Symbolic and Diabolic

Of course demons can't stand one another. What's the alternative? That they love each other? No, Demonville must be like the Hitler-Stalin pact, a relationship of pure expedience, and even then marred by paranoia and double-dealing. 

By the way, even if one is skeptical about the existence of demons, spooklating about their nature helps to further our understanding of what man must be like: angelic nature illuminates human nature, just as do material or divine nature.  

In other words, man can do things that neither physical nor living matter could ever do on their own terms. What is the principle of man, his sufficient reason? Obviously it cannot be reduced to biology or physics, unless we expand those two disciplines beyond their intrinsic limitations. 

Thus, we -- or materialists, rather -- may not know what this principle (of humanness) is, but we know it must exist, or we wouldn't be here. Or, we'd be here but wouldn't know it, since matter doesn't know anything.

Pretending otherwise is like trying to build a house out of feet and inches -- or worse, meters and centimeters -- or trying to fill your bank account with numbers. Numbers count wealth, they don't create it. Likewise, matter specifies man's form in time and space but it can't conjure a soul. Nothing comes from nothing, every time.

Speaking of which, an understanding of the angelic relationship to materiality helps to illuminate ours. That is, while man is a substantial union of matter and form, angels are pure form with no need of matter. And above that is God, who is both immaterial and formless. He cannot have a form, because this would be a limitation. Infinitude is like this blog: informal.

Yesterday we alluded to the fact that demonic friendships -- such as they are -- are "welded together by a common hatred of God and men." Here again, this helps to illuminate the human world. 

You will have no doubt noticed that conservatives hate because they love, while for leftists it is the other way around: their hatred is prior to the love. And while their movement opposes God and man, it all begins with a more general hatred of reality. If they resent human nature, for example, it is because it places sharp limits on their godlike desire to redefine and manipulate reality. 

We've all heard the crack that conservatives love people, it's mankind they can't abide, while progressives luv mankind, it's just people they hate. To be a conservative in America is to know that one is well and truly hated by a third or so of the population -- or two thirds in California, and 95% in academia. An esteemed dean at San Diego State University assures us that,

Just so we’re clear on the Right’s agenda – racism good, abortion bad, money good, women bad, capitalism good, sustainability bad, stupidity good, science bad, power good, equality bad, white people good, nonwhite people bad. Stench, indeed (https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/12/is-there-a-distinction-between-the-academic-left-and-the-twitter-fever-swamp.php).

Conversely, we do not hate leftists in this way. Rather, we only detest their ideas and policies. For example, yesterday a leftist friend from down the street broke his pelvis, and our immediate response is to help him out in any way we can for the next couple of months. He's just deluded, not malign. 

He also happens to be a secular Jew, which raises the evergreen question of why such an intelligent group of people so disproportionately supports Democrats? 

Part of the answer is a historically understandable distrust and resentment of Christians. Today Christians are their greatest friends, whereas the left is filled with crude anti-Semites such as Omar, Obama, and Sharpton. 

Nevertheless, the progressive left abounds with conspiracy theories to explain away that inconvenient reality. Predictably, 80% of Orthodox Jews approved of President Trump, while 80% of secular Jews in the U.S. were victims of TDS.

Culture easily swamps mere intelligence, especially given the perverse pleasures of resentment, projection, and superiority. Asian-Americans will eventually come around -- meanwhile the beatings at the hands of Biden supporters will continue -- and Hispanics are well on their way, each trend alone catastrophic to the electoral prospects of the progressive hate-cult. 

Okay, I get it: you don't come here for the political BS. You come here for the spiritual BS. So let's get back to the remaining highlights of Angels and Demons before wrapping it up.

Demons communicate with each other, but very much in the manner of our news media; that is, they are the ultimate propagators of fake news:

the intention guiding the act of informing is always perverse; its purpose comes from the wicked design of the demon, who seeks to turn others away from God, whereas enlightenment is a communication of truth that aims to direct the beneficiary toward God.

Simple as. Watching the average news broadcast is a seminar not just in stupidity, but a kind of diabolical stupidity devoid of truth, beauty, or virtue. Darkness visible.

Oh, and it's not just me: "the demonic world as a society of intelligent, wicked beings" is "not without interest for political philosophy."

You don't say. Tell us more.

demonic society provides the theoretical model by which to speculate about the possibility of a society that rejects any reference to the objective moral good. 

But why speculate about abstract theoretical models when you can look at real world examples such as China or San Francisco?

Here's another helpful hint: the demons work to make "apparent goods gleam" (emphasis mine). 

Obviously, even progressives don't want bad things for themselves; they may be ignorant and crazy, but they're still self-interested. It's just that they transform evils -- e.g., sexual perversion, abortion, tribalism, racism -- into goods, and goods -- e.g., fossil fuels, limited government, free speech, self-defense -- into evils.

I'll leave off with a footnote on p. 27 that I think is pregnant with words, but blogviating them would veer into a vast new subject. Instead, I'll let you work out the implications on your own:

The term diabolos -- the divider, the one who opposes the "sym-bolos" that unites -- translates [to] Satan.