The Chaos Protocols Quotes

“There is no greater defence against the grim, uncompromising wasteland of the late capitalist world than the unshakeable awareness that it will end and you will not.”
― Gordon White, The Chaos Protocols: Magical Techniques for Navigating the New Economic Reality

“whatever we build in the imagination will accomplish itself in the circumstances of our lives.”
― Gordon White, The Chaos Protocols: Magical Techniques for Navigating the New Economic Reality

“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.”
― Gordon White, The Chaos Protocols: Magical Techniques for Navigating the New Economic Reality

“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”
― Gordon White, The Chaos Protocols: Magical Techniques for Navigating the New Economic Reality

“Magic departs from mysticism because it proudly proclaims its unshakeable intention to do noteworthy things in this world, rather than seeking merely to transcend it”
― Gordon White, The Chaos Protocols: Magical Techniques for Navigating the New Economic Reality

“Becoming invincible is the process of immunising yourself against the monoculture.”
― Gordon White, The Chaos Protocols: Magical Techniques for Navigating the New Economic Reality

“The scant pieces of the common approach to the gods suggest an entirely different, low-tech, more transactional relationship. A similar ethos informs this book. We are not here to found a sci-fi religion or roleplaying circle. Pick an ambivalent ally and move on.”
― Gordon White, The Chaos Protocols: Magical Techniques for Navigating the New Economic Reality

“You are certainly free to join whatever nineteenth-century swingers club masquerading as a magical order you like, but do it on your own time.”
― Gordon White, The Chaos Protocols: Magical Techniques for Navigating the New Economic Reality

“mysticism is fundamentally irrational and that is its great power and solace. “Proving” mysticism with science is like using a slide-rule to measure wind speed.”
― Gordon White, The Chaos Protocols: Magical Techniques for Navigating the New Economic Reality

“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.”
― Gordon White, The Chaos Protocols: Magical Techniques for Navigating the New Economic Reality

“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.”
― Gordon White, The Chaos Protocols: Magical Techniques for Navigating the New Economic Reality

“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.”
― Gordon White, The Chaos Protocols: Magical Techniques for Navigating the New Economic Reality

“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.”
― Gordon White, The Chaos Protocols: Magical Techniques for Navigating the New Economic Reality

“Apply yourself diligently in a schooling system built to turn out factory workers in the nineteenth century that now cannot even do that. Earn a college degree that guarantees “good, safe employment.” Have a “career” working your way up through large, stable corporations. Use your below-inflation-growth salary to acquire a mortgage for a suburban home from which you commute to your “career” using high amounts of increasingly expensive energy. Fill your mortgaged house with appliances and offspring so that the cycle may perpetuate. Allow inflation to convince you that your suburban house has appreciated in value so that you can sell it and move either to a larger one if you still have offspring or a smaller one if you don’t. See Europe on a coach tour with other Americans at some stage. Die.”
― Gordon White, The Chaos Protocols: Magical Techniques for Navigating the New Economic Reality

“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.”
― Gordon White, The Chaos Protocols: Magical Techniques for Navigating the New Economic Reality

“Graham Greene once wrote that all writers must have a splinter of ice in their hearts so that they can be involved in the world and also slightly removed, making observations. The hearts of modern magicians living through the Kali Yuga must contain glaciers.”
― Gordon White, The Chaos Protocols: Magical Techniques for Navigating the New Economic Reality

“Finally, learning about demons is just more fun than learning about consumer price inflation, even though only one of them is absolutely guaranteed to negatively affect your life.”
― Gordon White, The Chaos Protocols: Magical Techniques for Navigating the New Economic Reality

“beings of the crossroads are ambivalent; they are capricious.”
― Gordon White, The Chaos Protocols: Magical Techniques for Navigating the New Economic Reality

“I am the Headless Daimon with sight in my feet; I am the mighty one who possesses the immortal fire; I am the truth who hates the fact that unjust deeds are done in the world; I am the one who makes the lightning flash and the thunder roll; I am the one whose sweat falls upon the earth as rain so that life can begin; I am the one whose mouth burns completely; I am the one who begets and destroys; I am the Favour of the Aion; my name is a Heart Encircled by a Serpent; Come Forth and Follow.”
― Gordon White, The Chaos Protocols: Magical Techniques for Navigating the New Economic Reality