by Frater P.S.G.

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

“Our humanitarianism, which is the syphilis of the mind, acts on the basis of the lie that the King must die.  The King is beyond death; it is merely a pool where he dips for refreshment.  We must therefore go back to the Spartan ideas of education; and the worst enemies of humanity are those who wish, under the pretext of compassion, to continue its ills through the generations.  The Christians to the Lions!”
-New Comment II:21

I’m not pursuing a full analysis of this particular section of Crowley’s writing.  It is a very fruitful verse and commentary.  I’m really just honing in on one particular aspect of it from one particular point of view.  So before you come for me with “Wait, lol.  He’s writing about the King, the HGA, and being beyond death and the Abyss, and everything is true and nothing is true.”  Stop.  I know.  I do not care.  That is not what I am talking about right now. 

Here are all the ideas I’m saying up front in case you don’t want to read until the end:

There are psychos that are destroying the world and its people. 

There are those that aid them deliberately and without intending to. 

We will use the engine of Marxism-Leninism to stop them. 

The Law of Thelema will guide our progress. 

It’s often the things that provoke revulsion or disturbance that yield the greatest treasure.  Where there’s discomfort and aversion, if we dig we can be sure to find gold.  One such section is the commentary for the 21st verse of the 2nd chapter of the Book of the Law.  I come back to it again and again.  One way to read Crowley is to ask what was going on in the world at the time he was writing.  This can be useful, but often just deteriorates into useless intellectual exercises.  It can also be beneficial to read Crowley from within our own time.  What does this mean to me, to us, now?

Yikes!  Humanitarianism, the syphilis of the mind?  Surely he doesn’t mean it.  He does.  Our humanitarianism.  Throw it in the trash. 

“Not our precious USAID!  Surely the CIA wasn’t using it all throughout the cold war into contemporary times to fund some very nasty foreign policy, “democracy promotion” and regime change.”  Pssst…they were.  I digress. 

Our humanitarian impulse is the bedfellow of brutal imperialism and exploitation.  It’s the neoliberal impulse.  The Christian impulse.  Do whatever you want: murder, rape, extort, exploit, destroy whole ecosystems, commit genocide, and then flip them a couple bucks to clear your conscience.  Go in peace!  Your sins are forgiven, my son.  This humanitarianism permits imperial powers, under the dictates of global capital, to do what it does: exploit, destroy and engorge itself; to hoard wealth and to peel off a few billion here and a few billion there for the little people, the people of the global south, the shivering denizens within the imperial core of western societies. 

The point is that nothing outside of a society and its own people is going to come and save it.  Nothing is coming to save us but us.  Nothing is going to save them but them.  Nothing is going to save you but you.

An alternative would be to dispense with global capital, imperialism and the brutal exploitation of the Earth and its people (see Duty), and to use the engine of Marxism-Leninism to achieve it politically, and the Law of Thelema as an ideal.  Rather than a bandaid of Our Humanitarianism we can permit all peoples, all people, to grow and thrive as they Will.  And for the love of the gods, not in the image of Western, liberal democracy.  We have to let that go.  It’s gone anyway, and it’s not coming back.  And there’s no way out but through.  “But I don’t want to eat bugs! Marx was Jewish!  Wahhhh!” Shut the fuck up.  We’re all going to be eating bugs and each other if these psychotic, imperial, capitalist motherfuckers – the low men – have their way.  Throw progressive identity politics in the trash.  Throw the bigotry and the fantasies of a Return to Tradition in the trash.  Throw liberal democracy in the trash.  Forget about Bernie, forget about AOC, forget about Mamdani.  They’ve hollowed out Marxist ideas and wear them around like a skin-suit and do nothing but get in the way.  They are not the solution.  And remember that “the worst enemies of humanity are those who wish, under the pretext of compassion, to continue its ills through the generations.  The Christians to the Lions!”

Love is the law, love under will