Spiritual Combat

What do I know about spiritual combat? Then again, having once been a psychologist, I was the man you'd see when the combat in your head was getting out of hand. Of course, I wasn't trained in "spiritual combat," but then again, everyone's head is a combat zone, more or less. 

Back in grad school, the idea of spiritual combat never came up except insofar as it was a primitive way of talking about "psychological conflict." Thus, it is as if the upper vertical was subsumed into the middle zone of the psyche. But what if this middle zone can't account for certain phenomena emanating from above -- i.e., those powers and principalities we've been discussing?

It's analogous to how a psychological explanation will mislead when the problem is completely biological -- say, hypothyroidism, which can cause symptoms that mimic any number of psychological conditions.  Likewise, is it possible that we are misdiagnosing conditions that are completely spiritual in nature, just because they resemble psychological conditions?

Another way of asking the question is, what did we lose when we jettisoned thousands of years of spiritual wisdom for a wholly secular psychology? To a certain extent, Jung attempted to at least recognize relations with the old spiritual world, and to maintain an embassy there. Nevertheless, he too tended to reduce the spiritual to the psychological. 

I just remembered that I applied for post-doctoral training at the Jung Institute back in the early '90s, because it seemed like the only option for a guy like me. Instead I decided to cut out the middleman and deal with the spiritual world on its own terms. This being in 1995. 

Which meant that I was essentially dealing with a kind of dual citizenship -- psychology by day, religion by... the rest of the day. I never worked full time. Or you could say left brain / right brain: as I've said before, I don't think the spiritual world exists because we have a right cerebral hemisphere, rather, vice versa. It's why all of us have the dual citizenship alluded to above. 

Come to think of it, it is why we are all conflicted, and not just in a bifurcated way, but trifurcated; again, at the very least, there is body, soul, and spirit, and each influences the others. For example, if your thyroid is off, it will have both psychological and spiritual consequences. And it works the other way around -- if you are psychologically off, it can and will have spiritual or biological consequences.

For example, over the years, there is no physical symptom I've seen that hasn't been produced by purely psychological causes -- even those of a heart attack, stroke, or seizure. I remember one lady who presented with seizures that turned out to be "pseudo-seizures." How could they tell? Because in the ER, when they attempted bladder catheterization, she voluntarily closed her legs. In other words, modesty overrode the apparent seizure.

I remember another guy who had episodes of chest pain and radiation down the left arm, but thorough testing revealed no evidence of heart disease. Unfortunately, I remember another patient who had pain radiating up into the shoulder, for which he was treated with vicodin, and dropped dead of a massive heart attack.

You may recall my own little overnight hospital stay six months ago, when I was having unexplained episodic nausea. They ruled out the heart or aorta, but no one has ruled out demons, least of all me.

To back up a moment, we left off the last post with the promise to "consider some practical advice on now to conduct spiritual warfare -- starting with ourselves." Which comes back to the first sentence of the present post: What do I know about spiritual combat? 

To back up even further, this is one of the reasons I entered the church: in a word, for protection. It's the same reason I take a statin and an ACE inhibitor to protect my heart and kidneys, respectively. Different means for different dimensions. Likewise, I exercise every day to benefit body and mind, and I medi-pray every day to benefit the spirit, although I'm sure it trickles down into the mind and body. 

It's all very confusing, then again, it's just common sense: we need to address our health on all levels of being, which are in turn interconnected in ways that are difficult to discern, but we ignore at our own peril.

At the moment, it seems as if the world is going crazy, similar to how it must have felt at the time of World War II. In an old post I reviewed what Carl Jung had to say about it:

As Jung said in a 1936 interview, Hitler was a sort of "medium" who had an uncanny ability to articulate what the nation was feeling at any given time: "German policy is not made; it is revealed through Hitler. He is the mouthpiece of the gods as of old. He says the word which expresses everybody's resentment." 

It is "rule by revelation": "He is the first man to tell every German what he has been thinking and feeling all along in his unconscious about German fate, especially since the defeat in the Great War." "All these symbols together of a Third Reich led by its prophet under the banners of wind and storm and whirling vortices point to a mass movement which is to sweep the German people in a hurricane of unreasoning emotion and go on to a destiny which perhaps none but the seer... can foretell -- and perhaps not even he."

Fuhrermore, in a 1938 interview, Jung contrasted Hitler with Mussolini, the latter of whom was still "human." But "with Hitler, you are scared. You know you would never be able to talk to that man, because there is nobody there. He is not a man, but a collective. He is not an individual, but a whole nation." Nothing Hitler said makes any sense to the non-German unconscious, with the interesting exception of the Islamic world, where Mein Kampf is always a huge seller.

With that in mind, I wonder if Jung's advice to America would be the same as it was in this 1938 interview:

"How to save your democratic U.S.A.? It must, of course, be saved, else we all go under. You must keep away from the craze, avoid the infection.... America must keep big armed forces to help keep the world at peace, or to decide the war if it comes. You are the last resort of Western democracy."

Keep away from the craze and avoid the infection.  

Which is precisely what we haven't done, what with the craze of wokeness and the spiritual infections of relativism, secularism, and ideological resentment in general. 

So, yesterday I consulted a number of books on spiritual combat, but was overwhelmed by the amount of material. Lotta ins & outs and what-have-yous, lotta strands in Gagdad's head, so I'll focus on just one. It's from Ripperger's Dominion: The Nature of Diabolic Warfare, and goes to the whole nature of victimology, and how it animates both Hamas and its useful idiots on the left:

Since demons are narcissists and they have contracted around the pain of their self-inflicted wound..., they desire to replicate that in human beings. They will pick constantly at the injustice in the person's mind, so that the person will become focused on the injustice and the pain of the injustice.

This is designed 

to block any type of healing process which could result in the person being able to be free and function properly.... if the demons maintain the person's focus on the injustice, the person's weakened state continues, and in fact, increases. 

What is this injustice the demon picks at?

Ultimately it is the same injustice the Serpent exploits in the garden: that there's a God, and you are not Him. There is also a chosen people, and you are not them.

Which, of course, does not mean what the enemies of the chosen people think it means. The Jews are just the proxies in a proxy war against God. 

In a recent editorial, Dennis Prager wrote that

There is no hatred like Jew-hatred. It is the longest ongoing hatred in history. It is the most universal. And it is the one exterminationist hatred: Those who hate the Jews want them destroyed. There is a Hebrew statement that is probably two thousand years old, and which is recited during the Passover Seder service: “In every generation, they arise to annihilate us.”

But why? Because  

Jew-hatred is largely a result of the Jews being The Chosen People. You can laugh at the idea if you are secular and inclined to do so. But those who hate the Jews have not laughed at the idea; they have hated the Jews because of it -- because they believed it and/or because it is true.

Why the Jews? Let us name the reasons: 

The Jews introduced to humanity the God in which most of the world believes; brought into existence the Bible that is the basis of the New Testament and the Quran; gave the Christian world its Messiah; and gave much of the world its morality through the Torah, the Prophets, and the Ten Commandments. Those who hate that moral code hate the Jews. The two groups who have tried to exterminate the Jews in the last hundred years, the Nazis and the Islamists (not all Muslims), hate that moral code. And they hate the Jews for embodying it -- compared to the Nazis and compared to Islamic regime of Iran, Hezbollah, ISIS and Hamas, Israel is composed of saints.

Again, the war on the Jews is a proxy war for a much larger war on God. 

Progressive Monsters and How They Get That Way

Continuing with yesterday's post, 

Those beings inhabiting the worlds of evil are also called "angels," but they are rather subversive angels, angels of destruction (Steinsaltz).

But in addition to these preexisting demons, there are those that are co-creations, so to speak, of man, "the subversive angels created by the actions of men, by the objectification of malevolence: the evil thought, the hate-inspired wish, the wicked deed." In fact -- or in theory, rather -- these creatures

are not independent entities living by their own forces; their existence is contingent on our world.... 

Imagine arousing positive emotions in another person, and then being nourished in a healthy way by those emotions -- like say, an artist or entertainer who provokes the applause that come back to him. Or, as the Beatles put it, And in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make. 

Well, something similar occurs with subversive angels, who "receive their life and power as the result of something they have aroused." Thus, "the more evil a human being does, the more life-force do these angels draw from him for their world." 

Which is why Israel has no choice but to destroy the evil world of Hamas, which is a closed system existing for its own sake, i.e., for the furtherance of evil. Like Nazi Germany, it has no other purpose. And extending the entertainment analogy above, notice the character of the people who "applaud" the actions of Hamas. You can learn a lot from an assoul, for whom the evil they take is equal to the evil they make.

Shifting seers to another book, this one called Dominion, by Chad Ripperger, he notes that demons, in the respect just mentioned, 

are able to make something appear as true, that is, the person under the diabolic influence can become very convinced of the truth of what is being proposed.

Satan, whatever else he is, has been a liar and murderer from the beginning, the latter facilitated by the former (which is why ideology is so critical to committing wholesale evil in good conscience). 

Interestingly, while there is "no truth in him," the evil one is adept at not only convincing people that they possess the truth, but simultaneously closing them off from the very truth that would amend their error. In other words, as mentioned at the end of yesterday's post, they are enclosed in a darkness they call light -- even "enlightenment." 

You know the type. 

Now, if enough people are mentally ill in the same way, we flatter the collective illness by calling it a "community" or even "culture" -- like the so-called culture of the Palestinians. Of course, there are also plenty of cultured Israelis -- AKA self-hating Jewish leftists -- but fewer than there were on October 6.

Consider the following, and ask yourself how a human being could adopt such absurdities:

I'm only a psychologist, not an exorcist, but it seems that demons -- or something like them -- "are able to block a person from self reflecting or being aware of his behavior." Thus, 

A psychologist would call this "cognitive dissonance," but I think we need a more expansive concept, for even if demons don't exist, something like them surely does. To paraphrase the Aphorist, one who speaks of the farthest regions of the soul requires a theological vocabulary, in this case, a vocabulary capable of conceptualizing and articulating the nature of evil.  

It reminds me of an Israeli saying to the effect that "we don't believe in miracles, we only depend on them." Likewise, we might say that "we don't believe in demons, we only fight them." After all, there is some power in man that causes him to call evil good and vice versa. That much is obvious. Starting with Genesis 3, come to think of it. 

Ripperger suggests that demons can "block the individual's ability to either hear what is being said or to see something." They can also affect the imagination "by causing the image to be so garbled that the person cannot understand what is being said to them." They frankly cause an otherwise intelligent person to become stupid, right before your eyes. You know the type.

Now, Schuon makes the Very Important Point -- this touching on the metaphysics of ideological victimhood -- that 

man has the right to be legitimately traumatized only by monstrosities; he who is traumatized by less is himself a monster.

This is how it has come to pass that we are ruled by progressive monsters who are traumatized by non-traumatic microaggressions such as being mispronouned, or being kink-shamed, or being subjected to abortion-stigma when "all abortion stories are beautiful." If you don't want to traumatize someone, then DON'T YUCK THEIR YUM! Simple as. 

Yesterday my son was scrolling through the twitter feed of Planned Parenthood, and examples are too numerous to repeat here, but it's even crazier than you might have imagined, for example,

There's no shame in contracting or spreading syphilis. In fact, there's no shame at all, and believing otherwise is to perpetuate trauma.

Speaking of which, exorcists have observed that "there is usually some form of trauma or psychological illness in which the demon only has to do a little bit of work... in order to get significant reactions from the individual." 

In other words, trauma is a point of entry for demonic influence, so it follows that the more the person is traumatized by trivialities, the more opportunities for the demon to exploit such weakness and control the "victim." 

You know the type, and if you don't, just check out that twitter feed. Darkness visible. And risible. In other words, simultaneously evil and ridiculous, which tracks with what Chesterton said. In a book called Jousting with the Devil: Chesterton's Battle with the Father of Lies, the author says

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.

This book was discussed in a previous post, so we won't repeat it here. Rather, why don't we consider some practical advice on now to conduct spiritual warfare -- starting with ourselves? In the next installment.

A Disturbance in the Celestial Kitchen

The title refers to a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode in which Larry and Jeff are in a restaurant and told by the manager that their order is being delayed by a "disturbance in the kitchen."

To their frustration, the restaurant manager is doggedly evasive when asked for specifics. Larry goes to investigate but rather than get to the bottom of the situation, he gets into an argument with the chef.

Well, this latest business in Israel has me thinking there's some kind of vertical disturbance going on, and that events on the ground are more or less distant reflections of it. It's also frankly kind of apocalyptic -- I don't mean the apocalypse, but at least an apocalypse, which simply means "unveiling" or uncovering of what has heretofore been concealed.

Unveiled? Like what? Like the fact that for the first time in history the majority of Democrats are more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause than to Israel. Being that the Palestinian cause is known as "genocide," this is not a small thing. Many, of course, are just ignorant, but the shift is also the result of decades of ideological brainwashing coming to fruition, and this ideology is as diabolical as the anti-Semitism it helps to engender and rationalize. 

Back to the disturbance in the kitchen. As one expert put it,

Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

Okay, but how about some details? 

Within 6:10–12 of Ephesians, Paul addresses spiritual warfare and how to combat spiritual attacks; "Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes."

Hmm. I get it, but that's not much to go on.  

Speaking of Paul, I read somewhere that his writings contain an inordinate amount of hapax legomenon, meaning words or expressions that occur "only once within a context: either in the written record of an entire language, in the works of an author, or in a single text." I wonder if Paul's comments on spiritual warfare are among them? I mean, there's no real follow-up, especially considering such an important subject. 

The first image that occurred to me after the barbarism of October 7 was that this is like a giant axe slicing through history, sheep to one side, goats to the other. Except it's up to us whether we identify as a sheep or goat. Back when I was a boy of the left, I was very much like this guy:

When I was a clueless young leftist I too believed Israel was the oppressor and Palestinians were the oppressed, because that’s what everyone around me was saying, and my empty mind was a vacuum that sucked it all up. Once I escaped my echo-chamber and began to objectively assess the facts, I realized just how unfairly Israel has been demeaned -- not just among leftists and Muslims, but also in media, academia, and on Wikipedia.

Now, if the chosen people are an instrument of divine influence, then it makes sense that they would also be the locus of anti-divine energies, and indeed, one of the most distressing themes of history is how Jews never stop attracting the darkness: “In every generation they arise to annihilate us.”

And us, to the extent that we are grafted onto the original plant.

A generation or two ago, it was the Nazis who arose to annihilate the Jews.

In this generation, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Islamic movements have risen to annihilate the Jews.

But 

Radical Islam’s useful idiots on the Left deny this fact. They say that Muslims who seek to annihilate Israel are not motivated by antisemitism but by anti-Zionism, as if there is any real-world difference between the two, and as if seeking to eradicate one nation in the world -- the only one that happens to be Jewish -- is in no way anti-Jewish.

 Useful. To whom? To the Head Chef, of course. 

Gaza must be the most comprehensively spiritually depraved culture on earth, so fighting them is fighting pure evil. But how did they get this way without vertical assistance? It reminds me of reading about Nazi Germany or the USSR, where the evil was so extreme that it defies any natural explanation. Indeed, it's difficult to wrap one's mind around it -- it's as if I read and understand the words, but there is still something absolutely inconceivable at the core. 

Well, evil is like that. Or so we have heard from the wise. The particular wise man escapes me at the moment, but he said something to the effect that it is useless to try to comprehend evil, because it partakes of pure absurdity. It is the opposite of intelligible, in case you were wondering what prompts a man to gleefully decapitate a baby or to gang rape a woman you just murdered.

Excuse me, but what about the disturbance in the kitchen? 

If Paul is correct about those vertical powers and principalities, then local conflicts between good and evil must be a reflection of nonlocal ones, so to speak. Well, details. We want some details as to just what's going on, hopefully in a way that doesn't sound crazy, or primitive, or superstitious. 

What do the chosen people themselves say? The first book I pulled out yesterday was The Thirteen Petalled Rose, because Steinsaltz has a fairly detailed account of what goes on up there. Here are some excerpts from previous posts:

"The physical world in which we live, the objectively observed universe around us, is only a part of an inconceivably vast system of worlds. Most of these worlds are spiritual in their essence.... 

"Which does not necessarily mean that they exist somewhere else, but means rather that they exist in different dimensions of being. What is more, the various worlds interpenetrate and interact in such a way that they can be considered counterparts of one another, each reflecting or projecting itself on the one below or above it."

This reminds me of something Terence McKenna said -- that whole universes are but a micron away. In his case he meant a micron of psilocybin, but the point is well taken. For example, we talk about the "unconscious" as if it's a separate space, when it is actually the non-conscious aspects of this and any human space. The unconscious is right here, right now, exerting its influence.

Which begs the question somewhat, because while we have a signifier for it -- "unconscious" -- just what it signifies is... well, for starters, it is infinite, or where infinitude comes into contact with the mind. And infinitude is not in us, rather, vice versa -- we in it. 

This is a bit romantic for my tastes, but the psychoanalyst James Grotstein described it thus in an old post: he

attempted to rescue the concept of the unconscious from its unfortunate reduction to a mere cauldron of uncivilized desires and impulses, and restore it to its true place as a sort of alter-ego, or “stranger within” that shadows our existence in a most intimate, creative, and mysterious way. Far from being “primitive and impersonal” (although it surely includes primitive “lower vertical” elements as well), it is “subjective and ultra-personal,” a “mystical, preternatural, numinous second self” characterized by “a loftiness, sophistication, versatility, profundity, virtuosity, and brilliance that utterly dwarf the conscious aspects of the ego.”

What we call O. In that same post, Bob wrote of how blogging is not so much a creative outlet, but inlet, and I still think he was on to something. At the very least it must be both, because the one implies the other, After all, "Does anyone actually know where thoughts -- much less creative thoughts -- come from?" 

Don't look at me. I have no idea where ideas come from. Well, I do, but it reminds me of asking a songwriter where songs come from. Almost always they will say that they come from some other source, and that they just open themselves to, and cooperate with, it. Or It. I just now googled "Leonard Cohen on songwriting," because I knew he'd have a good description:

“If I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often,” he said in response to a question regarding his songwriting technique. “Being a songwriter is like being a nun: You’re married to a mystery....

Married to a mystery. Or the Mystery, rather. 

So, the celestial kitchen is just a mystery? That's not very helpful. 

Let's get back to the Rabbi: 

Steinsaltz discusses the distinction between the vertical and horizontal.... Obviously, in speaking of the vertical, of the qualitatively higher and lower, he is not speaking of an actual physical location. Vertically speaking, "to call a world higher signifies that it is more primary, more basic in terms of being close to a primal source of influence; while a lower world would be a secondary world -- in a sense, a copy."

This may be important in terms of understanding the Disturbance: 

As Steinsaltz explains, "just as there are holy angels built into and created by the sacred system, there are also destructive angels, called 'devils' or 'demons', who are the emanations of the connection of man with those aspects of reality which are the opposite of holiness."

This would not only explain bad songwriters, but bad people:

Just as there are evil beings, there are evil worlds. These are simply the "space" inhabited by the evil beings. Wisdom is a space, or "mansion." So too, creativity, love, beauty, peace. You can sense it when you enter one of those mansions. You can also sense it when you are near one of those haunted mansions where the dark ones reside. Enough malevolent wishes and wicked deeds, and pretty soon you have created a world.  

As Steinsaltz describes it, "the sinner is punished by the closing of the circle, by being brought into contact with the domain of evil he creates.... as long as man chooses evil, he supports and nurtures whole worlds and mansions of evil, all of them drawing upon the same human sickness of the soul.... as the evil flourishes and spreads over the world because of the deeds of men, these destructive angels become increasingly independent existences, making up a whole realm that feeds on and fattens on evil."

Now we're getting somewhere, because it means that evil, whatever else it is, is a closed system, enclosed in its own darkness. It is no longer open to the Light which would negate it. It can only flourish in a kind of impenetrable darkness -- a darkness that we can see, but they cannot. You and I see Hamas, and know exactly what it is and where it comes from. But they cannot see us, except insofar as we are obstacles worthy of genocide. When they say "death to America," they mean it.

To be continued...

The Postmodern Hitler-Stalin Pact

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. --Schuon

Not only did the Devil appear on October 7, he's been exploiting the situation ever since, what with his media spokesghouls, academic defenders, and street-level demon-strators.

In an interview of Chesteron, he was asked the following:

"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."

Concur, but we need a less theoretical and more concrete, even practical, understanding of how the adversary rolls. When his involvement in a situation is as obvious as this, then perhaps we can use it as an opportunity to see his tactics and rationalizations more vividly.  

The above is from an old post. I've been rummaging around the archives trying to find something appropriate to the current diabolical moment, but I can't decide whether there's too much or too little. Moreover, if I say something, I want it to be different from what the others are saying. There's plenty of astute commentary, but still, something is missing, i.e., the Raccoon perspective, whatever that is.

It reminds me of a dream I had last night. I'm always thinking about the Sequel, and in the dream I realized that I will never find the book I'm searching for, so therefore I will have to write it. 

It sounds solipsistic to say that I must write a book that is from and for myself, but then it occurred to me that all theology is a bit like this. The reason one theologian differs from another is that he has verbalized a theology that is first of all acceptable to him, and he's just hoping it will also speak to others as well. 

Which reminds me of something I realized way back in grad school. I don't know how many schools of psychology there are, but whatever the number, it is much higher today, and there were already too many in my student days in 1980s. 

Anyway, with no objective way to determine the correct one, it occurred to me that each theorist develops a theory that first and foremost applies to, and satisfies, himself. Each theorist is patient zero, so to speak, of his own theory (and therapy). Ultimately,

The great imbecilic explanations of human behavior adequately explain the one who adopts them.

But I never found a psychological theory adequate to explain Bob to Bob, let alone cure Bob. I could fit myself into the theory, but this always entailed cutting off important pieces of myself. Procrustean.

I eventually wandered into theology (among other disciplines), but still couldn't find a perfect fit. So I had to invent my own. But not totally. Rather, since I accepted the fact of revelation, it was more a matter of "tailoring" than creating a bespoke ideology -- take in the waist here, let out the leg there. I guess you could say it's a divine-human project, AKA the religion the almighty & me works out betwixt us.  

What is truly original is never a wild plant, but one that has a clever graft. 

Conformity and nonconformity are symmetrical expressions of a lack of originality.

Originality must adhere to the continuity of a tradition.

In any event, this explication of a theology acceptable to me isn't exactly new. For it is written (on the About the Author page), that

Dr. Godwin spent many years searching and researching for his book, only to conclude that it didn't exist, and that if he ever wanted to read it, he would probably have to write it himself. Having now read it a number of times, he is happy to share that burden with a wider audience of fertile eggheads interested in peering behind the annoying veil that separates them from ultimate reality.

Still true, except that after 18 years of blogging, I need to boil it down to another book from and for myself. And for anyone else who is built like me, which may reach even into the double digits.

As for the title of this post, I am reminded of the good news / bad news of our "victory" in the cold war in 1991: yes, we "won," but by then, Marxism had infiltrated and taken over nearly every major institution of society. Some victory.

Likewise, it certainly looked like we had defeated Nazism in WWII, but the left's widespread support of Hamas is leading to a reassessment of that victory as well. 

For nearly a third of WWII, Hitler and Stalin were allies. And it looks like they're getting the band back together for WWIII, albeit in a new iteration, i.e., the international left and the Iranian-backed Nazis who seek the destruction of both Jews and the Christian west. 

The turning point of WWII was Hitler's betrayal of Stalin with the invasion of Russia. Is there something equivalent that could cause a rift between the Islamist Nazis and their useful idiots on the left?

I don't know, but I was heartened by this story about Bari Weiss, for if leftist Jews wake up en masse and come over to our side, I think it would go a long way toward the erosion of the postmodern Hitler-Stalin pact.

Progress and Maturity

Everything is dated, but not everything ages. -- Dávila

A couple of posts ago we highlighted the importance of your philosophy or religion applying equally to good and bad times. 

This has real life consequences, because in a place like the United States, it is all too easy to believe in a kind of inevitable progress, because we take for granted all the particular attitudes, values, and difficult choices that made the progress possible. Most of the progress was a side effect of a spontaneous process designed by no one. See Hayek for details.  

It is as if progressives take the effect -- progress -- and presume to turn it into a cause, not unlike "peace activists" who think that if we all just think peaceful thoughts, war and conflict will end. 

Me? I was full of progressive thoughts when I was younger, and progress seemed an inevitable law of the cosmos. For example, I remember lifting weights when I was 18, and the results were immediate and dramatic. But equal effort today would not yield the same automatic results. Rather, it's more a process of forestalling decrepitude for as long as possible. I'm still in good shape, but I'll never be in the shape I was at 18. 

This may partly explain why progressivism makes so much sense to the young and stupid, and certainly why Dems would reduce the voting age to 16 if they could.

To praise youth is to forget our former idiocy.

The young person is proud of his youth, as if it were not a privilege that he shared with the most idiotic.

Young people believe that youth is a destination, when it is merely a provincial bus stop.

Believing that he roars, the youth brays.

The independence of which every youth boasts is no more than submission to the new prevailing fashion.

Adolescents rise up in flight with the contemptuousness of eagles and soon crash softly to the ground like pretentious chickens.

The above thoughts were provoked by an observation by Tolstoy (in Morson):

"Ashamed as I am to confess it, it was only much later that that I recognized why the theory of progress seemed so convincing to me. It was at the time" when "my muscles were growing and strengthening, my memory was being enriched, I was growing and developing; and feeling this growth in myself it was natural for me to think that such was the universal law in which I should find the solution of my life."

I remember well. Good times. Early on I glommed onto the "evolutionary thought" of people like Ken Wilber -- as if all we have to do is ride the coattails of a universe that is inevitably progressive. In fact, if you look at the integral movement subsection, there I am with all those other dubious thinkers with whom I have nothing in common. 

Back to Tolstoy's surprising discovery that progress isn't automatic or endless:

But the time came when I felt I was "fading," my muscles were weakening, my teeth falling out, and I saw that the law not only did not explain anything to me, but that there never had been or could be such a law, and that I had taken for a law what I had found in myself at a certain period of my life.

D'oh! I don't know that I would express it quite so pessimistically, because there is a principle of Life, just not rooted in biology. But there is also a principle of... crucifixion or something, and "he who loses his life for my sake shall find it." 

Morson continues: "since progress, defined as educated people do, depends on educated people, we should hardly be surprised that they are the main 'believers in progress.'" 

That certainly checks out. It seems that spending your life with young people with skulls full of mush has a two-way influence that it didn't have back when human development had a telos -- AKA mature adulthood -- instead of being a kind of perpetual adolescence that "progresses" nowhere,

Which is not to say I have anything against adolescence. But there's a right way and a wrong way to perpetuate it.

A fulfilled life is one that after long years delivers to the grave an adolescent whom life did not corrupt. 

The young mature when the old no longer seems automatically bad and the new no longer seems automatically good.

Without a certain religious childishness, a certain intellectual profundity is unattainable.

Whoever fights against the process of aging merely ages without ever maturing.

 From an old post:

"For Schuon, all natural phenomena are here to convey deeper lessons to us. Thus, for example, our lives are not just divided into day and night, but into seasons: the childhood spring of 'formation and learning'; the mature summer of 'actual and effective realization'; the late-middle age autumn of 'consolidation, reparation, and the directing of others'; and the old age winter of 'detachment and transcendence.' 

"Alternatively, one could say that childhood is 'the paradise of innocence,' youth 'the time of the passions,' maturity 'the time of work,' and old age 'that of sadness' -- at least for the horizontal man. For the vertical man, 'the opposite takes place: age is an ascent towards another world. Extremes meet, as paradise comes into view.'"

Ideological Alibis and Islamist Allahbis

In an editorial touching on the book we've been discussing, Morson writes that Dostoyevsky

showed how even the most innocent hearts can be drawn into committing monstrous deeds and feeling proud to have committed them. “And therein lies the real horror: that... one can commit the foulest and most villainous act without in the least being a villain! 

Later, Solzhenitsyn, "contemplating the idealist Russians who joined in torture and the enlightened Western intellectuals who whitewashed it,"

asked why Shakespeare’s villains murdered only a few people while the Bolsheviks killed millions. To answer this question, he reflects, one must grasp that no one thinks of himself as evil. To perform evil deeds a person must discover “a justification for his actions,” so that he can regard stealing, humiliating and killing as good. “Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble,” and so conscience restrained him. He had no ideology, Solzhenitsyn observes, nothing like “anti-imperialism” or “decolonization” to allay pangs of guilt. Solzhenitsyn concludes: “Ideology -- that is what gives evil-doing its long-sought justification and gives the evil-doer the necessary steadfastness and determination..." (emphasis mine).

So, in order to accomplish wholesale evil on a genocidal scale in good conscience, all one needs is an ideology: it "readily leads us to commit immoral acts" while transforming evil into good.  

The word "Islamism" was invented to distinguish the ideology from the religion, but the millions of Hamas supporter around the world might beg to differ. As far as Hamas or Hizb'Allah are concerned, they're just good Muslims, not "ideologues." Rather, "Zionists" are the evil ideologues doing evil things because of their evil ideology. Such as defending themselves from evil. 

Before a person can do evil... he must discover "a justification for his actions" so that he can tell himself that his stealing, destroying, killing and torturing serve the good (Morson).

So, an ideology, whatever else it is, is an airtight alibi:

When one claims an alibi, one can perform an otherwise heinous action while disclaiming responsibility for it.... Such thinking is literally irresponsible: invoking the alibi, a person disclaims responsibility that cannot be disclaimed.   

At least without a lot of help from the media. I thought they might wait at least a week or so before giving cover to the terrorists, but it started within 48 hours. Interestingly, they never mention or defend Hamas's actual genocidal ideology, rather, they condescendingly incorporate them into the western ideology of victimhood.

The terrorists, of course, know this, and never stop manipulating the useful idiots of the western media, who cover the religious Allahbi with their own secular alibi. In the ideological self-deception of the left, all religions are due equal respect. Except western religion. 

I can't think of an ideology that doesn't divide the world into victims and oppressors, whether based on race, class, gender, climate, whatever. And

This division absolves people of individual responsibility. It also offers the heady feeling of moral superiority. 

So, is victimhood the most effective alibi for committing evil in the name of good? Only in western civilization, which is so thoroughly infused with the Christian message (of God as innocent victim). 

Again, our adversaries know this, which is why they even purloin our terminology to manipulate us -- for example, calling terrorists "martyrs," or living under Islamist tyranny "freedom for Palestine," or calling genocide "social justice." 

Victimhood offers an alibi for evil because it allows one to regard the harm one inflicts as a form of justice. Evildoers are punished, and oppressors, or those who belong to the group of oppressors, suffer what they have long deserved. It follows that those who wish to inflict suffering will seek to view themselves as victims....

Boy and how. As Rene Girard or Gil Bailie might have predicted, the whole thing is playing out as a media drama of Who's the Real Victim Here? Note that in this exercise victimology completely displaces morality: instead of considering objective good and evil, all they need to know is who is the victim, and morality takes care of itself (even if it is deeply and intrinsically immoral).

I want to say that victimology is the lazy man's way to morality, but it's much worse than that. For it is the wicked man's way to transform evil into good. And the western media cooperate with this depravity because why? 

Morson quotes a fellow who says "Woe to the new society in which yesterday's slaves become today's rulers." He goes on to say that

former victims make the worst tyrants. First, they feel justified in inflicting on others what they have suffered; and second, they know better than anyone else what hurts the most.

And Dostoyevsky in particular

detected in [the ideology of the intelligentsia] a systematization of victimhood psychology, which licenses unlimited harm and provides a perfect alibi for those who inflict it.

Which brings to mind any number of Aphorisms, for example,

When the exploiters disappear, the exploited split into exploiters and exploited.

That would be Hamas and Gazans, to the extent that there's a difference. And "the man guilty of having committed the crime is not the envious murderer [Hamas] but the victim who aroused his envy [Israel].

Philosophy in Good Times

Just a brief one.

The true philosophy must apply equally to good and bad, happy and tragic, times -- in both joy and suffering, exaltation and despair. Which calls to mind a couple of aphorisms:

The same doctrine must serve in dim light and in bright light. The truth is only what is true without distinction for afflicted or exalted souls.

Nothing is more vapid than truths that mature in the spirit’s temperate zone.

There's a reason why Oprahesque new age philosophies flourish among the AWFULs (Affluent White Female Unmarried Leftists) who think microaggressions, mispronouning, and climate change are traumatic. 

No, traumatic is being kidnapped and raped by Nazi Gazis. Then your philosophy will be tested. It's easy to be a Chicken for KFC until you're in the frier. Only then might you have to rethink your principles.  

There's a subsection devoted to this subject in Wonder Confronts Certainty, called The Test, in which Morson observes that in the Soviet Union "Extreme conditions tested moral outlooks." I'm sure there are still atheists in foxholes, but how many of them would prefer to be captured by Islamists instead of Israelis? 

So let us ask: who behaved better under pressure, imprisoned Bolsheviks or religious believers? Materialists or those who acknowledged absolute standards of good and evil? Who acted nobly and who behaved like a scoundrel? 

Whose philosophy passed the Gulag Test? Turns out it was the believers who "would not do what they regarded as wrong," regardless of consequences. Conversely, "when arrested, Bolsheviks behaved the worst, and the higher up they had been, the more executions they had authorized, the baser they proved" (this according to Solzhenitsyn).  

Reminds me of those bad guys in movies, who turn out to be so pusillanimous when cornered or captured. Or university students who stand strong against Israeli Fascism and Apartheid, until the moment their careers are threatened. 

Likewise in the USSR, where 

"It was all very well philosophizing under shady boughs" or in comfortable university offices, but in the face of Soviet interrogation, "the great materialist's wisdom seemed like the prattle of a child."

Suddenly ethical relativism doesn't seems so sophisticated when you're being subjected to torture by ethical relativists. "How wise it all seems when you read these philosophers as a free man!," only to find out too late that there can be no appeal to "medieval" concepts of truth, beauty, goodness, decency, mercy, pity, etc. 

Among Russian writers, "Time and again, suffering leads to awareness of Truth or apprehension of God."

Just as in Life Itself, undistorted by ideology. To be continued...

Do Unto Others, Good and Hard

Reading this book on Russian writers, I'm sure seeing a lot of parallels between Soviet and Islamist ethics. I'm starting to suspect the problem isn't with the ideology, but with some *flaw* in human nature, for which the ideology is just a pretext or something.

If Antisemitism is the socialism of fools, then by extension, socialism is the foolishness of Antisemites. The Democratic Socialists of America doesn't disappoint:

DSA is steadfast in expressing our solidarity with Palestine. 

Today’s events are a direct result of Israel’s apartheid regime -- a regime that receives billions in funding from the United States. End the violence. End the Occupation. Free Palestine....

We cannot forget that the Israeli state has systematically denied Palestinians the right to self-determination for decades. This was not unprovoked. For over 60 years, Palestinians have faced ethnic cleansing, torture, bombings, and housing demolitions. Gaza is still under a blockade. 

Socialism? Check. Foolishness? Check. Antisemitism? Check.

This unethical ethic goes back to Lenin, for whom "All is permitted!" 

Nothing, however vile, should be condemned if it is committed by a man who is useful to the party.

The world is divided into exploiters and exploited, the former constituting "a race of worthless predators." Moreover,

Since their children were bound to "exhibit the same malice, cruelty, meanness, rapacity, and greed," the entire race had to be exterminated. 

Likewise Jewish children for Islamists. Indeed, it would be an act of cruelty to allow them to live. Lenin and Trotsky "sneered at the whole idea of 'the sanctity of human life.'" "Is there any reason not to target children themselves as a way to terrorize a population?" "Everything that promotes revolution is moral; everything that hinders it is immoral."

"Do not seek in your accusations proof of whether the prisoner rebelled against the Soviets with guns or by word. First you must ask him to what class he belongs.... These answers must determine the fate of the accused." 

"One must eliminate whatever groups that... foster undesired values or conditions." Another theorist of terror wrote that "the concept of personal innocence is a hangover from the Middle Ages. Pure superstition!" There is no objective morality, rather, each class defines right and wrong "to suit its own interests." "To us there is no such thing as a morality that stands outside human society; that is a fraud."

Even "to show compassion was to risk the accusation of covert religiosity," so "it therefore paid to be as cruel as possible. Cruelty, in short, became an atheist virtue." 

The Soviet credo was "always use human beings as mere means." Moreover, a "reverse golden rule operated," which is to say, "always treat others -- meaning class or other enemies -- as you would not want to be treated yourself. It was immoral not to."

Another key principle in Soviet ethics was the division of all people into two categories: "Each person in the bad category is automatically responsible for -- is essentially the same as -- all others."

Similarly, for Islamists, a Jew is a Jew, whether an infant, a Holocaust survivor, or a pro-Hamas useful schmendrick. Against such enemies, violence is "not a regrettable necessity, but a good in itself." But what if the shoe is on the other foot? Is it moral for enemies to defend themselves?

Of course not: "Russian revolutionaries not only dismissed it," but seemed unable to grasp it, as if to say "How dare they defend themselves!" This reflects the Leninist principle that "what is wrong for them is right for us."

One cannot ask "what if the shoe were on the other foot?" because to do so would suggest "an equality of moral rights."

You cannot equate communist and bourgeoisie any more than you can Muslim and Jew. 

Preventing Future Crimes Against the Regime

Soon enough we'll get back to the usual content, but I first have to get through this book -- Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter -- and it is striking how it illuminates the ideological terror of the day. 

If you're really bent on committing mass murder, then you need an ideology. Again, "Nothing limits the violence potentially flowing from the theoretist [AKA ideological] mindset, which can justify anything" (Morson). "The sanction of bloodshed by conscience is... more terrible than the official, legal sanction of bloodshed." 

Back when I was a psychologist we called this a "corrupt superego," or a conscience become evil due to a twisted environment. But this just begs the question of the source of morality. In other words, if there isn't an objective basis for morality, full stop, then on what basis can we judge this or that environment good or evil? Morality becomes completely relative and subjective. 

For example, one Nazi physician stated that “Out of respect for human life, I would remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind.” Simple as.

Similarly, this guy says that if you grew up in Nazi Germany, then  

In such an authoritarian culture, the moral messaging you likely received would have resulted in your developing a so-called "evil superego," based largely on the anti-semitic biases systematically implanted within you. Ironically, the moral essence of who you were wouldn't be reflected by your prejudicial outlook. And parroting what, externally, you'd been convinced was ethical, would have driven you to act unethically.

Now, to say "moral essence" is to acknowledge a transcendent human nature which this author otherwise ignores. Well, at least that's the last time I will quote Psychology Today. .  

What is our ultimate defense against a corrupt superego? Gotta be a well-formed conscience, and how do we get one of those? One way: "Conscience is ordered to the task of holding to the most fundamental of all moral precepts: do good and avoid evil." 

But isn't one man's terrorist another man's freedom fighter, and all that? Nah, for conscience may grasp "objective moral truth" and know "what is truly good and what is truly evil.... Contrary to some popular misconceptions, conscience is not the 'source' of morality, but rather is its 'servant.'"

Suffice it to say, there is no such thing as natural law for communists or Islamists (nor even for mainstream Islam, for which Allah's absolute will overrides any influence from our end). 

Nor for scientism: Stanford Scientist, After Decades of Study, Concludes: We Don't Have Free Will.

Now, dialectical materialism also denies free will, except --unlike frivolous adolescents of tenure -- the communists took seriously the implications:

If no one is responsible, then punishment exists not to ensure justice but to direct behavior, and the only question is which punishments are most effective in doing so. Guilt is beside the point, and the concept of innocence disappears. What reason could there be not to lock up those who might commit crimes to prevent them from doing so? This is precisely the conclusion drawn in Soviet justice.

We're seeing something similar in our two-tier system of justice, with violent criminals of color being released back onto the streets because they can't help it (being victims of systemic racism or something), while the book is thrown at the leading presidential candidate to prevent future crimes against the Regime.

The Soviet criminal code... specified potential crimes as crimes in themselves.... Simply belonging to to the wrong class... was sufficient. After all, if all crime results from bad social conditions, and if one belongs to a group that might want to preserve those conditions, then one merits elimination simply by virtue of belonging to that group.

As one commissar put it, "We protect ourselves not only against the past but also against the future." So, the regime is doing its best to prevent Trump's future crimes against the the managerial class -- the swamp and its allies and supporters. And the DOJ is hard at work criminalizing those of us who belong to the wrong class -- MAGA supporters, traditional Catholics, pro-lifers, anti-groomer parents, etc.

The Magical Appeal of Violent Ideologies

Morson distinguishes between "revolution" and revolutionism, the latter going to the addictive mental state discussed in yesterday's post. And "the twentieth century demonstrates" -- or should have demonstrated --

that revolutionism, almost irrespective of ideology, can lead people to do anything. The magic of "the Revolution" renders destruction and murder sacred. 

It seems that the line between revolution and revolutionism has been crossed when the violence is "no longer a means to an end; it becomes an object of mystical worship." 

One commonality of communism and Islamism is that both are impossible. They have nothing to do with the real world, with human nature, with practical politics. We might think of this as a bug, but ideology makes the impossible seem possible by superimposing the map onto the territory. 

Then the ideologue takes up residence in the dramatic space of the ideology, from communism, Nazism, and Islamism, to global warmism, transgenderism, and CRT. Each allows the individual to trade in his own boring life for participation in a transcendent drama of good vs. evil. 

I remember what that was like. In 1980 I supported Barry Commoner for president. Jimmy Carter was too conservative, and Ronald Reagan was, of course, a fascist. 

It's hard to recall what I was thinking at the time, or rather, the state of mind that was the larger context for the appeal of the Drama of the Impossible. It seems that the possible is no match for the intoxication of the impossible, for if something can actually occur, it's no longer magic. The Aphorist has a number of zingers along these lines:

People do not choose someone to cure them, but someone to drug them.

After conversing with some "thoroughly modern" people, we see that humanity escaped the "centuries of faith" only to get stuck in those of credulity.

Reason, truth, and justice tend not to be man's goals, but the names he gives to his goals.  

Morson writes that  "If one is looking for the usual sort of rational explanation, it may be true that Stalin's actions make no sense. But if one bears in mind the logic of revolutionism -- which demands constant intensification, shock, and the deliberate defiance of everyday thinking," then the absurdity starts to become intelligible, if that's not a contradiction of terms.

In any event, "no consequences will extinguish the youthful appeal of the thrilling, dangerous, and addictive violence of the devoted revolutionist." Media apologists keep reminding us that half the citizens of Hamastan are under age 18, which is less an appeal to mercy than a dire threat. After all, the Hitlerjugend were also children.

The next chapter of the book gets into the psychological allure of impossible theories and preposterous abstractions. Living inside of one can be more compelling than the people and conditions of everyday life, or "more real" than the reality the theory is supposed to explain. 

Ideology, "theoretism," "certaintism," whatever you call it,  

It should come as no surprise that terrorists despised doubt. How could hesitant souls, constantly reexamining their own premises, ever resolve to kill?

People who behead infants are a lot of things, but self-critical is not one of them. Similarly, for Russian terrorists, "openness to different points of view testified not to a commitment to truth but to intellectual flabbiness.... For Lenin, doubt itself was reactionary." "Dialectical materialists do not seek truth; they already possess it." 

No one in the Arab world is going to weigh the evidence and conclude that baby killers might also blow up hospitals, for, as with ideologues,

An idea is true not because it corresponds to "objective" facts, but because it produces the right results....

If facts "contradict the theory, the facts must yield" to the ideology. Even better, "Nothing limits the violence potentially flowing from" such an inversion.  

Lifestyles of the Wretched & Depraved

Continuing with yesterday's post, it seems that it's not just the content of the terrorist mind that is different, but the container. This is well understood in cases of severe mental illness on an individual basis, but what is going on in a collective "terror culture" like Gaza?

Conveniently, the next subsection in this chapter is called Metaphysical Hatred, and it seems to me that anti-Semitism is the metaphysical hatred of hatreds. Such hatred "can never be satisfied. It feeds on itself."

So overwhelming is the hatred of Hamas that it easily overwhelms any practical concerns, including, of course, for their own people. Similarly,

For a true Leninist, nothing could be sweeter than hate-filled revenge. "When hatred motivated terrorists, the 'people' did not matter."

 These terrorists were hopeless idealists:

In this way of thinking, goals pollute the sacrifice by making it utilitarian and therefore impure. 

A pure sacrifice... where have I heard that before? "Even those who did not seek a martyr's death found self-sacrifice appealing." Anything less than total commitment "would not have satisfied us."

For Bakhunin, "the attraction of all messianic socialism was that it invested the inner dialectic of the personality with apocalyptic significance." In effect, he advanced "a mystical theory of self-realization through revolutionary action."

As with the Islamists, "The process of radicalization, once started, repeats and the terrorists grow ever more terrible."

From killing specific people only when necessary, they rapidly advanced to killing random people whenever possible. Soon enough, sheer sadism became common. "The need to inflict pain was transformed from an abnormal compulsion experienced only by unbalanced personalities into a formally verbalized obligation for all committed revolutionaries."

But again, "what explains this dynamic," which is "repeated in the history of other revolutionary organizations," including Hamas? One motive seems to be

the craving of lonely and alienated young people for an especially tightly knit community, a family bound together by the imminence of death.

Very much like the dynamic that motivates normal military cohesion, only turned diabolical, partly because it is for its own sake, not for any rational or achievable goal:

For those addicted to the thrill of danger and the intensity of the moment, familiar violence soon becomes routine and ceases to have the desired effect. As with addictive drugs, larger and larger doses are needed. The war on boredom grows boring: repeated violence soon seems almost peaceful... 

Hence the incredible barbarism of October 7, which, if one is attracted to such things, must furnish an intense dopamine high (or something like it). 

In fact, in a recent newsletter, Rob Henderson reviewed a book called Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty by psychologist Roy Baumeister. He writes that

Under intense stress, the body releases soothing and pleasant chemicals to return to normal (homeostasis). Over time, this feeling becomes addictive. 

This is how people come to enjoy bungee jumping or skydiving. I’ve done both. The act itself is both terrifying and thrilling, but the feeling of coming back down from the rush is enjoyable.... 

Baumeister suggests this happens with repeated acts of inflicting harm.... At first, people feel a sense of terror, anxiety, or disgust. The body then counteracts such feelings to restore itself to baseline. People gradually become addicted to this feeling. 

In this view, the pleasure of harming someone comes mostly from the restorative process, not the initial act. You pay the cost up front, and enjoy the benefit after. 

As the book puts it, “The thrill of killing may be closer to the thrill of parachute jumping than to the thrill of taking drugs.”

Another motive is the joy of victimhood: 

research in the book documents how, for perpetrators of genocide and ethnic violence, “The ones who carry out the massacres perceive themselves as victims of mistreatment and injustice.”

Hitler and the Nazis famously cast the Germans as victims of “nefarious” Jewish people.

Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and other communist leaders carried out horrific acts resulting in bloodbaths by demonizing anyone deemed to be a “class enemy,” i.e., an oppressor.

Henderson also highlights the danger of evil motivated by "idealism," beginning with an observation by a psychologist Jonathan Haidt that "The major atrocities of the 20th century were carried out largely by men who thought they were creating a Utopia.”

Henderson continues:

In a twisted way, idealism uses people’s moral intuitions against them. If you harm someone to take their money, you might feel guilty, even if you needed the cash. But if you harm someone because you believe they are an obstacle to the gates of paradise, then any guilt is quelled. 

This helps to explain how ordinary people became murderous in the regimes of the twentieth century. They believed themselves to be moral. And the more evil acts they committed, the more moral they believed themselves to be.... 

Committing mass murder might be unpleasant, but if in the end it’s for a good cause, then people will fulfill their duties....  

Idealistic perpetrators, full of self-righteous conviction, believe they have a license, or even a duty, to hate.

That's about it for today... 

Terrorist Time and Time for Terror

I'm reading a book called Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter, by Gary Saul Morson, and it turns out to be timely, because there's a chapter devoted to the revolutionist-terrorist personality. 

Suffice it to say that they're not like us, and yet, they rely on western dupes and useful idiots to treat them as if they are -- you know, just aggrieved people with rational and realistic goals.

The late 19th century

witnessed the birth of Russian terrorism.... Russia became the first country where young men and women, when asked their intended career, might answer "terrorist," an honorable, if dangerous, profession....

I know of no earlier society that made terror routine for everyone, celebrated "mercilessness" as a virtue, and taught schoolchildren that compassion is criminal.

Well, I know of a later one. And *coincidentally*,

Until 1964, the word “Palestinian” rarely described Arabs who once lived in Israel. That was when KGB Agents of Communist Russia created and funded a terrorist group called the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).... The PLO was as artificial as other effective and deadly groups communists used during the Cold War to take over Algeria, South Africa, Kenya, Vietnam, and Cuba.

Morson asks "What self-justifications do those who commit monstrous crimes invoke, what moral alibis do they seize upon, and what makes excuses persuasive to them?" As if he has never tuned into CNN or visited a college campus.  

Just like the Palestinians they sponsored, Russian terrorists "gave rise to a mythology and martyrology that conferred sanctity on killing." Their "readiness to slaughter innocent people, not just opponents, looked forward to later terrorists' dynamite in crowded public places and to Lenin's taking of random hostages..."

How are we to understand these people -- and not fall into the trap that they are somehow like us, sharing the same reality, motivations, and goals? One important point is that "The revolutionary (and terrorist) of this sort lived in a special temporality -- let us call it terrorist time..." Quoting Solzhenitsyn,  

They, the zealots, could not afford to wait, and so they sanctioned human sacrifice... to bring universal happiness nearer!

"Terrorist time led to the time of terror" (Morson). 

I'm going to skip past a couple of important chapters on The Intelligentsia and The Idealist and go straight to The Revolutionist, the latter often supported and rationalized by the former two. But

For many terrorists, goals, programs, and ideology were irrelevant. What they loved was revolutionary activity itself....

Time and again, the means for achieving a goal became the goal itself.... if at first revolution was the end and terrorism the means, terrorism soon became the end in itself. 

As it is for Hamas, who care about Jews only slightly less than their own people: "For revolutionists, aiding workers and peasants was at best secondary." Like today, there were those progressive voices  claiming that "they turned to terror only as a last resort," but this excuse "does not pass the smell test." Rather, "it is the decision to murder that leads to the justification."

Now to the main question, which is "If relieving human suffering is beside the point," why does the terrorist murder, rape, torture, and risk his life? "What motivates the revolutionist to engage in terror?"

I guess we'll get into it in the next post, but let me end by going back to what was said above about Terrorist Time. Morson writes that "Terrorists may sense themselves living in a special sort of timeless time" which he calls "living in liminality." It's definitely a spiritual state, in that it's a little like being dead while alive, and thus liberated from every quotidian concern:

This feeling of living posthumously frees him from ordinary concerns and places him beyond good and evil. He becomes a superman....

Consequences, for oneself and others, no longer matter. The present moment is all there is. Sheer liminality -- betweenness, transitionality, contradiction, and freedom from all definition -- becomes addictive....

We wonder how they can be living like rats in those underground terror tunnels, but they would no doubt find it tedious beyond belief to devote themselves to banalities such as economic development, or proper education and healthcare, or turning Gaza into a seaside vacation spot. Such terror addicts "aren't at home in anything except change and turmoil.... They aren't trained for anything else, they don't know anything else except that."

Trapped in liminality, in "never-ending preparations," they cannot create anything, let alone an earthly utopia.