Alexander, Author at ALEXANDER BLUM

Memory, Resurrection, and the Indeterminate Past

The world can be split into two fundamental impulses – that of the serpent and that of Christ. Yes, this is highly symbolic, but let’s go with it. The serpent is materially successful, conniving, wise, and willing and able to hurt other people. Serpentine knowledge is the only thing that allows you to get a… Continue reading Memory, Resurrection, and the Indeterminate Past

Other Publications

Trump and the Jungian Shadow, for Quillette American Centrism Has Failed The Appeal of Jordan Peterson How The Enlightenment Separated Humankind From Nature Democracy vs. Capitalism The Case Against Liberation: Mystic Pessimism Free Speech on the Left The Failed Hero’s Journey A short story about the warring impulses between Cain and Christ My feature article… Continue reading Other Publications

Giant Serpents Wriggling Through Thunderstorms in the Sky

Materialist reductionist science is the bottom layer upon which our civilization is built. The outcome of materialism in philosophy will be the outcome of materialism in society. This is because all technology is embedded in the reductionist principle, and all the wisdom that has granted us phones, neural nets embedded in hard drives, skyscrapers and… Continue reading Giant Serpents Wriggling Through Thunderstorms in the Sky

An Essay on the Modern Problem of Living

As the old fears creep in, the tendrils of the mystical, the totally preserved anxieties of the ancient mystery religions transported into the present day, we question the foundations of our society. The pre-Christian terrors, the primeval fears of a world where we have all the complexity of raw phenomenon and experience, but with no… Continue reading An Essay on the Modern Problem of Living

DAMN: When Prophets Become Pessimists

Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN is a product of its times, for better or for worse. To Pimp a Butterfly was an epic, a relentless drama about internal struggle that culminated in rap’s ideal, Tupac Shakur, announcing blood, death and riots as America’s self-consuming future. Mortal Man, the final track from To Pimp a Butterfly, ends on… Continue reading DAMN: When Prophets Become Pessimists

Circling Around Chaos

So you’ve been wronged, screwed, born upside-down, the world is a pale shade of what it should be, and your own internal development is stagnating and festering like sitting water. You’re not wrong about any of this. The denial of this suffering is impossible in a world where responsibility exists. Responsibility for oneself implies loss.… Continue reading Circling Around Chaos

The Jobs Are Not Coming Back

The Plastic Beautiful World

Jobs are never coming back to the United States. The price of labor, with benefits and wages, is simply too high to compete with international sweatshops. Trump’s worship of business clashes directly with his protectionism. It is an incoherent worldview. Once Tesla’s self-driving cars become a reality, truck drivers will be the first out of… Continue reading The Jobs Are Not Coming Back

Trumpland: Flames and Renewal

The face of empire unmasked, the pomp and circumstance of our illusions rejected. There’s something to be said for the efficacy of the right versus the trepidation of the left. Obama, elected in 2008 with the most votes of any President ever, had a mandate. And yet, he played to the center of the political… Continue reading Trumpland: Flames and Renewal

The Trumpland Podcast

The Trumpland Podcast chronicles the weeks following Donald Trump’s surprise victory in the 2016 election. The goal of the podcast is to hold the Democrats accountable, expose neoliberalism and oligarchy, and offer some hope for a progressive future in light of the global rise of far-right populism. EPISODES: [soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/292711453″ params=”color=ff5500&inverse=false&auto_play=false&show_user=true” width=”100%” height=”20″ iframe=”true” /]… Continue reading The Trumpland Podcast

21st Century Symphony Manifesto

This craggy fantasy mountaintop enshrouded by wispy clouds looks like a bizarre landscape from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image, which is even more dramatic than fiction, captures the chaotic activity atop a pillar of gas and dust, three light-years tall, which is being eaten away by the brilliant light from nearby bright stars. The pillar is also being assaulted from within, as infant stars buried inside it fire off jets of gas that can be seen streaming from towering peaks. This turbulent cosmic pinnacle lies within a tempestuous stellar nursery called the Carina Nebula, located 7500 light-years away in the southern constellation of Carina. The image celebrates the 20th anniversary of Hubble's launch and deployment into an orbit around the Earth. Scorching radiation and fast winds (streams of charged particles) from super-hot newborn stars in the nebula are shaping and compressing the pillar, causing new stars to form within it. Streamers of hot ionised gas can be seen flowing off the ridges of the structure, and wispy veils of gas and dust, illuminated by starlight, float around its towering peaks. The denser parts of the pillar are resisting being eroded by radiation. Nestled inside this dense mountain are fledgling stars. Long streamers of gas can be seen shooting in opposite directions from the pedestal at the top of the image. Another pair of jets is visible at another peak near the centre of the image. These jets, (known as HH 901 and HH 902, respectively, are signposts for new star birth and are launched by swirling gas and dust discs around the young stars, which allow material to slowly accrete onto the stellar surfaces. Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 observed the pillar on 1-2 February 2010. The colours in this composite image correspond to the glow of oxygen (blue), hydrogen and nitrogen (green), and sulphur (red).

Artistic Assumptions 1.) The universe is a process 2.) This process is the ‘becoming’ of soul 3.) Human beings have one foot in the world of soul, but remain mostly in matter 4.) History moves in cycles, and time is accelerating these cycles 5.) Awareness of cycles, and consciously rejecting them, is how soul creates… Continue reading 21st Century Symphony Manifesto