Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/04/24/steve-bannon-digs-the-occult.html
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And of course, there were plenty of the actual, original Nazis who were ga-ga over occult stuff. Himmler and Hess come to mind right away.
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The Power of Positive Thinking is a precursor to The Secret; they both have the same premise – that if you visualize and think positively about things you want, then the universe will give them to you. They take the concept of prayer and transform it into a secular, greed-oriented exercise: you don’t need to pray to any particular god or spirit, just say “I want a million dollars” every day, and you will get it, magically. And yes, that’s an actual example used in The Secret.
It’s not coincidence that Trump is a big fan of the prosperity gospel, which preaches that Christianity is all about rewarding you financially. With these guys, it’s not about enlightenment, it’s all about greed.
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Bannon as the Disraeli of the dark side
Interesting phrase. I wonder what his version of Sybil: Or The Two Nations" would go. Probably that Sybil and her family deserved to be poor, I suppose.
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The most offensive thing about The Secret and the like is the implication that victims of child sex slavery and genocide and other horrors just didn’t WANT to escape their circumstances badly enough.
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Absolutely true. A co-worker gave me a copy of it once and told me it would change my life; I had no idea what it was, and watched the first bit of the DVD until I realized what was going on here. I had the same reaction: all these people were talking about the universe giving them fancy cars and a million bucks or a CEO position, and I’m thinking “okay, so you’re telling me that the universe gives rich white people priority when it comes to getting stuff they ask for, not poor brown people who want to eat food sometime this week or stop being raped.”
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Exactly.
Some of it was even too nutty for Hitler:
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It creates a conceptual karmic master race of people who supposedly think more positively than others and that’s why they’re wealthy and successful and others are poor. It’s just a new variation on social Darwinism. And it sadly gives supposed credence to the concept of “why don’t the poor just stop being poor (through positive thought)?”
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When the Right Wing Loony thingy comes to an end for Bannon, he can be a New Age Occult sharletan.
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I think Blavatsky’s books are some of the most hilarious bullshit ever committed to paper, as if the theosophists thought they could connect threads from all the various piles of made-up bullshit and arrive at some hidden truth.
You might as well try and find correlations between Marvel comics, Archie comics, and MAD magazine to see what deeper knowledge it provides.
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You can learn more about that on the “Nazi UFOs and the Mysteries of the Bible” Channel, aka the “History” channel. (Although since I ever coined that name they have moved on to more “reality” programming which tends to be just as fantastical, American Pickers and Pawn Stars indeed!)
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Given the way these turds are all about projection, the question is how long until we find out that Bannon is an practitioner of actual ‘spirit cooking?’
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It’s like eugenics for people who are so anti-science they can’t even handle basic pseudoscience!
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Is it already time to repost the New Age Bullshit generator?
I suspect that “We are being called to explore the dreamscape itself as an interface between serenity and science.”
(I got that link from @lolipop_jones here )
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Dogmatically anti-Science types are fascinated by woo 
Color me surprised 
/s
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Beyond Words, the publisher of The Secret, has its HQ around the corner from me. A suite in a dowdy office park.
You’d think if this positive visualization thing worked they’d manifest a ritzier place in which to do business.
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I don’t know why people would find this so surprising. The occult basically means “that which cannot be seen”, which is for better or worse, most things. Most of the universe is not directly observable my human senses.
As a teen, I had a summer job working at the printing house of the local newspaper. They did a lot of other print jobs, too, including a magazine on occult and UFOlogy. I used to read some of the scrapped copies on breaks, and marvel at the weirdness and how seamlessly both the writers and the readers seemed to fit in all the woo they could find.
I also scored a translated copy of G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, which made me a Chesterton fan for life, and overall was more important to me and my development than the money I got from the job.
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“Steve Bannon digs the occult”
Obviously… with Beelzebub now in charge in the WH.
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The interesting thing there is Blavatsky’s works are absolutely packed with old racialist theories and eugenics. And from even earlier than that the occult, pseudohistory, and certain pseudoscience are likewise deeply deeply entrenched with and based on white supremacy and extreme right wing thought.
Seems the be an ever increasing response from skeptics and actual academics that focus on exactly that.
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