Map Making | 007

Ecology of Epistemology

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Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

A group of people can sit in a room for five minutes and, without voting on anything, establish a kind of unspoken, even unacknowledged, treaty between themselves. Not the written kind, but the functional kind. This almost imperceptible agreement in the room is deeper than merely behavioral. It is carried in tone, in what is laughed at, in what is passed over quickly, in what is “obvious,” in what is treated as too delicate to name plainly. It shows up in the tiny ceremonies of deference, in the way disagreement is permitted only if it is framed as “clarifying,” in what phrases that act like passports, and in what phrases that act like winks to secrets between a select few. A newcomer learns it fast, because the consequences of not learning it are immediate: confusion, embarrassment, social friction, the subtle chill of being out of step.

This is the Lower-Left quadrant: the interior of the collective. The “We” space. Not behavior (that’s the Upper-Right realm of bodies and actions), not systems (that’s the Lower-Right realm of institutions and machinery, even if we acknowledge this could be seen as “collective behavior” in some respects), and not private experience (that’s the Upper-left realm of our personal interior). The Lower-Left is the shared field of meaning in which a group becomes intelligible to itself. Culture, in other words—not as folklore or aesthetics, though those can be pieces of this quandrant—but as the invisible architecture that tells a community what anything means. Put another way: it’s the realm of our various worldviews.

Modern occultists like to pretend culture (whether the dominant culture or any of the various subcultures) is optional As if we can simply choose to be “objective,” or “above it,” or “independent thinkers” floating serenely above the tribal swamp—as if the term “occulture” isn’t a dead giveaway that we’re not above such thinking at all! That pretense is charming in the way a toddler’s insistence on unlimited cookies for breakfast is charming. Culture is not wallpaper. Culture is an operating system. It decides what counts as normal, what counts as noble, what counts as shameful, what counts as a threat, what counts as “the problem,” and what counts as a solution so obvious it barely needs to be defended.