How O9A’s Accelerationist Agenda Fuels a Seductive, Nihilistic Mythos
Disenchantment and the Bitter Seeds of Nihilism: Part Three
Just a few days ago a Guardian article painted a picture of Gen Z attitudes, including the ‘terrible truth… that we’re heading for an uninhabitable planet.’ It’s a view reflected in a 2021 survey showing that 44% of Millennials / Gen Z believe ‘we have passed the point of no return regarding environmental damage’, and echoed in a BBC survey where 56% think humanity is doomed, and 80% that humans have failed to care for the planet. These stats reflect the phenomenon of ‘collapsed futures’; a belief that there is no viable planetary inheritance for humankind, at least within the current system.
The philosopher Byung-Chul Han aligns this fatalism with ‘the burnout society’; a generation where a prevailing ‘culture of convenience’, coupled with a so-called ‘achievement society’ has driven a state of nihilism and exhaustive depression amongst its young people. A society that promises everything but facilitates nothing foments a situation where humanity wages war on itself. This is expressed through literal acts of violence because of the ‘compulsive structures and psychic indispositions dwelling within it [society].’
We are the children of the Anthropocene, here to accelerate the end - М.К.У. quote
Various commentators have pointed to the UK’s Southport riots as an example of this: an expression of violent discontent, in this case amongst a socioeconomically aggrieved working class who are poor, disenfranchised and futureless. The problem is particularly acute amongst young white males, who sense they are fundamentally powerless. Violence becomes not just a means of lashing out against a world perceived as unjust, but a badge of their exclusion. A similar observation was made during the 2021 Northern Ireland riots, with one MP claiming that ‘it’s not rioting for a purpose, nor even against anything in reality. Instead, it’s just a rage. It’s nihilism with nothing to be gained, just destroying whatever they can.’
It is therefore tragically ironic that the putative object of the Southport rioters’ ire – Axel Rudakubana; the perpetrator of egregious murders in which three young girls were killed – appeared to also exhibit a form of violent nihilism, albeit in a form far more distressing and transgressive. Excluded from school on ten occasions for carrying a knife, and referred to Prevent – the government’s counter-extremism programme – three times, there was no evidence of ideological motivation behind his attack. Rather, he was ‘absolutely obsessed’ with violence and genocide. Videos of death, torture, and executions were found on his devices. Upon his arrest, he said ‘I’m so glad those kids are dead.’
Rudakubana exhibits what analysts refer to as ‘unclear ideology extremism’ or ‘fringe fluidity’1 – a bricolage of personal, contradictory ideologies or, in some cases, lacking any ideology at all, being primarily interested in violence for its own sake. The category is growing fast: Prevent referrals for those with a mixed, unstable or unclear ideology increased by 48% in 2020.
The week before Rudakubana was sentenced, another violence-obsessed UK-based extremist was jailed, although the event received far less coverage. Arrested for a litany of offences, Cameron Finnigan was a member of 764, an online decentralised network of sadists or ‘threat actors’ who infiltrate platforms as diverse as Instagram, Discord, Telegram, SoundCloud, Minecraft and Roblox with the purpose of explicitly targeting minors. Founded by one Bradley Cadenhead in 2021, the chief aim of the network is, through sextortion, to blackmail victims into committing various violent, degrading or traumatic acts, which are recorded and then shared amongst members. Caldenhead was sentenced to 80 years in prison in 2023, and the 764 network notionally dissolved, although it continues via various offshoots such as 676, CVLT, Court, Kaskar, Harm Nation, Leak Society, and H3ll. A reporting consortium uncovered an ecosystem of 50 servers and hundreds of actors, distributing three million messages from potentially thousands of victims.
Finnegan, and many other 764 threat actors, have displayed affiliations to the Order of Nine Angles (O9A)2 – an esoteric accelerationist terror network reputedly founded in the late 1960s, in the UK, by one ‘Anton Long’ (AKA David Wulstan Myatt). At one time, O9A was considered something of a joke in occult circles: Satanic neo-Nazi edgelords with grandiose ambitions but little in the way of influence, and amounting to only a handful of adherents. In recent years however, it has emerged as one of the most consequential groups reshaping 21st-century extremism, acting as the primary driving force for 764 and myriad other transgressive Internet social currents, including the likes of: Atomwaffen Division, Tempel ov Blood, М.К.У, White Star Acception, the prohibited Sonnenkrieg Division, Feuerkrieg Division, and Q309 Network.
The internet is the O9A’s primary enabler, facilitating anonymous dissemination of both its operative framework and esoteric mythos, which are highly adaptable to multiple extremist contexts; in fact, they actively encourage the apparently incoherent and fragmented motives of unclear ideology extremism.
In terms of the O9A’s ‘post-ideological’ operative framework, its main thrust is to validate and glorify violence as nihilistic currency, where performative misanthropy is understood as an aesthetic, spiritual and catalysing pursuit rather than political strategy. While operational blueprints are available online, no significant centralised administration exists. Instead, it advocates lone actor terrorism or small independent cells known as nexions. Thus, formal membership of O9A is eschewed in favour of individualized pathways of radicalization, defined as The Seven Fold Way or ‘Hebdomadry’. A key component of this system includes covert infiltration (known as insight roles), the purpose of which is to understand, influence and destabilise other groups and institutions (law enforcement, military, NGOs, and religious groups.) Acts of calculated antinomianism such as rape and murder are also advocated.3
Their enthralment at the spectre of catastrophe and annihilation, is in part an alternative to the pervasive affects of paralysis and depression borne of a dying civilization. - Richard Seymour
‘Destabilisation’ is key to the O9A worldview, the chief goal being to completely undermine or collapse Western society and democracy. Its overarching mythos is rooted in Julius Evola’s militant Traditionalism: a belief in a primordial spirituality that has been supplanted by the Abrahamic ‘Magian’ faiths. History is viewed through an esoteric framework called ‘Aeonic theory’, which posits that human civilizations undergo 2,000-year cyclical transformations governed by metaphysical or acausal forces. The current Fifth Aeon, identified with post-Enlightenment Western society, is deemed terminally corrupt due to its adherence to Judeo-Christian morality, liberal democracy, and multiculturalism. Thus, through a toxic combination of neo-Nazism and deistic Satanism, the role of the nexion is to accelerate Earth’s final stage, ushering in an ‘Imperium’ of militaristic governance, due to commence at some point in 1990–2011 and last until 2390. Alongside overt and covert acts, nexions participate in ‘soul forging’ violence-based magickal rituals to manifest acausal energies and bring about ‘the Sinister Numinal’ – a rupture in reality enabling fascist rebirth.
The Nietzschean wet dream of the O9A Imperium reaches its apotheosis when, as part of its complex mythos, acausal energies manifesting as Dark Gods flood the mortal world, culling non-whites and Marian influences alike. ‘Vindex’ is a messianic spirit-being who incarnates in physical form and leads the Übermensch to triumph. The ultimate Sixth Aeon – the ‘Aeon of Fire’ – sees Satanically illuminated humanity use genetic augmentation to develop super-Aryans to populate the galaxy. Stellar Darwinism in the form of planetary culling is undertaken to assert humanity’s pre-eminence, and to annihilate alien civilizations deemed evolutionarily inferior. A state of eternal expansion or perpetual war is maintained against rival galactic empires to maintain racial vigour.
If this sounds familiar, it should, because it maps very closely to the mythos of Warhammer 40,000. I was not being facetious in this post when I argued for 40k as a mythos for our time. Its darkness, xenophobia, fascism and militarism, its heartless bureaucracies, and it’s End Times nihilism, all chime with the current defining mood, and with the O9A manifesto.
Whether similarities between the O9A and 40k mythologies are by accident or design, or by some more eldritch mechanism, is hard to say. What is understood, however, are the methods used by the O9A to inveigle its agenda into mainstream culture, metastising through online channels and communities (particularly disaffected incel-inclined young white males.) O9A should therefore be understood as a form of cultural insurgency rather than a conventional terror group. It gives to digitally native, nihilistic, alienated, impotent youths a grand mythic narrative of racial apotheosis, where violence shifts from political tool to mystical imperative, and where fascism is presented as an inevitable cosmic force rather than a political choice. Its mythos transforms nihilism into sacrament and alienation into brotherhood.
The power and importance of myth to transmit cultural messages persists, even in this postmodern age. When myth itself becomes infected, so to do culture, society and civilization. I predict that the cross-fertilising of two expansive, nihilistic mythologies – 40k and O9A – will prove seductive; a pandemic spreading through the fault lines of our digital age. It is already happening, if you know where to look. Security agencies will reformulate their counterterrorism strategies to ‘myth mitigation’. But without viable alternatives, the ‘burnout generation’ will seek agency where they can find it.
Related posts
See https://extremism.gwu.edu/age-incoherence
See https://www.middlebury.edu/institute/academics/centers-initiatives/ctec/publications/dangerous-organizations-and-bad-actors-order-nine
See https://www.isdglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/O9A-ISD-External-August2022.pdf
Great article, I recall O9A being discussed in Head magazine in the early 90's - it all seemed somewhat comical back then.
https://www.cosmobooks.co.uk/pages/books/366948/radical-culture/head-magazine-the-magic-issue-no-5-magick-human-sacrifice-how-to-raise-the-dead-cats-and-magic-kaos
From a related trajectory (not sure if you are familiar with bifo's writing):
https://www.e-flux.com/notes/649956/new-heroes
This is a really interesting article. I wonder what crossover there is with the esoteric writings and experiments of the Ccru. Even Mark Watson, who came out of the Ccru but turned left, argued that people brought up under what he called 'Capitalist Realism' could more easily imagine the apocalypse than the end of capitalism. The Ccru had a seemingly more Lovecraftian view of 'esoteric' influence in the universe. Perhaps the individualist and messianic 'super-aryan' vision you outline here is kind of mental fail-safe reaction similar to JSK's 'Dark Fluff' whereby the believers convince themselves that they have some sort of agency in the face of unknowable horror . Breaking stuff does 'feel' a bit like agency, hence the rise of the so-called 'disruptor', which has gone from the legitimate categorisation of an organisation that breaks open a static situation by innovation, to being used to describe any individual clown who wanders into a company or organisation and wrecks it. The former is hard to achieve, the second is shockingly easy if you have some influence that makes you untouchable.