Why Are People Such Assouls?

Probably easier to just write a new post than dig through the arkive for the Saturday re-run.

Ever wonder why human beings -- I mean mankind at large, not this or that individual -- are such assholes?

That's an important question, isn't it? As the cliché goes, the leftist/radical/revolutionary loves mankind. It's people he hates. You know, Joe the Plumber. Sarah the Hockey Mom. Bob the Suburban Mystic.

For the Raccoon -- and any properly religious person -- it's more or less the opposite. He doesn't hate mankind. But he doesn't hold it in much esteem. At best, it is a neutral stance, in that for every great achievement of mankind, there are two or three abominations. For every peak, there is an equal and opposite valley. Charles Murray discusses this point in Human Accomplishment:

"What, I ask, can Homo sapiens brag about -- not as individuals, but as a species?... Military accomplishment is out -- putting 'Defeated Hitler' on the human resume is too much like putting 'Beat my drug habit' on a personal one. I also omit governance and commerce.... those achievements are akin to paying the rent and putting food on the table..."

Amazingly, the left believes that it can turn this situation around by merely increasing the size of government and the amount of rent they will charge us for it. They love to make fun of religious people, but can you imagine a more naive belief system?

The problem is not just that man is fallen, but that if he fails to realize this, he will not recognize the very medium in which he swims. Furthermore, he will mistake movement and agitation for real change, when it is merely disintegration and descent.

Everyone can see that there is a kind of "natural balance" in the biosphere. Or at least there was until the humans moved in and wrecked the neighborhood. People who imagine that only modern humans have done this are strictly fooling themselves. In fact, this is the take-away point of Genesis, isn't it? That the moment Man opens his eyes to dualism and self-awareness, trouble begins. Truly, there were no problem in the cosmos prior to that moment.

You could even delve more deeply into this problem and reduce it to its most basic element. This is what Bion did. He noted that the universal problem facing mankind -- both collectively and individually -- is thoughts and what to do about them. The obvious answer is to think them, but we all know how rare that is.

Or perhaps you don't. But virtually every psychotherapy patient is suffering from this problem if they are lucky. In other words, they are persecuted by depressed thoughts, anxious thoughts, thoughts of inadequacy or low self esteem, envious thoughts, obsessive thoughts, etc. Wealth doesn't matter. If anything, it only serves to underscore their misery, in that they realize better than anyone that no amount of money can eliminate the mind parasites that make one's head uninhabitable.

But most people don't even bother to think those thoughts. Instead, they enact things before they have a chance to become thoughts. Or they evoke them in others and make them miserable. Or they embody the thoughts in the form of pain or dysfunction. Or often they just deaden the source of the thoughts, either through drugs or alcohol, or sometimes just systematic neglect. Most people have never had an original thought in their lives.

So, man is clearly a kind of "new category" in the cosmos. There was no good in the cosmos prior to his arrival. But nor was there any evil. UF writes that man may "go beyond the limits of the law and engender arbitrarily malicious forces whose nature and action are beyond the framework of the law," for example, "the Molochs and other 'gods' of Canaa, Phoenecia, Carthage, ancient Mexico and other lands, which exacted human sacrifice."

Yes, these beings are the product of thought + imagination, except that they are for the purpose of destroying thought and imagination. That such cultures cannot evolve should go without saying, any more than the bloodthirsty Palestinians can evolve. The trouble with Palestinians is that they cannot ask the simple question: why am I persecuted by all these hateful demons? Instead of thinking the thoughts, they violently project them from the psyche, and then murder them. It seems to be the Muslim way.

How much better off they would be if they had a culture that recognized man's fallen nature! Such a culture will not externalize blame or adopt the role of victim. Rather, such a culture will collectively ask, "what did I do wrong, and what can I do to fix it?" You will note that the culture of the secular left has much more in common with the Palestinians, in that it never occurs to them that people are largely responsible for their own problems. Indeed, this is one of the purposes of a culture of liberty: to allow people to fuck up on their own. What a blessing! It has never occurred to me that I am a victim of circumstance. Rather, if I look a little deeper, I can always find something I could have done differently. Or not. Sometimes the problem is just me. Being me simply has a price. It would have been easy to be someone else.

Individuality is freedom lived. Or, to turn it around, freedom in the abstract is meaningless. So too is merely "embodied" freedom. Rather, what we are after is mental and spiritual freedom. These are the freedoms that the left resists. They do not want you to actually be an individual. Rather, you are a member of a group, i.e., black, hispanic, female, homosexual, transgendered, etc. But as UF points out, mystical revelation restores the freedom that has been partially or totally lost, in particular, the freedom to be oneself, which again, is the only real, concrete freedom. The left offers only counterfeit freedom -- for example the "freedom" to choose an abortion, even while they compel the premature sexualization of the innocent. Or a compulsory "fairness doctrine" that eliminates free speech.

Only the awakening of free will can deliver one "from possession by fixed ideas and psychopathological complexes." As Freud put it, "where id was, there ego shall be" (the real meaning of which is where it was, there I shall be). This is just another way of saying that, just as we have been attempting to colonize an enslaved world with liberal principles over the past 250 years, so too must we colonize the individual mind with those same principles. It serves no purpose to free a culture for socialism, as it is a contradiction in terms. It is like freeing an individual to become a slave.

Real lived freedom is a kind of every day sacred magic inserted from on high into the cosmos. For it is an analogue of the Creator's vertical generation of the cosmos itself.