Currently, we live in the Empire, the overculture, the marketplace world. No matter the bureaucrats at hand, it is a penal-carceral police state ruled by the trinity of Patriarchy/Individualism, White Supremacy/Colonial-Settlerism, and Capitalism: The Father, the Son, and the Hungry Ghost. Or The Authority, The Control, and The Annihilation. These archons are Kyriarchy Itself, the master cogs of the machinery of our society, the soul of civilization, and I have Named it thrice.
Its Virtue is the ability to thieve the destinies of those who are yoked within its grasp. By destinies, I very much mean the siphoned-away value created by workers, and access to material resources. The embodiments of these archons, those humans who control access to our collective material resources through their amassed wealth of our stolen labor value, have divvied up among themselves the means for survival, and you have to pay them to keep having access to the resources necessary to stay alive.
And yet all these resources are achieved (planted, grown, dug up/mined, harvested, made, cooked, refined, built, collected, etc) by workers. We live on a farm and are the livestock for a select, inaccessible network of individual humans/families who thrive off the rest of us: the Rich. They are stealing the Fates of millions to live in incredible, wasteful luxury and ease. The whims of these individuals is at the expense of all of us.
It's no secret the US is a huge tax haven for the ultra-wealthy, where labor is dirt cheap and its citizenry aren't even entitled to healthcare, not even the "essential" laborers. It's a dire place for most people who aren't "middle class" and whyt, for those whose families have not gathered generational wealth in which to raise children, be material/financial help or support, or pass down wealth. Because of the enslavement of Black, brown, and indigenous people in the US' conception, as well as the projects of terror during the Jim Crow era, folks from those ancestries are often poor because of that lack of generational wealth. You see a lot of the same thing in Appalachia, especially here in West Virginia where lots of poor immigrants settled (mining!) and where they've been doing extraction-capitalism for generations.
The primary function of white supremacy is to destroy community and install hierarchy. My Craft abhors institutionalism and hierarchy. Witchcraft and the Other is branded the enemy, but it is the authoritarian culture-sickness that plagues both body and the Land. Indigenous peoples of the western plains occupied by the United States have called this Western civilization the Swallowing Monster.
Because of this long project of disenchantment, many of us have forgotten how to Dream, how to truly Sense, to be embodied. The survival trauma of having to push though discomfort, disease, injury, disability, to keep working and surviving in this manufactured hellscape numbs us to our deep desires, diminishes our imaginations, limits our capacity for novel thinking and creativity, and lulls us into a dreamless sleepwalk. Even many of us involved in magic, we have forgotten what is possible.
This is why I write -- to remind us what is possible. I am firmly in the project of Re-Enchantment, and I am blessed with a Liminal Self that has Crossed the Lethe many times, and I've seen so many strange sights--I can remember tomorrow, where my soul has been.
Let us Dream together a new world, new ways, into being, a waking world that nurtures and nourishes each of us instead, allows us to tell our stories, liberates us into our fullest selves and grows those selves to new depths and heights, a paradise.
Anything worthwhile is dangerous, and nothing is ever accomplished alone.
--from my forthcoming work, Battle Cries.