Yockey vs the Dorks
AI, Ethnic Souls, & the Tech Kabbalah

7,492 words

I consider that all materialists, including the vertical racists, are and must be hostile to us…. Furthermore, [they] have mainly nineteenth-century outlooks. I have small tolerance for these survival types, but I never disturb them in their mental graveyards. It is they who attacked me.”
—Francis Parker Yockey[1]

The conventional reductive materialist (physicalist) model embraced by many in the scientific community, including its assumption that the physical brain creates consciousness and that our human existence is birth-to-death and nothing more, is fundamentally flawed. At its core, that physicalist model intentionally ignores what I believe is the fundament of all existence — consciousness itself. —Eben Alexander, MD[2]

Man, your head is haunted; you have bats in your belfry!”
—Max Stirner[3]

***

Francis Parker Yockey’s magnum opus, Imperium, [4] opens (leaving aside an overture, entitled “Perspective,” to which I will return) with three chapters denouncing the main culture-distorting ideologies of his time: Marxism, Freudianism, and Darwinism. All three are examined and dismisses as materialistic, and—worse yet—as outmoded, nineteenth-century thought-forms. “Every science,” he writes, “is a profane restatement of the preceding dogma of the religious period.”[5]

Right-wing readers (and I doubt many, if any, leftists have bothered to begin Imperium) generally greet the first two with huzzahs, and then shocked silence, or perhaps a Bronx Cheer, for the turd-in-the-punchbowl of the third.[6]

Yockey has been criticized by some “Rightist” luminaries such as David Duke [and] the revisionist David McCalden…. Certainly, Yockey’s philosophy does not fit neatly into the racial-nationalist paradigm of genetic reductionism. Like Oswald Spengler’s epochal Decline of the West, to which Yockey owed a great intellectual debt, Yockey focused on spirit and culture above and beyond genetics.

Just as Spengler was criticized by National Socialist race theorists, primarily by Alfred Rosenberg, who nonetheless conceded that The Decline of the West was “great and good” – although by then redundant philosophically[7]; Yockey was not well received by American National Socialist George Lincoln Rockwell, who condemned “Yockeyism” as “dangerous” and “evil.” Although James Madole of the National Renaissance Party was very much influenced by Yockey’s ideas.[8]

Where Yockey seems old-fashioned, reactionary and hopelessly out of sync with the present age is his attitude toward science. [9]

Many of Yockey’s ideas on biological race specifically, and on science and scientific topics generally, are not only ludicrous but just plain wrong.  Objectively wrong. [10]

If Yockey were revising his text today, I think he would find his withers unwrung, and might even add a fourth chapter, dealing not with these critics—whom, like Spengler or Nietzsche, he would simply ignore—but with that new darling of the tech dorks, AI. Yockey would feel vindicated and right at home in the 2020’s. I’d like to offer my reasons for thinking so, and I think they might help us understand why Yockey ties all three (or four) together.[11]

So let’s leave these musty old 19th century debates behind, get on the Zeitgeist Express and rocket ahead to the hippest, coolest issue around: AI.

Bernardo Kastrup, who has two PhD’s, one in philosophy and one in computer design, so he must know more than your Humble Author, has never been impressed with AI. In “Sentient Robots, Conscious Spoons and Other Cheerful Follies,”[12]he lambastes delusional Hollywood screenwriters and so-called “science journalists” (an oxymoron if ever there was one) as churning out a kind of predictive programming, leading audiences to take seriously (and presumably continue to fund research into) such notions as up-or-downloading consciousness itself as if it were a computer program.[13]

Well, not so fast, there, you academic A. J. Foyts. Consider this:

The entertainment media takes its cue from the fact that research on artificial intelligence—an objectively measurable property that can unquestionably be engineered—is often conflated with artificial consciousness. The problem is that the presence of intelligence does not imply the presence of consciousness: whereas a computer may effectively emulate the information processing that occurs in a human brain, this does not mean that the calculations performed by the computer will be accompanied by private inner experience.

After all, the mere emulation of a phenomenon isn’t the phenomenon: I can emulate the physiology of kidney function in all its excruciating molecular details in my desktop computer, but this won’t make the computer urinate on my desk. Why, then, should the emulation of human information processing render a computer conscious?[14]

Why is this important? Consider:

[Only] living organisms and the inanimate universe as a whole can be conscious subjects (a more extensive argument for this point can be found here). This way, as a living nervous system is the extrinsic appearance of an organism’s inner experiences, so the inanimate universe as a whole is the extrinsic appearance of universal inner experiences. Circumstantially, the inanimate universe at its largest scales has indeed been found to structurally resemble a nervous system. Under this view, there is nothing it feels like to be a spoon or a stone,[15] for the same reason that there is nothing it feels like to be—at least as far as you can assess through introspection—one of your neurons in and of itself. There is only something it feels like to be your nervous system as a whole—that is, you. Analogously, there is only something it feels like to be the inanimate universe as a whole.

And again, why does that matter? Strap in, here we go:

If biology is the extrinsic appearance of conscious subjects other than the inanimate universe itself, then the quest for artificial sentient entities boils down to abiogenesis: the artificial creation of biology from inanimate matter [my emphasis]. If this quest succeeds, the result will again be biology, not computer emulations thereof. The differences between flipping microelectronic switches and metabolism are hard to overemphasize, so nature gives us no reason to believe that a collection of flipping switches should be what private conscious inner life looks like from the outside; let alone stones and spoons.

Though Kastrup’s “consciousness-only” ontology may be a bit of an outlier (so far) he’s not alone in his skepticism about AI in particular.[16]

The idea that if you could just get the code right, consciousness would take care of itself, might remind us of the dilemma of Dr. Victor Frankenstein. In Mary Shelley’s original novel, Dr. Frankenstein starts off with alchemy, only later veering off into his familiar graverobbing, stitching together harvested body parts in his “workshop of filthy creation.” Stitching together body parts – inanimate matter – is like the 1’s and 0’s of the computer program; what’s missing, even with the brain – another inert, inanimate object – shoved in, is consciousness. That a bolt of physical lightning was sufficient to animate such a body – inject it with consciousness goop, as it were — is a typical notion of the early modern period, with some claiming that material processes like lightning or electricity were what spiritual ideas “really” were, while others argued the reverse, that these newly discovered forces showed the limits of the materialistic worldview.[17]

The Hollywood follow-up, Bride of Frankenstein, turns the screw again: Dr. Frankenstein seeks out his old mentor, Dr. Pretorius, who mocks his student’s crude, materialistic handiwork, and reveals that alchemy has indeed enabled the good doctor to create whole living beings (though on a rather small scale).

Frankenstein, the Golem, alchemy; too spooky for you? Think we’ve moved too far beyond that nice, sane crackpot materialism of Carto, Oliver & Sailer, LLC? (Wait a second, I thought the Marxists were the materialists? Forget it, I’m rolling. Let’s press forward). Well, in another turn of the screw, another “dialectical reversal” (damn, Marxists again, on every side!), we land even further into hipsterland. What’s cooler than AI? AI and Nick Land![18]

Now, I wouldn’t dream of subjecting you, Dear Reader, to Land’s painfully turgid and deliberately convoluted prose (nor, frankly, myself) so consider this recent online exchange by a couple of Stalkers in the Slavlands:

Iain Davis: So you know if you if we look at someone like uh Musk you know and he’s you know “neural net” and things like that, this idea of us interfacing directly with uh digital processes and with AI which is a complete misnomer by the way: AI, it’s just total bollocks, it’s an algorithm, it’s just a computer program, it’s just you know it’s… People get very excited about AI. “We’re approaching the singularity.” No, I don’t think we are. It’s just dumb AI. It’s not a mind or anything close to being a mind.

Rurik Skywalker: Well….

ID: But that’s what they want us to believe.

RS: Nick takes an occult perspective on it and he’s into Kabbalah and he thinks that basically you can summon like a demon or a daemon from the noosphere into the circuitry and that the circuits are like glyphs or seals or like the Seal of Solomon or whatever and so that’s how you would create an AI like an actual artificial intellect, you’d summon it from the warp and you’d imbue it in this machine…[19] that’s what he gets into with his … it’s … really hard to decode because these people write in this way and they claim it’s to filter out dumb people but it’s I think it’s obscure their views… it sounds like tech communism to me.[20]

Both Kastrup in his article and the online Stalkers seem to be rapping on the same idols:[21] first, that a merely material arrangement of circuits or code could not be a conscious entity, since if it were such an entity, the arrangement could only be the exterior appearance of some artificially created life within; then, the suggestion that such a life need not be created but simply (!) infused or entrapped within the arrangement. So what we’re trying to do here is move from consciousness as an added “something” that enables a mere algorithm to not just imitate but to be conscious, to the notion of dealing with the problem by fetching consciousness itself from some higher realm and enslaving it (if we’re lucky).[22]

Since the subject of biology has come up, let’s stay with the Stalker for a while as we look for more clues. [23]

Enter Rupert Sheldrake and his work on the theory of morphic fields and morphic resonance. The idea of morphic fields actually made its first appearance in Russia more than a century ago as an explanation for why living things take on the physical shape that they do. Even now, in the era of DNA-mapping, the problem of morphology in biology has not been solved. The theory of morphic fields basically postulates that there is an intangible informational blueprint that is used to form the shape of various limbs, organs and whole organisms, and that morphology (physical form) is not explainable by protein-coding (DNA). It’s considered extremely controversial and a heresy in academia.

Now, Sheldrake went a step further and postulated that species share a noetic informational cloud server that all members of the species had the potential to access. This cloud server basically has a PDF and an EXE file which enables plants to run a program that governs the process of sprouting, growing leaves and so on through the various morphological forms that the plant will assume throughout its life. Sheldrake went on to run a series of tests [which], in Sheldrake’s mind seemed to confirm the possibility not only of a shared informational bank, but a shared informational bank that was actually constantly being updated with the shared experiences of members of the same species.[24]

Computers may not be enough like biological entities to be conscious, but perhaps they can provide us with metaphors to understand how biological entities grow and evolve. And of course, the reaction to Sheldrake[25] was not unlike the Yockey-bashing we’ve seen.[26]

Naturally, he was summarily dismissed by academics as a quack and his experiments castigated as a form of neo-Lysenkoism.[27] His sin was quite clear: he had run afoul of the materialist and neo-Darwinian dogma of the academic world.

Once again, we know for a fact that such things are impossible because the SCIENCE! tells us that genes cannot pass down information gathered during a person’s life and, again, according to their dogma, only genes get passed down from generation to generation. To suggest that something can be passed along from one generation other than random mutations smacks of the Lemarckian heresy or, again, neo-Lysenkoism. But, perhaps, just perhaps, the idea that information and experience is indeed somehow passed down over the generations isn’t as outlandish as it seems at first glance.

Here’s where things really start to get “controversial”; for as Skywalker observes, blacks are allowed to claim “generational trauma” from the days of slavery, and Jews as well, since “Hitler forced them to do manual labor a century ago.” There seems to be only one group (or Race-People-Nation-State, as Yockey would say) who are denied such indulgence, both by Official Science and the Gatekeepers of Conservatism Inc. Strange and interesting bedfellows. I don’t suppose such ideas could, you know, actually support some conservative notions, such as, you know, “tradition”?

Anyways, Rupert Sheldrake eventually began attending Anglican church services despite his New Age leanings. His reasoning was that he would be in closer resonance with his ancestors if started attending the same church services that generations of his ancestors had. In other words, he thought it would bring him into better alignment with the Anglo-Saxon cloud server in the heavens. When I heard about this, I reached out to Rupert Sheldrake and asked him if his theories implied that certain races or ethnic groups would have a connection between members that spanned generations, a shared ethnic Oversoul perhaps. You’re just going to have to take my word on this, but he confirmed that this would, indeed, follow logically. But, for obvious reasons, that last logical step would have to remain implied and not openly stated because of the current political climate.

Indeed. Still, despite his New Agey patina, the New Age Left isn’t going to be happy with Sheldrake anyway, for – as Skywalker clearly sees – we are entering into the orbit of the Rassenseele of Ludwig Clauss and Evola’s spiritual race; a land so dangerous that Wikipedia can do no more than quote a German dictionary before dropping the whole topic: too dangerous to even hang around and sneer! (Metapedia is more forthcoming) A land where Left and Right join hands to police the limits of acceptable thought.

We’re having fun, though! Let’s look at another Big Brain before I try to tie this all together.

Carl Jung, the famous mystic psychologist claimed that he had discovered a collective unconsciousness in the course of his examination of the subconscious mind. His descriptions of what he saw sound quite a bit like he is describing a cloud server with shared information uploaded and compressed like a ZIP file through the use of evocative symbols that reflected the shared experiences of generation upon generation of descendants of an ethnic group.

Carl Jung claimed that to be born without connection to this reservoir of shared experiences would be akin to being born deaf, mute and blind. He also spoke about a “collective shadow” that could be passed on over the generations. It sounds a lot like the concept of “inherited trauma” that we discussed before. The sins of the grandfathers truly are born by the sons, it seems. Carl Jung’s other ideas are just as “out there” and yet they are taken seriously in the field of psychiatry. Why shouldn’t we consider his theory of a shared collective unconscious as well?[28]

Cyborgs! Celestial cloud servers! Tech Communism! Tech Kabbalah! After this, we can return, as promised, to the first chapter of Imperium, and perhaps read it with new understanding, or, as Yockey calls it, “perspective”:

PERSPECTIVE

Far out in exterior darkness where no breath stirs, no light shines, and no sound is heard, one can glance toward this spinning earth-ball. … Hovering above Europe we can see what never before was so clearly visible—the presence of a purely spiritual organism. A close look reveals that the light stream is not flowing from the surface of Europe up-ward into the night sky, but downward from the hitherto invisible organism. This is a discovery of profound and revolutionary importance, which was only vouchsafed to us by reason of our complete detachment from terrestrial events in the outer void, where spirit is visible and matter visible, only by reason of the light from the spirit….[29]

What is this supraterrestrial phenomenon? Why does it hover over Europe in particular? What is the relationship between it and the human material under it? The latter is shaped up into intricately formed pyramidal structures. Ranks are formed. Movements proceed along channels of labyrinthine complexity. Persons stand to one another in defined relationships of command and obedience. Apart from this tiny peninsula, the human currents are horizontal, swirling, eddying like the water in the streams, the currents in the ocean, the herds on the vast plains. It is, then, the spirit-organism which forms and impresses the population of the peninsula into their intricate organic shapes.[30]

Like the technological Golem, the morphic field, the psychological archetype, Yockey’s “race” is a spiritual entity (or if that makes you itchy, call it a “higher dimensional entity”) that is needed to organize terrestrial formations and work up crude material sludge into organic wholes with a purpose: cultures-races-nations-ethnicities.

Just as George Lucas ruined the Star Wars mythology with his ridiculous retconning of The Force as a matter of “midi-chlorian counting,”[31] as if that made it more “real” to the hopelessly materialistic of mind, so it was Master Yoda/Yockey who gave us the true doctrine:

Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not. For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.[32] You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes. Even between the land and the ship.[33]

Now, I know what you’re going to say, Reader: enough with all this airy-fairy philosophy, psychology, and yes, even biology: what about really-real reality? What about Physics?

And here again Kastrup can assist us. The redoubtable double-doctor [34] addresses the basic methodological and ultimately metaphysical issue underlying the questions here – is race determined by genes alone? Is consciousness determined by binary programming alone? — in an essay entitled “Is Life More Than Physics?”[35]

We assume that we could, in principle, reconstruct everything else in the universe by assembling these basic building blocks together in just the right way, like Lego bricks. Nobel laureate physicist Philip Anderson called this the “constructionist hypothesis” (1972). The idea behind it is that, given the equations that govern the behavior of the subatomic particles, we should be able to predict all natural phenomena, including the largest and most complex. If so, understanding the physical laws that operate at the microscopic level—the level of the subatomic particles—is sufficient to provide us with a ‘Theory of Everything.’

My suggestion is that the idea – obsession, really – that race is only a matter of genes is another instance – a subspecies, shall we say – of the more general notion that physics explains everything, as if everything were made of Lego ™ blocks, from the bottom up.[36]  Sounds nice, and people have been assuming that the equations are almost within our grasp since around the time of Descartes. The problem is, it can’t be done. Let’s ask another Nobel laureate physicist, shall we?

In practice, however, it is impossible to predict the behavior of all but the simplest and most minuscule natural phenomena based on this theory. In the words of Nobel laureate physicist Robert Laughlin and David Pines, the associated equations “cannot be solved accurately when the number of particles exceeds about 10. No computer existing, or that will ever exist, can break this barrier…. Predicting protein functionality or the behavior of the human brain from these equations is patently absurd.” [37]

In Laughlin and Pine’s words, ‘We have succeeded in reducing all of ordinary physical behavior to a simple, correct Theory of Everything only to discover that it has revealed exactly nothing about many things of great importance.’ [38]

Aside from practical limitations, there are also theoretical and empirical reasons to suspect that fundamental organizing principles exist in nature at a macroscopic level—that is, at the level of things we can touch and manipulate with our bare hands and see with naked eyes. If so, these macroscopic principles aren’t captured by the Theory of Everything. Instead, they are extra, yet-unrecognized natural laws.

Philip Anderson himself posited this hypothesis. He alluded to life as a phenomenon we may never be able to explain in terms of subatomic particles, because it may be governed by yet-unrecognized natural laws operating at a macroscopic level: ‘We have yet to recover from [the arrogance] of some molecular biologists, who seem determined to try to reduce everything about the human organism to ‘only’ chemistry … [However,] each level [of biological organization] can require a whole new conceptual structure.’ [39]

Those midwit molecular biologists are almost as silly as those right-wing gene fetishists! We’re really on a roll now, let’s ask some more physicists:

Anderson’s views were echoed in 2008 by Mile Gu and collaborators: complex systems may possess emergent properties difficult or impossible to deduce from a microscopic picture […] macroscopic laws that govern macroscopic observables […] cannot logically be derived, even in principle, from microscopic principles.

Debated as it still is, such hypothesis is acknowledged even by orthodox physicists such as Sabine Hossenfelder, who granted that ‘a derivation of emergent from fundamental properties [might turn out to be] impossible even theoretically’ (2010). [40]

Kastrup goes on to note the somewhat paradoxical problem that such macroscopic explanatory principles are exactly what cannot be proved, or even noticed, under controlled conditions; I suppose this accounts for the “unscientific,” spooky impression they give the right-wingers in lab coats. However, the same is true for their own “notion that everything about life can be reduced to the behavior of subatomic particles”: it’s “just a guess; we just aren’t in a position to know.”[41]

Kastrup is quick to notice that this position of uncertainty means that “we may be forced to reconsider some neglected hypotheses raised by scientists and philosophers of the past.”

For instance, in the early 19th century Arthur Schopenhauer hypothesized that living organisms are governed by more than just the physical and chemical laws that rule the inorganic world: “we shall certainly find in the organism traces of chemical and physical modes of operation, but we shall never explain the organism from these, because it is [brought about by] a higher Idea that has subdued these lower ones.” [42]

As Kastrup reconstructs the suggestion:

In other words, for Schopenhauer life is created and maintained by a “higher” organizing principle operating at the level of the organism as a whole, not just its constituent atoms and molecules. And although we have advanced immensely since the early 19th century, today we still can’t refute Schopenhauer’s hypothesis. [43]

Schopenhauer leads us back, through Carl Jung (again), to … why lookie here, another Nobel laureate physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, who conducted an extensive correspondence with Jung regarded what the latter called “synchronicity,” which Kastrup explicates as suggesting that:

[…]in addition to the known microphysical laws… the events of life may be orchestrated by a macroscopic ordering principle that tends to bring similar events together. According to this hypothesis, instead of mere flukes, some meaningful coincidences are the natural outcome of such orchestration. [44]

Kastrup concludes:

There may be much more to life than we dream of today; unsuspected organizing principles in nature that influence—perhaps even govern—how our bodies work, what we think and feel, and how we act in the world. Investigating this possibility scientifically is perhaps one of the greatest and most important challenges yet to be addressed, for it directly concerns our own essential nature as living beings.[45]

Kastrup is being a bit metaphysically modest – uncharacteristic, but perhaps for obvious rhetorical reasons — in characterizing his “macroscopic” principles as things we can see and touch, though even so, still difficult to prove. If hard to prove, then why not go all the way and locate them in the transcendent? Traditionally, the macroscopic, versus the microscopic, encompasses the whole universe, and perhaps dimensions beyond.

In any event, Yockey’s notion of ethnicities and races being determined, in the last, most important instance, by trans-Darwinian, cosmic principles doesn’t seem that “out there” and “woo woo” now, does it?

***

Despite their cocksure tone, it is not Yockey but his critics on the Right who are “old-fashioned, reactionary and hopelessly out of sync with the present age.” And leaving aside the Zeitgeist, their reductive materialism is both empirically false and theoretically impossible. It is, as he suggests, a relic of the nineteenth century; it may indeed have proved to be a useful, shorthand metaphysics for early scientists, and a comforting substitute for religious belief. Yet by Yockey’s time—and even more so, our own—it needed to be given up, and alternative views sketched out and confronted.[46]

Esoteric instructions and wisdom are always offensive to materialistic men, because they lack the ability to conceive and act upon these revelations. They will thus always remain incorrigible and any such message is wasted upon them.[47]

If the notion of race being a kind of cloud storage facility in the sky or in a higher dimension still grinds your gears, think of it in terms that are perhaps more characteristic of the secular Right: not vertical but horizontal; i.e., in terms of our racial/ethnic heritage from the past:

In summation, all of the examples that I have brought up in this essay from the ancient world and from more contemporary mad men seem to hint at the idea that we do indeed share a metaphysical connection with our descendants. That a Greek and a Jew and a Scythian are NOT the same on the soul level. That belief in a shared familial, ethnic or even racial soul was commonplace for much of human history, and across various cultures. Only our people reject it out of hand nowadays either for religious reasons[48] or because of misplaced faith in SCIENCE! … Now, you don’t have to believe in any of this stuff if you don’t want to. But humor me and run a quick experiment before you dismiss the idea out of hand.

Indeed, are we not hard-bitten empiricists? [49]

Compare the lamentable state that our people find themselves in and decide for yourself whether we are better off for rejecting the metaphysical beliefs of our ancestors and metaphysical belief in our ancestors … or not.

And, frankly, does it really even matter whether Genii or Daimons or Zeus exist or not? Well, it’s hard to prove one way or another, isn’t it? But we can simply compare the results of the best practice of honoring one’s ancestors, to the practice of spitting on their graves, can’t we? All I’m saying is that a people that carves out one day in a year to have a picnic by their grand-pappy’s gravestone probably has a better chance of making it through the ethnic meat-grinder of the 21st century in one piece.[50]

As we saw above, “vertical” is Yockey’s metaphor of choice for his notion of race, not “horizontal,” but elsewhere, in conversation with Laurent Guyenot, Skywalker notes that while the nationalist “cannot connect people directly to a nation,” one can attempt to “rebuild a connection to ancestors, a vertical sense of lineage,” (a horizontally-mediated verticality, if you will) since: “Genes are antennae connected to higher world.”

Readers of Yockey need not deprive themselves of the insights offered by his cosmic vitalism in order to fit in with the Kool Kids: they are the Kool Kids already. Indeed, “The wise Nibelung-dwarves have a strange and conspicuous connection to the results of the most recent natural scientific research.”[51]

Notes

[1] “Correspondence with Adrien Arcand,” Nov. 21, 1949; see The World in Flames:
The Shorter Writings of Francis Parker Yockey; ed. Kerry Bolton and John Morgan (Centennial Edition Publishing, 2020) pp. 117-18.

[2] “My Experience in Coma.” H/t to Robert Stark for alerting me to this case history.

[3] The Unique and Its Property; A new translation, with introduction by Wolfi Landstreicher (Baltimore, Underworld Amusements, 2017), p61. For more on Stirner, with an emphasis on his rather neglected mystical elements, see my essays here, many of which are collected in Mysticism After Modernism: Crowley, Evola, Neville, Watts, Colin Wilson, & Other Populist Gurus (Melbourne, Australia: Manticore Press, 2020).

[4] I assume readers of Counter-Currents need no introduction to either; if not, consider: Kerry Bolton, “A Contemporary Evaluation of Francis Parker Yockey.”

[5] Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics; ed. Greg Johnson; Introduction by Willis Carto (Centennial Edition Publishing, 2024), “The Scientific-Technical World-Outlook.”

[6] To continue the metaphor, and switch to Brooklyn, perhaps the “turd” chapter.

[7] No doubt made redundant by Rosenberg’s own Myth of the Twentieth Century.

[8] Bolton, op. cit.; with my [!].

[9] Peter Bradley, “Wilmot Robertson on Francis Parker Yockey.”

[10] Ted Sallis, “Kerry Bolton’s New Yockey Biography Project.”

[11] I’ve always been intrigued that the intellectual “Big Guns” of the Right – Spengler, Yockey and Evola – are all on the “wrong side” on such a basic “White Nationalist” theme. I guess the Satanic Leftists are right about something after all, and it just so happens to be that. “Oh no, Bre’r Rightist, don’t throw me in dat dere briar patch!” I suppose one might still think this is only a coincidence, and the Big Three err only on this one issue, and are correct in general, but as Goldfinger points out, “three times is enemy action.” One might almost think that race is a factor, Freud and Marx conveniently being of the Hebraic persuasion. Perhaps Miles Mathis can clarify Darwin’s pedigree.

[12] Now reprinted in Science Ideated: The fall of matter and the contours of the next mainstream scientific worldview (Winchester, UK: Iff Books, 2021), which lays out his entire system of “analytic idealism.”

[13] To what end? Consider: “A new, clearly coordinated top-down campaign is pushing the AI phantasm onto society. And just like the engineered intersectionality of race and identity to create a distracting poison brew of strife and outrage, so too is this new AI revolution being planned as the new ingredient to the mix of ‘intersection’. And how will they do that? It has become fairly obvious to me, they are now using the concurrent AI roll out to condition us for the acceptance of a few key theses crucial for the next stage of their plans for society:

The first of these is the gradual breakup and disaggregation of the concept of ‘humanity’, not only to more smoothly inaugurate the coming waves of transhumanism, by making the concept more palatable, dimming its ‘unethical’ perceptions, but the ultimate end-game will revolve around waging a sort of ‘class war’ against what will be deemed ‘non-humans’.” To continue, see Simplicius the Thinker, “Fracturing Identity at the Altar of Transhumanism.”

[14] This is why the much lauded “Turing Test” is simply a rebranding of 19^th century Behaviorism.

[15] Alluding to Thomas Nagel’s landmark essay on the nature of consciousness, “What is it like to be a bat?”; an annotated online version is here.

[16] And still not alone; consider Jon Rappoport, April 16, 2024: “Science Fiction and AI: the illusions of the writers.”

[17] Consider the rhetorical coopting of such terms as “enlightenment” and “illuminated.” On this, as well as the history of substances shifting out of “the occult” into “science,” and vice versa, see Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (University of Chicago Press, 2017).

[18] Subsequent to writing this, Land turned up as a topic on Tucker Carlson’s podcast: “The Occult, Kabbalah, the Antichrist’s Newest Manifestation, and How to Avoid the Mark of the Beast”; transcript here; Land’s response here. See also the subsequent article in Compact: “The Faith of Nick Land.” H/t to John B. Morgan IV for alerting me to the Compact article.

[19] We’ve seen this technological golem before: with analog recording, “Music became a kind of writing, a mysterious phono-graph that was only returned to the realm of air through an industrial contraption. Symbolically, the phonograph record stages a peculiar double movement: of drawing living spirit into matter, and the, upon playback, the even more uncanny act of reproducing that spirit – or something like that spirit – from matter. This process lent the photograph a spectral dimension.” Erik Davis. Led Zepplin IV (Continuum, 2005) p. 16. For more on Davis, see my review of his Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica (Portland, Or.: Yeti Publishing, 2010), reprinted in Mysticism After Modernism, op. cit.

[20] “The “Dork” Enlightenment and Acceleration Agenda w/ Iain Davis.” Transcript, 29:34 to 31:27

[21] “The preface of Nietzsche’s Götzen-Dämmerung oder Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophiert (1889) reveals that the eponymous hammer is not a weapon, but a “tuning fork” used to “sound out” idols.” Stephen Lydon, “Nietzsche’s Tuning Fork.”

[22]  Shakespeare knew of the problem: “GLANDOWER: I can call spirits from the vasty deep. HOTSPUR: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?” (Henry IV, Part 1, Act 3, Scene 1). Of course, if they do show up, what then? “Our rejected occult or esoteric tradition has long recognised this. ‘Don’t call up what you can’t put down’ is solid magical advice, and the overconfident protagonists of many occult horror tales have learned it to their dismay. Thoughts are things, very powerful ones, this tradition tells us, and it is prudent to be aware of their power.” Gary Lachman, Lost Knowledge of the Imagination (Edinburgh: Floris Books, 2017), p.146. Lachman references a concept close to the ethnic soul: “An egregore is a kind of group entity that is maintained by the belief, ritual, sacrifice, and imagination of its devotees. With enough of these, the egregore can take on a life of its own. See Joscelyn Godwin, The Golden Thread (Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 2007) pp. 47–54.”

[23] The following quotes are from “Reactionary Metaphysics V: The Ethnic Oversoul.”

[24] Compare: “As progress is made on this difficult path, and as the ego becomes conscious of the Selbst (that is, of the astral body, updating it, making it visible….” – Miguel Serrano, The Son of the Widower (S.l., Ediciones de Nueva Edad, 2003), pp.22-23.

[25] “[Sheldrake] appears a highly unlikely candidate for apostasy; he seems more like the Cambridge biochemistry don he once was, one of the brightest Darwinians of his generation, winner of the university botany prize, researcher at the Royal Society, Harvard scholar and fellow of Clare College.

“All that, though, was before he was cast out into the wilderness. Sheldrake’s untouchable status was conferred one morning in 1981 when, a couple of months after the publication of his first book, A New Science of Life, he woke up to read an editorial in the journal Nature, which announced to all right-thinking men and women that his was a ‘book for burning’ and that Sheldrake was to be ‘condemned in exactly the language that the pope used to condemn Galileo, and for the same reason. It is heresy.’” Read more here. Faced with similar intolerance, Yockey published Imperium under a pseudonym, and his second book, The Enemy of Europe, was burned by West Germany’s liberal democratic regime (a scholarly edition of the surviving German translation and a retro-translation into English appeared from Counter-Currents last  year).

[26] Yockey might also have found this of interest: “But let’s put Sheldrake aside for now and consider another interesting experiment that was run in the 20th century on groups of German patients suffering from clinical depression. A group of psychiatrists came up with a treatment that came to be known as Constellation Therapy and which was based on Zulu mystical ancestor worship practices. The practice, in a nutshell, is about reconnecting people to their ancestors. Many Germans were in denial about members of their family having being Nazis and felt a deep sense of shame about their grand-pappy forcing Jews to be eaten by electric bears and masturbated to death by Himmler’s patented “rub and tug” machines during WWII. This led to feelings of depression that were only alleviated when they were coaxed into acknowledging the existence of their deceased family members and coming to terms with them and their past. The developers of Constellation Therapy have an impressive track record of treating what they call “inherited intergenerational trauma”, which they claim is passed along through the generations, somehow.”

[27] Again, aren’t the Marxists supposed to be the materialists?

[28] Skywalker, loc. cit.

[29] Compare: “Ellegaard Ellerbek, [Guido von] List’s ardent war-time admirer, embarked on a vigorous anti-Republican campaign … to vilify the Allies, denounce materialism, and to elevate the Germans to the status of god-men. His Versailler Visionen [1919] described the subtle aura suspended over each of the European nations as a function of their spiritual character and concluded with an ‘occult-armanistic’ exhortation to his countrymen: ‘Do you know that you are gods?’” Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke,  The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology, (Expanded with a new Preface) I.B. Tauris & Co., 2004; p134.

[30] Yockey, op. cit., pp7-8. My colleague, David Zsutty, Esq. of the Homeland Institute, has noted the rather Lovecraftian tone of this passage, both in its “cosmicism” as well as its suggestion of extraterrestrial spirits or “gods” coming down from the skies to influence mankind. Arkham House began publishing its omnibus volumes of Lovecraft’s writings in 1939, and it certainly would have been possible for Yockey, like thousands of others, to have read Lovecraft’s tales in their original “pulp” format. I explore the Lovecraftian tones of Evola and other Traditionalists in the title essay of my collection The Eldritch Evola . . . & Others: Traditionalist Meditations on Literature, Art, & Culture (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2014).

[31] “In order to gauge an individual’s potential in the Force, blood tests were used to estimate the number of midi-chlorians within the subject’s cells. Anakin Skywalker, the Chosen One, possessed the highest known count in galactic history—over twenty-thousand midi-chlorians—surpassing the potential of Grand Master Yoda and all Jedi.” – Starwars.fandom.com. Since midi-chlorians are in every cells, the more cells, the stronger you are; obviously the way to improve the Jedi Temple is to put on massive amounts of weight.

[32] Recall: “Hovering above Europe we can see what never before was so clearly visible—the presence of a purely spiritual organism. A close look reveals that the light stream is not flowing from the surface of Europe up-ward into the night sky, but downward from the hitherto invisible organism. This is a discovery of profound and revolutionary importance, which was only vouchsafed to us by reason of our complete detachment from terrestrial events in the outer void, where spirit is visible and matter visible, only by reason of the light from the spirit.”

[33] “What is this supraterrestrial phenomenon? Why does it hover over Europe in particular? What is the relationship between it and the human material under it?”

[34] I intended this as a bit of good-natured snark, before noticing that his website is indeed entitled “Bernardo Kastrup, Phd, Phd.” Given the level of not just disagreement but outright hatred directed as the views discussed here, one certainly needs all the academic armor you can lay your hands on. “Well, how did you become two doctors? It’s most unusual. I mean, did you take the exam twice, or…” Fawlty Towers, “The Psychiatrist” (S2E2).

[35] Science Ideated, Chapter 24.

[36] Recall: “the light stream is not flowing from the surface of Europe up-ward into the night sky, but downward from the hitherto invisible organism.”

[37] Ibid, p166, emphasis by Kastrup. “Laughlin and Pine’s point is that, each time we add a particle to the system we are trying to model, its complexity grows exponentially. And exponential growth—such as in Ponzi schemes and nuclear chain reactions, to mention two radically different examples—becomes unmanageable very quickly. It is thus effectively impossible to use the Theory of Everything to model relevant, real-life systems.”

[38] Cf. “Since science cannot explain the consciousness that created it, when it has finished explaining everything, it will in fact have explained nothing.” The Authentic Reactionary: Selected Scholia of Nicolás Gómez Dávila; translated with commentary by Ramon Elani (North Augusta, S. C.: Arcana Europa Media, 2023). Also: “In our vital need … science has nothing to say to us. It excludes in principle precisely the question which man, given over in our unhappy times to the most portentous upheavals, finds the most burning: questions about the meaning or meaninglessness of this whole human existence. Do not these questions, universal and necessary for all men, demand universal reflections and answers based on rational insight? In the final analysis they concern man as a free, self-determining being in his behaviour toward the human and extrahuman surrounding world and free in regard to his capacities for rationally shaping himself himself and his surrounding world.” ―Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.

[39] Ibid, p167.

[40] Ibid, p168.

[41] Ibid, p169.

[42] Ibid, p169; quoting The World as Will and Representation, transl. by E. F. J. Payne (Indian Hills, Colorado: The Falcon’s Wing, 1958), p145, with my emphasis; see also Kastrup, Decoding Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics: The Key to Understanding How It Solves the Hard Problem of Consciousness and the Paradoxes of Quantum Mechanics (Winchester, Iff Books, 2020), pp.68-69.

[43] Loc. cit. One might also adduce the example of Swedenborg’s notion of Divine Influx. For more on both, see Josephson-Storm, op. cit.

[44] See also Kastrup, Decoding Jung’s Metaphysics: The archetypal semantics of an experiential universe (Winchester, UK: Iff Books, 2021), Chapter 4. See also the video by Welt Geist, “Why Quantum Physicists Love Schopenhauer.”

[45] Loc. cit.

[46] As Yockey likes to say, “Readers in 2050 may find it hard to believe that….”

[47] “Nosce Te Ipsum,” Sec. 14, Note 3.  These instructions, dating from the 12^th century founding of the Templars, were revived by Lanz von Liebenfels’ Order of New Templars. See Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, Ostara and the New Templars; translated by George Klanderud. GermanenOrden Series, vol. 4 (The 55 Club, 2019), p42, and  my review, “Beast Men & BLM: Lanz von Liebenfels’ Prophetic Visions,” where I note his many rather New Age ideas, including – in his last essay, 1950’s “Coincidence or Destiny,” his foreshadowing of Jung’s notion of synchronicity. In his Introduction, the editor notes that this theorist of the ”Empire of the Blonds” freely quotes from the Talmud, and “had praise for his friend, Philipp Stauff, who was a dark-haired, round-headed man. One must use common sense when reading Lanz” since racial affinity is not predictable based on genes! (ibid, pp22-23).

[48] That is to say, Christianity: “There is no metaphysical explanation for race provided to us by Christianity. Any differences between a Frenchman and a Chinese person, for example, are the result of a kind of optical illusion created by Satan. Once the Chinese person is baptized and takes Holy Communion, he is the same as the French man. Of course, in the past, the Church was able to admit that biological differences between the two groups existed, but they insisted that this difference was only material and had no metaphysical implications. When pushed to explain why, then, if we were all the same on a soul level, we would look and act so differently on a material level, the only explanation proffered by the Church came in the form of crosses, bonfires and dungeons, naturally.” For all their anti- or post-Christianity, the gene-only dogmatists agree; one Oversoul or no Oversoul have the same implications. It may also be interesting in this context to recall that the “tabula rasa” that materialistic conservatives oppose with their conservative side, is rooted in the materialistic views of John Locke.

[49] “Public opinion will not long endure a theory which does not work in practice. Today, probably more than ever before, man demands proof of the truth of even his highest ideal. For ultimate satisfaction man must find a principle which is for him a way of life, a principle which he can experience as true.” Neville Goddard, Freedom for All, Foreword. “Were it possible to carry conviction to another by means of reasoned arguments and detailed instances, this book would be many times its size. It is seldom possible, however, to do so by means of written statements or arguments since to the suspended judgment it always seems plausible to say that the author was dishonest or deluded and, therefore, his evidence was tainted. Consequently, I have purposely omitted all arguments and testimonials, and simply challenge the open-minded reader to practice the law of consciousness as revealed in this book. Personal success will prove far more convincing than all the books that could be written on the subject.” Feeling is the Secret, Foreword. “Science progresses by way of hypotheses tentatively tested and afterwards accepted or rejected according to the facts of experience. The claim that imagining creates reality needs no more consideration than is allowed by science. It proves itself in performance.” The Law and the Promise, “Imagination Creates Reality.”

[50] “Reactionary Metaphysics V: The Ethnic Oversoul.”

[51] Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, Theozoology, ibid.