I hope you all had a happy and holy Christmas. I have been absent from Satan’s window for the most part, but am now back with the second part of Pacts With the Devil.
This is a bigger idea than will work in this format, and I provide only one example of how it applies in the digital age.
The willing acceptance of a known evil on a vast scale has been witnessed by us all - twice - in the last three years. Today I will talk about why we choose evil and the pernicious rewards of doing so.
SELFISH REWARDS
The Faustian pact terminates in madness, not in magnification. The Enlightenment promise is the Liberal promise, that the emancipation from God and all the so-called restraints of meaning, morality, tradition and order will make magnanimous the man of reason. Soulless, he magnifies the self, which makes him sick.
His machines are a means of aping God, a fever dream emerges in which his crafty inventions - technology - can confer eternal life and master life, death, nature itself. The man of reason forever imagines a nowhere ruled by himself alone, a utopia, and all his Godless cults end in failure. His, and that of the empire of lies he created.
The role of fantasy is central to the cult of reason supreme. It is the attempt to project a vision as if it could be made real by insistence. To burn the image of the screen on to the world, as it were, an act of malevolent projection. The treasured objects of the mind, driven mad by the burden of the world and all its meaning, are lasered into the landscape. Humanity replaced by a smouldering silhouette, a great future which never escapes the status of promise.
The promises are as false as the premises on which they are founded. Man cannot be the instrument of his own salvation. He does not improve with the ticking of the clock, a machine which reading back from the progressive present appears to have been invented to measure his inexorable moral elevation.
Of course it does no such thing, but the serious point is that the reimagination of history as an heroic escape from ignorance is a falsehood, whose imposition drives the vandalism of art and literature and heritage. Worse, it leads us not into a new dawn but deeper into the darkness. Progress is the lodestar of the lost, a mirage on the desert, an oasis of the mind whose pursuit tempts the thirsting to death.
This feeds into the fantasy of sickness and insanity as the companion of wisdom.
Hence The Magic Mountain, Sylvia Plath, the hypochondriac narcissism of those who have claimed the superior vision of the enlightened.
These avatars of liberal emancipation bear the weight of the truth of humanity alone in their aristocracy of reason. This is both true and not true, the weight of the world indeed crushes a man, but it does not make him better.
It makes him so hopeless and crushed he will cleave to anything. It makes a dusk of every dawn, in which the Devil’s bargain glimmers like some star of distant promise.
The fantasies of the Enlightenment cannot be reconciled with the limitations of reality, and so they are enforced to intentionally replace it. That this is evil is irrelevant to anyone in this position. What is needed is something - anything - other than the nothing they know.
The Psychopathology of Everyday Lies
The lies we are told are a means of personal compensation.
They are in sum an ideology of fantasy, which is the use of make belief to make sense of a world made senseless.
The result is the vanity of imaginary worlds, the adoption of false beliefs to make weighty an empty self.
To live as if these things were true is to inhabit a delusion. The duty ethics of this worldview compel its imposition on others. We are obliged to go mad to be “good”.
LOCKDOWN INFERNO
If you think this a bit much, consider how circumspection and caution were condemned under Operation Covid.
All the claims of the propaganda campaign of this horrible period have turned out to the opposite of the truth.
There were zero flu deaths, but the number of annual deaths was approximated as being caused by THE DEADLY VIRUS.
The 100% safe and effective injections did not stop transmission or infection and turned out to be highly dangerous novel treatments contaminated with dirty DNA.
Experts such as Dr Sucharit Bhakdi have described the aggressive promotion of the so-called “vaccines” as a “crime against humanity”.
Along with others, Dr Bhakdi also warned in March 2020 of
“the truly unforeseeable socio-economic consequences of the drastic containment measures which are currently being applied”
The lockdowns, undertaken to preserve society, destroyed its liberty, social fabric and the mental of many children (and adults). Vast sums were generated to be handed to the already rich, whilst the high streets were shuttered as commerce migrated online.
Loneliness, homelessness, drug abuse, mental illness among children and adults all soared under lockdown - along with domestic violence and divorce.
Alcoholism and online gambling replaced face to face human contact, with a report from the UK’s Centre for Social Justice concluding that the damage done to the nation and its children has been “catastrophic”.
“The lockdown generation are growing up and the harms and damage may take years, even decades to come to the surface.”
All these negative outcomes were predicted by people who were marginalised and vilified as fringe lunatics. The damage was foreseen and foretold. The response was to persecute the wise, who stated the obvious, resulting in a worldwide epidemic of hatred for the unvaccinated.
Why did people go along with this?
As we know, propaganda only works because people comply with it. The reason people went along with this is for the same reasons shown by Mann and Goethe and even Marlowe in the tale of Faust.
People will cooperate with any evil as long as it magnifies them. The isolation peculiar to lockdown incentivised precisely these false individual rewards - by replacing practically all meaningful relations with house arrest and the attendant consolations of drink, drugs and digital addictions.
Did this evil make them great? It made a very few richer, but for the majority the rewards were of a different order. To adopt the narrative was to be permitted to sneer at “conspiracy theorists”, “anti-vaxxers” and other paranoid fools. It granted the weak the power to ridicule the wise. It gave a sense of power to the powerless, and a perverse form of comfort to those traumatised by an international regime of coordinated torture.
The wages of this sin are especially attractive to anyone who is desperate for status, meaning, a sense of wellbeing, and for personal significance - everything the lockdowns took away from you. Lockdowns potentiated selfish, self-destructive behaviour with the one-time special offer of feeling good at the expense of the bad people. It was irresistible to anyone who
believed they deserve more attention
thought they should be recognised as “better”
whose lives lacked ultimate meaning
who had a bad conscience anyway
who wanted to feel important
The parallels with the narrative which replaced lockdowns and injections are obvious. The psychological reward of supporting the obscene war in Ukraine were the same. It was a frictionless shift from one symbol to another - both obviously evil - but offering the glittering prize of self-satisfaction. This was won by demonising anyone who noticed the obvious.
The most vain nihilists echoed this narrative as loudly as the empty vessels they struck to celebrate a National Health Service which was lying to them. (In Britain, people stood on their doorsteps and hit saucepans to support public health system which was conspiring in a programme of harm).
It would be impossible to convince these people that their doctors and nurses had misled them, that “the Science” they were following was nonsense, and that their beloved news sources were making it all up.
To these people being terrified of sickness promoted the highest virtues. This is the wisdom of cowards. Sanity was treason, with the refusal to lose your mind a sign of madness. This poisoned families and friendships, workplaces and community groups, as the feeble minded and suggestible were empowered by a mendacious media to lord it over the less suggestible and despise them.
They will never forgive you for what they did to you. This is one example of the power of evil and of its allure. You must forgive because they cannot.
I would not advise you to forget this lesson.
Sickness Benefits
The real illness reproduced at scale in these times is a sickness of the soul. I do not believe that men and women who seek the grace of God require the consolation of contempt for others.
The benefits of spiritual sickness are moral evils. This one offered a sense of unmerited superiority over others.
The unvaccinated were said to have blood on their hands - for their “selfish” refusal to inject themselves with a mysterious substance for which the manufacturers enjoyed complete legal indemnity from any resulting harm.
This is so obvious a warning that only the insane could ignore it. How did madness become mainstream? Why did these vices become virtues? The power of the Devil’s bargain is the answer. The reward for pulling the wool over your own eyes was the gorgeous garland of self congratulation. It was a complete denial of the obvious, of the real, and a sort of apotheosis of the self.
Without God, there is no meaning to life but me. This is where esoteric nihilism leads, through strangely infused symbols of death to the destruction of all that has value. The wise called fools, the wicked rewarded, childhood cancelled, lies become truth and facts called fantasy. This sickness is called the highest virtue.
The lockdown years have shown a face of man that he wishes to mask, and why. It was a relief to the lost to finally have a cause. That the cause was wicked did not matter, and it never does. What drives these people is an appetite that can never be satisfied by dopamine-desperate displays.
The Sickness Unto Death
The argument of Kierkegaard, whose Christian existentialism was bastardised into the impossible effort of Sartre to reconcile his existential nothingness with Marxism, is that the sickness of man is that of Godless despair. In the believer, despair is a sin, it being the denial of salvation promised by Christ.
The sickness I speak of is not an accident of misery but an obligation. The Enlightened are notably desperate. Noble savage Bertrand Russell described his frequent depressions as the result of his forlorn hope than men will ever be made sane.
Those who would “make men sane” are sick. Their means are fantasy, their methods a repressive desublimation of desire which imprisons the soul in the dramatic magnification of the trivial.
It is a promise of liberty which functions as a curse, leading to nothing in the end. Life is therefore absurd, a state of “thrown-ness” into a world with no purpose. It becomes an endless experiment of desire and of ambition, bracketed by twinned oblivions.
At its beginning and at its end, life itself has no essence. An emergent property, as they say of intelligence, and having emerged it simply vanishes into the void. Between two full stops - a sentence. This is the sum of the parts of the Liberal self and the world it inhabits. Life reduced to components, minus its essence, restocked with the consolations of evil.
Following this brief primer on evil and its fringe benefits, I will be doing a news update. There has been a lot of news, and I will do my best to summarise it presently.
“Make men sane” is just another way of saying “Make men as I wish them to be” which is the same as saying “I know better than the creator of this man how he should be”. This is a desire to play God wrapped up in performative compassion.
I am a huge fan of Lewis Mumford and his trilogy of books about the "fake worlds" being woven around the notion that man was a machine and his maintenance would be similar. Mumford suggested that mankind was backing itself into a dead end mentally in which the collapse of our civilization was inevitable ... precisely for the fact that man was not a machine and machines did not have godlike powers to confer on all of us. When the reality met the fantasy and the machines were discovered to be quite useless for all the most important truths, the civilization would collapse from madness and disappointment at their false god betraying them.
This writing is actually better IMHO.