A little pill for your electile disfunction
Left, Right, Neocon, Neoliberal: A Field Guide to Political Swindles
“The Gurdjieff Work has nothing to do with politics!”
This is something you’ll hear from time to time, usually from individuals who have never actually read what Mr. Gurdjieff said and wrote on the subject or, if they have read the material, they have performed such a remarkable feat of mechanical eisegesis that none of the ideas have managed to penetrate or remain.
Gurdjieff had an entirely different view:
“A collective existence is only possible through one system: that of Mr. Ashiata Shiemash. Right now, our only concern is the development of candidates to become future followers of Ashiata Shiemash. Later on, we will choose among them. Do you understand?” - GI Gurdjieff, Paris Meetings 1944
For Mr. Gurdjieff, the Work is essentially political - just not in the way you’ve been conditioned to think about politics.
Here, and elsewhere, he says that “our only concern” is the development of candidates to assist the work of Ashiata Shiemash, chronicled in Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, to normalize the “abnormal being conditions” on planet Earth by instituting a new social order, centered on the authority and influence of a circle of initiates.
Gurdjieff devotes four whole chapters to recounting the work of Ashiata Shiemash - much more than I can summarize here. (I invite you to do something no one at the self-styled Gurdjieff Foundation will do: read and consider the narrative for yourself, beginning in Chapter 25, and concluding with Chapter 28.)
But Gurdjieff’s concern with normalizing the “abnormal being conditions” isn’t limited to these chapters - it’s mentioned dozens of times throughout this book, the Paris Meetings, and elsewhere.
What do we mean by abnormal being conditions? You already have a pretty good idea of what they are. Look out the window or briefly check out tonight’s headlines: the threat of World War III, genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, bands of feral criminals terrorizing our cities, the deliberate destruction of the family, skyrocketing suicides and fentanyl deaths, and the U.S. government spending billions of dollars to maintain 800 overseas military bases in more than 70 countries while millions of its citizens go without housing and health care, are just a few examples of what we mean. You deal with the abnormal conditions every day - at school, work, home, church, and the grocery store.
The concern with these conditions, and a possible remedy, is one of the main themes of Mr. Gurdjieff’s work. Still, it is conspicuously absent from most contemporary discussions among those who claim to be carrying on his legacy.
We’ll return to the mission of Ashiata Shiemash, and a possible explanation for this absence, later, but first we need to survey the contemporary political landscape, especially in the current year, when the hysteria surrounding the ‘election’ is once again reaching alarming levels.
Let’s begin by unpacking a few of the key terms, or symptoms, of the current political disorder:
Ashiata Shiemash: Civilization and its discontents
Those who manage acceptable political discourse - the media, academia, politicians - frequently use ‘left’ and ‘right’ to describe current political disputes. Because their goal is to confuse, not to clarify, they don’t ever define these terms. So let’s unpack what we might mean by Left and Right from the point of view of the Gurdjieff Work.
To look at these forces it might be useful to get a sense of what Mr. Gurdjieff sees as the purpose and function of a normal civilization:
Here, for the correct valuation of your contemporary favorites it will be apropos to remind you that after the action of the organ Kundabuffer had been destroyed in the three-brained beings of your planet, the first generations very soon learned that a certain cosmic substance had to be transformed through them and that their assistance in this transformation was one of their chief being-duties.
“Do you remember, I have told you that the beings of the continent Atlantis even considered this being-duty of theirs as sacred and called it ‘Amarloos,’ which in their language means ‘Help-to-the-Moon.’
“The three-brained beings of the continent Atlantis of that period, namely, the period then called the ‘Samliosian civilization,’ even devised and very strictly practiced certain customs that greatly contributed to the fulfillment of those being-duties as productively as possible.
“The beings of the continent Atlantis even very wisely and expediently devised the fulfillment of these two being-duties—namely, the duty of the perfecting of their higher bodies and the duty of serving the Most Great cosmic-Trogoautoegocrat—by uniting them into one and performing them simultaneously.”
For those of you who aren’t familiar with Mr. Gurdjieff’s language and cosmology, what we see here is that man has an individual and collective duty to transform a ‘certain cosmic substance’ and to develop ‘higher bodies.’
The transformation of substances is part of a great chain of reciprocal maintenance that extends to The Most Holy Sun Absolute, the abode of His Endlessness. This process, according to Gurdjieff, was the motivation for the creation of the Megalacosmos and nurturing participation in this reciprocal activity is the proper aim of civilization. It is the purpose of life on Earth.
This isn’t a new idea. It just seems strange because of decades of propaganda about “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” being the highest good and only reasonable and moral aim, an idea that isn’t self-evident and would have been met with contempt in every ancient culture.
For Vedic culture, the driving organizing principle was called Rta (ऋत), indicating the natural cosmic order and the set of organic relationships between the various parts of this order. This gave rise to the idea of dharma, the practices and laws that uphold Rta, including various sacrificial rites that are seen as essential for maintaining cosmic harmony. Civilization didn’t exist for itself, or for the pleasure of individuals, but as a node in a complex relationship of reciprocal maintenance and sacrifice, made possible by what Gurdjieff called “conscious labor and intentional suffering.”
In Egypt, this same principle was known as Ma’at, and personified as the goddess of harmony, cosmic law, and morality. In the afterlife, the individual would be judged in a process known as the “weighing of the heart” by Ma’at, overseen by the god Anubis. What was being measured here was conformity to this divine order, not whether an individual had “followed their bliss.”
Similar ideas are found in Sumeria, China, and many other ancient civilizations, because this connection to cosmic harmony and the responsibilities is civilization. Anything else is a degeneration, or in the case of contemporary regimes, a complete inversion.
Mr. Gurdjieff relates that there was a general and steady falling away from this order, due to men’s failure to engage in the necessary inner work, what he calls Conscious Labor and Intentional Suffering. As they refused to continue in this sacrificial work, their lack of development led to the continued growth of what Gurdjieff called the ‘crystalized consequences,’ including vanity, self-love, pride, egoism, self-conceit, suggestibility, and credulity, among others.
As these crystalized consequences metastasized, they contributed to the worsening of the abnormal being conditions - the social ills that are a collective result of these inner consequences. These abnormal conditions in turn exacerbated and reinforced these crystalized consequences, and man was on a downward spiral.
According to Mr. Gurdjieff’s Tales, this downward spiral was temporarily and regionally arrested by the work of Ashiata Shiemash, a ‘messenger from above,” who established a new order that began to take hold and reverse the de-evolutionary process.
This reversal began with a core of initiates under the instruction of Ashiata Shiemash who in turn instructed others, building a critical mass that began to exert an objective influence on the culture. This coincided with the development of what Mr. Gurdjieff called “Great Initiates”:
…then the Very Saintly Ashiata Shiemash himself selected from among those who had become All-the-rights-possessing brothers of the brotherhood, those who had already sensed the said Divine impulse, consciously by their Reason and unconsciously by the feelings in their subconsciousness, and who had full confidence that by certain self-efforts this Divine being-impulse might become and forever remain an inseparable part of their ordinary consciousness. And those who had sensed and become aware of this Divine conscience, and who were called ‘first-degree-initiates,’ he set apart, and he began to enlighten their Reason separately concerning these ‘objective truths,’ which before that time were still quite unknown to the three-brained beings.
These Great Initiates could consciously participate in reciprocal maintenance and thus fulfill the purpose of life on Earth and a legitimate civilization.
Along with the development of these Great Initiates, the influence of the labors of Ashiata Shiemash began the process of decrystallizing the maleficient consequences and the abnormal conditions:
“The total result, however, of everything I have mentioned, was that within ten terrestrial years there had disappeared of their own accord those two chief forms of ordinary being-existence abnormally established there, from which there chiefly flow and still continue to flow, most of the maleficent causes the totality of which engenders all kinds of trifling factors which prevent the establishment of conditions there for at least a normal outer being-existence for these unfortunate favorites of yours.
“And namely, firstly their division into numerous communities with various forms of organization for external and even internal existence, or as they themselves express it, ‘state-organizations,’ ceased to exist, and secondly in these said numerous communities there also disappeared equally, of their own accord, those various what are called ‘castes’ or ‘classes’ which had long before been established there.
“And in my opinion, as you also will surely understand eventually, it was precisely this second of the two mentioned chief abnormally established forms of ordinary being-existence, namely, the assigning of each other to different classes or castes that had specially become there the basis for the gradual crystallization in the common presences of these unfortunate favorites of yours, of that particular psychic property which, in the whole of the Universe, is inherent exclusively only in the presences of those three-brained beings.
“This exclusively particular property was formed in them soon after the second Transapalnian perturbation there, and, gradually undergoing development and becoming strengthened in them, was passed from generation to generation by heredity, until it has now already passed to the contemporary beings as a certain lawful and inseparable part of their general psyche, and this particular property of their psyche is called by themselves ‘egoism.’
As the work of Ashiata Shiemash began to spread, the cultural and political structures established by the people Mr. Gurdjieff calls “power-possessing beings”, which were established to allow them to benefit from the labor of others, began to disappear, and a normal order, based on objective spiritual attainments, began to emerge.
In Beelzebub’s Tales, power-possessing beings is a term used by Mr. Gurdjieff to describe those who take power intending to exploit the labor of others. Instead of an elite distinguished by objective spiritual merit and an obligation of service, the power-possessing beings are driven by the lust for power alone.
According to the Tales, these power-possessing beings are assisted by a class of malformed intellectuals that Gurdjieff calls “learned beings of new formation.” These are not sages or true intellectuals, but merely clever men who lack the ability or inclination for inner work that could develop objective reason. Lacking any higher motivation, they easily ally themselves with power-possessing beings in return for patronage and status.
The organization developed by Ashiata Shiemash was effectively dismantling the order set up by the power-possessing beings and their pet learned beings of new formation. The corrupt rule of self-serving and degenerate elites was in the process of being replaced by a legitimate elite, distinguished by spiritual accomplishment and an orientation towards the proper functioning of a harmonious social order.
The Revolution
One of these aspiring power-possessing beings, named Lentrohamsanin, would become the instigator of the revolution to return these elites to power and destroy the organization established by Ashiata Shiemash.
Mr. Gurdjieff tells us:
“When this later great learned being there reached the age of a responsible being, and although he had indeed a great deal of information or, as it is called there, ‘knowledge,’ nevertheless, he had absolutely no Being in regard to this information or knowledge which he had acquired.
“Well, when the said Mama’s-and-Papa’s-darling became a learned being there of new formation, then because on the one hand there was no Being whatsoever in his presence, and on the other hand because there had already by this time been thoroughly crystallized in him those consequences of the properties of the organ Kundabuffer which exist there under the names of ‘vanity,’ ‘self-love,’ ‘swagger,’ and so forth, the ambition arose in him to become a famous learned being not only among the beings of Nievia, but also over the whole of the surface of their planet.
“So, with all his presence he dreamed and ruminated how he could attain this.”
The ambitious Lentrohamsanin, who Gurdjieff describes as a Hasnamuss (something like a psychopath), decided to make his mark by writing a manifesto to challenge the organization of Ashiata Shiemash, to serve as a rallying cry for the displaced elites to mobilize for its destruction.
I’ve included the entire text of his manifesto, which he called a Kashireitleer, below to make clear the common themes that mark nearly all revolutionary movements:
Man’s greatest happiness consists in not being dependent on any other personality whatsoever, and in being free from the influence of any other person, whoever he may be!
Undeniably, life under the present state-organization is now far better for us than it used to be before; but where then is that real freedom of ours upon which our happiness must depend?
Don’t we work and labor as much now as during all other former state-organizations?
Haven’t we to labor and sweat to get the barley indispensable to us to live and not to starve to death like chained dogs?
Our chiefs, guides, and counselors are always telling us about some other sort of world, supposedly so much better than here among us on the Earth, and where life is in every respect beatific for the souls of those men who have lived worthily here on the Earth.
Don’t we live here now “worthily”?
Don’t we always labor and sweat for our daily bread?
If all that our chiefs and counselors tell us is true and their own way of living here on the Earth really corresponds to what is required of their souls for the other world, then of course God ought, and even must, in this world also, give more possibilities to them than to us ordinary mortals.
If all that our chiefs and counselors tell and try to make us believe is really true, let them prove it to us, ordinary mortals, by facts.
Let them prove it to us, for instance, that they can at least change a pinch of the common sand, in which, thanks to our sweat, our daily bread arises, into bread.
If our present chiefs and counselors do this, then I myself will be the first to run and kneel and kiss their feet.
But meanwhile, as this is not so, we ourselves must struggle and we ourselves must strive hard for our real happiness and for our real freedom and also to free ourselves from the need of having to sweat.
It is true that for eight months of the year we now have no trouble in obtaining our daily bread; but then, how we must labor those four summer months and exhaust ourselves getting the barley we need!
Only he who sows and mows that barley knows the hard labor required.
True, for eight months we are free, but only from physical labors, and for this, our consciousness, namely, our dearest and highest part, must remain day and night in slavery to these illusory ideas which are always being dinned into us by our chiefs and counselors.
No, enough! We ourselves, without our present chiefs and counselors who have become such without our consent, must strive for our real freedom and our real happiness.
And we can only obtain real freedom and real happiness if we all act as one, that is to say, all for one and one for all. But for this, we must first destroy all that is old.
And we must do so to make room for the new life we shall ourselves create that will give us real freedom and real happiness.
Down with dependence on others!
We ourselves will be masters of our own circumstances and no longer they, who rule our lives and do so without our knowledge and without our consent.
Our lives must be governed and guided by those whom we ourselves shall elect from our midst, that is by men only from amongst those who themselves struggle for our daily barley.
And we must elect these governors and counselors on the basis of equal rights, without distinction of sex or age, by universal, direct, equal, and open ballot.
Here we see the key elements of subsequent revolutions: the incitement of class hatred and resentment, atheism, and the demand for ‘democracy’ and universal suffrage.
Despite never having worked a day in his life, Letrohamsanin complains about having to labor under the yoke of oppression. This is typical - revolutionary leaders rarely emerge from the working class: Lenin came from an upper-middle-class family, Castro was a lawyer from a wealthy family, Che was a doctor from an upper-class Argentinian family, and Karl Marx was the son of a prosperous attorney. Revolutionaries don’t come from the working class; they live lives of privilege and leisure, arousing discontent to seize power to indulge their ambition, greed, and depravity.
However, there’s something more important than mere policy in the Manifesto; it’s a call to re-orient the entire direction of a civilization. It begins with “Man’s greatest happiness consists in not being dependent on any other personality whatsoever, and in being free from the influence of any other person, whoever he may be!’” and concludes with “Down with dependence on others!”
This is the core of the revolutionary impulse: a rejection of what Mr. Gurdjieff calls the Trogoautoegocrat, a chain of reciprocal maintenance. Because he wishes to be free to indulge his greed and lust, the revolutionary leader rejects any obligation - to family, to society at large, or to any higher purpose. Above all, the Revolution is a rejection of Genuine Being Duty in favor of “the pursuit of happiness.”
Following the publication of the Kashireitleer, the call was taken up by the unemployed learned beings of new formation. In the revolution that followed, Ashiata Shiemash’s work was largely undone, and the abnormal conditions returned. (Read the full story of the Revolution here).
Left and Right
Despite the destruction of the order established by Ashiata Shiemash, old ideas about civilization survived, in diminished form, until fairly recently.
Looking at the great cathedrals of Europe, for instance, we can see signs of a culture that acted harmoniously towards a higher aim. These cathedrals were often generational projects because it was widely understood that service to the Divine order was the essential function of a civilization.
The same forces who mobilized against the reforms of Ashiata Shiemash once again rose to dismantle this order and seize power for themselves. And it is here that we find the origin of the terms “Left” and “Right.”
In France, those who were opposed to the old order sat on the left side, recalling the Gospel of St. Matthew account of the judgment of Christ, where the damned are placed on the left, and the righteous on the right.
Thomas Carlyle, in his history of the French Revolution, describes the scene:
“…if we glance into that Assembly Hall of theirs, it will be found, as is natural, ‘most irregular.’ As many as ‘a hundred members are on their feet at once;’ no rule in making motions, or only commencements of a rule; Spectators’ Gallery allowed to applaud, and even to hiss… Nevertheless, as in all human Assemblages, like does begin arranging itself to like… Rudiments of Methods disclose themselves; rudiments of Parties. There is a Right Side (Cote Droit), a Left Side (Cote Gauche); sitting on M. le President’s right hand, or on his left: the Cote Droit conservative; the Cote Gauche destructive.”
However, the symbolic meaning of left and right predates the French Revolution. The word ‘right‘ can be traced to the Proto-Indo-European word *reg from which we get words like ‘regular’, ‘straight’, ‘correct’, ‘royal’ and ‘rule’.
In many cultures, people use the left hand to perform tasks that include contact with dirt and excrement. Across the Middle East, and in many other parts of the world, touching food with the left hand is a cultural taboo.
Both literally and symbolically, ‘right’ embodies normality, law, cleanliness, reciprocal maintenance, and the natural order of things. The ‘left’ embodies the opposite - abnormality, disorder, rebellion, and excrement.
So it’s understandable that those who were committed to the destruction of the old order would sit on the left. It was the perfect reflection of their inner state and intentions.
The Revolution these Leftists carried out swept away the old order and killed thousands, including a genocide in the Vendee, where thousands of faithful Catholics men, women, and children were brutally murdered.
This massacre would find its echo in subsequent Left revolutons: in 1930’s Russia, where tens of millions of Christians were murdered by the Bolsheviks; in Spain, where the revolutionaries killed thousands of Catholic clergy, monks, nuns, and faithful during the Spanish Civil War; in 1970s Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge killed an estimated 2.8 million; and the Cultural Revolution in China, where the Red Guards fought to destroy the ‘Four Olds’ (old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits - what Mr. Gurdjieff would call ‘good being habits’), destroying temples and shrines and killing at least a million people, including a massacre in Guangxi that featured acts of cannibalism.
The revolution, a movement of ‘power-possessing beings’ and their cadre of learned beings of new formation, targets any remnants of the old order, including religious institutions, families, traditional gender roles, and education, to eliminate any impediment to their absolute control.
“Thus the expected discontent grew thereupon from day to day, until one day, not long after, there occurred just that which has ever since been definitely proper to be present in the presence of the three-brained beings there of all ensuing periods, and that is, to produce from time to time the process which they themselves nowadays call ‘revolution.’
“And during their revolution of that time, as it has also become proper there to these three-brained phenomena of our Great Universe, they destroyed a great deal of the property which they had accumulated during centuries, much of what is called the ‘knowledge’ which they had attained during centuries also was destroyed and lost forever, and the existence of those other beings similar to themselves who had already chanced upon the means of freeing themselves from the consequences of the properties of the organ Kundabuffer were also destroyed.”
-GI Gurdjieff, All & Everything
U.S. Politics: Liberal, Conservative, Neoliberal, Neoconservative
There is no ‘Right’ in American politics, even though the term is frequently misused to describe one of the factions that serve the current regime.
The entire U.S. political framework is entirely the child of the Left Revolution, and the forces described as ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ merely represent two different revolutionary impulses that have worked together to manage the regime.
Early in U.S. history, these factions were known as the Federalists, who were sympathetic to the Whigs and the English Revolution, and the more radical Democratic-Republicans, led by Thomas Jefferson, who were sympathetic to the French revolutionaries.
In the current political scheme, the Whig forces are called conservatives, generally found in the Republican Party, and the radicals are called liberals, generally found in the Democratic Party.
Liberalism represents the economic and social elites centered in the major coastal cities like New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Their goal, like all revolutionaries, is the concentration of power and elimination of old being habits and any other impediment to their rule. But they have three challenges: 1) they don’t have sufficient numbers to act; 2) they despise the majority of their own citizens, particularly those who are most productive; and 3) a naked appeal to power is an unconvincing and unmarketable platform.
To address these challenges, the elites engage various client groups including racial and ethnic minorities, sexual deviants, and recent immigrants, allowing them to frame the drive for power as a struggle for liberation from oppression, real or imagined, just as Letrohamsanin stirred up resentment among working people against the order established by Ashieta Shiemash.
They use these clients as shock troops against their enemies - working people, largely located in the middle of the country (the elites call this area the ‘flyover states’). Small business owners, tradesmen, farmers, churchgoers, and people with traditional families all represent a potential nexus of resistance. This is why the elite politicians and media work consistently to demonize and marginalize them. President Obama mocked them as backward people who “cling to their guns and religion.” Hillary Clinton labeled them “deplorables.” If you listen to elite media, you may be convinced that every person living in the center of the country is secretly wearing a Nazi uniform underneath their Klan robes. The Biden Administration labeled parents who were concerned about LGBTQMAP and gender reassignment evangelism in public schools as “domestic terrorists.”
Mr. Gurdjieff calls this “the principle of the action of which was called ‘Ksvaznell’ or ‘inciting one against the other,” noting that this is a tactic used everywhere by power-possessing beings to secure their positions.
Despite their contempt for the productive classes, the elites cannot eliminate them. These oligarchs and their clients aren't capable of producing anything, and they are unwilling and mostly unqualified to serve in the military. Joseph Stalin liquidated the Kulaks and brought massive famine and economic ruin to the USSR. If the regime eliminated those it calls ‘deplorables,’ the economy would grind to a halt; nothing would be produced, there would be no one to repair things, the supply chain would collapse because no one could drive the trucks, and no food would be grown.
So the power-possessing beings have a dilemma: on one hand, they hate the “chumps”, but can’t function without them. So they need to manage them. This is where the ‘conservatives’ come in.
The conservatives act as a restraining factor, making sure that any dissent is channeled into pointless political campaigns that are inherently no threat to the oligarchy. By posing as opponents of the elites, the Republicans function as a controlled opposition.
Even those who are acting with some measure of sincerity don’t have any chance of challenging the power-possessing beings, because they are operating within the same flawed revolutionary framework.
So the public contest between the two parties serves to preserve, rather than challenge, the rule of the elites.
But the ‘conservatives’ play another important role:
Take Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), as an example. Anyone who has watched him for any time will easily conclude that his primary driving impulse is in baiting young men.
What I am referring to (of course) is his role as a cheerleader for the endless military conflicts necessary to prop up the corrupt oligarchy. This requires bodies, mostly young men, and ‘conservatives’ like Lindsey Graham are devoted to getting their hands on those young bodies, using appeals to duty and patriotism, alongside fear-mongering and propaganda. Historically, the backbone of the military has been from the middle of the country, and the pool of recruits needs to be heavily propagandized to convince them to enlist.
Conservatives misuse the normal instincts of duty, loyalty, and service, twisting them to convince young people to enlist to serve in the regimes’s endless wars. The oligarchs can’t make this pitch themselves; the conservatives do the work for them, convincing young people from the ‘flyover states’ to fight and die for a regime that hates them.
This makes it possible for the current regime to maintain 800 military bases in every corner of the globe, and rack up a body count unmatched by any in history.
This war propaganda is so effective, that in 2015, a poll found that 30 percent of Republicans would support bombing Agrabah, the fictional nation from the Disney movie "Aladdin.” (19% of Democrats were in favor)
Neoliberalism and Neoconservatism
While the American public is enthralled by the alleged contest between these two factions, they work together to facilitate the rule of the ‘power-possessing beings’, and at their core, they share an underlying ideology, described as neoliberalism and neoconservatism.
Neoliberalism has been the dominant economic policy in the U.S. since the late 70s. It isn’t a philosophy or economic school, like Keynesianism or the Austrian School. It is rather, a principle of organizing economic relations in such a way as to guarantee the transfer of wealth upwards, to fewer and fewer hands, using a variety of tactics, including so-called free trade, deregulation of certain industries, the privatization of public enterprises, and the elimination of economic safety nets.
The results of these policies have been catastrophic for working people. Even as GDP and productivity have increased, actual living standards have continued to decline consistently. In the 1970s, many families were able to afford a comfortable lifestyle on one income. But as high-paying jobs were relocated overseas and prices continue to rise, many are unable to survive on two incomes, and a record number of Americans are homeless. At the same time, CEO salaries have skyrocketed and hedge funds report record profits.
In her 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein claimed that everywhere neoliberalism has triumphed, ‘between 25 and 60 percent of the population’ had been turned into a ‘permanent underclass’.
This isn’t an accident - this is the purpose of Neoliberalism.
Neoconservatism is the enforcement wing of Neoliberalism. Neoconservatism emerged in the 1970s, articulated by men like Irving Kristol, a former Trotskyist, and Norman Podhoretz, who was one of the original signatories of the "Statement of Principles" of the Project for the New American Century founded in 1997.
Neoconservatism, like neoliberalism, isn’t a philosophy; it’s a willingness to use force wherever necessary to preserve the economic dominance of the governing elites. The crowning achievement of the ascendency of neoconservatism was the U.S. invasion of Iraq, when politicians of both parties, in cooperation with corporate spokesmen in the media, knowingly promoted the false narrative of “weapons of mass destruction” to justify an intervention to preserve U.S. dominance in the oil-rich region. Over a million Iraqis died as a result, most of them civilians, in a criminal act that had active and enthusiastic support from politicians of both parties, including not just George Bush, but Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden as well.
The invasion of Iraq is only the most prominent action in a list that would also include Libya, Syria, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Haiti, and many others. Turn on the news tonight and you’ll see the neoconservative agenda in action; thousands of people, mostly poor civilians, died today as a result of this bipartisan ideology in action.
The two parties have different functions, but a shared purpose: to maintain the rule and maximize the profits of the ruling elite. As Mr. Gurdjieff said:
“It is the same thing, the same smell. It smells like a chicken’s ass. The expression does exist. When you buy a chicken, you always smell it in one place. Whether it;s old or young, there is one place you sniff: under the tail. That’s the way you tell if it is old or young, if it was killed five days, a week, or a month before. That is why you smell it there. All chickens smell the same in that place, but with different qualities. Old, one quality; young, another quality. But both are mixed with the smell of shit. It is the same with all your political parties; the smell is mixed with the smell of shit.”
- GI Gurdjieff, Paris Meetings 1944
Beyond Chickenshit Politics: Ashiata Shiemash
There’s no solution in voting for either faction. Choosing one group of criminal predators over another won’t make any positive impact; it only strengthens the regime and wastes time and energy better devoted to grown-up matters.
The masses, egged on by regime spokesmen in the corporate media, will once again be drawn into the hysteria surrounding the elections. That’s the function of elections. They absorb a tremendous amount of energy and maintain the illusion of ‘democracy.’
If you’re caught up in election hysteria, if you’re fervently devoted to one political party or the other, you’ve probably found this offensive. I sincerely apologize. This wasn’t written for you - you’re not in the Gurdjieff Work. Your center of gravity is in MSNBC or FOX News, not All & Everything. Move along. Go back to sleep. The Moon is hungry.
For those who take Mr. Gurdjieff seriously, we do have an alternative to the dumpster fire of American politics. As noted at the beginning of this post, he said:
“A collective existence is only possible through one system: that of Mr. Ashiata Shiemash. Right now, our only concern is the development of candidates to become future followers of Ashiata Shiemash.
- GI Gurdjieff, Paris Meetings 1944
This, not the criminal philosophies of the power-possessing beings, is our North Star, the purpose and aim of our individual and group work.
The re-establishment of the organization founded by Ashiata Shiemash begins with our own personal work. But unlike the various self-help and new age bastardization of the Gurdjieff Work, we don’t see these efforts as an end in themselves. The sole purpose of our individual work is to be able to assist in the renormalization of being conditions on planet Earth so that men can once again participate in the Most Great cosmic-Trogoautoegocrat.
If you’re interested, I would suggest beginning with the text Mr. Gurdjieff left as a complete and final expression of his ideas: All & Everything (available in Kindle, PDF and HTML format here).
If you’re interested in discussing these ideas at length, the Spritual Sun offers weekly discussions and personalized tutorials for qualified and sincere candidtates
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