If I were the Devil

Here’s some new advice for the basement crowd, on effective devilry:

1. Martyrs are bad news. Do your best to avoid making one. Something weird happens when they do that denial-of-self-and-taking-up-the-cross thing. It is so not you, and, from your point of view, positively viral.
   
   
2. Speaking of martyrs, the good news for the basement is that there is an anti-virus. The opposite of martyric (or saintly) is not agnostic, or atheist, or heretic, or arch-villain. That idiotic antinomy (which is always good for a laugh in the infernal improv) serves, I’m sure, to obfuscate the real integrated treatment plan for humanity: make like the First Dead Man (not Adam – way, way before that) – be completely self-absorbed … embrace your inner hell. Become yourself. Savoir Sartre.
   
   
3. How to make people more self-absorbed? I have to hand it to you. Materialism was a great idea. Not because it is an “ism,” which it isn’t. Despite what cultural critics (and wannabe’s like me) might prize out of the mix, there really is no intellectual content to materialism. It is only a fancy word for the process of avarice, gluttony and idolatry. I know this, and because I know it, you can construe two things. The first is that it can’t take much to figure out, if it can occur to someone like me. The second is that if someone like me thinks it, it won’t catch on.
   
   
4. Again, kudos for your proficiency in giving fancy names to a lot of cardboard-covered packets of effluvia. Madison Avenue could take a lot of lessons from you, in this regard and many others (well, uhhhh …). Pssst, true be told, and I won’t tell anyone, but just between you and me – isn’t there a lot of cultural stuff, high and low, that passes for nouveau and sophistication, but is only façade and gas? And you can even get whole movements to line up behind these significations. What sophistry! What rhetoric, to set the flies buzzing after the waving banners! When did you guys learn that more was gained from giving up on sinking humanity down to Cocytus, and simply confining it to minimal hell, running amok in the vestibule?
   
   
5. You guys must have the latest in hardware and software. Are you Bluetooth-capable? Probably. I wonder what your domain is. Well, anyways, I just wanted to say that your VR work is really, really … well, not “real” or even nice, but really attractive. You have achieved a whole generation preferring artifice over creation. You have gotten fundamentalist materialists to reject matter! You have sucked millions into the furious orifice of baneful priapism, and have leeched onto the rut and ruck the sepsis of despair! You have supplanted joy with frenzy, love with lust, hope with positive-thinking, leadership with gentile-domineering, kings with oligarchies, persons with corporations, happiness with entertainment, dance with voodoo, ceremony with celebration. None of these replacements would have been possible without the phantastik wedge of virtual reality. Let’s see … it started with photography, then moving pictures, then broadcast moving pictures, then AI-directed media (they call it the Web, but you and I know different), then what’s next? Neural implants? Just like you? Oh, I forget. You guys don’t need any hardware. You’re wireless already.
   
   
6. Here’s the advice (note that it comes at this number). Mind you, I hope you don’t take it. I like to think I’m on the other side. I know that you’re not going silly at premature celebrations over slush-funds-for-hush-fun revealed There’s no hoopla over float-your-boat-ordinations for the not-so-girl-next-door, the profitless-prophetess. And even though I would think that a whole Goetian Walpurgisnacht would be thrown for the spectacle of feminists marching with the Hezbollah, you guys are just too busy. Hat tip to you: you’re not distracted. Depressed, yes. Distracted, no. You have hidden your madness and your clinical despair. Your psychosis is so big that it has become normal – so normal, that it has leaked into the upper stories (probably through the ductwork). But no one knows. It’s like the fish, unaware of the water: except this madness is in the air. It’s only right, of course: you are, after all, of it the Prince. You aren’t celebrating mainly because these cheap little escapades are just cover for your real enterprise: there’s too much work to be done.
   
   But advice? Keep distancing language from things, and from the bigger things. You know what I mean – the things too large to fit in the senses, too true to be defined by thought (or that playpen restriction of the scientific method). And keep preventing prayer. You know, and I know, that determinism works for you. Prayer is the revolution. Suppress, devil, the spiritual proletariat from rising up, and throwing off its chains, and you’ll have more to keep you company, if you can call it company, and if you can call yourself a “you” … in any case, you’ll make out better at whatever you’re doing and why.

Which I don’t understand, except in those regrettable moments when I look at passion from the inside out. Then I get a glimpse and understand that there is no why.

Well, I’ll sign off, knowing full well I’ve told you nothing new. I’ve divulged no secrets, especially not to you. There’s no advice here. You’ve thrown off the red pajamas, the Freddy claws and the Jason mask long, long ago.

You’ve ensconced yourself nearer, and clearer, behind every mirror.

Thank God I’m not on your side, and that He died, and you are tried.

Comments

[ochlophobist]

Very well then. You got me. I concede. This may be the best written post I that have ever read. Thank you.

[Reid]

Yes, it is beautiful, insightful, and convicting (for me, at least).

I do wonder, though, if the development of VR in point #5 goes back even further than photography. I recall reading that the explosion of literature in Renaissance England followed from the development of printing. The ability to mass-produce books cheaply meant that suddenly one could make money by writing books with wide appeal. My snatches of reading on the subject suggest that the notion of copyright developed about the same time, which seems consistent with an emphasis on writing for profit.

So as I imagine it, prior to the advent of printing a man went through the tremendous labor of writing a book primarily because he thought he had something worth saying. After printing became widespread, the profit-motive came to predominate. In particular, writers of fiction (virtual reality) might find it easier to make money by appealing to the corrupted tastes of fallen man than by producing literature of true value. I wonder if visual VR (photography, movies, etc.) simply extended this practice by making its products easily accessible to more people.