“That is the trick­ery of the witch­craft. They want us to believe…”

Decon­tex­tu­al­ized like this, this prompt makes me think about the amount of self-deception nec­es­sary in sus­tain­ing an unex­am­ined life of priv­i­lege and inac­tion in a self-destructive, mas­sively top heavy cul­ture of death, poised to come crash­ing down around our shoul­ders at any moment. There is sleight of hand in obscur­ing inter­lock­ing sys­tems of oppres­sion but there is also will­ful belief.

On the one hand, per­haps it refers to witch­craft: the culture-wide per­for­mance involved in sus­tain­ing a vision of “the West” as coher­ent, just, ratio­nal, demo­c­ra­tic. Or  the ide­ol­ogy that obscures the inequitable work­ings of cap­i­tal­ist eco­nomic sys­tem in con­junc­tion with var­i­ous cul­tural and insti­tu­tional sys­tems of mak­ing “isms” simul­ta­ne­ously pro­duc­tive and invis­i­ble. Or the dif­fu­sion of a matrix of power that inter­acts that pro­duces and acts upon var­i­ous dif­fer­ent sub­jects. This is all witchcraft.

On the other hand, per­haps it refers to the witch­craft that ensures we remain invested in the sta­tus quo in so far as we can­not con­ceive of some­thing else, some­thing fea­si­ble. Or, as I am often caught, if we can con­ceive of some­thing else, some utopian vision of lib­er­a­tion or an end to strug­gle but find our­selves too woven into our own web of cyn­i­cism and dis­trust of the state, left­ist alter­na­tives, and our­selves: a posi­tion equally apo­lit­i­cal. In this way cyn­i­cism can often be a crutch that dis­avows a more ten­able posi­tion. It’s also a decid­edly white mas­culin­ist posi­tion and, hon­estly, fuck that. I’d like to think I grew out of this posi­tion years ago but in my weaker moments, I find myself think­ing that John Zerzan, Der­rick Jensen, and Ted Kaczyn­ski might have their redeem­ing qualities.