It has long been argued that man is an inherently religious creature – that he cannot exist without worshipping something. And indeed, it seems that many people who eschew religion end up equally fanatical about something else, whether it be the dictatorship of the proletariat, or women’s issues, or global warming, or white guilt. Or something.
Almost any belief system can give rise to slavish devotion, bloody persecutions and holy wars, as long as it is packaged in a way that resonates in the right parts of the human psyche.
You see, for something to be a religion, it must give rise to religious feelings – that tantalizing combination of epiphany, reverence, and ecstasy that people call a religious experience. Interestingly, I can recall several women comparing it to orgasm, but I have yet to hear a man make this comparison. Even so, sexual frustration is more easily turned into religious fanaticism than anything else, as any Jihadi recruiter of suicide bombers can tell you.
But there is more to it than that. The religious experience is centred in the amygdala and the insula – the same organs which mediate emotional affinity, dominance and submission, sexual desire and fear. Which is why no self-respecting horror movie is complete without some luscious female, dragged off, naked and screaming, to be punished unspeakably for her hypersexual ways by some vile denizen of hell… and why the media incites a prurient fascination with lurid sex crimes while clamouring for even more lurid psycho-punitive treatments to be applied by a merciless totalitarian state.
These are two modern examples of how such feelings are used to separate people from their money and to deprive them of their freedom. Motivating belief systems isn’t the only thing these feelings can be used for, but it is the most dangerous.
If these feelings are not triggered – in exactly the right combination – the experience is just not emotionally compelling. In which case the belief system will go nowhere, and all the sophisticated logic in the world will not help it. But if the feelings are properly triggered, the experience is addictive, and the formal logical structure simply doesn’t matter.
All the high-level abstractions are just there to keep the neocortex busy and get it out of the way, so the paleocortex can have a party with the limbic system and the mesencephalic dopamine system. (The former is the so-called reptilian brain, including the brain stem, the basal ganglia, and the hippocampus, which together mediate the instincts, basic drives and urges, and ritual/repetitive behaviours; the latter, including the cingulate and insular cortices, mediate emotion, motivation, learning and perceptions of self/other).
Now, many of these structures, together with the corpus callosum, exhibit intense, synchronized rhythmic activity during epileptic seizures – and, to a somewhat lesser degree, during ritual chanting and dance. And orgasm. So it is no accident that epileptic seizures are often associated with spontaneous orgasm and religious experiences – or that ritual chanting and dance are commonly used to induce similar states, especially in conjunction with substances that stimulate the dopamine receptors.
And, since these areas are more densely interconnected in females than males, it is no accident that these states are observed more often in females than in males. And, in turn, it is no accident that charismatic religious leaders are mostly men who know how to induce these feelings, while their devout followers are mostly women who are addicted to them.
This is one of the fundamental pillars of male power – related to, but deeper than the mere fact that males are bigger and stronger and more aggressive. But that line of thought takes us in a different direction, leading ultimately to why women derive deep satisfaction from submitting to powerful men, and why the success of feminism leads inescapably to the emotional barrenness of modern women.
As civilization progresses and the frontal cortex gets more involved in daily life, people require ever more sophisticated rationalizations and justifications for exhibiting behaviours and seeking cognitive states which have not changed appreciably since long before we were even human. So it wasn’t long before manipulative individuals realized that control over when and where and how these drives, urges and feelings are expressed leads to control over people. And that was bad enough.
But somewhere along the line, someone learned that these drives, urges and feelings are far more susceptible to manipulation when they are repressed than when they are expressed. And so the ancient polytheistic fertility cults, with their debauched orgies and their blood sacrifices, were replaced by modern monotheistic cults of chastity, with their sterile piety and their neurotic self-mortification. But they are still obsessed with sex and death. Only the polarity of the obsession has changed.
Mother, father, reward and punishment fit into this picture at every level in many ways – not all of which are consistent with what the political correctness thought police would have you believe. The archetypes of mother and father are layered on the same neurophysiological substrates that form the religious experience, in much the same way.
Gods and goddesses are not merely layered on father and mother, they are inextricably entangled with them. But my point is that there is also a direct connection from our highest religious constructs to our basest drives, urges, feelings and instincts. Of course, you can’t take mother and father out of the equation, but if you did, you would find that we are still hard-wired for religion.
And this is a root cause of all the trouble we are in today.
You see, by destroying the family, the secular feminist totalitarian state does exactly that: it takes mother and father out of the equation. But we just saw that you can’t eliminate the archetypes. So the removal (or even worse, the emotional distancing) of the real mother and father leaves a huge, gaping, undefended hole that penetrates to the core of the psyche. And this takes the full power of all that deep psychological structure, and puts it right in the hands of the state. And/or the church. And/or the corporation.
In the past, the family – meaning a man, his wife, and their children – was the last and best line of defence, limiting the oppressor’s access to people’s subconscious minds, just by existing. It is much harder for church and state to manipulate the archetypes of father, mother, god and goddess when real flesh-and-blood mothers and fathers are standing in the way. But now that this last line of defence has been breached, people are left very exposed and vulnerable to manipulation.
Thunder, fire, sun and moon have been robbed of their mystical power by modern science. But the ancient and unbreakable connection between sex, magic and death is absolutely fundamental, just as Freud and Jung told us. The dynamics of the Id – the structure and function of the collective unconscious – are directly determined by the neurophysiological structure and function of the central nervous system. Only its expression can be modulated by the environment – and of course this modulation can be very dramatic, to the extent of completely inverting the natural way of being and resulting in an unrecognizably crippled psyche.
And this is what we see in modern Western civilization.
Music and dance have been decoupled from spirituality in a way that renders the induced trance state meaningless. And everything about the way we live distances us from the true cycles of life and death. Most of us never see anyone die or be born, nor do we grow or kill our own food. And those who do loose the ability to connect with the main stream – or, rather, they lose the ability not to go where most others cannot follow.
This is especially true in the cities. All true paths to gnosis and wisdom have thus been closed, and people are reduced to blank slates, upon which the state may write whatever it wants. And what it wants is chattel, hopelessly enslaved by their own obsessive-compulsive efforts to satisfy needs they do not understand and whose nature they cannot admit to themselves.
As Nietzsche put it, “destroyers are they who lay snares for the many, and call it a state: they hang a sword and a hundred cravings over them.”
The church, the state, and the corporation are locked together in a worldwide dance of cooperation and competition to create this state of unguarded access to the deep structure of the human psyche, and to exploit it for power and profit by seizing control of people’s deepest needs and fears with a scientific precision that has never been seen before.
And the traps they set come in all colours and flavours. The existing religions are assimilated under the banner of multiculturalism, but it moulds them all in accordance with the goals of cultural Marxism. And those who think they have broken free of the old traps are lead right back into psychological slavery by collectivist moral relativism and feminist secular edenism.
People are taught that there is no right and wrong, only appropriate and inappropriate – which gives people a way to excuse themselves when they betray each other – and which gives the state a way to justify telling people, do as we say and not as we do.
Nonetheless, the idea of original sin is too useful to give up, so it remains, only now it is called white guilt: if you are white, you deserve to be punished, not for anything you have done, but for what you are.
Women are taught that their husbands are their worst enemies, and they cannot be complete or fulfilled unless they withdraw their devotion from husband and family, and give it instead to an employer.
So the modern white male is angry, and the modern white female is frustrated.
He wants his power back and she wants her sanctuary back, but they are forbidden to admit it. Most of them have no idea that they want what they want, because they have been taught to fear and avoid every thought that might lead to understanding.
They have been taught that such thoughts are evil.
And into this explosive mixture, multiculturalism introduces neo-fundamentalist Islam – an atavistic religion which resembles nothing more than Judaism in a state of arrested development, frozen in time in its most dogmatic and intolerant form. But it does have clearly defined roles for men and women, which satisfy instincts they have been deliberately disconnected from by cultural Marxism.
Feminist secular edenism first renders men and women incompatible, and then feeds off their resulting anger and frustration. And this is what makes Islam so threatening on an ideological level.
Islam promises that, by submitting to Allah, men and women can escape the treadmill of mutual destruction on which the cultural Marxists have trapped them. As Western culture decays and the war of the sexes becomes increasingly intolerable, the pressure to embrace Islam mounts until they lose sight of the fact that they will only be jumping from the frying pan into the fire.
This threat is driving many people back into the fold of Christianity, hoping to escape the trap. But it is a neo-fundamentalist Christianity which is hardening into its own form of dogmatic intolerance in order to push back against the incursion of Islam. In doing so, it is shedding the Christian charity and forbearance which were its main redeeming features. And thus it, too, becomes a trap.
Those who think politically correct progressivism will save them are no better off, because political correctness is itself becoming very dogmatic and intolerant. It is extremely harsh in its condemnation of everyone who is not tolerant of just the right things, in just the right ways. This is no different from any other neo-fundamentalist belief system, whether it is formally called a religion or not.
And so the clash of ideologies gets more intense every day, grinding Western culture to dust like giant mill stones, and showing us the bitter answer to the question asked by Joseph de Maistre:
“Until now nations were killed by conquest, that is by invasion: But here an important question arises; can a nation not die on its own soil, without resettlement or invasion, by allowing the flies of decomposition to corrupt to the very core those original and constituent principles which make it what it is.”
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 