Book Review: The King in Orange by John Michael Greer
I am not often moved to tell people about a book I read, but I am making an exception with The King in Orange: The Magical and Occult Roots of Political Power by John Michael Greer, because it covers virtually everything I have been thinking about for the past decade.
Nice and short (barely 200 pages) this is the place to turn if you what to understand the strange world that we now live in. Politics, power and the world at large cannot be grasped by standard means. The BBC, CNN, NPR, PBS, Vice, Buzzfeed, even so-called independent media won’t tell you what is really going because they simply do not know. And they do not know because they do not understand magic. Fortunately, John Michael Greer does, and lays it out for us.
First, a warning, if you are currently experiencing Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) you are not going to like this. But if you have TDS why are you even engaging with me? Friends, old and new, please do not be offended, but please do recognise that TDS is a very damaging condition, fore-shadowed by the abandonment of critical thinking. And also please know that, as Greer implies, it is actually much more than that. It is the result of a magical spell. Trump lives rent-free in so many people’s heads because they have been enchanted that way.
Greer is a good storyteller and has the ability to make two difficult subjects – magic and politics – relatable. He successfully demolishes the case that America is divided by race or gender, instead suggesting that it is in fact class which is the problem. He identifies four such classes; the investment class who make their income from rents, dividends and profits. The salary class, who are paid monthly and accrue all kinds of benefits (including healthcare). Then there is the wage class, who receive no such benefits and are often busy with insecure work which pays by the hour. Then there is the welfare class, who subsist courtesy of government programs. Greer places the responsibility for the rise of Trump squarely on the overwhelmingly left-leaning salary class, a group of people who exist within a profound cognitive dissonance, feeling themselves to be morally superior to others, while all the time wreaking havoc upon their own nation. From the book,
“The unspeakable truth which shaped the discourse of the pre-Trump era was that the Good People, the morally virtuous people, enthusiastically supported policies that plunged tens of millions of Americans into poverty and misery. In the usual fashion of aristocracies, the Good People insisted that the policies that benefitted them were the only morally thinkable options, and that anyone who objected to them could only be motivated by deliberate evil.”
The remaining fools who still believe that Trump supporters are simply racist low-information bigots need to re-read and reflect on those words, at length.
Greer lays out the pre-Trump situation in detail and believes that the “cascading absurdities” of American political life, a cosy consensus of establishment Republicans and Democrats who joined forces to gut the wage class through globalisation and foreign wars of choice, are coming home to roost. He then identifies the magical forces that were unleashed, first for Trump, in internet chat rooms in 2015/6, and then by The Resistance, against Trump, in 2018. He also, very astutely, points out the left-leaning origins of the Resistance in the New Age movement and the Theosophists of the late 19th century, and makes a powerful case that positive-thinking-law-of-attraction types separate into two strands, the straightforward positive thinking people who practice prosperity consciousness, and the megalomaniacs possessed of “a sense of entitlement inflated to cosmic scale”, namely Hillary’s supporters.
Although Greer does not explicitly advocate for Trump, he is highly critical of the pre-Trump consensus of Clinton, Bush and Obama. At last! It is so refreshing to hear this from someone else who knows both magic and politics. As I have said countless times, there is a lot wrong with Trump, and even more wrong with the Republican party. But the idea that Trump was ever some kind of Hitler is completely insane, something no rational person could entertain. It is a position that can only be taken by people who have been enchanted upon.
The real enemy, the real menace of the last six years has been the anti-Trumpers, the never-Trumpers and the Resistance. These are the people that have destroyed sensible discourse, installed a geriatric in the White House, laid out the conditions for World War 3 and accelerated the roll out of woke-madness across the West. And what is the defining feature of such people? For them it is all about FEELINGS. Nothing else matters. Trump is mean and crass and rude and offensive so he must be taken down. Feelings. Young teenage boys feel a bit effeminate, so they must undergo irreversible surgery. Feelings. Some people do not feel sufficiently included, so we better up-end the whole of society to accommodate them. Feelings. Zelenskyy’s on the cover of Vogue with his wife, so he must be a Good Person, just like me. Feelings.
Feelings are important. They tell us that we are alive as well as informing and enriching all sorts of experiences. They are an essential part of life. But that is all they are, a part of life. Feelings should not be repressed, but neither should they be worshipped uncritically. Feelings can be wrong, often wildly. Feelings change, often rapidly. The abandonment of thinking, the Great Closing of the Mind, is not a liberation. It is a regression, a backwards step for humanity, and the magic unleashed for and against Trump has put this on steroids.
Now, all this political talk will cause some of you to reach for the Aquarian Solution, to say that this duality can be transcended, that both sides are as bad as each other and that if you just raise your vibration it will all go away. This view is infantile because, as Greer points out, a magical war is raging and every single member of society is part of it, whether they know it or not. None of what is happening in the world – especially in the field of Social Justice – is the work of higher consciousness, unless if by higher consciousness you mean destruction.
For years now I have tried to walk a middle line with all this and to be open to all comers. But the truth of the matter is – and Greer identifies this too – that those most in need of a new perspective or a shift in consciousness are precisely the people that will not do it, because they believe that they are already one of the Good People. Frankly, I am sick to death of this. The hypocrisy and arrogance of the Good People is sickening. They are the ones driving society off a cliff because they simply refuse to use their minds. They are in thrall to their feelings, and refuse to see that the feelings which drive them are in fact fear, resentment and hatred. Also among such people kindness has morphed into naivety. Bad people exist, but they are not all white and male. Bad things happen, but they are not all the result of white privilege or colonialism. The disadvantaged sometimes do it to themselves, and it is not all the fault of systemic inequality. And the marginalised are sometimes better off that way, not excluded unfairly, but cast out for the safety of everyone else. When you have a thinking mind you can see this. When you are ruled by Feelings you never will. If you are even halfway in agreement with me then read this book and see much more. I do not agree with everything he has written, but the very fact that there exists one more book which resolutely refuses to bow to wokeness, and sees what is really going on in our world, is to be congratulated.
And just in case anyone was thinking (or feeling) that Trump is old news, well think again. It does not matter whether he runs again or not, he will continue to dominate the news-cycle and magic will determine the outcome of the 2024 election, just as it did in 2016 and 2020, with the forces raised around this moving outwards from there and changing the world irrecoverably. Trump or no Trump, the maelstrom of magic cannot be put back in the box and as a result the liberal, democratic idea of expanding equality and never-ending progress is over. As Greer says, “expect world-class meltdowns as that reality begins to sink in.”
The King in Orange: The Magical & Occult Roots of Political Power is published by Inner Traditions and is probably available from all good bookshops (as well as some not so good ones).
