I don’t discuss politics that much on social media; it’s very rare that I do a political post. This is a political post.

How the nature of belief shapes our world and our perceptions is clearly illustrated via the changes I have seen within political thinking over the last 40 years. Sometimes I don’t really know what to make of it all, because the thing is my politics have not changed much over the last 40 or so years but the perception of them has. I’m viewed politically as a very different animal to how I was viewed in the 1980s and yet my political stance has not changed much within that time.

As a child of the miners’ strike of 1984- 1985 it’s not surprising that my political views became left wing. I tend to agree with Ghandi that poverty is the worst kind of violence having experienced poverty first hand during the miners’ strike. Watching what the adults around me were going through during that time. Their upset when I went to the soup kitchen during the summer holidays and the despair when they were unable to buy me any Christmas presents that year. The lack of heating that winter and the looks of worry that they tried so hard to hide in my presence. This led to my having political views that centred around a belief that poverty is bad, and wouldn’t it be great if everyone was just a bit nicer to each other. The idea of compassion become central to my political thinking with a view that no society whether it’s based on free market enterprise or state ownership will ever be successful, unless we as humans learn the true value of compassion. Mostly I would advocate for a mixed economy, which is what we had in the 1980’s. Of some essential services being state run and not for profit, like the NHS and public transport, while having free trade in other areas as I would want to encourage human creativity via free enterprise. It’s putting profit before the well-being of the people that I have an issue with not profit per se, there’s nowt wrong with making a living.

In the 1980’s my views then were considered middle of the road leftie, not veering towards the right but not communist.  Politically I was a bit basic. My views were nothing exceptional, nothing to write home about, an unremarkable middle left opinion. My contemporaries at University viewed my politics as a bit “blah,” a bit weak.  Around that time there were known communists in the Labour party who were viewed as too left to make the Labour party electable and Thatcher’s Conservative Government ran for three terms.

With the fall of communism, Thatcher’s successive governments and the rise of New Labour there was a shift. Labour as a party had shifted a little to the right and has in my opinion been progressively shifting to the right ever since. They are now more right wing than Thatcher’s government ever was and I no longer put my X in the Labour box at the elections as Labour is no longer a left wing party. That’s my view.

However, there are plenty of people who would disagree with me, plenty of people in the UK who view the current Labour party as a dangerous far left political party. So the party who are more right wing than Thatcher’s Government are now viewed as far left, as for me well I’m off the scale, now I’m considered a dangerous reactionary, far, far, far left individual.

But it’s not me that has changed; it’s how I am viewed that has changed. It appears that advocating for compassion is one of the most subversive things that one can do in modern Britain. Views that would have been considered fascist in the 1980’s are now within the mainstream of politics and we call them “right” or “far right” today. The majority of people in the UK wanted Brexit and Brexit they got and my views on compassion are part of the minority counter culture when they used to be within the political mainstream.

So what does this have to do with Chaos Magick? Well everything, as working with the nature of belief is one of the core practices of chaos magick. Often belief shifting is seen solely in terms of what one does in Temple, shifting your beliefs so that you are able to do rituals from a number of different paradigms. But what do we do that for?  Why do we practice belief shifting, what’s the benefit?  One of the big criticisms of chaos magick is that it teaches us to be a Jack of all Trades, which is superficial, that we do not delve deeply into any one paradigm and it’s all just surface level nonsense. That certainly seems to be the view of Moore and Moore in the “Moon and the Serpent” who describe chaos magick as “a fast foods results-based magic system that, like the New Age movement, was chiefly concerned with material benefits to the practitioner.”

We do belief shifting as that practice within ritual is a gradual process of freeing the mind from pre conceived biases and enabling the practitioner to work towards illumination. To see past the duality on which our world is built and realize our union with the chaos that birthed our multi verse.  In chaos there are no paradigms, no divisions, all that we see is chaos manifesting itself in many diverse ways. As human beings we are overly focused on the differences and suffer from the illusion of separateness.  We inherit many of our beliefs and some are formed by the culture in which we find ourselves. The chaos magician then seeks to liberate themselves from that. The most important aspect of belief shifting happens outside the Temple when we challenge our own pre-conceived beliefs, bias and prejudices so that we are able to choose the views that we really think are the most beneficial to human kind rather than blindly accepting the beliefs of our society. This means that chaos magick is a bit more than Moore and Moore’s interpretation of it as it involves going to the centre of our very being and exploring our core beliefs and challenging them on our quest for illumination and liberation.

What I see in our society, is an increasing polarization between people viewed as far left and people viewed as far right. What used to be right wing i.e. some of the current labour policies are now viewed as left and what was common sense is now reactionary. What used to be seen as fascism in the 1980s is now seen as reasonable.

This is what the power of belief does; our beliefs shape the world which we are in to the extent that right is now left and a basic political opinion in the 1980s is seen as dangerous and reactionary now. The chaos magician can look at this, what is going on politically and see through this mire, can choose not to accept the labels that are ascribed to them and be free to choose the pathway that they feel is the best way forward; as opposed to getting so caught up in the emotions of the thing that they fail to do the fact checking. What I see behind many of the strong political views put forwards is fear, fear of not having enough, fear of being side-lined, fear of violence which is why reactions on social media are emotionally charged as opposed to being based on facts.

I don’t have any firm and clear answers to the political mess in which we find ourselves; I wish that I did and that I could end my post with an optimistic stance, with a light at the end of the tunnel. All I can say is that what has transpired over the last 40 years politically indicates the importance of belief and its essential role when building societies. This is why it is so core to chaos magick practice as our beliefs have real consequences in the world. The current political climate has led me to re-evaluating my own beliefs and that I have come back to the politics that I have always had, that I choose compassion as the only political pathway worth striving for.