The Rise of Plutonism

1991

Although it was hardly noticed at the time by reviewers, on July 18, 1990 a two-volume work was published in Milwaukee, the manuscript was written in prison during the previous year and a half by Zeke Pluto. “Anarchies of Reason” and “Anxiety of Contentment” set out the Plutonic Signifier’s philosophy.

It was evident from a close reading of the work that Pluto had strong pretensions to entrenching a major religious movement, and that he considered the world as a whole to be in danger of forever corrupting itself. There were, he argued in the book--as he had earlier and repeatedly argued in the public arena in Queen City and elsewhere in the mid-west--twin perils threatening "the fabric of humanity." One was the “soulessness” inherent to unchecked technological growth, the other, "rampant utilitarianism." It was his experience in foster care, military service and prison that taught him "the truth" about the New World Order's' Conspiracy to rid the world of "altruistic collectivism" by means of political coercion, ideological domination, and spiritual corruption.

The rubric, New World Order," hitherto an umbrella term, referring to those economically affluent nations defined as the First World, took on, in Pluto's theory, a new meaning, one that within a decade was to capture the minds of millions worldwide. For Pluto, "altruistic collectivism" was synonymous with "virtue." By contrast, "New World Order Conspiracy" was synonymous with "moral corruption." Pluto's ideological tracts were full of appeals to individual Edenic innocence and vulnerability. Considering the "inexorable insidiousness" of the New World Orders' political project, Pluto wrote, "how could their unfortunate victims be blamed?" The politics of the mass consumer culture conspiracy were such that its proponents were precision disseminators of "dialectical perfidy." Their ideological apparatuses were marked by what Pluto deemed, “pseudological” distortions of truth. According to Pluto, modern life itself was a calculated device, an epistemological and ontological trap. The bourgeoisie working class worldwide and the global under-class were the victims, not the beneficiaries, of technological progress.

Pluto positioned himself in "Anxiety of Contentment" as a man who had experienced, and who would forever reject, not only the depersonalization of progress, but also the destruction of a sensibility of communal obligation and therefore life on earth. The threat, as he perceived it, concerned the integrity of self-identity and personal autonomy, and the New Order’s attempt to deliberately sever the connection between material progress and moral responsibility. He told his readers:

"The ideological functionary bides his time, insidiously categorizing, quantifying and appropriating the unsuspecting target's ontological center with his pernicious psychosocial machinations, indoctrinating through a dogma of false consciousness and thus alienating the subject from the bosom of the natural world. The New world Order ideologue marshals every resource available to undermine the foundations of core selfhood. Systematically, he blurs the distinction between ego and machine, striving to sever the ties between self and language. Technology, misused, is responsible for weapons both inert and organic that present the most dangerous and immediate threat to mankind. Only through an unremitting and thorough rejection of technological meliorism can we prevent the impending apocalypse."

In “Anarchies of Reason” Pluto outlined his mission: he would expose and then annihilate the looming threat posed by the rise of technology. Pluto not only warned his readers of what he considered the life-threatening dangers to mankind; he also explained his role in combating those dangers. His message was apocalyptic: "Should schizophrenic technology, aided by consumer ideology, triumph over being," Pluto wrote, "its inexorable movement will be the funeral march of mankind, and this planet will follow its orbit through the ether, without any human life on its surface, as it did millions of years ago. And so I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the unnamed and prime mover. In smiting down the technologies of materialism I am defending the Lord's creation."

By 1992, Zeke Pluto's attraction reflected his cults' propagandists' political skill in creating a hero of the man of the streets, and in glorifying him as an innocent victim of a soulless society. Pluto did not impress all observers.

Theologically, Plato's dogma was predicated on those gaps that comprise the contradiction between faith and disbelief. His ministry was an attempt to reconcile this paradox. Pluto understood that, if the Bible tells us that "God is our refuge and strength, / a very present help in trouble (Psalms 46:1), we should also understand that, as Thomas Szaz put it, "If you talk to God you are praying; if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia." It was within this schizophrenic rapture that mediated God's "talk" that Pluto found the core of his doctrine. Schizophrenia, in fact, came to define Pluto's ideas on how one should live. That the "New World Order," a post cold-war euphemism for the "ancien regime," would associate this sensibility with silent minorities and the fanatic fringe was typical of pre-genocidal propaganda historically.

The left colored him as a racist ethnocentric while the right saw him as an immoral Jeremiah born of anarchistic revolutionary forces. So it was easy for conservative talking heads, like Howie Boekrusch, and liberal byte-spinners, like McCarthy Magwitch, to condemn Pluto's ideas according to their self-tailored political agendas. In one famous tract, Boekrusch (pronounced Buckrush), compared Pluto's cult members to the Hutu minority, who, in Rwanda in 1994, butchered 800,000 of the Tutsi majority. The colonial construction of this bloody rift was never mentioned. In a similar fashion, Magwitch had excoriated Pluto on theoretical grounds, claiming that the totalitarian bent of his group should be less influenced by Stalin and Mao than Marx and Trotsky. The charge was that Pluto had abandoned all things socialistic and even democratic, applying violence as a means of internal allegiance in the same way that dictators resorted to terror as an instrument of domestic policy. Both views held some truth.