Last week, in the state of half-sleep before I wake up during which I get most of my best ideas, I realized that the lords of the Corporate Empire in Spanner may believe in the least scientific form of the deadliest pseudoscience in history, eugenics, the form exposed and denounced in the two most famous books of Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity and Evil Sisters: in essence, a cult, likely borrowed by the infamous proto-Nazi Ariosophy cult from the Brahmin priests of Hinduism (who call it "bindu"), that identifies blood, semen, brains, gold, money, and oil (petroleum) as the identical substance. Not materially — Ariosophy is consistently "spiritualist" in accepting Plato's notorious claim that matter is a corrupt reflection of supernatural absolutes — but "spiritually", in that they allegedly share the identical supernatural "essence". This they call "occult physiology". As usual, the supernatural is used as a weapon to silence rational and scientific inquiry and pawn off lies as fact. The cult's effect on the Corporates is hysterical antifeminism, hysterical racism, hysterical homophobia, hysterical class bigotry, hysterical authoritarianism, even hysterical misanthropy, and a paranoid obsession with "vampires". The Corporate ideology turns out to have a very unexpected side effect: middle- and upper-class mothers, to prevent the Corporates from kidnapping their daughters and turning them into mindless breeding slaves, marry them (this is one of the two primary yuri elements in Spanner).
The hysterical antifeminism: According to the "bindu" cult, blood and brains are made of semen. This means that men possess them and women do not. The hysterical aspect is a paranoid view of women that sees them as vampires — literally — who can only become intelligent because they steal the semen of men through heterosexual intercourse. If semen is identical to blood and brains, then sex is vampirism. Thus women must be forcibly "put in their place" in order to preserve the "natural order". Here you can also see the pseudoscientific origin of the idiom "fucking one's brains out". Dijkstra notes that eating bull testicles ("Rocky Mountain oysters") was a common practice within the cult, and the popularity of androgenic steroids (called "man essence" by the cult) surely originated with this cult.
The hysterical racism: The cult claims that men possess "bindu" only to the extent that they lack melanin. This means that only white men are said to possess it, and "racial hygiene" is therefore necessary to protect the "purity" of the white man's "blood". "Racial hygiene" (which became the official policy of Nazi Germany, hence the Holocaust) is the paranoid conspiracy theory that claims that "inferior" or "sub-white" races are out to "pollute" or "defile" the "purity" of (in the immortal [and immoral] words of Stanley Kubrick's General Jack D. Ripper) "our precious bodily fluids". The "inferior races" are those which are darker than the European races, formerly including the Jews but, after the formation of the State of Israel in 1948, substituting the Arabs in their place (the two kinds of anti-Semitism). Hence, like antifeminism, racism is a moral imperative to the cult. Note that the parallel racial-supremacist cult called "Afrocentrism" identifies melanin as part of the "bindu" substance, leading to black supremacism in place of the usual white supremacism; the hysteria of the cult's racism, however, remains the same, and race terrorism is still the result.
The hysterical homophobia: The cult defines homosexuals as "man-women", that is, men who possess the nature of women. Remember how the cult defines "woman": as "bindu"-lacking vampire. Even more than the born-again Christians who claim that homosexuality is a curable condition caused by demon possession and cured by faith healing and "spiritual warfare", the Corporates are paranoid about "the homosexual agenda" to the point of conspiracy theory. But unlike the Evangelical "spiritual warfare" cultists, the "bindu" cultists attribute homosexuality entirely to "evil nature" and are more likely to simply exterminate them. This is why Hitler exterminated homosexuals as well as Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, and dissidents. It is also why one of Spanner's archvillains, Dr. Henry Becket, is an infamous serial killer of homosexuals.
The hysterical class bigotry: The cult defines money in general and gold in particular as identical "in spirit" to blood, brains, and semen. Acting on this assumption, the German composer Richard Wagner declared the Nibelung gold (of The Ring of the Nibelungs) to be the same thing as the Holy Grail (the central talisman of his final opera, Parsifal). Thus, rich men possess "bindu" and the poor do not, and the degree of one's "manhood" depends on how much money one possesses, especially in the talismanic form of gold, a substance traditionally used to create pagan idols. This is the true occult origin of so-called "Social Darwinism", the erroneous belief that "survival of the fittest" is defined as eternal class warfare of the rich against the poor. Once the working masses realize that the Corporates are engaged in an occult-driven campaign of class warfare aimed at destroying the working class, you will see a massive revival of Marxism. And this is precisely what happens in Spanner, which is in part a record of the world class war that is in our near future.
The hysterical authoritarianism: since the "master race" must be kept "pure" at all costs, dictatorship must be established to protect the race. (Wrote Albert Camus of the Nazis, the enemy he fought against in the French Resistance: "The master race must be eternally oppressed in order to exist.") Thus "occult physiology" is the secret doctrine that underlies synarchism and its Fascist and Nazi offshoots. (Note: this is the actual Synarchist movement of the European elite, not the "Judeo-Nazi Banker Conspiracy" that conspiracy cult guru Lyndon LaRouche calls "synarchism" and claims is polluting his "precious bodily fluids".) Thus, to protect the dictatorship of the "pure", the "pure" establish an all-powerful secret police force that answers only to them. The template is Plato's "republic": Plato, an early eugenicist, claimed that a "guardian" caste of warriors was necessary to protect the racial as well as spiritual purity of the "philosopher-king" ruling caste, and of course protect their dictatorship over their eternal enemy the "rabble" as well. So to keep the "impure" from destroying "civilization" (or "Kultur", defined by the cult as — of course! — the "blood" of the "pure"), democracy must be destroyed. Synarchism conflates democracy, communism, anarchism, and free-market libertarianism, claiming that they are one and the same thing: the evil conspiracy to destroy "Nature", which the cult claims is identical to — you guessed it — their "blood".
The hysterical misanthropy: There are those among the cult who have come to hate the human species itself. They claim to be pure spirits trapped in the impure flesh of glorified monkeys. They believe that their pure spirits, rare by definition, account for the difference between humans and all lesser simians. But alone among humanity, they are lost gods with divine rather than animal souls. These are the notorious Illuminati, the upper-caste Gnostics whose defining tenet is "Nicolaitanism", the belief (borrowed from the Stoics) that they alone have immortal spirits and that therefore they have the divine right to rule all "lesser" humans. Some among them take the extreme position known as posthumanism: that it is the destiny of the elite to transcend humanity itself and (in occult terms) reclaim their true godhood. The dark side of the hacker underground includes a cult whose doctrine is known as "TechGnosis", the subject of Erik Davis' book. It is these hackers (the majority of whom may be autistic males who find their own flesh repulsive) who are most likely to turn to the "dark side" and the Illuminati, and who are responsible for the "Moravec Plan" to replace carbon-based life with a single silicon-based collective organism (named after Hans Moravec, author of the plan's source book, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence). Thus, in Spanner, you find Corporate barons taking their brains out of their bodies and into their corporations' central computers, thus transforming those corporations into cyborgs, distributed lifeforms of a new Earth-born alien species. Colonel Tom Becket, the villain of Bad Company, thus becomes Dictel Corporation in Spanner. It gets even crazier than this, and I'll dedicate an entire entry to just this.
The hysterical vampire obsession: If you believe in the core tenet of the "bindu" cult, then of course you have to believe in the corollary conspiracy theory that those who do not possess the "holy" substance are by definition compelled to steal it. That's why those outside the cult are allegedly out to "pollute", or (even worse) "steal" vampirically, the cultists' "precious bodily fluids". The only rational response to this threat is, of course, total war against the "lesser" majority of the human species.
Now you know why I insist that the dominant men the conspiracy theorists are obsessed with are the most paranoid conspiracy theorists of all. If the Illuminati are Gnostics, as I insist they are (and of course they do too), then they are especially vulnerable to supernaturalist explanations of natural phenomena: "occult" versions of various sciences that Theosophy has long been infatuated with but which has no resemblance to any actual natural phenomena or any real science. "Occult science" is no more scientific than "creation science" is, and just as denialist. Is it any wonder that so many of the devotees of "occult physiology" today are Holocaust deniers?
To protect their "precious bodily fluids" and its "purity", the Corporates practice an extreme form of eugenics. Not just the Holocaust-level race terrorism, but an equal assault against women that consists of enslavement for breeding purposes. This enslavement amounts to zombification, that is, the destruction of the unfortunate women's souls for the benefit of extremist dominant males. The Corporates also consider polygamy an absolute necessity, since they need to breed as many pure descendants, particularly male ones, as possible in order to protect their supremacy and keep the "master race" from going extinct. Here's where the "yuri" (other than the central lesbian romance) in my manga comes in: The weakness of the cult and its conspiracy theory has to do with lesbianism. Lesbians are not out to steal the "blood" of the "chosen", and yet they do not fuck their literal brains out like the cult pseudoscience says they must: they do not become stupid. Thus their threat is to the pseudotheory itself: their existence disproves it. Lesbianism, of course, makes even the "purest" women too "impure" to be suitable breeders for the Corporates.
To protect their daughters from enslavement by the Corporate lords, a growing number of concerned mothers, starting with a few prominent female defectors from the ruling caste, are actually marrying their own daughters so as to make them unsuitable as breeding material. They become "husbands" (as they are actually called) to the daughters they marry. To reinforce this and make sure their daughters stay out of Corporate hands, they consummate their marriages by becoming their daughters' lovers. Feminism from the late 18th to late 20th centuries called for women to cultivate same-sex relationships as a protection against the domination of men, as I learned from Lillian Faderman in her book Surpassing the Love of Men. But mere lesbian relationships aren't enough under the Corporate Empire, since the Corporate lords can always end these relationships through kidnapping, especially since their hysterical homophobia leads them to decree a draconian ban on same-sex marriage for eugenic purposes. This is why mother-daughter marriages in defiance of the ban become necessary, though only for middle- to upper-class white women. Thus major character Ariel Shield marries her young daughter Uma, Dr. Willa Richter-Thomas marries her teenage daughter Jennifer, and Taylor Brinkman (Ariel's sister) comes to marry her daughters Leila and Fiona Shelley. But Shira Thomas, Spanner's openly bisexual main character, has no need to marry her own mother (civil-rights lawyer and prominent dissident Hope Reston) because she is racially ineligible for enslavement by Corporate overlords obsessed with "racial purity". Still, with the moral breakdown inflicted by militant Corporatism (and of course opposed in equally extreme and totalitarian fashion by its symbiotic enemy, the Islamic Caliphate), Shira finds her sexual options so wide open that she can take any lover she wants.
So an extreme ruling-class ideology leads to an extreme reaction, to the point of creating a total war between the sexes that may end up destroying one sex entirely: the Corporate patriarchy creates a matriarchy determined to destroy it, even if that means the extinction of the male sex.
And the story ideas in Spanner get even crazier, as I'll show in future entries. Stay tuned...
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