Another World, May 2022
Welcome to our many new supporting members! If you have any questions about your supporters’ benefits, please email us at distro@abeautifulresistance.com.
Upcoming Courses
We have announced several courses for the SPRING/SUMMER course period of Académie Hérètique: another installment of Asa West’s popular course on Green Witchcraft and also Alley Valkyrie’s Land: Loss&Reconnection. If you would like to take either of these as part of your member benefit, please email us at distro@abeautifulresistance.com
Other News
We’ve also announced the upcoming publication of Courting The Wild Queen, by poet, herbalist, and mystic Seán Pádraig O'Donoghue. The pre-order is now open, and please note that your member benefit can apply to all orders, even to pre-orders. For more information on the release, see this link.
We’ll soon also be announcing the publication date of The White Deer, by Melinda Redinger. This will also be our first publication in multiple editions, including a fine edition. More information coming soon!
In this month’s Another World
Alienation and Neoliberalism: an interview with Angie Speaks
An interview with cultural commentator Angie Speaks:
I also think that on a spiritual level, identity narcissism is a form of “false purpose,” a void-filling exercise. We are living in the “age of death” where consumer goods are prioritised over the collective good, so naturally the impulse to view yourself and others as commodities will flourish too. The spiritual void this creates in an environment where people are totally rudderless makes narcissism appealing as an antidote to nihilism.
The most challenging aspect of the period we currently inhabit is that the values and institutions that once gave people a sense of cohesion are no longer viable under neoliberalism; therefore, this new form of “cope” is posing itself as the new meta-narrative despite being part of the problem.
An excerpt from Courting The Wild Queen, by Seán Pádraig O'Donoghue:
People now tend to speak of sovereignty as being individual and personal—our right to control our own bodies and lives. But the individual rational actor is an invention of capitalism, a concept that severs our connections to land and community. In reality, our bodies and our minds are ecologies—communities of myriad beings coming together and giving rise to a more or less shared consciousness—and are completely interdependent with the humans and other-than-humans who share our landscape. Just as a god might be the mind that arises from a forest, a river, a planet or a cluster of galaxies, so too each person’s consciousness is a collective consciousness born of the matter and energy that make up our beings.
To be sovereign is to be in alignment, to be self-possessed—which inherently means to be conscious of the ecological selves we are members of in the same way that our individual neurons are members of a brain, a nervous system, a neuro-endocrine emergent self-regulating feedback loop, a human body, a family, a community, a species, an ecology, a landscape, a planet, a solar system, a galaxy, a universe, the body of God Herself.
From Rhyd Wildermuth’s manuscript-in-progress:
The problem is that the Professional-Managerial Class cannot actually speak for the rest of the working class, because although they hold cultural and political positions which give them the influence that can actually change and shape society, their material conditions, lifestyles, and values are closer to the capitalist class. What they imagine as a march towards progress and equality, what for them looks like liberation, appears not only out-of-touch but also dictatorial to the rest of the working class whose concerns are more practical and related to their actual economic situations.
This difference is particularly sharp when it comes to Woke analysis of the family and traditional cultural values. A migrant agricultural worker is much less likely to see Woke calls to “Abolish the Family” or challenge binary gender roles as helpful or even good, especially because their own families are the only refuges they have against the alienation and exploitation of capitalism. But we must also ask, why would a construction worker really care that facial feminization surgery is not always fully covered by medical insurance companies when he doesn’t even have medical insurance? And what relevance are any of the discourses about white privilege, cis-heteronormativity, or the gender-pay gap in Silicon Valley tech companies to a minimum-waged retail clerk (of any gender or racial group) at Walmart?