Tuesday, November 18, 2008

How to Create Your Very Own Demon (12.01.11)

There can be entire communities that revolve around collectively generated demons. I find it interesting that one of the early themes of the Bible has to do with the Creator's effort to get folks to stop worshipping these damn mind parasites. As UF explains, "the Canaan Moloch who demanded the bloody sacrifice of the first born, mentioned so often in the Bible," was "a demon created artificially" by the human collective.

As I mentioned in my book -- which has now been in the amazon top two million for 93 consecutive weeks -- when we encounter collective beliefs and practices that appear insane and self-defeating, we are probably dealing with mind parasites. While they don't appear adaptive, they actually are. It's just that they are adaptive to the internal, not external, world. This is no different than a neurotic patient with a baffling symptom. Ultimately the symptom can be traced back to some earlier adaptation.

The most difficult challenge for human beings is to adapt to the problem of having a mind. Ultimately, mind parasites come down to the problem of thoughts and what to do with them -- anxious thoughts, fearful thoughts, envious thoughts, greedy thoughts, angry thoughts, sexual thoughts, etc. One of the primary purposes of culture is to collectively manage these primitive thoughts.

In the course of writing my own book, one of the better works I found on the topic of lethal mind parasites was In the Shadow of Moloch: The Sacrifice of Children and Its Impact on Western Religions. It's probably been over a decade since I read it, so I can't give it an unqualified recommendation. Here's what it says on the inside flap:

"In ancient times, humans projected their hostility into their gods; 'bloodthirsty' gods who 'demanded' the sacrifice of children. In the Shadow of Moloch begins with pre-biblical times by examining Moloch, the god of the 'Children of Ammon' who demanded the burning of children. Tracing the legacy of child sacrifice, Bergmann shows that the greatest efforts to overcome this ritual can found in biblical accounts of the suspended sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham and of the sacrifice of Christ by God the Father to atone for original sin. He argues that the development of Judaism and Christianity can be seen as an effort, only partially successful, to ameliorate past aggression of child sacrifice through the creation of an entirely loving god."

I would say discovery of an entirely loving God, but you get the point, because there is no evolutionary reason to believe that human beings could have "invented" such a being, given their dismal track record. Obviously, the systematic murder of one's children poses a challenge to natural selection, unless there is some deeper mechanism to account for it. Again, I believe that mechanism is the urgent need to adapt to the catastrophic condition of having a self-conscious mind.

It is difficult for us to imagine how catastrophic that was -- to have been, as Richard Prior so poetically put it, the first motherf*cker to look around and ask himself what in the f*ck is goin' on?! Then again, not really, if you can empathize with the emotionally catastrophic conditions of infancy -- which, sad to say, many, if not most, parents still cannot do. I would estimate -- actually, studies on maternal attachment estimate -- that perhaps only a third of parents in the West are able to do this. In more primitive locales, such as in the Islamic world -- well, fuggedaboudit. Child sacrifice goes on unabated. They just call it intifada instead of infanticide.

And in the West, we simply have more subtle means of engaging in child sacrifice. We don't kill the body, but murder the soul. I mean, I literally cannot imagine sending my son to a California public school, because I would in effect be sending him off to be sacrificed to the leftist collective.

I could not bear doing to him what was done to me -- back when the leftist takeover of the educational system wasn't nearly as complete as today. He would have to internalize all of their strange gods -- multiculturalism, moral relativism, materialism, scientism, environmentalism, etc. -- and in so doing, die to his own -- God's own -- soul. I could no more do that than I could have sent him out to a nursemaid moments after his birth -- which is what most well-to-do people once did in the West. Why did they do that? Because they could not tolerate their own internal infant and therefore not tolerate their external infant. Likewise, if you do not know your own soul, you cannot protect and nurture your child's soul.

In fact, continuing with Bergmann's flap, I think it is a truism that "the psychological conflict of child sacrifice still haunts the unconscious of modern men and women." He posits a "Laius complex -- hostility of the father toward the son -- to explain sacrifice. He discloses that, in psychological terms, the development of Western religions is an effort by insufficiently loved men and women to change their inner balance away from hostility, toward a more loving center."

The only problem with the book is that it takes a purely psychoanalytic approach, and is therefore reductionistic. But you can take the same ideas and place them in a more expansive religious metaphysical framework, which is what I attempted to do in my book.

I'm at a crossroads here... continue with Bergmann, or return to MOTT? I'd better stick with the latter, or we'll never finish.

Regarding the collective mind parasites, you can see that UF is really not far from Bergmann: although "engendered subjectively," these artificial demons "become forces independent of the subjective consciousness that engendered them. They are, in other words, magical creations, for magic is the objectification of that which takes its origin in subjective consciousness" (again, think of the image in the card of the man and woman chained to a larger entity that they have co-created).

UF compares these collective demons to psychological complexes, which is why it is something of a truism to say that a culture is a public neurosis, while a neurosis is a private culture. But there are also public psychoses, e.g., the community of dailykos or the viewership of Keith Olbermann.

Yes, they are very frightening to think about, because they really do believe those things. But it's not so much "the things they believe," i.e., the contained (♂), as the container (♀) -- i.e., the very space in which they live -- that is so disturbing. Again, think of that deeply irrational container as a sort of desperate effort to contain their own unbearable proto-thoughts and impulses. You could say that the kos kids and Olberchildren are pathological products of an insane pairing of ♂ and ♀. Leftism is what happens when you put together an abandoning ♀ and a homicidal ♂: uncontainable and incoherent.... yucktoplasm leaking all over the place.

You could also say that these demons represent the premature birth of the unborn due to an inability to tolerate reality and allow the thoughts to "gestate" in the womb of being. In other words, they represent premature closure of the psychic field, which is again one of the main reasons why people believe such weird things.

These weird ideas nevertheless have to be "nourished" by the psychic life of the parent, which is why intellectuals devote their lives to feeding and propping up their craziness -- e.g., Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and thousands more. Their body of work is a kind of pathological psychic body that is completely detached from reality. When they die, it will "live on" in followers who have been infected by these ghostly and ghastly ideas. Think of "patient zero," Marx, who is still spreading his spiritually fatal infection. Religion -- properly understood -- inoculates one from the infection, but that's the subject for a different post.

Suddenly I am out of time. To be continued.....

54 comments:

Anonymous said...

I like your illustration of unwise ideas as akin to infectious microbes that propogate in susceptible hosts, and the countermeasure of the "inoculating" vaccine of religion.


This covers human to human to transmission of ideology, but what about the ideology that seeps in from outside vectors?

I'm talking about ideology instilled directly into the mind from God, or ideology coming in from other, less savory sources from below and to the side of our "plane."

Or, are the vectors the primary source, and the human to human transmission secondary in the chain?

In other words, who or what gave "patient O-Marx (I love it!) HIS fatal dose of the soul-clap?

To where can we trace the malady?

robinstarfish said...

X-Filed
on the chosen path
lie many diverse dangers
whole armour of god

Gagdad Bob said...

Welcome to Obama's Tyranny of the Stupid.

Ephrem Antony Gray said...

Regarding the collective mind parasites, you can see that UF is really not far from Bergmann: although "engendered subjectively," these artificial demons "become forces independent of the subjective consciousness that engendered them. They are, in other words, magical creations, for magic is the objectification of that which takes its origin in subjective consciousness" (again, think of the image in the card of the man and woman chained to a larger entity that they have co-created).

So it is safe to say that Satan is Lucifer(the fallen angel)'s mind parasite? Or is that just too weird...

Brazentide said...

who or what gave "patient O-Marx (I love it!) HIS fatal dose of the soul-clap?

To where can we trace the malady?


I typically dismiss horizontal conspiracy theories outright as most require the actors to have a level of secrecy, diligence, cunning, foresight, and unity of purpose that transcends human limitations and weaknesses.

Vertical conspiracies, however, have no such limits.

Gagdad Bob said...

I think UF would say that Lucifer is a fallen entity of the celestial hierarchy, so that he has a certain "legitimacy" that mind parasites lack.

mushroom said...

OK, but I kind of took what River was saying to mean that Lucifer fell due to the mind parasite Satan. Or possibly that Lucifer's fall from rebellious pride resulted in the creation of the uber-parasite known as Satan.

Or maybe I need more coffee.

Niggardly Phil said...

And now you can
generate cartoons to go with your mind parasites!

Van Harvey said...

“I mean, I literally cannot imagine sending my son to a California public school, because I would in effect be sending him off to be sacrificed to the leftist collective.
I could not bear doing to him what was done to me…”

That hurts. Truth often does.

Magnus Itland said...

When I grew up on the rocky western coast of Norway, the local newspaper for some reason commented on the ancient practice of exorcism and how this had all but ceased, as you did not see possessed people around anymore. "But where did they go, all those spirits that were exorcised?" mused the editorial. "Perhaps they have gone into politics?"

I think they hit a nail there.

Anonymous said...

"Think of "patient zero," Marx, who is still spreading his spiritually fatal infection. Religion -- properly understood -- inoculates one from the infection"

Yes, I've been thinking for some weeks now that the antidote to the "vertical conspiracy" represented by Obamanation is going to have to come from the churches of America.

Does that make us antibodies?

Gagdad Bob said...

So true. Politics is largely a field for the articulation and management of mind parasites. Which is why a return to true liberalism is the only long term solution, because it places the parasites back where they belong: in the individual. I am not my brother's mind parasites' keeper.

julie said...

Maineman, apropos your comment is this sobering post by (the other) Dr. Bob.

Re. the cartoon, that's just twisted. I got a picture of the mom looking at the "Bible Story of Creation" while little Billy talks, paired with the caption "I do not want believers."

julie said...

Oh wait, there's a permalink feature- this one is apropos.

julie said...

Hm.

Okay, this is far too entertaining. Must... quit... procrastinating....

Ephrem Antony Gray said...

Demons still exist, I think, but since their work creates mental disorders, it is likely that many cases which need some exorcism are only getting therapy or meds.

Anonymous said...

Bob said:
“But you can take the same ideas and place them in a more expansive religious metaphysical framework…”

Let me expand on this framework if I may, as it pertains to yesterday’s and today’s posts.

According to the bible a man named Benammi was the progenitor of the Ammonites. Guess who his parents were and guess where they lived prior to his conception. Also take notice of how he was conceived.

Anonymous said...

My question is, what are the function of "mind parasites" in the overall scheme of things?

Why have them at all?

My best guess is that they are in place to make life more challenging. Without them the ultimate storming of heaven by humankind might be a tad too easy for proper sportsmanship.

My second best guess is that, in God's unquenchable thirst for experiences, He sets 'em up just to watch 'em fall. In the doing is the joy.

Or, "mind parasites" might be man-created abberations without Godly sanction?

That would be another, albeit more unlikely, way to look at it.

James said...

They are, in other words, magical creations, for magic is the objectification of that which takes its origin in subjective consciousness" (again, think of the image in the card of the man and woman chained to a larger entity that they have co-created).

Hmmm... I've never thought of magic in these terms before. In that case, Magnus, the possessed are truly legion. We just don't see it as them as possessed anymore. We call them wacky leftists and give them tenure. The possessed are not going to get all "The Exorcist" on us until the adversary feels like he has enough control. Then there will be pea soup and spinning heads for all. No,it will probably be worse then anything from a horror movie.
Personally, I'm moving from the legion group to the religious group, but there are times I still feel the puppet strings tightening. Although, amazingly, I feel hope. After all, God saved a wretch like me. This isn't the first time this has happened.

Anon at 9:20:

Humans are given the ability to talk to God. They can use this same faculty to speak with the fallen. But you must open the door. It takes some effort. But with a few exceptions, like Job, demons cannot directly influence you unless you let them in. Of course there are many tricks they can use to get in. The neo-paganism movement is one of them. They never talk about the devil, but he's there promising one thing and delivering another. No our own mind parasites create enough drama for this world.

Anonymous said...

"Politics is largely a field for the articulation and management of mind parasites."

Once again, O Gagster, you've put into one succinct observation something I've tried to articulate for years. Pretty much every "activist" I've ever known has been a profoundly unhappy and angry person whose personal troubles ultimately seemed to have little or nothing to do with whatever cause and/or ideology they'd glommed onto.

Whoever coined that saying, "The personal is political," was right on the mark -- but not in the way they meant. What that most hackneyed of all PoMo leftist cliches really signifies is that private mind parasites often find their fullest and most destructive expression in the public political realm.

Or as I once put it, "Leftists always seem to have their *politics*, their *therapy*, their *art* and their *spirituality* all mixed into one messy conglomerate, where the 'politics' leaves them feeling more powerless than ever, the 'therapy' fails to heal, the 'art' creates nothing of beauty or truth, and the 'spirituality' is drained of any sense of transcendence."

Gagdad Bob said...

It also explains why it is difficult for happy people to compete in politics....

robinstarfish said...

Maybe we're not in such bad shape after all. Jesus got rid of a whole family of demons in one swell foop, casting them into a herd of pigs which went plop into the nearest body of water.

Perhaps our recent hard left turn will be more short lived than we expect. Anyone living near the coastlines might want to buy stampeding pig insurance.

James said...

Robin,

Your right. I have much hope.

Anonymous said...

Mmmmm, bacon....

Anonymous said...

Mmmmm.... forbidden bacon...
*drooool*

Anonymous said...

Vote for Queeg for Biggest Pro-Censorship Ass-hat.

Vote for Bob for Best Religious Blog. You know, as a sacred hoot.

julie said...

Heh - now we'll really get to find out what how much our votes matter. Is this a "vote-early-and-often" kinda deal?

Anonymous said...

Present.

Anonymous said...

"This is no different than a neurotic patient with a baffling symptom. Ultimately the symptom can be traced back to some earlier adaptation.

I mean, I literally cannot imagine sending my son to a California public school, because I would in effect be sending him off to be sacrificed to the leftist collective.


I could not bear doing to him what was done to me..."


Keep up the work Bob. We make the path by walking.

NoMo said...

Has not our very own "human collective" artificially created the worst form of Canaan Moloch "Roe" demon, to whom we routinely and willingly sacrifice innocent human lives every day under the protection of law?

And we wonder why that same collective just selected Moloch's high-priest-king-of-the-crazies as President.

America needs a genuine spiritual revival...real bad...real soon.

USS Ben USN (Ret) said...

Bob is currently tied for FIRST PLACE, along with Catholic Dads.
Although it's still early, this bodes well.

Bob- I raccoonmend you post it in your post as well.

Thanks for more details on the mind parasites Bob. I gotta better handle now.
Artificial demons. I like that.

Anonymous said...

Yuctoplasm!!! Would that make a cool horror flick or what?
Or mebbe a thrilla? Thrilla horror?

Anonymous said...

Or howabout this:
Yuctoplasm On A Plane!!!

Anonymous said...

You tell 'em I'm comin', and hell's comin' with me! You hear? HELL'S COMIN' WITH ME!

USS Ben USN (Ret) said...

Okay, I don't "like" artificial demons, I like the descriptive term Bob used: artificial demons.
Just wanted to clear that up.

Anonymous said...

Where have I heard that before?

Anonymous said...

Whatever you do, don't cross the streams.

USS Ben USN (Ret) said...

Yuctoplasm sounds a lot better than the damn Blob.

Anonymous said...

It wasn't the Damn Blob, just "Blob".
But I agree.

Anonymous said...

Hey Doc!

Anonymous said...

Why hello Steve. I didn't recognize you.

USS Ben USN (Ret) said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

Yeah, well, you know, 60's fashions are out. 1960's that is.

Anonymous said...

Who do I thank for that bit of good luck?

Anonymous said...

Ha ha! Good point, Doc. Unlike the style of your time which, incidently, is timeless.

Anonymous said...

I thank you sir. I must say the style for the women folk was somewhat lacking, though.

Anonymous said...

Yeah, no belt for guns.

Anonymous said...

Indeed. And that wire contraption is murder when one is enebriated.

Anonymous said...

Sure brings new meaning to the term "wired," ha ha ha!

Anonymous said...

Yes, with all that "high tech" I believe you call it, the ladies can go wireless.

Anonymous said...

I'm wondering why these "artificial demons" need be artificial. The Revelation of John mentions how the devil was cast out from heaven to the earth, and his angels with him. Perhaps as we experience weaknesses in our souls, the entities Bob describes as "mind parasites" are literally the workings of Satanic angels (aka demons) drawn to these weaknesses in an attempt to exploit them, like opportunistic infections in the physical body or teenage script kiddies on the Internet.

USS Ben USN (Ret) said...

"Vote for Queeg for Biggest Pro-Censorship Ass-hat."

Queeg is smokin' the competition, LOL!

Don't forget to vote for Babbazee as best gal anti-jihad blogger. :^)

julie said...

Stepping back from frivolity for a moment, I just read this comment by Cobb over at Vanderleun's, and it would really be a shame to just let it go unnoticed by a raccoonish audience:

"There are moments when I remember why I love old men, and they have everything to do with being the old man back from war, the incredible weary grace of a humble witness to the barbarity of mankind only finds its voice when it knows the barbarity of self. Back from the edge we are not possessed by the abyss, God help us from testing another look. It is often enough to see a steely, watery eye in prose. Thanks, old man.

My wrong mind is the thousand mile stare, the amoral logic of que sera, imbibing of detrius and inhaling of vapors just to test the strength of my digestive system, to fuck her just to see the look on her face. The wrong mind is reading yourself into the part made for Bonaparte - it's all about getting away with hmmm... what is it I can get away with?

Sometimes. Sometimes I have to remind myself to be afraid. There are seven moments of fearlessness somewhere in my life I am not ready to confess, but two I remember from childhood. One was me staring over the edge of the Hoover Dam wondering how long it would take me to hit the water and how many helicopters they would send after me. The other was wondering how the half horsepower circular saw with the dull blade never powerful enough to cut my 2x4s would deal with my thumb from a dead start. On the second occasion I tried a pencil instead and remembered the value of fear. On the first occasion I was screamed into submission having put one foot over the rail.

What matters is that the survivors of the plague remain healthy enough to tell tales of horror. We are nothing without it, our bravery empty. Ask the man who base jumps for the adrenaline, he inevitably knows no history. So we would all self-destruct on sacrifices unworthy of our humanity were there no monsters lurking in the stories of our elders."

Van Harvey said...

Thanks for carrying that forwards Julie.

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