Like with lots of humanities ex-students my way of analyzing and thinking about things is fairly second-half of the Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism. But before I went to college and was drowned in that sort of stuff, I have been a hardcore imbiber of all the arts, many of them "countercultural" in flavor ever since I was at least 13, and it is really that which I have held a very internally self-contradictory allegiance to more than anything. My most natural sensibilities are to be rebellious against yet at the same time sentimental towards my Protestant ubringing, and really the main form this rebellion takes has been through approaching many of the arts, particularly independent and arthouse cinema, with a kind of reverence that is probably an attempt to take on some kind of enchantment or mythic way of experiencing which is other than the non-idiotic one I was raised in. In any case, early in my 20s I had some kind of "episode" which had me crawling up the walls with a very return-of-the-repressed Protestant kind of paranoia which initially took the form of your typical illuminati conspiracy theory but, more interestingly, a sudden awakening to the fact that the vast majority of my favorite works of art had a strong connection to the occult--an area which I had never consciously studied (though I had been very well familiar with and influenced by Campbell, Jung, McKenna, etc for different reasons). This led me to lurking on the occult reddit, but frankly, a lot of the way that people talk and reason on that sub really turns me off. I have a strong distaste both aesthetically and philosophically for anything that is too adolescently dark, so I don't really feel at home with a clan of chaotes, Satanist or Crowleyite or what have you (I mean there are a lot of people on that sub so I don't mean to generalize but perhaps you catch my drift). Seeing zummi and rd's posts on that sub led me here because (1) many of their posts presuppose a theoretical knowledge in a way I find attractive, (2) their attitudes are playful and lighthearted and serious but hardly ever reminiscent of some teenager trying to be edgy. There seems to me to be more of a genuine lived investment in these problems in a way which may strategically involve posturing but is not constituted purely in it. So for me it's really just a matter of feeling a distant kinship with the SENSIBILITIES of these two posters and the ideas/problems which seem to interest them than it is necessarily an alignment with any of their positions, per se. (I find Nick Land in particular very much not to my liking.) Nevertheless right now I am in too much of a place of the classic "total agnosticism about everything" thing RAW labeled himself as to feel comfortable doing much discussion or argumentation on here, and I think perhaps part of the reason I read this sub is to integrate the part of me that likes McKenna, Campbell, RAW, and Alan Watts with ways of thinking which are a little less... uh... well... rightly or wrongly, there is a lot in those men which instinctively rubs me as naive. And there is much in critical theory which instinctively rubs me as really grappling with key problems in a convincing way, but overall perhaps too anti-foundational to assist in Living or orienting oneself, which is the way those more "naive" sounding thinkers to nevertheless sound. So I suppose I read this sub as a kind of way of leaping onto ideas and experimenting with them as kind of middle points between the different discursive camps which have constituted the form of my faith and the form of my skepticism. This is an oversimplification but that's the only way I can articulate it.