PATHOTHEISM BY CHARLES PLYMELL

April, 2004

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.

Charles Plymell's bio can be found at Cherry Valley Editions