Make money doing the work you believe in
I finished reading Owen Benjamin’s new book How to Slay a Wizard. I’m a fan of Owen and did a post about him previously here, even though he is far from perfect (as are we all): neofeudalreview.substac…
Basically, I’m a fan of his because he stood up for what he believed in publicly and paid the price for it - he was cancelled for opposing the “trans agenda” even though he had a pretty great comedy career going at the time, and he remains banned on YouTube and other platforms because he sees through a lot of elite narrative lies. I like people who stand up for their beliefs, another one who comes to mind is the gym owner Ian Smith who stood up to the authorities during the height of COVID hysteria. And I like that Owen insists on the importance of phenomenological truth - starting from what you can see, hear, taste, touch, and not what the electric screen tells you is true.
With that said, Benjamin’s book was pretty mediocre to me - all stuff I’ve heard from him on his podcast. It’s an easy to read book and pretty simple, it meanders and tells vignettes and talks about various “wizard” tactics to gaslight people into believing or not believing certain things, but it’s not a structured argument and it didn’t really teach me much. He’s very much of a public performer and he self admits as an audio-visual guy who doesn’t read much. Anyway, here are a couple passages that stood out to me:
“Here’s the thing about all these spells: none of them work on you if you don’t want what they’re selling…A wizard can’t trick someone who isn’t already in a weakened state. The spell requires something from you. Not consent, exactly, because you didn’t choose to be tricked. But it requires a crack. An insecurity. A wanting. A belief that you’re missing something.”
“Chaos magic is the belief that there are no universal laws (which is itself a universal law, but wizards always live in contradiction), that perception creates reality, and that symbols and narratives can be charged with emotion to bypass critical thought and alter behavior. The mechanism is straightforward: belief structures intention, intention drives action, action shapes reality. If you can hack the belief, you can harvest the action….The wizard hacks your belief using charged symbols, simple narratives, and repetition.”
“The point is that when you vacate yourself, when you hollow yourself out through trauma and vanity and materialism and the externalization of all authority, you become a vessel for something. Maybe it’s demonic. Or maybe it’s just the worst parts of human nature somehow filling the void. Either way, the antidote is the same: develop a self. Develop discipline, morality, love, health, and gratitude. If you have a strong inner world, there isn’t space for something strange to get in.”
“You already have every tool you need. You can see, hear, taste, smell, and touch. Your five senses are your five knights. They never lie. The wizard’s entire project is getting you to distrust them, to agree to non-sense, to live in a world where what you observe with your own eyes is less authoritative than what a stranger on a screen tells you.”