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

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Love is the law, love under will.

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

As a Thelemite, in theory we all subscribe to the notion of individual will. Each person gets to decide the path one takes, and of course suffer the consequences of one's own decisions without having the excuse of deflecting responsibility for one's life onto someone else.

All in all, a very adult theological system. No supernatural spectres to blaim one's life on, no God above counting the fall of every sparrow who has ordained that your life or your fate must take one path or another--just man, his Will, and the world, engaged in a contest to see which gets to shape the other. You succeed or you fail, it's all on you, babe!

So what do I read? Take Heed!:

If you're an OTO member and you're not reading localduesblues, you should. If you're above 4th degree and you're not reading it, you should be slapped!

Oh, look; someone telling me what I should do.

So let's get into the meat and potatoes of the argument being made by one Keith418, who I'm sure is otherwise a very nice person.

One of the biggest problems involved in the "basements and sofas" model of the local bodies is the feeling that you are a "guest" in someone's home. Under this "home church" model, the local body master nearly always had to have meetings, masses, events, and other OTO ceremonies in their own homes. This led to the local body master feeling burnt-out, as their home had to be open to strangers, and their domestic routine was subject to the vagaries of the OTO. Family members could get resentful and the stress of having constant "open houses" often contributed, in no small extent, to local body masters feeling as if they had had enough. When you factor in the all-too-common "judge me not" approach to Thelemic morality, the strain is more than understandable. In many cases, watching what they had to put up with, I wondered how many lbms could keep going for as long as they did.

Well, perhaps it was the choice of the local body master to open his or her house, and suffer the consequences of that choice? And doesn't that fall in the category of, you know, this Thelema thing where we respect the choice people make and realize that they only have themselves to blaim for the decisions they make?

One practical problem I've seen as well is that half of the burnout of these local body masters comes from ungrateful people telling these poor fools that they are complete schmucks for opening up their houses. So rather than offering solutions or support, Keith's argument about burnout is in fact part of the fucking problem.

But, in many cases, another unfortunate effect occurred. When you are a guest in someone's home it is difficult to criticize them and how they do things. How many of us, for example, have heard the line, "This is my house and you will follow my rules" from our own parents? As guests, we have learned to be polite and accept our host's hospitality as graciously as we can. It's not hard to see how this dependent, "guest and host" relationship fostered an uncritical atmosphere that encouraged the lbms to continue to do things they probably shouldn't. I can imagine how difficult it would be to be an SGIG and try to hold a lbm accountable when they had been hosting all the OTO events in their own home for many years. When common domestic affairs and arguments bleed over into OTO events, you have a recipe for real craziness.

Well, there is this saying. Sing after me if you've heard the lyrics before: "with great power comes great responsibility."

And this is the core of my grumpiness.™ Thelemites hear "do what thou wilt", they are told "every man and every woman is a star", they are reminded that they should find their True Will--yet none of them make the painfully obvious logical leap from "do what thou wilt" to "and you're responsible for what you do."

I mean, come on--are all people attracted to Thelema so fucking stupid they cannot realize that if you play in an adult sandbox, you have to at least pretend you're an adult? And what is part of being an adult? Responsibility.

In this case any Local Body Master who doesn't assume the responsibility of creating a comfortable environment for the OTO, who allows his personal crap to bleed into Order crap, and who cannot set limits on unfraternal behavior but not project their own beliefs into unfraternally limiting those who come--they haven't figured out this strange word "responsibility", and have no business calling themselves a fucking Thelemite, much less holding events.

That Keith presumes that all Thelemite LBMs fall into this category tells me that Keith has yet to translate the foreign word "responsibility" into his native tongue.

But wait, it gets even sillier. If you think the problem is simply that Local Body Masters hold all the power by holding events in their home, and the solution would be to create a neutral location to meet, you don't know your Keith:

But we haven't quite got there yet. When the lbm and a few officers cover most of the costs, we still have many of the problems we had when the lbm was the "master of their domain" in their own home. It's hard for their members to critique them when they are the ones paying for everything. The lbms are, in a very real and tangible sense, still the "hosts" - and the members are still their "guests." The venue has shifted - but the power dynamics remain. For example, one friend of mine was recently told, "No one should critique the lbms and USGL officers, since they are the ones paying for everything." How different is this from someone politely refusing to critique a host in their own home? It's not that different at all.

So the fundamental problem here not that things are being held at the LBM's home, where (for example) his failure to get laid by his girlfriend last week bleeds into his griping about his life to anyone who will listen at Mass--something which home ownership doesn't give you exclusive license to do--but that the LBM has material power and then uses that material power to shape the body.

That is so fucking nuts I don't know where to start. All I can do is observe the painfully obvious: we are not all born equal, nor do we all have equal means or opportunities. Hell, I think even Crowley got that one in his drug-addled state.

And I'll quote some scripture:

Fear not at all; fear neither men nor Fates, nor gods, nor anything. Money fear not, nor laughter of the folk folly, nor any other power in heaven or upon the earth or under the earth. Nu is your refuge as Hadit your light; and I am the strength, force, vigour, of your arms.

If Keith is fearful of the impact of Thelemites who don't know about this "responsibility" thing because they use their money exert power at a local level--either by providing a home to meet in or by helping to foot the bill in providing a space--then Keith is essentially being fearful of money.

Remember: the line does not say: "Personal success fear not, nor the laughter of the folk folly..."--it says "Money fear not." In it's ambiguity it could either be interpreted as personal success, or the influence of external money power. In fact, given that the rest of it talks about external powers (the laugher of the folk folly, nor any power in heaven or upon the earth or under the earth), I would suggest that reading this passage as "Personal success fear not" is a rather self-serving interpretation.

But I guess Keith is fearful of money if it's held by one person disporportionally to another, or if it's used by anyone other than Keith.


Bottom line: if you don't get this "responsibility" thing, or if you're fearful that others cannot assume responsibility for their actions given the authority they've been granted (as LBMs are granted authority by the EC), then why are you wasting everyone's time by calling yourself a Thelemite?

Love is the law, love under will.

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

Yep, that's what it says. Do what thou wilt. And so the current thinking goes, anything which may interfear with me doing what my will is has got to be lined up against a brick wall and shot. But not just shot through the head and heart, firing squad style. No; anything at all which may make me feel bad about doing what I think my will is should be first shot through the kneecaps so it can't escape, then through the nuts so it suffers humiliation and pain--and then shot through the stomach and left to die a slow painful death of internal bleeding and digestive fluids coursing through the internal viscera.

We don't brook anyone telling us what to do. After all, we're Thelemites, God Damn It!

And that includes such concepts as "shame", which we bury in deep pits in our back yards (or our parent's basements, for those of us who have no shame couch-surfing), "responsibility", which we gut with a swift sword as an imposition by "The Man" which forces us to do things to like feed and cloth ourselves, and "mindfulness" which we mindlessly kick across the room as it wimpers at us like a beaten puppy.

But even the Marxists out there recognize that there has to be people who have some sort of ability. After all, you can't have "from those according to ability, to those according to need" if no-one was able to stuff--like grow food or weave clothes.


Therein lies one of the failures of Thelema as it is currently practiced today. There is no fucking shame. And while it's all fun and shit to feel like we can fuck like bunnies in front of large crowds and be proud of our bodies, people who fail to be good Thelemites (such as getting off their asses and stop couch surfing, or stop being mindless twits and take responsibility for their interactions with others--even if that means not fucking like bunnies from time to time) should feel ashamed for their failure.

But we have no way to instill cultural norms. We cannot comment on the Book of the Law. Our masses contain no homilies whereby group values can be shared or normative values can be established. We have no mechanisms, in other words, to instill shame--and those of us who'd like to tell people that perhaps they may want to think about what they're doing--we're just fucking with someone else's Will.

And up against that brick wall we go.


There is value to shame, responsibility, and all those other restrictions to one's will that creates the structural framework to make people better, and to build better institutions.

And it's a sure site better than being mindless assholes to each other, with the excuse that if I call you on your shit, I'm just "fucking with your buzz" interfearing with your Will.

Bah.


Love is the law, love under will.