Superman Seriously:
Mitch Horowitz & Muscular New Thought,
Part 2

5,244 words

Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

In his characteristic participant/observer fashion, Horowitz narrates his own encounters with the gods. He has “an attachment to the history of Rome,” and “a series of propitious events” has led him to “venture a prayer to Minerva” as a “figure of deific exploration and possibility”:

I have written a prayer to her and placed it on my home altar. I have made a traditional Roman offering to her of olives and silver. I have also lit two candles to Minerva in silver candlesticks, which I recently purchased at a neighborhood theater’s fundraiser. My act of veneration is simple, resonant with tradition, and, I hope, dignified. In return for the granting of my petition, I have vowed to write a book in veneration to Minerva. (You can evaluate my loyalty in the future.)

In this capacity, he has also bicycled “to Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan to see the tripartite statue of Mercury, Minerva, and Hercules above the great station’s main entrance” and then “to another statue of Minerva in Herald Square in Midtown.” He also “made plans to visit still a third statue of the goddess in Brooklyn’s sprawling Green-Wood Cemetery.” One wonders if he ever ran into Jason Jorjani and Mr. X on a pilgrimage to one of New York’s statues of Prometheus, Atlas or, especially, Hermes; what a conversation that would be.

Horowitz then discusses some subsequent events that might be considered synchronicities in response to his pilgrimage, and how — and if — one can distinguish these from what the materialist would insist is “mere coincidence.” And this leads to another passage that many on the “dissident Right” can find useful:

I have elected to be public about my search in my writing. I hope my transparency is useful. There may be periods in which you are more public about your search and other times in which you are more private. I counsel only this: explain yourself to those who ask but only to a certain point. People either get it or they do not.

One of the toughest lessons I have learned in life is that no matter how much clarity, earnestness, and good faith you bring to your explanations, you invariably encounter some fraction of people who cannot see past what they really want: which is for you to behave like them. This means obeying them.[1]

When moved or called to explain yourself, do it once. Then be silent. And disobey.

The next chapter pushes the critique of New Age nostrums yet further. Horowitz narrates several anecdotes, from his own life as well as those of others, that he calls “epiphanic realism,” a moment of “stark, even preternatural clarity” that one can count on no one, and that one has no need of anyone’s help anyway. Such moments, which he compares to William James’ notion of a “conversion experience,” can “produce resolve that a thousand affirmations never will”:

Nothing other than self-sufficiency will ameliorate this kind of crisis. Nothing. If someone does not perceive value in what you or I do today or may do tomorrow, they must be cut off to the greatest extent possible. They will never dispense value, help, or collegiality.[2]

His reflections on collaborators once more suggest lessons for the dissident Right:

I faced the fact of my powerlessness and vowed to get along without the help of those people, no matter how highly or modestly placed, who would not earnestly work with me. Rather than bring hopelessness, acceptance brought a seismic shift. Or seemed to.

Easy gigs attract lazy people. . . . I work incredibly hard. I log long hours and happily. But if I am bumping against the wrong kinds of people then I am clearly in the wrong kinds of neighborhoods.[3] Hence, I began wondering if questionable collaborators were just a reflection of the broader scene to which I have willingly succumbed.

In what Horowitz might consider a remarkable example of synchronicity, Chapter Eight, “The Wish Machine,” devotes itself to Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s 1972 Soviet-era science fiction novel Roadside Picnic and its 1979 film adaptation, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, a great favorite on the dissident Right.^[4]

Within the Zone exists a rumored wish machine, also called the Golden Sphere. This otherworldly device grants you whatever you want — and only what you want. The wish machine reads your psyche.

The book and film explore a theme central to Neville and Horowitz: the power of a wish. As the main character describes it,

[t]he Golden Sphere will only grant your innermost wishes, the kind that if they don’t come true, you’d be ready to jump off a bridge!

And there’s the rub: As both Neville and Horowitz emphasize, everything depends on knowing what your truly wish, not some woke claptrap about “universal peace and love.”^[5]

The Wish Machine, at least in the novel, operates as life does according to New Thought (NT). Like life, it will grant our deepest, truest, most passionate and longest, most firmly-held desires; it will not respond to a phony, pious wish.^[6] Since it operates continuously and unconsciously, it may be impossible to detect its actions, and so the events that befall us are dismissed as “chance” or “coincidence” and attributed to some unknown but undoubtedly stupid, materialistic cause.^[7] And whether wished for or not, our desires may entail some degree of unpleasantness:^[8]

Life lived in a certain way is the wish machine: we move toward and receive a great deal of what we want, albeit unconsciously in most cases. There exists only the most tenuous bond of memory between wish and event. Deliverance often reaches us, or we it, in a form that is unforeseen or even unrecognized.

This situation is worsened when we reduce vast complexities to homilies like, “there are no accidents” or “everything happens for a reason.”

To trifle with such ideas, rather than fall to your knees and sustain them as lifelong questions, is to toy with destruction.

This is the frightful bargain life offers us. The price of self-estrangement is that we insist that our wishes lay in one direction but, ineffably and unfailingly, the psyche and emotions move towards what is truly desired, which may be in another direction.

Turning to Tarkovsky’s adaptation, the Golden Sphere is reimagined as an area within the Zone called the Room[9] — and here I will echo Horowitz’s spoiler alert — where the current Stalker’s mentor received his true but unacknowledged wish, the guilt for which led him to suicide. “Hence, your aim must be exquisitely well selected.”

Hence, when approaching the wish machine, you must not be a stranger to yourself. You must be uncompromisingly clear about what you want. Because you will get it. Ponder that.

This is a danger of the wish machine: receiving your alienated wishes. Never approach the wish machine without impeccable self-scrutiny. Never take its powers and possibilities for granted.

Further, rather than simple ignorance of our true desires, self-styled New Age believers often try to kid themselves, and others, feigning belief in some woke shibboleth or another, resulting in “an inordinate number of passive-aggressive people within the radically ecumenical culture of therapeutic spirituality called New Age”:

I have observed two disproportionately represented flaws among New Age believers: 1) lack of accountability and 2) unacknowledged anger. These traits engender self-undermining and passive-aggressive behavior.

Many, if not most, people within New Age culture work with “Law of Attraction” style methods — but often without the authenticity that the Room requires of those who are brave or foolish enough to enter it.

Indeed, New Age culture tends to promote the practice of reprocessing one’s wishes through sanitized filters: i.e., asking for things or circumstances not because they express a profound and stark personal yearning . . . but rather, asking through the filtration of ersatz altruism or thinly realized notions of planetary consciousness.

Over the next couple of chapters Horowitz continues, as he says, to revive William James’ “constructive critique” of New Thought, using the pragmatic method of correlation, which

[h]onors, rather than dismisses, individual testimony. Across time and through meta-analysis, individual testimony forms a record. In fact, we use this approach all the time, such as in measuring degrees of pain or happiness in clinical settings. We rely upon testimony to determine the efficacy of psychopharmacological drugs, which are highly individualized.

Using his own experiences and those reported by others, he develops “a subtle approach to wording that effectively ‘charges’ your mantra with potency and power” (you’ll have to read the book to find his two-part formula); and asks us to consider whether the symbols of the I Ching or the Tarot deck function as tools of selection, in the same way that “our sensory faculties are tools of measurement,” thus predicting the future by bringing it about in quantum mechanical way.

Chapter Eleven, “Optimism of the Will,” then presents a meditation on “Mind power as a philosophy of life.” He starts by addressing Christopher Lasch’s critique of “the New Age movement” as a mash-up of Gnostic theology and science fiction imagery, all rooted in “infantile fantasies.”[10] It’s easily seen that Lasch simply “lacked familiarity with New Age material and its distant antecedents.”[11]

But Horowitz also feels the need to deal with Lasch’s critique on a deeper level: “What is mind power for? Is it just a metaphysical ego trip? Or a mode of escapism?” What really is the “purpose and significance of metaphysics of any kind — and particularly the type . . . which emphasize attainment”? Even more generally:

Is the wish to create, produce, earn, generate, or live in a certain way — in short, is ambition, even of an ethically developed variety — a worthy end of the spiritual search?[12]

Horowitz again finds support in the Hermetica (hey, it’s been around for 2,000 years for a reason). We are created by mind, or some kind of intelligent Creator, and so we share in both God’s natural drive to self-expression — ambition, if you will — and God’s method, the imagination.[13]

But contrary to Lasch, this is not a license for acting as if the universe is simply at our command: “But this schema also holds that we are limited by the laws and forces of our cosmic framework. ‘Ye are gods,’ the Psalmist says, ‘but ye shall die as princes’”:

Humanity, for all its potential greatness, is conscripted to dwell within a framework where physical laws must be suffered. The individual is at once a being of boundless potential and natural limits — a paradox that creates the tension of existence.

I believe in experiential philosophies that elevate and encourage our expansion toward self-expression and heightened existence — without denying existential trauma.

As I see it, nothing in this approach abrogates or fundamentally conflicts with Lasch’s analysis, other than his blanket disparagement of New Age. the mind causation thesis contributes a defensibly greater possibility to the human situation than what appears in Lasch’s or many other secular psycho-social outlooks. As seeking people, we must avoid delusional excesses, which occur on either extreme — mystical or materialist — of how one views the psyche.

I reaffirm my contention that the true aim of life is self-expression. And we possess tools — including mind causation — in that effort. Such prospects are not to everyone’s spiritual and ethical tastes but nor do they require a break with philosophical sobriety.

As we’ve seen, Horowitz values personal testimony, including his; he’s also not afraid to issue an existential challenge to others. Lasch writes that

[t]he best defenses against the terrors of existence are the homely comforts of love, work, and family life, which connect us to a world that is independent of our wishes yet responsive to our needs.

In response to this snuggly Stoicism, Horowitz notes that Lasch’s biography calls his writing his “most enduring passion” and “most fundamental vocational impulse” and asks: “Would Lasch, denied the writer’s pen, the teacher’s lectern, the public’s ear, have found sufficient defense in those ‘homely comforts’?”[14]

All this is moot if mind creation isn’t real. Perhaps the most interesting chapter for the general reader is the twelfth, “The Parapsychology Revolution,” dealing with evidence for psi phenomena. It’s the longest and most heavily footnoted chapter, and Horowitz largely abandons his preference for anecdotes and autobiography for published research; it’s necessary, however, in order to convey the vast range of confirmed psi phenomena, and deal with the rearguard attacks from professional skeptics.

Horowitz gives a concise history of the development and achievements of parapsychology, from its beginnings in “lace curtain” Victorian séance investigations to the pioneering work of the original Ghostbuster, J. B. Rhine at Duke University,[15] to today’s cutting-edge work at Harvard and the now-retired Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab (PEAR), founded in 1979 by Princeton’s Dean of Engineering, Robert G. Jahn, and presently under the auspices of the Global Consciousness Project:

I am going to make a statement and I am then going to argue for it. My statement is simple. We possess heavily scrutinized, replicable statistical evidence for an extra-physical component of the human psyche. For decades, this evidence has appeared in — and been reproduced for — traditional, academically based journals, often juried by scientists without sympathy in the direction of its findings. This evidence has been procured and replicated under rigorous clinical conditions. It demonstrates that the individual possesses or participates in a facet of existence that surpasses what is known to us biologically, psychologically, sensorily, and technologically. . . .

The outcome of the present moment is, I believe, general acknowledgment that we as a global culture possess indelible evidence of an extra-physical component to life.

Rhine has come to be subject to a lot of knee-jerk midwit condescension, especially at the hands of self-appointed “experts” such as Martin Gardner and James “Amazing” Randi, which has entrenched itself, seemingly immovably, at such “reliable sources” as Wikipedia and the New York Times. Horowitz sets the record straight, showing that Rhine, on the contrary, was actually a pioneer in proper experimental design, well aware of such problems as “the desk drawer” (where researchers carefully remove and ignore negative results) and even the “replication crisis” that Steve Sailer fans seem to think is the latest thing (but which Rhine anticipated and worked against, essentially inventing the “meta-analysis” 36 years before the term was coined).

In fact, arguably, parapsychological research is far more confirmed than run-of-the-mill social science. In 1975, Charles Honorton examined 3.3 million individual trials, and concluded that:

61 percent of the independent replications of the Duke work were statistically significant. This is 60 times the proportion of significant studies we would expect if the significant results were due to chance or error.

45 years later, Rick Berger, PhD examined the data again, finding that:

33 independent replication experiments were conducted at different laboratories. Twenty (20) of these (or 61%) were statistically significant (where 5% would be expected by chance alone).

And yet resistance to Rhine continues, with “skeptics” imagining Pythonesque theories of fraud, such as “test subjects repeatedly crawled through a ceiling space to peek at the cards through a trapdoor over the lab.” Or just lying: professional “skeptic” James “Amazing” Randi distributed a guidebook for elementary schoolteachers on ESP, stating that “[i]t is now well established that Rhine and his colleagues had been allowing themselves to ignore much of the data they had collected and reported only those with positive results. Negative data were set aside.”

Even Wikipedia, the current source of all knowledge, states, without any source, that “[t]he original series of experiments have been discredited and replication has proven elusive.” This led to an all-too familiar kerfuffle: apparently there is a group calling itself “Guerilla Skeptics” policing Wikipedia entries on parapsychology — including rewriting the biographies of researchers. When Horowitz called them out on their “freewheeling digital jihad,” outrage was expressed on Twitter for daring to compare them with Islamic terrorists, and when he replied that their name was, after all, Digital Guerillas, he received the postmodern excuse: We’re being ironic, man. [16]

An interesting example of both well-founded psi results, and hysterical reactions, is the case of “Feeling the Future” by Cornell research psychologist Daryl J. Bem, demonstrating “cognition across boundaries of linear time” — in other words, future events can alter the past.

In a nine-part study, Bem found that subjects correctly identified the position of erotic pictures at a rate better than chance, but non-erotic pictures were identified at rates that were not significantly greater than chance. As we’ve seen above, emotional involvement — passion — is necessary for the psi effect to operate: as Neville says, “Feeling is the secret.”

But in the last two parts of the experiments, “subjects displayed improved recall of lists of words that were to be practice-memorized in the future”; as Bem wrote:

The psi hypothesis was that the practice exercises would retroactively facilitate the recall of those words, and, hence, participants would recall more of the to-be-practiced words than the unpracticed words.

The results show that practicing a set of words after the recall test does, in fact, reach back in time to facilitate the recall of those words.

While we fans of Neville rested in smug contentment, the “mainstream” went into attack mode. “Skeptic” Ray Hyman fumed in the New York Times: “It’s craziness, pure craziness.” Some suggested that the study was a fake, intended as satire, along the lines of Alan Sokal’s famous send-up of postmodern “sociology of science” drivel.[17] A trio of “skeptics” hashed together and published a rejoinder within a year, a meta-analysis concluding that all attempts at replication had failed, but without mentioning two studies that did replicate the results which they had received before the publication deadline. So who’s hiding the negative results in the desk drawer?[18]

It took Slate, of course, to drive the clown car into the ditch: Since Bem had followed all the rules, in reaching his unacceptable conclusion, there could only be one explanation: science itself is fake: “Bem had shown that even a smart and rigorous scientist could cart himself to crazyland, just by following the rules of the road.” How postmodern.

Some have even ventured to suggest that psi research is actually less likely to be corrupted, since it lacks the motivating factors of social and professional prestige and lavish funding.[19] Horowitz calls psi researchers the “punks” of science.[20]

With its solid track record, and probable lack of corruption, why all the hate? Here is where some people — including some on the Right — would suggest that it’s all part of the Plans of the Powers That Be: keep the masses running on the hamster wheel of materialistic scarcity, salving themselves with occasional bits of traditional religion, while the Elite fund secret advanced parapsychology research projects, perhaps at their equally secret bases in the Antarctic, building superweapons and tapping into our thoughts.

Horowitz has a milder suggestion: Not only are most people, including scientists, unwilling to give up on the accepted worldview, a more or less pedestrian materialism, but some, as we’ve seen, even equate science as such with materialism.^[21]

Hence the importance of Horowitz’s discussion, here and elsewhere, of the equally weird but widely-accepted results of decades of research under the rubric of quantum mechanics, which make possible — both in the sense of explaining how it works and making a mind-only worldview acceptable — the idea of mind causation.[22]

Horowitz wraps things up by reiterating the need to find your deepest desire — not the schoolbook answer, not what your parents or peers or society say you should be focusing on — because only a “real and authentic” wish can “trigger . . . the metaphysical processes of the psyche.” To aid your quest, he provides his own “simple formula”:

1) focused desire;
2) enunciation;
3) sex transmutation; and
4) acceptance of channels.

I’ll let you read what he has to say about each, but since you’re probably most eager to read about “sex transmutation,” you can get a preview here.

I hope this review has given the reader a sense of the breadth of Horowitz’s concerns, and the depth with which he subjects them to critique. The word “critique” might suggest an introspective and stuffy Kantian proceeding, but although Horowitz is also examining our cognitive faculties, Horowitz is more interested in experience and testimony, as was his “philosophical hero,” William James:

Whose effort at constructively critiquing New Thought has been neglected since his death [in 1910]. I am attempting to revive that effort. I invite you to join me through our shared practice.^[23]

Before joining in, the reader might ask: What’s up with the title? It refers, of course, to The Monkees’ 1967 hit. Monkees member Mike Nesmith had a Christian Science upbringing, and his 2017 memoir, Infinite Tuesday, has reflections that Horowitz feels worthy of Neville himself. Moreover, Horowitz and the band have had an “odd entanglement” for years, which I’ll let the reader discover for himself here and in his earlier book, The Miracle Club.[24] But here’s why the title:

In using the title Daydream Believer, I am honoring a band that I love — and with which I have had strange, albeit indirect, associations. I am also acknowledging what I hope is a core point of this book: that the powers of thought causation, while entirely real, are not an exit ramp from the frictions, challenges, and caprices of life. If you hunger for an existence of Edenic monotony, this book is not for you.

Indeed. I must also point out that the title likewise connects with two other dissident Right icons; first, through the use of the phrase in the title of Kevin Coogan’s biography of Francis Parker Yockey: Dreamer of the Day.^[25] And then, from its source, T. E. Lawrence:

Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that all was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, and make it possible. (The Seven Pillars of Wisdom)

What, then, is your dream, Reader?

* * *

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Notes

[1] “You know this person. You have shared Thanksgiving with him or her. This is the person to whom you say, for example, that you are a socialist, and you get conflated with Pol Pot. Or you say that you are a libertarian, and you get equated with the Sackler family of Oxycontin infamy.”

[2] Not for the first time does Horowitz sound this note: “New Thought at its best and most infectious celebrates the primacy of the individual. Seen in a certain light, the mystical teacher Neville Goddard, the New Thought figure whom I most admire, was a kind of spiritualized objectivist. Or perhaps I could say that Ayn Rand, the founder of philosophical Objectivism, and an ardent atheist, was a secularized Neville.” For more on this notion, see “Evola’s Other Club.”

[3] This advice might have helped murdered New York City liberal activist Ryan Thoresen Carson.

[4] See John Morgan, “Ten Great Films Against the Modern World, Part I”; Fróði Midjord and John Morgan also discussed the film on Guide to Kultur, here. Mark Gullick likewise recommends “the original book, Roadside Picnic” as “a brilliant piece of science fiction.“; see Gullick, “The Killing Zone,” as well as Ondrej Mann, “How I Met Lemmy Kilmister: An Interview with Mark Gullick.”

[5] As in this scene from Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables:

Sean Connery: Why do you want to be a police officer?

Williamson: To protect the — people and the — p —

Sean Connery: I’m not looking for the “yearbook” answer. Why do you want to join the force?

Williamson: The force?

Sean Connery: Yeah, why do you want to join the force?

Williamson: Because — I —

Sean Connery: Yeah?

Williamson: — think I could help.

Sean Connery: You think you could help.

Williamson: — with the force.

Sean Connery: Thank you very much, you’ve been most helpful. [Williamson walks away] There goes the next chief of police.

For more, see my “’God, I’m with a heathen’: The Rebirth of the Männerbund in Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables,” reprinted in The Homo & The Negro, second, embiggened edition, ed.by Greg Johnson (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2017).

[6] Hence the difficulty in “proving” such a mechanism, in laboratories or life. “Prove to me that you’re no fool/Walk across by swimming pool.” Herod to Jesus, Jesus Christ Superstar.

[7] “You can always connect the dots, but only backwards.” – Steve Jobs

[8] This may be related to Evola’s discussion of why magicians like Crowley or Spare seem to live such poor lives and come to such bad ends; see The Hermetic Tradition (Inner Traditions, 1995), “The Invisible Masters.” We might well add Evola himself to this: see my “Immobile Warriors: Evola’s Post-War Career from the Perspective of Neville’s New Thought.”

[9] Not to be confused with the more recent Eastern European classic, The Room (Wiseau, 2003).

[10] See the 1990 afterword to his 1979 bestseller The Culture of Narcissism. For Christopher Lasch and the Dissident Right, see Greg Johnson, “Our Prophet: Christopher Lasch’s The Revolt of the Elites,” Part 1 and Part 2.

[11] By contrast, see Horowitz, “The New Age and Gnosticism: Terms of Commonality” (Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies, Vol. 4, Issue 2, 2019, pp. 191-215).

[12] Here we might recall, from the passage previously quoted, the idea of Neville as a spiritualized Ayn Rand. In “Mid-Century Männerbund: Mad Men Mans Up” I explore Don Draper’s refusal to accept a buyout of his agency. Here, Don tries to convince the retired founding partner to join his conspiracy to steal their files and start a new agency:

Bert: So I should just throw away my fortune? I don’t have the rest of my life to earn it back.

Don: I understand. I’ll let you get back to sleep.

Bert: Why do you care?

Don: Because I’m sick of being batted around like a ping-pong ball. Who the hell is in charge? A bunch of accountants trying to make $1 into $1.10? I want to work. I want to build something of my own. How do you not understand that? You did it yourself 40 years ago.

Bert: That’s true. But I’m not sure you have a stomach for the realities.

Don: Try me.

[13] In “Of Apes, Essence and the Afterlife” I explore the implications of understanding God on the analogy of his creation: us. Alan Watts, in Beyond Theology (New York: Pantheon, 1965) offers a similar argument by analogy: “A universe which grows human beings is as much a human, or humaning, universe as a tree which grows apples is an apple tree. . . . There is still much to be said for the old theistic argument that the materialist-mechanistic atheist is declaring his own intelligence to be no more than a special form of unintelligence. . . . The real theological problem for today is that it is, first of all, utterly implausible to think of this Ground as having the monarchical and paternal character of the Biblical Lord God. But, secondly, there is the much more serious difficulty of freeing oneself from the insidious plausibility of the mythology of nineteenth-century scientism, from the notion that the universe is gyrating stupidity in which the mind of man is nothing but a chemical fantasy doomed to frustration. It is insufficiently recognized that this is a vision of the world inspired by the revolt against the Lord God of those who had formerly held the role of his slaves. This reductionist, nothing-but-ist view of the universe with its muscular claims to realism and facing-factuality is at root a proletarian and servile resentment against quality, genius, imagination, poetry, fantasy, inventiveness and gaiety. Within twenty or thirty years it will seem as superstitious as flat-earthism.” See my essay “’PC is for Squares, Man’: Alan Watts & the Game of Trump”; both are reprinted in Mysticism after Modernism.

[14] I recall reading one of Lasch’s books in the 1990s where he was lauding the Stoicism of the old-time working class, who just bit various bullets as needed and forged through their awful lives without any fancy “health care” or whatnot. Needless to say, this was the period when the neocons and libertarians found a “strange new respect” for this old liberal. “The proles are actually better off than we are, poverty is so morally bracing!” I also recall wondering if he availed himself of modern dentistry and air conditioning. Orwell discusses this sort of thing in Road to Wigan Pier.

[15] Rhine almost set up shop at the Ghostbusters’ original Columbia University site, and as Horowitz notes, we meet Dr. Venkman conducting a bogus experiment with the same Zenter cards Rhine used in his famous – and well designed and replicated – experiments in precognition.

[16] For more on the poison of irony, see Greg Johnson’s address to the Scandza Forum in Oslo on July 1, 2017: “Postmodernism vs. Identity, Part 2: Identity vs. Irony.”

[17] “A scholarly hoax perpetrated in 1996 wherein Alan Sokal, a physicist, successfully published a satirical piece declaring quantum gravity to be a social and linguistic construct in a heretofore respectable journal of postmodern cultural studies.” See Shawn Bell, “A Superfluous Man.”

[18] Horowitz notes that after publishing several pieces in the New York Times, the “paper of record” declined to publish his letter correcting an article that include Bem’s study in a list of psychological claims that have never been replicated.

[19] “The field of parapsychology has since its inception worldwide been funded in adjusted dollars at less than two months of traditional psychological experiments in the U.S. (experiments which, like much of the work in the social sciences, are overturned in routine cycles to reflect changes or corrections in methodology). That is less than $333,500,000, or a little more than the cost of four fighter jets. This figure compares with literally tens of trillions in adjusted dollars that have been spent worldwide during the same period on physics or medical research.”

[20] In Chapter Two, Horowitz briefly discussed the influence of Napoleon Hill (“Think and Grow Rich”) and his idea of the group mastermind on the formation of the Washington, DC punk-reggae band Bad Brains, whose first, cassette-only release included a track announcing their PMA (positive mental attitude), leading Horowtiz to add a Bad Brains logo — a lightning bolt with the letters PMA — to the aforementioned Neville and Rand tattoos. As you can see, Horowitz has cultivated a bit of a punk persona as well.

[21] The recent series of books by Bernardo Kastrup are particularly valuable for not only explaining the mind-only universe of quantum mechanics, but also emphasizing how materialism is only a theory, not a indubitable fact of empirical perception. It should be noted that Kastrup is not a proponent of New Thought or mind causation, but he does admit that his “mind-only ontology” makes mental causation possible, while it would be impossible on the assumption of materialism.

[22] Miles Mathis, with crackpot consistency, argues that both psi and quantum mechanics are part of the Elite’s Plan, trying to convince us that reality doesn’t exist and leaving us susceptible to their narratives. Of course, that doesn’t explain why QT is lavishly funded and its researchers hailed as geniuses, while psi research receives a pittance along with considerable mockery. Perhaps that’s exactly what they want you to think. Here Mathis joins hands with the Zman and the others who think New Thought is just wishful thinking. As one says, one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens.

[23] Horowitz might prefer Nietzsche’s idea, expressed in the subtitle of Twilight of the Idols: “How one philosophizes with a hammer,” meaning not BAPian destruction but “to tap all things with a hammer to hear whether or not they yield that familiar hollow sound.” (See Bernard Williams’s review of Heidegger’s Nietzsche, Vol. 1: The Will to Power as Art). Interestingly, “critique” occurs eight times in Daydream Believer, six of them in reference to Lasch.

[24] Reviewed here: “Evola’s Other Club: Mitch Horowitz and the Self-Made Mystic.”

[25] Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International (Autonomedia, 1999).