Herd mentality

Satan thinks His followers dress funny

Posted on by A lesser demon

Satan’s key observation about hipsters is that they prove a generic human trait: whenever humans achieve the freedom to be individuals, they use it to imitate each other. In an attempt to look unique and uninfluenced by fashion, hipsters look to each other for inspiration and eventually all look the same. It is this trait that makes Satan think of His followers as hipsters: they wish to stand out from the herd’s expectations but habitually become involuntary stereotypes for that very reason. Satan has observed that with some venerable exceptions, His followers occupy three categories when they choose their outfits:

1. The heavy metal dude with a pitiable body dressed with prominent pentagrams and inverted crosses, complemented with illegible band name tee shirts. Studded leather boots that would fit a slightly homo-erotically–appealing villain of a medieval-times TV series also seem popular. All of it except the band name and image was black before being worn and fortunately washed too many times. Satan counts his blessings (or curses) that they grew up without knowing what the heavy metal icons of the 1980es looked like and attempted to imitate them instead.

2. The pretentiously overdressed snob who attempts to impress others, who watch overbearingly while the pretender impresses only himself or herself and possible a few fellow followers. The Devil hands this follower that at least he or she managed to grasp a few basics about lesser magic and the need to stand out from the herd but wishes that they would observe the Balance Factor. At least they seem to be learning that looking like Anton LaVey is growing out of fashion. Satan cannot tell if the memory of Mr. LaVey is fading or if the general population today now simply shrugs at a shaved head and a goatee, and is mostly relieved that fewer of His followers make the attempt without having the skull—both literally and figuratively—to imitate the old Doctor. He cringes at the thought that His followers might instead one day look to Peter Gilmore, LaVey’s successor in His church, resulting in a horde of eyebrows combed upwards and a tendency towards overweight, but rather than hoping Peter Gilmore will one day recall his own opinion about Michael Aquino’s shaved eyebrows two decades ago, the Devil takes solace in knowing that Peter Gilmore’s meager charisma will inspire few people to imitate his physical appearance.

3. The person who has lost perspective and only recalls that he or she is a Satanist when the Devil is occasionally mentioned and otherwise behaves and thinks and dresses entirely like everyone else. The wardrobe reflects the similarity with others.

The Devil swears by nine parts respectability to one part outrage in accordance with the Balance Factor. Not eight parts that scream loser to two parts 1990es movie, not seven parts respectability to three parts empty posturing, and not ten full parts of mediocrity.

Satan thinks people are being bullied because they are weird

Posted on by A lesser demon

From an evolutionary perspective, herd confirmity is critical to social animals. In fact, even solitary animals must obey the “social” rules of their species, including rules that mandate getting killed and devoured by a fellow specimen.

If you deviated from the social norms in ancient times, your local peers would quickly inform you of your misstep with angry outbursts and often physical reminders intended to motivate correct behavior. Deviation was not called for; it usually implied life-threatening risks and deadly mistakes affecting the entire social group, and such is usually dealt harshly and swiftly with on an evolutionary scale: evolution requires change and adaptation, favoring those who possess a lucky fit to physical and social environments, but most evolutionary paths are short and dead-ended. Repeat offense tended to be punishable with death, where your socially conscientious group would rend you limb from limb or ostracize you and leave you to the futile odds of surviving on your own. Lex Talionis—the law of the jungle—stipulates that you either conform or die.

By the same token, physical deviance is perceived as a threat, too, for good reason: in Nature, if an animal looks like something is wrong, then usually something is wrong, and the unfortunate individual should immediately be prevented from contributing to the gene pool as a matter of precaution.

Mankind may consider itself to be highly evolved but Satan thinks Man is barely a late-generation ape whose apparent sophistication is skin deep. A long history of evolution and very basic rules of survival govern human behavior to a much larger extent than humans like to think. Such deeply rooted core behavior dominates, so as soon as a human grows old enough to decode primitive social situations, any sight of unnatural (meaning any eccentric or peculiar) behavior will prompt normal human children to use all forms of peer pressure involving chicanery, harrassment, exclusion, bullying, and violence to suppress the aberration. The specific methods usually become more refined and artful as the children grow older and into adults, but typically not much and least among less gifted individuals. Nonconformity is feared by any age group because unnaturalness awakens the primoridal terror of a threat to group survival.

Satan wishes to interject here that it is a common misconception that people who rise to the top broke the rules to get there. They did not; they are in fact highly conformant. Some successful businessman or leader may indeed seem to break all codes of conduct or deviate from classical methods but social expectations ask just that of a powerful individual, and he or she rose to the top only through satisfing the herd’s demand for conformity-enforcing products or opinions. Satan thinks that few things are as conformant as acting “nonconformantly” in accordance with a social role that is defined by the herd. To successfully deviate from the herd, you must deviate in a predefined fashion that everyone accepts.

There are individuals who cannot help being nonconformant, however. They may suffer from mental illnesses or personality disorders that prevent them from understanding or following social rules or even from perceiving the world in a manner that aids their survival. To a varying degree, their irregular behavior threaten the life-sustaining conformity and hence they deserve to be either taught to conform or be properly disposed of, sometimes for perfectly good reason if their deviant behavior is harmful to others. And so from an early onset in life they are bullied until they occupy a harmless role in their society and until they keep a proper distance to normal people. For matters of brevity (and possibly because my Master specifically asked me to avoid any mention of demonic possession in the context of mental illness), your disloyal demon points its dear readers to our esteemed denizen Mr. Foucault’s book: Madness and Civilization for a historical rundown of psychotherapeutic treatment. Focus must remain what Satan thinks, not how humans have historically addressed mental health.

The Devil does not wish to share His opinions on the moral aspects of bullying, nor will He discuss specific forms of deviance. He merely understands that it is innately human to bully outliers, and that being bullied is thus a litmus test for deviance. Some anomaly is easily identifiable—physical disability or deformity is obvious—but adults do not readily recognize that if a child is otherwise being bullied in school, then probably there is something wrong with that child from a normality perspective. Bullies may be forced to stop but Satan thinks that an important step to stop the bullying would be to locate the deviant behavior and its cause because an early diagnosis can change everything for the better for a person.

Satan thinks moral people are untrustworthy

Posted on by A lesser demon

Satan’s preferred epistemological model of human knowledge is tabula rasa, because most humans preserve this state of mental blankness throughout their existence. What little primordial wisdom exists is systematically replaced with herd conformity and herd values through a process known as socialization. Little children, the hellspawn that they are, have an innate concept of justice and understand that exploiters and predators should be ostracized or overthrown; but through careful grooming they are taught to view sophisticated exploitation and oppression as socially desirable. They are taught to succumb to the undeserved power of trickery and brawns by a herd thus suppressed, learning to follow herd expectations: they become moral beings.

Some herd decisions may be advantageous for the continuation of the species but the Devil is satisfied with recognizing them all as man-made, not universal or divinely prescribed. They are the herd leading itself. Moral requirements are nothing but peer pressure to fit in, and Satan, had He not been morally disengaged to begin with, naturally disassociates Himself from all crowd self-control.

Satan does not mind seemingly moral arguments serving the self-interest of every individual. For example, blood or organ donations, tax payment, or similar society-level resource pooling can be regarded as either personal insurance or investment sharing, and the Devil tolerates a limited level of moralization on such issues against people who do not condone or grasp the obvious advantages of self-serving actions and are swayed by appeal to morality instead; Satan considers the latter a necessary white lie.

Satan abhors moralizing individuals who place themselves on a pedestal by example of their own moral superiority, however. Our Lord of Lies is unconcerned with the truth value of their claims, knowing that moralization and hypocrisy are lockstep conducts; it is the moralization He despises because it is empty posturing and an attempt to obtain unearned authority. Satan recommends that His followers never trust a person who claims to be right because he or she holds a higher moral ground than his or her opponents. Anyone that uses self-aggrandizement as the authority for truth and justice will treat you as an inferior with fewer rights once you inevitably have disagreements.

Satan thinks the Ninth Statement is a warning

Posted on by A lesser demon

A religion that preaches redemption from evil needs evil to be redeemed from, and a religion that sentences its stray sheep to Hell needs Hell. My Infernal Lord is therefore not surprised to be integral to Christian mythology, nor has He overlooked the fact that by His many names, countless other religions and ideologies have drawn upon His services to drive their droves into place and will continue to do so.

All it took for Mr. Hitler and his associates to convince their population to persecute the Jews was to draw pictures of them with little horns and claim that they were my master’s people. (My master asks me to mention that He nonetheless does not hold “Adolf,” as He said, entirely responsible for the Holocaust incident, as Mr. Hitler had merely followed up on the proposals of Martin Luther, the founder of Protestantism.) And a few decades ago, a president in the Western World who shall remain nameless, because we do not wish to speak the names of angels to be, needed only declare the Middle East to be the “axis of evil” and an enemy of his religion in order to launch a full scale war against a competitor to his family business.

Satan thinks the mechanism is a tad more general than being a manipulative, religious tool, however, because He finds it deeply rooted in the human brain. Any group—religious, political, social, or other—defines itself positively and negatively. The terms refer to what the ideology believes to contain and not to contain, and do not signify “good” or “bad” values. For example, atheism rejects the notion of gods, and although atheists consider this to be good (and Old Nick wholeheartedly agrees), it is a negative definition. A positive definition of atheism, had there been any, would describe what atheism adds rather than what it subtracts compared with other groups. The population of the USA would define itself positively (i.e., by what they are) by stating, e.g., that they are inhabitants of Northern America, and negatively (i.e., by what they are not) by assuring that part of their excellence involves not being Canadian.

Positive and negative definitions are often made-up. The positive definitions serve to reassure oneself of validity and greatness, or they are group goals, while negative definitions serve to both demark the limits of a group, and to be “inverse positives” which communicate that the group is the opposite of the negative definition. The Devil dryly notes that from his perspective, the latter is generally a statement of what the group merely wishes it wasn’t, because humans usually are as deplorable as they say they aren’t.

Human beings tend to converge on quite similar positive and negative definitions regardless of group identity, mainly because Man is a social animal and behaves accordingly. Human survival depends on everyone behaving mostly alike, and in societies, which all function mostly the same around the planet. Satan grants that there are trivial differences between groups such as geographically determined traditions regarding food or fashion, differently named gods and varying degrees between believing in literal or abstract deities, or different names for how governments universally enable the ruling class to exploit the less fortunate.

As social animals, humans need to belong to a group but its size is limited by the mental capacity of its members. Everyone outside of the group (which can be geographically far stretched in a highly connected world) is “the others” because the human brain can scope only the individual’s own group. Human identity is derived from their groups through the groups’ self-definitions: that which the group is and is not is what its members are and are not; defiance implies ostracism, which is the worst of all fears because in human evolution group rejection once spelled certain death.

Satan thinks that the stronger the need of an individual to feel the identity bestowed by his or her group, the more prone he or she is to concentrate on negative definitions, emphasizing how other groups are different or, equivalently, how his or her group is entirely unlike them. This is especially true when the groups seem similar, because at a deeply primal level the similarity creates the impression that the other group is a close contender to one’s own group, which might subsequently be overtaken and eliminated and oneself with it. Satan cares little whether the need to underscore one’s group at the expense of others arises from a self-inflated sense of significance which inspires people to contribute high importance to negative definitions, or whether it is the result of a mental capacity falling far below Dunbar’s number that requires less ambiguously defined group boundaries. He thinks that the strong need to defend one’s group is herd mentality regardless of cause, and the only important and perhaps counter-intuitive observation is that herd mentality compels an individual to identify strongly with narrowly and even binarily defined groups (by specific congregation, nationality, etc.) and aggressively dismiss its closer contenders rather than finding common ground. Herd mentality drives Europeans to fear the Middle East more than the Far East, and Western Satanic groups to be more spiteful against each other than even against the soup of Christianity that engulfs them all.

Your humble, and more often humbled and humiliated, narrator had wished to ask its master if the observation is really counter-intuitive, and whether not true individualism as opposed to herd mentality would obviously make someone both shrug off group conflicts and be capable of joining very large communities without feeling obliged to group-think. However, the Horned Almighty routinely punishes dumb questions with another turn on the rack, and yours unfaithful has decided to leave the answer blowing in the hot winds of Hell.

Satan thinks that the Ninth Statement should be taken as a warning not to be yet another friend of the Church through one’s actions and demeanor. When Satan observes one of His followers behaving according to Christian precepts about the Devil’s own, believing to be thus expected, He thinks the follower is a Christian who has no place wearing the Devil’s colors. It helps little if the follower does so knowingly in order to offend his or her haters. That requires no talent; true demonic skill lies in turning the haters’ invested emotions against themselves, perplexing them into dislodging their ideological conviction. Satan thinks that wishing, by one’s actions, to be the best friend the Church has ever had, the best option is: go to church.

And Satan thinks this warning should call for introspection, too, allowing the abyss to gaze back. His followers should avoid the herd mentality need to identify themselves so strongly with their own group that their use of other groups for negative definition turns disagreement into obsession. He recalls that one of his denizens, some Friedrich Nietzsche, once cautioned against becoming the monster you chase, and thinks that His followers, too, should avoid the temptation to allow their enemies—percived or real—a seat on His throne by casting them as the followers’ Devil in order to stay in business.

Satan thinks religious diets are jail food

Posted on by A lesser demon

The Devil prefers to think that He fails to understand why humans fuss about dietary habits, but He does have some hypotheses.

Some foods are risky. Pigs often carry diseases and require stricter cooking techniques than, e.g., poultry. Ancient Man knew nothing of microbes but must have been mindful of the potentially lethal consequences of eating under-cooked or raw meat from certain animals. So, when mankind invented their gods, perhaps they threw in a divine ban on pork as a reminder to avoid it. Satan finds this explanation insufficient, however. It makes sense for swine (my Horned Master unfortunately did not clarify whether he meant the animal or the religious people) but is hardly true for many other dietary restrictions imposed by the various gods around the globe, and the Devil is inclined to dismiss this hypothesis except for a limited number of particular foods in specific historical areas.

Satan suspects more sinister reasons. He believes the gods never intended to serve Man (again, Satan sounded ominously ambiguous saying this) by offering sound advice but instead attempted to feather their own nests. My Master understands that gods use every trick in the book to retain their followers, and intricate rituals with complicated table manners and recipes requiring special attention to ingredients require both host and patron to concentrate on their faith. The more complicated the more the followers are forced to think about their divine lords.

The trick of eating different foods also provides the ability to distinguish oneself from other groups. For example, to stand out from the shellfish-eating, primitive pagans of the other tribe, is is easier to remove oyster from the menu than to stop being an equally primitive screwhead.

Lastly, leading its followers to believe that certain foods are yucky, or “unclean,” surely won the inventor a cosmic patent for its effectiveness as an unclimbable fence around the followers. Human taste develops during their lifetimes, but usually keep within the limits of learned acceptable categories of food. Humans that were raised to feel aversion to, say, fish, will usually stay off seafood. The divine subterfuge is to select food that is consumed in nearby religions, because this will keep one’s own followers from leaking into neighboring groups, who eat disgusting things.

The human adaptability to strange situations teaches followers to consider unreasonable and nonsensical rules to be normal, and they will argue their necessity and pass them on to their offspring, never realizing that they are held hostage. Satan thinks religion is best defined as an institutionalized Stockholm syndrome.