Eternally Gainsay
You will hate this essay. By that I do mean, you will like it, but also hate it.
Contradictions. The power source for the merry-go-round. Some call it hypocrisy. I call it delicious. We are a fascinating race. We went through decades where we were terrified of the spy next door, the secret Communist, the evil Russian who might be lurking around the corner. (Have we come full circle on that one?) In the ‘80s, the “Red Scare” finally started to lose some of its mojo—because Gorbachev was so nice, he let his people drink Pepsi!
—so we had to replace it with another sort of moral panic. The Karens back then feared their sons becoming devil worshippers as a result of listening to Black Sabbath.
There were other bogeymen, but religious extremism and the Satanic Panic had particular resonance at that time. (Season 4 of Stranger Things dealt with this in their Eddie Munson story arc.) In the 90s, you had some counterattacks in the form of shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
The rise of the Gothic went some way toward reclaiming the virtues of witchcraft—or just, being slightly weird. Yet every action must have a reaction, every reaction a ricochet. The Christian “moral majority” went off the rails against explicit lyrics, video games, and, yes, the ever bogey of devil worship. It was all rather cleverly satirized in movies like The Birdcage (1996), where Gene Hackman’s character beautifully encapsulated the anesthetized Silent Majority.
Saturday Night Live reached its peak in this era, but sadly even that wasn’t enough to prevent the election of George Bush II and the rise of neoconservatism. Fast forward to 9/11 and we were on the sure path to hell. What interests me about all of this is the simple but profound recognition of the yin and the yang, the pendulum, and how the positive and negative are only opposites in that they are at opposite ends of the pole. Really, they are just two sides of the same coin. The two sides of the bipolar are equally dangerous. The manic is as deadly as the depressive. Nowhere is this more apparently true than in the Archie Comic series Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. I love the Netflix adaptation too, but I’m enjoying the graphic novels so much more. The irony of the opposite for every Christian tenet strikes me in all the right ways. The colorful, plucky illustrations lure you in and you find yourself laughing at the satanic allusions that flip every staple of Christianity on the head. In the name of Satan, it’s a helluva raucous time, pun intended.
Flirtation with the Dark Side has its limits, of course. There comes a point when you realize that even in the underworld, there is extremist nonsense, lots of misogyny, and a horrific callousness when it comes to the treatment of “inferiors” (animals for slaughter, for example) and oppression of the masses. What better evidence is there for the maxim that human error is the downfall of every doctrine? Unconsciousness will carry anything too far! It’s hard not to conclude that we as a whole are incapable of loving anything without hating its opposite, or of worshipping one god without demonizing another. Is it inevitable that every reform must have its revolt?
I’ve seen a lot of people suggest that somehow the “Trump era” seems more divisive than prior ones. I’m not sure. The era we live in must be worse than any other—that goes without saying—and maybe the MAGA crowd are more divisive than the Goldwater Republicans or the McCarthyites. I don’t know, but the one thing I feel might be a certainty is the human tendency to take anything—nay, everything—too far. Are we even capable of knowing when to quit? Like, Jesus hit the nail on the head (I’m genuinely sorry for that pun) when he spoke the Golden Rule, but somehow his (all too) human disciples evolved his entire philosophy into fire-and-brimstone, pedantic insanity. Even when we “see the light,” self-righteousness reenters and we immediately resume the comparisons to other people. As Eckhart Tolle puts it, we return to the usual spin, making others “wrong” and ourselves “right.” I don’t have any confidence in most people’s ability to stop doing this. I see it too many times a day—egos reacting to egos and the fog of unconsciousness continually thickening, and there’s no way to deal with it except to disengage, and then they say you’re anti-social, and we all know where that slippery slope leads. I’ll be someone’s scapegoat one day, no doubt. When it comes to the various cliques and societies of the world, I’m never “enough” of whatever it is that each one prizes. I don’t identify with any “ism.” X is a Buddhist and Y practiced Hinduism for years, and while I appreciate lots of things about both Buddhism and Hinduism, I could never call myself a devout of one or the other. The one thing I’m an absolutist about is that I hate absolutism. Sorry, but if it negates and excludes everything else, it can’t be the answer. (If you are absolutely right, someone is wrong somewhere, and that person believes themselves to be absolutely right and you absolutely wrong. When spirituality becomes dogmatic, when it shapes an ideology, it ceases to be spiritual—in my humble opinion, of course.) Life is too complicated, too nuanced, to be solvable by only one philosophy. I know a lot of people just pick the philosophy that speaks most sensibly and naturally to them, and that’s fine, I get that. I get that, life being so complicated, sometimes we just have to compartmentalize and organize things in the way that makes the noise make sense. So if Buddhism speaks more coherently to someone than anything else, well, that person is a Buddhist. My mind just doesn’t work that way. If there’s more to the picture, I can’t just pick one color scheme. I can’t just go, “Well, that sounds nice, that feels good, ok I’m done.” I am done only as far as this article goes, for now.
Alanis, you have the mic:
“I have been running so sweaty my whole life
Urgent for a finish line
And I have been missing the rapture this whole time
Of being forever incomplete”