The Tonic Gnostic
Another fine writer who’s published his thoughts on Tonic Masculinity is Luc Koch. Luc is a German living in France whose introduces his blog with:
The world has gone bonkers. It is increasingly difficult not to fall into despair, black and white thinking, and nihilism. Like many others, I have come to the conclusion that the only way forward is to reconnect with long-lost, or at least culturally suppressed, spiritual and philosophical perspectives.
His titles include “How to Grow Your Soul.” His piece called “What is Tonic Masculinity?” defines it as opposed to ‘toxic masculinity of culture war fame.’
Luc sees biological drives and appetites as influencing and limiting our self-expression. Yet it’s also an access point to the higher realms, as he writes:
A good relationship, therefore, is one in which both partners work towards aligning themselves with the higher, using their biological bodies as a gateway, a springboard, to access Reality in their own, male or female, styles.
As a consequence, they will work together as a team towards a common goal, each in their own way, and support each other reaching a higher level.
Some red-pillers might object that this sounds kinda unmanly. But look at it this way: supporting your woman in her soul development doesn’t mean meekly going along with everything. It requires serious demon slaying. For when you are weak and fragmented, that is, slave to your inner demons and cut off from the higher realm, you will push back against her for pathetic emotional reasons, and you will not push back out of weakness when the situation requires it. You’ll be the helpless reaction machine. You’ll get everything wrong, and you won’t be the man she needs: who can protect and inspire her. Clear away those monsters with your shining sword, and you’ll be on the right track towards actualizing the higher masculine principle.
I’ve been giving some thought to what tonic masculinity is opposed to, because I think there’s been an emphasis on masculine as opposed to feminine rather than tonic opposed to toxic. But the culture war version is, I think we all agree, a manipulation to divide and conquer, and put forward policies with a female face that are toxic for all of us. In Sacred Masculine, my episode on William Hunter Duncan, I quote from Peter Linebaugh’s foreword to Re-Enchanting the World by feminist Silvia Federici. He writes:
A neoliberal feminism has emerged that accepts market ‘rationalities’ and sees the ceiling, rather than the hearth, as the symbolic center of its architecture and the ladder rather than the roundtable as its furniture.
Perhaps this neoliberal version is what Luc refers to as toxic feminism. To take a stab at defining toxic, meaning poison, maybe it’s wielding power over others, domination. Neoliberalism itself could be the ‘soft’ feminine power of monetary control as opposed to the masculine military control of neoconservatives—the iron fist inside the velvet glove. The power-over objective is the same.
Within relationships there are certainly power dynamics, with violence at the extreme. I know a mother who allowed herself to be beaten in order to protect the kids—until she left and the Solano court gave him full custody, something for which they are notorious. I urge everyone to follow that link, on which I’ll do a future episode. I can’t imagine anything more horrible than living with someone you’re afraid of in order to protect your kids, unless it’s not being able to protect them at all. But as Jay Rollins quoted recently, in an honest and vulnerable essay, “Hurt people hurt people.” It doesn’t make them toxic.
If I go back to my definition when I coined tonic masculinity, it’s a world that puts children at the center, surrounded by women, surrounded by men. Our purpose in life, I believe, is to care for the people and places that have been entrusted to us. In order to do that, however, we’re forced to serve the bankers who own the houses because they’ve usurped the right to generate our money supply as mortgages.
This is a toxic system where they wield power over all of us. It uses our love for others against us, to force us to work for them. In a toxic world, the oligarchs are at the center and we all serve them: men, women and children alike.
What does Luc mean by ‘red-pillers’? He explains in Red-Pilled in Disneyland, subtitled “the true meaning of Gnostic liberation or: escaping this world is not about shutting out the world.
He writes:
Transcendence means seeing the unseen as reflected in the material world, not overcoming the material world by declaring it irrelevant. It means paying more attention to reality, not less, with the mind firmly oriented towards the higher and the lower worlds simultaneously. …
But the way to it is through it—not out of it.
When we are in a dark tunnel, laying down and dreaming of the light won’t do: we must actually move towards the light, which means we must pay strict attention to the tunnel’s topography.
I love this description. What I call socio-spirituality is looking with open eyes at the reality IN the world while questioning the reality OF the world. The spiritual grounding allows you to look without fear, so you can really see. If it is a collective dream, a possibility I consider, the only way out is through—turning the dream into one we’re not afraid to wake up from.
As Luc says, it means you pay more attention because what’s here is a reflection of the unseen, and you need to understand the topography of that tunnel. I once wrote a poem called Mystic Currents that says:
A mystic is a cartographer mapping the ocean floor from the surface ripples. We are all born prophets. To see the future is no more than seeing the present clearly. Expect prophecy within your own home. Listen closer. A moment lived in the awareness of death is a speck of infinity, exploding. The answer to the conundrum: to be fully human is to be fully divine.
Some months ago, before the TM brohaha, Luc responded to the Matt Walsh film, “What Is a Woman?” He writes:
The word “woman,” just as the word “man” and other words that have a long and somewhat consistent past and are connected to the very core of life, are not mere symbols that stand for an object, as the impoverished and naive modern understanding of language would have it. They express not only a whole world, but a whole universe. They can’t be defined—a dictionary doesn’t help. And yet their meaning, to any sane person with a soul, couldn’t be clearer.
We risk losing the bottomless richness of our intuitive, non-verbal understanding of what a woman is. The kind of knowledge that is as sure as it gets, and because of that, cannot be expressed in words.
In short, we risk losing the history of the entire cosmos; our connection to the infinite depth of our existence, to every experience we have from cradle to grave; to our entire history, society, dreams, drives, feelings, aspirations; our connection to something higher, above our whims, to true love.
I’m not going to attempt to improve on that.
Last Sunday Luc wrote a deep and insightful post about perception, both sensory and what we call extrasensory. He sees both, if I’m understanding correctly, as a dialogue between the conscious thinking mind and the higher mind, for which ‘all that is’ is a reflection. He writes:
Just as we perceive thoughts and feelings without, we perceive thoughts and feelings within, but the source of those thoughts and feelings is not entirely clear. It might not be “us” in a sense; and even if it is us, the question is: what is “us”? If, during self-observation, our conscious “I” can perceive thoughts and feelings that another “I” seems to create, and this other “I” apparently has some information that the conscious “I” doesn’t have, where exactly does this information come from? We seem to connect to, to communicate with, something. We might as well call it higher.
This seems obvious enough when we think of inspiration. Countless artists and writers have described the process of manifesting inspiration during moments of profound, blissful creative activity “in the zone” as a sort of collaboration: whole creative chunks seem to come down the pipeline, and the artist's job is to map those unto their own understanding, their own experience. The ideas and inspiration may come from without, but the formulation, the execution, and the connections between various concepts, come from us.
In this post he mentions Rudolf Steiner, who the higher mind clearly wants to bring to my attention! On my last post, Nord Streams and the Bagel of Doom, Michael Fuller commented:
I am particularly struck and delighted (strange quality, I know), that you and Michael Hudson point out the fact that the US and the West have spent most of their waking lives since 1900 trying to destroy Germany. This resonates with the deeper thought from Rudolf Steiner that the reason they do this is to prevent Germany and Russia form working together into the future to help bring about a more spiritual, more brotherly epoch. ( I'm sorry this is so shorthand - please ask if you want specific details of Steiner's ideas [ 6,000 lectures, 50 books])
However, in a nutshell he suggests that for this kind, brotherly, earth-respecting spiritual impulse to succeed, it will need those of us in the West who can see through the mind-games of the Western military industrial complex to inwardly and outwardly support the idea of this Middle Europe/Slavic future epoch. This means, amongst much else, looking within ourselves and allowing kindness, humility and openness to grow, qualities which you reference beautifully at the end of the essay when you speak of the film.
The books that Michael cited were Steiner’s 26 WWI lectures given in 1916 and captured in two volumes called The Karma of Untruthfulness. I’m eager to dig in.
And today’s post was about Five Theories of Human Nature. He writes:
His first four theories are Hobbes, Adam Smith, Freud and Rousseau’s noble savage. His last are Dabrowski and Lobaczewski who Harrison Koehli analyzes in Political Ponerology. They say that we have different starting points, potential for growth and degree of actualization. Luc writes:
In this picture, we recognize that humans are neither fundamentally good nor evil. Rather, there exists a spectrum: some, like clinical psychopaths, are close to being fundamentally evil; others seem to be virtuous almost from the start. Most of us fall somewhere in between.
That is, some of us have little potential for developing virtue, while others do. But even those of us who do have this potential not always realize it, because it requires both motivation and hard work. Mustering both is so difficult, in fact, that it almost always requires going through transformative crises and hurtful realizations to break us out of our stupor and super-charge our motivation for change.
Traditionally, this process has been framed in terms of spiritual development: growing closer to the Divine, through sudden illumination, until we see ourselves utterly transformed, when the Divine spirit affects the totality of our lives and experiences: we bring every aspect of our existence under the umbrella of higher principles; everything will be ordered according to the Divine spark.
The premise in my book, How to Dismantle an Empire, is that people are inherently good and, when they behave badly, systems are to blame. In the Milgram experiments, people were placed in a system of absolute power over others and an authority normalized the pain inflicted and pressured them to inflict more. As an experiment, it contradicts Lobaczewski because the situation brought out the same tendency to obey in a random population, not one selected for psychopathic tendencies.
The Stanford prisoner experiment proves this further, with random selection between who would be guards and who would be prisoners. The capacity for cruelty was dependent on being put in a position of dominance and under pressure from peers and authorities. It didn’t matter whether someone was fundamentally evil or virtuous from the start. When we see some people as inherently more virtuous than others, it justifies systems of domination by our “betters.”
Who created some babies as future psychopaths and some as future Gandhis, regardless of the circumstance of their lives? I’d like to ask Luc, would you say that about your own kid: this one is just a bad egg? Born that way. Nothing we could do about it.
This is a belief in what I call God the Monster, a god who creates some people evil and some people good, some with little potential, some with great, some who’ll never touch the Divine, and some who’ll illuminate the Divine Spark. As a gnostic, which is how I also refer to myself, I believe that Truth/ God/ Reality wants to be known and creates us all equally capable of knowing and loving. I know that, as a parent, I want my children to know me. Would God be less loving than me?
So that’s a month of Sundays from Luc Talks, which I recommend for everyone as deep philosophical questions approached with an open mind and an open heart. I’m going to follow it up with Muskrat Love & Anarchy [Substack version], on David Graeber and David Wengrow’s book, The Dawn of Everything, that directly refutes Hobbes, Freud and Rousseau:
In The Dawn of Everything, Davids Graeber & Wengrow tell the story of Kandiaronk, or the muskrat, the Wendat stateman who ran circles around European politicians. They also show why Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari are unduly pessimistic about the ability of humans to invent and reinvent their own social structures. I add Chris Hedges to this doom and gloom trio and explain why blind obedience has it backwards. The three essential freedoms are listed, that every person NOT trained in obedience took for granted. My theory, that money has been 3500 years of obedience training, is expounded. I end with Kandiaronk view of money and the question from the Daves of 'when did we stop imagining that we could reinvent our social relations?'
and The Theodicy Triangle on Alister McGrath:
Responds to Russell Brand's interview of McGrath, "Is There Any Point in God?" by saying 'not a God consistent with the world.' Explains the theologian's dilemma of why an all-good and all-powerful God can't logically coexist with evil, then elaborates on how a God worth considering might be possible. Follows up on my video, "What Is The Matter?" on Iain McGilchrist by answering a viewer's question of why God can't exist—in an active, interventive way—in the dream.
The milgram and Stanford experiments were partially rigged by the ignorance of academia.
https://robc137.substack.com/p/the-milgram-experiment-and-how-we
I didn't go into Stanford but ivy league university students are hardly representative of normal people. They want to please the people running the experiment. It's a form of trusting authority.
I appreciate Luc for his willingness to write about the spiritual journey. All of us raised in the West, it does not come easily, our techno-industrial, scientific materialist, postmodern training gets in the way.