Carpool Karaoke with the Devil at the Wheel

 

In the New Testament, Jesus casts out demons from a boy who seems to be epileptic. Matthew 17:14-18.

When they returned to the crowds again a man came and knelt in front of Jesus. “Lord, do have pity on my son,” he said, “for he is a lunatic and is in a terrible state. He is always falling into the fire or into the water. I did bring him to your disciples but they couldn’t cure him.”

“You really are an unbelieving and difficult people,” Jesus returned. “How long must I be with you, and how long must I put up with you? Bring him here to me!”

Then Jesus reprimanded the evil spirit and it went out of the boy, who was cured from that moment.

Lucian of Samosata, a pagan Greek exorcist, dealt with similar cases.

“Everyone knows how time after time he has found a man thrown down on the ground in a lunatic fit, foaming at the mouth and rolling his eyes; and how he has got him on to his feet again and sent him away in his right mind.”

This is sometimes pointed to as evidence that the ancients simply misunderstood mental illness; there is really no such thing as demonic possession. We know, after all, that epilepsy is caused by physical damage to the brain.

But this does not explain how they seem to have believed they could cure it.

The long-distance diagnosis of epilepsy may after all be wrong. Falling down, rolling eyes, foaming at the mouth, jumping into the fire or the water—this also sounds like a child’s tantrum, magnified and taken to an extreme.

The thought is inspired by some recent TikTok clips of leftist women reacting to the death of Ruth Bader Ginsberg. They are throwing tantrums. And one of them, the woman with the short dark hair, the fourth in this compilation—you have a look.

What is a tantrum? It is when a person is completely under the control of some desire, some want, some urge. Not some emotion: that looks quite different. Someone overcome with sorrow, for example, will go entirely quiet. Someone overcome with fear will hide. Someone overcome with love will hug. This is desire, not emotion, a primal hunger, a violent assertion of self-will. But then again, it is more complicated than that: the desire seems to take over the will; the women in the video are no longer in control of themselves. Rather than self-willed, they may even be self-destructive: “I wish I had been aborted.” They might throw themselves into a fire, or break their own toys.

The easiest way to make sense of it is to understand this thing, this desire, as an independent will; which is to say, a possessing demon. It thinks and acts independently of the will, and controls it.

Hitler, they say, used to throw such fits. As is immortalized in a million memes. 

We commonly nowadays call such possessed people “narcissists.” This is fairly apt. Narcissus himself, in the legend, was possessed by just such a demon, a lust towards himself, which was self-destructive. But he is perhaps more instance than ideal paradigm. We have been prejudiced in his direction as a vestige of Freud’s pseudo-biological fixation on sex as prime motive.

Possessed might be a better term. Such people might be possessed by any or all of the Seven Deadly Sins: pride, wrath, lust, envy, acedia, gluttony, avarice. All of whom are traditionally, and properly, understood as demons.

For two thousand years or so, Christianity has been here to keep such demons at bay. In the East, Buddhism has done the same work, beginning with the Noble Truth that such desires are the root of all suffering. All major religions no doubt do this work.

Now we have turned away from religion, and the demons run wild in the streets.