Pride and the Left Hand Path
Balancing identity and ideology with sovereignty and antinomianism
It’s been a long and interesting year since I first published the post The Psychedelic Flame on June 2nd, 2023. Since then, I’ve made some missteps and blunders in my exploration of matters related to the intersection of gender identity and the Left Hand Path. One reason is that I view such work as an essential part of the Word of Hermekate, which is hinted at by the fact that the word “Hermekate” combines the names of a feminine deity and a masculine deity in much the same way as the more recognizable “Hermaphroditos,” from which we derive the word “hermaphrodite.” The reckoning of gender relations within the wider Aeonic context is thus implied as a particular concern of the Word in all possible dimensions, including the balance of power between men and women as well as that involving gender identities that defy biology and/or fall outside of the traditional gender binary altogether. By extension, this is one particular focus of a Word which more broadly concerns itself with synthesizing the individualistic tendencies of the Left Hand Path as a whole and the Aeon of Set in particular with the more collective imperatives of the Aeon of Ma’at. This Ma’atian overlay is all about balance and harmony, with a special eye toward both truth and justice.
One thing many newcomers to the Left Hand Path don’t realize—perhaps because it’s fairly subtle depending on where you look and on what you’re reading—is the extent to which the Setian perspective already incorporates the principle of Ma’at, especially when compared with the perspective that prevails in the domain of The Age of Satan. This is a much more natural fit than one might think unless one understands how central Egyptian thought is to the Setian perspective, and how important the concept of ma’at as a principle was to ancient Egyptians. In other words, the influence of the principle of ma’at is so intrinsic that it almost goes without saying. However, one thing the Word of Hermekate brings as a modification to the Aeon of Set is a recognition that, given the Aeon’s inherent emphasis on the development and empowerment of the individual, a special effort must be made to center ma’at more prominently so that it doesn’t completely fade into the background; otherwise, there are going to be some problems.
Left Hand Path philosophy is deceptively complex. In the simplest terms, it starts with one clear proposition—one which is often misunderstood and dismissed immediately: The centering of oneself in regard to spiritual and personal development, as opposed to centering an external force such as a deity or a social or political institution. Even at this simple level—likely because of how deeply social human beings are as creatures—a great many people immediately dismiss this proposition as inherently narcissistic and potentially dangerous. Such a perspective is often regarded with marked suspicion, often a suspicion that the entire endeavor is nothing more or less than a pretext toward justifying inherently toxic and harmful behavior. This is a fair suspicion because the sad reality is that for some people, it is. In other cases, people hold the Left Hand Path perspective for more mature, principled reasons, but also haven’t quite “matured” into its more highly-developed forms of expression and thus make mistakes that can reflect poorly on the path as whole.
I have actively walked and eagerly embraced the Left Hand Path for about 9 years now and I still have a lot of learning to do. I’m a fairly sensitive and intelligent person, but there are understandings of the path that I am just recently growing into, and there’s an important and subtle reason that is pretty much impossible for outsiders to see at all: Many aspects of the Left Hand Path can only be fully grasped by learning from experience. Even if this is something a person is fortunate enough to have specifically pointed out to them as I am doing now for my readers, the importance of an empirical and subjective understanding of the LHP is something that is almost guaranteed to be overlooked and ignored until one sees for oneself how and why it matters so much. This is one of the inherently Saturnine aspects of the path: There’s an impenetrable boundary surrounding it that can only be passed by walking the path, and an understanding that only comes with time and with hard experience.
(Happy 50th birthday, Alanis!)
It is for such reasons that even people who have personally dabbled in LHP occultism themselves are almost certainly failing to see the path in a completely clear light. This is very obvious to me now as I look back on my experiences, especially over the past year in particular. As such, in the interests of offering a much more thoughtful consideration of the LHP in connection with the themes raised by Pride month, I am going to begin by doing what I do best here at Dark Twins: Narrating from my personal experience. Then I will move into a more impersonal exploration of these matters that will make a lot more sense in light of some of the specific examples I will have introduced.
My hope is that by the end of the post, I will have captured and conveyed some important ideas illustrating why the LHP perspective is not only much deeper than mere egotistical navel-gazing, but is in fact an absolutely indispensable element of building a freer, more just society.
Highlights of My LHP Journey
Looking back on my journey since starting Dark Twins, it’s actually a bit hard for me to believe how much I have changed in such a brief period of time. To be fair, one of the primary factors I credit for this has been my decision to get sober…*checks sobriety counter app* 11 months and 11 days ago. Addiction experts say that when we are living in active addiction, our personal and emotional development largely freeze, and my experience bears this out. I’ve grown more in the past year than I did in the previous 8 years since first formally setting foot on the LHP. The matter of habitual substance abuse and how it relates to the LHP is something I could write an entire post about, and perhaps I’ll do so around my one-year sober anniversary.
If you go back to my earlier posts here, you’ll see evidence of how closely I was following Father Nathan Monk at the time. In my subjective experience, he and I were vibing so closely that for a long time, I seriously believed he was following my work and intentionally dropping hints about it in his writing. In fact, I took a major turning point back at the end of July last year, when I met him in person and that illusion came crashing down when it was pretty obvious he didn’t know me from Adam. That was the point at which I made the decision to take this blog down entirely and spend a few months reflecting on my experiences thus far and what—if anything—they might have meant. I didn’t reboot Dark Twins until the end of January.
Similar “vibing” with Father Monk is still ongoing, and I’m just not letting myself get so swept up by it anymore. Case in point: I’m sitting here writing a post about the LHP and the boundaries between identity and ideology; I’ve already referenced the concept of narcissism. And now, as I popped over to the Dark Twins Facebook Page to grab an old photo of me with Father Monk, I see that around the time I started writing this post, he posted a screenshot from someone on Twitter named Narcissa Stique commenting about the imposition of religious ideology on LGBTQIA+ identity:
Why do I bring all of this up? Because, since I was making it a point to follow him on Facebook from the Dark Twins Facebook Page—and owing to his committed activism as a member of the LGBTQIA+ community—the algorithm started hooking me up with some of the other Pages he himself followed and interacted with, and given the elements of the Word of Hermekate I introduced above, I started following them myself, and liking and commenting on various pages. By the time I met Father Nathan Monk here in Houston, I was quite familiar with the work of Eddie Engels of Trans skater boyfiancé (known at the time as “Trans skater boyfriend,” and so I suppose congratulations are in order), and it was just about as trippy sitting in the same room with him all of a sudden as it was to be shaking hands with Father Nathan Monk. During that time, I also popped up on the radar of Trans Fury, having its admin warmly greet me on my own Page. I also began following and interacting with Art by Veya.
It was a pretty interesting time, looking back, and I have the benefit of retrospect now to say that my experiences over those few months were a pointed and humbling lesson about identity, especially since I was going through those experiences with an intentional emphasis on the Left Hand Path perspective.
As all of this unfolded, I came to much more conscious terms with the fact that in many ways, I could be regarded as gender-fluid. In light of this, I spent some time experimenting with that and with different kinds of gender expression, toying with the more traditional boundaries of the same. I even came to essentially consider myself a member of the trans community by virtue of my burgeoning non-binary identity, and to overtly subscribe to the label of “gender fluid.” I set my gender identity on Facebook to reflect that, and I’m honestly not sure if I ever got around to caring enough about my gender identity at all to bother changing it. Why would I need to change it, you ask? You’ll see.
I belabored this much more deeply in the post None of Your Business, but at one point not long after first beginning to sell the “PriDEMONth” t-shirt design that went viral last year, Veya established a new group on Facebook to organize for trans activism. I joined it, and in my introductory post, made the mistake of very openly expressing my Left Hand Path identity alongside my trans identity, because—as I’ll get to later in this post—I saw a lot of room for potential overlap. As I look back now from a much more educated perspective, it probably should not have come as a shock when my introductory post in the group—which directly mentioned Anton LaVey and Satanism—was filtered out and excluded by the moderators. I took offense and wrote the post I linked to above from a perspective of protest and indignation which, while I still think it made some important points, was also deeply informed by my own position of privilege. My own understanding of the full implications of the gender-related subculture I was stepping into was every bit as shallow as I was accusing Veya’s understanding of occult nuance of being. I had been hoping to build some “subcultural bridges” and felt misunderstood and unfairly rejected instead. At that point, I began my withdrawal from participation in the trans community, and even stopped paying much attention to its “current events” at all.
Instead, I spent a few months intentionally exploring various different perspectives on transgender identity, from the most open-minded and “liberal” perspectives to the most conservative perspectives founded on the gender-critical lens.
Here’s the thing: My explorations were completely sincere and born of a desire to understand the implications of gender as well as I possibly could so as to come to the most informed conclusions possible. However, doing so involved spending some time listening to quite a few different perspectives that many self-avowed transgender activists would have angrily attacked and castigated me for even thinking about. The amount of infighting in the transgender community is so high that it’s not really difficult at all for me to sympathize with anyone completely on the “outside” of the community itself who regards the entire effort for transgender rights with skepticism. It’s pretty complex, and within the boundaries of the community itself, not everyone agrees about fundamental things like definitions or objectives for the movement as a whole. Solidarity is nowhere near as tight or well-established as it needs to be for the movement to be more effective.
It all gets so heated that today, while I inwardly continue to have a great deal of respect for many transgender individuals, my level of esteem for the movement as a whole is—to be completely honest—fairly low. As a result, I’ve sharply reeled in my sense of identity with the movement and distanced myself from it. Ever since then, I’ve undergone a few different experiences that have caused me to revise past positions I once held with regard to the Left Hand Path. This is very much a position that remains in flux: In recent weeks—and even recent days—I still find myself re-evaluating positions I expressed and took mere months ago.
For now, I’ll end this little retrospective and move into the more impersonal side of this examination as I shift into processing and analyzing just what was going on over this past few months, and the things it has taught me about the Left Hand Path.
Identity and Ideology
The single aspect of the Left Hand Path that has taken me the longest to even begin to understand and appreciate is the way the Left Hand Path perspective deals with politics. Some of this has only fully “clicked” for me in the last couple of weeks even though, as I mentioned above, I’ve been walking the path diligently for about 9 years now. Most of this has to do with the infinitely nuanced perspective on the Self that is fairly unique to the Left Hand Path practitioner: As a branch of the wider path of esotericism, it takes aspects and models of Self into consideration that are widely invisible to most members of society at large, who hold a more mundane and secular set of views. As a branch of said esoteric path that is by far held by the minority of people involved in esoteric work, its perspective is even more nuanced still because the LHP pretty much turns many of the more popular views on the esoteric path inside-out and upside-down. It is for this reason that I assert—and sharply caution—that most people who think they understand the Left Hand Path have absolutely no clue about a lot of things unless they have committed considerable time and effort to actually walking the LHP. There are many ways of understanding the world that cannot be developed or grasped in any other way. This is one of the reasons the path itself is so lonely: To reach such an understanding requires a very rare mix of traits involving two major distinctions:
A tendency to inherently resonate enough with some of the LHP’s core values to actually take them seriously.
A level of tenacity and curiosity about the world and oneself that is very rare.
The second trait above is important because the first trait alone, while serving as a necessary pre-requisite, is not sufficient to progress very far on the LHP. To chip away at the various unconscious assumptions and understandings that impede LHP development takes a great deal of dedication and diligence. This becomes especially apparent in the example of ideology—and is especially true of political ideology. Some people—no matter how well they fit with the first trait and how warmly they regard the more basic LHP tenets—will simply never be able to reach the level of understanding that is afforded a person who also embodies the second trait.
The specific type and level of understanding of the Self described above is especially hindered by the kind of political polarization taking the world by storm in recent times and is made even more complicated by the specific lines along which that divide is drawn.
In terms of the political left and right wings (for now, I am going to disregard the Y-axis of the political compass—that of authoritarian vs. libertarian political perspectives—and to work with a simplified “left vs. right” perspective that covers both economics and politics. The reason is that I will assume a basic preference for the more libertarian pole of the Y axis, which is generally more compatible with the basic tenets of the Left Hand Path), there’s a somewhat jarring and disruptive disconnect between the priorities and goals of each where the Left Hand Path is concerned:
On the leftward side of things, there is great sympathy with the Left Hand Path in the sense that by and large, the left/liberal side of any given political system is more accepting of diversity and thus more pluralistic in terms of seeking to make more people free to be themselves. However, the left also goes about achieving this aim by tending to be more collectivist in its attitudes and approaches, which clashes with some of the individualistic priorities of the LHP. I will get more specific about the consequences and results of this in light of the experiences I shared above.
On the right wing, there is sympathy with the Left Hand Path in terms of the preference for individualism over collectivism, but this comes at a cost from the LHP perspective in that the right wing also tends toward social conservatism: There is a greater expectation that said individualism expresses itself within much tighter constraints of social conformity and orthodoxy, which clashes with the LHP emphasis on the uniqueness of each individual. On the right wing, one is given much more license to serve the interests of oneself, but only to the extent that those interests uphold the prevailing social order.
On both wings, there is a split wherein there are those tendencies that align with the goals of the LHP and those that impede and contradict them. No matter which wing one tends to personally prefer, there comes a tradeoff involved in making that stance.
If you walk the LHP and stand on the political left, you will enjoy more inherent diversity wherein you are more likely to be accepted regardless of your ethnic background, gender identity, and/or sexual orientation—but you will struggle against its collectivist tendencies, which will often be experienced from your developing LHP viewpoint as being rooted not so much in actual solidarity with your political fellows, but rather in a disempowering kind of co-depdendence that merely masquerades as solidarity. This is a major blind spot for most leftists that—again, as one who leans left politically myself—it took me years to accept and see clearly: The left wing roots much of its agenda in a perspective of victimhood that depends so much on moving in unison with others to actually get anything done that being too attached to it tends to hinder one’s progress on the Left Hand Path. In this paradigm, doing the social Good involves so emphatically reaching to step outside of one’s personal perspective (and needs) that it tends to eventually veer into outright negating them and putting the needs of others first. Given a resonance with leftist values, this is not necessarily something you would ever see as a downside—unless you walk the Left Hand Path. Then, there will be some cognitive dissonance. At least, that’s been my experience.
Conversely, if you walk the LHP and stand on the political right, you’ll feel right at home with the way it encourages self-interest—and more likely than not, your core identity will already align closely enough with the prevailing cultural norms around you that you won’t feel like so much of an outsider relative to the overculture—and thus, you won’t be as readily sympathetic with a perspective that takes greater diversity into account. Simply put, it won’t be as much of a priority for you, because you yourself won’t feel that uncomfortable along the lines of identity and will thus have a hard time understanding the experiences of diverse others who do. This will eventually develop into a point of tension and discomfort, beginning to cause friction as you advance on the LHP to understand the essential uniqueness of the individual perspective. As that developing understanding begins to chip away at your preconceptions surrounding social normativity, you’ll feel uncomfortable and will resist accepting the ways in which social normativity can be experienced by others as oppressive. You may very well resist the burgeoning sense of demand this begins to place on you to set your personal perspective aside as you open more to different ways of seeing the world.
Because of the tendencies above, there are two separate, but closely-related obstacles to development along the Left Hand Path that converge in a way that can be extremely confusing and confounding until it is well understood:
The more extreme or pronounced one’s alignment is on the left-right political/economic spectrum, the more one tends to project one’s Shadow onto those who stand on the opposite side. This is even truer given how polarized politics are these days: Those on the left will see, in those on the right, the oppression and pain caused by sharp self-interest and pressure for social conformity as great evils. Those on the right will see, in those on the left, the collectivist outlook and tendency toward expressing and belaboring social grievances as a great weakness; they will see the pressure to open their own orthodoxic perspective to scrutiny as a form of personal oppression.
The Left Hand Path itself also has an uncanny way of serving as a mirror into one’s Shadow, especially to those on the Right Hand Path, or those relatively new to the Left Hand Path. This is, in large part, because of its incorporation of antinomianism as a tool and method of self-liberation. The proper understanding and skilled use of antinomianism is such a subtle thing that until that understanding is developed, even a person who appreciates its more obvious aspects and its utility is bound to misunderstand what’s going on when they see it being deployed. Very little on the Left Hand Path is truly as it seems. I’ll be spending time focusing on this in particular in the next section.
There is one understanding in particular that seems to develop and to come into its own only after a great deal of “seasoning” on the Left Hand Path; it may develop on the Right Hand Path as well, but is much less of a “sure thing” than on the Left Hand Path, where developing such an understanding is much more intrinsic to progress on the path itself. It’s a pretty counter-intuitive prospect until one comes to see it at work within oneself. It’s such a subtle thing that, until something calls it into question and you begin to see it for yourself, almost sounds absurd:
You are not your identity.
Until you begin to understand that, your own ideology will be largely invisible to you in the same sense that a fish doesn’t notice the water around it or a human doesn’t think of the air that they breathe. This is because of the way we tend to identify with our ideologies. This reality betrays itself in our very language: We don’t usually say “I subscribe to right-wing thought.” We instead say, “I am a member of the right wing.” We don’t say, “I hold left-wing views;” We say, “I am a leftist.” “I’m a Republican.” “I’m a Democrat.” “I am, I am, I am”…and the more we identify with any given group as an “us",” the more firmly we oppose any corresponding, contrasting “them.”
However, as we plumb the deeper aspects of ourselves in ways that are simply much less likely to occur outside the Left Hand Path where such an inquiry is made such an emphatic and explicit priority—as we apply antinomian practice more skillfully and consistently and seek to challenge old habits while establishing new ones—we come to appreciate the extent to which almost all aspects of our identities—no matter how deeply held—are not essential parts of the self, but are instead “attachments” or “overlays.” Our identities are masks that we wear, are a mediating force between the true, essential self and the world around us. As we get more and more in touch with the nature of the deepest, most essential aspects of the self, we begin to understand many if not most of our various identities more as things that we tend to do out of habit than as things that we are. We begin to see more and more clearly how each person is not only a human being, but a human doing.
On a personal level, such a developing understanding dramatically colored my experiences over the past year. I had not previously thought of myself as potentially “transgender,” although I’ve always had an innate understanding of myself that in many ways defies gender norms; for example, my inner monologue is very often more feminine than masculine. It was, in fact, the work I had done on the Left Hand Path to challenge my core identities that opened the way for me to even consider identifying as transgender. That proved very ironic as I proceeded to learn a firsthand lesson in just how “sticky” identity seems to be: Once I opened up to the possibility of altering my identity in such a way as to think of myself as being transgender, it was almost automatically and without deep forethought that I began to incorporate it as an actual part of my identity, to the extent that I was rather hurt upon what I perceived as a rejection by new peers who shared that identity. After that happened and I distanced myself from the transgender community, it was just as interesting to note how quickly that sense of identification subsided.
Based on my experiences, it is undeniably plain to me that most people who have not done the work to separate their deeper sense of self from their various identities are simply more apt to view their identities as essential and immutable aspects of who they are—and thus to perceive and experience the same as absolute. On both sides of the political spectrum, such people are far more apt to vehemently decry and react against the opposing side—and thus to give the opposing side more power to define them as a person. Regardless of one’s political alignment, this is seen by a seasoned practitioner of the Left Hand Path as a deeply disempowering way to live.
By contrast, those who have done the work of separating self from identity will experience a greater sense of freedom and flexibility—having gained the power to consciously choose aspects of one’s own identity and even to adjust them situationally depending on one’s goals and one’s values.
Antinomianism and Sovereignty
On the Right Hand Path, there’s a strong tendency to attach moral significance to the position of the pentagram: The upright pentagram, with the single point up and the dual points down, is “good” and expresses the dominance of spirit over matter; the inverse pentagram, with the dual points up and the single point at the bottom, represents the dominance of the material elements over spirit, also implying the primacy of the ego over the same, and is thus “evil.”
Meanwhile, on the Left Hand Path, this dichotomy holds a different meaning so subtle that most people on the Right Hand Path wouldn’t even be able to break through their ingrained prejudices long enough to even fully grasp it:
The upright pentagram, standing firm on two legs, represents stability and even stasis—which, from the LHP point of view, can arguably be construed as objectively bad for reasons that I will be discussing in this section. By contrast, the inverse pentagram, balancing on its single downward point, implies and necessitates dynamism and constant motion. Think, here, of a top—which must persist in gyroscopic motion in order to remain standing. On the LHP, this is considered to be a very good thing.
This symbolism can readily be applied to the present discussion about identity, upon which deeper reflection can reveal some compelling reasons that the upright pentagram might be viewed as more “evil” than the inverse pentagram. In the sense that it stands for stasis or stability, with relationship to identity it thus symbolizes the crystallization into a static, rigid, and unyielding conception of the self—from which a great deal of the harm connected with today’s political conflict emerges. The inverse pentagram, then, represents a sense of self characterized by change and thus flexibility, a more nimble and adept relationship with oneself and thus the world that is only made possible by destroying the fetters attaching the self to particular static identities.
The resulting empowerment—and, crucially, the type of relationship with others that such a form of empowerment engenders—has consequences and implications that extend far beyond oneself and offer keys to a world of promise that are simply inaccessible to those who haven’t done the associated Left Hand Path work. Such arcana are among those that have taken me the longest to understand and appreciate. At the same time, such a perspective is one upon which it was most tempting for me to project suspicion and mistrust—that is, until I began to understand that what I was really seeing was my own Shadow.
As I proceed here, I will be speaking from the perspective of my own leftist political alignment because it’s the one I can appreciate the most. While the work I’ve done has resulted in a better understanding on my part of the right wing perspective, I don’t feel that comfortable speaking for said perspective because although I’ve taken great strides in prying away my sense of identification with my political views, I do still hold political views largely similar to the ones with which I first began my LHP journey. The difference is that my relationship with those views is now less emotional and more intellectual, as well as being less rigid.
On the political left, there’s been an increasing tendency of late to emphasize values like self-awareness of one’s privilege and the importance of making an effort to both interrogate and also to voluntarily relinquish various aspects of our privilege. There is a growing recognition that racism and oppression don’t need to be either overt or even conscious to be harmful to others. This goes hand-in-hand with a growing sense of empathy that impels us to make fewer assumptions about the lived experiences of others—especially where we benefit from power differentials in relationship with them—and instead to seek to become better informed about those lived experiences, mostly by listening to them. An aspect of this that comes by natural extension is a culture of mutual accountability, since we recognize that often times, the only way to become more conscious of our deeper assumptions is for them to be actively pointed out to us by others. Because this aligns with our native political ideals, we welcome this from our peers even where it can be uncomfortable and even painful to us, because that’s what it means for us to live in accordance with our ethical values as leftists.
Over time, these developments have led to the gradual shift from accountability culture to something more accurately described as callout culture. A collective mode of activity that was previously rooted in mutual consent among leftist peers began to take on more and more the spirit of obligation. The norm has shifted toward an ever-increasing tendency to be more assertive and even aggressive in leveraging accountability upon others. This has expanded from circles of personal acquaintance and similar political inclination to involve those the left perceives as being its opponents: In other words, calling out bad actors on the right as well.
The odd thing is, it’s not as though the left didn’t call others out before this development which is colloquially recognized by the term “woke;” it only makes good sense that the fight for social justice against those responsible for oppression is necessarily going to involve trying to tell them things they don’t want to hear. What has changed, however, is the dominant attitude about it all: The tone of moral outrage regarding behaviors that are increasingly regarded as harmful has sharpened to the point that it is more likely, now, to come from a place of scorn and contempt. As more of the left has embraced this culture of mutual accountability, there seems to have been the unconscious assumption that those who don’t embrace it are now all the more culpable than before for their ignorance. As leftists understand more how their own ignorance contributes to harm, they’re no longer content to call out the overt oppression of the right—they’re increasingly attempting to hold the right to the same standard of accountability that they have voluntarily adopted; they’ve begun to expect everyone to address their unconscious privilege, too. To the extent that they resist this accountability (which frankly shouldn’t surprise the left), the right is increasingly maligned for its unwillingness to play ball. It responds largely by trolling the left, and the harder the left pushes them, the more overtly harmful this trolling becomes. In response, the left gets even madder and starts policing even its own speech that much harder, as if to compensate. The entire situation is really unsustainable.
The core intentions behind “woke” are good and heartfelt, but the execution has been flawed, which has resulted in the continual escalation I’ve described; as a result, over time, the left has gradually developed a worsening habit of active “aggrievement” in which, rather than seeking with sincerity and vulnerability to dismantle privilege, the emphasis has shifted to actively seeking reasons to be offended and outraged, even toward fellow leftists. It has also begun to take the ethos of personal responsibility so far as to take on accountability even for the potential actions of others; a lot of the policing now ensuing on the left has become less about the direct harm of one’s own actions and more about the potential actions of others: Don’t use certain phrases because they’re now being used as dogwhistles by the alt-right; don’t make certain kinds of jokes because they might encourage bad actors to engage in hate speech, etc. As this tendency has worsened, people are increasingly focused on policing others and less focused on being more conscious of one’s own business.
This is—probably rightfully—perceived by others as overreach; and not only that, but the habit of hypervigilance for potential harm, whether intended or otherwise, has begun to reach the level of outright paranoia:
A lot of right wingers and neo-Nazis use Pepe the Frog memes, so now all frog memes and emojis might indicate hidden racism. A lot of fascists are into Germanic spirituality, so now we’re nervous every time we see a rune in someone’s social media activity (which is pretty rough if you’re a member of the Pagan community, let me tell ya); we understand the Overton Window and how it can be weaponized, so now we treat all centrists and Libertarians like avowed white supremacists even if a lot of them are probably just doing their best to uphold their own understanding of things.
It’s gotten so exhausting. There’s only so much personal responsibility a human being can take for all the harm everyone in the world might possibly be doing. There’s only so much energy you can spend in recrimination and finger-pointing, even if you really think there’s a good reason for it. The less chill there is on the left, the more easy targets the right has with which to own them, and the worse the deepening political polarization gets.
Lovecraft was a bigot, so no one is allowed to talk about Cthulhu unless they’re a bigot, too. Wagner is now known to have unequivocally been a supporter of the Nazis, so fuck you if you still enjoy his music even on a basic aesthetic level. Hitler gave roses to Nietzsche’s sister, so if you find any value in anything Nietzsche said, you’re just as bad as any avowed white supremacist. You get anywhere near the cooties of the canceled, you’re gonna live to regret it.
My own engagement with this process has been interesting to note. I remember sharing many of the above sentiments as recently as the COVID-19 pandemic; I remember the grand partisan taking-of-sides in the wake of BLM and QAnon. I noticed a special level of tension around other people I know from the Left Hand Path community: While my liberal friends were growing ever-more socially conscious and making noble displays of “divesting” themselves from Harry Potter fandom, I saw people on the LHP happily continuing to share HP memes, quoting Kant unironically, and unabashedly expressing their admiration for Lovecraft.
Were they sending dogwhistles?
Did they approve of white supremacy?
Was Stephen Flowers a closet Nazi after all?
Knowing what I knew about antinomianism—that is, the practice of engaging and even indulging in practices or customs that are socially unacceptable for the sheer personal empowerment that results from breaking free of the associated constraints—I could reasonably suspect that was more likely to be the purpose of such activity than intentionally expressing racist or harmful views. But how could I be sure? And even if I could be sure—was it ethical to intentionally share a song written by a known Nazi if you fully understood how it might make some people feel? Were these cats being too cavalier about acts which might cause real harm?
To be completely honest, my views about this have changed over time as I have increasingly indulged in my own antinomian acts; taking a walk on the wild side. Reading more work by Michael Aquino even though he had such a sinister reputation and even I could tell many of his views were more conservative than my fellow liberals (even in the classical sense of the term) would have been comfortable with. Buying a copy of LaVey’s The Devil’s Notebook and reading it even though I myself couldn’t stomach many of his attitudes, quite apart from any empathetic concerns I might hold on behalf of other people. I exposed myself to thinkers even I had no stomach for in order to build my own resilience. By the way, I actually ended up enjoying The Devil’s Notebook. I didn’t agree with every statement within it, but it was liberating to read it anyway. I’m a grownup; I can practice discernment.
This was how I learned some important lessons about sovereignty, censorship, and the consequences of speech. That’s right: There is very little one can assume about the deep intentions of others where antinomianism is concerned, because in the end, antinomian practice is actually at its most useful and effective when it’s our own deeply-held taboos that we’re breaking. So, where harm is concerned, it’s definitely important not to overdo it—if I have a lot of trans friends and I consistently share Harry Potter memes, it’s only reasonable to assume they’ll be hurt by it, and if they decide to block or unfriend me over it, I shouldn’t be too surprised…but if I let a meme starring Draco Malfoy slip here and there and some people decide to hold it against me for life…even though I also clearly advocate for trans rights, how much responsibility should I really take for that? It’s up to other people to decide which side of me to assign more weight to, and to make their own decisions.
When I know for a fact that half my friends have reached the point where they’re actively seeking reasons to be offended, how much of their resentment is my fault or my responsibility?
If they really know me as a person and still think I might have shared a given quote by Nietszche because I actually share his most oppressive views, how much sleep should I lose over that?
If they shun me…should I miss someone that shallow?
The bottom line is that there’s so much mistrust, vitriol and fear circulating now that it’s simply not even healthy to spend so much time so concerned about others that it takes over our every waking moment—unless we really do decide that the feelings and happiness of others are objectively more important than our own. Just as I recognize the freedom of some of my friends to hold views I might find objectionable, I recognize the right of my other friends to cede all of their personal power to the other people in their lives if that’s what they want to do. From the Left Hand Path perspective, a sovereign individual can only be responsible, at the end of the day, for oneself. Over time, my personal ethics shifted into a place where I stopped looking out the side of my eye for potential political faux pas…and if I don’t directly observe or hear of fairly bulletproof indictments of a person’s character, I don’t err on the side of assuming ill intent.
Many of my liberal friends might say things like, “We can disagree on things like food preference and still be friends…but not on genocide,” in reference to Israel’s actions in Gaza. In 2020, I would have deferred to the popular collective view and acted accordingly. Today, I have Jewish Zionist friends, and although I find the actions of Israel reprehensible, I can fully sympathize with a Jewish friend’s reasons for supporting the State of Israel because I’ve worked at a Holocaust Museum and I understand a thing or two about generational trauma. I know about the prejudice Jews have to deal with and what the realistic fear of antisemitism does to them. In light of all that, I can’t honestly say I would land on a different position if I’d shared many of their personal experiences. People are human. If I can see that my friends are just doing their best according to the way they sincerely see the world, that’s good enough for me. I can personally draw a distinction between overt and obstinate hate and a basically good person who makes very different decisions than I would. I’ve made some terrible decisions of my own and if my friends all judged me so harshly, I wouldn’t have any friends left.
If that bothers any of my other friends, they can go ahead and shun me.
Life is hard enough for all of us and no one is perfect.
I take the good that I can from any given situation and leave the rest on the table; if my fellows on the left can’t find it within themselves to do the same, they can go ahead and cancel me too. I am confident in the fact that if I’m not doing active and overt harm, I’m doing better than most—including many on the left who spend all day angry at everyone they even slightly disapprove of. At the end of the day, I genuinely think my Zionist friends have kinder hearts than my liberal friends who hate everyone that disagrees with their politics; I also live a much more peaceful, less stressful life by focusing more on kindness and good will.
From my experience, everyone I know who truly walks the Left Hand Path feels the same way, and acts in accordance…and despite a wide range of difference in views, absolutely none of them are out there in the world vandalizing synagogues, beating up trans people, or bombing settlements. That’s good enough for me.
To walk the Left Hand Path is to hold an interesting relationship with one’s values. For whatever reason, it’s all-too-human to put our political values front and center in terms of shaping our identities, and as the world grows ever-more divided, it’s easy to give in to the animalistic herd instinct that pushes us to stand apart from people with different political values while being relatively uncritical of the political imperatives of whatever camp we ourselves identify with. In such a climate, taking true ethical courage to disagree with those views and hold true to our individual, nuanced convictions is rare.
There comes a point on the LHP at which an inner tension arises between our commitment to being true to ourselves and those moral convictions that are honestly more a product of who we know and how they might feel about us.
However, when I post a meme that conflicts with the prevailing mores of my chosen political ideology—knowing full well that it is, in the end, just that: An ideology—I’m not being hypocritical by “compromising” my political values. Rather, I’m being fully authentic by choosing loyalty to my Left Hand Path values, which put such a high priority on individual freedom and on deeply-considered ethicality—which is a different concern entirely from surface-level social morality—that I would never intentionally commit grievous harm that would significantly impede the rights of anyone else to exercise those self-same liberties. I have learned enough about the difference between ideology, identity, and true selfhood to know that often enough, people are essentially being complicit in much of the moral harm they experience by renouncing their own sovereignty…and nothing I do can change that. It’s not my responsibility. Lastly, I know that all of my other friends who walk the Left Hand Path more or less act the same way. None of us are terrible people serving as channels for the true harm that darkens this world.
Not our monkeys, not our circus.
In Lords of the Left-Hand Path: Forbidden Practices and Spiritual Heresies—which I am currently re-reading for the first time in about 8 years now that I have 11 months of sobriety under my belt—Stephen Flowers wrote:
Literally speaking, antinomianism implies something “against the law.” But the practitioner of the left-hand path is not a criminal in the usual sense. He or she is bound to break the cosmic laws of nature and to break the conventional social laws imposed by ignorance and intolerance. But in so doing, the left-hand-path practitioner seeks a “higher law” of reality founded on knowledge and power. Although beyond good and evil, this path requires the most rigorous of ethical standards. These standards are based on understanding and not on blind obedience to external authorities.
This latter characteristic of the true left-hand path is the chief cause of its misunderstanding, not only for those on the outside, but for some who would follow the path as well. It takes an enormous amount of spiritual courage to persevere in the face of rejection by not only the world around them but by elements within their own subjective universes as well. Many break under the strain and fall away from the aim and sink back into the morass of cultural norms.
p. 12
To take this passage at face value, one can clearly see Dr. Flowers is a man who stands for personal freedom and would unwaveringly support the right of all people to be themselves, despite cultural norms, so long as they are doing so ethically.
Elsewhere in the book—as early as the very next chapter—he freely quotes the work of Julius Evola on the subject of Hinduism. Julius Evola held many racist views and openly supported fascism, but neither of those are the subjects at hand. There is not a single inherently prejudiced view expressed in this entire book, but alas—probably simply because Dr. Flowers dared to quote the wrong person—many speculate about his sympathy for white supremacy and dutifully err on the side of doubt rather than directly confront just how inconsistent such a suspicion actually is with the viewpoints he consistently expresses in this book. In the end, they make up their own minds—and in so doing, most demonstrate that they probably aren’t themselves cut out for the heavy ethical responsibility of walking this path.
Either way, I’m sure it’s no skin off his back. I don’t think he loses any sleep over it.
In like manner, I take glee in the occasional opportunity to revel in similar heresies by quoting the unquotable, absolutely free of guilt, and trusting that my true friends will sort themselves out.
In any event, during this Pride month, I will look in admiration upon the spiritual courage of the queer and trans people I’ve known and respected. I’ll continue drawing inspiration from Nietzsche and even cheekily drop an ironic Harry Potter joke even as I staunchly affirm their right to exist and to determine their own identity for themselves. If they can overcome their surface identifications, there is a great deal they might learn from him about Becoming who they are; I personally think the decision to transition is one of the most Neitzchean endeavors in the world. Proud trans people are, to be sure, true Übermenschen.
Happy Pride Month!