On UNVERIFIABLE PERSONAL GNOSIS
Entry 98 in the Triarchy Press Idioticon
98. Unverifiable Personal Gnosis - the fact-checker’s nightmare
We live in a world more preoccupied (perhaps) with truth, fake news and authenticity than ever before. And yet, for centuries we have all known that the royal court, the imperial or colonial machine, the aristocracy, the press, the rich, the educational system, the judiciary, the church… have been lying through their teeth to protect and maintain their power and privileges. There’s nothing new about a US or French President or a British or Israeli Prime Minister rewriting history. So why are we so troubled by it now?
And which of us is not reimagining the ‘truth’ hourly as we seek to justify, explain, assert, implore, argue and coerce our way through family or political or organisational or relational life? [That’s not to say we are all liars, but that we are often attributing to ourselves intentions, motivations, desires, thoughts and wishes that are infinitely more convenient and coherent than our actual experience of being ourselves.]
For publishers and other fact-checkers, the biggest problem lies with what has come to be called Unverifiable Personal Gnosis. There is no scientific evidence for dowsing, homoeopathy, astrology, crystal energy, god, synchronicity, source, grounding or bad luck. Nor for groupings of magpies or small flocks of cormorants turning north unexpectedly… actually meaning something. Yet we probably all know someone very well who acts as if there were evidence for one of these things.
Triarchy Press, in spite of holding out for scientism for a decade, has since published a number of books by remarkable women and men who draw on their unverifiable personal gnosis of various phenomena like these to propose theories, practices and ways of thinking and being that countless people find enlightening and transformative.
So what’s to be done when an Unverifiable Personal Gnosis is infinitely more help than another product of the white-supremacist, capitalist, military-industrial patriarchy? Do you favour spraying biocide across your milking parlour or an unsupported belief in biophilia? How do you steer an editorial policy in such circumstances?
These questions are more important than ever when we are trying to find our way as things unravel - climate, biodiversity, geopolitics, capitalism to name but four.
There’s precious little UPG in Imagining After Capitalism - the culmination of professional futurist Andy Hines’s 10-year exploration of what will replace the void created as the capitalist system implodes over the next 30 (or so) years. Except for the author’s absolute determination that we are not powerless in the face of change.
Hines laments the Ineffective Left’s inability to come up with better “guiding images” for the future than the Entitled Right’s desire to make yet another sclerotic patriarchy great again.
If we’re to avoid thugs and industrialists and billionaires trying to carry on running things when capitalist structures collapse, we need compelling positive alternatives - otherwise we’ll remain stuck in a combination of fear, denial, and false hope.
Hines has found that many ideas about what could be next are being developed by citizens, activists, and scholars worldwide. This book analyzes and synthesizes those views (hundreds of them), and synthesises them into 3 broad “guiding images”:
an environmentally-driven Circular Commons
a socially-and politically-driven Non-Workers’ Paradise
a technology-driven Tech-Led Abundance.
Imagining After Capitalism is a fascinating and informative guide to thinking differently about the future.
Passing the Time, as things unravel...
is a non-standard afternoon at the ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ in Hackney, East London.
At a moment when many people are wondering more intently than ever how things might unravel, Passing the Time is an invitation to become wilder, get lost, take action, reimagine where we are.
Come and explore interconnections between:
Art, imagination, change-making
Movement, nature, ecological thinking,
Becoming feral, wandering, walking, drifting
Collective action, creativity, qualia knights and goblin queens
A chance to move, talk, listen with Triarchy Authors like Clare Qualmann and Claire Loussouarn at The Garden of Earthly Delights.
See their – and others’ – books and hear from the authors. There will be ample opportunity to formulate your own UPG in the face of our unravelling.
Click on the poster above to see more details at Eventbrite.
There’s lots of UPG in Professor Simon O’Sullivan’s The Ancient Device: the story of four somehow familiar, rather dishevelled, sometimes sympathetic characters: Hare, Fox-Owl, Ribbonhead and King John.
Exactly who they are, where they are and what they are up to, becomes increasingly uncertain as the book draws us into the mist, exploring and experimenting with notions of narrative and plot, psychology and self, performance and place…
But since O’Sullivan’s work is primarily in relation to fictioning and myth-work, we’d hardly expect it to focus on essentialist ‘truth’.
Two of O’Sullivan’s recent books are launched at an event on Thursday 3rd October (today) at Goldsmiths. Do go if you can
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