Compassion is not Collectivism
Confusion over the meaning of the word “Collectivism” is quite common in the contemporary environment. You may encounter the erroneous assumption that simply because you uphold a morality of Self-Deification and Individuality it means you don’t believe in compassion – that you’re just a selfish brute, a narcissist, or an egomaniac. This is a false conclusion for as a free thinking individual you are free to exchange with whomever you want as much as you want, and as long as you are doing so voluntarily it is an act of free will and by definition not an acquiescence to collectivism. Collectivism always bears some amount of coercion if not out-right force. In truth it is always collectivist, socialist, and totalitarian systems which attempt to twist and mutate compassion to make good soldiers or police who can kill without conscience, to stir an irrational sense of impersonal love for ones own tribe or ones race, and so forth. The free individualistic and self-deifying Black Magician allows his compassion to develop freely and for it to develop him in return. Compassion is a great source of virtue and power and that is maybe just on reason Anton LaVey made it fully one-third of his system of Greater Magic.
It is the same for the act of cooperation. There are those who will point to any act of cooperation you appear to engage in saying, “See? You need collectivism!” Again this represents a wrong understanding of collectivism and obliviousness to the fact that it always carries with it some amount of coercion. Free and willful cooperation is the cornerstone of a productive society and the successful individuals who make it so. Cooperation is merely the continued exchange of value for value on another level that drives and fuels creation and innovation. It is in fact always collectivist, socialist and totalitarian systems that seek to control or prohibit free and voluntary cooperation between individuals, for instance by regulating and taxing certain transactions to manipulate human interaction and make certain forms of cooperation appear more or less valuable.
Communication is another area where confusion will emerge. Really more at the extreme end of the socialist spectrum, here the objection is that any form of communication demonstrates that you are part of a collective and that you are therefore being somehow hypocritical in rejecting collectivism. This is the extreme form of the old saying “no man is an island,” a ridiculous assertion that the only way to maintain individuality is to be completely cut off from any external influences of the environment. Communication via words and ideas is of course one of the great ways people trade value and learn and grow and is a vital part of human nature. In that it is engaged in voluntarily it represents no loss of will and no threat to individuality. Again, it is in reality always collectivist socialist and totalitarian systems which seek to coerce and control communication via propaganda, censorship, and political correctness (or as George Orwell called in in 1984 – Newspeak).
I realize that some who read this may scratch their heads and wonder why I have spent so much time on what may seem fairly obvious points, but I assure you each and every one of these – compassion, cooperation, and communication – have been presented to me as objections and evidence of mans need for collectivism and governance. Clearly there is much misunderstanding out there, and that is just one reason why it’s worthwhile spending some time considering the moral basis of rational self-interest, self-deification and individualism. Until we do, the Christians, Monotheists and Statists will always be able to claim the moral high-ground. If all you can say in response to their charges is “everything’s relative,” they will win the argument every time.
But if you can point out and articulate the very real and substantial immorality of coercion and sublimation of the self, then you will be able to stand your ground. Maybe in debates and such, but more importantly in your own mind. In your own mind you must understand clearly and without compromise why the Left-Hand Path is the moral high-ground. And you must also understand that regardless of any apparent goodness of anything the RHP tries to do –whether it’s feeding the poor or fighting bad-guys – they cannot do any of it without coercion and control. There is always a price, or as Dr. Aquino likes to say, “There is no free lunch.”
It is perfectly natural and normal for a self-actualized and centered person to have compassion for others, to be capable of sympathy, and to wish for love and companionship in one’s life. It is one of the tricks of the RHP to convince us that those who follow the LHP have somehow given up on such things. But in reality it is those re-born and Remanifested in the Black Fire of Set who come to know a much deeper and more powerful potential for compassion, a more objective sense of love, and a deeper sense of conscience. In these ways we develop stronger ties to others that transcend ethnicity, and may endure many trials and tribulations.
By embracing the LHP morality, it empowers and charges your ability to make more significant contributions to the various groups, circles, and institutions in which you interact. This is a foundational idea for what in the Esoteric Order of Beelzebub they call The Circle of Reciprocal Maintenance which demonstrates that your contributions to the right kind of group – one that embraces the morality of the LHP – may actually fuel and fire your own becoming.
To feel compassion does not mean that your individuality is fusing or blending with a collective, or that we can start blending our psyche-centric consciousness with collectives nowadays since we’re in some kind of new ‘post-individualism era.’ There is no such thing as a post-individualism era, and it should be noted that the idea we are some how ‘out-growing’ individuality as a species and growing into a collective mind is an idea that really comes from Karl Marx; it does not come from any of the Lords of the Left-Hand Path. Rather these teachers were trying to give us something to help us defend ourselves against this sort of idea of the diffusion of individuality. None of them went through all that trouble to utter words and suffer the slings and arrows of an ignorant world and establish teachings just for us to be able say “it’s all relative.”
If you read Dr. Aquino’s book MindStar, you may learn that the survival of the psyche is simply the idea of our individuality – the Subjective Universe – continuing beyond biological death within the Objective Universe, and that it may have existed even before we came here. In this teaching the only sense in which there is a blending of OU and SU is in the CSU or “Collective Subjective Universe,” which is something which can be used privately or creatively, but is more often used by monotheistic and statist systems to control you. Sure, by virtue of your separate psyche you’re still an individual no matter what, but don’t let your actions and your course in life be broken down into that of a slave. You were not given the Gift of Set so you could come to Earth and be a slave.
Coming Soon, Part 6: A Sense of Duty
From Sagaciy with love 