Psychic militancy
Part of the survival guide for this time
https://www.plutobooks.com/product/from-the-clinic-to-the-streets/
I just ordered this book and recommend this podcast by its author because what she names as “psychic militancy” has been my praxis for upwards of 30+ years.
Lara Sheehi’s notion of “psychic militancy” as a phrase sounds almost paradoxical. Militancy ordinarily evokes streets, movements, organizations, struggle, and public action. The psychic, by contrast, evokes interiority: dreams, symptoms, affects, anxieties, desires, and the hidden architecture of subjectivity. Yet perhaps the very force of the term lies precisely in its refusal of that distinction. For what if the psyche itself is already a battleground? What if politics is never merely “out there,” and what if domination does not stop at institutions, armies, borders, or laws but penetrates into perception itself? Lara Sheehi—drawing heavily from Fanon (who is central to me and the FSO)—appears to be pushing theoretical psychoanalysis toward precisely this realization: that liberation requires not merely political struggle but an active defense against the colonization of psychic life itself. For occultists who know what is what, this is a ringing endorsement of the concept of “occult war.”
But this idea immediately recalls Frantz Fanon’s central insight that colonialism does not simply conquer territory; it occupies consciousness. It rearranges desire. It restructures self-perception. It infiltrates language and installs itself within the categories through which subjects come to understand themselves and the world. Colonial violence therefore does not cease when physical coercion ends because domination seeks a deeper victory: to become internal. The greatest triumph of power is achieved not when it merely compels obedience externally, but when it succeeds in reproducing itself inwardly.
In this sense Fanon’s analysis (as I have been saying for some time) remains startlingly contemporary. One need not limit coloniality to nineteenth- or twentieth-century imperial formations. Contemporary subjects live amidst vast systems of ideological production: media infrastructures, algorithmic realities, propagandistic saturation, political spectacles, cults, lobbies, online shills and economies of perpetual affective stimulation. The result is not merely misinformation. It is something subtler and perhaps more dangerous: the reorganization of psychic life itself. One’s fears, desires, identifications, and horizons of possibility gradually become administered. One does not simply consume ideology; one begins inhabiting it.
This appears close to what Sheehi names as “psychic intrusions.” Systems of domination do not remain external structures. They enter psychic space. They sediment there. They begin shaping reality from within. And here the significance of psychic militancy becomes clearer. It is not merely activism plus therapy. Nor is it the politicization of psychoanalysis in some superficial sense. Rather, psychic militancy names an active discipline of refusal: the labor of resisting domination at the level of inward structure itself. This has been my practice and strategy, especially in my war against the Baha’is, their enablers and their hangers on.
Such militancy therefore concerns fidelity. Fidelity to perception. Fidelity to reality against distortion. Fidelity to one’s ethical and liberatory commitments against the constant pressures of ideological rearrangement. It becomes a form of psychic vigilance.
One can see the broader genealogy here. Paulo Freire argued that the oppressed frequently internalize the oppressor and unconsciously reproduce structures of domination within themselves. Herbert Marcuse warned that advanced societies manufacture not merely products but needs themselves. Wilhelm Reich explored the manner by which political structures sediment into bodily and psychic organization. Fanon brought these insights into anti-colonial struggle. Sheehi appears to extend this trajectory into contemporary psychoanalytic language: psychic life itself becomes a site of organized resistance.
But there is another aspect that interests me even more. The language of intrusion, sedimentation, and colonization suggests a model of psychic life as fundamentally dynamic before it becomes fixed. Domination here is not merely external coercion; it is a process of hardening. Something fluid becomes rigid. Something open becomes enclosed. Something alive becomes administered. In other words, we are talking about spiritual warfare.
This is why the concept resonated with me so strongly. Across many domains—metaphysical, legal, social, and political—for years I have increasingly come to suspect that systems of power often function through premature closure. Living processes become codified too quickly. Dynamic realities are frozen into rigid categories. Articulation gives way to fixation. Movement becomes sediment. One could even say that power desires ontology itself to become static.
Psychic militancy, then, may be understood as resistance against such closure. It is not simply resistance against external authority but against the inward naturalization of authority. Against the subtle process by which contingency comes to appear necessary. Against the transformation of historical arrangements into psychic inevitabilities. This becomes particularly urgent today because contemporary forms of domination increasingly operate through reality itself. Information warfare no longer merely seeks to convince; it seeks to disorient. Propaganda no longer merely imposes narratives; it fractures the very conditions by which narratives can be distinguished from one another. Under such conditions one begins to understand why militancy must become psychic. If perception itself becomes unstable terrain, then preserving clarity becomes a political act.
Fanon once showed that liberation is not merely expelling the colonizer from land. It is preventing the colonizer from taking residence within the architecture of consciousness itself. Sheehi seems to be radicalizing this insight further. Revolution cannot concern institutions alone because institutions are reproduced through subjects. And subjects themselves are produced within psychic economies already traversed by power. Perhaps this is what psychic militancy ultimately names: a disciplined refusal to permit domination to become inward destiny. For if conquest begins in consciousness, then liberation must begin there as well.
Thus we resist and will continue to.
While I have yet to read Sheehi’s book, and only just ordered it, what I have seen her say about it resonates with me because, as I indicated, “psychic militancy” has been my own practice for the entire duration of my conflict with the Haifan Baha’is, the Dugin fascists, the Zionists, their hybrids, and similar. Psychic militancy also creates internal resilience and when coupled with a real spiritual practice, it becomes a literal force of Nature—as my own enemies are now publicly confirming on these pages of Substack itself.
For these 30+ years, these enemies—particularly those of them associated with the Haifan Baha’is and adjacent actors—have tried through thick and thin to discredit, deplatform, ostracize, marginalize and harass—even, as I believe, to orchestrate the mysterious murder of my German wife in Berlin during early 2019. They have failed in all attempts to break me, whereas I have scarred and bruised them badly in a proverbial psychic knife fight each time. So years later they are escalating once again because my psychic militancy has once more become an irritant to them and a foil to their larger nefarious agendas.
Given this, a psychic militant does not need to apologize for their militancy in the political domain of conflict. They are completely free to even threaten to skullfuck an adversary (as I have done many times), since the fight is in the mind. Because if the war is ultimately occult and spiritual, then psychic militancy in such a war requires beating this Devil (in whatever form he appears) bloody and bruised, spitting on him in the process, pulling no punches in doing so and then even pissing on him at the end when he is taking a count of 10. That is what I have done, and will continue to do, and will never apologize to anyone for doing so.
Psychic militancy is God’s own Way. It negates passive-aggression and is the choice method of the true Warrior-Archetype. Let the Akira Kalashnikovs, Chris Bennetts and similar who like cowards hide behind their asymmetrical institutional privilege and websites emulate this.