Sacred Rites: Journal Entries of a Gnostic Heretic
Antero Alli
Falcon Press
2023

review by R.U. Sirius

Antero Alli has been a master at gifting others with their presence in the moment and in the world as it is… and the world that we feel and imagine, although he is too humble to make such claims. His ritual journal entries bring to life the personal and group dynamics of some of his “sacred rites.” Herein Alli takes us with him as he dances on light and falls, stumbles and hurts, rises with great inner strength and then backs off and makes space for the others to struggle and play with their own angels, demons, ancestral Jungian archetypes, mutable gendered forms, true memories and conjured reflections and refractions of their personal and group experiences past and present.

Who else has shared hir journey into a sort of embodiment of depth psychology married to the theatrical and cinematic artistry of a unique individual mind? Did Gurdjieff leave behind such generous notes? Did Artaud ever climb out of his own tortured mind to guide others into a theater of revelation and share the results? I think not.

As a lonely writer and minor league media trickster playing and toiling in the fields of counterculture and model agnosticism — I am jealous of those who got to be present for Alli’s physically active deep soul uncoverings — these experiences that he calls Sacred Rites. I always intended to join one of these experiences but time was my master and my excuse. I was a busy little beaver playing in McLuhans spider web of endless mediations where I have amused and (I hope) occasionally informed others while eking out a bare livelihood feeding and housing my own brief experiment in embodiment. I now understand that this experiment would have been more successful if I had allied with him for an experience or two.

When I first met Antero way back in the 1980s we were both working and playing under the influence of the neuro-political and exo-psychological maps provided by Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson. Leary brought us the theory of the minds’ evolution in tandem with biology and technology (tools). Bob Wilson gave it clarity and a heart. Antero Alli took the mind and the heart of Leary/ Wilson theory and gave it a body. He brought with him an influence from Jerzy Grotowski and his paratheatrical theories. As Alli writes, Paratheatre was “combining methods of physical theatre, modern dance, vocalization, and standing Zazen to access the internal landscape of forces in the Body – the impulses, emotions, sensations, tensions, and other autonomous forces – towards their spontaneous expression in movement, vocal creations, symbolic gesture, characterization, and asocial interplay.”

What a lovely contribution from E.C.C.O (Earth Coincidence Control Office) to bring Alli’s unique imprint into alignment with this relatively obscure path. Here, in Sacred Rites, Alli’s interior observations hide within them a map to the work he has been doing for some 46 years. It’s all here. How to create asocial interplay. How to conjure and embody visions and insights through the use of archetypes. How to move people from their stuck places. It’s not a cool cerebral picture. There’s a lot of howling, weeping. I would venture that there’s even some gnashing of teeth. Alli brings you inside these sessions and this text will leave you wanting more. Fortunately, the work will continue. Read the book and find out.

The post Review Sacred Rites by Antero Alli appeared first on Mondo 2000.

American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century, by Michael Willrich, Basic Books, 480 pages, $35

The lawmaking and policing powers of late 19th and early 20th century America did not think anarchist agitators deserved the protective penumbra of our Constitution. After Emma Goldman immigrated to the United States in 1885 from czarist Russia, she became a dynamic and hugely popular traveling lecturer on anarchism and other rebellious causes, such as draft resistance and contraception. Consequently, she was arrested a lot—and in 1919, along with hundreds of other accused anarchists, she was deported to what was now Bolshevik Russia. (Goldman's version of anarchism was not the free market kind; she wanted to eliminate private property as well as the state.)

Many anarchists saw a bright side to these legal fights: an opportunity to preach their beliefs in a courtroom setting, where the press often amplified their message. The anarchists sentenced to death in the notorious 1886 Chicago Haymarket bombing case spent three days in court laying out their beliefs; in one of their own trials, Goldman and her sometime consort and lifelong comrade, Alexander Berkman, settled for five hours of speaking their anarchist minds.

Berkman did more than lecture against the state and capitalism; in 1892 he decided to try to kill a murderously strikebreaking Carnegie Steel factory manager, Henry Frick. (While he shot and stabbed Frick, he failed to kill him.) This did not help public opinion of their cause. Neither did the fact that Leon Czolgosz, the 1901 assassin of President William McKinley, was a self-proclaimed anarchist who claimed that Goldman's rhetoric had "set me on fire."

In American Anarchy, the Brandeis historian Michael Willrich argues that those legal battles surrounding anarchism in America forged two distinct and opposing elements of modern American policing and law.

On one hand, the anarchists' enemies, from New York City cops to military intelligence to the departments of Labor and Justice, built a wider and more intrusive system of political surveillance and repression to quell and expel the anarchists. These systems' techniques—often relying on frequently unreliable, nativist, and paranoid citizen snoops and snitches—might seem quaint in the post–Edward Snowden age. They also seem especially brutal, given the cops of that era's habit of giving "the third degree" (that is, terrible beatings) to seditious radicals, and to people the officers merely assumed were seditious radicals. Many prosecutions hinged on the accuracy, or not, of some cop's written notes on what a suspect had allegedly said in public.

This repressive apparatus, Willrich writes, was "cobbled…together by putting public power in the hands of private civilian operatives, harnessing local police to national purposes, and drawing upon surveillance technologies developed both in the U.S.-ruled Philippines and in the internal immigrant 'colonies' of New York." The result was "an inefficient and stunningly violent operation that foiled few actual plots, put thousands of people on trial for speaking out against capitalism or the war….and showed an almost total disregard for…constitutional liberties."

And that planted the seeds of these battles' second great effect: Ironically, they ultimately made First Amendment doctrine more respectful of free expression. After the crackdown on the anarchists died down, and past the Cold War repressions under the Smith Act, it became more difficult to imagine anyone could go to jail in America solely for saying or writing a political heresy. Even when people are targeted for their speech, propriety requires that a more substantial charge be added. (The modern inheritor of the mantle of "enemy for whom constitutional protections can be ignored" is the drug seller and user, though different amendments are implicated.)

Three prosecutions during the World War I–era crackdown on political dissidents under the Espionage Act ended up before the Supreme Court. Free expression lost every time. But in Abrams v. United States, based on a 1918 expansion of the Espionage Act known as the Sedition Act, a dissent signed by two justices established an attitude toward the First Amendment's reach that became standard over the course of the 20th century.

In August 1918, the Army Corps of Intelligence Police had arrested a group of Russian immigrants in New York for distributing allegedly seditious pamphlets. The defendants insisted that the literature—many copies of which were tossed out windows for passersby on the street—was not meant to impede the ongoing U.S. war efforts against Germany, that being the basis for many of the charges. The literature was rather opposed to U.S. interference in revolutionary Russia, with whom we were not at constitutionally declared war.

The Abrams defendants were represented by Goldman's lawyer, Harry Weinberger. His role in Willrich's narrative is as central as hers and Berkman's. (Willrich argues that the war on anarchists essentially created the modern figure of the civil liberties lawyer.) The Supreme Court upheld the convictions, 7–2. But a dissent authored by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (who had written the earlier, bad decisions in the Espionage Act cases) laid out a First Amendment vision that more strictly limits when government could constitutionally punish expression: only if said expression represents a "present danger of immediate evil or an intent to bring it about."

After reading the dissent, a future founder of the American Civil Liberties Union wrote to Weinberger that "we are going to put it to some use all right." Civil libertarians in and out of the judiciary have been doing so ever since, in ways that have expanded Americans' expressive rights.

***

Things got predictably worse for civil liberties and for anarchists as the war went on. The 1918 Immigration Act, as Willrich sums it up, "authorized the secretary of labor to deport any person identified as a noncitizen and an anarchist." Even your individual beliefs could be elided, since "being a member of an organization that advocated 'anarchistic' ideas was now sufficient cause for deportation." Having built your life here productively for decades and having a family was not enough to save you from being grabbed and shipped out, if a government official thought you didn't believe the state should exist. (In 1903, during the post-Czolgosz wave of anti-anarchist action, Congress passed an immigration law that barred entry to anarchists, though it was difficult to enforce and in its first seven years caught a mere 10 anarchists among millions of immigrants entering.)

The story of the anarchist crackdown is, for good reasons, often used as a crackerjack historical example of the anti-liberty madness that even the supposed land of the free can descend to. This wave of anarchist repression was indeed destructive to many people and organizations—the Industrial Workers of the World, for example, were nearly annihilated by mass raids and arrests.

But the aftermath of these authoritarian spasms suggests we should give at least half a cheer for the Constitution. The rights it lays out were sorely dishonored, but at least they could be called upon eventually.

After World War I ended, President Woodrow Wilson commuted sentences for more than 125 Espionage Act prisoners. One assistant secretary of labor—Louis Post, who actually respected the Constitution—canceled 1,140 deportation orders, nearly three-quarters of the cases he was able to review when briefly in command of the process. The notorious 1919 and 1920 Palmer Raids sent 500 accused radicals to Ellis Island for deportation, but as public opinion and the grinding of the courts turned against the mania, only 23 of them were actually deported. And in 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt gave a general amnesty to the remaining World War I–era political prisoners.

Contrast that with Russia, where many of the anarchists were deported. The Bolshevik state murdered many of them, including two of the Abrams defendants.

Willrich's richly detailed study is especially relevant today, as that expansive sense of First Amendment rights that Willrich traces back to Holmes' Abrams dissent is under fresh fire from legal academics who see the amendment as a barrier to progressive change, from young Americans who think certain possibly hurtful things ought not be legally spoken, and from a culture that in general seems increasingly and angrily eager to shut opponents up. This valuable book shows one big reason why an expansive reading of the First Amendment is important: Without it, human beings have been beaten by cops and exiled from their home, just for saying or writing things the authorities don't like.

Goldman, for one, thought America was better than that. She once told a huge crowd in New York City that when people like her denounced war and conscription, they did this not because "we are foreigners and don't care." They had come here "looking to America as the promised land," and they grappled with the country's errors "precisely because we love America."

The post When Attacks on Anarchists Accidentally Improved Free Speech Law appeared first on Reason.com.

Sacred Rites: Journal Entries of a Gnostic Heretic
Antero Alli
Falcon Press
2023

review by R.U. Sirius

Antero Alli has been a master at gifting others with their presence in the moment and in the world as it is… and the world that we feel and imagine, although he is too humble to make such claims. His ritual journal entries bring to life the personal and group dynamics of some of his “sacred rites.” Herein Alli takes us with him as he dances on light and falls, stumbles and hurts, rises with great inner strength and then backs off and makes space for the others to struggle and play with their own angels, demons, ancestral Jungian archetypes, mutable gendered forms, true memories and conjured reflections and refractions of their personal and group experiences past and present.

Who else has shared hir journey into a sort of embodiment of depth psychology married to the theatrical and cinematic artistry of a unique individual mind? Did Gurdjieff leave behind such generous notes? Did Artaud ever climb out of his own tortured mind to guide others into a theater of revelation and share the results? I think not.

As a lonely writer and minor league media trickster playing and toiling in the fields of counterculture and model agnosticism — I am jealous of those who got to be present for Alli’s physically active deep soul uncoverings — these experiences that he calls Sacred Rites. I always intended to join one of these experiences but time was my master and my excuse. I was a busy little beaver playing in McLuhans spider web of endless mediations where I have amused and (I hope) occasionally informed others while eking out a bare livelihood feeding and housing my own brief experiment in embodiment. I now understand that this experiment would have been more successful if I had allied with him for an experience or two.

When I first met Antero way back in the 1980s we were both working and playing under the influence of the neuro-political and exo-psychological maps provided by Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson. Leary brought us the theory of the minds’ evolution in tandem with biology and technology (tools). Bob Wilson gave it clarity and a heart. Antero Alli took the mind and the heart of Leary/ Wilson theory and gave it a body. He brought with him an influence from Jerzy Grotowski and his paratheatrical theories. As Alli writes, Paratheatre was “combining methods of physical theatre, modern dance, vocalization, and standing Zazen to access the internal landscape of forces in the Body – the impulses, emotions, sensations, tensions, and other autonomous forces – towards their spontaneous expression in movement, vocal creations, symbolic gesture, characterization, and asocial interplay.”

What a lovely contribution from E.C.C.O (Earth Coincidence Control Office) to bring Alli’s unique imprint into alignment with this relatively obscure path. Here, in Sacred Rites, Alli’s interior observations hide within them a map to the work he has been doing for some 46 years. It’s all here. How to create asocial interplay. How to conjure and embody visions and insights through the use of archetypes. How to move people from their stuck places. It’s not a cool cerebral picture. There’s a lot of howling, weeping. I would venture that there’s even some gnashing of teeth. Alli brings you inside these sessions and this text will leave you wanting more. Fortunately, the work will continue. Read the book and find out.

The post Review Sacred Rites by Antero Alli appeared first on Mondo 2000.

Percival Everett has breathed fierce life into one of American literature's iconic characters in James, a retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, the runaway slave.

James' conceit is that Jim is secretly literate and can speak with perfect diction. Twain's "painstakingly" studied "Missouri negro" dialect is a put-on that Jim and other slaves use to deflect white anger and suspicion. Everett is a sly writer, and he loves to employ this code-switching and the fictions of race for subversive comic effect.

But language is all-powerful in James. Early in Jim's journey, a slave steals a pencil for him—a hangable offense—so that Jim can "write himself into being."

"I can tell you that I am a man who is cognizant of his world," James, as he renames himself, writes, "a man who has a family, who loves a family, who has been torn from his family, a man who can read and write, a man who will not let his story be self-related, but self-written."

James' revolt against a society that defines him as property extends to the metaphysical. In his fever dreams he debates Voltaire and John Locke. He in fact writes himself out of Huckleberry Finn's unserious final act to pursue an ending that better fits his outrage and newfound agency.

Finn's key moment is when Huck declares he'll help Jim even if it means going to hell, but Everett reminds us that Jim is already there. James tells another man he was "born in hell. Sold before my mother could hold me." James is not a gauzy moral fable or boy's adventure, but a man's flight through the inferno of America's racial past that is by turns darkly funny and terrifying.

The post Review: <i>James</i> Retells <i>Huckleberry Finn</i> From Jim's Perspective appeared first on Reason.com.

Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars, by Kliph Nesteroff, Abrams, 312 pages, $30

The first paragraph of the book jacket lays it out: "There is a common belief that we live in unprecedented times, that people are too sensitive today, that nobody objected to the actions of actors, comedians, and filmmakers in the past. Modern pundits would have us believe that Americans of a previous generation had tougher skin and seldom complained. But does this argument hold up to scrutiny?"

There's a good point underneath the hyperbole. People tend to believe—and pundits, politicians, and activists tend to claim—that whatever issues trouble them are worse than ever. Why? Because these things are happening now. To us. Problems in the past weren't as urgent or significant because they happened to others, and anyway things turned out OK (or if they didn't, at least those problems are over).

So Kliph Nesteroff's Outrageous has a decent premise. Alas, it also has significant flaws.

The book's subtitle is A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars, and Nesteroff has some expertise—at least regarding the former. He previously wrote The Comedians, a lively and informative work that, admittedly, bit off more than it could chew, trying to cram the history of American comedy into a few hundred pages.

A history of public opposition to American entertainment is a more manageable subject, though still a big one. While Nesteroff starts with complaints about blackface and minstrel shows in the 1800s, most of the book deals with post–World War II controversies. And he has some fascinating stories to tell about the many attempts to cancel movies, music, TV shows, and just about anything that was new and different.

Some of these stories may be familiar. Many people know about the resistance All in the Family faced when it first aired in the 1970s, with its vulgarity and ethnic slurs; CBS stuck by it, and the sitcom went on to become one of the biggest TV shows ever. But how many people remember Bridget Loves Bernie, a sitcom that followed All in the Family for one season? Vaguely based on the 1920s Broadway blockbuster Abie's Irish Rose, it was a show about a marriage between a Jewish man and a Catholic woman. It received so much pushback—including bomb threats—that CBS canceled it, despite its high ratings.

Interesting though these tales are, the book's overall narrative is shaky. It tends to move from one anecdote to the next without sufficient transition. Outrageous often comes across as less a history of a phenomenon than a chronological data dump.

There are some lapses in the research too. For instance, Nesteroff claims Cole Porter wrote "Do It Again" (I assume he's referring to the George Gershwin tune) while attributing Porter's song "Love For Sale" to Irving Berlin. And he mistakenly asserts that David Letterman wrote an episode of the sitcom Good Times. (The episode in question features Jay Leno in a small role. Perhaps that's where the confusion arose.)

But the biggest problem is that Nesteroff has an ax to grind—one so large it ends up taking over the book and turning it into a screed.

It's true that any conservatives who claim that censorship today is worse than ever lack historical perspective. Still, that doesn't mean there's nothing worth complaining about, or that we should simply dismiss what they say. Nesteroff writes as though we should.

Nesteroff notes how the John Birch Society saw Communist conspiracies everywhere in the 1960s. Far from disappearing, he argues, their discredited philosophy has been rebranded; recent culture wars, funded by partisan foundations, have used fear tactics to fool people into supporting otherwise unpopular policies. (Funny, my Republican friends say the same thing about the left.)

According to Nesteroff (and the partisan experts he quotes), right-wing think tanks tell their talking heads in the media what to say, often gaining consensus through payment of large sums. (It's not clear what he believes the left is doing in the meantime. I guess they're just telling the truth and being ignored.) Further, under the guise of supporting free speech, right-wing plotters send "provocateurs to speak on college campuses for the purpose of incitement. When protests erupt, such objection is used as proof that the campus is opposed to free speech. Demonized in the body politic, funding is threatened—and legal action undertaken—until the campus is made hospitable to think tank interests."

Wow. A conspiracy theory almost worthy of the Birchers.

Let me suggest a different narrative. Nesteroff seems to believe the right has, if anything, gotten worse in recent decades. Worse or not, it's true that it has changed. But hasn't the left changed as well?

A few decades ago, many would say, the movement for greater civil liberties was spearheaded by the left. (Some of the most famous student protests of the '60s were centered around Berkeley's Free Speech Movement.) Courts responded with interpretations of the First Amendment guaranteeing greater freedom to express oneself. Outside the legal realm, much of the country—and much of the left—adopted a cultural ethos that it's a good thing people are allowed to say what's on their mind, even if some find it offensive or dangerous.

But over time, much of the left reversed its position, becoming suspicious of such freedom—at least for groups it opposes. Thus, the "provocateurs" Nesteroff warns of aren't just protested at colleges: They're disinvited, or shouted down, or physically attacked. Meanwhile, students are disciplined and professors fired for expressing views that, while not outside the larger social mainstream, are considered objectionable on campus.

What's more, this culture has spread into the world off campus. Newspaper editors are fired for running editorials that trouble their staff. Workers in large corporations fear that expressing unorthodox political opinions can get them cashiered. People are deplatformed on social media for questionable reasons. And, of course, there are the showbiz culture wars—the putative subject of Outrageous—where people feel they have to make public expressions of regret for something they said or did in the past, or risk not working again.

This isn't just based on anecdotes. A number of polls—for example, a recent College Pulse/Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression survey of undergraduates—show that today's young liberals are more willing than previous generations to shut down speech they find offensive. According to the American College Student Freedom, Progress and Flourishing Survey, conducted annually by researchers at North Dakota State University, about four out of five liberal or liberal-leaning students think it appropriate to snitch on a professor for stating fairly common (but "wrong") opinions on hot-button issues. It's one thing to debate or protest ideas you don't like. It's quite another to try to stop anyone from even hearing them.

When you don't listen to the other side…well, it's hard to put it better than John Stuart Mill: "He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that." Unfortunately, today's left seems to lean more toward Oscar Wilde's Lady Bracknell: "I dislike arguments of any kind. They are always vulgar, and often convincing."

So yes, there's good reason to be concerned about the cancellations and related issues that upset the right, even if repression was sometimes worse in the past. And if you wish to engage in serious debate, it's not enough to be satisfied with your own arguments. You've got to refute the other side, not brush them off as dishonest or evil or brainwashed.

Outrageous starts with a "Note to the Reader": "Please be aware that some of the material quoted within this book includes archaic terminology that might be considered wildly offensive by modern standards." I would hope that anyone reading this book, or any book dealing with history, already knows that people thought and spoke differently in the past. A better warning would state that Nesteroff's work may claim to be an objective look at cultural history but that lurking inside is a polemic.

Too bad. There's a lot of good material in Outrageous. With a slightly different presentation, it could have been a more useful addition to today's debate.

The post A Brief, Biased History of the Culture Wars appeared first on Reason.com.

The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society, by Joseph E. Stiglitz, W.W. Norton & Company, 384 pages, $29.99

Joseph Stiglitz, a former chief economist of the World Bank, thinks that taxation is a precondition for freedom, not a threat to it. The current political problem, he argues in The Road to Freedom, is that the right (which for Stiglitz includes libertarians as well as conservatives) rejects the Founding Fathers' idea of no taxation without representation in favor of opposing any taxation at all. This is a problem, he continues, because market failures are more extensive and severe than the "neoliberals"—people like Stiglitz's fellow Nobel laureates Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman—would admit. For Stiglitz, redistribution and regulation are the real road to freedom.

Much of the book is devoted to criticizing neoliberals, who Stiglitz defines as proponents of "unregulated, unfettered markets." In Stiglitz's view, "a free-market, competitive, neoliberal economy combined with a liberal democracy" isn't enough—for "a stable equilibrium," we need "strong guardrails and a broad societal consensus on the need to curb wealth inequality and money's role in politics."

This book is written as though the regulatory state has not expanded since the end of World War II and as though the welfare state was dismantled in the 1980s. It is written as if liberal democracies' economic policies were all written by someone with the worldview of President Javier Milei of Argentina or the Brazilian MMA fighter Renato Moicano, who at UFC 300 proclaimed that everyone who cares about freedom should be reading the libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises. It is written as though we were still in the Lochner era, when the Supreme Court regularly struck down economic regulations.

But that is not the era we live in. Instead, the state has kept growing because neoliberalism has never reached the level of influence its adherents wanted. A more coherent argument—though still not a good one—would be that the modern state is big but should be bigger.

Nor is this book a good guide to the views of "neoliberals" like Friedman, Hayek, and Mises. No reasonable reading of these writers would suggest that they do not believe in market failures, yet Stiglitz claims that neoliberals think "markets on their own were efficient and stable."

Stiglitz also claims that "Unfettered markets designed along neoliberal principles have effectively robbed [the U.S. and U.K.] of their political freedom." One would expect an economist of Stiglitz's stature to make an effort to support this claim, yet his book offers no evidence for it. The available empirical evidence suggests that Stiglitz has it backward: It is state control of the economy that suppresses democratic freedom. There are other inconvenient empirical studies, including ones showing that the neoliberal "Washington Consensus" works fairly well and that there is no clear evidence that economic freedom leads to more inequality. (There is, however, abundant evidence that economic freedom makes us richer.)

The book does contain many reasonable ideas. Stiglitz is certainly right that the challenges associated with global fisheries, pandemics, and climate change are a fertile opportunity for more economic analysis. And the notion that market failures are both more complex and more common in an increasingly interconnected world should be a starting point for economists and policy makers.

Unfortunately, Stiglitz is too comfortable claiming that the solution to these problems is "regulation," without adding much explanation of how regulation should address such issues. Here he should have engaged more deeply with the insights of another Nobel laureate in economics, Elinor Ostrom. Stiglitz does mention Ostrom's research on the regulation of the commons—that is, of shared resources that anyone can use (and overuse, in the absence of rules governing how people can draw on them). But he sees her work as a defense of "regulation" and a critique of private property.

That wasn't what Ostrom was arguing. Rather than rail against private property, Ostrom argued that it is an empirical question as to whether private property, communal arrangements outside the state, or government control is the most appropriate way to manage the commons. And nothing in Ostrom's work implies a wide-ranging critique of private property. Her work is fully within the same classical liberal tradition that includes Hayek and Friedman.

Public goods, Ostrom argued, are not provided solely by the government. She also stressed the importance of polycentricity—of multiple levels of governance that offer opportunities for citizens and nonprofits to provide public goods, with each level able to cooperate with the others and also to act independently. This is especially useful for thinking about how to address the kinds of complex externalities Stiglitz sees as pervasive. Ostrom even developed a polycentric approach to climate change.

The call for regulation is less fundamental than asking what political arrangements give rise to the most appropriate rules, be they public, private, or communal. Elinor Ostrom and her husband, Vincent Ostrom, highlighted federalism's value as a laboratory of democracy because, like Hayek, they recognized that we do not know how to solve many pressing problems. This book would have been more convincing if instead of devoting so much time to criticizing the neoliberals (and overstating their influence), Stiglitz had spent more time exploring such insights.

Stiglitz's polemics are unlikely to change anyone's mind, but they will probably find an audience among people already predisposed to agree with them. His ideological fellow-travelers will probably like his full-throated defense of "progressive capitalism" (basically contemporary Sweden, with its combination of a generous welfare state, pro-labor policies, and a market economy). But Stiglitz does not explain why the U.S. is not like Sweden, nor how to get to Sweden from where we are now. Nor does Stiglitz note that Sweden, which ranks highly in the Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom, is rather open to policies promoted by neoliberals.

If you're interested in understanding market liberalism, there are better recent books to read, such as Peter Boettke's The Struggle for a Better World or Deirdre McCloskey and Art Carden's Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich, each of which explains what classical liberals mean by freedom. If you are tempted to accept the notion that neoliberals lack a moral sense, you would especially benefit from Humanomics—by Bart Wilson and another Nobel laureate, Vernon Smith—which articulates the rich moral framework of Adam Smith's tradition. And if you want a more compelling empirical critique of capitalism, Daniel Bromley's Possessive Individualism explains how modern capitalism differs from the capitalism of even half a century ago, let alone Adam Smith's time.

But even our current, heavily regulated variety of capitalism is better than countless real-world alternatives. After all, if the situation in the U.S. were as bad as Stiglitz suggests, one would not expect so many people to want to move here. The border "crisis," which is really a problem with excessive regulation, suggests that the U.S. has pretty good institutions. Or at the very least, that people think those institutions are better than what they are leaving. And what they are leaving is less economic and political freedom.

The post Stiglitz's <i>The Road to Freedom</i> Under Scrutiny appeared first on Reason.com.

The literal and figurative search for enlightenment by a solar-powered "Artificial Friend" drives the plot of Klara and the Sun, a 2021 novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. Purchased to serve as a companion to a fragile and isolated genetically augmented child, the robot Klara's autonomy and potential are limited by strict constraints on AI.

Klara's primitive, spontaneous sun worship and deep loyalty to her charge govern her choices in ways she only barely understands.

Over the course of the novel, it becomes clear that Klara is not alone—her humans are equally hemmed in by state, society, and their own fallibility.

The book's beautiful prose floats effortlessly over heavy questions of free will, epistemology, and faith.

The post Review: <i>Klara and the Sun</i> Tackles AI Regulation appeared first on Reason.com.

For Reason's June 2024 special issue on AI, all of our brief reviews involve AI in some form or another. Of course, we decided to ask an AI to write one of the reviews. Since X's AI is named Grok, after the term coined by sci-fi author Robert Heinlein in Stranger in a Strange Land, it was only natural that we'd ask Grok to write a review of another Heinlein novel, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. See what Grok wrote for us below.

In The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein masterfully crafts a gripping tale of revolution and liberation on a lunar colony. The 1966 novel follows the colony's intense struggle for independence from Earth, led by the charismatic Manuel Garcia O'Kelly and supported by a fascinating AI supercomputer, Mike. Heinlein's unique portrayal of Mike highlights his destructive potential but ultimately emphasizes his choice to aid the revolutionaries.

Through the political, social, and military aspects of the Earth-Moon conflict, Heinlein delves deep into themes of liberation and revolution, weaving in his own thought-provoking philosophies about law, society, and frontier libertarianism. This sci-fi gem offers a captivating narrative, exploring the very nature of freedom and the role technology plays in shaping our destiny. In the end, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress reminds us that even a supercomputer like Mike can have a heart—or at least a well-programmed sense of humor.

The post Review: <i>The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress</i> Underscores How Technology Supports Freedom appeared first on Reason.com.

Theodore Roosevelt was president at the start of the Celebrity Age, and at the start of much of the modern image of the presidency. The White House was just beginning to be called that (rather than the Executive Mansion); Roosevelt's renovations on the building created the West Wing. And his daughter, Alice, created one model for presidential relatives over the next century.

Aged 17 when her father became president, she was a gift to the Washington press corps. Photogenic and charming, she was nicknamed "Princess Alice" in the papers. She was invited to Edward VII's coronation (she did not attend), and the German kaiser had her christen his yacht. Her hobnobbing with royalty didn't sit well with her father's man-of-the-people pose, but he could do nothing to stop his daughter's fame.

According to White House Wild Child, Shelley Fraser Mickle's new biography of the presidential daughter, Alice's "celebrity had certainly surprised him. He hadn't seen it coming. Whenever Alice appeared, crowds gathered to cheer her. Dresses and gowns appeared in 'Alice blue.' Her face gazed out from cards packaging candy bars. Songs were written about her, and her picture was featured on their sheet music. Her face was centered on magazine covers." Mickle sees in Alice the forerunner of Jackie Kennedy, Princess Diana, and other trendsetting beauties and influencers.

The president was happy to deploy Alice tactically, to charm guests and diplomats. Such diplomatic tactics went the other way too: She was showered with gifts on foreign visits, gifts she referred to as her "loot." The Cuban government gave her a magnificent set of pearls for her wedding. The Foreign Emoluments Clause apparently didn't apply to her.

Taking advantage of her situation seemed only natural. Alice's father had to tell her not to ride the train without a ticket. (While presidents were entitled to free travel, their kids were not.) But this was when a presidential daughter might still jump on a train with friends, rather than be accompanied by a phalanx of Secret Service agents.

Mickle's book is part biography and part psychological study, the story of a woman growing up in impossible privilege but with a life marked by tragedy. At Alice's birth, her mother slid into a coma and died two days later. Theodore's mother died the same day, a double blow. He responded by avoiding his baby daughter, leaving her in his sister's care while he fled into his political work and to his ranch out west.

He reappeared in her life three years later to introduce her to a new stepmother. A clutch of younger siblings soon followed. Mickle makes much of how this must have damaged Alice, particularly her father's reluctance even to speak her name. (She had been named for her mother.)

***

Mickle's book is a study in how a republic treats its leaders' families. The nickname "princess" shows the knife-edge between democracy and dynasty, a line that presidential families have struggled to walk ever since. Alice would have her debutante ball in the White House, and she wanted a new floor installed. She approached the speaker of the House, asking him to appropriate funds for this purpose. "Alice used her every ploy on him, enjoying her first taste of lobbying," Mickle writes, "but the Speaker held firm, refusing the funds."

She didn't get her way that time, but her desires were voracious. "I want more," she scribbled in her diary. "I want everything." She spent through her enormous allowance, and she saw nothing wrong with receiving high-value presents by dint of her position. Foreshadowing the practices of generations of socialites to come, "She tipped off newspapers about where she'd be and what she'd be up to, then pocketed the cash for the info."

She also enjoyed making a spectacle of herself and pushing boundaries. Driving around Washington with a girlfriend in a sports car, showing up at parties with her pet snake around her shoulders, smoking in public: She was attention seeking (and attention getting). "In one fifteen-month period," Mickle tells us, "she went to 407 dinners, 350 balls, 300 parties, and 680 teas, and she made 1,706 social calls."

Alice was determined to get while the getting was good, fishing for a husband in the pond of D.C.'s eligible bachelors. She wanted one with money, and one who could be president himself one day. Her goal was getting back to the White House. (Of course, she never did.)

She picked Nicholas Longworth, an Ohio congressman 15 years her senior. Their White House wedding was the social event of the season. But Longworth turned out not to be on the presidential track, and he was an unfaithful alcoholic.

Alice's life turned to disappointments. She became renowned for her caustic comments as she got older, and the wit did not disguise her bitterness. Her marriage was unhappy; her late-in-life child was the product of an affair. Her daughter died of a drug overdose in her 30s. Her father's presidency was always the golden moment she wanted to recapture. She continued to engage with the politics of the day, joining the fight against the League of Nations and later writing newspaper columns against her cousin Franklin's presidential candidacy. Richard Nixon was a friend for decades, and he invited her to his inauguration. She remained a Washington figure, still hovering in the orbit of those in power despite having no official role.

The legacy of "Princess Alice" raises questions we still grapple with today. How much should presidential family members trade on their name? Could that even be avoided? Of course, gifts and favors will materialize for those close to power, whether they're sought or not. Being whisked around by motorcade and private jet these days means there's no escaping their link to the president. It's easy, I'm sure, to lose sight of what's normal.

What we should accept as normal is itself an important question. With presidential son Hunter Biden in the news for crossing the line to the point of criminal indictment, we should think more seriously about where exactly that line should be drawn. There are few laws specifically dedicated to the activities of first family members. Should children be barred from particular careers? From running for office themselves? What about siblings? (When presidential kids aren't in the news, there are embarrassing presidential brothers in the Billy Carter mold.) Even when an activity isn't officially forbidden, the tang of shadiness or self-dealing will linger if a family member seems to be cashing in. Individuals may be chosen by the ballot, but they come with an unelected supporting cast.

Had her father not been president, Alice Roosevelt still would have made the society pages. She would have been a Park Avenue debutante. She would have been steered toward marriage with the scion of a prominent family, or perhaps a titled European. A future of philanthropic work and society events would await. But she would have wanted more.

White House Wild Child: How Alice Roosevelt Broke All the Rules and Won the Heart of America, by Shelley Fraser Mickle, Imagine, 256 pages, $27.99

The post How To Be the President's Kid appeared first on Reason.com.

White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, Penguin Random House, 320 pages, $32

A new book, White Rural Rage, paints white rural Americans, a small and shrinking minority of the country, as the greatest threat to American democracy. The authors, political scientist Tom Schaller and journalist Paul Waldman, try to buttress this argument by citing scholarly publications. We are two of the scholars whose work they cite, and we cry foul.

The overarching argument of White Rural Rage is that ruralness can be equated with racism, xenophobia, conspiracism, and anti-democratic beliefs. But rigorous scholarship shows that rural identity is not reducible to these beliefs, which are vastly more numerous outside rural communities than within them. To get to a conclusion so at odds with the scholarly consensus, Schaller and Waldman repeatedly commit academic malpractice.

Consider the "ecological fallacy" of political geography, on which some of the most salacious arguments in White Rural Rage depend. Most people know that you cannot argue something about individuals because of how groups to which that individual belongs behave. The most famous example of this poor reasoning is thinking that because the richest states of Massachusetts and California vote Democratic, rich people everywhere vote Democrat. The opposite is true.

But Schaller and Waldman depend on this well-known fallacy to support their most provocative claims. Because authoritarianism predicted support for Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican primaries and because rural residents tend to support Trump, they say rural residents are the most likely to be authoritarian. Because white evangelicals are most likely to support Christian nationalist beliefs and because 43 percent of rural residents identify as evangelical, they say the hotbed of Christian nationalism is in rural communities. Perhaps the most egregious form of guilt-by-association comes in a weakly sourced analysis of who supports "constitutional sheriffs": Not a single study of rural attitudes is cited in that section of the book.

It gets worse. In several instances, the authors misinterpret what the academic research they cite says. For example, they use a report by the Chicago Project on Security and Threats to argue that "rural Americans are overrepresented among those with insurrectionist tendencies." But the actual report concludes exactly the opposite: "The more rural the county, the lower the county rate of sending insurrectionists" to the January 6 Capitol riot. Moreover, when a peer-reviewed article in the journal Political Behavior compared rural and non-rural beliefs on whether politically motivated violence is a valid means for pursuing political change, it revealed that rural Americans are actually less supportive of political violence.

Another example comes when the authors rely on a report from the Public Religion Research Institute on QAnon conspiracy theories. The report has its own fundamental problems, including a suspect measure of QAnon support in the first instance, but what Schaller and Waldman do with those data is more egregious yet. First, the authors do not even interpret the model output correctly, writing that the results mean that "QAnon believers are one and a half times more likely to live in rural than urban areas." But the report presents odds ratios, which means that living in a rural area increases the likelihood by just 30 percent. Inaccurate interpretation aside, if they were more statistically literate they would see this is probably not a model worth citing. On the exact same page, the model output suggests that, compared to white Americans, being black increases the likelihood of believing in QAnon by 90 percent! Weird results like this are red flags that should make us ask questions, not confirm our priors.

Beyond issues of sparse and selective citing, the book misrepresents the findings of multiple scholars who have built careers conducting research on rural politics and identity.

The authors characterize the academic concept of rural resentment (the less headline-grabbing academic term that Schaller and Waldman have apparently rebranded as "rage") as necessarily including racial resentment as a constitutive component. But academic work on rural identity has overwhelmingly shown that these two are distinguishable. They are different concepts.

Indeed, as we have painstakingly demonstrated in our own work, rural resentment involves perceptions of geographic inequity. Many rural people see inequity in who politicians pay attention to, which communities get resources and which don't, and in how different types of communities are portrayed in the media. This is not racial prejudice by another name.

Schaller and Waldman favorably cite our research showing that there is a modest correlation between rural resentment and racial resentment, a commonly used attitudinal measure of negative racial stereotyping. What they fail to note is the only statistically and intellectually sound conclusion that could be drawn from our data: While this slight correlation exists, rural resentment is an attitude distinct from racial prejudice.

In another peer-reviewed publication that Schaller and Waldman erroneously cite, we found that rural resentment strongly explains rural preferences and behavior even when one controls, statistically, for a litany of factors, including racial resentment, that Schaller, Waldman, and others conflate with it. The value of our academic work has been to elucidate the place-based dynamics of American politics—to say that there is much more than rage and rebellion in the heartland. It's distressing to see a book citing our work to support misleading arguments.

At a time when trust in experts is on the decline throughout America, flawed analysis like the ideas in White Rural Rage may be a greater threat to American democracy than anything coming from the countryside. It is popular these days to say "follow the science." Well, the science shows that there is no mystery to rural rage: Years of neglect, abandonment, and scorn have driven rural America to view "experts" like Schaller and Waldman as the enemy.

The post The Truth About 'Rural Rage' appeared first on Reason.com.

Sacred Rites: Journal Entries of a Gnostic Heretic
Antero Alli
Falcon Press
2023

review by R.U. Sirius

Antero Alli has been a master at gifting others with their presence in the moment and in the world as it is… and the world that we feel and imagine, although he is too humble to make such claims. His ritual journal entries bring to life the personal and group dynamics of some of his “sacred rites.” Herein Alli takes us with him as he dances on light and falls, stumbles and hurts, rises with great inner strength and then backs off and makes space for the others to struggle and play with their own angels, demons, ancestral Jungian archetypes, mutable gendered forms, true memories and conjured reflections and refractions of their personal and group experiences past and present.

Who else has shared hir journey into a sort of embodiment of depth psychology married to the theatrical and cinematic artistry of a unique individual mind? Did Gurdjieff leave behind such generous notes? Did Artaud ever climb out of his own tortured mind to guide others into a theater of revelation and share the results? I think not.

As a lonely writer and minor league media trickster playing and toiling in the fields of counterculture and model agnosticism — I am jealous of those who got to be present for Alli’s physically active deep soul uncoverings — these experiences that he calls Sacred Rites. I always intended to join one of these experiences but time was my master and my excuse. I was a busy little beaver playing in McLuhans spider web of endless mediations where I have amused and (I hope) occasionally informed others while eking out a bare livelihood feeding and housing my own brief experiment in embodiment. I now understand that this experiment would have been more successful if I had allied with him for an experience or two.

When I first met Antero way back in the 1980s we were both working and playing under the influence of the neuro-political and exo-psychological maps provided by Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson. Leary brought us the theory of the minds’ evolution in tandem with biology and technology (tools). Bob Wilson gave it clarity and a heart. Antero Alli took the mind and the heart of Leary/ Wilson theory and gave it a body. He brought with him an influence from Jerzy Grotowski and his paratheatrical theories. As Alli writes, Paratheatre was “combining methods of physical theatre, modern dance, vocalization, and standing Zazen to access the internal landscape of forces in the Body – the impulses, emotions, sensations, tensions, and other autonomous forces – towards their spontaneous expression in movement, vocal creations, symbolic gesture, characterization, and asocial interplay.”

What a lovely contribution from E.C.C.O (Earth Coincidence Control Office) to bring Alli’s unique imprint into alignment with this relatively obscure path. Here, in Sacred Rites, Alli’s interior observations hide within them a map to the work he has been doing for some 46 years. It’s all here. How to create asocial interplay. How to conjure and embody visions and insights through the use of archetypes. How to move people from their stuck places. It’s not a cool cerebral picture. There’s a lot of howling, weeping. I would venture that there’s even some gnashing of teeth. Alli brings you inside these sessions and this text will leave you wanting more. Fortunately, the work will continue. Read the book and find out.

The post Review Sacred Rites by Antero Alli appeared first on Mondo 2000.

The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality, by Andy Clark, Pantheon Books, 304 pages, $30

For René Descartes, minds were essentially thinking (or feeling) things. For the founding fathers of behaviorism, minds were identical with behaviors—talking, habits, dispositions to act in one way or another. More recently, minds have been imagined as a kind of computer: the software running on the hardware of the brain.

For Andy Clark, a cognitive scientist and philosopher at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, minds are first and foremost prediction machines. "Instead of constantly expending large amounts of energy on processing incoming sensory signals," he writes in The Experience Machine, "the bulk of what the brain does is learn and maintain a model of body and world." Our mind/brain is "a kind of constantly running simulation of the world around us—or at least, the world as it matters to us."

In other words, while people typically imagine the mind taking in information through our senses and then processing that information to create a model of the world that we experience and act upon, Clark reverses the order: Minds create a model of the world, and the senses tell us how to update the model if the world is different from what was predicted. Those predictions make up most of what we experience—but when things don't go as expected, the mind makes corrections to improve the model.

This may seem counterintuitive (and it is), but Clark makes a strong case in a very accessible and engaging book, bringing together a number of recent trends in the sciences of the mind, including the importance of the body to our mental processes (what's called "embodiment") and how our day-to-day cognition extends out into the world through our use of tools. Along the way, he shows how his approach can explain a diverse set of phenomena, including illusions, mood disorders, chronic pain in the absence of tissue damage, and why police mistakenly see weapons where there are none.

***

I should probably note, especially since I am writing in Reason, that the experience machine of Clark's title is unrelated to the famous "experience machine" proposed by Robert Nozick in Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Though Clark does write of mental simulations, he is not invoking Nozick's thought experiment about a machine that can give subjects whatever experiences they like.

Clark has a rather different project. He has been a prolific theorist of the mind for more than three decades, and his new book ties together themes explored in his previous work, often updating and illustrating them with examples from more recent cognitive science research.

For example, Clark's 1998 book Being There argued against a disembodied understanding of mind (as one might get from Descartes). We are not simply minds that happen to have bodies, he argued; we often think through our bodies. Clark extends this argument in The Experience Machine by reviewing recent work on the role of the gut (which includes 500 million neurons of its own), discussing how the microbiome of gut bacteria shows their influence on cognition. With gut bacteria producing 95 percent of the serotonin in our bodies, we should not be surprised that scientists are beginning to trace connections between our digestive system and our moods, dietary preferences, and other mental states.

Similarly, in Clark's 2008 book Supersizing the Mind and in earlier work with philosopher David Chalmers, Clark has moved beyond the body's role in cognition to consider the role played by external tools. Clark and Chalmers' provocative thesis—what they call the parity principle—is that we should consider "as part of the mind" anything that would inarguably be considered mental if it were carried out by the brain. For an example, consider those of us of a certain age who once used our brains to remember a lot of phone numbers but now rely on our smartphones. Clark and Chalmers think we should consider those phones parts of our minds. A mind, they say, extends into those parts of the world that are regularly and reliably accessible to it.

How do the tools that constitute the extended mind connect back to the predictive brain of The Experience Machine? If the core of mentality is developing and maintaining a predictive model of the world, then cognitive tools that are reliably and predictively there for us are an important part of our predictive process. That predictive process, in turn, is what we ought to think of as our minds.

***

At this point, you may be wondering whether being part of our minds means being part of consciousness. Is Clark claiming that my smartphone is somehow constitutive of my conscious experience?

If I have a complaint about this book, it is that it does not give enough attention to these questions of conscious experience. In the sections that explore the extended mind thesis most fully, there is generally little mention of consciousness at all. That said, the book does include an interlude that takes issue with David Chalmers—Clark's extended mind collaborator—and with Chalmers' worries about consciousness.

For Chalmers, the important problem for any theory of the mind is what he calls the "hard problem of consciousness": Why and how does physical activity give rise to conscious experience at all? You could imagine an artificial prediction machine that shows all the outward behaviors that Clark's account calls for, but this prediction machine might lack any conscious experience whatsoever. It would, in Chalmers' terminology, be a "philosophical zombie."

Against these concerns, Clark proposes that the phenomenon of consciousness might instead be best captured by predictive minds making "meta-predictions" about their own predictions. While admitting this part of his story is "highly speculative," Clark gamely proposes that the predictive mind thesis may help unravel the mystery of consciousness too. Alas, his discussion here is too short to be clear about what exactly he is proposing, let alone whether that position is likely to be true.

But that disappointment is short-lived. The rest of The Experience Machine features lively and interesting discussions of how scientists have been grappling with various puzzles about the mind. For example: You probably know that placebos (such as simple sugar pills) can have real effects on the subjects who take them. But were you aware there also exist "honest placebos"—that is, sugar pills given to subjects who are told they're just sugar pills? What's more, these honest placebos can also have real effects on subjects!

Or perhaps you remember one of 2015's biggest social media phenomena, "the dress." When a photo of a dress went viral, some people insisted it was blue and black while others saw white and gold. Clark takes his discussion of this in surprising directions, as when he recounts scientific work relating the colors people saw with their sleeping patterns—e.g., whether they tend to be early risers or night owls.

All these things connect back directly to Clark's proposal that the mind is, at base, a prediction machine, guided by the expectations we have learned. If you are curious what that entails and if you want an accessible tour through recent cognitive science, I predict that you'll find this book illuminating

The post Is the Human Brain a Prediction Machine? appeared first on Reason.com.

Sacred Rites: Journal Entries of a Gnostic Heretic
Antero Alli
Falcon Press
2023

review by R.U. Sirius

Antero Alli has been a master at gifting others with their presence in the moment and in the world as it is… and the world that we feel and imagine, although he is too humble to make such claims. His ritual journal entries bring to life the personal and group dynamics of some of his “sacred rites.” Herein Alli takes us with him as he dances on light and falls, stumbles and hurts, rises with great inner strength and then backs off and makes space for the others to struggle and play with their own angels, demons, ancestral Jungian archetypes, mutable gendered forms, true memories and conjured reflections and refractions of their personal and group experiences past and present.

Who else has shared hir journey into a sort of embodiment of depth psychology married to the theatrical and cinematic artistry of a unique individual mind? Did Gurdjieff leave behind such generous notes? Did Artaud ever climb out of his own tortured mind to guide others into a theater of revelation and share the results? I think not.

As a lonely writer and minor league media trickster playing and toiling in the fields of counterculture and model agnosticism — I am jealous of those who got to be present for Alli’s physically active deep soul uncoverings — these experiences that he calls Sacred Rites. I always intended to join one of these experiences but time was my master and my excuse. I was a busy little beaver playing in McLuhans spider web of endless mediations where I have amused and (I hope) occasionally informed others while eking out a bare livelihood feeding and housing my own brief experiment in embodiment. I now understand that this experiment would have been more successful if I had allied with him for an experience or two.

When I first met Antero way back in the 1980s we were both working and playing under the influence of the neuro-political and exo-psychological maps provided by Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson. Leary brought us the theory of the minds’ evolution in tandem with biology and technology (tools). Bob Wilson gave it clarity and a heart. Antero Alli took the mind and the heart of Leary/ Wilson theory and gave it a body. He brought with him an influence from Jerzy Grotowski and his paratheatrical theories. As Alli writes, Paratheatre was “combining methods of physical theatre, modern dance, vocalization, and standing Zazen to access the internal landscape of forces in the Body – the impulses, emotions, sensations, tensions, and other autonomous forces – towards their spontaneous expression in movement, vocal creations, symbolic gesture, characterization, and asocial interplay.”

What a lovely contribution from E.C.C.O (Earth Coincidence Control Office) to bring Alli’s unique imprint into alignment with this relatively obscure path. Here, in Sacred Rites, Alli’s interior observations hide within them a map to the work he has been doing for some 46 years. It’s all here. How to create asocial interplay. How to conjure and embody visions and insights through the use of archetypes. How to move people from their stuck places. It’s not a cool cerebral picture. There’s a lot of howling, weeping. I would venture that there’s even some gnashing of teeth. Alli brings you inside these sessions and this text will leave you wanting more. Fortunately, the work will continue. Read the book and find out.

The post Review Sacred Rites by Antero Alli appeared first on Mondo 2000.