Paisley Abbey gargoyles, Scottland. (Wikimedia Commons)

‘We’re Functioning In a World of Artifice’:

Will Solomon interviews Mitch Horowitz about parapsychology, skepticism, the death of materialism, and only way we’ll fix social media

Mitch Horowitz
26 min readSep 17, 2024

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A literary and social journal commissioned writer Will Solomon to conduct a q-and-a interview with me. As though heralding a point made in the piece — “we still live at a juncture where evidence for extraphysicality cannot be spoken of within most of mainstream letters” — the editors first ghosted the writer and then canceled his article, albeit with a kill fee — and without explanation. Will’s piece, provided in full here, highlights the uncertain place we occupy as the philosophy of materialism, which still dominates mainstream humanities, suffers intellectual demise without a new consensus-reality replacing it, a topic to which Will alludes in his introduction and which is further explored in my upcoming podcast, Extraordinary Evidence: ESP Is Real. — MH

We may live in a nominally secular, rational, and materialist age but reality seems to be straining under the weight of its accumulated contradictions. From rising religious fundamentalisms worldwide to the mainstreaming of conspiracy theory to the now-naturalized surrealism of Trumpism, we’re clearly experiencing something of a collective crack-up.

Mitch Horowitz is a PEN award–winning author, lecturer, television host, podcaster, and historian of the occult and alternative spiritual movements. His recent writing has covered some of the more extraordinary dimensions of the shifting parameters of consensus reality, including New Thought and mind metaphysics, the evidence for psi phenomena, the significance of UFO experiences, and the history of contemporary occult movements. The author of many books, including Modern Occultism, Occult America, and The Miracle Club, his writing spans history, personal essay, criticism, self-help, and much more.

In the following interview, which is slightly edited, Horowitz and I talked about breakdown in the contemporary world and consensus reality, the fundamental flaws of philosophical materialism, practical spirituality, and how to navigate with personal integrity in a degraded landscape. Will Solomon

Mitch at NYC’s Masonic Hall in 2024.

You made a comment in a recent episode of the Rendering Unconscious podcast: referencing the concept of the “long nineteenth century,” you suggested we’re experiencing something similar in the present, saying that “the twentieth century is ending…we are really seeing the commencement of the twenty-first century right now.” We in the West seem to be collectively living through an extended crack-up of the world we’re accustomed to — the postwar political-economic order, relative ecological stability, and a sort of consensus psychological reality that’s governed the world for many decades. How do you see the twenty-first century beginning right now?

The one thing that everybody seems to agree upon at this moment is that all of us as individuals feel as though we’re functioning within a world of artifice. For some people within the tech world that amounts to the simulacrum argument, which isn’t really what I’m driving at. I’m more interested in how this view expresses itself in broad-based pop culture. The Barbie movie, for example: it was popular in the U.S., it played in China, it played in Saudi Arabia. Obviously three countries with very different cultures and outlooks and yet everyone seemed to get it.

There are of course the golden oldies like The Matrix and The Truman Show, and everyone seemed to get those as well. I’m really struck by the manner in which people seem to feel that we’re surrounded by artifice.

Now, on the rightwing that often takes the form of conspiracies like election denialism. On the left maybe it’s more of an ennui or a kind of existential uncertainty about what it even means for there to be a left at this cultural moment in history, when leftism was for so many years steeped in economics, and that’s not really the case anymore.

I think we all feel a fraying of familiarity and an uncertainty as to what we belong to, what we’re supposed to call ourselves, but the one thing on which everyone agrees is that we seem walled in by some sort of artifice.

All of modernist philosophy sought to determine antecedents. For Marx it was economics, for Freud it was trauma, for Einstein space-time, for Louis Pasteur germs, for William James self-image. There were these unseen qualities of life, existing out of sight but no less impactful.

We’re dealing, I think, with a new search for antecedents, unseen antecedents, because we feel like the old story no longer holds up, and doesn’t explain the daily lives that we’re going through.

A theme in much of your recent writing is challenging or offering an alternative to philosophical materialism, the theory by which, you write in last year’s Modern Occultism, “Western life has organized itself for nearly 300 years. Philosophical materialism holds that matter creates itself, and that your mind is strictly an epiphenomenon of your brain.” You call this philosophy “obsolete.” Explain what you mean.

It no longer covers that bases of life as we’ve come to understand it. A field like neuroplasticity alone — not a controversial field, which is why it actually functions as a good example: no one disputes its data — has shown through brain scans that sustained thoughts, whatever a thought actually may be, have an impact on and alter the neural pathways through which electrical impulses travel in the brain. It’s actual mind over matter on a biological level. And a natural law, in order to be a law, must be consistent, even though that consistency can get interrupted and conditioned by all kinds of outside factors.

Within the field of neuroplasticity itself, we see something which is ethereally referenced — a thought — having physical impact. We speak of the development of AI, a term that I suspect is getting so overused we’re all going to stop referencing it within a couple of years — like synergy in the corporate world: when everyone realized it was all a bunch of bullshit, the term fell into disuse. People, I think, are going to grow to hate AI and feel that they are beset and troubled by it. Nobody wants to talk to an AI chatbot online. I want a real human to deny the healthcare benefits I paid for, not a machine.

We’re using a term, AI, at present, but we haven’t even defined what intelligence is. And as far as I’m concerned, any reasonable survey of psychical or ESP (extrasensory perception) research, say over the past ninety years — although we still live at a juncture where evidence for extraphysicality cannot be spoken of within most of mainstream letters — will demonstrate replicable, bulletproof, juried, and impeccable lab-based research that shows the anomalous transfer of information through no known psychological or sensory apparatus.

There’s only so much longer, I would say, that academic and journalistic precincts can ignore that, dismiss it, or roll their eyes at it. I think probably they can do it for about another generation, but the data just keeps mounting and keeps mounting and it reaches a point where you’ve painted yourself into a position of absurdity.

We have an inability to understand quantum data without theories that point, almost as a logical imperative, to existence of other dimensions of time, other intersections of time, [such as] the multidimensional model, something that string theory developed conceptually to address. We as a civilization are going to have to tolerate more and more in the way of natural laws possibly contradicting one another.

It’s often said that relativity and quantum physics do not meet, that they both empirically exist insofar as we’re capable of information gathering, but there’s no grand design that unifies them. We’re going to have to get very comfortable with that, because I think that the question of nonlocal intelligence is continually building as an imperative, and the question of the psyche’s capacity to receive or solicit information in some manner that we don’t understand, possibly from other intersections of time, other dimensions, might become a theoretical model that gets applied both to the UFO thesis and to some of the remarkable data that continues to emerge from parapsychology.

But even if one were to take all the controversial examples off the table and just stick with the peas and carrots of neuroplasticity, quantum mechanics, and probably the most ambitious reaches of mind-body medicine, a conundrum would exist that cannot be explained by materialism.

So while materialism has succeeded culturally, it has at this juncture failed intellectually. And I’m of course talking about that strict, physicalist materialism, which holds that the basic building blocks of life — the table of chemical elements and the basic molecular verities that we’ve arrived at — are the only building blocks that exist to explain the structure of life. That view does not hold up. That’s a view that I think is eventually going to go the way of whale-hunting. You know, various things seemed so vital a part of nineteenth-century life, we couldn’t imagine a horizon beyond them, but I think we’ve hit that horizon.

I’m struck by this paradox in which strict scientific materialism is the implicit law of the land, even as much of our most advanced science — as you say, fields like quantum mechanics and neuroplasticity — undercuts its underlying prejudices. As does, like you mentioned, and despite what people may’ve heard, ESP research. In Modern Occultism you write: “We possess heavily scrutinized, replicable statistical evidence for an extraphysical component of the human psyche… 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.” Can you talk about the history of parapsychological research, particularly the Rhine and Honorton experiments?

Parapsychology as a science goes back to the late nineteenth century, but it really found its legs here in the U.S. in the early 1930s at the Parapsychology Lab at Duke University, which was opened by J.B. and Louisa Rhine. J.B. and Louisa’s determination was simply that, if there is some kind of extraphysicality to the human story, let’s look for it in the most conservative way possible. They weren’t discounting mediumship or ghosts or after-death survival or anything of that nature, but they were asking themselves whether the psyche possesses some sort of existence outside the known physical one — and can it be tracked?

They devised statistical models that were impeccable — so much so, in fact, that a lot of people who study the history of science don’t realize this, but it was J.B. Rhine and his lab partners themselves who established the practice of meta-analysis. People refer to meta-analysis all the time now as a tool to confirm or discredit statistical findings. All you’re really doing is marrying together the whole wide range of related experiments and applying them to a statistical test — that, it must be admitted, does have within it some subjectivity, but it is a proven tool for pooling and evaluating data.

J.B. was really a pioneer in that. J.B. and his lab were pioneers in eradicating what is called the “file-drawer problem,” which is when researchers tuck away research that they don’t like and only show us the “good stuff.” And the good stuff, of course, always favors their thesis. It’s a very big problem, so self-evidently flawed it’s hard to believe that modern American science once permitted such practices.

J.B.’s lab — contrary, it must be said, in all bluntness, to lies that were told about J.B. by the recently deceased pseudo-skeptic James Randi — called out and discontinued the practice of reporting selective results, and required that everybody working under the lab’s auspices report every single set that they had tested for.

His basic experiments were done using a five-suit deck of cards called Zener cards. If you ask individuals to guess randomly at which cards are being laid down, you are, after a time, going to get a hit rate that just reflects [random] guessing. Rhine found that there were some individuals for whom that hit rate was consistently and repeatedly, across tens of thousands of trials, with every conceivable safeguard made against corruption or statistical pollution, several percentage points above chance. It’s literally impossible based on the physical interpretation of our world, but there it is.

The Rhine experiments number in the millions of trials, and have been parsed and debated and scrutinized for decades. And again and again and again, they come up bulletproof.

You’ll read all these mealy-mouthed statements on Wikipedia and other reference works about how J.B.’s work has been discredited. Such things are either not referenced or they’re referenced back to a single source, which is a publishing company called Prometheus, nowadays a lot smaller than it used to be, that issues a vast number of tracts and pamphlets and books by people who are partisan skeptics, deeply opposed to even the existence of a parapsychology lab on college campuses.

And again, the skeptics have won culturally. There are very few ESP labs nowadays on college campuses. There’s no longer one at Duke. There’s no longer one at Princeton. People do independent research sometimes at Cornell. But even though the parapsychological professional group, called the Parapsychological Association, is part of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and is academically recognized, the labs have withered because of the polemical onslaughts from the media edifice of pseudo-skepticism. They’ve been very successful. They ought to be happy. But they don’t seem very happy. They seem sardonic and bitter, and I would be too if I spent my time putting out work that didn’t allow me to sleep well at night, although I have no information as to whether any of them sleep well at night. But again, as with the case of ardent materialism, the success has been cultural and not intellectual.

One of J.B’.s proteges, although the two of them did not get along well personally, was Charles Honorton, whom you mentioned. Honorton just revolutionized the whole field in the 1970s and ’80s through the ganzfeld experiments. Ganzfeld is German for “open field.” In brief, he tested for telepathy, mind-to-mind communication. And his findings were of greater statistical significance even than J.B.’s own. In 1986, Honorton collaborated with a man named Ray Hyman. He is a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Oregon, and he’s a hardcore, career-long skeptic.

A 19-year-old Honorton in 1965.

The two of them, Hyman and Honorton, collaborated on a paper in which they jointly meta-analyzed a vast range of statistics emergent from the ganzfeld experiments. And Hyman said something remarkable, which he has never come close to repeating, which is that while he did not believe in the reality of ESP, he agreed that the data was uncorrupted, unpolluted, solid, and showed great improvements from data that had emerged earlier among similar classes of experiments, and warranted further research.

Now this was 1986, about a generation ago. That kind of approach has never repeated. Honorton, who suffered from lifelong health problems, unfortunately died in 1992 at the age of forty-six of heart failure, and as I’ve often said, it was the equivalent of losing Einstein at the dawn of relativity. It was a terrible setback for the field. You have to live with these things. But Honorton’s experiments, too, have proven bulletproof.

So, either ESP is real or there’s some fundamental flaw in our method of gathering statistics under clinical lab-based conditions. Now that latter argument has been made by an author in Slate. The problem with his argument is not that science shouldn’t be held up to severe scrutiny, but that he selects a Cornell researcher, Daryl J. Bem, who is living and recently did a series of experiments on precognition, as the poster boy for bad practices — without so much as once demonstrating a flaw or any corruption in Bem’s research and ignoring its replications.

Now the author would say that, in fact, Bem is an impeccable researcher and he just shows that the research model itself is broken because Bem’s research, as he puts it, carts us off to “crazy-land.” But that’s just arguing taste. If you haven’t found flaws in methodology, you’re arguing preference.

This is the crisis facing our modernist-materialist culture of letters. They feel that it is so self-evident to truth to disparage questions of nonlocality, with name-calling like “crazy-land,” that they fail to see their own incapacity to even understand what science is. It is methodological replication; that’s all it is. Science is not an outlook, position, or synonym for the kinds of thought styles that I or somebody else would like to see in the world. It is methodological replication. And if you’re not finding a flaw with the methodological replication, other than projecting your own taste onto it and insisting that an outcome can’t be because such things just can’t be — which is the essential argument you’ll find in mainstream letters — then you fail to even define your own terms.

When I was sorting out these questions, I went on Wikipedia to re-familiarize myself with the Rhine data, and Daryl Bem as well, and if you read their articles, as you point out, you’ll read that it’s all methodologically flawed, it’s all been discredited.

It’s partisan fraud. I have pointed out numerous instances where such statements will be unsourced. And if I do so in a sufficiently public setting, a day or two later, lo and behold, there appear four sources! What is Horowitz talking about?! And then you go to the sources, and virtually all of them will be from Prometheus, or affiliated offshoots and publications. It’s putting the public at a great disadvantage.

As usual, it exemplifies the most familiar of human ironies, which is that the people who want to protect us from irrationality are the ones besetting us with irrationality, because the scientific method is producing data that they don’t like. And in the service of disliking that, and with cultural whims at their back, they are able to spike Wikipedia pages. And it is a loss for our culture, not only in terms of the sharing of information, but in degrading Wikipedia as a reference tool. And it is extremely important as such.

Mitch lecturing at the Theosophical Society in America, Wheaton, IL, in 2024.

A related topic that’s gone more mainstream the last few years is UFOs, or UAPs as they’ve been rebranded. Despite the psyop-y weirdness of some of it, you have argued its mainstreaming heralds a shift in collective understanding. As one way into the topic, I’d like to jump back a couple decades and consider John Mack. A quote of his: “The one unforgivable sin to the Western mind is when something that should be in the spirit world transgresses and shows up in the physical world.” Who was John Mack, and what were his contributions to sort of recalibrating our sense of what constitutes reality?

Mack was a widely feted and highly admired clinical psychiatrist at Harvard. He came in touch with cases of people who said they’d experienced some sort of abduction phenomena. And in interviewing them, through using the various clinical tools that the therapist applies to people who have experienced trauma, he came to the conclusion that his subjects were not lying, and that whatever it was that happened to these people, it wasn’t registering as sleep apnea, fantasy, suggestion, displacement, psychosis, projection, or any of the categories in which we think when we want to explain delusion. They weren’t experiencing delusion, in Mack’s estimation.

He, I think, pursued and articulated this thesis with great integrity, saying that in using the tools of his field as a trauma specialist, his diagnosis was that the patients were telling the truth, and that if a person doesn’t like that diagnosis, they can go to another clinician. Using hypnosis, correlation, the application of different laboratory and therapy models, he came to feel that the accounts indicated sincerity and accuracy.

Obviously, this created tremendous controversy, and very nearly cost him his job and his reputation. Mack’s observation that you were quoting is pertinent to all these figures whom we’ve been discussing. They committed that ultimate transgression of saying that some sort of unseen element in life — rather than just belonging to dreams, psychology, mythology, songs, poems — actually impacts the life that we know and experience. And that is the unforgivable sin within the modernist mindset. Somewhere within the making of modernism, this philosophical outlook that seeks antecedents, we as a human community, seemingly almost by osmosis, excluded any consideration of extraphysicality or nonlocality from the retinue of antecedents that are acceptable to discuss.

We as a culture lack the language. We lack the perceptions, the orientation, to even consider the UFO thesis, either as it pertains to extraterrestrials or potentially to interdimensionality. We lack the possibility of considering the ESP thesis. We lack the possibility of considering the abduction thesis. We rely so heavily on concepts like suggestion or sleep apnea that it almost starts to border on satire.

I was recently researching the case of Betty and Barney Hill, the couple who claimed an abduction experience in 1961. Whatever one thinks about Betty and Barney’s narrative, everyone comes away with the impression that these were people of deep maturity and ethics and solidity.

And there’s a pseudo-skeptic on the Wikipedia page referencing Betty and Barney who almost laughably refers to their gleaning images from an episode of The Twilight Zone, and another guy, in a similar vein, references their gleaning images from The Outer Limits, as though autosuggestion is this magic power that can somehow induce in the individual delusions of such depth. These guys put Power of Positive Thinking author Norman Vincent Peale to shame, a figure they revile by the way, in terms of supposing the extent to which self-determination can actually shape experience. It’s self-contradictory.

Another challenge to philosophical materialism you repeatedly come back to is mind power. You’ve written a tremendous amount on mind metaphysics, both critically and supportively, but always, in my view, soberly, including in your most recent book, Happy Warriors. Can you talk a bit about a central figure you frequently reference, Neville Goddard?

I’m so surprised at Neville’s popularity and yet I suppose I’m not, because people are experiencing in Neville what I experienced when I first discovered his work in 2003. I was exposed to it by a major-league pitcher named Barry Zito who used Neville’s techniques in his training regimens.

Neville was a proponent of extreme idealism, the notion being that life is altogether perceptual to the extent that everything that the individual experiences is the product of his own emotionalized thoughts and mental images, even right down to the words that the reader is experiencing at this instant. There’s no Will and Mitch, there’s only you the reader, and this conversation is a product of your own psyche, because for whatever reason, you were prepared to experience this at this juncture, and you created these figments called Will and Mitch, who were having this conversation, and the publication is a further figment, and everything is perceptually based.

And that’s the kind of thing that one might hear and say, well gee, that’s nice to discuss at the grad-student lounge over a beer. But people who get into Neville — and I’ve found a surprising number of people in the tech world who are into him — they read him, or they listen to one of his lectures, and discover that this radical thesis is argued with such prescience and suppleness and impeccability that after twenty minutes, you’re saying, oh, I think I’ve just discovered the “open sesame” to life.

Of course it’s going to require years of experimentation before one can say that with any degree of confidence or maturity, but I stuck with Neville for years, and while I have problems with him, and I have objections to his ideas, I have found his thesis and particularly his style of framing so involving. Of all the metaphysical figures whose work I’ve experienced, I would have to count Neville among a handful of the most deeply influential.

Neville Goddard c. 1946.

I think what’s also so appealing to people about Neville is that there was no branding apparatus around him. He was just a guy who issued his pamphlets even though he was handsome as a movie star, and probably could’ve been a movie star. He had very few photos taken of himself, and very much was a kind of unspoken exponent of DIY culture, I suppose. He allowed people to tape-record his talks. Neither he nor his estate ever renewed copyright, so virtually all of Neville’s work is in public domain. And I think in our hyper-consumer age, people find something very refreshing about that, and I do too.

Absolutely. How about New Thought, the intellectual movement that informed Neville’s teaching, and its legacy today?

New Thought grew out of the transcendentalist ferment of New England in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. New Thought, in short, became a radical application of Transcendentalism, and its exponents, whom I call happy warriors, believed in the principle that thoughts are causative, and they believed it in the most radical sense.

It was a message that many Americans were waiting to hear, and many Americans embraced. Many Americans also disparaged it. H.L. Mencken hated the New Thought movement. And I have to crack up when I see people writing their attacks today on The Secret or what have you, because Mencken did it, and did it better, in 1910. And his arguments must be honored.

But nonetheless, this thought movement has endured, and I have always found that its exponents had an instinct for human nature. If they were wrong about a lot of things, and they were, they were right about a lot of things, too. They had an instinct for things that were later validated in placebo studies, mind-body medicine, neuroplasticity, and I would say even studies in quantum theory, which eventually popularized a language of perceptual causation.

You started to find that intellectual model developing in New Thought earlier than it did anywhere else. There also were things that they were, I think, gravely wrong about. They didn’t deal with end-of-life issues that we deal with today. They dealt with a medical apparatus that wasn’t in any kind of working order. They had a tendency to attribute everything to one mental super law, which I would not do and will never do, because I believe not only do we live under a complexity of laws and forces, but natural laws are conditioned all the time by surrounding circumstances. Gravity is conditioned by mass. So there’s no reason to assume that even if you’ve discovered a law of causation that it would be the only game in town, so to speak.

So I think there were terrible blind spots to the movement. Its language was often very childish. In addition to being insightful it could have a kind of singsong, gee-whiz tone to it that has endured. The intellectual culture of New Thought is in desperate need of burnishing.

I think the field stopped growing after the death of William James, maybe with the exception of Neville. Neville was a point of growth, but he was such a remarkable individual, and he was kind of off in his own world for a while, doing his own thing.

As I often say, the movement did a better job of popularizing than of refining itself. So we have a movement that I think has contributed a lot of valuable things to the human experience that suffers from ills that never got addressed, because the movement itself was so damn successful nobody seemed to care to address them. I’m trying to address them, and I think New Thought holds something for people.

I’m not trying to sound overly populist about this, because populism, like everything else, is a double-edged sword, but I’m also very touched that New Thought is a movement that really speaks to the practical mood of people who are taking on life day by day. I love the practicality of the movement. I love that Wallace D. Wattles, a socialist, had the bravery to write a book called The Science of Getting Rich, which sounds so gauche to us today, but he was meeting people where they lived.

I recall your respectful criticism of Barbara Ehrenreich in your book The Miracle Club. You talked about how in her book Bright-sided she sort of blamed the 2008 crash, or some dimension of it, on positive thinking. And you included a letter from a couple in California, who in response to Ehrenreich’s argument had written something like, “Actually, after we lost our house, positive thinking was incredibly helpful in getting us back on our feet.” They’re not the examples people think of, but they’re real.

Barbara was a great social critic who had a tin ear for idealism. And she, I think, nurtured a world-weary cynicism that made it difficult for her to accept the American public on its own terms.

I am very interested in people’s pursuit of off-the-grid solutions, whether physically, whether economically, whether politically, or whether spiritually, psychologically, personally. What else is it that we’re doing here? We’re supposed to be beings who are striving for some degree of self-expression. We have reasonable latitude with which to do that, at least in certain times and circumstances.

I’m not interested in shattering somebody’s experiment. I’m interested in looking at the flaws, being mature and explicit about them, but also looking at things where they work. When I read that letter from that couple, I was not only moved by it in general terms but it functioned for me as a mirror. I’ve had the same experience myself. Am I imagining things?

Years ago, Jon Stewart said to Barbara, “If Jesus makes you stop drinking, isn’t that okay?” She replied: “ No, I never think delusion is okay.” And the audience applauded, and they moved on. And watching this I thought to myself, well, wait a moment, what is delusion but a kind of a ruinous inability to grapple with reality? Is somebody who’s had a successful experience with Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) engaging in ruinous behavior? Or did the time and setting and circumstances prove helpful to him?

I’m not going to argue with somebody over whether an atheistic or a theistic point of view is a better way to go through life. William James would say that pragmatism requires evidence. James used to say, if the world was going to end in an hour and you had that information, would it matter whether you were an atheist or a theist? Maybe, maybe not. But if the answer is no, then, again, we’re just arguing about the arrangement of deck furniture. It’s irrelevant. And the definition of a delusion must be accompanied by some show of cause. What’s the show of cause?

If a spiritual program or ideal or outlook doesn’t work, and it steers somebody into a ditch, well, that’s obviously a real problem. But if you can’t show me the ditch, and I mean that all but literally, then I challenge the diagnosis. Again, it just becomes an argument over taste.

That’s a good segue into my next question. As we’ve discussed elsewhere, including in CounterPunch last year, there’s also a dark side to all this — namely, that the breakdown of existing structures and norms can be a violent, destabilizing, disorienting process. I think some of what we’re seeing with phenomena like Trumpism and QAnon, antivax movements, the proliferation of conspiracy theory, it stems from this loss of bearings. What do you make of this dimension of the crack-up? Is it inevitable? Is it going to swallow everything?

I really struggle with it. I don’t recognize the impulse that seeks to flip over the chess board if the game is going against me. I’ve never played a game of chess that I didn’t want to win, but I’ve never flipped over the chessboard. And the election denial movement, for example, is, in fact, a movement that I think meets the definition of delusion, because it’s ruinous. It’s ruinous. It will ensure, and has already been ensuring, our inability to do arithmetic. And that cannot be a good thing. And I don’t recognize this impulse. I just don’t recognize it. I can understand that people are profoundly unhappy. Some of the people who are unhappy might have deeply different policy ideas than I have. We can probably work some of that out. Maybe some of it we can’t work out. But damning our ability to do arithmetic — I find nothing hopeful in that.

And I really don’t see any way forward other than for people to just support themselves on the individual level in the best way humanly possible. Do not get into pissing matches on social media. Do not turn political friction into entertainment. Do not get into the easy and sleazy habit of denigrating people, running down people in shorthand. I have no idea whether that is going to help in terms of our political culture. I am certain that it will help in terms of an individual’s day-to-day experience. That’s been the case for me and I can’t imagine that my life is exceptional.

Beyond that, I wish I had something to offer. I wish I could offer a life vest. But I really don’t have one.

The theme of breakdown is entwined in many traditions with the idea of reconsolidation, or reintegration. You discuss Carl Jung a bit in Modern Occultism; for him this might mean individuation or self-realization. I do think there’s a real need for integration. Considering this multifaceted crack-up we’ve been discussing, and these themes that challenge materialism and consensus reality — the positive and negative sides — what might the process of integration, on either a personal or collective level, look like?

It seems to me that we have to scrutinize, each of us as individuals, the thrill that we derive from conflict and attack. I’m not suggesting to people that they shouldn’t go hunting or play football or box or join the military or, for that matter, any of that stuff. I’m talking about the day-to-day pernicious feeling of vitality and life that we get from engaging in or witnessing attacks. And instigating them. I guess you’d call it the thrill of contest.

Contest has a place in our lives. I don’t want to cancel the Olympics. We as a civilization have done very poorly with digital culture because we’ve married it to the thrill of contest, and it’s an absolute choking smog.

I remember years ago fairly popular New Age writers saying that the internet was going to be a tool of human unity, which always struck me as preposterous. I think I pointed out to one of these writers, to no impact whatever, back when I was editing her work, that most of the leaders of Europe were cousins at the time of World War I. The czar of Russia and Kaiser Wilhelm were cousins. It didn’t do anything. The internet is not going to do anything for human comity and, in fact, it’s only made it worse. It’s made it easier to organize a flash mob against Muslims in India. It’s terrible. The influence has been terrible by and large.

I don’t want it to be more convenient for people to kill one another. I want it to be as inconvenient as possible. And I think that’s among the reasons why I keep coming back to this theme of attempting some sort of ethical behavior in our intimate lives. And like it or not, our intimate lives are public, are social media. I’ve never understood the expression “Twitter isn’t real life.” It’s as real as it gets. People spend more time on Twitter or X than they do around people they love. Literally so. It would terrify us if we really looked at these numbers. Then we’d forget about it and we’d just go back online insulting people again or enjoying seeing somebody get insulted and torn down. If we don’t desist from that behavior, we as a human community will not make it. It instills shame in the individual, and when the individual feels shame, he or she, like an addict, just goes back to the needle, back to the bottle, and takes another hit, which only worsens the situation.

I think it’s demonstrably unhealthy for people to be doing stuff digitally that they wouldn’t do personally. I certainly have never seen anybody walk into a grocery store and just insult someone based on their appearance, and yet I’m sure somebody’s done that in the last thirty seconds on my Twitter account, somewhere in the scroll.

We will not function if we don’t get in front of this. This 24/7 global open mic is greater than our own intellectual and ethical devices, and that imbalance absolutely has to be redressed, and it’s not going to get redressed through macro solutions; I think it has to get redressed through the individual.

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Mitch Horowitz
Mitch Horowitz

Written by Mitch Horowitz

"Treats esoteric ideas & movements with an even-handed intellectual studiousness"-Washington Post | PEN Award-winning historian | Censored in China

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