Against Sustainability

Recently I’ve found myself wishing—when I hear the word “sustainability”—that I had a revolver to reach for.  “Sustainability” has become a coded mask for a cause I detest—the salvation of Capitalism.  Obviously, Too-Late Kapital is running down the road to “global” ragnarok, and has been doing so since the great take-off of the Technopathocracy in about 1830 (when, according to HG Wells, “the first superfluous human was born”)—ie, the Industrial Revolution, the triumph of the Machine over Nature.  Nietzsche dated the birth of the Terminal Human to about this same date; so the first shall be the last.

The whole point of sustainability is to save cars, but re-design them to run on sunshine or salad oil—to save highways, parking lots, jet planes, suburban lawns, bourgeois yuppie liberal smug self-satisfaction and “first world” entitlement—but to transform them all into something beige, crunchy, “ecological,” “organic,” smiley–faced, goodygoody—and to go on like this forever—“sustainably.”  To avoid the Fall, even if it means abandoning huge swathes of the human race and its habitat, so as to salvage the part that counts—US—or put another way, US (of A).  To escape to Mars with Mr Musk in a driverless spaceship “shared” by other billionaires, and fuck all hoi polloi and their degraded junkfood “lifestyle.”

Solar power and wind power, the panaceae of sustainability, are themselves source of vast hellscapes of aesthetic filth and poisonous pollution—the factories (in Mexico, of course) to produce those ubiquitous alien-gray panels and war-of-the-worlds-style windmills (impervious to any poor Don Quixote)—to cover the deserts with black glass, the seas with whining avicidal behemoths—so that WE can go on enjoying our horrid health-food, our idiotic iPhones, our crapulous computers, our tedious televisions—not to mention our armies and police forces, our bureaucrats, politicians, lawyers, silicon-valley “disruptors” and all the other parasites and oppressor-class scumbags who take but never give.

Forget sustainability.  Forget efficiency.  Efficiency is the devil’s shit.  Fuck “green capitalism” and its neat corporate cornucopia of consumer garbage and badly-designed “designer” crapola.  Technology will not solve the “problems” that technology created in the first place, any more than heroin will cure morphine addiction, or arsenic will save you from arsenic poisoning.  The only way to free ourselves from the rule of sick machines is to smash the machines.  The Luddites saw the light already in 1812.  A sledgehammer is the sole solution.

False Messiah

Jesus of Nazareth presents himself as a very obliging figure; he’s prepared to be whatever you want him to be.  World teacher and avatar; anarcho-Zealot revolutionary or proto-anticapitalist rebel (“Jerusalem Slim” the IWW hobo “Wanted for Sedition”); Apollo or maybe Dionysus; assemblage of holy relics (and sixteen foreskins); Docetic phantom or Gnostic magician; humble carpenter and Hellenistic philosopher; Middle Eastern dying-&-resurrecting fertility-deity archetype or homosexual; magic mushroom; even very God of very God and divine Savior.

Jesus seems willing to act as Roman Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian, Method-ist, Nestorian, Monophysite, Arian, Holy Roller, Ranter, Anabaptist, Southern Baptist, Pentecostalist, Chaldaean, Russian or Greek Orthodox, Hindu Avatar, Islamic Prophet, Taoist sage, or even a Jew.

He’s the Prince of Peace, or else he wields a sword.  He’s pro-family, or else orders you to spurn your father and mother and follow only him; he’s for icons or against them; he loves organ music or detests it; he upholds the Law or preaches antinomianism; he serves alchemical wine with the bread and roast lamb, or he sticks to prosaic grape juice and vegetables; he practices and enjoins strict chastity or he marries Mary Magdalen; he died and rose again, or else emigrated to Kashmir (where his tomb is still to be seen), or maybe Southern France.

I have to admit that for a long time I found none of these versions of Jesus totally convincing—all equally persuasive but also unpersuasive—until a few years ago when it occurred to me one day to think of him as a failure.  A failed messiah.

Suddenly he became attractive to me.  All at once he came to life.  I could take him seriously at last.  Perhaps even “believe in him.”

Jesus promised his disciples he would “come again while some of ye yet live”—but 2000 years have gone by and there’s no sign of him.  Assuming he was actually crucified—or that he secretly conquered the world and is reigning in glory over the Eschaton—there exists no evidence of his resurrection and ascension into heaven (which is where exactly?)—and in fact there’s no hard evidence that he ever really existed at all.  (The paragraphs concerning him in Josephus were obviously forged by later Christian apologists.

It seems unlikely that he intended to found a new religion, but if he did we can say confidently that the result left a lot to be desired.  Instead of universal peace, love, tolerance and care for the poor, the movement turned to holy war, murder of heretics, dissidents, pagans, sinners, Jews and witches; paranoid self-loathing and smug righteousness; and theological justification for usury, feudalism, imperialism, colonialism, nationalism and capitalism.

Of course some religious art and music have been produced over the centuries. If only the Church had restricted itself to stained glass and polyphony, they’d be no reason not to love it. Instead it has meddled with morality and dwelt morbidly on sin, guilt, hell and damnation.  How much nicer it all sounded in Latin, which no one could understand, especially when sung in four-part counterpoint.  The Catholics were, I believe, quite correct not to translate the Bible into vernacular tongues.  Have you ever actually read the Old Testament?  Shocking!  Smite the Amalekites, indeed!  And the Gospels are chock full of contradictions and obfuscations.

Jesus takes on a new luster, for me anyway, when contemplated as an existentialist (anti)hero, a sort of crypto Nietzschean bohemian drop-out preaching the will to powerlessness, a forerunner of Thomas JJ Altizer’s “God is Dead” movement, a hopeless advocate of Flower Power, a Rastafarian ganja-head, the original hippy peacenik.  I don’t need to believe in his miracles, just in his good intentions—and besides, neither really worked.  The savior who couldn’t even save himself…I can grok it.

Having considered all this, I next realized that Jesus was not only a Failed Messiah, he was probably also a False Messiah.  I trust my readers are familiar with Gershom Scholem’s masterpiece on Sabbatai Sevi, the false Messiah who converted to Islam in 1666 whose followers still exist as a Jewish-Sufi-Antinomian-Freemasonic sect in Turkey called the Dunmeh.  Sevi in turn inspired another wild False Messiah, Jacob Frank of Poland, who converted to Catholicism.  The Frankists (who may now be extinct, though I hope not) seem to have practiced an even more extreme form of antinomian excess, a kind of heretical magical tantra. Some of his followers were involved in the French Revolution, and there’s a rumor that Sigmund Freud’s ancestors were Frankists.

The true role of the False Messiah is to proclaim the esotericization and abrogation of the Law.  As the Ismaili leader Hasan II, the Assassin Qa’im(a sort of Messiah) of Alamut put it, “The Chains of the Law have been broken.” If “the Kingdom of Heaven is within you,” then you are (in potentia) already “perfect,” and all that you desire is holy.  Thus Moslems can drink wine, Jews can eat pork, Christians can achieve erotic bliss, having all become “as gods.” This theosis, to use the technical term, constitutes the esoteric message of the False Messiah.  The predicted “end of the world” always seems to be a flop, but in truth the world of compulsionhas indeed ended and the disciple of the messiah becomes the messiah, the liberated child of God, an angel of light.  In effect the False Messiah becomes Blake’s Satan, not the embodiment of evil but of the Divine Imagination, “beyond good and evil,” the Nietzschean free spirit, the one who overcomes the merely human and realizes the true alchemical self.  In short, in the eyes of the world, a dangerous criminal.

This messianic project, as we’ve already explained, is a failure.  It doesn’t matter however.  What counts is the “gratuitous act” of self-liberation, the assault on Heaven, the glorious defeat, the legacy of infamy.  Now we can say that Jesus was an anarchist, a queer, a magician, a mushroom, etc—and it will have some resonance.  All this will constitute a real Faith, one which we can be proud to claim as our own.

It’s been proposed that Christianity is an “impossible” religion.  Now we can admit that this is true, and that explains why we might want to practice such a farrago of surrealist nonsense.  Credo quia absurdum est—but it’s not the doctrine of the Trinity that’s absurd, nor the “scandal” of resurrection, nor the transubstantiation of bread and wine, nor the injunction to be “perfect.” The absurdity is Jesus himself, and that is why we can at last embrace him.

Defending Anarchy

Several people have recently said to me—half-jokingly—“You anarchists must be happy now that the Republicans are dismantling the government!”

I’m afraid I replied angrily and bitterly that such a remark (even half in jest) represents a serious misunderstanding about the nature of anarchism, which—in all its varieties—includes a strong critique of any form of hegemonic oppression by any kind of “authority.” Continue reading

Letter to anchorage anarchy

Dear Joe,

I forgot to say in my last letter that the New York IWW Arts Branch was organized by Mel Most, an old-time anarchist now sadly forgotten, Judith Malina and Hannon Reznikov, and Bob Fass.  Mel suddenly died, and that took the wind out of our sails.  A movie about Bob Fass was recently released (I missed it but heard it was good).  Hannon died young…  Judith is still going strong, heading for 90!  Thanks for reprinting the article from The Storm, great individualist mag edited by Mark Sullivan, several issues co-edited by

Yours truly,

Peter Lamborn Wilson

Letter to anchorage anarchy

Good article on unions.  I agree—and have been a member of several over the years, including a short-lived IWW Arts Branch in NYC, with members of the Living Theater and WBAI (Pacifica).  It’s no accident that Stirner spoke of a union of self-owning ones as the only possible strong (or even militant) organizational form for individualist anarchists.  Our Italian Leftwing Stirnerite guru “Brand” Arrigoni used to say the same, as did George Sorel (before he lurched to the Right).  See also Bob Black’s excellent article on the IWW in the new magazine Modern Slavery.   Unfortunately we now seem to be nearly as far removed from the possibility of a real radical labor union, as from Proudhon’s Mutualism or Landauer’s version of Kropotkin’s anarcho-federalism.  As the whole Movement of the Social appears moribund, no other organizational form seems possible for us but the “gang”—or as I once tried to put it more elegantly—the Tong.  But how to organize a “secret society” in an age without secrecy (a.k.a. privacy)?  Anarchist anthropologists like David Graeber and James C Scott talk about reversion to “earlier” economic forms such as swidden gardening—or even “the Gift”—but I sense no willingness amongst modern anarchists to embrace the luddism which would be required to “leave Civilization behind” to any real extent.  Individual revolt alone seems to remain possible—every moment lived outside the Technopathocracy is an act of propaganda by the deed.

Desperate Times,

Peter Lamborn Wilson