ExXception Draft

This is an excerpt from ‘Demons of the Modern World’, from the forward. And in this passage the author is talking mainly in response to the ‘Satanist’ kidnappings/what have you in the 80’s. I think this goes to an explanation of how ‘you know how everyone’s into weirdness right now?’ (from the movie ‘Slacker’). Me, I’m always trying to come to grips with cultural history, but this excerpt has a kind of theory about how in the 90’s things went weird and I’m thinking it goes maybe the X-Files was such a touchstone because it was like working through these issues. And maybe the whole thing was just economics, shit I don’t even understand. President Clinton listening to gallup polls and calling people at home to see what they thing he should do. Anyway, I just started this book, and from the forward it sounds really interesting.

“When social workers, therapists, and political theorists rejected the reality of the oppressor in favor of the reality of the oppressed, they also rejected traditional scientific and legal reasoning as well. What they exalted as the “real” reality, however, was the reality of fantasy, the supernatural, and the demonic. It was, in McGrath’s words, “a child’s reality as recovered through fantasy, play, nightmares, dreams, and memories of childhood. As a result, the world of children’s fantasies and nightmares became elevated to the status of reality. And for political reasons social workers and therapists said that this reality was unassailable by traditional scientific or legal reasoning.”

The failure of children to make an abstract distinction between the mechanical and the symbolic worlds and, consequently, their taking up residence in the demonic world, that is the world of magic and monsters, the adoption of this worldview as the only legitimate view, and, consequently, the assignment of a reality status to it by social workers and therapists set demons free upon the surface of the earth.

Today, unfortunately, these demons are everywhere. Although the sensate, antidemonic subculture now dominates, it is threatened on every side by an ever-rising tide of ideationalism and the work of purveyors of the occult and supernatural. Every Gallup Poll shows a majority of people believe in extraterrestrial spaceships, aliens in our midst, life after death, and the reality of ghosts and angels. More than half of our citizens believe in seers, psychics, and ESR Despite the universality of higher education, the general level of scientific knowledge seems no greater today than it was a century ago. Thousands today still believe that the stars control our destiny, and millions still embrace primitive religious concepts and beliefs that have little or no relevance to the world of today. Thousands still seek moral and spiritual refuge in various metaphysical systems, ascended masters, channeled entities, the Cabala, Edgar Cayce, Rosicrucrianism, tarot cards, TV psychics, the Akashic Record, and what have you. Every new belief—no matter how bizarre—is taken as a sign of a spiritual realm. They are living proof that a demonic world exists.”

-‘Demons of the Modern World’

from the Forward by Robert A. Baker, Ph.D.