Flying Monkeys

 

G. K. Chesterton is supposed to have said “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing. They then become capable of believing in anything.”

Jesus says something similar in the New Testament: 

“When an evil spirit leaves a person, it goes into the desert, seeking rest but finding none. Then it says, ‘I will return to the person I came from.’ So it returns and finds its former home empty, swept, and in order. Then the spirit finds seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they all enter the person and live there.”

It is not enough to exorcise a demon, a “mental illness.” It will come back. The only way to expel a demon permanently is religious faith.

And then there’s Bob Dylan: “It may be the Devil, or it may be the Lord, but you gonna havta serve somebody.”

We are created with a God-shaped hole in our soul. Without this absolute, our thoughts and our emotions cannot cohere. If God and Good and Truth is not allowed to fill that hole, something will. Fenatyl, alcohol, Marxism, sex, power, status. Something.

For the narcissist, it is the ephemeral concept of self that fills that hole; or the self’s arbitrary desires.

Good, God, and Truth then becomes the ultimate enemy. The narcissist will deliberately deny Truth and morality. Truth is whatever they will it to be, and do what you will is the full extent of the law.

If a person is committed to God or Truth or Good, they will perceive this person as evil. This recognition is terrifying: it means to stare in the face of the Devil. Hence, PTSD. 

But if a person is not committed to God or Truth or Good, such a person will fill their God-shaped hole. They are liable to idolize them. They act, after all, as though they are God. They seem sure of themselves.

This is what produces the familiar phenomenon of “flying monkeys,” people who do the bidding of the narcissist in tormenting their victims.

These are the True Believers.