Why the World Is Going Mad

Charlie and Erika Kirk

Demonic possession is real. It is as Chesterton supposedly said, “When people cease to believe in God, they do not then believe in nothing, but in anything.”

This is something Jesus said in the Gospels: 

“When an impure spirit comes out of a person, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that person is worse than the first.” – Matthew 12:43-5. See also Luke 11: 24-5.

The only way to avoid delusion is to make sure your house is occupied. Occupied, that is, by a permanent relationship with God. Descartes, too, reasoned this through, step by step. God alone is our assurance of the reality of anything else. Otherwise we cannot tell delusion from reality.

Belief in God is therefore our sole protection against delusion. Which is again why Christianity spread so quickly throughout the ancient Roman world, and then through Northern Europe, and then through the Americas, and now through Africa: because it was able to efficiently cast out demons, which is to say delusions, which were then so prevalent. 

And this is again why “mental illness” and mass psychosis has again become so prevalent in recent years, since the early 20th century. It is because with scientism, faith in God has been in decline. This way madness lies.

Our intuition tells us things are not random. We see the patterns, especially the brightest among us, showing some intelligence is obviously behind events. Things are not random. We have been lied to that they are. If we will not accept that God and the Devil are behind it all, we will resort to conspiracy theories, which become paranoid delusions: the classic schizophrenic delusions. It is the CIA. It is the Jews. It is the greedy capitalists. It is aliens. It is the WEF. It is the Vatican. It is the Jesuits. They are out to get me. They are trying to control my thoughts.

It is demons trying to control your thoughts. They may at times use other people for their purposes.

Not that all conspiracy theories are wrong. Which makes it all the harder to resist the temptation to see them everywhere.

I believe Candace Owens has recently fallen off this wagon, and us an illustrative case in point—despite the fact that she has fairly recently publicly converted to Catholicism. Not all who say “Lord Lord” really believe. I don’t think her conversion has been sincere—more like an expression of anti-semitism in reaction to her employers at the Daily Wire.

To my mind, the clearest evidence Owens is off the glory train is her conviction that Brigitte Macron, the French president’s wife, is a man. Suppose she is. Why do we care? Why is it anyone else’s business? This is gossip, which is always at best a temptation to the sin of calumny. And this looks like the sin of calumny. That Candace is going so hard after this shows she is at best ignorant of her supposed Catholic faith. 

But it is an impressive, compelling conspiracy theory—and salacious. Imagine—the entire French government and the world press has been subverted! What else might this explain?

Ownes has also, of course, gone after the Jews. She responded “Jesus is king” to Ben Shapiro in a heated exchange, seeming to me to use her religion as a club. Not good-hearted, at best.

I always take antisemitism as a sign of the Devil. The Jews are, after all, God’s chosen people. The Christian Bible says so; Jesus himself affirms it in the gospels. And all the evidence of history says so: the miraculous Jewish survival and record of accomplishments for civilization in general say so. Anyone who goes after the Jews is explicitly going against God, therefore, and committing the sin of Cain: envy.

But the Jews are the convenient universal scapegoat if you are craving a good conspiracy theory. They are a closed group, and they are amazingly influential.

Finally, Owens is now going after Turning Point USA, accusing them, and Charlie Kirk’s widow Erika, of conspiring to assassinate Charlie Kirk.

I can see why she thinks so. My intuition tallies with hers in finding Erika Kirk’s reaction to his death profoundly insincere. And it is all delightfully salacious. It is always self-gratifying to think ill of successful people. For women, of a beautiful and accomplished woman like Erika Kirk, a former beauty queen.

But look at the practical effects of Owens’ campaign: it is attacking the victims of a crime in their time of grief. It is calculated to destroy Kirk’s organization, his legacy, and all that he was trying to do. If Erika Kirk did not assassinate Charlie Kirk, Candace Owens is trying to do so. This is the sort of calling-card the Devil leaves in his wake. He is always doing the opposite of what he pretends to do.

Owens’ conviction that French intelligence and/or Israel and/or the CIA or someone are trying to assassinate her is the next step in her paranoia.

It is not lovely to watch.

The Tell-Tale Heart

 

I am not a fan of Edgar Allen Poe. To me, his writing is over the top—fear-jerking, cheap thrills.

But I just went through “The Tell-Tale Heart” with a student, and I think Poe may have a lead here on the true nature and cause of what modern psychiatry calls “paranoid schizophrenia.” 

In the story, the narrator is driven to psychosis by a guilty conscience. And not only guilt over murdering an old; he murders the old man in the first place out of guilt. A bad conscience made him imagine the old man saw into his soul and was judging him.

Poe does not tell us what he feels guilty about in the first place; but the clue is his insistence throughout the tale that he is not mad. He is more concerned about this than about being convicted of murder—he is resisting the obvious insanity defense. Why?

Out of pride. It is literally vitally important to him to convince the reader that his version of reality is the correct one. He must have the ability to impose his will on reality, and not concede to it.

In other words, a schizophrenic is a narcissist overwhelmed by his guilty conscience.

This is consistent with a mystery I read of a long time ago, in a book about Florida’s “death row.” It claimed that virtually everyone on death row seemed fully insane, delusional. Even though they were all judged sane and able to stand trial when they were convicted. And this included contract killers, mob killers—people who did it professionally, as a job. It seems implausible that such people were psychotic at the time they committed their crimes; a psychotic cannot plan well enough for a mob hit. 

Possibly the fear of death drove them mad; but most of us see death coming at the end of our lives, and do not go mad expecting it. It seems more likely the psychosis was provoked by having the chance to meditate over their former deeds.

M. Scott Peck, and Robert Fleiss, have both observed that narcissists when challenged can become psychotic. After all, their everyday assumptions, if examined closely, are already delusional. They all secretly think they are better than everyone, a Napoleon, or the god Siva, or the virgin Mary, or the promised Messiah. They will delude themselves with ideas of their own exceptional talents: like Poe’s narrator boasting of his extremely sensitive hearing, and of how clever he was in how he committed the murder and hid the body. This is how narcissists talk.

Shake them up enough, and the mask they wear to hide these assumptions from others slips. They openly declare themselves Napoleon, or Siva, or the Virgin Mary.

Paranoia comes with schizophrenia. Paranoia is itself a clear expression of egotism. It is the belief that everything is about you. Someone on the television is speaking directly to you. The CIA is trying to control you—obviously, they consider you that important. Everything is a message for you personally.

This is all the opposite of depression, which is caused by a sense of inferiority.

But in either case, the obvious and necessary cure is the same: to bring God and submission to God into the mix. 

Conspiracies

If you don't know what this image means, I'm not telling.

Everyone on the left is currently deeply concerned about “QAnon.” My friend Xerxes points out that it is a conspiracy theory, and conspiracy theories are not rational.

He is right, but not in the way he thinks. QAnon is apparently in itself a conspiracy theory. But getting agitated about QAnon is also a conspiracy theory, considering QAnon a significant factor. Yet people on the left apparently do. In a recent poll, those on the right listed their chief concern as illegal immigration. Those on the left listed their chief concern as people on the right.

Funny that I only ever hear of QAnon from the left. On the right, nobody is interested. The same was true, a little while ago, of “Pizzagate.” Nothing about it on the right; the left was all over it. Or the “alt-right”: same thing. Entirely a discovery, if not an invention, of the left. Or “anti-vaxxers.” Definitely started on the left, with figures like RFK Jr. Or “white supremacists.” According to the left, everybody but them is a white supremacist. The term is never used on the right. Or "dog whistles." People on the left keep hearing them, but imagining they are for the right. People on the right never hear them.

In other words, “QAnon,” the “alt-right,” and “white supremacy” are conspiracy theories—in that they really exist almost entirely in the imaginations of people afraid of them. The reality is probably in each case a few kids blogging from their basements, and probably being misinterpreted or misquoted at that. You could probably conjure up an infinite number of such conspiracies on any conceivable subject with a little Googling.

Most if not all of leftist politics seems to be based on conspiracy theories. One is the concept of “patriarchy”: that men, throughout the ages, have been conspiring to oppress women. Or the Marxist concepts of “ideology” and “hegemony.” Marxism, very like Gnosticism, holds that most or all of what we think of as reality is actually invented by rich capitalists to maintain their control. Or the idea that “white people” have invented not just the USA, but Western civilization in order to suppress “people of colour.”

The larger a claimed conspiracy, and the longer it is claimed to have continued, the less plausible. Because people are people, and are not good at keeping secrets. Yet with “patriarchy,” “white supremacy,” or Marxist “ideology,” the left has gone as far as possible: conspiracies embracing the entire world since the first written records.

Pettipiece: “Ancient Gnostics believed that the world we perceive is, in fact, a prison constructed by demonic powers to enslave the soul and that only a small spiritual elite are blessed with special knowledge — or gnosis — that enables them to unmask this deception.”

Striking, surely, how closely that describes the claims of the left, since at least Lenin’s “vanguard of the proletariat”; if not to Rousseau and the French “romantic” revolutionaries.

Why do people keep believing in conspiracies? In part, because some conspiracies are real: ask Julius Caesar. Ask Adam Smith, who observed that, if any two members of the same trade got together, the conversation would inevitably turn to possible collusion in restraint of trade.

But more broadly, and for the bigger, less plausible conspiracies, it is because of a loss of belief in God.

People need meaning. We are born with an empty God-sized hole in our hearts. With God, you have meaning. Without God, you have paranoia.

As G.K. Chesterton observed, “people who do not believe in God will believe in anything.”