Last night I met a guy at Halloween party who told me he was a Free Mason. He was hilarious and fit right in with my friend group. Upon asking him what the Free Masons are he just said “basically we’re a bunch of dudes who get together for pancakes on Saturday.”
I’ve also heard conspiracies about the group in the past, and I even had an ex coworker once tell me the Free Masons were a cult and were out to get him.
Anyone have any insights? The internet is not very helpful.
A bunch of Christians decided to reincorporate magic into the religion after folk magic had become detestable and demonized. They did it in a very nerdy way with organized ritual. You join as a newb/student and work your way up through several layers of seniority. It’s kind of like Deism except that instead of incorporating Enlightenment natural philosophy into religion, it was hermetic philosophy. This was pre Enlightenment so that makes sense.
Masons are a derivative of this kind of thing. It’s mainly a fellowship thing just like organized religion except with the nerd shit of esoteric/occult knowledge.
Imagine a 16th/17th century Discord group with roles and everything. The conspiracies come up because a lot historical figures were part of the discord server and they used esoteric imagery because they were big nerds.
Conspiracy stuff also comes up because during the bourgeois revolutions (American, French), revolutionaries did organize through their Masonic lodges, so pretty much every memorable figure of the American revolution was a Freemason. The conspiracy-brained part is thinking that Masonry is fundamentally a conspiratorial/revolutionary organization, that continues to control social changes today.
Conspiracies come up because of shit like this
Nah, that happened so late in the game it didn’t matter. People have been accusing the Freemasons of running society from the shadows for as long as they’ve existed. The GLADIO thing was more that all the members of the conspiracy joined the same club because they were buddies, not that the Masons as a whole are always doing sneaky spy shit.
Ugh, god, my late grandfather loved that shit. Buncha old dudes being chuddy together with rituals and shit. Networking. No women allowed. Wouldn’t be at all surprised if some southern lodges had klan ties
EDIT: for context, this was a very rural, 100% white lodge. So maybe others are less overtly racist, idek. But women being forbidden from joining is a rule for the entire organization.
IIRC the Klan was always very anti-Masonic, as well as anti-Catholic.
A whole lot of these secret (or at least private fraternal) societies really don’t like each other.
The freemasons are a very decentralized organization like a motorcycle club or a very badly managed franchised restaurant chain. The structure of lodges can be radically different from each other, and while the freemasons aren’t exactly a shining beacon of leftist values (p2 was literally a fascist terrorist group) the actions of one lodge does not speak for all freemasons. It would be unleftist for us to persecute against freemasons for simply being freemasons. This isn’t to say that the freemasons are immune from criticism because they are a decentralized organization, but generally they usually pose no threat to our goals and have been our bedfellows in a few struggles like against nazism and the civil rights movement. We should target the bad actors but the organization itself has a right to exist, under scrutiny of course. We should apply the same criticism to it like we would to the church or college fraternities, ideally they wouldn’t exist but we have much bigger fish to go after and they aren’t overtly hostile to us. Let me say again that decentralization is not inherently why we should tolerate freemasons, the klan operates in chapters and they need no explaining why they are bad, but the hells angels, they do have good people in their ranks, they do have some relatively good chapters, they are not explicitly racist or white supremacist in any way, but we should seek to abolish the hells angels because their ideology will always be fundamentally opposed to our own, it will always have white supremacist leanings that cannot be erased away. The actions of the bad chapters will always outweighs the actions of the good ones, you cannot be a hells angel without fundamentally supporting something that we don’t. Masons are not explicitly white supremacist, that is why we shouldn’t fuck with masons. It would be like targeting Jews because of the actions of Israel. Like don’t. It’s a line we shouldn’t cross, we must be careful as to who it is acceptable to discriminate against and masons are not one of those people, though they are close to being so.
I never said we should harass or otherwise target freemasons. They’re mostly a peculiar harmless organization that serves as a boogeyman for conspiracy theories nowadays.
My thinking was more along the lines of “what if we had our own kind of institution comparable to this, that wasn’t quite a vanguard party itself, but opened up new communistic directions”.
Well in my country they’re just petite boug weirdos that play dress up and do nepotism with each other.
It’s half LARP, half social club, half business networking group, and half sinister conspiracy.
It’s a bunch of dudes who go to meetings where they do LARP shit like wear robes and recite ritual stuff, then hang out to talk business and network. They do charitable work, they have retreats, they host dinners. The “sinister conspiracy” part is that they’re basically like the Chamber of Commerce, in that all the notable professionals and business owners in town join up so they can make decisions about politics in the area.
It’s basically a club petite bourgeoise LARP and network.
In most lodges it’s basically like the Elks Club or the Lions Club, just a place where old guys go to sit around, chat, and smoke inside. Big difference with the Masons is that it’s also a local networking thing. My best friend’s dad is a Mason and he says that the other members are guys who own an autobody shop or own the only Indian grocery store in town.
