Alchemy

In Defence of Abbie Chatfield Part 2

…and Crowley’s growing fixation on finding a “Scarlet Woman” who would be as capable of embodying the force of Babalon as Crowley was of embodying the Beast 666. This Scarlet Woman, once located, would assist Crowley in the process of his own further initiation into the sphere of Chokmah, allowing him to pronounce his word Thelema, which would form a new guiding principle for the world and shape it in his image.

- Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley by Richard Kaczynski

Abbie is upset. The usual pop and squeak of her vocal fry is quavering. She looks tired. She’s delivering a slow monologue in front of a green screen emblazoned with the lede from a recent Daily Telegraph article revealing she’s out of the running as a potential replacement for Jackie O on KIIS FM’s Kyle and Jackie O show. It’s not a fulmination and it’s lacking her usual vituperative style. There are tears in her eyes. Crows feet of worry. She breaks down when she talks about her mental health and how much fun she had on breakfast radio. Abbie is not the first woman adjacent to Australian media’s locus of power, or what’s left of it, to have her dreams and ambitions dashed against the rocks of legacy audience sentiment. She might be the last though. The aperture is closing, old media is dying, Abbie probably has enough infrastructure lying around her bedroom, nestled between the heaving piles of dirty laundry frequently pictured on her floor in her videos, to run a radio station herself. 80 foot dipole antenna would probably be enough to broadcast across metropolitan Melbourne. ACMA are too busy sending take down notices to K-Mart Mums for Facebook memes to notice a pirate radio station.

I’m only semi ironic on X when I confess my undying love for Abbie Chatfield. It is an objectively hilarious bit to commit to. I don’t so much consider myself a contrarian, more a Devil’s Advocate. And I’m a strong believer in a strict caveat to always trusting first instincts. First instincts are always right - but only in a vacuum. You can’t trust a first instinct in company. Communal instinct is invariably wrong. Social media means you’re never exposed to new political, social or cultural information in a vacuum. All think, is groupthink now. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. For many people, it helps them find a sense of community, a sense of purpose, it makes people feel like they belong. But that’s about the extent of its utility. Real insight comes from seeing things other people don’t, thinking in ways other people can’t, or are afraid to. It comes from letting yourself think like other people. And it’s not something you can switch on and off. There are certain paradigms, kinds of lenses you see the world through you can’t switch in and out. David Lynch saw the world as a dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream, everything he said and saw and made came from below a sub-conscious event horizon, he couldn’t see the world any other way. So it is for the pathological Devil’s Advocate.

I recently spent a whole day reading Where It All Went Wrong: The Case Against John Howard by Amy Remeikis. I started out listening to it, downloaded the audiobook from Spotify, but it became clear to me having Remeikis’ voice in my head represented a profound cognitohazard, like if I let too much of that millennial crackle cook my auditory receptors I might start arguing with my Dad, eating girl dinner charcuterie boards and developing various feminine neuroses.

It’s already been noted extensively the book is a mess of contradictions and errors but that wasn’t why I was reading it. Catching progressive doctrinaires out on research failures can be done by an AI, and publicizing them provides little beyond the smug glow of self satisfaction you get from reading it online. If you want to win a political argument, you have to understand your enemy, intimately, you have to know how they think and allow yourself to think like them. I frequently criticize criminal profiling as a pseudoscience in my writing but ironically, forensic psychology has a lot more to offer the political operative than the detective, you have to stare into the abyss long enough that it stares back.

That’s why I like Abbie Chatfield’s content so much. I have a diseased obsession with the things women write and say. You will never understand women by listening to what they say to you, you have to dedicate yourself to absorbing what they say to the world, especially when they think no one is listening.

The truth was, I wasn’t just reading the Remeikis book to glean some prophetic insight about the Australian progressive establishment, maybe on some level, I was trying to make myself angry. Annoyed. Anything to dispel the sudden onset of deep, grave and all pervasive happiness I’ve been experiencing these last months, which is the reason I haven’t written anything in so long.

An over abundance of happiness should be considered a mental health disorder on its own. Inverse depression. They say mania is the opposite of depression, but manic people aren’t happy. Happiness is something else. A sudden outburst of happiness can ruin a man, sap him of ambition, slow his productivity to a crawl. Your face gets sore from smiling. You walk around in a daze admiring fucking flowers and gorgeous vistas. You become a zombie. Men were not meant to be happy. Millions of years ago, when the emotion first manifested, as some kind of nervous response, hedonic centers in the brain, that guy, that hominid - I reckon he straight away picked up a club and brained someone. Started a war. Left his hairy hominid wife in a cave with his mewling infants and set out for new horizons.

“Why are you reading that if it makes you angry?” Ginger, the reason for my attack of joie de vivre asks. Ginger is tall and willowy with bright eyes and a whit of whimsical tattoos on her arms. Someone designed her in a lab to make someone like me happy, I’m certain of it. She’d triggered a solid two weeks of happiness after I’d met her that made me think I was going insane until I realized what was really going on. Thank the Gods I’m just falling in love.

Live as a committed bachelor for long enough and you come to realize a grim truth about attraction. It’s really just memory absent rationality. A man only really falls in love once and then you’re cursed to remember it, over and over, with different people. For most men, they either never experience this to begin with, or the first time is enough, one way or the other. But some of us have been marked for destruction by the Gods. A good memory condemns you to Hell, and mine is almost eidetic.

Abbie Chatfield reminds me a little bit of Ginger, just enough that it’s impossible not to drown in sympathy for her. And Ginger reminds me of Violet. And Violet reminded me of Elly. Who reminded me of Gen. Who reminded me of a girl I meet fleetingly on a plane. Who reminded me of Amy. Who reminded me of… And so on and so forth back to the beginning.

The beginning is what really matters, if you really want to understand yourself. Freud says it’s your mother, but I don’t believe that. My mother is compassionate, coherent, calm. The women I fall in love with are cold, complicated and crazy.

I think there’s a quantum element to attraction. Like maybe the kinds of people you’ll fall in love with in your life are encoded as 2D data on the outer edge of the universe according to holographic principles. Somewhere in the 6x10 to the power of 80 bits of information contained out there, there’s bundles of elementary particles meant to crash into each other, in different combinations, over and over again, forever. Maybe smashing your jaw bone with a hammer so the classically attractive blonde with big boobs will like you is as futile as fighting the laws of gravity, because sometime after the Big Bang who you were really meant to be with was fixed, etched on a dimensional membrane and nothing you can do changes it. Women, I strongly suspect, are a wave function, a superposition. That’s why you see the same ones over and over again.

It doesn’t make it any easier though. Familiar seeds of doubt and anxiety in my gut. Welcome back old friends. A cool bath of horror after the claustrophobic sweatbox of glee. Falling in love is the best cure for happiness. I should have known earlier. A few days before Ginger was brushing her hair at my desk, she has long, long hair, one of those big wide brushes. You ever notice what a unique sound that is? A woman brushing her hair? Nothing else sounds like that. I have long hair too but my hair doesn’t sound like that when I brush it. A woman brushing her hair sounds like how fingers massaging your heart would sound through a stethoscope. I was pretending to sleep while I watched her. She kissed me and left. I luxuriated in a cloud of contentment. I hated it. Could feel my edge fading away. When I got up I found that she’d taken the hair that had come out on the brush and balled it up in the small bin under my desk. I looked around the room, as though someone might be watching.

Don’t do that man. Don’t make this worse. My better devils said to me. Do it cunt, keep it, put it in a match box, put a ribbon around it, tuck in the back of a drawer so she finds it after you die of old age after living your whole lives together. My worst angels muttered. I picked it up and smelled it. Pomegranate. Goji berries. Those pink musk sticks. I tucked it into a drawer. That’s when I correctly diagnosed the problem and the fog of happiness lifted. The edge returned, gleaming in the darkness. It’s ok guys I’m back. Then I decided it was the right time to finally read that stupid Amy Remeikis book.

“Is it like watching horror movies? Is that why you read stuff by people you hate?” She asks later, which makes me laugh, because I’d never thought of it like that. Maybe it is, get close enough to the abyss it stares back, maybe I’m playing an ideological game of chicken, hoping one day I’ll read something that crashes into my own seemingly robust political identity with such force it will wipe it out and replace it.

I put the book down and roll over in bed, “I have a diseased obsession with knowing how these people think” I tell her, she laughs, says, “that’s silly”. I hold her head in both hands, less like a lover, and more like a wizard contemplating the orb of her skull. I have a diseased obsession with knowing how she thinks too and I’m no closer to figuring it out. That’s the great secret of radical right politics, I ponder. We’re not really trying to figure out how to defeat the left. We’re trying to figure out women.

The whole, billion dollar male self improvement industry, the manosphere, the “looksmaxxing”, the legacy pick up artist movement. It’s all just trying to teach men to create the pre conditions for attraction from first principles. That’s why incels and the right are so deeply intertwined. If you can figure out women you can figure out progressivism and vice versa. That’s the real reason I read this stuff, obsess over it. That’s why I’ve read every book, listened to every podcast produced by an Australian female political figure in the last 30 years. That’s why I watch Abbie Chatfield videos. To scry their secrets. Abbie rails against the incels, the manosphere, but the chthonic irony is they’re trying to do the same thing she is. I’m trying to do it too, albeit through apotheosis.

The key that unlocks the door to insight is reading what the other side writes. Listen to what the other side says. That’s where it starts.

Fellow travellers are often shocked when I tell them I think the greatest book on Australian political campaigning is Sally Rugg’s How Powerful We Are: Behind the scenes with one of Australia’s leading activists. Yes, that Sally Rugg, the gay rights campaigner, the ex campaign director at GetUp, award winning progressive political activist. In 2019 she decided, for inscrutable reasons, to write down every single political strategy and campaign tactic employed by her side of politics in a programmatic way. A literal handbook. Since 2019 I’ve bought 3 copies. The first one got so dog-eared rattling around in the bottom of my laptop bag during that year’s election campaigns it fell apart, the second one was stolen by an ex girlfriend and my current copy lives permanently on my desk, with tabs and margin notes. I don’t actually need to read it that much since I’ve transcribed so much of it verbatim in briefs for clients I have much of it memorized. From a recycling campaign for a Sydney council by Sally Rugg contemporary Dee Madigan to the cloying insincerity of Punters Politics, to Pro-Palestine agitprop to the campaign I’m working on right now, to save the Greyhound racing industry from progressive activists in the RSPCA - Rugg’s DNA cuts through every public campaign the left have run in this country for a decade. These campaigns have their own aesthetic language and underlying psychology that once understood, can be reverse engineered and turned on them. Their practices, when detailed, reveal fundamental logistical flaws, over reliance on digital collateral, massive material inefficiencies as well as the fact so many of their so called professionals lead disordered personal lives that are ripe for exploitation. But you wouldn’t know any of this in an evidential way if you don’t read the outputs.

Ginger reads a lot. When I met her she was reading The Happiest Man on Earth: The Beautiful Life of an Auschwitz Survivor by Eddie Jaku. The second she pulled it out of her bag, 30, maybe 40 fully formed and objectively hilarious jokes tinged with ironic holocaust denial formed in my mind. Do the doors. My worst devils muttered. Chicks love it when you joke about the wooden doors. To give you an idea of how badly I fell for Ginger - I didn’t say a single one. I said “That looks cool” with my tongue bleeding.

She furrows her brow as she fingers the spines on my book shelf, in the corner where I keep my collection of progressive didacticism. “I thought you were some kind of fascist, why do you have four books by Julia Gillard?”

I find this is my greatest frustration with right wing political campaigning in Australia. And men in general. Not a lack of intelligence per se, we have some incredibly smart guys - but the lack of intelligence. Or much of a desire to acquire it. The guys manning the Iran desk at CIA’s Langley headquarters aren’t reading David Frum they’re reading the Exegesis of the Means of Salvation or Commentaries on the Liberation of the Intercession by Ruhollah Khomeini. Much like radical Islam, the radical left can’t help but put everything in writing. Everything you could possibly want to know about progressive political culture is open source and waiting for you to read it. Piles of books and academic papers and journals containing the most miniscule details. I once found complete technical details of the preferred CRM suite for every progressive campaigner in the country by reading the gloating analysis on Climate 200 campaigns in a doctoral thesis. You don’t even need a subscription to the Australian Journal of Political Science for most of it. Here’s a voluminous monograph on “The War on Woke” from May last year that presciently predicts the rise of One Nation from when they were still at 7% primary that lays out the progressive reaction to it before it even happened.

Read enough of this stuff, swallow your distaste and wallow on through it, you start to develop a theory of mind for these people. A real one, not the patronizing one articulated through our own propaganda.

Setting aside the misinformation and flawed research sitting at the heart of Remeikis’ book is a paradox where she tries to cast Howard as both a bumbling idiot who dragged Australia into pointless conflicts for venal and ignorant reasons while he was at the same time, a master conservative strategist nefariously trying to stymie the birth of Modern Australia by public brinkmanship, culture warfare, and sophisticated media manipulation.

It seems evident to anyone with a shred of experience in Australian politics (which I have a skerrick of, I started my career in the Howard Government), these two opposing principles cannot be true at the same time. And yet in Amy Remeikis’ head, they are. And herein lies a secret of progressive psychology, one that if we’re serious about winning, needs to be fully understood, and weaponized against them. Call it “pathological syncretism”, or political alchemy.

The origins of this are inherently feminine, eloquently laid out in Helen Andrews’ work The Great Feminization. I agree fundamentally with everything Andrews says, but her thesis is that the world hit a turning point in 2005, which she cites as patient zero for woke but I tend to think this began a lot earlier, in fact I think it’s always been there, buried in the hearts, the very souls of women (and to an extent, effeminate men).

One of the reasons I think Andrews’ thinking on the origins of the modern scourge of political correctness have become so popular since she published it last year is that she’s incredibly literate on feminism in her own right. She correctly points out that it is feminism, not mere Cultural Marxism that is the underlying ideology of the modern managerial state. The problem for the political right is this iron clad belief, informed largely by the left’s own academic output, that feminism has evolved through phases, some of which take on a mythological quality, golden ages, that buried in the past feminism was possessed of positive qualities and then something happened in the 1960s that changed it, with blame usually being laid at the feet of perfidious Marxists for twisting a benign social justice movement to their own ends and that’s why you have to wear a rainbow lanyard to the office and take diversity training now.

But go back far enough and all the component psycho social pieces are right there. In Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men she delivers a searing rebuke of Edmund Burke’s beautiful and the sublime, which to Burke were opposing principles, but in which Wollstonecraft seeks that same alchemical syncretism of opposing forces:

But should experience prove that there is a beauty in virtue, a charm in order, which necessarily implies exertion, a depraved sensual taste may give way to a more manly one–and melting feelings to rational satisfactions. Both may be equally natural to man; the test is their moral difference, and that point reason alone can decide.

Wollstonecraft’s test of moral difference is the cornerstone of feminist thought for the next 250 years. The first time this most fundamental trait of female psychology was ever written down. Two opposing things can be the same so long as they measure morally equal.

From political philosophy to literature, no work better articulates this than Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, you see this idea writ so large it becomes wholly obvious. Frankenstein’s creature is horrific, abhorred monster, wretched devil and yet is tender toward a drowning girl, craves the love of a woman, and demands Frankenstein make it one. It’s neither a contrast nor a contradiction, but eclecticism of the beautiful and the terrible. Women write superior horror novels for this reason. It likely has something to do with the fact the female condition is one of perpetual terror, existing in a world where everything wants to either kill them or fuck them or both. In one of my favorite novels ever written by a woman, the reasonably obscure The Cipher by Kathe Koja, the female protagonist is not revulsed by an enigmatic black void that appears in a cupboard and mutates anything it touches - she falls in love with it instead.

Mary Shelley was arguably the first great female writer, (Wollstonecraft is pretty stodgy if we’re being honest) but the first editions omit her name. It would be 5 years before Shelley was credited as the author. That’s why I strongly suspect it contains a lot more about the secrets of the feminist mindset than anything that came before - because I think Shelley herself might not have known she was ever going to have her name attached to it. It’s like the Rosetta Stone for femininity. Maybe a Philosopher’s Stone instead. I don’t think it’s a coincidence her Victor Frankenstein confesses to an intellectual interest in alchemy in the third chapter. Or that women have historically been its chief practitioners and priestesses deep into antiquity. In Asia, the taijitsu, what we call the “Yin and Yang” is inverted in alchemical texts. Quod est superius est sicut quod inferius.

Consider the concept of intersectionality. Women, such as Wollstonecraft, have made great contributions to philosophy throughout history, but none as successful and pervasive as Intersectional Feminism. As Andrews points out, it’s the foundation the whole political super structure of modern academia and bureaucracy is built on.

Tesseracts of oppression and privilege that make less sense the more you look at it, but make perfect, inherent sense to women themselves, even those with little to no formal education in critical theory. So much so, that philosophy has come to dominate public discourse in the last two decades. You take the world’s greatest living male philosopher and sit him down with Kimberlé Crenshaw’s On Intersectionality and he’ll very likely say - that’s fucking horse shit. But pick out a random woman in yoga pants reading the labels on hair dye bottles at Priceline and explain it and she’ll say yep that’s how it is. This is the entire intellectual foundation Abbie Chatfield’s media career rests on. Women understand these concepts at a preternatural level.

Again, it’s my perennial frustration that more people on the right of politics don’t bother to read or understand what our opponents actually believe. The origins of intersectional feminism are fascinating and stretch deep into the point that femininity itself is rooted in contradictive, alchemical principles.

In 1851 an African American woman named Sojourner Truth delivers a blistering polemic in Ohio called Ain’t I A Woman the central conceit of which is that white women, and white abolitionists in particular, are beneficiaries of privilege she herself isn’t accorded due to the color of her skin.

“Dat man ober dar say dat womin needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted ober ditches, and to hab de best place everywhar. Nobody eber helps me into carriages, or ober mud-puddles, or gibs me any best place!”

I’m not being racist, that is in fact how women’s suffrage activist Joslyn Gage transcribed the speech in 1863. It’s now thought likely Gage might have taken some liberties with the transcription in particular, the very phrase “Ain’t I A Woman?” might have been retroactively canonized to contrast with the slogan of the British abolitionist movement, “Am I not a man and a brother?” Again, the transposing of opposites.

But this is the real patient zero for it. This idea of a mutable omni struggle against oppression which can contain multitudes, where a woman can be a man can be a black woman can be a black man can be a Jewish woman under certain circumstances but not in others - can even be an animal if they’re being treated harshly enough. That X can perpetually be Y and vice versa. Et quod inferius est sicut quod est superius. To a practitioner of intersectional feminism, black can be white, a man can be a woman, bad can be good at the same time, the material elements of something don’t matter, only their moral balance. The syncretism of opposing principles. Political Alchemy.

By that measure, Abbie Chatfield is Australia’s John Dee. “Who is John Dee?” Ginger asks, making me realize I said that last part out loud while I type. “14th century alchemist, astrologer, occultist. A magician. Early template for modern political staffers.”

She narrows her eyes into catlike slits and purses her lips. An expression of someone realizing they may have bit off more than they can chew.

I met Ginger at a party a couple of months ago. She was sitting on the floor next to me and I said something funny, or sad, or funny and sad at the same time and she put her hand on my knee, and we looked at each other and transmitted a burst of tightly encrypted emotional information that we’ve both been trying to decode ever since.

The gender wars are cold, more cryptographic than kinetic. We’re not trying to wipe each other out as much as learn each other’s secrets. Or at least we should be.

Men are increasingly cruel, a symptom of lives lived online without seeing women up close and personal, smell the long chain mono polymer clouds they walk around in from endless Shein orders, the goji berries, pommegranets and musk sticks, they haven’t felt the ridges of the self harm scars on the arms under the tattoos, forming the little ladders women use to climb out of whatever hole they started in. They haven’t properly catalogued all the alchemical contradictions. All that becomes subject of a 140 characters of mockery, of otherness, Daddy Issues, Borderline Personality Disorder. Nose Ring Theory. The Foid. A mythological entity that exists only digitally. The real things don’t fit into those neat boxes, women are vicissitudinous.

I stop writing and crawl into bed, not for the first time in these creatively fallow months. Literally crawl, like me, Ginger sleeps on a mattress on the floor. “Is it because you’re a vampire, you need to be in the ground?” Something like that. I look over her shoulder as she scrolls through TikTok in bed. “Look, it’s your girlfriend.”

Abbie Chatfield’s face fills the screen, her hair is wet, she’s apologising to… Donald Trump? The US State Department? Because her boyfriend had his visa refused at the Canadian border. Ginger turns the volume up. Abbie is midway through a, frankly unhinged stream of consciousness jeremiad. “Why do you like her so much?” When Ginger laughs it comes up as peristalsis and catches in the cul de sac of her sinuses in a snort. A chortle, if I’m being honest. It’s beautiful and makes me forget what I was just writing about. Which has been happening a lot lately. “Alchemy.” I say, and go to sleep.