“What I always expect from history is surprises, and surprises which I still haven’t succeeded in explaining, although I have made great efforts to understand.” – Jacques Lacan The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man

It feels like we’re on the cusp of an epochal change with what has come to be known as neoliberalism in crisis and an unknown future showing the first signs of breaking through.

Understanding our neoliberal present led me to a life changing book, Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Fisher, in turn, guided me to the writing of Richard Seymour, specifically his book The Twittering Machine. The central thesis of that book, that we think we are “tweeting” when we are, in fact being tweeted is something I think about as I, and I’m sure many of you, struggle with the amount of time we are captured by the algorithms.

Seymour has a new book out, Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization that grapples with our present confusing moment. In the book Seymour analyses the international rise of authoritarian leaders in the U.S., Brazil, The Philippines, Hungary and elsewhere and how these emerging movements create compelling, though false, narratives to explain real crises such as climate change, immigration and economic disparity. As Seymour puts it, “disaster nationalists offer a curative decivilization: violent restoration, followed by laughter and forgetting.”

Against a background of atomization, loneliness and toxic individualism disaster nationalists provide what Seymour calls “participatory disinfotainment” such as Qanon and a violent “death squad populism” of strongmen like Rodrigo Duterte.

The difficulty with an honest assessment of the troubles we face is the abstract nature of problems such as climate change and disaster nationalists know how to exploit this. Seymour says,

Many of the sources of our problems are obscure, remote and impersonal, and they can appear almost random. For example, it was reported in 2022 that austerity policies in the United Kingdom had caused 300,000 excess deaths. That causal relation would not necessarily have been evident to surviving relatives at the time, when the deaths would have been attributed to ailments such as cardiovascular disease rather than to the conditions making people vulnerable to the disease. If one wasn’t tuned in to politics, one might have been aware of losing a loved one, of misfortunes piling up, of the quality of life generally getting worse, without having a face to put to the crime. In those circumstances, resentment might either remain below the threshold of awareness or settle on a personal or political scapegoat.

Pro wrestler Kane in the ring with future education secretary Linda McMahon.

While the disaster nationalists offer “a nimbus of piety, sex and violence.” (see the six part Netflix documentary about pro wrestling impresario Vince McMahon for a perfect example of this) the centrist politicians who oppose them keep us in a state Mark Fisher described as “nihiliberalism”. As Margaret Thatcher said “there is no alternative” and as Joe Biden promised, “nothing will fundamentally change.” Seymour describes this now stagnant and fading order,

The point was not any admirable social goal, but merely the maintenance of a market order in which everyone competes in a state of ignorance: ‘a willed and deliberate unknown,’ as Raymond Williams put it, ‘in which the defining factor is advantage’. This pointless pursuit of advantage as the summum bonum of social life also entailed constant measuring of self-worth against the success of others, so that failure became unbearable at just the point where millions could amount to ‘literally nothing’.

Seymour spends the bulk of the book analyzing the qualities of disaster nationalists, their obsessions with violence and sex, the ways they use celebrity and technology, the differences and similarities between them and the fascists of the 1930s. It’s definitely not a fun beach read but if we’re going to counter this movement we’ve got to do some ‘know thy enemy’ homework. Seymour sums up,

Where real crises abound, disaster nationalism is enthralled by entirely fictional crises. And, inasmuch as it presents itself as a solution, it is also palpably hankering for a world-shattering, cleansing crisis: bring it on. This disaster fiction, I have suggested, is a kind of dreamwork enacted on the real crises of the age, conducting the molecular flow of economic, emotional and erotic miseries into a building tidal wave of vengeful violence.

Seymour hints at two promising suggestions on how to counter the disaster nationalists. He says we need a basis of, ‘bread and butter’ politics—addressing people’s material needs for health care and housing. But he suggests that this is not enough. We need to work, Seymour says, on the “bowling alone” problem described by Robert Putnam—the fact that we lack connections between people that used to be formed by churches, labor unions, clubs etc. I don’t think anyone knows how exactly to go about solving that lack of group cohesion but I also agree we have to try. The neoliberal order wants to keep us isolated on our smartphone screens while the far right offers a togetherness rooted in an “armed shitstorm”. We have to offer a compelling alternative based on solidarity.

There’s a hole in my late night soul once occupied by the late, great Art Bell. No talent can ever replace that voice, emanating as it did from the vast mysterious desert of the Southwest, spinning tales of the great mysteries of this land, from UFOs, to Bigfoot, to ghosts to the shadow people that haunt the margins of our vision.

I listen to a few podcasts in an attempt to fill that Art Bell hole including the Dark Histories Podcast. The host, Ben Cutmore, did an episode on a very unlikely exorcist, the Anglican clergyman reverend Dr. Donald Omand. Cutmore based the episode on a book, The Man Who Exorcised the Bermuda Triangle by journalist Marc Alexander. I picked up a copy of this book in the library and it proved to be page turning fun.

Father Omand’s ecclesiastical career first came to prominence when he became the chaplain of a traveling circus. It was his work with this circus where his exorcism skills first came to use. A tragic incident occurred in which an otherwise normal and much loved strong man antagonized, in an uncharacteristic and unexplainable moment, the lion tamer’s animals causing them to attack and kill the tamer. Omand was asked later, by the superstitious circus performers, to exorcise the lions.

The press picked up on this incident and Omand’s skills were soon in demand. He built up his exorcism chops (which he traced to the supernatural skills of his Orkney born mother), starting with possessed individuals to ever more geographically spacious and seemingly absurd projects ranging from roadways with high accident rates to remote “sea madness” vortexes in the North Sea, to the Lock Ness Monster and his magnum exorcism opus, the entirety of the Bermuda Triangle.

I had expected the book to be more absurd and unbelievable than it actually was. By the end of the book, Omand’s project seemed sensible as a purging of the psychogeographical bad juju that we all intuitively feel in our desecrated landscape of parking lots and freeways. Omand comes off as careful, kindly and sincere, a man with a sense of humor and not the attention seeker you might expect at first. The Lock Ness exorcism is indicative of his approach. Alexander’s book explains that he wasn’t really seeking to end sightings of the monster but, rather, to stop the negative “vibes” associated with the Lock Ness Monster’s apparitions. In so doing Omand not only keeps the British Isles’ enchantment intact but even ads some “rizz” to the mystic Albion of our dreams. I’m left wondering if the U.S. could use one of Omand’s large scale psychogeogrpahical exorcisms at this present moment.

I recommend you dig The Man Who Exorcised the Bermuda Triangle out of the dusty stack of your local library, but if you want a quick summary of Omand’s life the Dark Histories Podcast episode, “The Spectacular Life of Donald Omand, Exorcist Extraordinaire” is a fun listen. The BBC segment above doesn’t capture what I think Omand was attempting to do, but at least you can see him at work and hear the bemused opinions of the Lock Ness locals.