Original Sin and Utopia
“Communism counted on and hastened the disappearance of religions, but in contemporary democracies religions are disappearing on their own. Communism may have decreed that politics would ultimately disappear, but in today’s world civic life is denigrated by those who stay away from the polls. Communism did everything it could to break down community and hierarchical bonds, encouraging even family members to inform on one another; these bonds are now undone by indifference. In other words, we have not really broken with out recent past; our world is an extension of it. It is as if the nihilism of late modernity were pursuing the uncompleted work of utopian ideologies.”
-Chantal Delsol, Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century, p.39
This passage was written in the year 2000, before we started to see the kind of radical atheism that was generated as a response to the cultural critique of perceived religious fundamentalism, both Christian and Muslim, which followed 9/11. I personally have issues with ascribing the term “fundamentalist” to people whose ideologies contradict the most basic premises of their nominal religious affiliation, but I am apparently alone in this. The point is that liberal democracy has accomplished what communism failed to do. It has done so, as Delsol points out, by ‘ridicule and incessant denigration,’ rather than by social engineering. Communism attempted to legislate these institutions out of existence while liberal democracy merely sneered at them, promoted a totalitarian ideology in which one is expected to sneer at them, and they disappeared on their own.
The two relevant questions, to my mind, are “how did liberal democracy achieve this?” and “what are the consequences?”
Delsol explores these ideas at some length, and in Unlearned Lessons, she points her finger at the erosion of the doctrine of original sin. This is an important question for the proponents of humanitarianism and liberal democracy, but it is also important to Thelemites, who share this view to some extent. We are agreed that original sin is a disastrous notion, but how we attempt to solve the problem of evil in light of our rejection of will radically affect the kind of values and society we create.
In Delsol’s critique of liberal democracy’s answer to original sin, she lays the blame at the feet of Rousseau:
“For Rousseau, ‘original sin’ is a deception. Man is by nature innocent and pure, as long as he has not been corrupted by culture and society. To explain this corruption, there must have been a mythic moment in time when the initial split between the innocent and the guilty appeared. He who first said ‘this is mine,’ invented private property, and thereby signaled the advent of a group of intrinsically guilty people, responsible for all the evil in tve world. Rousseau, who thought of himself as the only natural and pure man to have survived perversion, predicted the eventual arrival of a group of innocents capable or re-creating the lost society. A little later Fichte firmly rejected the thesis of original sin. … On those grounds, he called for the construction of a ‘perfect system’ through the fashioning of a ‘perfect man…”
Ibid p.175
The precondition for any such system would have to be the erosion of the social institutions that create the ‘evil’ in human beings. Liberal democracy succeeded where communism failed because it fostered a totalitarianism of society’s values rather than a totalitarianism of the state. This has been enabled by a corporate plutocracy whose personal wealth is invested in maintaining a myopic consumer culture that cherishes idleness and ridicules ideology, and promotes comfort over conviction through a very sophisticated mass media onslaught. The intent is never explicit, as it was in the case of communism, which made no effort to conceal its aims, and thus is was a great deal easier for the public to become invested in and identify with.
To find a fairly obvious example of this phenomenon, look no further than television aimed at children. The primary institutions that children participate in are school and the family. Since the 1980’s, the primary message of cartoons aimed at kids has been “your teachers are lame,” “school is lame and you shouldn’t want to be there,” “your parents are lame, especially if they encourage you to participate in school,” and “Television is cool, and provides you with the things your teachers and parents try to deny you.” You can argue with me about this, but you’d have to be clinically insane or living in a bubble to do so. The same programming aimed at adults also criticizes cultural institutions such as the family and the church. Where is does not explicitly say they are “evil,” as communist propaganda might, it holds them up for ridicule and indicates that they should not be taken seriously. As a method of destroying the power that these institutions held over society’s values, this is much more effective than communism’s attempts to legislate them out of existence. This cultural shift, caused by mass media entertainment, is what Delsol refers to when she says:
“…there is no longer any question of outlawing traditional forms of behavior; instead, they are ridiculed with incessant denigration, and their all-too-obvious mediocrity is the subject of sarcasm. In other words, it is a question of destroying by discrediting that which squadrons of henchmen in the service of power were unable to undo.”
Ibid p.38
The neat trick of this is to make the mainstream culture seem as though it was an underdog fighting against a larger oppressive foe. Erich Fromm’s observations on Mickey Mouse’s popularity in the 50’s apply here. People want to root for the little guy, and television makes them believe that’s what they’re doing. Look no further than the Simpsons, arguably the most popular show of the last twenty years. It presents itself as rebellious and controversial, when the fact of the matter is that there is nothing more mainstream and ubiquitous. If it were actually rebelling against mainstream values, it would not be popular. This is so obvious that most people don’t even notice it. The faux rebellion that is also found on South Park and other supposedly “shocking” shows, however much it may hold cultural institutions up for ridicule, also grounds itself firmly in the intrinsic goodness of human beings, in the Christian sense of loving one’s neighbor and sacrificing one’s own needs for the good of the group.
Rousseau’s rejection of the doctrine of original sin is also based on an assertion of the essentially “pure” and “good” nature of human beings. His ideas of purity and goodness are also intrinsically Christian in nature. The “natural man” is described as such only when he seeks to harm no one, causes no strife, and lives at peace with his neighbors. Ironically this “natural man” is, in nature, nowhere to be found. Crowley and Nietzsche also reject the notion of original sin, but their rejection is based on the idea that the so-called “evil” in human beings is not evil at all, but that the essential nature of humanity is to be lustful, vibrant, belligerent at times, and ultimately to seek either individual self-determination, or to submit oneself to someone who has accomplished that state of being.
Rather than declaring that these aspects of the human condition are foreign substances implanted by evil social institutions, the prophets of the New Aeon embrace them as natural, therefore good, and reject the Christian notion of evil as a product of the fear and guilt of people who are unable to reach that self-determined state of being. The values of liberal democracy may seem “nice” to most people, but what is the harvest? They have produced wealth and security for a very small group of people and for the rest there are pointless and costly invasions; extra-judiciary executions of legitimate political figures, economic terrorism by world banking institutions, (in the name of humanitarian aid) torture, unlawful detention, and scores of other crimes against the human spirit.
This, according to Delsol, is what is at stake:
“The abandonment of the idea of ‘original sin,’ understood as evil rooted in our very condition, gives rise to two consequences: it becomes possible to hope for the elimination of evil, and it becomes necessary to situate the cause of evil elsewhere. A declared belief that evil can be eradicated from the face of the earth raises the question of how to accomplish this task of secular redemption. The only possible solution consists of isolating evil in certain groups-both visible and recognizable-which can then be eliminated.”
-Ibid, p.175
Because these are the people preventing the “perfecting” of our society, they must be destroyed by any means necessary. This is not so hard to understand. The most convicted humanitarians consider WWII to be a “just” war because it was fought against the Nazis. The fact that the Nazis were human beings as well is not something many people like to think about. To many, the Third Reich is a personification of a kind of absolute evil rather than the obvious consequence of social and economic factors which followed Germany’s defeat in WWI. It is easier for liberals to blame the demonic Adolph for what happened, rather than look at the economic terrorism that the allies inflicted on post-war Germany, just as it is easer for Americans to blame Saddam for Iraqi suffering rather than look at the suffering and death caused by the post-war sanctions imposed and maintained by the terrorist Bill Clinton. All of this, naturally, was done because the victims were seen as enemies of human perfection.
By rejecting original sin but accepting the idea that human imperfection is circumstantial rather than moral, the prophets of the New Aeon place the responsibility for human perfection on the actions of self-determined individuals. We do not attain this lofty goal by destroying some enemy, but rather by individuals striving to become more than they are. One solution is intrinsically positive, one is intrinsically negative. This should come as no surprise, considering that the basic premise of the rejection of original sin is in one case that human beings are good and have been made evil on one hand, and that the idea of absolute evil is nonsense on the other.
In Liber V Crowley tells us (as I never get tired of quoting) “the idea of evil, independent of conditions, is fatal to philosophy.” Crowley is not saying, as are some that Delsol addresses above, that evil is intrinsically part of the human condition, but rather evil is part of the circumstances humans find themselves in. Scuba gear is good in the ocean, evil in the desert, and has no absolute negative value beyond that.
This leads us quite nicely into Delsol’s critique of liberal democracy’s notion of individualism. I suspect I’ll write more on that in the future, this essay seems long enough as it is. But I encourage people to take a look at what she has to say about this subject. Thelema is individualistic, and because it shares this ideal with mainstream culture Thelemites can overlook the need to think critically about individualism. Do Delsol's criticisms apply to Thelema?
Returning to morality, if evil is a result of our conditions, the imperative to confront it does not come from some idea of perfecting the human condition as a whole, but rather, it becomes relative to our individual situation. Whatever confrontation we have happens on an individual level, motivated by our own values. We confront ‘people as people,’ not ‘people as personifications of a transcendent evil.’ This is a key distinction. By situating certain groups as enemies of a utopian ideal, they become personifications of evil. When we understand that they are only enemies of US, as individuals, we become able to “fight like brothers,” as Liber AL tells us to do. What’s more, we understand that we are personally responsible for the choices we make when we decide to fight that fight, unlike those who fight in the name of eradicating evil qua evil.
All the same, if there is no shared project or shared ideology, we collapse into the same nihilism that Rousseau’s system produces. “If each individual lays claim to his own conception of good and evil, to his own morality and law, then dialogue is no more possible than is each were to speak his own tongue.” (Ibid p. 134) This is where the idea that the self-determined individual brings those who are not capable of achieving that state around to his or her project becomes paramount. This requires a self-determined leader with conviction. This is the emergence of the master/slave dialectic that threatens so many people. Without conviction in one’s beliefs, they simply become opinions that are not worth fighting over at all. The slave’s fear of conflict becomes justified as promoting social peace. This is why the individualism of a master has to be understood as an ideology worth bringing other people around to. As Delsol points out:
“Once converting others to one’s belief is seen as worthy of ridicule, personal conviction must eventually become muted, while the need for an identity, which never fades, still finds satisfaction. Universal messages are in this way turned into tools that serve the purposes of individuals and identity groups, in the hope that social peace will be the consequences and reward for the effacement of these messages.”
Ibid. p.126
To posit social peace as a goal is to have a goal that obviously contradicts the human condition. Ironically, impersonal corporations are perpetrating the bloody wars now being carried out in the name of social peace. The war advocated by Liber AL is a personal matter. When Aiwass says, "kill and torture," he's not talking about one stranger beating another in a locked cell, after stranger B. has been flown in from Afghanistan and stranger A. has been flown in from Chicago, to meet once on that occasion, know nothing of one another, and never to see each other again. Such an encounter has no personal conviction in the sense of individual self-determination. It is merely an example of servile obedience to an unknown master.
If social peace requires global war, might not the acceptance of conflict on a personal, and therefore social level, create a state of global peace? If we were personally invested in the conflicts we participate in, how might that change the world as we know it?
The cultural institutions that communism and democracy sought to destroy have, for better or for worse, vanished. We cannot bring them back to life. The question is: What will we replace them with?
-Chantal Delsol, Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century, p.39
This passage was written in the year 2000, before we started to see the kind of radical atheism that was generated as a response to the cultural critique of perceived religious fundamentalism, both Christian and Muslim, which followed 9/11. I personally have issues with ascribing the term “fundamentalist” to people whose ideologies contradict the most basic premises of their nominal religious affiliation, but I am apparently alone in this. The point is that liberal democracy has accomplished what communism failed to do. It has done so, as Delsol points out, by ‘ridicule and incessant denigration,’ rather than by social engineering. Communism attempted to legislate these institutions out of existence while liberal democracy merely sneered at them, promoted a totalitarian ideology in which one is expected to sneer at them, and they disappeared on their own.
The two relevant questions, to my mind, are “how did liberal democracy achieve this?” and “what are the consequences?”
Delsol explores these ideas at some length, and in Unlearned Lessons, she points her finger at the erosion of the doctrine of original sin. This is an important question for the proponents of humanitarianism and liberal democracy, but it is also important to Thelemites, who share this view to some extent. We are agreed that original sin is a disastrous notion, but how we attempt to solve the problem of evil in light of our rejection of will radically affect the kind of values and society we create.
In Delsol’s critique of liberal democracy’s answer to original sin, she lays the blame at the feet of Rousseau:
“For Rousseau, ‘original sin’ is a deception. Man is by nature innocent and pure, as long as he has not been corrupted by culture and society. To explain this corruption, there must have been a mythic moment in time when the initial split between the innocent and the guilty appeared. He who first said ‘this is mine,’ invented private property, and thereby signaled the advent of a group of intrinsically guilty people, responsible for all the evil in tve world. Rousseau, who thought of himself as the only natural and pure man to have survived perversion, predicted the eventual arrival of a group of innocents capable or re-creating the lost society. A little later Fichte firmly rejected the thesis of original sin. … On those grounds, he called for the construction of a ‘perfect system’ through the fashioning of a ‘perfect man…”
Ibid p.175
The precondition for any such system would have to be the erosion of the social institutions that create the ‘evil’ in human beings. Liberal democracy succeeded where communism failed because it fostered a totalitarianism of society’s values rather than a totalitarianism of the state. This has been enabled by a corporate plutocracy whose personal wealth is invested in maintaining a myopic consumer culture that cherishes idleness and ridicules ideology, and promotes comfort over conviction through a very sophisticated mass media onslaught. The intent is never explicit, as it was in the case of communism, which made no effort to conceal its aims, and thus is was a great deal easier for the public to become invested in and identify with.
To find a fairly obvious example of this phenomenon, look no further than television aimed at children. The primary institutions that children participate in are school and the family. Since the 1980’s, the primary message of cartoons aimed at kids has been “your teachers are lame,” “school is lame and you shouldn’t want to be there,” “your parents are lame, especially if they encourage you to participate in school,” and “Television is cool, and provides you with the things your teachers and parents try to deny you.” You can argue with me about this, but you’d have to be clinically insane or living in a bubble to do so. The same programming aimed at adults also criticizes cultural institutions such as the family and the church. Where is does not explicitly say they are “evil,” as communist propaganda might, it holds them up for ridicule and indicates that they should not be taken seriously. As a method of destroying the power that these institutions held over society’s values, this is much more effective than communism’s attempts to legislate them out of existence. This cultural shift, caused by mass media entertainment, is what Delsol refers to when she says:
“…there is no longer any question of outlawing traditional forms of behavior; instead, they are ridiculed with incessant denigration, and their all-too-obvious mediocrity is the subject of sarcasm. In other words, it is a question of destroying by discrediting that which squadrons of henchmen in the service of power were unable to undo.”
Ibid p.38
The neat trick of this is to make the mainstream culture seem as though it was an underdog fighting against a larger oppressive foe. Erich Fromm’s observations on Mickey Mouse’s popularity in the 50’s apply here. People want to root for the little guy, and television makes them believe that’s what they’re doing. Look no further than the Simpsons, arguably the most popular show of the last twenty years. It presents itself as rebellious and controversial, when the fact of the matter is that there is nothing more mainstream and ubiquitous. If it were actually rebelling against mainstream values, it would not be popular. This is so obvious that most people don’t even notice it. The faux rebellion that is also found on South Park and other supposedly “shocking” shows, however much it may hold cultural institutions up for ridicule, also grounds itself firmly in the intrinsic goodness of human beings, in the Christian sense of loving one’s neighbor and sacrificing one’s own needs for the good of the group.
Rousseau’s rejection of the doctrine of original sin is also based on an assertion of the essentially “pure” and “good” nature of human beings. His ideas of purity and goodness are also intrinsically Christian in nature. The “natural man” is described as such only when he seeks to harm no one, causes no strife, and lives at peace with his neighbors. Ironically this “natural man” is, in nature, nowhere to be found. Crowley and Nietzsche also reject the notion of original sin, but their rejection is based on the idea that the so-called “evil” in human beings is not evil at all, but that the essential nature of humanity is to be lustful, vibrant, belligerent at times, and ultimately to seek either individual self-determination, or to submit oneself to someone who has accomplished that state of being.
Rather than declaring that these aspects of the human condition are foreign substances implanted by evil social institutions, the prophets of the New Aeon embrace them as natural, therefore good, and reject the Christian notion of evil as a product of the fear and guilt of people who are unable to reach that self-determined state of being. The values of liberal democracy may seem “nice” to most people, but what is the harvest? They have produced wealth and security for a very small group of people and for the rest there are pointless and costly invasions; extra-judiciary executions of legitimate political figures, economic terrorism by world banking institutions, (in the name of humanitarian aid) torture, unlawful detention, and scores of other crimes against the human spirit.
This, according to Delsol, is what is at stake:
“The abandonment of the idea of ‘original sin,’ understood as evil rooted in our very condition, gives rise to two consequences: it becomes possible to hope for the elimination of evil, and it becomes necessary to situate the cause of evil elsewhere. A declared belief that evil can be eradicated from the face of the earth raises the question of how to accomplish this task of secular redemption. The only possible solution consists of isolating evil in certain groups-both visible and recognizable-which can then be eliminated.”
-Ibid, p.175
Because these are the people preventing the “perfecting” of our society, they must be destroyed by any means necessary. This is not so hard to understand. The most convicted humanitarians consider WWII to be a “just” war because it was fought against the Nazis. The fact that the Nazis were human beings as well is not something many people like to think about. To many, the Third Reich is a personification of a kind of absolute evil rather than the obvious consequence of social and economic factors which followed Germany’s defeat in WWI. It is easier for liberals to blame the demonic Adolph for what happened, rather than look at the economic terrorism that the allies inflicted on post-war Germany, just as it is easer for Americans to blame Saddam for Iraqi suffering rather than look at the suffering and death caused by the post-war sanctions imposed and maintained by the terrorist Bill Clinton. All of this, naturally, was done because the victims were seen as enemies of human perfection.
By rejecting original sin but accepting the idea that human imperfection is circumstantial rather than moral, the prophets of the New Aeon place the responsibility for human perfection on the actions of self-determined individuals. We do not attain this lofty goal by destroying some enemy, but rather by individuals striving to become more than they are. One solution is intrinsically positive, one is intrinsically negative. This should come as no surprise, considering that the basic premise of the rejection of original sin is in one case that human beings are good and have been made evil on one hand, and that the idea of absolute evil is nonsense on the other.
In Liber V Crowley tells us (as I never get tired of quoting) “the idea of evil, independent of conditions, is fatal to philosophy.” Crowley is not saying, as are some that Delsol addresses above, that evil is intrinsically part of the human condition, but rather evil is part of the circumstances humans find themselves in. Scuba gear is good in the ocean, evil in the desert, and has no absolute negative value beyond that.
This leads us quite nicely into Delsol’s critique of liberal democracy’s notion of individualism. I suspect I’ll write more on that in the future, this essay seems long enough as it is. But I encourage people to take a look at what she has to say about this subject. Thelema is individualistic, and because it shares this ideal with mainstream culture Thelemites can overlook the need to think critically about individualism. Do Delsol's criticisms apply to Thelema?
Returning to morality, if evil is a result of our conditions, the imperative to confront it does not come from some idea of perfecting the human condition as a whole, but rather, it becomes relative to our individual situation. Whatever confrontation we have happens on an individual level, motivated by our own values. We confront ‘people as people,’ not ‘people as personifications of a transcendent evil.’ This is a key distinction. By situating certain groups as enemies of a utopian ideal, they become personifications of evil. When we understand that they are only enemies of US, as individuals, we become able to “fight like brothers,” as Liber AL tells us to do. What’s more, we understand that we are personally responsible for the choices we make when we decide to fight that fight, unlike those who fight in the name of eradicating evil qua evil.
All the same, if there is no shared project or shared ideology, we collapse into the same nihilism that Rousseau’s system produces. “If each individual lays claim to his own conception of good and evil, to his own morality and law, then dialogue is no more possible than is each were to speak his own tongue.” (Ibid p. 134) This is where the idea that the self-determined individual brings those who are not capable of achieving that state around to his or her project becomes paramount. This requires a self-determined leader with conviction. This is the emergence of the master/slave dialectic that threatens so many people. Without conviction in one’s beliefs, they simply become opinions that are not worth fighting over at all. The slave’s fear of conflict becomes justified as promoting social peace. This is why the individualism of a master has to be understood as an ideology worth bringing other people around to. As Delsol points out:
“Once converting others to one’s belief is seen as worthy of ridicule, personal conviction must eventually become muted, while the need for an identity, which never fades, still finds satisfaction. Universal messages are in this way turned into tools that serve the purposes of individuals and identity groups, in the hope that social peace will be the consequences and reward for the effacement of these messages.”
Ibid. p.126
To posit social peace as a goal is to have a goal that obviously contradicts the human condition. Ironically, impersonal corporations are perpetrating the bloody wars now being carried out in the name of social peace. The war advocated by Liber AL is a personal matter. When Aiwass says, "kill and torture," he's not talking about one stranger beating another in a locked cell, after stranger B. has been flown in from Afghanistan and stranger A. has been flown in from Chicago, to meet once on that occasion, know nothing of one another, and never to see each other again. Such an encounter has no personal conviction in the sense of individual self-determination. It is merely an example of servile obedience to an unknown master.
If social peace requires global war, might not the acceptance of conflict on a personal, and therefore social level, create a state of global peace? If we were personally invested in the conflicts we participate in, how might that change the world as we know it?
The cultural institutions that communism and democracy sought to destroy have, for better or for worse, vanished. We cannot bring them back to life. The question is: What will we replace them with?