The Abolition of Man by the Monster Next Door

At some point every morning while enjoying a steaming cup and waiting for my scattered bits to beam down from the dream transporter and coalesce into a recognizable version of me, I will hit the Technorati "blogs who link here" function in order to determine who hasn't linked to something I've written, which basically consists of "the internet," or "mankind at large," give or take. In short, no one pays any attention aside from the small number of you who do, for which I am grateful.

That we all know each other's names probably explains why I have never seen anything resembling the mythical "royalty check." Now, if I were a bitter man -- which I am not -- I might enviously gnash my teeth over the matter of my good friend, whose 20-something musician son landed one of his songs in a commercial, so that his toilsome work life consists of making the long trek to the mail box and back to the couch. But as I said, I am not bitter. Thanks to the Colonel's influence, I have more or less internalized "the code of the Beagleholes," which helps me to keep that last commandment -- you know, the one about coveting your neighbor's beastly mailbox.... or was it male ox? I forget....

But yesterday there was a link to someone who took me to tusk for treating the atheist Sam Harris like some kind of dumbo with nothing but a pachydermented junk in his trunk. Which in itself is interesting. It reminds me of working with patients, who, as often as not, ignore your most elephantine point about their psychic jungle and instead seize upon some tangential tail of a comment as being of earthshattering importance to the blind fellow holding it. You just never know what's going to happen to something once it leaves your piehole. Despite your best efforts at clarity, you have almost no control over how people will respond to what you say -- or what they may turn it into in order to justify a certain emotional reaction that "lies in wait." Sometimes this is referred to as "marriage."

In a way, it's a mirrorcle when communication succeeds at all, especially when one is dealing with highly abstract metaphysical concerns or with that expensive new phone she bought when the existing one was perfectly adequate. Sometimes a point is so subtle or tricky -- and I am well aware of this -- I must simultaneously "build" the receiver while I am sending the message. (Some of you readers out there have hinted that my writing has succeeded at this for you, helping you to uncover the part of yourself to which my writing is addressed.... While this is gratifying, I still can't help wondering if my book will ever earn back the tiny advance from my penurious publisher.... Stop it! The Code, lad, the blasted Code!)

Thank you, Colonel. As I was about to say, this is certainly true of therapy, where much of the groundwork consists of creating the conditions under which therapy may take place. I believe it was the great psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott who said words to the effect that our primary task as therapists is to try to cure the patient of their own attempts at self-cure. In other words, the patient's self-cure is the illness, so to speak, similar to how, say, inflammation is now understood as a more widespread disease process that represents one of the body's own healing mechanisms gone haywire.

In order to facilitate the healing process, the therapist must enter the closed system of the patient's psyche and, as ShrinkWrapped wrote the other day, "become a new and important object to the patient" so that he can begin to understand himself in the intimate context of a two-person system. In short, the task for the patient is to transition from "oneness" to "twoness." As the cryptic O-racle at Delphi might have put it, "Man is the beast who becomes One by becoming Two." (Or three, in that grace operates in the same way. As I have mentioned before, I didn't make much spiritual progress until I gave up my own efforts and instead surrendered to the nonlocal influence of anOther. I'm sure most of you gno the schtick.)

Now, where the hell was I ?

Yes, the link. This person -- who does not appear to be anti-Bob -- took some exception to my characterization of Harris as "intellectually banal," a "metaphysical yahoo," and "an adolescent drone" who "cannot raise his intellect to religion," but who, "in the American way, has turned his infirmity into a virtue and is no doubt making a small fortune in the process.”

Well now, look. One thing critics never take into consideration is that I do try to entertain, somtimes with colorful insults directed at our idiotilliogical opponents. I think that in order to have a successful blog, you have to be a bit entertaining -- you know, mach schau, Beatle!, as Herr Koschmider put it. But if I'm right about this, how come my readership is so small, while that punk Joey just walks to the damn mailbox once a month, just like Sam Harris?

That's not the point. That is not how a Beaglehole measures success. In any event, I meant what I said about Harris, who, let us be clear, wishes to destroy everything a Coon regards as sacred and holy. For he and Dennett and all of the other militant atheists are embarked upon a passionate mission aimed not just at the abolition of God, but the abolition of man, which would ineluctably follow from the former. Of this I am absolutely certain.

However -- and this is a big however -- Harris would no doubt be a perfectly decent fellow to have as your next door neighbor. It is not the neighborly Harris to whom my characterization applies. Rather, it specifically applies to the deicidal and therefore genocidal monster who speaks through him.

For make no mistake, we are talking here about soul murder -- not just the murder of this or that soul, but the soul of mankind, ipso facto, mankind. Nothing -- nothing -- could be less human than the monstrosity of secular humanism, for it robs man of his humanness in the name of fulfilling it. Should these intellectual quacktivists succeed in their pondsy scam, or should we fail to duck, it would be the creation of hell on earth, a truly daffy dystopia unfit for Donalds everywhere. We can't just let this roll off our ruffled feathers in back, as God is our wetness.

I am sure that to some, this sounds polemical, perhaps even like hysterical rejoycing. I don't know what to say except that this blog is not for you. There's really no middle ground here in middle earth. Either you will know exactly what I'm talking about, or you will have no earthly idea what I'm talking about. In short, you are either with us or with the metaphysical errorists (who will also grease the skids for the terrorists).

Yesterday Lisa asked what I meant by the term "bi-cosmic." It refers to the ontological orientation of the Raccoon, who lives crucified at the crossroads of verticality and horizontality. This is our home. It is our environment. It always amazes a Raccoon that the leftist environmental extremist concerns himself with the external environment of this or that snail or worm.

But what about the environment of man, which is not an exterior environment -- after all, any one will do, from Miami to Anchorage -- but an interior one, a home fit for the soul? Man can only thrive -- can only become man -- if given the proper human environment. They want to give animals a human environment and humans an animal one. How could it not be so, once you have destroyed our sensitive vertical ecology?

Yesterday I spoke of how biology only takes us to the threshold of humanness, after which it is up to us to colonize as much consciousness as we can in this life -- you know, building a sturdy astral body or luxury corps and all that. But if the secular fundamentalists succeed in their unsane jihad, it would mean a disavowal of all the great spiritual omsteaders and fleshlights who have blazed a path into that wonderful verdant territory, and a life condemned to living at the shoreline, right back where we startled after first opening our third eyes.

Thus, I make no apologies for calling Harris a beast in human form, even though I would probably let him babysit Future Leader. For that, too, is a part of being bi-cosmic. Coons live with the unsettling realization that our own predators might very well be our good neighbors next door.

How does this differ from, say, crazy leftists who think that George Bush or Dick Cheney or Condoleezza Rice are evil? For one thing, they would never let them babysit their children, for to do so would be to recognize their essential humanity, which is to say, divinity.