Charles Douglass Plymell

Pathotheism is a philosophy that states human existence is unknowable, open-ended
and all belief systems and religions are for the purpose of utilizing the story to assuage
the human predicament of the condition of the unknowable. That the human species
itself suffers an innate and inescapable awareness of existence that can only fall back
to beliefs in stories to control the anxiety of awareness of the unknowable.

The reliance on faith is the only uniquely human attribute to make peace with the
unknowable question. Paradoxically, faith tends toward faith-based religions with
fundamental orthodoxies. These religions are usually the rationale for wars on
geopolitical levels as well as killings on personal psychological levels. In subconscious
justification to take another’s life, one’s own position is re-enforced.

For the orthodox body some human beings find it easy to kill other species, as
well as their own. The show of force, conversely, calms the nature of the human from its
anxiety of the unknown. This is why it is easy, and becoming easier to rationalize taking
another’s life, either on a personal valueless basis, or on a rationalized altruistic bases
of state or religion. Given that there have been roughly over 50,000 wars throughout
recorded history, and most of them were based on rationalized dogma, it is no surprise
that we end up at the beginning of the 21st century in the very same predicament.

To consider latent causes of killing should be of highest importance if the human
species wishes to remain. There should come a time when the human species desires
to evolve into a sapient being. In this respect cloning is not out of the question. If we
could delete the code of the undesirable kill trait, we might be able to live without killing.
Albeit we may loose some of the spirit that seems embedded in the kill. Cloning from
aliens is not that unbelievable, when one considers the stories of the other major
religions from an objective point of view. All religions rely on the absurd, the fanciful,
somewhere in their story. The many examples should be readily apparent to thinking
people.

The dual nature of finding a good justification for a deeper-seated problem is quite
natural to the human psyche. Carl Jung touches on the philosophy of anxiety in his
Mysterium Conjunctionis: “In the domain of pathology I believe I have observed cases
where the tendency of the unconscious would have to be regarded, by all human
standards, as essentially destructive. But it may not be out of place to reflect that the
self-destruction of what is hopelessly inefficient or evil can be understood in a higher
sense as another attempt at compensation.”

Family values and onward Christian soldiers are ill timed if not ill fated. The forces and
environment we live in have probably changed the chemistry of the human already. Our
brains are no longer the product of the altruistic actions in this chemically affected
planet as they once were. The seminal results of overpopulation and over-technology
makes old ways quaint and ineffective as Huxley observed way back in the 50’s.

The best of constitutions and preventive laws will be powerless against the steadily
increasing pressures of overpopulation and of the overorganization imposed by growing
numbers and advancing technology. The constitutions will not be abrogated and the
good laws will remain on the statute book; but these liberal forms will merely serve to
mask and adorn a profoundly illiberal substance. Given unchecked overpopulation and
over- organization, we may expect to see in the democratic countries a reversal of the
process which transformed England into a democracy, while retaining all the outward
forms of a monarchy. Under the relentless thrust of accelerating overpopulation and
increasing overorganization, and by means of ever more effective methods of mind-
manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms -- elections,
parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest -- will remain. The underlying substance
will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the
hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy
and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial -- but democracy and
freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly
trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will
quietly run the show as they see fit. BRAVE NEW WORLD REVISITED, 1958

Of course I would like to live in simpler times. But the indications are that the usual
progression is taking place in which we will destroy ourselves marching to the quaint old
truths, which were so splendid in our day. To hold on to them as things of divine
providence is uplifting and wholesome, but is shrinking as other realities expand. Where
has our manifest destiny gone? Or better yet, where can it go? It usually takes a couple
generations into the new century to blossom as the seeds planted in the turn of the
century’s furrow (in this case the millennium), as the expansion seems exponential in
the new world where fast changes will have to take place. Every decade will be vastly
different even with the quaint old forms deeply embedded in barely recognizably
paradigms.

I therefore don’t know how to respond when many people send me poetry and art
deriding Bush and his actions. It’s the same old rhetorical thinking that can be applied
emotionally in any decade. And we never quite see it fully. Whether McNamara lied or
Cheney is going to hide, it’s all the same. I have to remind the poets who use the sixties
as a rally style that at least half the country is like Bush and likes him. What will you do
with them? And when the other half, the thought manufacturers like Bush, dominates
with their fundamental emotions, what then do you have? Probably the same old thing.
And what to do with them? Imprison all the radicals and liberals along with the
minorities, but then they will be the majority. What will it take to organize and control the
vast numbers growing? We really don’t have any idea, until it happens.

If you are not ready to contemplate the eternal why….don’t cry. You’re just living in the
same old world you have for thousands of years. But there is more anxiety as it
increases exponentially. And the states will give money to the poets who write safe
words for the academic minds. And the state will give money to the safe radicals and
the safe arrivals yearning to be free, who will get their safe brains washed free, and
maybe we won’t destroy others so quickly by reading the quaint old radical poetry.

And institutions and departments will justify themselves. Universities will compete for
the young people’s hard-earned money, so that they can buy themselves a notch up the
class ladder, and be indebted to the old shop-worn ideas that never produced anything
but a professor’s salary. Education marketed as a way out. Out of what? The only game
in town. A safe bet, if one wants to spend one’s life paying back the money it costs to
have what should come free to those who can read and think. But grades are used as a
class marker. Play the game of these tired old ideas or be marked in a class-based
society, to find a safe place to hide in the unknown with pension until death. Only then
the purpose of life will be known…or not. Meanwhile we deal with the subconscious fear
that one day we will not exist. And no trace of our existence may exist. An inconceivable
thought, so we think up stories, and that is all we have. And much of the human race
devotes itself to trying to force these stories on others or to kill them. That,
unfortunately, is our (non) progress report of humanity. Happy New Year 2003.