How to Wage
A Mind War
“I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass.
And I’m all out of bubblegum.”
john nada, they live
Management theory, as we have come to know it and be subject to it, began on the slave plantations in the Caribbean and southern states. According to Harvard Business School researcher Caitlin Rosenthal, it was the request for regular reports by the absentee landlords of Jamaican and Barbadan plantations that led to the modern separation of management and ownership … one of the hallmarks of modern capitalism.62 It was in this milieu that managers first kept details records of a human’s worth and cost. A strapping young man may pick more cotton but also eats more than a couple of cheaper, older women. Which purchase was the most cost effective over time? Slave owners could collect data on their workforces that no one else could because the “employees” were locked in from cradle to grave. Northern workers subject to such extreme monitoring would have simply quit. The increase in data led slave owners to experiment with output optimisation techniques like small cash prizes for whichever slave picked the most cotton—call it the “slave of the month” programme—that are still in use today.
This ghoulish origin story is one of the many reasons I reject the word “hack.” Business hacks, like so-called life hacks, inevitably boil down to silly little habits designed to fit more work into your day. They are descendants of a highly dubious family line and contribute nothing of true value to your life. There is a reason there is no such thing as a “meaning hack” and it is because you cannot short-circuit the quest for life’s meaning by learning a few new tips to optimise your inbox. Four-hour work weeks, keeping your cubicle clean, wearing a tie on Fridays … these are all demonic devices that trick you into thinking the illusion of control is the same thing as life meaning.
In the same boat as these appalling hacks we can place any of those single Big Idea books that became popular about a decade ago—ones to do with being fooled by uncertainty that are, at best, inflated versions of feature articles from Sunday papers. Either they are based on rapidly dismissed scientific “evidence” or they are published by out-and-out liars. Jonah Lehrer was proved to be plagiarising. Malcolm Gladwell’s name appears on an early 90s third-party message development list for tobacco lobbyists, i.e., a list of journalists who can be relied upon to create sympathetic content. This is around the time he was writing pro-tobacco industry pieces in the Washington Post. Imagine that. Any of these so-called business success books appear to only provide advice in how to be successful
shilling business books. You have to go back almost a century before you find popular finance advice that isn’t worse than useless.
As for the Internet’s consensus on how to achieve financial success in a knowledge economy or creative economy or whatever word we use to describe an economy with a hollowed-out manufacturing base, this appears to only have relevance to college-educated white boys looking to found a startup described as “Uber for scooters” while their girlfriends financially support them by working at social media agencies.
What is so astounding about this entire industry is that it is selling you unachievable ways to get a life you do not even want in the first place. Seriously, let’s look at the life you are supposed to have.
A Recommended Life
Everyone wants a unique life. They want outcomes that are different from the norm: wealth, health, longevity. And yet the approach to getting outcomes different from the norm appears to be by approaching life in the same way everyone else does. This is bad strategy and bad magic. Here are the phases of a recommended existence.
Right away you can see some problems. Firstly, the life on offer is awful! Secondly, the parts of the plan that rely on society’s promise to you have long since gone. The education system is a mess, the college system is the very definition of extortion, stable white-collar employment no longer exists, energy is prohibitively expensive, and housing is not an investment but at best an inflation hedge.
Why then does it melt everyone’s faces if you dare to suggest that there might be another way to achieve a life different to this one? The answer inevitably comes down to one of those trendy Big Ideas you could write a bestselling life hack book about—herd bias, especially if you use evolutionary psychology to tie it back to our evolution out of monkey troops.
Herd bias is an unbecoming trait in a magician. One does not meet the devil at the crossroads to build a life that looks like everyone else’s. Too often people confuse their current circumstances for their fate. To be sure, our current circumstances are not all that rosy but that just gives us our starting position. Here is where magic departs from the religious beliefs—such as Paganism—that frequently house it; it has an unavoidable moral ambiguity to practical enchantment that I am anything but ambiguous about. Your current lack of success might be the will of the gods, but you are still going to do everything in your power to change it. I often think about our magical ancestors and the social and economic upheavals they had to go through. Consider what life was like for the wandering sorcerer during the collapse of the Roman empire or the Pembrokeshire cunning man during the industrial revolution and let them be your inspiration. Yes, the world is changing—possibly even collapsing. We would all prefer a better economic environment in which to thrive, but this is the one we have. It does not change the game, only the plays.
As for what this chapter is doing in a book about magic, let me give you some medical advice. Never ask your doctor what he or she thinks you should do. Ask them what they would do in your situation. The suggestions below are what I would do in your situation because I am in your situation and this is what I have done. Magic, like the cosmic equivalent of medical lubricant it really is, has been liberally applied at every probabilistic friction point in my work life. And it has turned out quite all right, to be honest. Adam Braun, whose nonprofit built 150 schools in developing countries before his thirty-first birthday, says “big dreams start with small, unreasonable acts.”63
For any of these unreasonable acts to appear palatable, something needs to break in the magician’s mind. It typically happens sometime after having that first inciting incident or initiation. There arises the permanent realisation that the promise of the world is not only bullshit but is also empty. To not act on this realisation, to not deploy what you have learned about the malleability of the manifest universe, is to be a mechanic without a car. What’s the point?
A defining characteristic of the most prominent magicians of fiction and reality is that they meddle. Dee, Crowley, Merlin, Gandalf, Morgan Le Fay, Bruno. Whatever the weather, they went out to remake the universe in a way that suited them better. We must do the same. Whatever the macroeconomic conditions, the magician must always heed the advice of Firefly’s Captain Mal Reynolds: aim to misbehave.
Be Brave, Not Reckless
Whilst writing this book, I met an American corporate lawyer in a castle in France and attempted to explain to her what I was writing about. She told me she would never buy it for her nieces because it sounded too grim. In her mind, nothing good could come of telling her nieces the truth of the economic reality they would face as they entered adulthood. Fine. Frankly, I don’t think it sounds grim enough. I don’t think it is grim enough because it offers a huge advantage: knowledge. Your advantage is knowledge, and no one can take that from you.
Knowledge in this case is a confident understanding of the probabilistic nature of the universe, a reasonable understanding of your current probabilities of successful outcomes and the capacity to unblinkingly act on the calculated risks that flow from both these understandings.
I say “calculated risk” but actually you cannot calculate risk, not really. What you can instead calculate is fragility. An object or person can be defined as fragile if it responds negatively to volatility. Nassim Nicholas Taleb uses the famous example of the teacup.64 Teacups do not like volatility. For the fragile, shocks bring higher and higher harm. Nothing happens to a teacup most of the time, but when it does happen, it is overwhelmingly negative: it breaks. (The impact of volatility also rarely shows up in the history of the product: you can’t tell that a teacup will smash by looking at its behaviour before it does. Similarly, volatile events like redundancies rarely show up in the history of you.) The goal of the magician, particularly the chaos magician, is to position his or her life so that it responds positively to volatility rather than negatively. Volatility should make your life better, not worse, just as the thousands of microtears in your muscles during weight training lead to larger biceps. Be the bicep, not the teacup! It’s easier than it sounds, and it gets easier the further you stray from society’s recommended life.
As for those who do not consider themselves risk takers, this reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of both risk and their own personalities. The appetite for risk exists on a spectrum, it is not binary. You may be so comfortable taking certain risks that you do not consider them risks at all, like smokers at the airport worrying about their flight, or patrons expressing concern over terrorism in the pub before driving home drunk. The other side of this inability to see risks you are comfortable with as inherently risky is the propensity to see risks that make you uncomfortable as much riskier than they are.
Consider the following. You may think these strategies are a bit too extreme, a bit too risky, and decide that getting massively into debt to buy an inflation hedge you can live in on the outskirts of your home town is “more you.” You don’t want to be doing anything with all these risky strategies. The thing about how economies work is that not taking a position is still taking a position. By refusing to adjust your strategy from the recommended life offered to the baby boomers forty years ago, what you are saying is that you have every confidence in the system; the current challenges are just temporary, and someone will come and sort it all out for us. That strikes me as extremely risky, riskier than putting it all on black. Is toeing the line being brave or is it being reckless? You cannot duck risk. There are no civilians in a mind war.
Here is the difference between bravery and recklessness. If you are not taking risks, you are failing to find the opportunities you are looking for, you are denying yourself optionality. In a career setting, this looks like taking on side projects at night and on weekends, being visible at industry events, putting your hand up for international assignments, applying for jobs you think you are under-qualified for, or even just asking the boss for extra work that stretches you.
Bravery, when combined with alertness, manifests in the highly desirable state of being “lucky.” It is not just the chance meeting with a potential employer at a friend’s birthday party, it is following through on that initial contact. It is replying to a blog commenter who had an observation about some industry news you had posted. The executive director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, Tina Seelig, observes that being lucky is actually a way of being in the world.65 It is also one that you can cultivate through the combination of risk-taking and observation. “Lucky” people are more willing to try things outside their usual experience which—and it sounds obvious when it is written down—is how they end up with atypical life outcomes like greater wealth and happiness. Stay open to the unexpected, be ready to pounce on unusual opportunities and always keep a bottle of abre camino oil to hand.
To be brave implies taking actions that have inherent risk, that may not go your way. This is as it should be. Recall that another name for capitalism might as well be “riskism.” The economic system is—or at least was—designed to reward capital that is placed at risk through investment. The problem is most people confuse risk with “too much risk,” especially when it comes to achieving their so-called dreams. People confuse taking a risk with risking it all. Particularly for those with creative aspirations, doing only what you love is terrible advice as it exposes you to much, much more downside from risk than there is upside. Achieving financial success through creativity is a very low-probability outcome that in many cases is ultimately self-defeating as it becomes increasingly difficult to sculpt or write a novel when you are worried about being homeless at the end of the week.
Instead, consider the following. Trial and error is the intelligence of chaos. If you wish to increase your optionality, if you wish to build “lucky” behaviours, then you are going to need to be placing multiple bets on multiple successful outcomes. You cannot do this for very long if each of the bets are too large. Invest in multiple bets that expose you to only a small amount of downside and a greater possibility of upside than one large bet. Do not quit your job to found a design agency, volunteer your design skills one evening a week for three separate charities or nonprofits.
Trial and error is the intelligence of chaos because your mistakes are information. The more of them you make, the more information you have to make the next round. Aim for as many mistakes as possible that cost you the least amount possible. Almost any situation you find yourself in can be improved and even turned around with a combination of persistence and increased information.
Optionality is applying the intelligence of chaos. As Taleb observes, you do not actually need to know precisely where you are going if you have upside, if an unexpected event benefits you more than it harms you. This is a hugely beneficial way of living in a probabilistic universe if you experiment where the losses can be minimised and the gains are very large. Returning to my persistent heresy against the one true religion of property ownership, an excellent example is the real estate landscape in London or New York. The salaries on offer are orders of magnitude greater than anywhere else in their respective countries, but the multiple of those salaries for the average property price is higher still. Moving to a high income economy enables you to shoot for much more individual wealth than in a smaller economic area. You minimise the risk associated with high salary/high risk careers by renting. Yes, rents are extremely high, but you still have not surrendered your personal optionality in being able to reduce rental overhead or even leave the city if you lose your high salary position. (You can also take higher salary positions elsewhere in the world more easily than someone struggling with property debt.) Over twenty years, exposure to an economy with extremely high salaries makes rent the investment everyone seems to think it isn’t.
If you want to be rich, move to where people get rich and then do not get into debt. If you want something different for your life, the same unemotional examination is required.
Housing
We have already covered why the mortgage industry exists and it is not for our benefit. We have also shown that as an investment it performs very poorly, offering you an inflation hedge at best. This is more about where and how to physically live—an unavoidable subject for all but the most ardent modern nomads. So that I am not misunderstood, property ownership is an effective store of value over the long term. Acquiring very high amounts of debt in an economy undergoing permanent, structural changes is too risky and too limiting. This is the great taboo of individual wealth. Here is what author and entrepreneur James Altucher has to say about it on his blog:
Buying coffee on the street instead of in a Starbucks is the poor man’s way to get rich. In other words, you will never get rich by scratching out ten cents from your dollar. People save 10 cents on a coffee and then … .overpay $100,000 for a house and then do reconstruction on it. Or they save 10 cents on a book and then … buy a college degree that they never use for $200,000.66
Having somewhere to live is obviously essential to living your preferred life and in markets where the customer has to participate—health, housing, food, and the like—dangers, cartels, and complexities rule. So let us consider the following thought exercise, based on a scenario outlined on Charles Hugh-Smith’s popular economics blog, Of Two Minds:.
A family with a household income of $80,000 sits just in the top 30% of all households. If this household bought at the top of the market, it has a huge mortgage, credit cards, auto loans for two cars. Servicing this debt in addition to combined utilities leaves very little for dining out or going on vacation, especially if the parents are contributing to college education for their kids. Measured in terms of the items this family (currently) legally owns they appear wealthy. However subtracting their debt obligations paints a picture of a family on the breadline that spends much of their incarnation servicing debt with little money to actually live their lives over the forty years of debt servicing. This is a family that is one negative health diagnosis or even minor auto accident away from disaster. This family is a teacup.
An alternative is not only possible, can we even call it an alternative in the world that has emerged around us? Try these.
Americans buy too much house. The average home size has increased by 50% in the last two decades, mostly in an effort to get people to take out larger and larger mortgages. They are now more than three times the size of the average house in the UK. You do not need this much house! You also need to be aware of how much of your future wealth will be absorbed by property taxes on a house that is either unnecessarily large or in an over-valued area. That is wealth that could go to making art or magic or having adventures.
Consider instead multi-generational or multi-family ownership. For all but the last sixty years, the entire history of human habitation has been multi-generational. The notion that a “real” American families lives on its own in a large house in the suburbs is a fifty-year-old Madison Avenue creation for a singular national market. The Danish, for instance, have been doing cohousing for more than half a century. Multi-occupancy or multi-ownership arrangement provide additional redundancy if one person loses their income or has a poor health diagnosis. Multi-ownership should ideally shorten the mortgage period down to three to five years, beyond which you begin to skew your risk. It also provides additional flexibility should one or more person need to move temporarily for work. Additionally, it kickstarts a return to intergenerational capital pooling, which has been the secret of wealthy families’ success since the rise of cities more than five thousand years ago. Return to Charles Hugh-Smith:
The solution to the erosion of the middle class lifestyle is to destroy debt and other fixed costs and eliminate self-sabotaging discretionary consumption that cripples the household’s ability to accumulate capital that generates income. There is nothing magical about the values and behaviors that enable this; it boils down to choosing to leave the permanent adolescence of debt-based consumerism behind and move up to a more prosperous, productive way of living: doing more with less.67
Thirty-five percent of Americans have debt in collection. Three-quarters live paycheck to paycheck. Almost half cannot cover a $400 expense without going into debt or selling something.68 You really have to ask yourself whether living in such a precarious situation is weirder than buying a house with your brother and his wife.
On a related note, it is regularly reported that one in four college graduates still live with their parents in the years after college. What is unclear to me is how this is a bad thing for anyone but landlords and mortgage sellers. Since we started living in huts we have been living in multi-generational dwellings. Are young people expected to do the opposite just as they face increased economic headwinds? (I left home when I was eighteen, by the way. And have moved countries several times since then. Lest you think this is an exercise in self-justification.)
The second essential transformation of the domestic space comes with the rise of edible landscapes. Nothing would make me happier than driving through the suburbs and seeing the lawns and hedges replaced with out-of-control pumpkin and cucumber vines. An unavoidable reality of life in the early twenty-first century is that the cost of food is increasing even as its quality in decreasing. Collectively, we need to get over the white people cringe that growing one’s own food is “something immigrants do.” Here is another activity which is almost entirely upside. Learn about, grow, and eat your own food. No space is too small.
Education
After the housing crash of 2008, the banksters were in need of a new source of debt to impose on Americans and then securitize into financial instruments of mass destruction. They found it. College debt exceeds that of all credit card debt and auto loans in the US. It is also the only form of debt that follows you after bankruptcy. This debt is now being securitised, just as subprime mortgages were, because it remains the only sufficient quantity of debt the general population appears willing to accrue.
The whole situation is ghastly. Tuition fees have risen 300 percent versus the (already manipulated) Consumer Price Index between 1990 and 2011. Thirty-seven percent of students fail to finish with a degree, meaning they are burdened with unavoidable debt for a product they never actually received.69 As states push through more funding cuts, universities raise their rates for a product that is getting less and less useful.
Even the Federal Reserve itself is suggesting a college degree is not be the universal panacea everyone once considered it to be. In May 2014, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco noted that incomes for the bottom 25 percent of all bachelor’s graduates do not outperform the incomes of those without a college degree and given the additional debt burden the graduates have, college becomes a poor financial perspective for this segment.70 They go on to suggest that the numbers do not hold for the incomes of the remaining graduates, but this is a misunderstanding of mathematics that can only come from a central banker.
In fact, once the costs of attending college are considered, it is likely that earning a bachelor’s degree would not have been a good investment for many in the lowest 25 percent of college graduate wage earners. Of course, what goes unsaid is that these numbers repeat until you only end up with one student left in the whole country. If the bottom 25 percent didn’t go to college, then the bottom quarter of the remaining 75 percent would be in the same situation when it comes to average wages which would have now risen for those who didn’t go to college.
In any other category of business, to have such high costs and such an astoundingly poor success rate would quickly lead to mass closures. Instead the higher education industry insists it is cost-effective and helpful for students even as all evidence points to the contrary. As Charles Hugh-Smith notes, tertiary education functions in an identical fashion to any other cartel: colleges maintain a monopoly on accreditation.71 There is no accountability for a poor product because you cannot buy it anywhere else.
And it is a product. A university can only issue a credential that is seen as a proxy for knowledge. Its relationship to any underlying knowledge is tenuous and its stamp of authenticity is largely redundant in a post-LinkedIn world. Google, for instance, no longer asks job applicants for GPAs or academic transcripts because they do not predict anything. There is no measurable correlation between success in college exams and success later in life. When it comes to successful people who have been through the college system, Taleb refers to this as “teaching birds how to fly.” 72 Imagine a business professor standing up in front of an auditorium, teaching a room full of birds about flight. At the end of his lecture he flings open the doors and all his students fly out. He thinks he has taught them about flying, but they were already birds.
If you are from a very wealthy family then, by all means, go to an elite college and milk it for network effects. Given that you are reading this particular book, it is unlikely that is the case, so think about the following. What we have with the tertiary education sector is a misunderstanding of scarcity. College degrees used to be scarce when in-person tuition and the oral transmission of knowledge was required. There were fewer people with degrees than there were jobs that required them. Today the opposite is true. Fewer jobs, more degrees than needed. This leads to degree inflation, which compounds the student debt burden and makes the entire system appear more essential. Where once a job required only a high school education, now it requires a bachelor’s degree. Jobs previously requiring a bachelor’s degree now insist on a master’s degree, and so on. Thus the cartel that caused the problem also appears as its seeming solution. Your vast amount of student debt didn’t get you the job you want? Then come back and have some more debt! Nice work if you can get it.
What’s scarce today is real-world experience or even, it turns out, real-world preparedness. The number of students exiting the college system with poor literacy skills is amazing, to say nothing of those entering it. Should you wish to pursue interests that require specific degrees, then a strategy that is equally radical to the above housing suggestion is required.
Now that I have gotten that off the chest, let us talk about learning rather than simply college. Given that I did a film degree that did not even have exams on the other side of the world from where I currently live, let me say that I regret almost every minute of it. The few minutes I do not regret are when I interned at Fox Studios and learned how to do audio post-production by listening to Christopher Lloyd say the same half a line over and over again until I found the correct one. (It had been mislabelled during production.) Or it was when I shot a documentary about a sunken city and had to work out how to convince two separate kings and one government minister to allow me access to the sites.
Projects and continual learning are the stakes plunged into the ground that demarcate your area of expertise. I have not been asked about my university experience in almost fifteen years. In the meantime I have presented global media and content strategy all over Europe and been acquired by a publicly listed American media company. My degree probably taught me nothing. My experience on the documentary helps me every day.
This book emerged from the success—such as it is—of my blog. And the blog emerged from being made redundant from Discovery Channel. I figured it would be good to improve my understanding of web publishing and I had some time on my hands. Should I do a course or should I just do it? Continual learning is not the process of accruing a growing pile of certificates in project management and MS Office proficiency and so on—although they can help. Continual learning arises when you refuse to let circumstances or other people’s opinions of you stand in your way. Like being lucky, it lives entirely in a singular mindset: do not worry about being good at something. Focus instead on getting better at it. The rest is upside.
Exposure to the New Economy
When Chinese ecommerce platform Alibaba submitted its IPO paperwork in advance of its 2014 stock market listing, it had 231 million active buyers, a volume of buyers greater than the adult population of the United States. More than two billion people have access to the web via mobile devices, and the total number of users is greater in developing countries than it is in developed ones. In all of human history there has never been so large a market of potential customers and business partners.
All of this is to say that you simultaneously live in more than one economy. Historically we have measured economies exclusively based on place—there is a recession in New Zealand, youth unemployment is declining in Paris—because all economies were based around place almost by definition. Today, multiple economies overlay the same geographic area. There is the economy of travel agents and newspaper printers that is dying and there is the rapidly growing, multi-trillion dollar economy that is fast emerging. It falls to you to decide which one you would prefer greater exposure to. Forget the unemployment figures you see on the news. According to the CEO of Gallup, the number of US adults employed for more than thirty hours a week is only 42 percent. “Official” unemployment data will suggest only around 8 percent unemployment. But there are 93 million considered not in the labor force. A report prepared by Global Insight for the 2014 United States Conference of Mayors shows that the new jobs being added pay 23 percent less than the jobs being lost at a national level.74
You are being intellectually dishonest with yourself if you think that pockets of hyper-growth occurring in places beyond where you currently live are irrelevant. They are not. A very obvious opportunity is staring you in the face. Move.
It is surprising that this option does not occur to people more often. During our lifetime—in fact in the last few years—we have experienced one of the biggest demographic changes in the human journey: for the first time ever we are now a majority urban species. Economic migration is the reality of the human condition. Opportunity is not evenly distributed and if you happen to live somewhere where there is less of it then you need to move. As with all economics, not taking a position is still taking a position. Refusing to move is taking the position that you will make do with the reduced or entirely absent opportunities in the area where you currently live.
One of the benefits of living in an age of Big Data is that much of the intellectual heavy lifting surrounding moving has been done for you. An evening spent with a bottle of wine and a search engine will result in an opportunity grid of potential new locations. Often these locations are counter-intuitive. Yes, New York will see the highest growth in low-wage service roles but parts of Florida, Washington, and Texas metro areas offer the highest potential for middle class job growth in the next decade. Raleigh, North Carolina, has been identified as an emerging tech hub (along with Eindhoven in the Netherlands if you are looking further afield). Atlanta basically already is one.
There have been periods in our recent history where our ancestors did things like walk across the Dust Bowl to find work as grave diggers. Today, in an age of affordable air travel and high speed Internet access, the propensity to move for employment is actually declining. Only 20 percent of today’s 25–34-year-olds moved for work, down from 31 percent in 1965.75 In a 2014 interview with Bloomberg, Carsey Institute demographer Kenneth Johnson said, “Migration is a key advantage of the American system historically. The ability of growing areas to attract migrants from a large national labor pool has historically helped the US adapt to changing economic conditions.”76
A common pushback to the idea of moving for work is that it is disruptive to one’s children. Maybe so, but the life outcomes are significantly worse for children who were raised in poverty versus children who moved several times during their schooling. If that is your only excuse, it is flimsy. Think very carefully on the possibility that you are using children’s natural resistance to change as a cover for your own unwillingness.
Between 1990 and 2013, disposable income rose 0 percent and rent rose 15 percent.77 A willingness to move offers you additional valves to reduce your cost of living pressure. It also becomes clearer how the mind war strategies work in concert: move to a high growth area with close friends or family, rent and live together, diversify your incomes, share costs, stay out of debt. A world in which opportunity is not randomly distributed that also has a working age population displaying less interest in chasing after it presents a significant strategic advantage for the ambitious magician. Resist the atomizing effect of monoculture’s celebration of the fiction of the individual. This is how tribes work, this is how it has always been done. Nomadism is humanity’s natural state and adventurism is wizardry’s natural one.
Seek Convexity
Convex work is simply the sort of work that has the highest revenue upswing potential from the initial investment. If you open a dive bar in Saudi Arabia you will be confronted with an immediate and fairly low revenue ceiling. If you open one in Hoxton, London, you will not. The same goes with personal or vocational investment. Given the demographic changes facing the western world in the next twenty years, is it better to specialise in gerontological nursing or adolescent nursing? For the same initial investment, which option has even the tiniest chance of you owning a network of old folks homes and retiring to a private island?
A caveat to seeking vocational convexity relating also to choosing where to live is to be aware of whether there is an oversupply in the medium term. In challenging economic times, masses of people retrain … typically in “sounds good on paper” pointlessnesses like MBAs or law degrees. Because the world needs more of them, eh? Just be aware that the oversupply may hit the job market before you can even get there.
Next, robot-proof yourself. This cannot be over-emphasised. Your new hobby needs to be keeping up with robotics news. The only type of work that cannot currently be robotised is that which has an unknown point of completion. An operation where a dental filling is replaced has a known point of completion: a new filling. A new summer menu or a garden design does not. In the next decade, robotics will affect the middle income workforce a lot more than you currently think but slightly less than you currently fear. For the open-eyed, there is opportunity here: when asked how he would prepare for a match against a computer, Dutch chess master Jan Hein Donner said, “I would bring a hammer.”78 Jan will probably still have a job in ten years time.
Mercifully, seeking convexity does away with the preposterous and dangerous fiction that you must only do work that you are passionate about, that you must follow this passion at all costs. If this were in any way a solution we would not have teenagers and kids in their early twenties dropping out of college—as the majority of them do—with incomplete degrees and massive debt burdens. The assumption that a child has a pre-existing passion is as flawed as the assumption that such passions align with ways of making money either today or in the near future. On an individual level, seeking convexity means “developing rare and valuable skills.” Scarcity always carries a premium. If you have in-demand skills then you can leverage them to engineer either the type of career or the type of life you wish to lead. Not everyone considers the largest possible salary as their primary goal. My accountant does not work Fridays because he likes to surf. I cannot do what he does, so I don’t get accounting services on Fridays. “Developing rare and valuable skills” lacks some of the romance of finding your destiny in a lifetime role that brings you happiness and wealth, but it has the strategic advantage of actually working. Especially when you combine it with the mind war strategy of taking charge of your own training and experience. Just as with housing and where you locate yourself, mind wars are invariably fought on multiple fronts.
From Convexity to Mastery
A common and highly suspect objection to the strategy of cultivating industry non-specific “rare and valuable skills” is that it smacks of dilettantism. Hardly. You have only a finite number of years in the workforce (and in your life!) so you must be highly intolerant of stagnation. If a project or a business or a job does not turn out the way you want or need it to, abandon it. In creative writing this is “killing your darlings.” In business this is good business. One of business writer Seth Godin’s best yet least-understood books, The Dip, describes how you should abandon anything you are not going to be best in the world at as soon as you realise this is so. Hyperbole, perhaps, but still a very good way of assessing which skills and projects you choose to focus your time on. Thus is mastery achieved with enough time to put it to use engineering the life you wish to lead.
In the Workplace
More or less every piece of workplace advice you have been given is either wrong or suited to more predictable economic times. Workplace advice is really human behavioural advice: how to regulate your own and how to shape that of others. Given that early twenty-first century workplaces run the full gamut from Alaskan crab fishing fleets to the International Space Station, there are a surprisingly high number of universal approaches worth incorporating into your mind war. Here are some personal observations from reasonably successful campaigns across multiple industries in five separate countries (so far).
The Network
People who do not understand networking think it is handing out business cards at conferences or retweeting industry opinion makers. Networks are not measured in the volume of people that you have met. Networks are an accumulation of social capital. For instance, the true value of elite education is located in the advantage of matriculating—and drinking and committing sexual assault in fraternity basements—with the scions of hyper-connected, wealthy families. Thus are future presidents selected.
It is a mistake to think that you are hired by a company. In actuality, you are hired by a person. All opportunity flows through people. The underlying spirit of the network is generosity, not reciprocity. An unthinking approach to network is to assume a tit-for-tat response to somebody doing you a favour. The ROI of your network is far less predictable. Help people with no expectation of reward because, as Executive Director of Harvard’s Saguaro Seminar, Thomas Sanders, notes: the underlying network science suggests that it is the weak links rather than the strong ones who deliver the best return.79 It is the friend of the friend of the friend who happens to have your perfect job opportunity. You will never know in advance which permutation of weak links will deliver this. Trying to keep some kind of Santa Claus-style grudge list is a waste of time. This is how global networking expert Sunny Bates explains it:
It’s very easy to think that somebody knows you. And that if they know you, they will think about calling you, or asking you, or wanting you for something. But people forget. I was a headhunter for many years, and I was always amazed because easily 20 percent of the time, the final person who was hired was well-known to the client. (They just hadn’t thought about them.) That means that, for every five people you know, one is likely to have an impact on you or hire you—that should make you want to expand your circle.80
In a mind war, networking extends far beyond having more than 500 LinkedIn connections. Correctly used, it is probably one of our greatest advantages. From a magical perspective, I have my professional network, but I consider it a subset of something larger and more varied. I consider it part of my tribe. It is too early to predict just how disruptive the rise of crowdfunding and the return of localism is going to be, but they are hugely positive signals that we are moving into a world that can be consciously decentralised. A healthy network means you can avoid the bottlenecks of restrictive bank financing or angel investors or acquisition editors or any of the other gatekeepers that emerged out of the legacy, centralised-industrial model. For this larger network/tribe, two things must be kept utmost in mind.
Firstly, a network is not a digital asset! You could have the maximum number of friends Facebook allows and still not have a healthy network. Digital platforms facilitate communication within a network. That is all. You still need to have coffee with people and birthday cards are always appreciated. (June 25, since you asked.)
Secondly, if you are a mechanic, make sure your network consists of more than other mechanics. Have chefs, teachers, painters, waiters, naval officers … whatever. Varied networks provide more useful weak link effects in unpredictable times. I like to think of this as the village in my head. In previous eras you would know your baker or your school teacher; you would know who to speak to about livestock issues or how to fix the roof of your barn. The economics of the modern world make it highly unlikely that you have access to such a variation in skills within easy walking distance. The positive side to the digitisation of networks is that in previous eras, I would not have had an Oxford astrophysicist or a marine biologist in my village … but I do in the village in my head.
A healthy network is one of the best ways to gain exposure to the new economy. Collaboration and shared ownership of income streams are emerging as the new funding model, replacing the old debt-based model of business loans and interest payments. Instead of founding companies, groups and collectives can dynamically appear that share necessary skills or access to potential new markets: don’t speak German but have a product or service you wish to market in Germany? Does your network contain any Germans with comparable skills who would be interested in an equity partnership?
In the end, effective networking comes down to a science fiction version of the tribal model. You don’t win a mind war on your own.
Wealth in the Medium Term
Even if you happen to be good at making money, you probably aren’t good at keeping it. Few people realise this is an entirely separate skill, and it is because of this lack of realisation that most people struggle to retain their wealth. Once it is pointed out, it is obvious. A successful dentist makes a lot of money because he or she is good at dentistry. But what do teeth have to do with investing and wealth preservation? Unless your actual job is investment advisor, I am here to tell you that you need to learn a brand new skill.
As you may have guessed from the “Recognising the Bars” chapter, I am a proponent of measuring wealth in terms of their real asset value. Story of my life, but this means inevitably keeping company with some spectacularly weird fringe dwellers. All too often, the words out of somebody’s mouth immediately following “physical wealth” have something to do with burying gold coins in your backyard because the US dollar is going to collapse. It isn’t. And the gold standard is never coming back. (My guess is we will eventually replace the fiat system with some sort of “basket of commodities” standard administered by the IMF which may or may not include gold.)
What this means is it is useful to be a physical wealth theorist, if not a physical wealth proponent. We have seen how our crony currency system distorts price signals and interferes with our ability to assess personal economic value. It is more difficult for the system to distort the value of the home you were born in or your tribally inherited water access rights as they both have an immovable physicality. In many ways, a preference for physical wealth or investment is philosophical and finds common ground with much of the magical and Pagan communities. For instance, I personally believe permacultural farmland is more valuable than mortgage-backed securities or taxi cab apps, regardless of their relative valuations. Remember the term humanomics. You are always in control of what you choose to define as valuable, even if that is nominally measured in currency.
Assuming you plan to remain incarnate for the next twenty years, you will live through the most dramatic changes to the monetary system ever. That makes determining value even more challenging. Historically, when huge monetary changes occur, the best rule of thumb is to control as many real resources as you can. These can include precious metals if you so desire, but it also extends to the above water-rights, energy production systems (solar, geothermal, etc.), and farmland or other arable land. For much of the world, it may be technically safer to keep these assets outside the banking system, especially since widespread policy changes mean you may be forced to bail in your own bank.
In terms of wealth creation strategies, our changing world presents a number of new possibilities. Before we describe them, I cannot stress enough that nothing in this chapter or indeed the entire book constitutes investment advice. The fact that it contains guidelines for a crossroad pact with the devil should really be the giveaway there. Cast your mind back to Deirdre McClosky’s notion of the Great Enrichment; the middle classifying of the whole planet. We can observe this process playing out in the world’s stock markets. In her 2014 annual wrap up, Catherine Austin Fitts observes that the total value of every stock market on earth in 1990 was $11 trillion dollars.81 Today it is $70 trillion and is on track for at least $150 trillion as more countries launch their own exchanges and the emerging ones continue to grow. Fitts calls this “a once-in-a-civilisation event,” the securitisation of the entire planet. It is a huge growth opportunity and it is presenting itself—indeed is powered by—the increase in access and participation in markets thanks to the rise of mobile and digital communications. We already see the beginnings of this increased participation with the emergence of crowdfunding, micro-funding and investment concepts such as motif investing, where participants can buy trends such as “clean energy” or “America on the move.”
As for retirement strategies, the world has changed so much that if you are under forty the social and capital infrastructure, pension funds, and so on will have been largely or completely dismantled by the time you come to retire. There are currently more than $60 trillion in unfunded pension liabilities as we head into the largest mass retirement in human history. Consider the following Ponzi mathemathics, courtesy once again of Charles Hugh-Smith. (Buy his book and subscribe to his blog.)82
Superannuation and pension schemes rely on harvesting the wealth of the working age population, “investing it wisely,” and paying for the retired members of the schemes with the profits from their canny investments. Don’t know about you, but I think I’ll pass.
Given the supreme unpredictability facing the economic system, let an understanding of physical wealth inform your retirement decision-making. It is also a very good idea to keep your network healthy as you approach retirement age, a practice that has been humankind’s tried and true approach to our later years.
Inevitably, what constitutes wealth and how much of it you actually need to achieve your personal vision of success can only be measured on an individual basis. If there were a defined strategy, everyone would be wealthy. Complicating this further is that the tried and true strategies of the previous five decades are not a good match for the changes the world is currently experiencing. These changes suggest some novel approaches are called for.
Finally, there is one other factor to be accounted for in your quest for success. The most important factor … so important it made it into the title of the book.
Chaos
There is the old saying that men plan and God laughs. You will have experienced this in your own life. Success as it transpires has very little to do with planning and very much to do with having a stomach for chaos, for unpredictability. Outside of some highly artificial scenarios such as chess or the more boring sports, the ten thousand hour rule popularised by tobacco lobbyist Malcolm Gladwell has severely limited applicability.
For life’s more important goals—making art, finding love—there is neither a minimum or maximum hour rule. Instead you have the permanent state of unpredictability: you probably will not find love tomorrow. This will happen every day until you do.
I say “stomach for” chaos but actually you need to learn to love it. If your work life reaches a dead end, dismantle it! If times get tough in your area, assemble a wagon train of friends and family and leave that old life behind for pastures new. If you find yourself in a situation where you are not cultivating rare and valuable skills, walk away. Any of these strategies trigger fear reactions in the majority of the population, but they are already walking casualties in the mind war. You have discovered that not even death can stop you and—armed with spirit allies and ancestors—adventure awaits.
Every strategy and every step on the adventure requires risk. Taking risks is about being brave, not reckless. Fear and victimhood are rejections of risk. They are anti-chaos and pro-status quo. Fear is the first and most important front in the mind war. Pulitzer-nominated journalist John Rappoport says, “Defeat is a program. It’s a mind-control program and it is planet-wide.” The good news is your finger has been hovering above the off-switch your entire life.
conclusion:
the temple at the
end of capitalism
A success magic book is a curious hybrid. It is beyond its scope—and beyond the scope of any book ever written—to declare one is in possession of the meaning of life. (I am afraid you will have to consider that homework.) Similarly, no one explains to you how difficult it is to demonstrate enough personal success to justify taking up the reader’s time without sounding like an appalling person in the process. So this has been the most challenging chapter of the book. Figuring that new vistas have a tendency to inspire creativity, I tried writing it all over the world. In the sky over China; in New York’s East Village; in Auckland, New Zealand; in South Beach, Miami. I even worked on the bibliography in Rome. (You see what I mean about sounding appalling?) Pieces occurred to me on my journeys, but the overall shape of the chapter remained elusive.
Perhaps flying almost twice around the world in less than a month suggests a shape. Writing this over the Atlantic on the way back to London right now, I am not at the front of the plane, but neither am I at the back. From a coal mining town in regional Australia to an accidental career on the other side of the planet provides interest challenge, globe-trotting excitement … and isn’t in banking. For magicians, the answer to the success question cannot be “Hey, let’s all be bankers. That will solve everything!” Success comes from suitably incorporating Meaning (with a capital M) into one’s life. We require a more sophisticated, more nuanced sense of the term than what is crudely expressed in a bank statement, but we also need to know how those curious glyphs on the bank statement came to be and how they relate to the rest of the world. I am happy that I have enough money to pursue what is important to me in life and grateful that I (currently) enjoy the way I make that money. You can keep your Learjet; I’d rather have a pen and a nice notebook.
The pursuit of Meaning has changed for both the worse and the better in the last two decades. Social mobility may be declining, but creative mobility has never been more achievable. Beginning with the bad news, Meaning is in short supply in our current and medium term socioeconomic future:
Now to the good news. While we may be living in the last days of centralised capitalism, we also live in an age of wonders. All the greatest novels in western literature can fit on your phone. You can have real-time video conversations with people living in Antarctic research stations at zero cost. Yes, most days the digital world may seem to consist entirely of cat pictures and pornography. But amongst the pussies you can also find the Nag Hammadi library or recordings of Siberian shamans singing to the ancestors. Private space programmes, gay marriage, cameras on mobile handsets that are far more sophisticated than anything I had access to in film school. Would you trade that for a stable, postwar factory job and a house in a racially segregated suburb?
To be clear, this is not a book of digital utopianism. We cannot conclude that you should be happy with your minimum-wage job because at least you have the Internet. Chaos magic first arose into popular consciousness during a time when people believed the digital age presented a future of free expression and fluid identity like some eternal Burning Man. This turned out to be very naïve. I hope I have demonstrated a willingness to stare at what is frankly an extremely challenging incarnation with as little sugarcoating as possible. We will not live happily ever after in the Cloud. However, you can now order seeds for rare, medieval vegetables—far denser in nutrients—and plant them in the backyard of the foreclosed home next door, sharing the bounty with neighbours found via location-based services. You can hear about a genuine Amazonian shaman on Twitter and book the entire journey to meet him or her on a single device while waiting in line for your lunch. You can finally find an audience for your throat-singing albums (probably). The learned networking behaviours of the digital world—such as sharing and mutual interest—are now being taken offline. A digital utopia is only legitimately expressed when you take the best of what it offers to integrate it into your physical existence.
For the first time ever more of us now live in cities than not as a species. Consider the following urban trend: After the Boomers, the next-largest demographic cohort is Generation Y, the so-called Millennials. Far fewer Millennials drive. Far fewer express a desire to live in the suburbs, preferring instead what is known as “urban light” in developer-speak. This means living closer to the centre and existing in walkable spheres of economic influence. It is impossible to overstate or predict the impact of this trend, but I would not want to be the big box retailer at the edge of town in twenty years—I would want to be the independent greengrocer.
A quarter of all people who have ever lived are alive right now. In the west at least, this means we are staring at a dramatic cultural change brought about by the first generation to have been raised with a very digital sense of sharing, community, and economies based on networks. The news media paints these changes in a negative light: Millennials live with their parents, Millennials are too coddled to drive, Millennials aren’t buying houses. This is the view of their automotive and real estate advertisers, of course, and they should be concerned because their world is going away. By 2025, Millenials will make up 75 percent of the workforce. As CEOs and business leaders, they will bring about changes in economic practice as great as the rise of the assembly line or the Internet.
Here is the view of one of the oldest think tanks in Washington, the Brookings Institute:
The desire of Millennials for pragmatic action that brings results will overtake today’s emphasis on ideology and polarization as Boomers finally fade from the scene. This cultural shift will be felt in all aspects of the American economy from its marketplaces to its workforce and from its board rooms to the daily decisions of its CEOs.83
A three-year study of Millennial attitudes by Accenture found that of their ten least-liked companies, four belonged to the country’s most powerful banks: JP Morgan & Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo.84 But is it really so bad a thing that consumption-based capitalism is ending? As the old world of stable manufacturing jobs shuffles off to retirement with its Boomer devotees, a new world is emerging that is asking the question of what work is for. What will be written on your tombstone? What is it about you that is perishable and what is imperishable? Even if you are not part of the Millennial generation you will still be living in a world built by their hands and their values, and it is very different.
Blink and you will miss all of this. It is all too easy to give in to fear and slip back into the control mechanism. That is why the rituals in this book may appear extreme on first read-through. Finding Meaning and success in the post-apocalypse requires a permanent value adjustment. If you picture subjects like wealth, employment, and property ownership as slow-moving planets in an astrological chart, they are currently moving into a new configuration to which we must all respond. It feels counter-intuitive at first, but finding success almost by definition requires you to do the opposite of what everyone else does. It can be so easy to lose your nerve at the last moment and follow the crowd. Crowds cohere around failure, not success. Follow at your peril.
“Degrowth” rather than growth is now the cutting edge of culture. It is a way of being in the world that values access over ownership, that does not measure success or prosperity in terms of consumption. I first moved to London two weeks before Lehmann Brothers collapsed. This was probably the worst time in a thousand years to seek employment in the city. (Although that fire they had a few centuries back probably wasn’t great, either.) And so I would apply for open positions in the morning and spend the rest of the day walking the streets and canals, visiting the (free) museums, reading secondhand books in Regent’s Park, buying cheap food at markets just as they were closing, watching documentaries online once it got too cold to be outside. I began with more savings than I had ever had before and—because this is how fate works—eventually started my first day of a new job with zero money left in my accounts. I had one pound left and the meal I ate the night before was a supermarket sandwich that cost one pound. It was an awful, stressful time, but it was also somehow wonderful. The experience permanently de-coupled money and status from my sense of personhood or my capacity to appreciate what is actually valuable in human life. You do not need a single cent to your name to appreciate Monet’s Water Lilies or to pick up a pen and start writing a short story. Today we live in a world where you may ultimately lose your teaching job to a robot, but you have the opportunity for exploration and expression of topics and people that would have got you burned at the stake a few centuries ago.
How you maximise the opportunities presented by our chaotic Kali Yuga is to first become invincible. Your distinct advantage over the majority of the denizens of the west is an unshakeable awareness that the physical realm represents a small sliver in the spectrum of your actual existence. Becoming invincible takes away every map you have ever owned and replaces them all with cold, brilliant freedom. There are no proscribed steps beyond such a point. For example, it is patently impossible to reverse-engineer the decisions I have made into a twenty-point plan to achieve a life that resembles my own … in the vanishingly unlikely scenario that anyone would even want it. Such a plan would not read well: be born in a regional Australian coal mining town, do a film degree, move countries on a whim, spend the next decade making a series of incandescent mistakes, get made redundant fairly consistently … profit. Who needs this? Become invincible and have adventures. The rest is detail.
Since the end of the Great Recession, the amount that the wealth of the 1 percent has grown is greater than the cost of every single social programme in America. We watch the last days of crony capitalism with the same grim fascination that the early gothics observed the cult of the ruin; the centralisation of wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands calls to mind the civilisations that have fallen before our own. Let us return to the Bank of England, one of the epicentres of our current monetary culture. When its surveyor, Sir John Soane, reopened a much-expanded Bank of England fortified against rioting Londoners and doubled in size to accommodate the new force of debt to drive imperial growth, he held an exhibition that showed his gleaming new building in ruins. Even its creator could not look upon the Bank without finding it monstrous and realising it—along with the British Empire—will one day end. (Sir John was pretty much full wizard. Be sure to visit his museum when you are next in London.)
Wizards have always thrived in periods of acute cultural and economic change. Indeed, the western magical tradition as we recognise it today was formed between the first and fourth centuries as empires split in two, new gods arrived from the east, distant provinces were abandoned to their fate, currencies were debased to pay for impossibly large armies, and the libraries of the classical world were scattered to the winds. We appeared again during the economic tumult of the union of Scotland and debt-ridden, Catholic-haunted England under James I—the first and only monarch to write a book on witch-hunting and demonology. We appeared again in the cane and cotton fields of the New World where merchants became richer than kings while humans were kept as property. We wait in the shadows for things to get rough and then step into the light like smiling loan sharks.
To do what, exactly? Inevitably, a regime of practical enchantment is judged on the physical results it manifests. I do not shy away from this. Success magic should bring you success. If not, you are doing it wrong. We cannot make success be whatever you want it to be lest we rob the term of its usefulness. What, then, does success look like in a world where the previous yardsticks—expensive cars, suburban houses—are no longer relevant? What are the outward manifestations of a meaningful, magical life? Success is not a McMansion in negative equity. Success is camping in a Languedoc field for a summer, drinking pastis and playing boules with the locals. Success is getting someone to buy one of your paintings, even if it is for a dollar. Success is extracting sufficient wealth from a dysfunctional system without the status anxiety that so often accompanies it.
Ultimately, success is a head game. It is bringing your best army to the mind war. Decades of happiness research have revealed that employment is poorly suited to making you happy and that, in fact, humans are extremely bad at predicting what will make us happy in the first place. Somewhere in the nascent science of consciousness research and how our minds interact with the physical world is the secret the hermeticists and yogis of the past seek to impart to us from beyond the grave. At some fundamental level you are creating and changing the universe. Practical magic can only amplify this pre-existing function. It cannot even supply the wisdom to know when to use it and when to hold off. Such wisdom is hard won and only arrives after many campaigns. You will recognise its arrival when your creative, imaginal capacity knows when to change the changeable and when to find another way around the unchangeable.
Success is being satisfied with an outcome you set out to achieve. Stop at nothing and you will eventually get there. Welcome to the Kali Yuga. Happy hunting.
appendix:
the grimoire that wasn’t
You may have noticed that books on magick, however interesting they are, eventually get onto boring exercises which apparently you have to do every day in order to actually get on to the interesting magickal heights scaled by the experts. They’re usually authoritarian about it, and the exercises tend to be deadly dull. They nearly put me off magick for life!
genesis breyer p-orridge
In the extremely unlikely scenario in which this is the first magic book you have ever picked up, common courtesy dictates I offer you some baseline magical skills and spells. This presents a number of problems in our post-Internet world.
Firstly, yes, you probably should do nothing but twenty minutes of daily meditation every day for six months before you start enchanting. You won’t, however. I certainly didn’t. It took me more than ten years to begrudgingly admit to myself that meditation is the single best thing you can do to improve your health and your magic and that I should probably do more of it. Your mileage will not vary much, that I promise.
Secondly, I am innately suspicious of any sort of list of baseline practices because it can resemble, in the mind of the reader, a training course. Disavow yourself of this notion immediately. I am not a teacher, I am a sharer. Also, if you do happen to be new to magic, you will skip over all the beginning stuff and jump straight to the demonology anyway. As a teenager, I leapt with youthful confidence over all Aleister Crowley’s boring, dreary chapters on yoga and went straight to the bits about drugs, sex, and demons. It would be churlish to deny you the same misadventure (which it most certainly is).
Finally, the role of the grimoire or book of shadows has not only changed in our post-digital age, it has also had new light shed upon it by the very existence of the Internet. If you read the works of Jake Stratton-Kent or Owen Davies, you will see that grimoires and other magical texts are necessarily incomplete, appear in different versions, are translated with varying degrees of accuracy, swap the gender of some of their principal spirits, etc. There are no definitive, dusty tomes come down to us from hoary antiquity that tell us this is How Magic Works. In all cases it is someone’s best guess, it is the personal workbook of a particular person at a particular time … the spirits and incantations that he or she found to be efficacious. In point of fact, it is this very custom of individual collation that is the western tradition. As Hans Dieter Betz points out in the introduction to his definitive Greek Magical Papyri, the magicians of the late Hellenic world were wandering craftsmen and women, picking up spells and hymns that appeared useful. They no longer understood the meter of the incantations, they bundled together gods, goddesses and angels, they blurred the nature and pronunciation of the spirits. The whole thing is a mess. A delicious, chaotic mess. Our magical ancestors forever tested new formulae and invocations, retaining only those that worked for them. Thus was born the western magical tradition.
We have an even greater opportunity to hybridise our working than even those magicians working at the end of the Roman empire. Today we have newly translated Akkadian and Sumerian texts appearing on university websites every day, online botanicas that ship worldwide, and we have an explosion of practitioners publishing their own experiments and findings on thousands of blogs and websites around the planet. Whilst it is true that any half-decent magician could lay waste to entire economies with just Paul Huson’s Mastering Witchcraft or the Simon Necronomicon, today we can and do drink from the firehose of practical magic.
And so it is in the spirit of our magical forebears that I present a collection of personal practical enchantments focused on success magic. This is not my Book of Shadows; I possess no such object. These are merely a few gulps from a firehose that has been left running for millennia. Drink, then contribute.
Meditation
Forgive the arrogance of attempting to summarise mankind’s most important consciousness technology in a few words, but here we go.
That’s it. Do it daily, even if just for ninety seconds to start with. We are coming up on about three decades of medical and scientific research that suggests mindfulness meditation has a miraculous cascade effect on your entire body. It can reduce or completely cure depression, it improves metabolism, it lengthens your telomeres. If there was any way big pharma could turn this into a pill, meditation would be declared a more significant medical discovery than antibiotics.
Successful people meditate. Do it.
The Chaosphere
Consider this a chaos magic equivalent of chakras, which I also work with. The chaosphere, however, is more interoperable with more magical paths and can also function as an instant protective barrier in psychically uncomfortable situations. Chakras are nevertheless worth investigating too. (That’s what the Internet is for.) The chaosphere is based on a ritual first designed by the English artist and grandfather of chaos magic Austin Osman Spare by way of Stephen Mace’s excellent Stealing Fire From Heaven. Modifications and mistakes are my own.
In the first aeon, I was the Great Spirit.
In the second aeon, Men knew me as the
Horned God, Pangenitor Panphage.
In the third aeon, I was the Dark one, the devil.
In the fourth aeon, Men knew me
not for I am the Hidden One.
In this new aeon, I appear before you as Baphomet.
The God before all gods who shall
endure to the ends of the earth.
A Universal Conjuration
One inevitably lands on a preferred go-to conjuration after taking a few of them for a spin. The Prayer of the Salamanders seems particularly popular. It is certainly quite evocative, but I prefer the faintly shamanic undertones of the Harleianus 5596 Magical Treatise of Solomon, albeit with a few modifications I commend to you below.
I conjure you, oh spirit(s), by God, whom the Angels, Archangels, Principalities, Thrones, Dominations, the Cherubim and the full eyes of the Seraphim, Virtues and Powers are serving and not ceasing to cry and say “Holy, holy, holy Lord Sabaoth, the heaven and earth are full of thy glory.”
I conjure you, spirit(s), by the heaven and the earth and the holy mysteries of God. I conjure you, spirit(s), by the seven planets of heaven, wherever you may be, come to me at once, without delay. I conjure you by the air, the fire, the waters, the earth, by the sea and the rivers, wherever you may be, whether in heaven or under the earth, in a mountain, a hill, a plain, an open sea, a lake, far or close; wherever you may be and wherever you may dwell, come here without delay.85
I have used this to great success with your classic goetic spirits but also in what we might cheekily call “archaeological magic”—summoning spirits from barrows and calling upon spirits of place. It has the benefit of being among the least-bullying or hectoring conjurations found in the grimoires. Typically they are far less polite. You catch more spirits with honey. (This is both literally and metaphorically true, incidentally.)
Saint Columba’s Prayer for Victory
Saint Columba was one of the first—if not the first—spiritual teachers to introduce Christianity to mainland Britain from Ireland. Modern Paganism has laboured under a very poor reading of history that would consider this wholly negative. If you have ever visited Iona in the off-season, you will see just how difficult a task Columba set himself. In the intervening centuries, his story has accumulated all manner of folk customs and tales that paint him as the archetypal wizard: dealings with kings, having magic battles with Pagans, brokering wars and marriages, protecting the innocent, curing livestock, flying through the air, and so on. He has even ended up with a few titles that point to his involvement—posthumous or not—with the fairy folk such as “Columba of the Graves and Tombs.”
What needs to be borne in mind is that many of these instances of religious conversion relied on the incomers having better magic than the incumbent priesthood. Columba convincingly won. Think of him as Gandalf in a purple cloak.
Mouth of the dumb,
Light of the blind,
Foot of the lame,
To the fallen stretch out your hand.
Strengthen the senseless,
Restore the mad.
O Columba, hope of the Scots,
By your merits’ mediation,
Make us companions,
Of the blessed angels.
By the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ,
Grant us the Victory that God alone can bestow.
Amen.86
An Adaptive Consecration
This is a fairly simple but potent charm for consecrating objects to be used in ritual, modified from José Leitão’s The Book of St. Cyprian. Make the sign of the cross at each +.
Agla + On + Tetragrammaton + Abraxas per dominum nostrum
+ fiat-Deus luxunus + in tenebris-trinus +.
Restricting Anger
Unless it is just my abrasive personality, it appears to me that we have a tendency to underestimate the impact of gossip and petty-mindedness on our careers, even if we are unaware it is going on. (Tip: It is always going on.) If you happen to live near a botanica, there are any number of anti-gossip candles and charms you may find useful. Fire seems to suit these kinds of workings. Sans candle vendors, here is an adaptation from the Greek Magical Papyri:
I restrain the anger and gossip of all,
especially of (name), which is CHNEŌM.
Banishing and Protection
It will surprise you just how many supermarket spices are efficacious in magic, particularly protection and exorcism. Simply burning asafoetida on a charcoal briquette and walking room to room will remove all but the most potent negative spirit influences. (It will also clear your home of humans too, because it completely stinks. Maybe file that away for the next time you throw a dinner party that goes on too long.)
Another folk magical practice I have found to be useful is to plant rosemary in your yard to prevent hauntings. If you are going to pursue necromancy in any serious way, it is nice to have an “always on” solution. Pour some red wine over your rosemary bush on St. John’s Eve as a traditional thank you.
My go-to protection amulet, which can be worn, placed under the bed, above doors, etc, comes from the Nordic svarteboken tradition. Although this one is from Denmark, it is a continuation of an amulet-manufacture tradition that dates back to the classical world, if not before. Namely, the inscribing of a magical word repeated on each line with diminishing letters. This one is known as the Kalemaris. Write it on paper, carve it into wood, pipe it onto pastry. Up to you.
K A L E M A R I S
K A L E M A R I
K A L E M A R
K A L E M A
K A L E M
K A L E
K A L
K A
K
For further information or assistance with protective magic, Jason Miller has written the definitive book on the subject: Protection and Reversal Magick. Highly recommended.
City Spirits
This presumes you actually live in a city, of course. As previously mentioned, for the first time in history more of us do than don’t, so it is a good bet. City spirits are more complex than, say, waterfall spirits. It is rare for waterfalls to declare war, invent democracy, or unleash fractional reserve banking on the world.
The bigger or older the city, the less it is influenced by offerings. London, for instance, merely expects them the way an absolute monarch expects tribute. Your offerings will not change its mind should it wish to crush you. (The Thames is more amenable to offerings if you happen to live in town. They have a “good cop/bad cop” thing going on.) Consider the offerings as a cover charge rather than a transaction. Your ability to achieve success or wealth or love or whatever will rely in no small part on the location you have selected. This payment merely gets you through the door.
If you are honest with yourself, you already know where your city spirit is most easily found. It is the place where you feel the most “London-ness” or “Chicago-ness,” etc. As for offerings, many of the common suggestions—feeding the homeless, volunteering at a shelter—are not going to move the needle very much with city spirits and indicate a very poor understanding of the history of urbanisation. There are certainly many fine reasons for volunteering at a foodbank, but if the spirit of London cared about homelessness I would not walk past so many people sleeping rough in Soho on my way to work. Should you still wish to use service as an offering then volunteer at a graveyard or assist the dead in some way. For whatever reason, city spirits care more for their dead than they do for their homeless. (A working hypothesis here would be that a city spirit is at least partly composed of the dead it contains.)
More direct, physical offerings are appropriate. I throw coins in the Thames as offerings, largely because I find it pleasing to realise the Romans did the exact same thing almost two thousand years ago. But you can even do something as simple as pouring out some of your drink (the first part of your drink!) in a park during your lunch break. Coins in fountains are also good. Whatever you choose, consider a ritual shape similar to this:
Emergency Flashlight
The second time I was fired/performance-managed out of a job was the worst so far. I had only recently moved to New Zealand and was working at a fashion retailer. The new store manager loathed me on first sight and made it her mission to remove me. I was offered the usual things like union or legal representation for the performance meetings, all of which I refused because I had two things going for me: the unshakeable self-confidence of youth and an impenetrable force field. I have retained only one of them. During what was a frankly very hostile meeting, the company HR director said he had never seen anyone handle this type of meeting quite so well. But of course. Genuinely none of their hostility was getting through the force field. Inside the bubble it felt like a dispassionate business discussion.
Life in general and business in particular is a veritable rat king of sudden nastiness, ulterior motives, and manipulation. You will never find a “clean” game for the same reason you will never find warm snow. The conditions of reality simply do not allow for it to exist. This is why you need a magical emergency flashlight. In many respects, this technique is a companion to the chaosphere because it is a method of instantly switching it on in those unexpected moments. Mine takes its inspiration from The Lord of the Rings, which will come as no surprise to those of you familiar with my blog. You will recall the part in the third film (which is actually in the second book) where Frodo uses the vial of water given to him by Galadriel to briefly banish the giant spider, Shelob. He says a few words and the water inside begins to glow, sending the spider packing. These are the words he says:
Aiya Eärendil Elenion Ancalima!
Before you dismiss the idea of using fictional enchantments as so much 1990s chaos magic claptrap, let’s consider the origin of the phrase. In Tolkien’s mythology, Eärendil was an Elvish mariner who sailed the night sky with a jewel known as a Silmaril. He is Middle Earth’s Evening Star, i.e., Venus. The name comes from an obscure Old English angelic name, Earendel, meaning “star dawn.” Professor Tolkien found the name in an anonymously written ninth-century poem, Crist I:
Hail Earendel, brightest of Angels!
Above Middle Earth, sent unto Men.
So the real version of Eärendil is an angel, the Morning Star—and thus remains Venus—and is also John the Baptist in the context of the original poem as Venus heralds the rising of the Sun/Son. That is quite a lot of punch in a single line of a made-up language! Plus you have a handy visual reference in your film collection should you need it.
Memorise the phrase and visualise the blinding, protective white light of the Silmaril emanating out from your heart centre. It can be used when encountering unexpected hostility or negativity or any situation that doesn’t allow for a lengthier ritual response. I use it on some sections of the tube where the line runs through old plague pits, for instance. Try it out. Practice makes awesome.
Annunaki Godform Assumption
This technique I commend to you reservedly. It almost did not make it into the final draft because it is, without question, the most dangerous technique in the book. But it is hugely effective if you have the stomach for it. Two pieces of context are necessary before we continue.
The modern western practice of assuming godforms originates with the Golden Dawn and is in and of itself a very worthwhile activity to explore. Briefly, you learn as much as you can about the attributes and mythologies of a particular god/dess, fill a ritual space with objects, colours, and smells associated with the god/dess and then sit there visualising yourself transforming into this being. Think of it like cosmic theatre sports.
Secondly, when I say “annunaki,” I do not mean the actual beings from Sumerian mythology. I mean the beings posited by ancient aliens theorist Zechariah Sitchin. I mean the space lizards who came to earth on nuclear powered rocket ships and genetically engineered mankind to mine gold to shore up the atmosphere of their home planet before getting into a nuclear war with each other, appointing some bloodline families to rule on their behalf and then leaving again.
To put it mildly, this is an extremely unlikely historical scenario. And by that I mean it emphatically did not happen. But after the last thirty years of alternative archaeological books and television programmes we all have a very vivid mental image of the “gods as hostile aliens” motif. It has spun off into about a dozen reptilian overlord conspiracy theories to boot. So, several years ago, after largely confining myself to western Europe for about five years, I was suddenly flying all over the world. New York, Fiji, Los Angeles, Hamburg, Tuscany, etc. It was the Fiji leg in particular that got me thinking about a potential godform experiment. It is one of those holiday destinations where the staff are so deferential it makes you feel awkward. They all but bow as you walk past. Tropical island holidays tend to be things of almost obscene luxury, especially given that they invariably happen in countries with few other viable economic sectors. It is not hard to imagine that if the planet were ruled by hostile alien overlords this is how they would live.
In this case, begin the godform assumption when you are on an airplane as it begins to speed up and take off. Picture your hands and feet morphing into three-taloned claws, your second set of eyelids blinking, your height extending by several feet, and allow a cold, calculating, uncaring personality to arise … like you are being dispatched to sort of a recalcitrant province of disposable ape men. Become an interloping Lord of the Earth.
It all seems fairly innocuous until you try it. The assumption triggers in me a metallic, influenza taste in my mouth that is my indicator I have wandered into a less salubrious corner of the imaginal realm. Retain this impression until about cruising altitude and then let it melt into the background. (For some reason this works better for me on take-off rather than landing. But I am usually pretty drunk by the time we land.) The personality change is remarkable, particularly in someone who is not overly misanthropic. No, really. And I will just add that it was a mere several months—perhaps six flights in all—of trialling this assumption before the startup I was working for was acquired by a large, publicly listed media company, netting me the single biggest windfall of my life so far.
Abre Camino
On the blog, I once asked whether a road opener was the only spell you needed. The question relates back to Nassim Taleb’s concept of optionality and seizing opportunities. What is a love spell but a request for new romantic roads to be opened? What about job-hunting spells?
Abre camino candles, incense, and oils are the ones I most often have to hand. I use abre camino oil when consecrating new statues, to open the road for a spirit to indwell in it. The incense also gets used fairly often when shoaling sigils.
An open road is a road devoid of obstacles. Viewed from this perspective, you could almost say Ganesha is the only success god you need. As such, it is worth considering 108 recitations of OM GUM GANAPATIYEH NAMAHA as a cheeky auditory equivalent of a road opener. YouTube will assist you with proper pronunciation.
Powerful Spell of the Bear
Another victory spell, this time from the Greek Magical Papyri.
ACHCHŌR ACHCHŌR ACHACHACHPTOUMI CHACHCHŌ CHARACHŌCH CHAPTOUMĒ CHŌRA CHŌCH APTOUMIMĒ CHŌCHAPTOU CHARACHPTOU CHACHCHŌ CHARA
CHŌCH PTENACHŌCHEOU
I call upon you, holy, very-powerful, very-glorious, very-strong, holy, autochthons, assistants of the great god, the powerful chief daimons, you who are inhabitants of Chaos, of Erebos, of the abyss, of the depth, of earth, dwelling in the recesses of heaven, lurking in the nooks and crannies of houses, shrouded in dark clouds, watchers of things not to be seen, guardians of secrets, leaders of those in the underworld, administrators of the infinite, wielding power over earth, earth-shakers, foundation-layers, servants in the chasm, shudderful fighters, fearful ministers, turning the spindle, freezing snow and rain, air transversers, wind-bringers, lords of Fate, inhabitants of dark Erebos, bringers of compulsion, sending flames of fire, bringing snow and dew, wind-releasers, disturbers of the deep, treaders on the calm sea, mighty in courage, grievers of the heart, powerful potentates, cliff-walkers, adverse daimons, iron hearted, wild-tempered, unruly, guarding Tartaros, misleading Fate, all-seeing, all-hearing, all-subjecting, heaven-walkers, spirit-givers, living simply, heaven-shakers, gladdening the heart, those who join together death, revealers of angels, punishers of mortals, sunless revealers, rulers of daimons, almighty, holy unconquerable AŌTH ABAŌTH BASYM ISAK SABAŌTH IAŌ IAKŌP MANARA SKORTOURI MOTROUM EPHRAULA THREERSA87
Then describe what you wish the spirits to achieve for you. Once you have done this, take the hundred-lettered name of Typhon and burn it in the candles. Attempt to have it burned by all seven of the candles and have the ash drop in the bowl with the cumin and honey.
Dreaming
Followers of the blog will know that I have been banging the drum for intermittent fasting for years. Initially embarked upon for a weight management solution that can fit a lifestyle of someone working in food media, one of the immediate discoveries was just how potent your dreams are on fast days. They are so vivid they border on entheogenic.
Here is what Peter Grey wrote about dreaming in our modern world in Apocalyptic Witchcraft:
If there can be a war on dreaming, I propose a devastating counter-strike.
Recognise that something sinister has been sculpting the landscape of dream. We are seeing an unprecendented colonisation and colonialisation of the dream worlds. When we discussed incubation it was made clear that the Ancient World understood the importance of dream, and since then it has been accumulating grey silt. The dream world is becoming as polluted as the natural world, as despoiled. Before we even reach the Asclepium, our minds are chorusing with chatter, assailed by demands. The previous strategy of thou shalt not have unauthorised dreams has been superceded by a more terrible strategy. It is not simply dream which is derided as meaningless, but every aspect of our lives. In a parody of Hassan I Sabbah, nothing is true and thus nothing is permitted. We parade our inner selves which are revealed to be no more than loyalty to a sect of compatible brands. When we see ourselves and the world around us we do not recognise the sacred. Our culture has devoured itself.88
Dreaming is a cornerstone magical practice the world over. It is the commonest route into the spirit world. Yet today we go to sleep filled with artificial foods, with a carcinogenic cellular device less than a foot from our heads, surrounded by WiFi signals and devices whose lights never seem to turn off. One way or the other, you must take back your own dream state. This involves:
In many ways, dreaming is an excellent place to end this appendix as it interfaces with all the enchantments not only in this chapter but throughout the whole book. Having the cleanest route possible into the dream realm is essential for spirit guidance and inspiration in response to a particular working or ritual. New spirits, gods, allies, and possibilities will also present themselves to you. Properly activated, your dreaming is one heck of a strategic advantage in achieving your dreams. Go to.
Adams, Cameron, David Luke, Anna Waldstein, Ben Sessa, and David King (editors). Breaking Convention: Essays on Psychedelic Consciousness. London: Strange Attractor Press, 2013.
Ariely, Dan. The Upside of Irrationality. London: HarperCollins, 2010.
Athanassakis, Apostolos N., and Benjamin M. Wolkow. The Orphic Hymns. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.
Baker, Jim. The Cunning Man’s Handbook. London: Avalonia, 2014.
Betz, Hans Dieter. The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation. London: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Brooks, Michael. At the Edge of Uncertainty. London: Profile Books, 2014.
Brooks, Michael. 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense. London: Profile Books, 2009.
Carroll, Peter J., and Matt Kaybryn. Epoch: The Esotericon & Portals of Chaos. Bristol: Kingsown Publishers, 2014.
Carroll, Peter J. The Apophenion: A Chaos Magic Paradigm. Oxford: Mandrake of Oxford, 2008.
———. Liber Kaos. York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1992.
———. Liber Null & Psychonaut. York Beach: Samuel Weiser, 1987.
———. The Octavo (Roundworld Edition): A Sorcerer-Scientist’s Grimoire. Oxford: Mandrake of Oxford, 2011.
Carter, Chris. Science and Psychic Phenomena. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2012.
Crowley, Aleister. The Book of Thoth. York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1996.
D’Alessandro, David F. Career Warfare. New York: McGraw Hill, 2004.
Davies, Owen. Grimoires: A History of Magic Books. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Forbes, Steve, and Elizabeth Ames. Money: How the Destruction of the Dollar Threatens the Global Economy and What We Can Do About It. New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2014. Kindle edition.
Gimian, James, and Barry Boyce. The Rules of Victory: Strategies from the Art of War. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2008.
Glei, Jocelyn K. Maximize Your Potential: Grow Your Expertise, Take Bold Risks & Build an Incredible Career. Seattle: Lake Union Publishing, 2013. Kindle edition.
Godin, Seth. Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? London: Piatkus, 2010.
———. The Dip. New York: Penguin, 2007.
Grey, Peter. Apocalyptic Witchcraft. London: Scarlet Imprint, 2013.
Hansen, George P. The Trickster and the Paranormal. Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2001. Kindle edition.
Harpur, Patrick. The Philosopher’s Secret Fire. Glastonbury, UK: Squeeze Press, 2009.
Hillman, D. C. A. The Chemical Muse: Drug Use and the Roots of Western Civilization. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2008.
Holder, Geoff. The Guide to Mysterious Iona and Staffa. Stroud: Tempus Publishing. 2007.
Hugh-Smith, Charles. Get a Job, Build a Real Career, Defy a Bewildering Economy. Berkeley, CA: Oftwominds.com, 2014.
Huson, Paul. The Devil’s Picturebook. London: Sphere Books, 1972.
———. Mastering Witchcraft. New York: Perigree Books, 1980.
———. The Mystical Origins of the Tarot. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 2004. Kindle edition.
Hutton, Ronald. The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Hyatt, Christopher S., and S. Jason Black. Pacts with the Devil. Tempe, AZ: New Falcon Publications, 1993.
Jodorowsky, Alejandro. Manual of Psychomagic: The Practice of Shamanic Psychotherapy. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2015.
Johnston, Sarah Iles. Restless Dead: Encounters Between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece. London: University of California Press, 2013.
Jünger, Ernst. The Forest Passage. New York: Telos Press, 2013.
Kastrup, Bernardo. Why Materialism Is Baloney. Alresford, UK: Iff Books, 2014.
Kay, John. Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly. London: Profile Books, 2010.
Kripal, Jeffrey J. Authors of the Impossible. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Leitão, José. The Book of St. Cyprian: The Sorcerer’s Treasure. Yorkshire, UK: Hadean Press, 2014.
Levenda, Peter. The Dark Lord. Lake Worth, FL: Ibis Press, 2013.
Mace, Stephen. Stealing the Fire from Heaven. Phoenix, AZ: Dagon Productions, 2003.
Marathakis, Ioannis. The Magical Treatise of Solomon, or Hygromanteia. Singapore: Golden Hoard Press, 2011.
McKenna, Terence. The Archaic Revival. New York: HarperOne, 1991.
———. True Hallucinations. New York: Harper Collins, 1994.
Meyer, Marvin W. The Ancient Mysteries: A Sourcebook. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987.
Mishev, Georgi. Thracian Magic, Past and Present: The Folklore and Magical Practices of the Balkan Peninsula. London: Avalonia, 2012. Kindle edition.
Mlodinow, Leonard. The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. London: Penguin, 2009.
Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Harvard University Press, 2014.
Radin, Dean. The Noetic Universe: The Scientific Evidence for Psychic Phenomena. London: Random House, 2009.
Robbins, Tony. Money: Master the Game. London: Simon & Schuster, 2014.
Roney-Dougal, Serena. The Faery Faith: An Integration of Science with Spirit. London: Green Magic, 2003.
Ruck, Carl A. P., and Mark A. Hoffman. Entheogens, Myth and Human Consciousness. Oakland, CA: Ronin Publishing, 2013.
Sheldrake, Rupert. The Science Delusion. London: Coronet, 2012. Kindle edition.
Skinner, Stephen, and David Rankine. The Keys to the Gateways of Magic: Summoning the Solomonic Archangels and Demon Princes. London: Golden Hoard Press, 2005.
Solomon, Grant, and Jane Solomon. The Scole Experiments: Scientific Evidence for Life After Death. London: Judy Piatkus Ltd., 2000.
Stratton-Kent, Jake. The Headless One. Yorkshire, UK: Hadean Press, 2015. Smashwords edition.
———. The Testament of St. Cyprian the Mage. London: Scarlet Imprint, 2014.
———. The True Grimoire. London: Scarlet Imprint, 2009.
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Antifragile. London: Penguin, 2012.
Targ, Russell. The Reality of ESP: A Physicist’s Proof of Psychic Abilities. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 2012.
Templar, Richard. The Rules of Management. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2005.
———. The Rules of Work. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2003.
Turk, James, and John Rubino. The Money Bubble. Online: Dollar Collapse Press, 2013.
Vallee, Jacques. Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact. London: Souvenir Press, 1988.
Vallee, Jacques, and Chris Aubeck. Wonders in the Sky. London: Tarcher/Penguin, 2010.
Vallee, Jacques, and Janine Vallee. Challenge to Science: The UFO Enigma. New York: Ballatine Books, 1977.
Van Lommel, Pim. Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience. London: Harper Collins eBooks, 2010. Kindle edition.
White, David Gordon. Myths of the Dog-Man. London: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
62 Caitlin Rosenthal. “Plantations Practiced Modern Management.” Harvard Business Review. September 2013.
63 Adam Braun. The Promise of a Pencil: How an Ordinary Person Can Create Extraordinary Change. Scribner, 2014.
64 Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder. Penguin, 2013.
65 Jocelyn K. Glei. Maximize Your Potential: Grow Your Expertise, Take Bold Risks & Build an Incredible Career. Lake Union Publishing, 2013.
66 James Altucher. “The Secrets of Personal Finance. “Accessed April 12, 2015. www.jamesaltucher.com/2014/09/the-secrets-of-personal-finance/
67 Charles Hugh-Smith. “The Solution to the Declining Middle Class: Destroy Fixed Costs and Debt.” Accessed April 12, 2015. charleshughsmith.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/the-solution-to-declining-middle-class.html.
68 Michael Snyder. “Job = Just Over Broke.” Accessed April 17, 2015. www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-08-13/job-just-over-broke.
69 Karen L. Cates. “Let’s Start Telling Young People the Truth about College.” Accessed April 17, 2015. www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-07-16/stop-feeding-high-school-students-the-myth-that-college-is-right-for-everyone.
70 Tyler Durden, (pseud). “Federal Reserve Warns That ‘College May Not Pay Off For Everyone.’” Accessed April 17, 2015. www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-09-04/federal-reserve-warns-college-may-not-pay-everyone.
71 Charles Hugh-Smith. Get a Job, Build a Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy. Createspace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014.
72 Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder. Penguin, 2013.
73 John M. Nunley et al. “College Major, Internship Experience, and Employment Opportunities: Estimates from a Résumé Audit.” Auburn University Department of Economics Working Paper Series. Accessed April 17, 2015. cla.auburn.edu/econwp/archives/2014/2014-03.pdf.
74 Global Insights. “US Metro Economies: Income and Wage Gaps Across the US.” August 2014. www.usmayors.org/metroeconomies/2014/08/report.pdf.
75 Steve Matthews and Victoria Stilwell. “America on the Move Becomes Stay-Home Nation for Young: Economy.” Accessed April 17, 2015. www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-05-12/america-on-the-move-becomes-stay-at-home-nation-for-millennials.
76 Matthews and Stilwell, ibid.
77 Tyler Durden (pseud). “Where Disposable Income Goes to Die: Since 1990 Real Rents Are Up 15% While Median Incomes Are Unchanged.” Accessed April 17, 2015. www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-07-02/where-disposable-income-goes-die-1990-real-rents-are-15-while-median-incomes-are-unc.
78 Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew Mcafee. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. W. W. Norton & Company, 2014.
79 Thomas Sanders. “Why weak ties are strong for job searches.” Accessed April 17, 2015. socialcapital.wordpress.com/2011/09/27/why-weak-ties-are-strong-for-job-searches.
80 Jocelyn K. Glei. Maximize Your Potential: Grow Your Expertise, Take Bold Risks & Build an Incredible Career. Lake Union Publishing, 2013.
81 Catherine Austin Fitts. “2014 Annual Wrap Up.” Accessed July 5, 2015. www.solari.com/blog/wrap-up-ready.
82 Charles Hugh-Smith. Get a Job, Build a Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy. Createspace, 2014.
83 Morley Winograd and Dr. Michael Hais. “How Millennials Could Upend Wall Street and Corporate America.” May 2014. www.brookings.edu//media/research/files/papers/2014/05/millennials%20wall%20st/brookings_winogradv5.pdf.
84 Ibid.
85 Ioannis Marathakis. The Magical Treatise of Solomon, or Hygromanteia. Golden Hoard Press, 2012.
86 Geoff Holder. Guide to Mysterious Iona (Mysterious Scotland). The History Press, 2007.
87 Hans Dieter Betz. The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation Including the Demotic Spells. Second Edition. University of Chicago Press, 1997.
88 Peter Grey. Apocalyptic Witchcraft. Scarlet Imprint, 2013.