benjamin conner

The need for ostentatious secrecy is of vital importance on the primitive level, for the shared secret serves as a cement binding the tribe together. -Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963)

In March 2024, Elon Musk threatened Don Lemon on camera: “Choose your question carefully. There’s five minutes left.” Lemon asked it anyway. A few hours later, Musk killed his show. A year earlier, CNN had fired Lemon. Four months earlier, Musk had told advertisers leaving X to “go f*** themselves.” Earlier that same hour, he’d admitted taking ketamine every other week or so. In the video below, Musk is relaxed. He jokes that he only had “one puff” on Joe Rogan’s show and doesn’t even know how to smoke pot. Whatever he is taking, he says, “I should keep taking it.” Then Lemon brings up the advertisers. “Is this the question you want to ask?” Lemon’s questions are “not cogent,” Musk says. “You are upsetting me.” Hours later, Musk cancelled the deal. Lemon posted the full interview on YouTube anyway and sued Musk in August 2024. By January 2025, Musk was working in the White House. So who lost this interview: the man who lost his show, or the man who lost his cool?

The very beginnings of societal structures reveal the craving for secret organisations. When no valid secrets really exit, mysteries are invented or contrived to which privileged initiates are admitted. Such was the case with the Rosicrucians and many other societies. Among these pseudo-secrets there are ironically -- real secrets of which the initiates are entirely unaware -- as, for example, in those societies which borrowed their "secret" primarily from the alchemical tradition. -Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963)

An egocentric culture makes us oblivious to the life of nature and the delicate ecological balances in the environment, it makes us ignorant of our social responsibility, and disrespectful of age and ageing. We have not learned the lesson which is basic to all ancient and tribal cultures: that the personal self is a working fiction, and deep down we are coterminous with the social collective, the ancestors, and even the cosmos itself. - David Tacey, Jung and the New Age (2001)

Neoliberal capitalism is that form that is utterly obsessed with ensuring as Margaret Thatcher so famously declared, "there is no alternative." In other words, it has given up on any effort to argue that the current economic order will prove capable of creating a world in which most human beings feel prosperous, safe, and free to spend a significant portion of their life pursuing those things they consider genuinely important. Rather, it is a system, in which even the very richest countries cannot guarantee access to basic needs such as housing, health and education. It works badly, but they want you to believe that no other system could possibly work. -David Graeber

"Man isn't a noble savage, he's an ignoble savage. He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly, unable to be objective about anything where his own interests are involved--that about sums it up. I'm interested in the brutal and violent nature of man because it's a true picture of him. And any attempt to create social institutions on a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to failure." -Stanley Kubrick