Part and parcel of the phenomenology of hyper-authoritarian Christians: The more they claim their affinity and psychical binding to Jesus Christ, the more pronounced their shadow half, that could be termed as demonic. In essence, individuals who insist they are light-bearers — who insist they are delivering good news to the world — who claim the mantle of divine radiance, yet, as a rule, cast a huge shadow within which broods palpable evil, and are bad news for all they have been given dominion. To wit:
Sports reporter Sarah Spain on sitting near JD Vance at the Milan Olympics:
When I see JD Vance’s eyeliner face, I literally feel ill. I feel like I just looked at a demon, like the devil, and I don’t even believe in that. My body felt like when you have been spooked and you have a little tingle that feels like, ‘Ooh, something’s not right.’ Or like when you get in a situation and you feel like, ‘Oh, some of the energy’s bad, something could go wrong here, maybe I should get out of here,’ or something’s dangerous. He’s a human being, allegedly, but he exudes demon energy….[His presence] was disgusting to me.
JD Vance’s mentor and key financial backer is Peter Thiel. The capitalist tech elite are maneuvering men like themselves to be the leadership templates of the future. The mythology of The Book Of Revelations was a Lovecraftian pulp jeremiad against the Roman Empire. Sarah Spain has sent back a dispatch from being within cringing distance of The Beast.
I had a friend since high school, an individual for whom the 1960s counterculture term, Jesus freak, would have been applicable. In those reefer-reeking, muscle car-deafening days Bill evinced the role of A lank-of-hair, love-you-neighbor sort of Christian. He and I had gone our individual ways over the span of decades. But, in recent years, we reestablished contact.
In the years since, his born again proclivities had drifted – then careened – rightward and authoritarian. His Episcopal Church domination had lapsed into schism between a liberal and conservative approach to Doctrine. Somewhere along the lines, he had donned the psychical mantle of a Christian Zionist thus he regarded me, a Jewish person, as somehow bearing a crucial element, expedited in the Final Days, that will summon Lord Jesus to appear in and then descent from the clouds and begin the redemption of this sin-sullied world.
In the days following the Oct 7 Israeli/Hamas hostilities, he became particularly solicitous, even to the paranoia-plangent point of offering his home as a place of refuge when (vaguely defined) forces would initiate US-style Nuremberg Laws against Jewish Americans. When I informed him that Jews were in zero danger from the US government, instead, due to the conflation of Zionism and Judaism, we posed a far greater danger to ourselves, he seemed dumbfounded, and even more so, and even to the point of taking offense, when, I posited, the role of Righteous Gentile should be fulfilled by shielding and sheltering the people that the US government terms as illegal. Withal, I requested he consider this verse from Scripture:
“When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.” – Leviticus 19:33-34.
Bill, for all intents and purposes, simply could not wrap his scripture beholden mind around the notion that said verse was applicable to the “ the least among us” in present day terms:
And the King will answer them, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.” – Matthew 25:40
There was an obtuseness, to the point of protective prickliness, evinced by my good news bearing friend if I pressed the subject matter. Then, as Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinian people raged on and the coming xenophobia-rancid rise of MAGA 2, our friendship, at least from his part, became untenable and Bill outright ghosted me.
In a direct manner, I had not attempted to confront him with the obvious: The Christian conservative evangelical system of belief is so radically antithetical to the gospel of Jesus Christ that an argument could be made that he and his brethren, in a collective manner, display the spirit of The Antichrist.
Luca Signorelli 1501 depiction of the face of the Antichrist from the Orvieto Cathedral
If the often metaphorically abstruse aspects of The Gospels can be applied, in clear terms to contemporary situations, this much should be obvious: the least among us in the form of so-called illegal immigrants should not be imprisoned within ICE detention centers and the tech billionaire’s will to dominate the earth violates the admonitions of Scripture, both Old and New Testament. Indeed, the oceanic phenomenon of the Age Of Information has engendered the rise of A Beast (of sorts) in the form of megalomania as evinced by Peter Thiel et al. For example, Thiel’s obsession with the lurid imagery of The Antichrist should be regarded as classic projection. In short, every accusation the libertarian true believer Thiel asserts in regard to the Antichrist’s lust for global domination should be regarded as an inadvertent confession of intent.
There is the banality of evil and the evil of banality. A hideous example of both deranged states of the human psyche: Pam Bondi’s refusal to turn around and acknowledge the survivors of Epstein-related exploitation. Bondi soul-defying response reflects her agenda to protect moneyed predators, in particular her boss, Predator-in-Thief Donald Trump; instead, during, her, universally mocked, congressional hearing crash-out, she waxed cretinous about the rising Stock Market (a rigged for predators dominion as well).
Bondi’s mode of mind and attendant actions brings into focus and defines the mindset of economic elites; that is, those in possession of obscene amounts of wealth enabling them to move through the world, causing massive harm without consequences while the lower economic rungs only exist as fodder for their exploitation.
The present capitalist order views us in the same regard as the girls Ghislaine Maxwell culled from across-the-tracks trailer parks — we are disposable, gig economy workers, as if we are hirelings pressed into service for the creepopathic desires of the Epstein-adjacent elite upon one of his massage tables.
We are in the demeaning thrall of the Capitalist Order for their Happy Ending (for them only) Nation.
Capitalist imperium, and this is unique (in a dismal kind of way) among past cultures, insofar as the proliferation of the present moment’s ugliness and shoddiness (e.g., take a perusal of the US interstate’s off-ramp architecture) and of the superficial (e.g., the contemporary breed of grifters known as influencers). This is the lying, hideous criteria we have been induced to take as reality.
Deep within, we know this: The banal architecture and relentless lies are the antithesis of what we long for mind, heart, and soul. The ugliness and superficial come-ons inflict a sense of aloneness and alienation — when we long for intimacy with life itself, to regard the world as the face of the beloved.
We yearn for the secrets vouchsafed within life’s mysteries to find affinity with our secret places, and then happen upon the company of others who we desire to invite into those secret places, for we know the world we carry within is endowed with far greater, more resonate realities than the extant world of fleeting appearances, and, in particular, the soul-defying, ad hoc ugliness of late capitalist modernity.
Thus the banality of AI slop. The innate, Homeric mythos of oneself is in constant danger of being buffeted into oblivion by the proliferation and prevailing dominance of electronic media mediocrity. There is a story within that is uniquely our own…It is freighted with mythic resonance that is drowned out and trampled by the banal clamor and footfalls of the herded masses.
There are vast, tragic consequences when the political and economic elite’s abuse of power grow unaccountable to humanity. One example: The lust for the bottomless accumulation of wealth of the capitalist overclass. Withal, Pam Bondi bellowing, “have you seen the Stock Market…? — directly correlates to the exponential rise of the planet’s greenhouse gases.
Headline: Scientific studies calculate climate change as health danger, while Trump calls it a ‘scam’ and Climate Change is beyond the tipping point[.]
Among the myriad crimes against humanity perpetrated by the (unaccountable) holders of power ruling the present order: their gaslighting regarding human created climate chaos, a phenomenon that threatens to render the Earth’s climate unconducive to the continuance of large scale human life on the planet. (Even if the aforementioned octopi haven’t checked the Stock Market as of late, the warming oceans of the Earth are highly salutary to their needs as a species thus octopi are thriving).
In short, life on earth will go on. Yet unless the scales fall from the eyes of the willfully blind, the human race’s prospects for futurity are far less propitious than that of cephalopod lifeforms.
To paraphrase a climate catastrophe denialist of a few decades back who asked, is our elites learning? Are they even capable of learning in the thrall of their greed-driven mania? The chief spokescretin of climate denial, one Donald Trump, Trump’s ravaged by mindless indulgence, in rapid decline body is the very emblem of humankind’s assault on the Earth’s ecological balance. As the poet (WB Yeats) averred, in his seminal poem of the carnage upon the psyche inflicted on the forces (i.e., a devouring, soul-devouring beast) of capitalist modernity: “[…]rough beast, its hour come round at last/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born”:
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”
All of which is anathema to the insight of a poet of an earlier generation:
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
— John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
The present order’s political and economic elite are siloed within a culture so isolated from Truth that their notion of Beauty is embodied by flights by private plane to Epstein’s Island.
It is a reality that Truth and Beauty can redeem us yet the economic elite and their political operatives and bagmen (and woman e.g., Pam Bondi) seem beyond redemption. The question is not if the system will collapse but when? Thus the knowledge evokes the crucial question, how will the rest of us act in that time of soul-challenging transition?
Take a few breaths. Close your eyes. Patience is required. There is a deathless quality within. It has always been there. In fact, it existed before Time. It cannot be manipulated nor dominated by the degraded forces of the present moment. The quality cannot be owned by billionaires. Exploiters cannot take it from you. The reservoirs of this inner landscape are inexhaustible. The soul’s innate energy surges forth in every heartbeat. Brooding within you like eternal Spring in deep Winter, its presence provides the ability to endure the noxious shoddiness and malignant lies of the present moment.
The post The Crook(s) of Revelation: There Is No Center to Hold appeared first on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Phil Rockstroh.