Combatting Demons and Journalists

While watching President Trump joyfully stick it to the media yesterday, it occurred to me that he is literally fighting with demons -- or at least jousting with nonlocal powers and principalities represented by the media. Recall what was said a couple of posts back about Satan; it works just as well if you replace "Satan" with "liberal media":

"Satan The liberal media is real. That's the first thing. The second thing should be obvious: Satan the liberal media is horrible. But the third thing may not be obvious: Satan the liberal media is also ridiculous. But it is the only ridiculous thing that must be taken seriously."

Well, not the only thing. But certainly in the top two or three, along with the state indoctrination establishment and popular culture. One scholar attempted to quantify the electoral boost given Democrats by the mass media, and I believe it was on the order of at least fifteen percentage points. So, with a fair and impartial media Trump wins roughly 65% to 35%; as does Romney and even the double-dealing McCain.

Who can watch the liberal media and not see that they are ridiculous? Remarkably, the vast majority of Americans see these clowns for what they are, being that trust in them is at historic lows. Which is why it is even more ridiculous for, say, Chuck Todd to suggest that "Press bashing may feel good to folks but when it's done by people in power, it's corrosive. Take off your partisan hats for a second."

The absence of self-awareness is just astonishing, such that it transcends anything mere psychology can explain. The reality is that "Conservative bashing may feel good to your fellow activists but when it's done by powerful media corporations, it's corrosive. Take your partisan head out of your ass for a second."

But this is precisely what the liberal media cannot do. When absence of self-awareness is this deep, this pervasive, and this universal, it makes me suspect something else is going on. How can they all be so blind?

Denial is like a psychic force field around that which is denied. Attempts to look at it are "repelled," so to speak. If you prematurely encourage the patient to look at it, they often "fragment" and spew a lot of disconnected nonsense. It's as if the closer one gets to the denied material, the more it gives off an energy that disrupts psychic continuity and dis-organizes the narrative.

I'm not sure I'm explaining it that well, but imagine flying over enemy territory and being strafed by anti-aircraft fire. It's like that.

I'm trying to find a better explanation. Siegel writes that "integration is the fundamental mechanism of health and well-being," involving "the linkage of differentiated parts of a system" such that "subsets interact with one another."

That being the case, "When we examine various mental disorders, what is revealed is that virtually all of them can be described as clusters of chaotic and/or rigid symptoms that we would say are examples of impaired integration."

Now, someone who is a liberal activist but doesn't know it is rather severely dis-integrated. I'm trying to put myself in their shoes, but it is impossible, for it would be equivalent to me absolutely denying that I am a conservative who writes from that perspective. How crazy, or lacking in insight, or demon-possessed would I have to be to believe that?

Tomberg suggests that there is another kind of integration that occurs in demon formation, that is, an unholy alliance of will and imagination:

"A desire that is perverse or contrary to nature, followed by the corresponding imagination, together constitute the act of generation of a demon." Again, this is the demon that goes on to enslave the parents (Mr. Will and Ms. Imagination) who conceived it.

Tomberg goes on to say that Marxism is the the most consequential modern demon, but he was writing in the early 1960s. Today we would say it is the degenerate neo-Marxism of political correctness, multiculturalism, identity politics, et al.

In any event, "We the people of the twentieth century know that the 'great pests' of our time" are the manmade ideological demons "which have cost humanity more life and suffering than the great epidemics of the Middle Ages."

You could say that the demon is born of a kind of drunken sex between will and imagination: "[I]t is always excess owing to intoxication of the will and imagination which engenders demons."

For the left, it is "a matter of excess -- a going beyond the limits of competence and sober and honest knowledge," by "a fever of the will and imagination to change everything utterly at a single stroke," in turn giving rise "to the demon of class hatred, atheism, disdain for the past, and material interest being placed above all else..."

Certainly there is nothing wrong with wishing to help the poor! But you cannot do so by vilifying the one system that has lifted more people out of poverty than all others combined. That's just stupid demonic.

So, "once artificial demons are generated, how does one combat them, and how does one protect and rid oneself of them?"

Pretty much by what Trump did yesterday, that is, naming and ridiculing them: "Light drives out darkness. This simple truth is the practical key to the problem of how to combat demons. A demon perceived, i.e. on whom the light of consciousness is thrown, is already a demon rendered impotent." And "a demon rendered impotent is a deflated balloon."

Which reminds me of the old joke about the man who, after being diagnosed with erectile dysfunction, decided to wear a tuxedo. Why? Because "if I'm gonna be impo'tant, I wants to look impo'tant." Few developments would be healthier for our nation than for the ridiculously self-important media to be rendered impotent.

The journalist arrogates to himself the importance of what he reports on. --NGD

How to Create and Maintain Your Own Psychic Imprisonment

The Devil Card, writes Tomberg, shows how "beings can forfeit their freedom and become slaves of a monstrous entity which makes them degenerate by rendering them similar to it."

Which is precisely why leftists have degenerated into the demons they have created: they fear fascism but they are the fascists; they detest racism while being race-obsessed; they hate intolerance while being absolutely intolerant of dissent; they attack misogyny while devaluing womanhood; they clamor for unity while sowing division; etc.

The lesson of the card revolves around "the generation of demons and of the power that they have over those who generate them." It is a kind of inverse analogy of the Creator who is sovereign over his creation, such that the creator of artificial beings becomes "a slave of his own creation."

You might say that the higher man rises (in his own estimation) the farther he falls. Isn't this just Genesis 3 all over again? You have to pay the cost to be the boss, and the cost is measured in our depth of fallenness.

Show me a leftist and I will show you a slave. The black who is persecuted by "white privilege" is simply forging the chains of his own imaginary enslavement. Likewise women who fancy themselves victims of the "patriarchy," or an "LGBTQ community" that imagines we think about them at all, unless they are doing distasteful things in public or in front of the children.

Anyone can be free, but there is a cost. One of the costs is personal responsibility, which is too high a price for most people, certainly on the left. There you find people for whom merely purchasing birth control -- "controlling your own body" -- is too much of a burden, or school choice an intolerable imposition.

Tomberg properly characterizes these demons as semi-autonomous "parasitic entities" that "are to the psychic organism what, for example, cancer is to the physical organism." What is cancer? It is an autonomous, runaway order within one's own order, so to speak. The body can have only one order. Introduce a second order, and chaos is generated.

It is the same with the mind. I am reminded of a crack by Schuon to the effect that "The noble man is one who dominates himself; the holy man is one who transcends himself. Nobility and holiness are the imperatives of the human state." I ask you: when is the last time you saw a leftist who dominates, much less transcends, himself? Rather, we see (as discussed in yesterday's post) intoxicated counter-inspiration.

It really comes down to what the mind is for, doesn't it? Which is really another way of asking what man is for. Which is what? I would suggest that the purpose of man is to think, for if he can't properly do that, then he's not good for much else. But thinking presupposes a great deal, including freedom, responsibility, and a love of truth. Eliminate truth, then thinking is pointless; eliminate freedom and it is impossible; eliminate responsibility and it becomes passionately egotistical.

While looking up that Schuon quote I found some others that go to our subject: "The worth of man lies in his consciousness of the Absolute." Leftists are, of course, moral relativists and multiculturalists. Which means they are worthless men, precisely -- not because I say so, but because this is the verdict they have rendered upon themselves. "Absolute relativism" equates to total stupidity and redounds to unfettered depravity.

"The paradox of the human condition is that nothing could be more contrary to us than the requirement to transcend ourselves, and yet nothing could be more essentially ourselves than the core of this requirement or the fruit of this self-overcoming."

Self-overcoming. This goes to one of the essential divides between left and right: the conservative blames himself for his failures, while the leftist blames "the system" or "white privilege" or some other imaginary construct. The whole purpose of leftism is to externalize agency, in such a way that one's own freedom is projected into malevolent others. For the left, the only truly "free" people are the ones controlling, dominating, and oppressing them in their imaginations, the "one percent," or "corporate America," or whatever.

Last night I heard a bit of a talk by Dennis Prager and Adam Corolla. As we know, for the left, all people of pallor are racist. Corolla equated this to saying that "all people are arsonists." Well, that may be true, but what we care about are people who actually set fires, not people who might theoretically want to set them.

The latter drains the term of all meaning -- as does the left's absurd definition of racism. If everyone is a racist then no one is a racist. As such, Corolla pointed out that there has never been a better time to be an actual racist (or Nazi), since the real racists are lumped in with some of the finest and most decent people in the world.

What essentially happens with the fall? Well, one thing is that the will dominates the intelligence. We "know better," but our willfulness hijacks the intellect and down we go. In the properly ordered soul, the will is "a prolongation or complement of the intelligence." And the intellect must be oriented to, and grounded in, the Absolute, without which it is just a planet with no sun (which is no planet at all, just a wandering fragment of space junk).

Thus, "The way towards God always involves an inversion" (of the willful plunge alluded to above): "from outwardness one must pass to inwardness, from multiplicity to unity, from dispersion to concentration, from egoism to detachment, from passion to serenity."

Basically this means that we operate from the center-out rather than vice versa (and our center is a vertical reflection of the Center). "The greatest calamity is the loss of the center and the abandonment of the soul to the caprices of the periphery." But -- to get back to our main subject -- this is precisely the meaning of Diabolos, which is to divide and scatter; and then accuse and slander.

The Leftist's Prayer: Give Me Freedom From My Demons -- But Not Yet!

Time only for a brief post. Busy day ahead.

In connection with our discussion of satan, I reread the chapter on the devil card in Meditations on the Tarot. Tomberg highlights two important characteristics, intoxication and counter-inspiration -- in fact, the intoxication of counter-inspiration. It is rare indeed to encounter a sober-minded leftist. But nor is it common to encounter an uninspired one! Have you seen Keith Olbermann's intoxicated rants?

In-spiration has to do with the reception of spirit. But as we all know, spirit cuts two ways. There are benign and helpful spirits, and malevolent and destructive ones. So, being "inspired" is nether here nor there. Rather, we must always consider the source.

He also points out that there are two modes of evil, a seducing principle and a hypnotizing principle. These two are pervasive in academia, but something must occur prior to the seduction and hypnosis in order for the content to take root, so to speak; one must be susceptible to the assault. There must be a wound, an opening, a breach in one's defenses, as discussed in the previous post.

I believe this is rooted in a type of parenting that places undue pressure on the child, breaking his will and forcing him to conform. As a result, the child will grow up being unable to resist authority -- he will become "hypnotized" in its presence. It is very much analogous to girls who have been sexually abused, and who, as adults, are vulnerable to getting involved with abusive men. Something in them is broken, which the "hypnotizer" and "seducer" easily picks up.

Tomberg also touches on the enslavement that results from creating projected demons. He says that the card is not so much about Satan as such, but about "the generation of demons and of the power that they have over those who generate them." "[B]eings can forfeit their freedom and become slaves of a monstrous entity which makes them degenerate by rendering them similar to it."

Contemporary leftism is all about creating the very demons that enslave oneself, AKA the victim culture. In order to be a self-styled victim, one must first create the projected super-structure of victimizers, e.g., "white privilege," "the patriarchy," "Islamophobia," etc.

These latter are needed by the victims, which is why you cannot rationally eliminate them from the leftist looniverse. Indeed, this is precisely why "structural racism" had to be invented, since there are so few (white) racists to be found. This is how, as one left wing academic put it, we can have racism with no racists!

So, a left-wing victim is a slave of his projected demons. For some reason I surfed into a feminist website the other day, and the bitterness of its victimhood was particularly over the top. Let's see if I can find it. Here it is. I clicked on the link to "Feminism 101," expecting a paragraph or two, but it's a book-length rant. It just goes on and on and on, into every miserable corner of her life. This person has never even wondered if the misery might be coming from within! She is a human toothache who locates the source of pain outside her own big mouth.

Radical feminists are simply slaves of their own creation. And not for one second do such slaves want to venture outside their demonic enslavement! Last night I was reading a book by Dr. Dalrymple, who writes of how difficult it is to get patients to say goodbye to their symptoms, which, after all, are there for a reason.

"Symptoms are like bad husbands and wives: people will go to any length to be rid of them but, once gone, they miss them terribly. The result is that the symptoms return in new and worse forms..." Which is why racism returns as "structural racism" and "misogyny" metastasizes into to the chaotic mess linked above.

Speaking of which, Tomberg writes that "The world of evil is a chaotic world," more like a "luxuriant jungle" than an ordered space, "where you can certainly, if necessary, distinguish hundreds of particular plants, but where you can never attain clear view of the totality."

So true. It is like a pre-scientific mindset in which there are only particulars but no organizing principles. Which is why it is not accurate to point out the ubiquitous "hypocrisy" of the left, since you can't really be a hypocrite if you have no principles to begin with. It reminds me of Pope Benedict's gag about "the tyranny of relativism" -- or of relativism absurdly elevated to absoluteness.

But "Evil cannot be absolute" for "it always depends upon some good which it misuses or perverts; the quality of Absoluteness can belong to good alone. To say 'good' is therefore to say 'absolute'" (Schuon).

Leftists aren't Evil -- Only Demon Possessed

In a previously unpublished letter, Schuon writes that "It makes no sense to believe in the devil and then each time, when he appears -- most often exploiting a specific situation -- to deny that he is involved." In other words, we need a less theoretical and more concrete, even practical, understanding of how the adversary rolls.

Anyone can see that the left has been behaving in an "insane" manner since last November 8, but there is something going on that transcends mere psychological categories. Indeed, whatever it is, it has also managed to appropriate the psychological categories as part of its strategy. Now, that's thinking ahead! Truly, the lunatics are running the asylum. I don't think most of these people are evil. But their minds have been highjacked by darkness. They are frankly possessed. But by what or who?

As it so happens, I recently read Jousting with the Devil: Chesterton's Battle with the Father of Lies. Perhaps he can help us understand what is going on here. The following exchange is from an interview in 1910:

"In your book just published you tell us 'what is wrong with the world.' As I haven't read the book yet, would you mind telling me what is wrong?"

"The Devil."

However, Chesterton was a happy spiritual warrior: "The finding and fighting of evil is the beginning of fun -- and even of farce."

It's certainly the latter, in that the left is beyond parody. In the book's introduction, Dale Ahlquist writes that "Satan is real. That's the first thing. The second thing should be obvious: Satan is horrible. But the third thing may not be obvious: Satan is also ridiculous. But he is the only ridiculous thing that must be taken seriously."

A ridiculous thing that nevertheless must be taken seriously. That is a very useful characterization, isn't it? So much about the left is so ridiculous that one is tempted to dismiss it as impotent self-beclowining. But it doesn't work that way: no matter how ridiculous the left becomes, it only seems to gain in power and influence.

It goes without saying that the left is utterly blind to its own ridiculousness. Something intrinsic to the process prevents irony, self-awareness, and rudimentary intellectual consistency. It is what makes a Meryl Streep denounce "brownshirts," even while liberal fascist brownshirts are violently preventing Milo from speaking at Berkeley.

Evil is something specifically human, which tempts one to imagine that it originates in humans. In other words, there is obviously no evil in the physical world, nor in the biological world. It only emerges with humanness, so it is easy to think that humans are the source.

Well, sometimes they are. But again, sometimes the evil goes so far beyond what can be explained by psychological categories, that any attempt to deploy them for that purpose is reduced to banality.

You could say, for example, that Hitler was mistreated by his father. Well, okay. So was Churchill mistreated by his father. What's your point?

It more useful to see that Satan exploits psychic weaknesses in order to invade the personality. There is a crack at the foundation -- or at the periphery, in lesser cases of evil -- which is where the demonic energies enter.

I heard Fr. Robert Barron use the analogy of a deep cut to the hand that one ignores. Over time the open wound becomes infected, and the infection can eventually spread to the whole body. So, watch closely over your own cracks, for those are precisely the soft targets that will be probed and exploited by the adversary.

It is very much as if we have a psycho-pneumatic autoimmune system that functions more or less effectively. But some people have the moral-intellectual equivalent of AIDS, such that they have no defenses at all. It is hardly surprising that leftism so disproportionately infects the young and stupid. Remember it is an invasion and rebellion, so it can also ride piggyback on youthful rebelliousness in order to gain entry.

Evil "has no independence or positive existence but always remains parasitic, deriving its life negatively by living off its host." This reminds me of something Schuon says in writing of the "'descending,' 'darkening,' 'compressive,' and at the same time 'dissipating' and 'dissolving' tendency, which on contact with the human person becomes personified as Satan."

So the force is descending and endarkening; and either diffuse or compressed and concentrated. Have you ever seen Watter's World? So often the people with whom he converses have minds that are ridiculously dissipated by evil. They simply make no sense at all, but are nevertheless tools -- and victims -- of the more concentrated evil. Indeed, this pretty much describes the process of a liberal education: hardened evil deployed to soften young and impressionable minds. Marx is hard. His youthful idiots are gelatinous.

Satan is also "a gentleman who promises good things and doesn't keep his word." Could this be why the left always promises the impossible? This is rooted in two fundamental impossibilities, 1) that there is some sort of cure for human nature, and 2) that man can cure himself. That is the recipe for hell, precisely.

Along these lines, Wild writes that "The heart of my thesis... is that the main work of the devil is to insinuate deficient ideas and false ideologies."

Looking at Genesis, we see that "a superiority complex was the beginning of all evil," i.e., the pretension of man displacing God. And the left is specifically and unapologetically in the business of inculcating "pride" and "self-esteem," which is to say, pathological narcissism and unearned respect. Look at how our professional child abusers are reacting to Betsy DeVos!

We alluded to the Devil's ridiculousness above. He is also "stupid as well as devious." This must ultimately be because he rejects truth. It reminds me of criminals, who may be vicious but are also stupid, with lower than average IQs. And the left is of course the pro-criminal party, whether it is protecting alien felons or fomenting violence against the police.

For Chesterton, "the only thing I will say with complete confidence" about evil "is that it tells lies.... whatever they are, they are not truths... about this world."

In fairness to the left, they clearly believe we are evil, and they have no compunction about saying so. Their rhetoric is always cranked up to 11, such that Trump is Hitler and we are his Storm Troopers. But how did we get so evil? In other contexts, the left will insist that there is no such thing as objective morality, and that "good" and "evil" are just social conventions -- a diabolical opinion if ever there was one!

But just as we are enjoined to hate the sin and love the sinner, Chesterton notes that "The assertion that a man is possessed of a devil is the only way of avoiding the assertion that he is a devil." It's a more sophisticated ontology. So, I don't say that Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer are evil per se, rather, only demon possessed. They are the tools, not the master.