18. FAMILY VALUES EXCERPTS, AND OTHER NOTES, BY OLE WOLF

This main article "Family Values," but not the additional notes, can be seen in full at http://www.dnai.com/~dnai/wolf/doc/familyvalues.html

In The Devil's Notebook, LaVey asked the question: "Who knows a good case of 'character armor' when he sees it?" With that question, LaVey referred to the late Dr. Wilhelm Reich, a psychologist and student of Freud's, who had gained an astonishing insight into the dark doctrines during his study of the human psyche. Wilhelm Reich described human neuroses as a process of "character armoring" in his book, Character-Analysis, which was first published in Germany in 1933. The book was aimed at students of psychology, and although the implications of Wilhelm Reich's study are immense, the fundamental principle of character armoring is quite simple: the single, important keyword is defense.

A character armor is basically a series of layers of a person's personality that are each a defense against an inner urge. The defensive armor is not directly caused by the urge itself, but rather by a contradiction between the inner feelings and the outer world. For example, when a male child masturbates in his cradle or shows interest in his mother's genitals, he does so because he is discovering his own genital feelings. This is natural. If the child is rebutted, he is confronted with a contradiction between his inner feelings and the rebuttal from the outer world. Unable to resolve the contradiction, the child instead encapsulates the contradiction by developing an armor that wards off his inner feelings. The contradiction remains, but will not be perceived by the child's consciousness as long as the child's subconsciousness maintains the armor.

The highly esteemed standards of the Western part of the world mandate that all inner feelings be suppressed. The means of suppression is the human brain. Neurology has long since proven that when some event occurs, it takes approximately half a second before one becomes consciously aware of them. (The human consciousness compensates for the half-second delay by "subtracting" the time difference between the time a feeling emerges and the time it becomes consciously known so that the experience is perceived as synchronized with other internal or external events. The truth is, however, that to the human consciousness there is no such thing as instant experience.) It follows that a feeling cannot be warded off consciously since it would then be too late, but it is nowhere implied that a feeling cannot be warded off subconsciously. In fact, by repeatedly being told to ward off a feeling (or by being told just once, if one is sufficiently impressed [punished or shocked into mini-trauma, a form of indoctrination, Ed.]), the warding off of the feelings is entirely worked out by the subconsciousness. However, warding off a feeling that originates in the body must necessarily be performed by the body, too. As neurology has shown, body and brain form an inseparable entity. Thus, all feelings warded off will be reflected by a particular behavior in terms of both thinking and acting of the person warding off his feelings. In The Satanic Witch, Doctor [LaVey] sketches a colorful array of these behavioral patterns.

What, then, is a randomly selected male with, e.g., a stereotypical two-o'clock behavior to say if asked why he is displaying sexual abstinence? One would hardly expect him to explain that he is afraid of the sexual act, nor that his fear of the sexual act originates in a fear of being deprived of his penis. Rather, he would explain that he just "happens not to need that thing that badly," that "man's soul is endangered by promiscuity," that he is "still looking for miss perfect," or a fourth, similar lie. One may argue that it is an excuse he gives as a consequence of not having any sex. That would be incorrect, however, because it is rather a precaution he takes to avoid having sex. The difference is where the contradiction lies. With the explanation that it is an excuse for not getting sex, it is implied that he wants to have sex but for some reason does not have it. Thus, according to that theory, the contradiction lies between his desire for sex and the fact that he is not getting any; the contradiction is external of him in that he is one of the two opposing poles in the contradiction. However, if this was the case, he would attempt to resolve the contradiction by innocently asking a girl. An initial (or even persistent) "no" would not affect him significantly, except that until he had gotten a "yes" from some girl, the contradiction would remain unresolved and as a result he would continue his courting act.

With the above explanation, the contradiction exists between his urge to have sex and his subconsciousness warding off the urge; the contradiction lies inside of himself, not between him and whatever girl he might catch interest in. Unfortunately, while his internal contradiction has not ceased to exist, his subconsciousness has quelled his ability to recognize it, let alone resolve it. He observes that something is wrong (i.e., that he is not getting sex) but the reason lies in a blind spot of his consciousness. Instead, failing to consciously recognize his internal contradiction, he unconsciously avoids it in a fashion that, admittedly, can seem to be an externalization of the contradiction. This is why he sets the unreachable standards for a girl that she should be, e.g., a chubby, red-haired, "Scully"-like (of X-Files) friend and sex-partner all at the same time so that "he will not get sex" as opposed to "because he did not get sex." That is a significant difference. If the problem was as simple as that he was not getting sex, he would just lower his standards.

A contradiction in itself is not unfortunate; in fact, life itself is a contradiction. We consist of matter that we consider dead, yet we consider ourselves alive. The act of living is a constant resolving of the contradiction between life and death, yet as long as contradictions are resolved, new contradictions arise. One's entire life can be viewed as a trajectory through a chaos of contradictions. When a contradiction ceases to exist, there is no motivation to resolve it - and is the contradiction in question the contradiction of life, death sets in. A contradiction that is encapsulated and disregarded has no motivating factor. In this sense, people who quell their inner contradictions are already partly dead since in some respects of their physical life they have no motivating factors. It is interesting to note that the Klippoth is indeed described as a living dead.

According to Wilhelm Reich, the purpose of character analysis is to peel off a patient's character armor, layer by layer. If the analyst shortcuts by aiming directly at the core or just skipping a layer or two, the patient might find himself intellectually agreeing that, say, he had problems at the anal stage. Similarly, he might understand how Christianity is secularized into society on all levels and understand that it is unfortunate. However, while the patient may intellectually understand it, he does not carnally realize it, because the armoring against his carnal feelings still remains in him. The discrepancy between the patient's intellectual and carnal understanding constitutes a split between body and mind. Thus, while he agrees that Christianity has a deteriorating effect on life, he will still maintain its principles, knowingly or unknowingly. We thus often see self-proclaimed atheists or Satanists effectively doing more work on Christianity's behalf than many Christians do. In this example, the patient will be inclined to conclude that his personal problems are fundamentally caused by Christianity. The conclusion would be correct (partly - I will get deeper into it later, because Christianity is not only to blame), but this knowledge alone does not help the patient. To the patient, Christianity simply becomes a convenient devil that can be blamed for the patient's problems. As we know, blaming the devil means pushing blame and redemption away from oneself onto others. The patient may start a crusade against Christianity, believing that this will solve his problems. However, in doing so, the patient moves his focus away from his own problem and towards Christianity (or Satanism, he thinks) and hence separates himself from his personal, real problem. The patient's reaction is not accidental: moving his focus away from his own internal problem towards anything external of the patient is a defensive way of escaping the problem that is internal to the patient. At the same time, the patient believes he is in the process of solving his problem. Therefore, instead of being mostly unaffected, the abrupt confrontation with one's inner contradictions may aggravate the armoring if the armor has not first been carefully peeled off.

In the process of penetrating a patient's layers of armor, the patient is repeatedly forced to face his inner contradictions. Easy as it may sound, the inner contradictions were originally so terrifying to the patient that they seemed to threaten his very existence. Thus, the patient will defend himself with fang and claw [develop a "hard ego." Ed.] against the analyst's penetrating the patient's armor, [or anyone else that can see through him, Ed.] even if he is consciously aware that the analyst has not set for the patient's destruction. [It would feel as if the analyst was trying to destroy the patient, that is, destroy the "hard ego" that is literally suffocating and burying the patient's true self, or his organic "I" Ed.)

In general, to relieve a person of his armor, it is necessary that the person obtain a carnal understanding of what causes his inner contradictions, not just that he intellectually accepts the analyst's statements as plausible explanations. Unfortunately, if a person suffers from a split between carnal and intellectual knowledge, the person cannot interpret his body's signals correctly, if at all, if he is aware of them. (If he could interpret them, the contradictions could be recognized and resolved.)

Personality disturbances based on psychological effects are generally considered less severe than those resulting from brain damages, although the symptoms in some cases are alarmingly similar or even identical. With our current technology, psychological damages are usually curable compared to brain damages, although sometimes psychologists, too, must give up. With perhaps a hint of malice, Wilhelm Reich noted in The Function of the Orgasm that priests were beyond his ability to cure and that he consequently refused to accept priests as patients.

I believe one method to cure neurotic patients is to make the patients relive the experiences that led to their inner contradictions, but, frankly, I do not know the procedure - after all, I am an electrical engineer, not a psychoanalyst. One way that should prove effective is to realize that the patient is not only "his mouth speaking"; the patient is his entire body and thus speaks with his entire body, not only his mouth. Obviously, since the body does not speak "human language" in the sense that it does not use words to convey its message, the message must be translated into words for the patient to intellectually understand what his body should really be telling him. The problem is, however, that the patient does not believe it. If one told the test patient in the above example that he saw a picture of a snowy landscape, he would deny it because he was not consciously aware that he did indeed see it. In this case, it might not be difficult to convince the patient of the fact because the patient has no incentive to deny it - except, of course, that skepticism can be expected on the patient's side in the form of a derisive reply like "sure, I guess the picture is attached to the unicorn you're also seeing?" to the analyst. (As an aside, judging form the results that Antonio Damasio presented, patients with said brain damage do in fact seem to have an incentive to deny facts.)

As with the brain damaged patient, the patient with psychological problems is not consciously aware of some bodily reaction that he exhibits as a result of his problem. However, if the patient is made aware of his reaction by having it pointed out, the patient may become aware of it if accompanied by an explanation why he is reacting that way.

Some of the following is addressed by Wilhelm Reich in The Mass Psychology of Fascism.

Our thoughts are a gestalt of the chemical reactions in our body and our physical structure. When some event triggers the thought of, say, a chair, the image of a chair literally forms in our brains - not out of wood or plastic, but as a structure of interconnected, firing neurons. At first, the image appears murky, but due to the feedback structure, or interconnectedness, of the human body and brain, the image reinforces itself due to associations of the sight, sound, and feeling of a chair that the body knows at carnal level. In short, while thinking of some subject, the body as a whole reacts upon itself as a result of the thoughts. As I pointed out, our vital existence is effected by our body, but since our thoughts affect the entire body, they affect our work and acts. Everything we are, do, and think will influence our work; therefore, an ideology will also influence our vital existence. Thoughts, philosophies, and ideologies can thus be regarded as a material force, since thoughts ultimately become materialistically manifest. Per this view, workers' ideologies determine both quality and quantity of the work they perform. The opposite is also true; our work influences our thoughts and hence work creates ideology. The materialistic reality modifies the worker and consequently (and in that order, unless one likes to claim that people are born with ideologies) his ideology is changed according to his work. With this interaction between work and ideology, the worker will implement his ideology through his work and affect his co-workers. In short, through our work, we create ideologies; based on our ideology, we modify ourselves; and by modifying ourselves, we change our work. This is a circular dependency, but not necessarily in the form of a vicious circle. However, if one of the links in the circle is damaged, if affects the entire system.

Thus, it is vital for a person to have an occupation that gives him or her a stance of importance, notably one of real importance, not a mere pipe-dream such as what a title in some religious or social organization might give him. The occupation need not be one held in high esteem by bourgeois standards. For example, consider the often-seen picture of the Soviet coal miner who broke God knows how many tons of coal in a single day. In the West, the example is used as a horror picture of what the Soviet system required of the workers; it thus has a soothing comfort on the Western workers, who, in their current situation, are fooled to believe that in the society they might otherwise be dreaming of, they would be exploited even more. In reality, and without the Western propaganda, the picture of the proudly smiling coal miner conveys the fact to other coal miners that he had accomplished a feat so marvelous that it would take a coal miner to repeat it. The coal miners realize that they are capable of deeds that no-one else can execute. It follows that the coal miners take pride in their work and realize their true importance for the foundation of society. Yet, the workers work for society only on a secondary level - they primarily work for themselves to earn their living.

Workers who identify with their work; workers who recognize the fact that the work they perform is vital, not only for their own existence but for the existence the society that they are a part of; workers who are conscious of their skills; workers who identify with their work; and workers who identify with workers internationally: each of these workers is their own master of their importance and need no authority above them as defense or justification for their existence. Each of these workers is his or her own Führer. Fascism, which requires the leadership of a supposed elite whose actions cannot be questioned, is impossible when each person is his own elite.

Conversely, workers who do not feel any importance will explain their existence as the mercy of some person whose existence is justified by the fact that, e.g., he (always male) owns the factory where the workers are employed. Thus, the workers are not working for themselves but for someone else. They have become literal slaves, owned by a higher being, and they feel it. Thus, the workers feel their lives have no justification; but this causes frustration, since they are nonetheless alive. They seek a way to give their lives justification. However, the only justification for life that they know of is the one that they have attached to their employer and his class - the bourgeoisie, who are self-employed and do not appear to be slaves. Therefore, the workers have but one choice: to provide themselves the same justification as they give the bourgeoisie. The workers attempt to become like the bourgeoisie, who, to the workers, exists as an external elite (almost as pagan gods), and with that there is a soil for fascism.

It should be obvious that a state that does not offer (or allow) work for everyone will have devastating results on those individuals that are not allowed to work, since these individuals would be living on others' mercy. Also, if a person is incapable of working, letting him stay in his job will have quite the opposite on his co-workers as that of the skilled coal miner. The advantages of a communistic society should be clear.

One of the key points in another of Wilhelm Reich's books, Listen, Little Man!, is that outside of the ordinary, little man's tendency to create "Gods of Assholes" (as Doctor [LaVey] outlined in issue 129 of The Cloven Hoof), every great man has a little man inside of himself. The prerequisite to becoming a great man lies in the ability to recognize the little man in oneself. It is all too tempting for the ordinary person who reads Listen, Little Man! to dismiss the little man as a subhuman; by doing so, the reader avoids facing the fact that he himself is a little, non-bourgeois man.

While the workers are not bourgeois, they can give themselves the feeling of being so by adopting the same life-style as the bourgeoisie. They begin to furnish their homes by bourgeois patterns and they dress nicely when they go out. I noticed a remarkable example many years ago when I was still a school pupil: the class was taken to Rømø, an island in the southwestern Danish marshland. The mission was to look at the old houses that had been turned into a museum. Someone noticed the very short beds and asked our teacher if people really were that small back then. Our teacher explained that the fashion of the high bourgeoisie at that time included the baroque hairdos that took hours or days to configure and thus required that people slept sitting up in bed to protect their hairdos. The peasants were not significantly smaller than today but had adopted the use of short beds as a fashion trend. (They could not afford the hairdos.) Whereas everything else in the home was suited for practical purposes, the beds - where you have sex - were copies of bourgeois standard furniture! In general, bourgeois life-style has now extended throughout people's entire homes and everyday activities as attempts to identify with the bourgeoisie. (For the current trend in bourgeois life-style, consult any fashion magazine you come by.) It is therefore difficult to distill the reason why the workers feel inferior, but the observation that the bedroom is one of the first places they attempt to model per bourgeois life-style indicates that the master/slave relationship they feel has a sexual importance to them.

Workers are not transformed from workers to bourgeoisie by simply adopting a bourgeois life-style. I do not remember if Wilhelm Reich also discusses in Listen, Little Man! the fact that in becoming a great man, one cannot entirely relinquish one's former being. Often people joining the Church of Satan state that they want to escape the Christian influence that has been enforced upon them (and thus has become part of them). However, our thoughts, although they have been more or less warped, are a physical part of ourselves. Wanting to escape from one's thoughts is thus a desire to escape one's own being and is indicative of a split between body and mind. Moreover, it is not possible to escape from oneself: what once was is no more and can never be again (you can never be a child again once you have become an adult), yet what was cannot ever be completely destroyed (you still carry your childhood in you, and if you could destroy your childhood now, you would destroy yourself). Needless to say, you cannot destroy a part of what once was, either. Running away from Christianity is not only not possible, but the desire to do so carries with it that there is a physical part of oneself that one does not accept. By reading Listen, Little Man! and dismissing the "little man" as a Klippoth, one conveniently avoids facing the possible fact that one oneself may be a little man. (That is, unless one also considers oneself a Klippoth.) It is therefore not surprising to see the same people explaining that their reason for joining the Church of Satan is that their membership allows them to identify with the "strong and smart." (It is not coincidental that many people feel safe in the company of a person who is imperfect in their view. An example is the secretary with the soiled underwear that Doctor describes in The Satanic Witch. Also, for manipulative purposes, it often pays off to play stupid. Daring to be imperfect or stupid can be difficult unless one has self-confidence, however.)

Similarly, when wannabe-bourgeois people see others that do not live as bourgeoisie, they have the illusion that they themselves (morally) belong to the bourgeois class strengthened. It is especially when they can tell other, "lower" people about their own, "finer" acts they feel grandiose. For example, they may explain to other Satanists how common neo-Satanists may become elevated to a higher position as real Satanists providing that they realize the good taste of fine wines, such as expert wine connoisseurs do. [Or fine clothing, or clothing that was stylish during a period that Anton LaVey tends to favor, or anything else. They are judging the book by its cover all over again. Ed.]

Over time, more bourgeois standards find their way into workers' homes. However, the workers, not being bourgeois, do not resolve the contradiction between their inferiority feeling in their work and their newly-gained glamour this way. While the workers adopt more of the bourgeois life-style, the contradiction between their actual social worth and their desired worth remains unresolved unless the workers simultaneously with their increased material possessions feel a corresponding importance as workers.

I am essentially stating the obvious: that fascism sentiments among workers is increased by the workers' opting for fascism. Fascism does not rise with Hitlers and similar fascist dictators; they would almost be too easy targets as scapegoats. What is perhaps not obvious is that the opting for fascism is visible in the workers' adopting the life-style of the bourgeoisie with king(!)-size beds and fine wines. Yet, the fulfilling of these material "needs" is but lesser magic.

In The Function of the Orgasm, Wilhelm Reich noticed that cured patients, who realized their own importance for their own lives, tended to develop a moral that was neither "good" per society's standards, nor "bad." Apparently Wilhelm Reich was unable to explain why this (carnal) moral was developed, but found it identical to the moral present in well-balanced, peaceful, matriarchal societies. Reich concluded that if the patients' new ways of life were caused by eliminating their sexual frustrations, the solution to society's problems would be a sexual revolution.

In the light of the above, I do not think the answer is that difficult. In the explanation of the workers who become their own Führers, substitute the word "Führer" with "God." Being one's own god, one is the master of one's own success, but one is also the master of one's own failure. Contributing these opposing concepts are to the opposing God and Devil, in becoming one's own god, one automatically becomes one's own Devil, too. These opposing self-deities are of course one and the same, so in resolving the contradiction between them one finds a solution that is not the unity of the contradictions; otherwise, the contradiction would not have been resolved. Similarly, the patients' new moral would necessarily be incompatible with the old moral.

As Freud showed us, a person's psyche is mainly determined during his or her infancy with a strong bias on the child's naturally or unnaturally evolving sexuality. What, then, is to be expected from a child that is raised in an authoritarian family? As my parents have repeatedly observed (with only a few exceptions) in their positions as teachers, children become exactly like their parents when the children become parents themselves - even if the children can clearly see their parents behaving wrongly.

We note that a fascist society thrives only on the masses' respect for authorities. The ideal family structure for breeding fascists is therefore a strictly authoritarian family, in which children are brought up with a "natural" respect for the father and, as they grow older, unquestioningly extend their respect and obedience to other authorities in society as well as pass the ideology on to their children. Some exhibit the opposite reaction, but do not escape the original problem: Often we see left-wing organizations being largely the fascists' right hand by living completely up to the image that fascists have conjured of "unruly bullies." Whenever these left wing members are confronted with police, priests, politicians, or other authoritarian figures, they take on the role as unruly kids and thus force their opponents into the roles of an authorities. Eventually, the persons they regard as authorities will become real authorities who in turn force the "unruly kids" into their role. A symbiosis has formed, and notably a symbiosis that allows for fascism.

Even if a family had the mental power to realize its fascist structure and completely reorganize itself, the damage might be done even before the conception of their children: mental disorders such as schizophrenia and manic-depressive illness are hereditary. (See, e.g., E. S. Gershon and R. O. Rieder, "Major Disorders of Mind and Brain," Scientific American, Sept. 1992.)

A fascist society needs a strong family, where fascism can grow unhindered. Thus, much emphasis is laid on the so-called family values, especially family values that dictate that the father, head of the family, is always right (refer to Hans Christian Andersen's popular story, What Father Does Is Always Right, or Hvad fatter gør, det er altid det rigtige as the Danish title goes); that his female slave (i.e., his wife) should remain chaste and succumb to her master's will. In Karl McKinnon's essay on pornography and romanticism, he noted on (the sadomasochistic) culture that: "This is an old but updated message for women: 'it is your destiny, your nature, to submit and enjoy submission. You are the slave of love and your master has the right to do anything to you that he wishes. You have him that right, because your experience of joy and self-fulfillment resides in relinquishing your power, your identity and your will. If he wishes to give you pain, you will enjoy that pain, for your will is his will.'" The woman in the fascist family must be kept unsexual, however. If the female obtained sexual liberation, she would not accept an authoritarian male who (as Tani Jantsang would say) "cannot fuck," and would simply seek her indulgences elsewhere. The latter will be recognized as the first of the Nine Satanic Statements: Satan represents indulgence instead of abstinence. By pursuing one's personal indulgences, fascism becomes impossible.

As an aside, I am guessing that in the authoritarian family also lies the reason for males' interest in child porn, but it is rather a recoil of females have gained more liberty and is thus connected to the authoritarian family on second order. Males, raised to be petit fascists, find it increasingly difficult to live up to the authoritarian stance that they are required to take in the patriarchal family. Karl McKinnon's essay, which also outlines the trend in pornography during this century, shows how female liberty causes a contrary male reaction that makes pornographic female submission more violent. If males cannot force women into submission, children can more easily be forced to look at the molesting male as an authority. A quick browsing through the USENET newsgroups that offer child porn supports the assumption: recurring patterns are the "school girl and principal" role and the young girls being referred to as "daddy's naughty little girls."

It is in realizing that family values play an important role - if not the important role - for maintaining a fascist society that we understand why the right wing political parties are so keen on including family values in their political programs. We repeatedly hear right wing politicians declare that the sanctity of the family is of foremost importance and that family values must be kept intact. If the family was neglected, fascist sentiment of the masses would decrease, since the soil of fascist ideology would become infertile.

When my own parents observed how children become like their parents, they also made another interesting observation: children's tendency to mimic their parents is especially true in families where the children felt unsafe (e.g., because the father beat the mother, molested the children, etc.). In contrast, in families where children felt especially safe, the children generally turned out to give up traditional family values, leaving their parents complaining that the children never wrote or never came "home." Children that are raised in a family with a strict, authoritarian father are used to the father taking on all tasks. As the children become adults, they feel helpless without the father and will extrapolate the image of their father to any authoritarian figure that he may provide protection. How often do we not hear someone reassure himself that his political leader, his priest, or his employer should make a decision since, "after all, he knows best?" It is not surprising that people who are used to authorities making the decisions do not carry much responsibility for their own actions. Indeed, as soon as their authorities disappear, they tend to be left bewildered and stupefied.

In Denmark, farmers were originally to be found on the right wing, as were the petit bourgeoisie such as the local grocer and other self-employed families. It is precisely in these trades that it is vital that the family stands together, and historically it is in these families that the mother has been essential for the farm or shop in the form of a literal slave for the owner. Thus, in these cases fascist family values are inherent in the family's very trade. Combine this observation with the historical fact that wars and religions began with agriculture. It is not unlikely that fascism began with agriculture this way; and due to the self-maintaining effect of family values, agriculture would provide rich soil for fascism. [See Tree of Destruction available on this website. Ed.] If the farmers worked for state farms and the grocer working for a state-owned grocery store, however, fascism would not be inherent in these trades. It may be that the original nutritional problems that came as a side effect of agriculture are in fact of lesser importance than the agricultural culture itself. On the other hand, the nutritional problems could have caused people in the society to have become unstable at cellular level. After all, it is worth remembering that the dark doctrines state that the Klippoth is made of "strange flesh."

[This] brings me back to Satanists' favorite aversion: Christianity. As a hard-core realist, one may at first feel inclined to reject such mysticism just like the political left wing persistently has insisted on doing. This would be a fallacy, however: although gods and devils do not exists as living entities, they certainly exist in many people's minds; and, as I stated above, people's minds ultimately produce material results. From this point of view, the Christian God and Devil do exist, as did their predecessors. After all, although the church at the end of the street has been founded on mysticism, it has a physical existence. As explained above, ideology follows from work, and if the work does not give the worker a feeling of importance, the worker will identify with someone external to him with metaphysics and mysticism as a result. In other words, even by focusing exclusively on materialism, one is forced to also include mysticism, since mysticism manifests itself materially as well as rises from materialism.

Christianity is a perfect tools for fascism, since it involves both mysticism, sexual suppression, fascist family values, and larger-scale fascism - even on a larger scale than can be attained by any mortal being, namely the authority of the Christian God, who, in Christian mythology, will always stand above anything. Maybe that is why few new religions hold a human as their god, but rather hold their leaders as representatives of the higher authorities. The highest amount of authority that a dictator has yet pleaded is to have been appointed by God. (In Denmark, the king was traditionally assumed to possess that quality; a remnant of this is still to be found in that the head of the royal family is required to be Christian.) For some reason, claiming to be appointed by a god apparently seems less ridiculous than claiming to be a god.

I have already explained how ideologies and vital existence largely become each other's cause and effect. With the Christian faith, it was possible for fascist (or feudal) leaders to enthrall entire peoples by promising that by accepting misery on Earth, they would be greeted with rivers floating with milk and honey on their death. These peoples, seeking to escape the oppression, therefore built churches for their God that they might be relieved of the oppression on their death, not knowing that by building their altars, they offered themselves as sacrifice for the fascists; their faith and their churches only had a self-aggravating effect on their misery.

Christianity, in a sense, is one of the most successful implementations of greater magic that we have seen thus far. Today, Christianity has lost much of is power; Doctor [LaVey] noted in The Satanic Bible that time works for us (Satanists). Doctor was right in terms of Christianity, but Christianity is merely a tool of fascism. With all of the above in mind, applying, e.g., Ayn Rand's libertarian, "objectivist" principles would not alter fascistic sentiment in the masses - rather, one would be even more prone to feeling insignificant and thus attempt to become like the bourgeoisie in a Randian society than in the current, semi-fascist societies. [Possibly in a homogenous society. But if the Randian society were completely libertarian, this might not happen in the USA due to the heterogeneous population.] It would seem that communism is in fact the best solution. [As an ideal, yes. But it doesn't always work out quite that way since the people have already been indoctrinated in a patriarchal/authoritarian family and society. Ed.] However, fascism does not cease to exist the second someone declares world or nationwide communism, nor does it fade into nothingness over the span of two or three generations. [Neither does the libertarian type of entrepeneurism, whether that results in an underground or black market or not. Ed.] People raised under fascist oppression will still feel a need for mysticism, and that is a problem that needs to be dealt with. Wilhelm Reich proposed a sexual revolution in which personal indulgences have priority over duties towards authorities. Indulgence instead abstinence, in strong opposition to fascism, is also the prime tenet of the Church of Satan. [That is, unless the fascism is sexually sublimated by morons and bullies. Then Satanists become defacto fascists within their own organizations where they are allowed to "play that game" by making threats that only have validity to the other members. They rise to the status of "Lords" within the organization; they begin to make unreasonable demands, least of all regarding the free expression of speech. Ed.]

Also included here from the studies Ole Wolf has been doing:

This is a part of scientific research that Ole Wolf runs into in the course of doing his own job. It is thoroughly known by the neurophysiologists. This is the stuff that 100% backs up what people of the classical tradition have observed and formerly (except for a few of us) kept esoteric. In fact, speaking of esoteric, some of the information on neurochemistry is semi or fully classified by government!

Someone said: In the USSR Freud was trashed. They had hard core neurophysiology. Antonio Damasio, at least in his popular books, is scratching the surface.

Another said: No neurophysiologist can take Freud seriously anyway. Appearance of neurotic disorders is purely Pavlovian and one does not have to apply Freudian type models involving artificial divisions of "mind" on abstract layers, etc., while simple "crushing" of opposite stimuli into each other can explain it well (see the quotes of Beria you put up in Reds yourself and think about them in this, Pavlovian, context). [See Beria Quotes on this website. Ed.] What Freud was reaching with psychoanalysis Pavlov could perform with tools as simple as sodium bromide and caffeine :- )

At the end of the day, the Ockam's razor principle hasn't been cancelled yet. The best representation of Soviet neuropsychological doctrine is writings of Academician Luria (former President of Georgian Academy of Science), but I am not sure if any of his works were ever translated in English. Out of popular western literature, check out a classical manifesto of dialectic eliminative materialism in neuropsychology: Neuronal Man. The Biology of Mind. by Prof. Jean - Pierre Changeux, a director of Molecular Neurobiology Lab at Pasteur Institute in Paris. It seems to me that the French were the closest to Soviet neuropsychological doctrines compared to the rest of (Western) Europe.

Basically: "There is no "mind." There are neurons, glia and connections between them. Impulses fired and transmitters released [in the body]. But there is no mind. The concept of mind is obsolete."

Ole Wolf's notes. Marlow's writing shows that the very words we're using weren't invented by any of us, as this was written in 1959. [Indeed, they weren't invented by anyone recent at all; these findings are but the rediscovery, over and over, or the ancient doctrine, notably a doctrine held by peoples who recognized a Boundless Darkness and felt it. Ed.] "The normal adjustment of the average, commonsense, well-adjusted man implies a continued successful rejection of much of the depths of human nature, both conative and cognitive. To adjust well to the world of reality means a splitting of the person. It means that the person turns his back on much in himself because it is dangerous. But it is now clear that by so doing he loses a great deal, too, for these depths are also the source of all his joys, his ability to play, to love, to laugh, and, most important for us, to be creative. By protecting himself against the hell within himself, he also cuts himself off from the heaven within. In the extreme instance, we have the obsessional person, flat, tight, frozen, controlled, cautious, who can not laugh or play or love or be silly or trusting or childish. His imagination, his intuitions, his softness, his emotionality tend to be strangulated or distorted."

"Now [, after the creativity has been spawned,] come the [secondary processes; that is, the] comparisons, the judgments, the evaluations, the cold, calculating, morning-after thoughts, the selections and the rejections.

"If I may say so, the secondary processes now take over from the primary [,spontaneous, childlike creativity], the Apollonian from the Dionysian, the 'masculine' from the 'feminine.' The voluntary regression into our depths is now terminated, the necessary passivity and receptivity [yin] of inspiration or of peak-experience [ecstasy] must now give way to activity, control, and hard work [yang]. A peak-experience happens to a person; but the person makes the great product. It could be described as a masculine phase succeeding upon a feminine one.

"Strictly speaking, I have investigated this first phase only, that which comes easily and without effort as a spontaneous expression of an integrated person, or of a transient unifying within the person. It can come only if a person's depths are available to him, only if he is not afraid of his primary thought processes."

In another essay, the author explains very clearly what it means that some people can see a rose, yet not see it at all because it is only a mental image that they see. When they say that they see a rose, in his words, all they say is that they've learned to talk. The author uses himself as an example, explaining that he thinks with his belly and sees with his heart. That's another great essay, but not nearly as hard as Marlow's essay.

What's important to note is that Marlow is a professor of psychology who drew his conclusions based on scientific observations. He also rejects Freud's principles, by the way, and I'm not sure whether Freud had yet been recognized as mostly wrong in 1959.

Someone said: The author should read "Convalescence From Christianity" and maybe some of the Damasio stuff or stuff on klippoths or other stuff on Vad's website. [This can be seen on www.apodion.com/vad/ under the heading Klippoths. Ed.]

Other said: Excerpt of "Creativity in Self-Actualizing People" by Abraham H. Maslow. Included in Interdisciplinary Symposia on Creativity and Its Cultivation, edited by Harold H. Anderson, Harpers & Brothers Publishers, New York, 1959. At the time this was published, Maslow was professor of psychology and chairman of the department of Brandeis University, MA. What follows are excerpts:

Characteristics of Self-actualizing Persons

The consequence was that I found it necessary to distinguish "special talent creativeness" from "self-actualizing creativeness" which sprang much more directly from the personality, which showed itself widely in the ordinary affairs of life, and which showed itself not only in great and obvious products but also in many other ways, in a certain kind of humor, a tendency to do anything creatively; e.g., teaching.

That is flowing Dionysian types. Versus the controlled "I'm going to create something" types. Those who DO versus those who try. [Those who ARE, versus whose who try to remake themselves every now and then since they have no idea who they are. Ed.]

Frequently, it appeared that an essential aspect of self-actualizing creativeness was a special kind of perceptiveness which is exemplified by the child in the fable who saw the king had no clothes on; this, too, contradicts the notion of creativity as products. These people can see the fresh, the raw, the concrete, the ideographic, as well as the generic, the abstract, the rubricized, the categorized, and the classified. Consequently, they live far more in the real world of nature than in the verbalized world of concepts, abstractions, expectations, beliefs and stereotypes that most people confuse with the real world (Maslow, 1954, Chaps. 12, 14). This is well expressed in Rogers's (1956) phrase "openness to experience."

That what we call the physical versus the cerebral. [Cerebral people try to get it, or they quote those who got it. They are always slightly off base no matter how correctly they parrot. Ed.]

All my subjects were relatively more spontaneous and expressive (Maslow, 1954, Chaps. 11, 12). They were able to be more "natural" and less controlled and inhibited in their behavior, which seemed to be able to flow out more easily and freely and with less blocking and self-criticism. This ability to express ideas and impulses without strangulation and without fear of ridicule from others turned out to be an essential aspect of self-actualizing creativeness. Rogers (1956) has used the excellent phrase "fully functioning person" to describe this aspect of health.

Another observation was that self-actualizing creativeness was in many respects like the creativeness of all happy and secure children. It was spontaneous, effortless, innocent, easy, a kind of freedom from stereotypes and clichés. Again it seemed to be made up largely of "innocent" freedom of perception and "innocent," uninhibited spontaneity and expressiveness. Almost any child can perceive more freely, without a priori expectations about what ought to be there or what must be there or what has always been there. And almost any child can compose a song or a poem or a dance or a painting or a play or a game on the spur of the moment, without planning or previous intent.

It was in this childlike sense that my subjects were creative. Or to avoid misunderstanding, since my subjects were after all not children (they were all people in their fifties or sixties), let us say that they had either retained or regained at least these two main aspects of childlikeness; namely, they were nonrubricizing and "open to experience," and they were easily spontaneous and expressive. [They spoke from their hearts, unstifled and unplanned. Ed.]

These characteristics were, however, different in quality from what is found in children, If children are naïve, then my subjects had attained a "second naïveté" as Santayana called it. Their innocence of perception and expressiveness was combined with sophisticated minds.

In any case, this all sounds as if we are dealing with a fundamental characteristic, inherent in human nature, a potentiality given to all or most human beings at birth, which most often is lost or buried or inhibited as the person gets enculturated.

My subjects were different from the average person in another characteristic that makes creativity more likely. Self-actualizing people are relatively unfrightened by the unknown, the mysterious, the puzzling, and often are positively attracted by it; i.e., selectively pick it out to puzzle over, to meditate on, and to be absorbed with. I quote from my description:

They do not neglect the unknown, or deny it, or run away from it, or try to make believe it is really known, nor do they organize, dichotomize, or rubricize it prematurely. They do not cling to the familiar [they don't live inside of paradigms Ed.], nor is their quest for the truth a catastrophic need for certainty, safety, definiteness, and order, such as we see in an exaggerated form in Goldstein's brain injured or in the compulsive-obsessive neurotic. They can be, when the total objective situation calls for it, comfortably disorderly, sloppy, anarchic, chaotic, vague, doubtful, uncertain, indefinite, approximate, inexact, or inaccurate (all, at certain moments in science, art, or life in general, quite desirable).

Thus it comes about that doubt, tentativeness, uncertainty, with the consequent necessity for abeyance of decision, which is for most a torture, can be for some a pleasantly stimulating challenge, a high spot in life rather than a low (Maslow, 1954, p. 206).

One observation I made has puzzled me for many years but it begins to fall into place now. It was what I described as the resolution of dichotomies in self-actualizing people. Briefly stated, I found that I had to see differently many oppositions and polarities that psychologists had taken for granted as straight line continua. For instance, to take the first dichotomy, I could not decide whether my subjects were selfish or unselfish. Observe how spontaneously we fall into an either-or here. The more of one, the less of the other is the implication of the style in which I put the question. But I was forced by sheer pressure of fact to give up this Aristotelian style of logic. My subjects were unselfish in one sense and selfish in another sense. And the two fused together, not like incompatibles, but rather in a sensible, dynamic unity or synthesis much like what Fromm (1956) has described in his paper on self-love; i.e., on healthy selfishness. My subjects had put opposites together in such a way as to make me realize that to regard selfishness and unselfishness as contradictory and mutually exclusive is itself a characteristic of a lower level of personality development. So also in my subjects were many other dichotomies resolved into unities, cognition versus conation (heart versus head, wish versus fact) became cognition "structured with" conation as instinct and reason came to the same conclusions. Duty became pleasure and pleasure merged with duty. The distinction between work and play became shadowy. How could selfish hedonism be opposed to altruism, when altruism became selfishly pleasurable? These same people, the strongest egos ever described and the most definitely individual, were also precisely the ones who could be most easily ego-less, self-transcending, and problem centered (Maslow, 1954, pp. 232-234).

But this is precisely what the great artist does. He is able to put together clashing colors, forms that fight each other, dissonances of all kinds, into a unity. And this is also what the great theorist does when he puts puzzling and inconsistent facts together so that we can see that they really belong together. And so also for the great statesman, the great therapist, the great philosopher, the great parent, the great lover, the great inventor. They are all integrators, able to put separates and even opposites together in a unity.

We speak here of the ability to integrate and of the play back and forth between integration within the person, and his ability to integrate whatever it is he is doing in the world. To the extent that creativeness is constructive, synthesizing, unifying, and integrative, to that extent does it depend in part on the inner integration of the person.

In trying to figure out why all this was so, it seemed to me that much boiled down to the relative absence of fear in my subjects. They were certainly less enculturated; that is, they seemed to be less afraid of what other people would say or demand or laugh at. It was found that they had less need of other people and therefore, depending on them less, could be less afraid of them and less hostile against them. Perhaps more important, however, was their lack of fear of their own insides, their own impulses, emotions, thoughts. They were more self-accepting than the average. It was this approval and acceptance of their deeper selves that made it possible to perceive bravely the real nature of the world and also made their behavior more spontaneous (less controlled, less inhibited, less planned, less "willed" and designed). They were less afraid of their own thoughts even when they were "nutty" or silly or crazy. They were less afraid of being laughed at or of being disapproved of. They could let themselves be flooded with emotion. By contrast, average and neurotic people walled off, through fear, much that lay within themselves. They controlled, they inhibited, they repressed and they suppressed. They disapproved of their deeper selves and expected that others did, too.

What I am saying in effect is that the creativity of my subjects seemed to be an epiphenomenon of their greater wholeness and integration, which is what self-acceptance implies. The civil war within the average person between the forces of the inner depths and the forces of defense and control seems to have been resolved in my subjects and they are less split. As a consequence, more of themselves is available for use, for enjoyment, and for creative purposes. They waste less of their time and energy protecting themselves against themselves.

Conclusion

All of these developments can, I think, be summarized as an increased stress on the role of integration (or self-consistency, unity, wholeness) in the theory of creativeness. Resolving a dichotomy into a higher, more inclusive unity amounts to healing a split in the person and making him more unified. Since the splits I have been talking about are within the person, they amount to a kind of a civil war, a setting of one part of the person against another part. In any case, so far as self-actualizing creativeness is concerned, it seems to come more immediately from fusing of primary and secondary processes rather than from working through repressive control of forbidden impulses and wishes. It is, of course, probably that defenses arising out of fears of these forbidden impulses also push down primary processes in a kind of total, undiscriminating, panicky war on all the depths. But it seems that such lack of discrimination is not in principle necessary.

To summarize, self-actualizing creativeness stresses first the personality rather than its achievements, considering these achievements to be epiphenomena emitted by the personality and therefore secondary to it. It stresses characterological qualities like boldness, courage, freedom, spontaneity, perspicuity, integration, self-acceptance, which make possible the kind of generalized creativeness I have been talking about, which expresses itself in the creative life or the creative attitude or the creative person. I have also stressed the expressive or Being [sic!] quality of self-actualizing creativeness rather than its problem-solving or product-making quality. Self-actualizing creativeness is "emitted," like radioactivity, and hits all of life, regardless of problems, just as a cheerful person "emits" cheerfulness without purpose or design or even consciousness. It is emitted like sunshine; it spreads all over the place; it makes some things grow (which are growable) and is wasted on rocks and other ungrowable things.

As I come to the end I am quite aware that I have been trying to break up widely accepted concepts of creativity without being able to offer in exchange a nice, clearly defined, clean-cut substitute concept. Self-actualizing creativeness is hard to define because sometimes it seems to be synonymous with health itself. And since self-actualization or health must ultimately be defined as the coming to pass of the fullest humanness, or as the "Being" of a person, it is as if self-actualizing creativity were almost synonymous with, or a sine qua non aspect of, or a defining characteristic of, essential humanness.

[The remainder of the conclusion addresses practical creativity, and has been omitted.] This is excellent. This is heavy. Note Maslow's use of inner split and fear of one's Being (complete with capitalized 'B'), his analogy of growable and ungrowable things in the conclusion, etc.

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