The Demon and the Genius

Shame, Ressentiment, and an ecology of spirits

It’s been a few days since I’ve posted anything for you. This is mostly because I decided to work on several longer essays that require a lot more research than the more prosaic reflections that I usually write. It’s also taken a lot of time because of some hesitation on my part, hesitation that I think I can finally let go of.

I should admit something here. Perhaps sometimes my writing seems very self-assured, and thus probably I seem that way. I’m not nearly so confident as all that, however, at least in a few areas, especially when it comes to writing how I actually see the world. The problem is mostly that it feels so different from anything expressed elsewhere, and thus much harder to describe without sounding completely unintelligible or potentially insane.

As “synchronicity” would have it, or providence, or the gods, or spirits, or however you’d like to put it, a writer whose work I enjoy wrote a piece that makes my own attempt feel not so absurd.

Demons

In the piece, the author makes the following possibly controversial statement:

I am not going to be prudent. I am going to say that to explain existing social conditions it is necessary to conclude that demons exist. Or, to put it another way, demonology is a necessary mode of social explanation.

I say “possibly” controversial, since this all of course depends on what one means by demons and demonology. The author suggests one such framework, informed by an older Christian framework in which such a thing as spirit(s) exist and influence the world. Such a view is hardly a rare one, nor unique to Christianity. Buddhism, Hinduism, and older forms of Islam have a similar opinion on such things, and such a belief is what we might call a core feature of animisms: Shinto, of course, but also all other ‘indigenous’ animisms including the pagan and heathen animisms of Europe.

In fact, until just a few hundred years ago, it was actually a rather rare thing to find religious or cultural frameworks in which the people don’t believe spirits have some sort of influence on the lives of people. It’s only since the Protestant Reformation and the subsequent obsession with “reason” that Europeans stopped believing such a thing, but even still I can walk through the village here in this modern, secular, capitalist nation and find plenty of people who believe spirits exist and do things.

Of course, they would likely disagree on what precisely constitutes a spirit, and might instead call them ghosts, angels, or demons. Angels within Christianity are a particular kind of spirits, and demons are of the same order of being (angels) but of a different genre or state (fallen) within that order. Saints, I’d argue, are likewise seen as a kind of spirit, though I don’t think the village priest would like that I describe them that way. Regardless, they often are reported as appearing to people with signs or some sort of spiritual body, in a way similar to way angels and demons do.

Whether a spirit is an angel, a demon, or a saint within Christianity is often quite relative. Consider Joan of Arc, who claimed that St. Catherine, St. Margaret, and St. Michael (the angel) spoke repeatedly to her and urged her to fight against the English to evict them from France. Of course her English interrogators were not so convinced, asserting instead that she was a witch and in communication with demons, rather than angels and saints.

It’s worth noting that the question of spirit communication wasn’t really up for debate. The devout English and the devout French both readily accepted her claim to be speaking to someone, because the intense charisma and apparently supernatural aspect of her victories wasn’t even in question. What was questionable, however, was precisely who was giving her such power. Because the English saw the results of her work as evil and malevolent, her powers must have been therefore infernal. For the French, suddenly finding themselves free of English rule, Joan of Arc must certainly have been guided by the God and his emissaries.

This same difference is even stronger across religions. The slaves in Haiti who made a pact with the Loa in exchange for victory against their French masters were either engaging in a satanic rite or a ritual agreement with kindly spirits, a difference of opinion coming down to whether you were one of the masters or one of the slaves.

II.

I went to the gym on Wednesday. This probably doesn’t seem to be a significant or relevant point at all, except that Wednesday was the first time in over three months.

I’m still not sure exactly how it happened that I stopped going. Lots of life things happened, sure. I got married, and I was working on a book, and I went on a honeymoon, and then I injured my foot, and I was generally busy, but none of those are actually the reasons why I didn’t go, just the excuses I made after the fact. It was around my birthday earlier this year that my usual four-day-a-week routine dropped off, becoming first three days, then two, and then by March once a week for a few weeks, then not at all. The last time I’d been there was the beginning of April.

It was really, really hard to go back. I’d been haranguing myself for the last few months about not going, constantly telling myself I’d go again, that I needed to go, that I wanted to go, and that there was absolutely no good reason not to go. All those self-reproaches were futile, and they only increased my depression about the matter.

Finally, this week, I worked out a way to trick myself into going again. I set up a new training appointment, and told the trainer ahead of time that I just wanted to do cardio and some light weight training. Then, I showed up for the appointment ready to argue with her, since I knew that she’d probably make something much more intense for me despite my stated wishes.

That’s what happened. I tried arguing with her, and almost tried to pull the ridiculous and whining “I’m in charge here because I’m paying you” routine. But have you tried arguing with a female MMA fighter? Her being half your size actually makes it harder, not easier. When a small woman who can beat you bloody in less than a minute is telling you that you need to get stronger because you were already strong and it’ll be faster to get back there if you do what she says, there’s no point in doing anything else but listening to her.

There’s so little of that kind of pushing elsewhere in my life. The last person who did that for me was the tantric therapist I worked with to get over all the shitty beliefs I had about myself. We tend to have to pay people to do that for us now. The stern father that pushes his kids to be better than they think they are, a role I’ve seen also taken up by mothers in some cultures (for instance, all my Puerto Rican friends when I was young had mothers who pushed them like fathers of others did), is now a thing so rare that Jordan Peterson could make millions just telling people to stop sniveling and make their beds.

Will is different from desire. We desire lots of things, and even convince ourselves that our desires are fully our own. I fully desired to go to the gym, but I also fully desired lots of other things, like inertia, and not being so exhausted the following days that all movement hurt. Will is when you make a choice between desires, and also when you choose to shape your desires around another desire, to put off others completely because they get in the way of what you’ve chosen to desire most.

Having someone push you to do exactly that is rare. You usually have to search for such people, and they’re sometimes very unpleasant to be around. They tend to get very bored of false hope and dead-end fantasies, which means they’ll get very bored of all your excuses as to why you cannot do the thing you truly want to do.

There’s of course quite a difference between being pushed to become who you are and doing something because of external pressure. We don’t really have the language or the spiritual framework to speak about agency without slipping into responsibility on one hand and culpability on the other. Doing something because someone pressures you do to it is an abdication of agency; being pushed to do something in alignment with your will is someone helping you ascend your own throne.

III.

The subtle difference between these—and our cultural inability to understand that difference—is probably why shame has become both such a powerful weapon and a powerful defense in the hands of the Woke. The core mechanism of a social media crusade is shame, with the goal either to shame the person into obedience or to so thoroughly stain the victim with the dye of shame that they are forever banished from the order of cultural meaning.

At the same time, “shaming” is the term used to dismiss any attempt to apply naturalistic reasoning to problems for which there might be practical solutions. It is “fat-shaming” to suggest high rates of diabetes and obesity in the United States are linked to the consumption of certain foods rather than others, or “poor-shaming” to propose that the yearly trampling deaths at Wal-Mart and Target maybe are a sign of an unhealthy consumerist obsession. It is a mean and horrible thing to point out there might be a better way of doing things, and that there might be external forces and personal decisions contributing to bad situations. It might make people feel bad, or ashamed, and that’s only something that should be done to people you think are evil or wrong.

I’ll admit that I felt quite ashamed that I’d stopped going to the gym. There was no external reason for feeling of shame. My husband wasn’t shaming me for this, nor was “society.” Going to the gym was entirely my choice, just as not going to the gym was also entirely my choice, and neither of these choices derive from an idea that I am “supposed to” go or need to conform to some standard of beauty or behavior. I needed to go, I had decided to go, but I wasn’t going. Something was holding me back.

The ancient roots of both the words shame and embarrassment, though they come from completely different linguistic origins, have a similar secondary resonance: that of reluctance or hesitation. Shame is derived from a word that meant “to cover,” with the sense that you might cover your face or hesitate to show yourself in public because of dishonor. Embarrass in its oldest sense meant to hinder (literally “to bar”); being embarrassed by something thus signified that there was something which stopped you or held you back.

As with so many other words, the original roots were verbs, not nouns. Thus, neither were static or end conditions, but rather active processes of hindrance. To be ashamed was to be in a moment of hesitation, to be embarrassed was to be in a moment of holding yourself (or being held) back.

So, by being ashamed of not going to the gym, and being embarrassed by it, I was really just aware that I was in a process of active hesitation and hindrance. To put this more crudely, it was a constipation of the will, a moment of blockage. No one else was hindering me from going, and I could not figure out how to stop hindering myself.

Looking again at the way shame operates now through social media crusades, it should be obvious that the intention is to hinder others, to bar them, to make them reluctant to show themselves. This is just as true for the Antifa-branded attacks against “fascist” figures as it is for the internecine smears between the Woke themselves. Successful crusades crush the will of the target, succeeding only when the victim then actively hinders himself or herself as well.

The other kind of “shaming,” however, is something else entirely. Having once been very overweight and also having once been very poor, I can tell you that there’s lot of shame already in both conditions. You don’t really want to be either of those things. Also, you don’t really know how to get out of those conditions, nor can you easily start to understand what is externally hindering you and what is internally hindering you. Thus, when someone tells you that maybe you shouldn’t be fighting other poor people for something manufactured by other poor people a continent away, or that maybe the food you are eating isn’t really good for your body or health, it’s not the easiest thing to hear.

Regardless, you need to hear those things, and such things need to be said. They aren’t actually shaming, but rather the opposite. Such things merely illuminate the shame (hindrance) that you already experience and, like the stern father, my really aggressive MMA-fighting gym trainer, or a spirit or god, try to help you stop hindering yourself.

IV.

If you’ve read Being Pagan, you already know why going to the gym has relevance to the discussions of demons and spirits, and why it was I ever started going to the gym in the first place, that it had something to do with gods and true will.

So, I’ll start with a statement: “Óðinn told me to join a gym.”

Perhaps that sounds absurd, so I can rewrite that sentence in a way that sounds a bit less “crazy,” such as: “it was because of Óðinn that I joined a gym.”

Unfortunately, that rewritten statement isn’t actually true. It was actually because of me that I joined a gym. That was my choice, my decision. Óðinn didn’t make me get a gym membership, and I didn’t get a gym membership because I was trying to make Óðinn happy, and as far as I know, it wasn’t even Óðinn’s idea, but rather mine.

So, the only way to say this is, “Óðinn told me to join a gym.”

To tell you this, though, is to obscure an entire story for which that statement is mere shorthand.

I said earlier that I didn’t know why I hadn’t gone back for so long, but that’s not actually true. I didn’t want to. I told myself I did, of course, but I didn’t. It’s fucking hard, honestly, and kind of awful, even as it’s brilliant and life affirming and feels incredible.

Sometimes I don’t want to do really hard things. I think that’s probably true for most everyone. Sometimes we’d rather do easier things, or nothing at all, and that’s all great and needful. Unfortunately, we also want more, want better circumstances and conditions, want to feel better and more alive than we currently feel. And it’s precisely in that contradiction where what we call shame arises.

In other words, we become aware of the conflict between certain desires and other desires and our struggle to sort them. We realize in those moments that we are hindered, reluctant, hesitating, holding back and hiding our faces because we cannot find our agency and cannot manifest our will.

The Greek concept of the eudaemon and the Roman concept of the genius are a lot more useful here than any modern psychological concepts that we use to talk about will and agency. The eudaemon for the Greeks was seen as a kind of friendly intelligent spirit bound in some way to an individual, a bit like the way Christians conceived of the “guardian angel.” The genius for the Romans was somewhat similar, though it was seen to be intrinsic to a person.

Both the Romans and the Greeks were animist peoples, believing themselves to share a world teeming with spirits. The way each culture conceived of those spirits and their relationship to them was different, but their frameworks shared enough core features that the differences matter less than the similarities. For the Greeks, these spirits were daemons, and could be helpful and benevolent (the agathodaemons or the eudaemons), unhelpful and malevolent (the kakodaemons), or otherwise neutral. The Roman understanding of spirits was somewhat similar, though for them spirits (genii) were an inhabiting presence. For instance, a place had a genius (the genius loci) just as much as a person had a genius, and some genii could become so significant as to then be seen as lesser deities.

The Greek and Roman concepts have quite a lot in common with beliefs in tutelary spirits, ancestors, and totems in other animist peoples, but what is particularly relevant to this discussion are the continuations of these frameworks into Christianity. The idea of the “guardian angel” is the most obvious of these continuations, one iterated early in Church history, codified in the 12th century, and still official and active Catholic doctrine.

If this last bit seems somewhat surprising or dubious to you, I assure you I felt the same way until just today, reading excerpts of Pope Francis’s discussion of guardian angels during a Mass four years ago:

There is the danger of not going on the journey. And how many people settle down, and don’t set out on the journey, and their whole life is stalled, without moving, without doing anything… It is a danger. Like that man in the Gospel who was afraid to invest the talent. He buried it, and [said] “I am at peace, I am calm. I can’t make a mistake. So I won’t take a risk.” And so many people don’t know how to make the journey, or are afraid of taking risks, and they are stalled. But we know that the rule is that those who are stalled in life end up corrupted… The angels help us, they push us to continue on the journey…

…The angel is authoritative; he has authority to guide us. Listen to him. “Hearken to his voice, and do not rebel against him.” Listen to the inspirations, which are always from the Holy Spirit – but the angel inspires them. But I want to ask you a question: Do you speak with your angel? Do you know the name of your angel? Do you listen to your angel? Do you allow yourself to be led by hand along the path, or do you need to be pushed to move?

…Our angel is not only with us; he also sees God the Father. He is in relationship with Him. He is the daily bridge, from the moment we arise to the moment we go to bed. He accompanies us and is a link between us and God the Father. The angel is the daily gateway to transcendence, to the encounter with the Father: that is, the angel helps me to go forward because he looks upon the Father, and he knows the way. Let us not forget these companions along the journey.

Setting aside for a moment the references to “God the Father” and the “Holy Spirit,” Pope Francis’s explanation of the role of the angels are fully in line with the ancient pagan understandings of both the eudaemon and the genius. Flashes of inspiration or insight (of “genius”) were attributed to these spirits, as well as intense moments of intuition about the consequences of certain choices or the motives of others, such as when you are being lied to or manipulated. Plato has Socrates attribute his eudaemon for helping him avoid earlier attempts on his life, as well as giving him insight into the true nature of other’s questions.

We set it aside for a moment, but the language of “God the Father” and the “Holy Spirit” are also in line with the pagan understanding, since it was through a person’s genius and eudaemon that they interacted with the rest of the divine world (manifested as other genii or spirits). Everything had spirits, or more correctly everything interacted with everything else as spirits because everything has and is a spirit.

(If for the materialists reading me this gets a little too difficult, replace the word “spirit” with “breath,” since anyway that’s what its root word meant).

For the Romans and the Greeks, the genius and the eudaemon in many ways could be also called a person’s true will or destiny because of its ability to see what was best for a person. These spirits helped them to become better, to gain more wealth or renown, to survive or avoid harmful situations, and they also provided insight into consequences of actions and the emotions of others. Thus, their general goal or work was to help you to become what we might call the “best version” of yourself.

The moments of hindrance and reluctance described by the words shame and embarrassment can best be seen as times of disconnection from the genius and the eudaemon. I’ve heard Christians describe this kind of disconnection as a sense of being “out of a state of grace,” or of “backsliding.” I think this is a short-hand for the same thing, because one of the other functions or roles of the genius was to act as a conduit, intermediary, or translator between the person and the divine. In some witchcraft traditions, the genius is called “the god-self” or the “god-soul,” and it is seen as being separate from (and often in conflict with) the mind but close kin with the animal or bodily self. This also parallels (or is informed by) older shamanic views on the matter of humans having multiple souls, one of which can interact with other souls independent of the body-soul.

V.

I’ll discuss souls in a later essay when I take up the concepts of animus and psyche, but it’s interesting at least for now to note that the Roman concept of the genius and the Greek concept of the eudaemon, which tended to fold into each other, were split apart again by Christian doctrine. Augustine in particular made this break, translating the genius into the soul and the eudaemon into a guardian angel. The Church also stripped all other things except humans of their genii, which was the real break of Christianity from the pagan animist cultures which mothered it. But another way of looking at this is that Christianity attempted to simplify the relationship between the human and the divine into a two-party interaction: there was only the human soul and the divine one-god, and only spirits which were in the service of that one-god (the angels) and genii of those who were faithful to him (the saints) could speak on his behalf.

Angels within Christianity have counterparts who still bear that older Greek name, the demons. The demons of Christianity are the Greek kakodaemon, the class of malevolent spirits who desire to harm humanity through humanity itself. As with many other things, the Church didn’t come up with the idea of such beings, nor of ways of dealing with them: it’s a core feature of animist frameworks that some spirits are just not nice, and rites and rituals of exorcism far predate the birth of Christ.

Though we’ve generally discarded the idea of good and evil in secular modernity, we still preserve the idea that a malevolence can possess a person and manifest itself in their behavior. As the author of the piece I cited at the beginning says, “…in a vestigial echo of the truth, we sometimes say ‘he is wrestling with his demons’ when such battles are particularly dramatic.” There are many more vestigial echos, however, including the most obvious ones where we speak of someone being “possessed” or “gripped” by an idea, mood, fear, or passion.

More subtle yet profound, I think, is when someone is not acting normal and we ask them “what’s gotten into you?” or when we speak of something “coming over,” “come onto,” or “taking hold of” a person.

I’ll explore all this also in upcoming essays, especially as it relates to ideology, psychology, and Carl Jung’s frameworks on the unconscious and the shadow, but we should now return to the matter of shame and embarrassment by way of Pope Francis’s mass and a peculiar point he makes regarding hesitation and stagnation.

And how many people settle down, and don’t set out on the journey, and their whole life is stalled, without moving, without doing anything… It is a danger….and so many people don’t know how to make the journey, or are afraid of taking risks, and they are stalled. But we know that the rule is that those who are stalled in life end up corrupted…

Shame and embarrassment are both active states of hesitation, of holding back from action. Being in such a state too long leads to long periods of inaction, of being “stalled in life,” which Francis asserts leads to becoming corrupted.

It seems like much of my work these last few years has been trying to understand the psychological state of ressentiment and how it influences mass politics. Ressentiment says “I am not happy, therefore you must not be allowed to be happy,” but as I noted in The Vampiric Gaze (and which Kirkegaard particularly notes), it ultimately says “I cannot act and therefore you shall not be allowed to act.” The “wet blanket” or “stick in the mud” state of the person in ressentiment is physical: you get the sense that the fire of life has gone out of them, but rather than being merely depressed they are actively seek to douse the fires of others.

Shame and embarrassment are the key here. Prolonged states of inaction and hesitation (again, crudely, “constipation” of the will) only increase the feeling of shame until something is done about it. That something might be good and helpful (like finally going back to the gym), or it might be harmful and malevolent (suicide or abuse of others). The latter is the route of ressentiment, which seeks to replicate itself in others, to make the whole world hesitate out of fear and abdicate their agency.

Ressentiment seems to me best described as a spirit, or as that essay stated, “demonology is a necessary mode of social explanation.” It is the corruption of which Pope Francis speaks that comes upon a person who is stalled, who hesitates, who does not risk, and then no longer understands that they’ve actively chosen such decisions. The “angels” there to help “push us” were for the Greeks the eadaemon, helpful demons. For the Romans, they were the actual spirit of the person, assigned to them at birth and accompanying them to the grave. We might now call this merely the “will” or “agency,” but it’s all really the same thing.

Can we call ressentiment a demon? Yes, I think so, but we can only be truly honest about it if we use the Greek framework and call it a kakodaemon. Some demons like humans, some demons want to destroy humans. As I’ve said many times before, “there are some gods who do not care how this ends, only that it does.” The spirit of ressentiment is quite malevolent, and its ultimate goal seems to be the destruction of the genius in both the Roman and the modern understandings of the word. The person who shines too bright, who ventures too far, who builds too well or creates too beautifully is a genius because he or she has a particularly profound genius. Their spirits are strong, bright, glorious, and they inspire (raise the spirits of, enspirit) others.

VI.

In a social media crusade, the goal is to crush the spirit, to force a person to cover or hide themselves as in shame, to bar themselves from action in embarrassment. Such things of course predate the Woke and the internet that birthed them, because we’ve always had bullies, “mean girls,” and communal or mass acts of shaming and terror. While we can debate endlessly the causes of such acts, what’s more interesting is the predictable results to the victims.

It’s become such a trope in stories of mass shooters that it’s rather clichéd, but one of the most common details that arises about the life of the killer after the events is that he (usually he) was socially awkward, ostracized, and very, very often bullied. The typical response to such details is to shake one’s head or to shrug, though we hear increasingly from the Woke that bullying cannot possibly be the cause. There are plenty of people who are bullied who do not become mass killers, we are reminded as if this were somehow an adequate rebuttal. Plenty of people drive drunk but do not get into car accidents; regardless, we all agree that alcohol’s effect on a driver is a relevant part of drunk driving accidents.

If there’s any modern event that we could agree upon as being demonic (in the Christian sense) or kakodaemonic (in the Greek sense), it would be a mass shooting. We spend days, weeks, and months trying to understand what could possibly possess a person to blow out the brains of schoolchildren or to murder groups of strangers at a shopping mall, a picnic, or a church. No matter how much we try to understand, no explanation ever feels sufficient.

To quote again the essay I cited: “Demonology is a necessary mode of social explanation.” And demons do indeed offer a very sufficient explanation, but only if the animism in which belief in demons makes any sense comes, too. In other words, demons not as the counterpart to angels, but rather demons as spirits, some of whom are quite nice and helpful, many of whom are indifferent (but might be convinced to come around one way or the other), some who are generally quite mischievous or harsh, and many of whom are quite malevolent and dearly wish to see us humans suffer, die, and even perish completely from the world we share with them.

Christianity is hardly the first religious system to have rites or rituals of exorcism. In fact, on the world stage it could fairly be said to have been very late to this. As I mention in Being Pagan, the role of priest-figures (shaman, mystic, etc) in animist religions is to be an intermediary between humans and the spirits, including placating and sometimes banishing, fighting off, or exorcising spirits. At best in our modern world now we have the psychologists and psychiatrists, those who study the psyche (which means soul in Greek) to diagnose its dis-orders and put it back into order. But they cannot tell us what comes upon a person, what possessed them, only the trauma that got them to that point, and how to heal that trauma before it opens you up to something else.

What Christianity did manage to do was to formalize such exorcisms and to create a moral code which, when followed, would keep individuals far enough from social or soul conditions that might lead them to possession. This is why all the grimoires of the renaissance magicians invoke Christ and angels in the binding of demons toward the will of the speaker: it’s an efficient framework, and one that works. Unfortunately, it works the way Starbucks works if you want a coffee or McDonald’s works if you want a hamburger. Everything is streamlined and flattened in the service of some greater entity. Worse, the goodness of the actions of that greater entity are fully relative to which side of a cultural divide you’re standing on.

To understand the problem, consider how in such a framework, Joan of Arc was either a saint or a witch. From an animist framework, she was both. She could interact with spirits (angels and saints) and not only not go crazy on account of her experiences but also could then translate those messages towards massive cultural and political change. Her genius shone brightly enough to convince others immediately of the rightness of her cause, and eudaemons warned her of danger and the intended motives of her enemies. These are all traits of a holy person, a saint, but all also of the witch. Both the French who followed her and the English who executed her were correct.

A Christian demonology might suffice as a start, but it cannot hold both of these truths at the same time. What is needed is a much deeper ecology of demons. What leads a person to become possessed by malevolent spirits, and how do you prevent that? How might such spirits be placated, or might they also be merely out-of-place? What is the ultimate goal of the spirits that overcome a person in addiction or in suicide? And particularly on the matter of ressentiment and other mass “psychoses,” is there some larger presence behind such manifestations?

Also and just as importantly, we need an ecology of the demons in relation to the genius (in both senses of the word.) Peter Grey’s recent book, The Two Antichrists, is a good beginning towards an ecology of the modern sense of genius, albeit indirectly. The current technocratic “space” order, including NASA and SpaceX, was built from the demon-soaked obsession of occultist Jack Parsons and inspired by the literary pulp fantasies of raving mad men who believed themselves in contact with alien or demonic intelligences. To put it bluntly, The Machine is the work of demons.

This isn’t a new idea, though. Gordon White points out repeatedly in his book Ani.Mystic (review coming very soon) that indigenous animist cultures have always attributed their knowledge, their wisdom, their flashes of insight, and especially their technology to spirit-teachers. Spirits of plants teach humans the uses of (or better said, how to be in relation with) the plant; ancestors come to descendants in dreams to warn of danger or to push for action. Spirits of stars and gods gave the plans for new ways of boat-building, of time-keeping, and even of governance. (Even Christianity and Islam have star-spirits as a central part of their founding narrative: Muslims pray towards a fallen meteor five times a day and the magi followed a star to the birth of Jesus.)

Importantly, cultures who believe in spirits and their guidance also have ways of determining which spirits actually give good advice, and what their motives are. We have nothing of the sort now, and thus every technology must be made, sold widely, and allowed to transform the world merely because it’s new. Which demons pushed humans to create the internet, and what were they hoping to accomplish? Which spirits gave the dreams that inspired the factories, or penicillin, or nuclear fission, or the printing press? And more urgent—what were they on about?

If we decide to allow ourselves to once again believe in spirits, we might have an easier time understanding all the greater political problems sweeping through societies, particularly these increasing moments of mass ressentiment, because we can ask questions we currently don’t allow ourselves to ask. If ressentiment is a spirit (a kakodaemon), then what’s its goal and how did it seize the person in ressentiment so thoroughly? How do we exorcise it from a person, and how do we help people avoid its dark influence?

This doesn’t actually conflict with Marxist materialism, as much as it might seem to. The best way to keep someone from becoming miserable and trying to spread their misery to others is to make sure they’ve got the means to live a satisfied life. If they’re not starving, if they’ve got dignified and meaningful work, and if their village wasn’t bombed by drone airstrikes and their children weren’t poisoned by radiation or chemicals in their food or water, they’re much less likely to then go on and try to tear down other people’s worlds. Likewise, if they’re not sitting at a computer all day eating trash food while reading that the cis-hetero-patriarchy or the global Jewish cabal is the source of all their problems, they might instead not try to impose their bodily alienation onto the rest of society.

It doesn’t conflict with materialism, nor really even with the Christian framework, provided we keep in mind that one person’s saint is another person’s witch and that neither of those positions actually contradict each other.

Ressentiment is really I think the best problem to start with, because it’s breeding violence everywhere. If shame and embarrassment are really the key to it (and I think it is), we must come up with ways to helping people to stop holding themselves back, to stop self-hindering, and to teach them—from whichever framework we use—how to know what they truly desire.