Alan Moore on Reclaiming Our Imagination from the Authoritarian Overlords

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]You're on team human conscious intervention in the machine. A spell cast with words creating new possibilities for thought and action. We can transcend human limits by unleashing the powers of our collective imagination. I'm Douglas Rushkoff and I'm on team human. Playing for team human today, writer, magician, shaman, and creator of alternate realities, Alan Moore. It's never too late to write a new story. I'm Douglas Rushkoff and we're all on team Human. I'm delighted to introduce you to our newest supporting sponsor, a Team Human enabler in more ways than one. Groucho. Groucho is a platform that answers the most common question we get at Team Human.

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[00:01:42]Alan Moore writes stories that transport readers into other realities. realities which then go on to influence or even replace apparently fixed worlds in which we live. Like James Joyce or William Butler Yates, he writes pros that transcends our three-dimensional logic and generates playscapes for the reader souls. From transcendent comics like from hell, League of of of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Providence to novels including Jerusalem and the long London series beginning with the great when Moore has been blending history, magic, and the occult into extended yarns that have settled into the cultural consciousness like a shared imaginary. A set of reality tunnels so richly rendered that visiting them feels like traveling both to another dimension and to a forgotten but all too familiar dream. It's my honor to introduce you to a psychoistorical wizard on the front lines of the battle for the future of team human, Alan Moore.

[00:02:57]>> Lovely to be here, Douglas. Nice to talk to you.

[00:03:02]Oh, it's so good to talk to you. It's funny. I was just remembering when when uh uh Terrence McKenna saw your uh what was it? 1984 swamp thing and was became with the with the spud remember the spud that fell off him. He lit up like like nothing else. Um but that's another story. I'm just honored to be with you. I've been been following your your work for 40 50 years. As a writer and a magician and a a cgrapher of what you'd call um idea space, you understand that our stories don't just describe our world, but they cast it. So what I'm hoping you can do is help us understand this practice and maybe more importantly then how we might uh transcend our current logic and reclaim the the imaginative sovereignty that's going to be required for us to write a better next chapter of the human experiment than the doom that our wouldbe overlords have in mind for us. Well, I'd first say that writers and creators should probably think more of themselves and think more of the craft that they are practicing.

[00:04:32]Uh I believe that if you are involved in any act of creation, any purposeful engagement with the phenomena or possibilities of consciousness, then that to me is magic pure and simple. I believe that um what we have to do or at least what I feel compelled to do is to reinstate the artist, the magician, the musician, the writer. We have to reinstate these at the center of culture, not at the top of it. Because I don't believe in hierarchical arrangements. I don't like vertical arrangements. I'm much more comfortable with horizontal arrangements. So, we need to position magic, I believe, at the center of culture. And we need to connect magic with art. I think that both parties would benefit from. They're practically the same thing anyway, but I think it would be better if artists thought of themselves as magicians and if magicians thought of themselves as artists so that they actually had some product from their magical excursions that other people could see as well.

[00:06:00]Um once we've done that we could connect up uh art and science again there's an awful lot of overlap already and then the most difficult B in fact I say difficult perhaps impossible might be more the word but we connect up science with politics so that we could have evidence-based government but that is the the most important and perhaps the most unlikely stage in the process. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't keep working towards it.

[00:06:35]>> Right. It's almost a a a mandelola uh you're describing of of articulation that at the very center is sort of the magical thought, then the art and artifact, then the the the more explicate explanation for that in science, and finally the articulation through through politics and live action.

[00:06:56]>> Yeah. Yeah. that is something that I think could work and it's also that I think I could contribute to. Um I mean since I've been a a teenager uh I wanted I remember reading Timothy Larry is the politics of ecstasy and uh obviously perhaps it's a book that hasn't aged particularly well. I don't know. But at the time, I remember him saying that um the people shaping human consciousness were the underground cartoonists, the rock musicians, and the drug dealers. And at the time, I thought, I probably haven't got what it takes to be an underground cartoonist or a rock star at this point. But I I was I was thinking I I am not uh I don't think that I am best used in physical conflict because um especially not at the moment. Uh, but I've always thought that I could probably do more um by using my art to modify human consciousness because I think that that is basically what art is for. It's our way of modifying our own thought processes and our own perceptions.

[00:08:18]But I thought that I could possibly uh if I pursue that vigorously enough, I could maybe have some kind of effect by doing that. So it seems to me a way that I can actually act upon the world uh in a useful way. Um, and if I think if more people felt empowered by their abilities, if they felt less like the entertainment and more like artists.

[00:08:54]I mean, I know that I' I've said this before, but I really I feel nostalgic for the BIC tradition. Uh, not that I was ever experienced it in any way, but in the BIC tradition, yeah. Um, if there was a wizard or a witch, some sort of sorcerer, and, uh, you got on the wrong side of them, maybe your hens would lay funny, uh, or something like that. Not that big a deal, basically. But if you offended a bad and that bad placed a satire upon you, then that would not only destroy you in the eyes of everyone else, uh perhaps your family, in your own eyes, but if it was a good enough satire, that would destroy you in the eyes of people who hadn't even been born yet. People in generations time. Artists were scary back then. They were respected. And that's the kind of world that I'd like to uh to get back to where artists have the respect that I think that they deserve if they are committed artists.

[00:10:16]the because artists and creative people are working at the the rock face of meaning of being >> and obviously looking at some of us it takes it out of us a bit. We don't necessarily end up in the best psychological shape, you know, but uh again that's no reason why we shouldn't do it and we shouldn't commit ourselves to it, >> right? I mean, it's often I I found myself over over the years feeling guilty for getting to be a writer, artist, and doing books and comics when, you know, my friends are on the front lines doing the social justice work. And how could I, you know, waste time and energy on this? But I think uh what I get from what you're saying is that if the artist is is true to their their core soul integrity, then they are doing uh a a truly great service to the to the collective. They're uh they're speaking speaking, writing, you know, their truth to whatever the power structures are, you know, in a in a way that's that's potentially, you know, destabilizing to whatever the the oppressive forces are and liberating to um to what is.

[00:11:37]>> Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean the of course it's always difficult to know how much what you're saying um is actually penetrating or getting through to your public. Um but sometimes, you know, there are occasions when I can I can think, yes, that perhaps was me that influenced that. They don't happen very often, but sort of uh it's a nice feeling when they do.

[00:12:12]>> Yeah. Oh, for sure. For sure. And you really you're not doing whatever they call it, you know, the spiritual bypassing or retreat or or it's not art is not a luxury. Art is is when we put it at the center of the mandelola.

[00:12:25]Without art, I would argue we don't even exist. Without the magic, there's not going to be anything there that we are uh in my worldview, we are generating this thing that we're living in. So you get rid of us, you're not you're gonna have nothing.

[00:12:41]>> Uh well, I mean, it's inarguable that the the universe that each of us perceives is our universe.

[00:12:50]We are the god at the center of it and so we should be. Uh this is anarchism.

[00:12:57]Um it's the belief that everybody should be responsible for their own universe.

[00:13:06]Um, admittedly that is not something that could happen overnight. Not after thousands of years of being weaned on to authoritarianism, but I believe that that was our original growth state. I believe we had a couple of hundred thousand years of um it wasn't called anarchy then because um we hadn't got any ary to uh >> to to get rid of. Yeah. Um but during the hunter gather period, you know, we got by and arguably that was the happiest period of human existence before we came up with agriculture which involved coming up with settlement and property and then leaders um who did more than just you know I mean originally I think that leaders were it was just a job like plumber or shaman or hunter. It was just that was your job >> and you didn't get a bigger crack of the whip than anybody else. Uh you were sort of uh everybody did their jobs and everybody shared until at some point when communities got too big and the leaders could say look you know you ought to be giving me at least a little bit for doing all this work.

[00:14:34]Um, and then eventually it got to a point where they could hire goons and um, at that point they were increasingly difficult to get rid of. And here we are. And they could build legal and economic systems that kind of reinforced this pyramidal understanding of the world. You know, when you have central currency, it's very different. Uh it's a very different model, you know, and I've been researching a lot lately about the difference between these pyramidal civilizations that are optimized for extraction and and savings and acquisition and the horizontal civilizations that you're talking about, which because people couldn't save money when they had enough, they optimized for leisure, >> they optimized for their time and ended up with cultures instead.

[00:15:26]>> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's funny. I was talking to I mean, my my family um my close family um we're as neurodeiverse as hell and uh I was talking to I think it was probably my grandson um and and also my daughter. We were talking about um how uh apparently neurotypical people favor uh vertical social arrangements uh hierarchical social arrangements.

[00:16:04]They feel more comfortable if there are people above them and people below them and they know where they are. Uh neurodeiverse people tend to favor more horizontal social arrangements. Um, so I was thinking about this and I I came up with what I think is a a brilliant solution um that we should medicate the neurotypical.

[00:16:29]Um, >> exactly >> because it's them causing all the problems, you know. Um, yes. Just leave us to get obsessed about tiny details and things like that and we'll be perfectly happy, you know.

[00:16:46]>> Oh, that's great. I mean it it could also be that that neurotypical people respond to um hierarchical education in a consiliatory way, you know, that they they adapt to it whereas we or neuro diverse people uh uh are less likely to do that. Uh but I want to get to the the for a moment if we can to to the craft of writing. Um, and you've I know you've spoken a lot about it, so I don't want to recreate all of that content, but I'm I'm particularly interested in in writing as spellcasting. And one way in which I've experienced it in your writing is the way you create place, the way you create spaces. So everything from, you know, Northampton in Jerusalem, which everyone talks about, but for me, even the preface to Harvey Pecar's Cleveland did the same thing.

[00:17:39]this understanding of of place as these that's why I talked about it in the intro this this way of I'm somewhere completely new but it feels like that dream that I forgot that I had that it it it when you write about space as opposed to many others you know great writer William James or or or Henry James and they people write about space in a great way but I feel like I'm or or or any of the great novelists I'm learning about a new place when you write about place. I feel like I'm remembering a past life or something like that, like it feels like home in a weird way. So, I'm wondering are are you exploring these spaces as you places as you write about them or are you creating them?

[00:18:25]>> Do you know what I mean? When you when you walk the streets of Long London, >> do you feel like you're a cgrapher discovering a pre-existing >> dimension or are you an architect laying the bricks as you go?

[00:18:37]It's I'm glad you asked this question, Douglas, because uh it's something that has been on my mind increasingly. And I'd say that the answer is to some degree both. Um, I have to say that I am creating it because the implications of me exploring it are a bit strange and a bit farreaching. So, however, I don't want to deny that because one of the feelings that I've been getting, particularly on these Long London books, is that I am I'm deliberately trying to augment history.

[00:19:23]I'm trying to take these marginal events and characters and to write a more fantastical but I believe a more credible and persuasive story to fill in the spaces >> between these fictions and rumors and facts >> and I have been while writing it I've been thinking coming up with all of these uh this pantheon of arcana, these giant symbolic beings that only exist to symbolize and to signify.

[00:20:05]Coming up with all of them, I'm I'm thinking these these sound great. Um I'm I'm really impressed despite myself with these figures that are emerging. Is it possible that I am in some way writing about something that's true?

[00:20:25]And I think I am, but I don't think I'm writing about something that happened.

[00:20:31]I'm thinking I'm I'm writing about something that is true even if it didn't happen, which I believe is something that Chief Broom says in the introduction to one to Over the Cuckoo's Nest. this is true even if it didn't happen. Um and and I've been thinking, so where is Long London? Does that exist? And I thought, well, yes, of course it does. It's a it's a platonic ideal of London that is in everybody's minds. It's the it's the imaginal space of London that the physical London is founded on. We are all founded upon a landscape of insubstantial ideas. That's what the material world is built from.

[00:21:20]We are living inside our unpacked imaginations. So yes, of course, in a sense, Long London, this symbolist territory that that's real. So what about all of these mysterious doorways then by which people can enter it? Uh are they real?

[00:21:39]Yeah, in a way, but uh they're in your head uh or at least they're in my head and hopefully in the reader head once they've absorbed that language that pros um that in a way if I am perhaps the answer is that in terms of I am doing some construction work on Long London But it's in the reader's heads perhaps rather than mine. What I am doing as a writer is exploring this place that I have found in my head and I am trying to uh to map it in sufficient detail so that the reader can then go through an entrance in a back alley or something like that in their own mind. It's it's a lot like this is a writer that I don't particularly care for, but CS Lewis, I remember when when he was asked, "Why did you write a story about a fantastical world that is accessible through the back of a wardrobe?"

[00:22:58]And he said, "Because it's true."

[00:23:02]And uh I I know exactly what he was talking about. And so yes, in a sense these art, fictions, all of these things, they are doorways.

[00:23:17]They give you access to a world. It just depends on how rich a world that is. Um how how informative a world that is, how useful a world that is.

[00:23:33]But I mean like the the thing of of space and place. I mean I've come to think that there's perhaps not much more than place in fiction because everybody, all of the characters, all of us, we grow out of the places that we inhabit.

[00:24:01]And at the same time those places they grow out of us. Um we are influenced by the places the streets we walk all of our lives. Um and yes we will go on to influence those streets. But it's it's like the important thing to me is to I just believe everything. It's like I was saying about artists earlier on that sort of I believe that they should see themselves as magician. I want to re-enchant everything.

[00:24:38]I believe that everything has become massively disenchanted.

[00:24:42]I believe that when we walk down our streets, we see ourselves as siphers walking through a bleak and meaningless industrial landscape. If we could see those places with all of the richness and all of the color of their history and meaning, then it would be an Arabian Knights marvel.

[00:25:09]>> You know, and we would be wonderful creatures for inhabiting it.

[00:25:13]>> Mhm. Mhm. I mean, you you you said somewhere in one of the interviews I looked at that that that any point on the map, you said any point on the map can be the center of the universe if you observe it with enough intensity. And I'm like, [ __ ] Right. So in a digital capitalist age that we're living in that I'm critiquing that despatializes and flattens everything where we're basically nowhere and everywhere at the same time then the act of writing one of these specific but transcendently enchanted locations. It's a way of of reanchoring the human soul in a a space of agency where the where we're creating the reality as we're walking through it.

[00:25:58]Yes. Yes. Absolutely. I mean, like I have to say I should put my hand up here and say that I um I've always been interested in place, but I didn't achieve anything like the focus that I have now until I discovered the writings of Ian Sinclair. Ian Sinclair in Blood Heat and the Suicide Bridge and all of his work since then.

[00:26:21]He gave me a new way of looking at place um which I tried to pick up that ball and run with it and um with we're very different writers but sort of uh but that that s I don't think that I almost had it a disagreement with Ian um where I was saying that I believed that any spot on the planet could yield an immense richness of stories and marvels.

[00:26:56]And he said he wasn't so sure that he'd just been investigating um some nearby towns like he wasn't very impressed by Ketering. Um and uh he was saying that or or Peterborough. Um he was saying that he didn't really feel until he got to Northampton that sort of uh he couldn't feel the energy. So I don't know. I would I I I am I would be very reluctant to disagree with Ian because he knows more about this stuff than I do. Uh it might be that some places have more energy than others. I don't know.

[00:27:40]>> It's what the people bring to it though.

[00:27:42]You know, the the thing that I keep getting stuck with in in a lot of people are are concerned that they're not acting on a global scale, that their politics isn't, you know, scale is the word of the industrial age. Does it scale? Does it scale? And what I've been arguing on team human is what you do locally, the the old woman that you sit with on the bench at the bus, the the the the children that you tutor, the the the what you do in your town in your exact from from you outward is the work.

[00:28:16]you know that that 99% of politics really can happen in the way we engage with each other and the 1% could worry about you know this Iran war or whatever it is that they're doing up there.

[00:28:28]>> I agree completely. I mean when in around about 2009 2010 um I took a break from writing Jerusalem because I'd just done the Lucha Joyce chapter and it had broken my brain. Um, so I uh I I thought what I need to do is to do something else for about 18 months, two years. So I did uh our beautiful but doomed underground magazine Dodge Logic. And uh I I remember in the first issue we said we are not local, we are not global, we are local.

[00:29:10]Um because I believe that that the local is the global that we're all where we are. Uh that's what unites us. Um, and I I agree completely that sort of be nicer to the people around you and be warmer to them, be kinder, >> be more protective of them because at the end of the day, they're all you've got and you're all they've got. So what we need to do in particularly in this current hellscape is that we should form strengthen community bonds in any way that we can. We should love each other and we should fight um for anything that tries to encroach against that.

[00:30:10]uh we should fight against it. So yeah, basically love and fight. This is what I think we could all do with. What tech taketh away, it can also giveth back.

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[00:31:33]Now, do you think we also need uh I mean, if if spelling is spelling, right, to to spell to is to cast a spell, then if we're currently living in uh uh >> let's call it a bad spell of the extractive systems and and power hierarchies. Might the remedy be a more complex and more human vocabulary for us to use?

[00:32:02]>> We should always be careful with language because language is con constantly evolving and it does it does determine how we think and what we can think. Um, basically I'm I'm a maximalist.

[00:32:21]uh the more words the better you know sort of never use three words if 60 will do because I I follow I think George Orwell's dictim that sort of uh with his viewspeak in 1984 that if we limit the vocabulary that people are using if we boil it all down to a few words then they'll be able to think less and imagine less and they will be more manipul able. However, if that's true, then surely the converse is true. Um surely if we actually um try to extend our vocabularies uh perhaps invent some new words if we feel like it. Uh all right as a writer you can't do that that often but sort of um but uh you know the English language is immense and there are all sorts of ways that we can put it together.

[00:33:24]Um, probably an io couldn't because the Ioi will be probably going for the the most probable end to a sentence. Whereas we can do better than that. We can hopefully imagine things that have never been imagined before. And in this way we can extend our consciousness. I mean if by limiting language you can limit consciousness then by extension by expanding language you can expand consciousness in when I used to be a member of what I called the psychedelic left uh during my teenage years. I'm not sure whether the psychedelic left actually existed or whether it was something that I perhaps imagined during an acid trip of some sort. But if the psychedelic left did exist, I remember that my early it was basically based upon the Aldis Huxley idea uh of um let's turn on people. Uh let's let's elevate people's consciousness and that will solve all the world's problems, which I thought, yeah, that sounds as likely to solve the world's problems as anything. So yeah, that sounds like a good idea. that my original plan was so LSD in the reservoir.

[00:34:54]Um, I was only a teenager, you know, sort of. And I very quickly realized, no, that that's a terrible idea. That would be horrible.

[00:35:05]Uh, that would be like something out of her Bosch. That would be dreadful. Don't do that. But what if you were to use writing?

[00:35:16]uh that's legal and um it's acceptable.

[00:35:21]It doesn't do so much potential damage as LSD, but it could be a lot more transformative >> because with writing there is a conscious intelligence directing the trip if you like. Um, so that has been my strategy to use language as a kind of psychedelic drug amongst other things that sort of uh if you tickle people's neurons in the right way, you can get all sorts of effects.

[00:36:00]Um, you can really get through to people. you can you can get through to their to their dreaming self >> in some ways. I mean, I'm doing all this um purely by um blind groping around in the dark and seeing what happens. But it's so it's an experimental procedure, but I'd like to think that that was what was happening.

[00:36:30]>> Yeah, it's an experiment in consciousness for sure. I mean there are a lot of great writers you know but most of them don't do the thing that you do which is show up in their dreams once you've started reading a few chapters the your reading life once well for me anyway my reading life and my dream life become the same so I'm giving which is just fun you know it's it's a fun place to be so then I just like a trip or something but then I wonder um what is it like to be writing as spelling. I mean, I don't it's not like I I take acid before I write, but I definitely put myself in the state of mind I'm trying to induce in my readers while I'm writing. I mean, do you um uh I don't know, do do you do things before you write? Do you do banishing? Do you go into a state or you or you just sit down and write? But I the the ritual element of my magic has uh probably dwindled as the the central um area of my magic has become more all pervasive.

[00:37:42]It's basically magic is everything.

[00:37:46]It's uh it's me getting up in the morning. It's every moment, every photon that hits my retina, every sound that tickles the timpana in my ears. It's everything. Human experience itself is magic. And I'm at a different stage in magic now uh than I was when I started.

[00:38:08]I mean that was what more than 30 years ago.

[00:38:12]>> Right. So you used to do workings and things like uh >> Yeah.

[00:38:16]>> Yeah.

[00:38:17]>> Yeah. Because I think probably when I was starting out, I needed something I needed experiences of the kind that I had back then, which were quite spectacular in order to convince me that there was something valuable there.

[00:38:34]>> Once I had had a few firework displays and was convinced that yes, there is something valuable there, then I didn't really need the fire firework displays anymore. Um, I didn't need to conjure or talk to demons. I just needed to understand what demons were and to have that within my uh consciousness.

[00:39:02]Um, it has all come down my magical practice these days is all focused upon the writing and I don't really need to do very much at all. um couple of joints and a cup of tea. Uh although I do find that perhaps perhaps just for various reasons, I'm finding that these days I'm doing most of my writing at night. Um say sometime between say 10:00 and 2:00 3:00 in the morning and that's a lovely time to write. I I remember when I first started as a cartoonist um in the late '7s that um I was I would be working at 2:00 3:00 in the morning and it's not just that it's quieter then but it's that everybody's minds have shut off.

[00:39:57]>> I know there's more bandwidth the it's the way I feel. You can't hear anybody thinking and you weren't you you you weren't sure that you could until it stopped.

[00:40:11]>> Exactly. There's it's as if there's a a I've always there's like a a mental highway up there that everybody's thinking and it's all congested with all the thoughts of working and calculation of people and then at night it's like oh there's free lanes. I >> Yeah. Yeah. It's sort of uh it's perhaps a bit like Songbirds and the ionosphere.

[00:40:36]Um that sort of in the evening when the ionosphere is going up. Oh no, it comes down in the evening and it goes up in the morning. But that that's why songbirds there's a brilliant point where they can bounce their song off of the ionosphere and it will have a much greater resonance to it. So maybe it's a bit like that that writing at those times you're going to get you're going to be a better song bird, you know.

[00:41:06]>> Yeah. And there's the space then to I to going back to the word maximalism which I love you using because I've been admiring maximalists now particularly in in in America even people in their homes who don't uh uh reduce themselves to the sort of pottery barn hotel reality that everybody's aspiring to which feels so you know flat and fascist and and boring that people that are maximalist are, yeah, you might have to do more dusting, but it's it's dimensional. You you know, they're building they're building worlds and so I I appreciate that as an approach to writing as well.

[00:41:48]>> And actually, um you don't even have to do the dusting, you know. Uh you can just let it fall, you know. I've got incredible oal artifacts all over this this this room.

[00:42:03]Um that uh are lost beneath layers of dust. It's sort of magic doesn't mind, you know. Uh magic is not about keeping a tidy house, you know, or at least I hope it's not because that's not how I've been practicing it, >> right? And I'm also interested and and I I admire completely the the the the idea of immersing so much or of of becoming so magic conscious that there's no distinction between magical practice and life. It just is what it is. But then I wonder as someone I've been doing workings to or with Ganesha and with an archangel named Aniel who's an interesting >> and I would feel um don't they want our attention though?

[00:42:48]Do do they are they bummed if we're not specifically engaging?

[00:42:54]>> Well, the way that I feel about these entities which may be parts of myself that I have not accessed before or they may be independent creatures that sort of are outside me or they may be both at once which is probably what it feels like >> right. Um, but what I feel is that a lot of people when you hear them talk about magic, it's clear that they want magic to like to do something for them. Um, they they want magic to get them a girlfriend or get them a lot of money or to like really really punish that that person who was mean to them at school.

[00:43:44]That is a misunderstanding of magic.

[00:43:48]>> Um it's not what it's a bit like John F.

[00:43:51]Kennedy said, it's not what magic can do for you. It's what you can do for magic >> do for magic that is it's we are not why do we assume that we that all of these entities which are far more marvelous and complex than we are. What do we assume that they're just hanging around waiting to do our bidding? Uh, no. No.

[00:44:15]It's that we can be useful to them if we are very very lucky and if we put our heart into it, then we can be useful to them and sort of uh and it's a great way of kind of it's delegating upwards. I like to think of it, you know, sort of uh so when I actually do a bunch of bad murders or something like that, I can always say, "No, actually, it was it was the gods who told me to do that."

[00:44:46]>> You know, it's uh No, I I think that we should just listen to magic and see what magic wants because I am certain that what it wants is benign and in our best interests, >> right? or or blissful. I mean uh uh you know I was just talking with David David Haskins about about magic and um uh uh magic and bliss and magic and and uh not decadence so much as pleasure, you know, and and pleasure pleasure as a great political attractor, you know. It's like, oh, we're having more fun, you know, that's why you should that's why you want to join our side. Well, I mean everything everything in the world, everything around you and me now, um it all emerged, all of culture emerged from shamanism.

[00:45:38]Everything uh all arts, all writing, dance, theater, music, all of these were originally part of shamanism along with science and medicine and everything else. And then everything gradually was hived off.

[00:45:57]Uh every shamanism was dismantled.

[00:46:02]And um originally first you got say um when you got settlements you could have and people didn't have to grow their own food anymore. Then people could specialize. So you've got priesthoods who took away the direct contact with the deity that was at the center of shamanism.

[00:46:26]They hide that off. And then a little bit then you got of course those well-known bastards, artists and writers who turned up and took away shamanism's role as the dispenser of visions. Well, we shifted from an oral tradition to a written tradition. So, >> yeah. Yeah. And so, all of this took away from and then eventually by the Renaissance, you'd got science and medicine emerging from magic and like many children decided that they didn't want anything to do with their creepy weird parent and trying to get them sectioned off to a maximum security nursing home or something. So you've got all of this. The only thing that and of course by 1910 uh magic had really only got the inner world and all of the theatrics. And then Freud turned up and using a vocabulary of terms that had been commonplace in occult parlor for more than a century.

[00:47:33]uh he came up with psychoanalysis and took away that last and leaving only the holo theatrics basically it's sort of but the one thing that they didn't take from shamanism was the ecstasy that was at the center of it was an ecstatic communion with all of being that everybody was through the shaman and through his performances his or her performances.

[00:48:05]Uh, everyone was sharing in the shaman's vision >> and so that ecstasy was right at the center of society. Well, right at the center of culture of everything. Now, once you've got settled societies, you can't have ecstasy because you you're not going to get people turning up at the conveyor belt on time if they're having an ecstatic vision. So, that's what I would like to see. I would like to see magic reassembled.

[00:48:32]I would like to see it be big enough to take on everything that it once was and importantly to have that ecstasy at the center of the experience.

[00:48:43]>> Right. And to do that though, I mean, as it's I just had a conversation with Brian Eno about art, it has to be nonapplied to anything but for its own sake. There's even a great um uh Talmud story where these rabbis are arguing about what's the most important reason to read Torah. Is it to remember our history or is it to act ethically into the future? And they're all arguing. And then the old whatever rabbi it is finally says, "What do you say? The only the reason to read Torah is for this reading of Torah. It's like for it's for you read it to read it, you know." And that's the magic thing. Then magic is I hate to put it like this, but magic is like a character. It's like its own thing. It's like to do something for magic is to do something for this. And as you've described it, even this this it's like a it has a personality. It has a a nest to it. It has a uh it's specific, not generic. It's, you know, it has a flavor. It certainly has a personality. This is not a neutral technology. This is not like electricity that can be used to power a hospital or to electrocute a a man with a mental age of nine. in Texas. It's sort of it's not like that. Magic has an agenda and it has a personality and it certainly has a sense of humor, which is really lucky when you think of all of the clowns that have postured in Magic's name across the centuries. It's really good that Magic does have a sense of humor, you know.

[00:50:19]>> Yeah. Well, I mean, speaking of clowns posturing up magic, I mean, you one could well, you don't even have to argue it. uh someone like um Donald Trump and a lot of his cronies, they're they're invested in a particular kind of magic in a sort of Norman Vincent Peele power of positive thinking.

[00:50:38]>> Yeah. Which is not magic. It's it's a it's a kind of an inquisitive materialist.

[00:50:45]Um it's a psychological trick. It's that obviously if you go into something thinking yes I am really confident that this is going to happen for me as opposed to going into it thinking oh this is not going to work out is it things never work out for me it's much more likely that the first person is going to succeed because that's just how it's not really it's not really what I would call magic it's just it's a psychological tactic yeah it's always better to feel confident? Of course it is. But it's like this manifesting um thing uh which has been around for a long time that um >> with that I mean apparently a lot of people think ah I have now got the universe.

[00:51:37]I'm sort of signed up to the universe as if it was like Amazon.

[00:51:42]um and now the universe I just have to sort of manifest something and the universe will give me whatever I want.

[00:51:49]No, it won't.

[00:51:50]>> Right?

[00:51:50]>> And any when it does work uh that is because purely because your psychological mindset is more receptive to success, >> right? It's almost as if magic it's not it's not anathema to it, but but it's a different order than the explicate order. It's it's like and to use a scientific it's occurring in the implicate order. It's occurring in more in the in the unrealized quantum. I mean that's that's part of why I've got such problems with AI is AI is trying to make everything explicit, you know, through probability to render it explicit and reduce it down to the the heaviest uh uh densest uh uh unflexible immutable.

[00:52:37]>> Yes. realized dead finish. Whereas real writing what we're doing is the opposite. We're trying to create as much as possible that liinal opening imaginative participatory unrealized.

[00:52:52]How much ambiguity can the reader tolerate and still be in your world?

[00:52:58]Yes, I I did. Uh, I mean, I was I was thinking about um I'd read I don't know if this was a a real AI or whether it was somebody perhaps satarizing AIS, but it was a an AI reproduction of uh Charles Dickens memorable opening sentences for A Tale of Two Cities, which was, "The times were average.

[00:53:31]It's perfect. Perfect. That's basically it, right? To remove the to remove the dimensionality and create the the real the the the thing. Exactly. Exactly. And that's why when going back to the idea of of magic having these qualities, this sense of humor, this thing, I mean, you know, to to to to the the the the materialist, a thought or a an imaginative m it's it's just like a ghost in the machine, you know, to to you as a an artist magician, the idea space is this legitimate dimension, you know, that thoughts are real and dream spaces are are are not just worthy of our exploration, but they are they are instant they're instantiations of of consciousness.

[00:54:21]>> Yes. Yes. And they are I mean obviously well at least from my point of view uh we are all amphibious in the sense that we live in two worlds at once, >> right?

[00:54:35]>> We live in the physical world that is around us that is apparently around us.

[00:54:41]Um, and we also live in our internal world, which I suggest is bigger and possibly more important. And yet we can navigate the physical world with relative ease. And we don't seem to think of our inner world as being a territory that we need to explore.

[00:55:04]>> We think, oh, this is just us. This is just how we are. We I think if we thought of it as a territory and perhaps if we ventured further, >> uh we might find that there's a few surprising things in here >> and people in there, you know, there's a whole new internal family systems which I I enjoy because they're like, "Oh, I'm all these people there."

[00:55:25]>> Yeah. Yeah. It's sort of uh Yeah. I mean I think that regarding like mental states I think we are probably hopefully progressing towards a point when we realize that all of us all of the different mental states they're they're in all of us to some degree or another that we're either all crazy or nobody is and it's just a matter of degree things like that that these are all realms of consciousness and they all probably have wonders in them. I mean some of the things that uh I mean now that people with autism are actually being given a measure of respect and sort of empathy then uh it turns out that uh a lot of autistic people are kind of brilliant >> uh in their areas of focus. They can do extraordinary things. Um, let's welcome everybody back into the human fold.

[00:56:38]You know, we probably need everybody to get through this.

[00:56:43]Um, and let's not exclude anybody at least not for what they are.

[00:56:52]uh for what they do possibly um you know because there are some people in the world at the moment who are frankly best you um and yes I'm quite happy about excluding those from the human fold but everybody else come on in are there are there are there common qualities to all of the kind of dream alternative spaces something about them feels similar to me. You know, just as magic sort of has a sense of humor and rewards you at the beginning and we we understand there's a thing. Is there a a sort of common shamanic principles to all of these alt dream spaces?

[00:57:40]>> I I think there may be, but they are they manifest they can manifest very differently.

[00:57:49]Um like in terms of say psychedelic drugs um I feel very very comfortable. I haven't taken them for a long time but I feel very comfortable with psilocybin silicon mushrooms. They they suit me down to the ground and they feel appropriate to magical practice in this country.

[00:58:14]It feels like there is um you know there is a tradition here whereas trying things like say Salvia uh or things that are probably part of the shamanic traditions of other countries and other cultures. I found that I really didn't get on with them so well and I didn't find them there was nothing in them that I recognized.

[00:58:41]There was nothing that sort of um spoke to me in those experiences. And with magical experiences um I only had a very very limited experience of the Inokeian system. It was just basically putting a toe in the water to see if the water was there. But uh that had got a very different feel to Cabala. It didn't feel like the same entities. It didn't feel like the same universe. I think that we have potentially um I don't think that a multiverse exists in the scientific sense. And I think even if it does, we'll never be able to tell whether it does or not. And it's probably a stupid idea because it's perfectly fine in fiction. Uh it's it's a wonderful thing in fiction but in reality it almost negates truth, negates any achievement or any act because um whatever we do or don't do in this world there are a billion other uses that are doing it or not doing it. So everything becomes but I think that in terms of our mental states yes there is potentially a multiverse inside our minds that we can probably have access to a potentially infinite number of spaces.

[01:00:24]I don't know. But certainly a much greater range of spices than the ones that we traditionally inhabit mentally.

[01:00:33]>> Right. But I do like I do like the assertion that there's something going on here. You know, that that there is a a thing going on that's being negotiated that there is a uh we are here. We are we are instantiated with with lots of possibility. I mean, for me, a lot of the problem has been as I become more aware of what is going on here, I see so much pain and suffering and grief and creatures consuming each other and and attacking each other. I feel like I'm in, especially on mushrooms, like I'm in this swirl of of uh uncomfortable metabolizing for so many beings. And I'll occasionally see, you know, Robert Anton Wilson in there or Genesis Poridge saying this is all ridiculous trying to help me uh see that humorous quality of magic that this is silly. It's like the Discordian church like when your you you you your own you know early devotion to to glyon you know which is this sort of joke almost as if we could pass through that humor um and really and really ground in that it won't seem as as as awful. Um do you do you uh engage with in some ways the horror of it all? Um, not really with the horror. I'm a, of course, I'm a horror writer. Um, or well, at least that is part of my remit.

[01:02:08]So, I have thought about horror and at the moment it's difficult not to think about horrible things sort of uh because there are so many of them about in the world. But that is that is probably not I mean I can get appalled by the horrors in the world without mushrooms and generally my experiences with psychedelic drugs are a much more they're an inclusive they they tend to focus the world in a way for me they tend to focus the world in a which is much more benoy and much more calm.

[01:02:55]And it doesn't deny the horrors that are happening in the world, but it seems to put them into a context that sort of um is more constructive perhaps than just cringing in horror, which sort of is obviously completely understandable, but sort of um perhaps if we saw things in a different way, that sort of uh we might have a more useful take on the situation.

[01:03:32]So, no, I think that sort of uh for I've always found psychedelic drugs, although I don't I don't really use them much anymore um hardly at all. It's more the writing is um makes them a little bit superfluous.

[01:03:56]I've um I've got a thing in the in the latest book uh my two main characters Grace and Dennis have early in the book um been given some purple haze acid which they've not yet taken. But I'm sensing that probably by the end of the book they'll find it perhaps a bit redundant after their psychedelic experiences in the great win. And that is kind of how I myself and perhaps feeling at the moment. Um I I I think that psychedelic drugs are a um a huge a hugely useful tool. Uh, and I'm really glad that after um research was stopped in the 1960s um that now it has been resumed and people are starting to realize just the wonderful things that are in there. Uh I think that's a good thing. But personally, um, yeah, most of my, uh, my psychedelic life is sitting behind the keyboard and sort of, uh, it's, um, which is actually sometimes as colorful and as rewarding and perhaps sometimes a lot more manageable um, than psychedelic states, you know.

[01:05:28]No, you're exactly like you could pick up the phone if and still maintain um it's funny because it doesn't feel important now in some ways. I've been thinking a lot about retrocausality lately >> and experiencing a lot of retrocausality lately. um the sense that that in some ways things I'm doing are I'm keeping promises to former uh to previous me but I also feel like I'm not it's I'm not having premonitions but I can feel the the emotional or psychic waves of things yet to come coming back and oh [ __ ] something now something's coming you know feel you can feel the thing >> yeah I mean I since I wrote Jerusalem Uh I have had a different perception of almost everything. Uh now when I am meeting a person or talking to a person I am more aware of them as a fourthdimensional shape that has that is informed by both their past and their future. Because of course um from a point of view of eternalism uh the past and the future and the present are all coterminus. They're all happening at once. Um there was a very good cartoon that I saw in New Scientist. This would have been over a year ago. The cartoonist Tom Gold who' um it was a two panel cartoon. And in the first panel, you've got um uh a protest outside a scientific establishment and the guy at the front of the crowd with the megaphone is shouting, "What do we want?" And the crowd is shouting back, "Aceptance for the block universe theory."

[01:07:32]And then the man is in the next panel is shouting, "When do we want it?" and the crowd are shouting back, "The distinction between past, present, and future is a stubbornly persistent illusion."

[01:07:49]Um, so I I tend Yeah, I agree with you completely. We are we are affected and shadowed by our futures just as much as our past. I think that um yeah, retrocausality is uh would seem to be quite possible.

[01:08:10]Um uh but it needs some thinking about. Um I remember in some of me and Steve Moore's earliest experiences with magic.

[01:08:23]I remember that after our first experience which came on us out of the blue, we wondered whether there was anything to be had from doing a ritual asking if we could have our first experience on January the 6th, 1994.

[01:08:45]Uh which had already happened by then.

[01:08:47]So we were doing something to make something in the past happen. But we were putting it in a wider context.

[01:08:55]>> We were saying, can you make this happen on January the 6th, 1994 as the first step upon an upward path to illumination?

[01:09:08]Um, and um, I think it it seems to work, >> but it's a different it's a different kind of magic though. It's a different kind of magic which corresponds to sort of the kind of activism I've been encouraging people do which is less about oh I want to make that happen and much more um I want to um engender conditions for different kinds of things to happen or I want rather than working on the facts on the ground as recorded by some historian I want to work on how nice we were all to each other when that fact happened.

[01:09:49]>> You know what I mean? It's like, not to say that everything's perfect as it is, but if we're doing magic for magic's sake, then we're not doing magic in order to fix the world. And this whole, and I've always had a problem with it, my own sort of Jewish medieval tradition of tikun alam. Oh, let's heal the world.

[01:10:08]Heal the world. As if what? The world's broken. The world's not broken. The world's the universe. The universe is just fine. you know that it's you're not going to you know >> Yes, I I know exactly what you mean and I have had some recent experience of this at least in my mind the other day for no particular reason I was happening to think so if I really could um affect things action at a distance if I really could with the power of magic.

[01:10:46]Um, if I could kill people at a distance with magic, just saying, you know, if in some impossible other world I could do that, then would I have a moral obligation to kill the president of the United States?

[01:11:05]Um, and I thought about that for a while. Um, and of course there's there's various reasons why you perhaps shouldn't do that. Like that would make JD Bars the president of the United States. So it's not going to be ideal either way. But what I mainly thought about was that no, I probably wouldn't because I think that probably, as bizarre as this might sound, I think that Donald Trump might be here for a reason. I have never seen the left wing as galvanized before in all of my decades of existence. I have never seen such a a thing that has united people against it to that degree. And I also think that it is this right-wing push that has been going on for the past 10 years. I think it it is so violent and so aggressive that it can only be born of desperation.

[01:12:18]Uh it feels to me as if they wouldn't be going all out if they didn't think that the world that they have existed in is not going to be here for very long. That there's a new world coming and they won't necessarily have a place in it.

[01:12:39]They won't have their power. And so that is why they are acting so outrageously.

[01:12:47]And I think that this this hopefully might break conservatism, might break fascism, might actually by showing people, yes, this is what you were voting for with your populism.

[01:13:07]This is what you put into power. happy.

[01:13:11]Now, I think that um this might end up being quite a uh a turning point. Uh mind you, I am incredibly naive and optimistic, so you should take that into account. But sort of uh I I I once did a tarot reading. Uh Melinda was here and she was asking if I could do a tarot reading for America and I thought well I'd have to know its birthday and and I thought well it's July the 4th obviously so America is a cancer which means that it's the uh what queen of cups um is the signifier.

[01:13:55]Um so I did a reading and it was unbelievably good. It was mostly alchemical cards and it seemed to suggest that America was as an alchemical reaction was going to work out fine.

[01:14:16]Uh, of course, as with anything with the tarot, it doesn't tell you the time frame that it's working in, but I could see a case for saying that the period that we're going through now is the period that in alchemy is referred to as the negrado or the black crow. It's when the matter in the crucible becomes black and putrid and when the alchemist themselves gives up all hope and despaires of the outcome and realizes that they've never been any good as an alchemist and that it's all nonsense and that it was a waste of time when they're at their absolute lowest depth. And that is when you get the ribbido, the red gold starting to emerge. There has to be that black period before the gold emerges, at least according to alchemy. But Alchemy has said some things that uh have proven to be true over the years. So that's what I'm basing my hopes upon.

[01:15:22]>> Right. Exactly. Even if they're not making actual explicit gold, there it's working truer on another level. And the the the other beauty of that of of that possibility is it means that our job now is again our job is to enable the collective imaginary. If we are moving from this world into another one then don't you want to participate in dreaming that world up that we'll get to live in? You know, that's that's part of the the meta message of your work is not just the stories themselves, but the act of participating in world building with you as a kind of uh uh uh almost soant dungeon master. You know, that we feel and that's the illusion or the reality of your books is I'm building the world with you and then learning how to build worlds that I can inhabit and write my own stories about in my dreams. um that's unlocking a very special collective human potential. You know, what I've been calling team human, but is really um may be what we're actually here for.

[01:16:33]>> Yeah. Well, I certainly hope so. And I I think that imagination is probably our greatest tool. It is what has got us all this. uh even the bad bits they had to come out of somebody's imagination. So the power of imagination is enormous. It's bigger than anything. But uh imagination isn't a gift that is just bestowed upon some people.

[01:17:03]Um I remember the songwriter and cartoonist and allound brilliant guy Peter Blackbad. He um used to be in Henry Cow back in the 70s, but uh and it one of his solo albums he had a song called King Strut and it had some very memorable lines. It said um imagination as a muscle will increase with exercise. King Strut developed his by having dreams and telling lies. This is the thing. Imagination is a muscle.

[01:17:40]Uh exercise it. Use your imagination.

[01:17:43]And by that I don't mean just watch and read imaginative fiction or fantasy because I think that if anything that is actually sapping the imagination.

[01:17:56]The fact that all of our imaginative needs are can be instantly met by one of the streaming services or you know the click of a mouse. Um I think that that makes for weak imaginations.

[01:18:12]I think that that possibly means that if that trend continues, if people continue to be passively entertained, then their imaginations will possibly atrophy.

[01:18:28]Um, get out there and imagine something.

[01:18:31]Doesn't matter whether it's any good or not. They imagine something and then try to imagine another thing and see how that gets you, you know, it be it's the beginning. Yeah. But it's the path to power and to making things dangerous and fun and sexy and and ultimately uh collaborative, you know, because you find the other imaginations when you're when you're out there.

[01:18:57]>> Yeah. Absolutely. And I think if anything that is the future.

[01:19:02]>> Exactly. That is the [ __ ] future. Um but you know getting finding you both as a a reader and now as a a uh if I dare I say colleague in the in the in the uh the thought wars um uh or the thought dances. Um it's it's great to it's great to know you and be with you and to share you with uh with some other people. I'm I'm I'm even call myself a fan. I'm a reader. Um >> that's that's all I ever wanted. That's all I ever wanted, Douglas, was readers, you know. And maybe we don't have to decide between uh dances and wars. We can have war dances, you know. It's sort of um you know, >> it's true.

[01:19:50]lovely being here and uh thanks for everything and uh hopefully you know u you know we'll talk again sometime.

[01:20:00]Yeah, I'm always here at your service.

[01:20:01]Anything you ever need in America, even if you just need a some candy or something sent, I'm more than happy to be your your facilitator. Um and if I'm if I'm in the UK, I will definitely uh let you know I'm over.

[01:20:16]>> That'll be lovely. Lovely. And so yeah.

[01:20:19]Well, you know, best of luck with everything, Douglas, and best of luck with everything, Teen Human.

[01:20:24]>> Oh, thank you. And and to you, too. I'll I'll be I'll be watching and I'm going to be thanking David Haskins in a moment for having uh cajjol you into doing this, but I'm too strong a word. Um, but thanks and thank you for being on team Human. Team Human is listener supported.

[01:20:43]If you want adree versions of the show and audio or video, go to teamhum.fm and click on support or go to patreon.com/teamhum and become a supporting member of the team. You get access to our discord um live premieres that we do of these of these special shows now, including an hour afterwards where we can chat together about what we just saw or anything at all that's on your mind. you get access to live events. Um, and it's just a nice way to to be part of this team. Uh, we appreciate it tremendously.

[01:21:18]It makes this whole thing possible. Um, but whether you can pay or not, please come, please be here. U, we appreciate your attention, your your support through your presence. Um, if you want, you can click on whatever like or heart or subscribe or something like that um to at least get the algorithms knowing that uh that you're on Team Human. So, thanks a lot. I'm Douglas Rushkoff. Team Human is produced by Joshua Chaplain and edited by Luke Robert Mason. You've been on Team Human, our last best hope for peeps.