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But can’t anxiety be challenging?
I’m not talking about that kind of anxiety — the kind that is connected with a goal. I’m talking about chronic anxiety, the kind that is nonspecific; the kind that just grips everyone like an overall atmosphere. The kind that increases automatic reactivity of everyone to everyone; the kind that increases blaming rather than owning; the kind that creates surges of quick-fix attitudes; the kind that gets everyone to herd. The kind that inhibits the expression or development of well-defined leadership. But raising society’s level of anxiety only sets the scene, and here you will see the essence of my genius — the more anxious I can make society, the easier it becomes for me to tempt creatures into violating the nature of their being, and that’s when I’ve really got them.
I’m still not getting it.
Look at it this way. If you read the accounts of creation carefully, you will see that the Creator established three principles to separate a god from a human. It doesn’t matter what kind of human, black or white, Jewish or Christian, male or female. The three criteria have to do with knowledge, power, and death. Whereas gods can be omniscient, omnipotent, or immortal, human beings cannot be all-knowing, all-powerful, or live eternally. Whenever they disregard, no less try to violate, those basic parameters of existence, they lose their way.
So you’re saying that almost all barriers to community result from trying to will what can’t be willed.
In a way, but let me get to the overarching theme here. It is when human beings become most anxious that they are most liable to forget what makes them human, and then they’re really in my power.
If I get your drift, what you are saying is that you do not want human beings to acknowledge or perhaps even face their frailty. You want them to think that as long as they have enough power or enough knowledge or enough time, they could solve anything.
Precisely. All my temptations work best when humans keep trying to solve what they cannot solve, rather than growing from the acceptance of their limitations.
Satan, sometimes you sound like a preacher.
Darth Vader was once a Jedi Knight.
II
Talk more about the dark side.
Very well. I have designed a whole set of temptations to fit those three natural limitations of the human condition: omniscience, omnipotence, and immortality, which as I said become more tempting as anxiety increases. If you want, I’ll explain how I have structured each set, but let me warn you, you’re going to find some of this very disturbing.
I’ll just pretend you’re not telling the truth.
Fair enough. To begin with: omniscience. What I do here is to get the human species to equate the mind — or more narrowly the cortex — with the soul.
As with the word “psyche”?
Ah, that one word helps immeasurably. It originally referred to the soul, but I have gotten the social sciences to equate it with the mind.
As in psychology, psychiatry, and psychosomatic?
By getting humans to think that their thought processes are the key to everything, I get them first of all to overlook the emotional processes that might be driving their thinking processes. That, in turn, furthers the absurd dichotomy between body and soul, which, as you may know, goes against all the new findings that the brain is the largest organ of secretion, sending messages to and receiving messages from all parts of the body simultaneously. Not even memory is solely in the brain. In all events I have succeeded just through that one word, “psyche,” in seducing the entire eastern intellectual establishment into concentrating on all kinds of irrelevancies. I begin with the focus on IQ as a quantitative category. That one starts in grade school, determines the structure of SATs in the selection process for higher learning institutions (which also sets the selection process for who will run society), and evolves into evaluations throughout every organizational structure. From that point, it’s relatively easy to get both parents and presidents to think that communication is a cerebral phenomenon depending on syntax, vocabulary, and rhetoric rather than an emotional process that depends on distance, direction, and anxiety. You know, people can’t get near you unless they are moving towards you.
So that whenever you are pursuing or rescuing, your message will never catch up.
Exactly. Next I get them to focus on values rather than self-regulation. And once I’ve got them concentrating in this fashion, then it becomes child’s play to focus them on data and method rather than on maturity and stamina. Have you any idea how many different diseases now have names? I mean emotional and physical illness. Why, I just got DSM 4, the new version of the psychiatric scriptures, to include almost a hundred new syndromes, though they left out another hundred disorders I thought up. In fifty years no one is going to be able to carry it around. But this is where the increased anxiety and the denial of human limits comes in. By overwhelming everyone with data, no one can feel adequate — and this one is also equally true for parents and presidents — so that the increased knowledge, instead of helping, adds to the anxiety. Then I work on the helping professions particularly. Focused on data rather than on their own maturity, they are easily caught up in society’s quick-fix attitude and try harder and harder to “cure” everything. But of course they can’t keep up. And here’s the best part of all. As long as I can keep the helping professions focused on addictions such as alcohol, drugs, and abuse, rather than their own self-regulation, they can’t see how their own perpetual imbibing of data and technique is the worst form of substance abuse around.
They’re searching for knowledge.
Nonsense, it’s not knowledge; otherwise it would lead to wisdom. Wisdom is one’s accumulated response to adversity. Wisdom is not a function of information. But, you see, that’s the beauty of what I’ve been able to tempt them into. The perseveration after data and technique keeps humans from focusing on what really would lead to wisdom. That’s why it’s a form of substance abuse. It makes the abuser feel better temporarily, but the very state of depending on it causes precisely those qualities that would make the substance unnecessary to atrophy.
That, sir, is absolutely devilish.
Thank you. But that’s only the half of it. The real secret to my perversity is getting humans to deny theirs. The more anxious society becomes, the more they want certainty. So I delude everyone into confusing their models with reality. And I find I am equally successful everywhere. Reductionism in science and fundamentalism in religion are really the same phenomenon. The key is to make people forget that the world is essentially ambiguous, to tempt them into thinking that there are answers out there just a little beyond their reach, and that if only they tried hard, they could solve or, at least, measure anything. But the critical factors in salvation are not subject to measurement.
That one idea could put a lot of people out of work.
And there are side benefits. The more they reify their models — you know people today assume the ego and the id have substance. I’ve gotten them to think they’re sophisticated when they give up belief in the supernatural , but notice how tempted they are to believe with perfect faith in the sub-conscious. Anyway, the more they are given to black and white, all or nothing, either/or conceptualizations of life, that really reduces the richness of their repertoire of responses, which is the key to any maturation process.
