Cult of the Me-God

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sol-ip-sism (sòl-îp-sîz-em, so-lîp-) noun, Philosophy.
1. The theory that the self is the only thing that can be known and verified.
2. The theory or view that the self is the only reality.
[Latin solus, alone + Latin ipse, self + -ISM.]

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Of course, it should not really be called a cult, as it is the true religion of choice throughout the world. It has not so much conquered Christianity as displaced it in the shrunken hearts and heads of the populace of what was formerly known as Western Civilization. Displaced it because there is no room for it and the following of that which is right in the affections of most people. The me-god and the real God are jealous deities, and cannot co-exist in the same human heart, no matter how large.

The me-god is winning right now. Self-idolatry grows like a weed on sterile soil, until it poisons its host environment and cuts off its own survival. It sends down a grasping taproot not easily pulled out. Constant weeding through a process of self-examination is the only known pesticide, and the vast majority of humanity have neither the will nor the want-to in order to rule themselves through a process of self-discipline.

The Origins of Self-Idolitry

It starts from infancy. A human baby cries whenever she is hungry, tired, has a wet or soiled diaper, or wants attention. When the child is not your own, you might well be angry at the little bundle of selfishness, but remember: the child has no other way to express herself except through the medium of crying. She has developed no sense of self-discipline to distinguish between her wants and her needs.

When you consider it, it is truly a miracle that infants grow out of a mere crying for whatever they want. Isn’t infantile wailing for what you want far easier than working for it? Many times the infancy is internalized within a person, and that person never becomes more than an amoral seeker after their own pleasures. No sense of self-discipline other than for purposes of concealment is ever developed. No morality other than a sense of "What do I want and how do I get it?" is formed. No other moral code other than "What’s in it for me" understood.

A six-month-old baby acting this way is a cute bundle of potential, as it is understood he or she will grow out of it. A six- or sixty-year-old baby is a monstrosity, a nightmare of burdensome dependence on parents and society, a drain of effort best spent elsewhere.

It gets worse. When people cannot grow up, sooner or later the small individual "me-gods" coalesce into a gigantic tribal state-god of enormous power, ruthlessness and appetite, as the small dirt clods of the me-god is moulded and poured into a huge tribal idol of half-baked clay before which all bad or noble must bow down before. The huge mud state-god has no redeeming qualities, as little of that which was good went into its construction. Worthless people make for worthless government, as in a fit of Gadarenian swinishness they seek out the government they deserve.

In sterner times, privation enforced self-discipline. But the vast majority of people living in this decaying democracy never had such a harsh schoolmaster to teach valuable lessons. These hard lessons will be dearly taught to a soft population.

Intergenerational Self-Idolatry

A soft population it is, and has been for generations.
Right now the former WWII generation is passing from power, as members of it are well over 70 years of age. Bob Dole is the last one of them to seek the Presidency. Supposedly since they fought WWII they derived a right to pass a debt sentence onto younger generations to pay for their retirement and medical care. "We deserve it! We fought The War and went through the Great Depression!" Never mind the fact that fighting for survival is usually and solely rewarded with the continuation of life, and that previous generations well knew it was up to them to solve their problems as they arose. So now massive debt has been expended on their government-sponsored care and retirement, functions formerly left to the individual. This generation grew up in relative freedom and left a legacy of huge, corrupt government and debt, the natural result of the me-god spawning a state-god. Thank God they are nearly gone!

The "Silent" generation is largely a group of wusses. The earlier part of that generation got sent to Korea and the latter ones got sent to Vietnam to fight the state-gods’s wars and were sacrificed without a peep. A eunuchoid group of compromisers, like sheep, all they will ever do is bleat as their throats are cut, prattling about the "law and order" passed onto them. Never having created or made anything of their own, they waited for priviledge sans responsibility to trickle into their feeble hands. Due to their own mental and moral limitations, expect neither change nor strife from this bunch.

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The "Baby-Boomers" are a bunch of ‘idealistic hypocrites.’ Never having to arise to any occasion, they got material wealth placed in their lap, and then assumed they had a natural right to success. Like George Bush, they were born on third base and assumed they had hit a triple. Their parents, when faced with their temper tantrums, took the easy way and told them about their "moral superiority" or some such rot, with the result that few of them ever grew up.

The first wave of them peed their pants when it was time to go to Vietnam and promptly proclaimed their courage in pursuing the option of cowardice. The rich and politically powerful of them let their rural and black cohorts get drafted and killed while they pursued college degrees. Now that they are in power, like the present First Crook, they see no problem in sending younger men overseas to get killed while protecting their political and financial interests. Impatient to get into power, and with a wink and a nod, these myopic power-seekers agreed to force unborn generations into paying off the bills the earlier generations ran up, while joining in the yawpish wail about the state of the national deficit. They won’t go quietly.

The last wave of them waste no time apologising for the actions of the first bunch and feel akin to the "GenX" crowd: knowing the bill is fixing to come due, determined to repudiate it and to break the intergenerational slave-gang chain.

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Lastly is the "Generation X" young adults. They have an undeserved reputation for wildness, for irresponsibility, for apathy. Nonsense! They are not responsible for creating the world as it is. They know since previous generations didn’t pay their bills it is irresponsibly expected for them to shoulder a burden not of their own making. This explains the side-glances they exchange under turned-backwards baseball caps -- their empathetic communication between themselves as to the ‘clueless’ moral posturing of the ‘old feebs’ who placed them in this mess and now wanting them to get all of us out of it.

They can’t and they won’t. Baby-boom ‘mothers’ aborted from their ranks about a third of their number -- courtesy of the me-god’s and state-god’s collusive partnership in sacrificing non-voting, unborn human life on the alter of convenience. A large portion of the survivors are mentally and morally crippled for life as a result of living in what is called the feminization of poverty -- the state-god’s picking up the welfare tab for the me-god’s worshipping of ‘free-love.’ So now an unsupportable burden is placed on shoulders narrowed by a lack of numbers and lack of ability to support that burden. Eventually this morally unmandated unsupportable burden will be chucked aside by the aborted generation.

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The Cannibalistic Partnership of the Me-god and the State-God.

From childhood, as an matter of growth, we learn that there is an outside world greater than ourselves. While all of us filter the input from that outside world, very few of us are even able to begin filtering this huge outside world in terms other than ourselves. The few who are able to cut large portions of the outside world and view it in dispassionate terms are so above average that they are usually said to have ‘genius’ because of their combined traits of mental and moral stability. This genius is a state of being aware. In fact, self-absorbed people unaware of the outside world, concentrating only on themselves and their wants, will never show any sign of any intelligence, will never be able to grow up, and act as a drag upon the aware.

Those whom are aware are able to impose discipline upon themselves. Self-discipline is a fitter ruler than all the petty Hitlers with their police states have been able to impose upon the undisciplined. However, in a land wherein the power of self-discipline has atrophied to the point where there are no moral limits, pretty soon the selfishness reaches a boiling point to the point where the common man, frustrated by the interactions of his fellow commoners, always says, "There ought to be a law . . . ." A law governing everyone else -- not himself. A law which doesn’t apply to himself, but to others. From such a conception engendered by a lack of self-discipline and awareness springs the monster known as the state-god, to whom all will be sacrificed. The state-god is the spawn of all the collective me-gods, a fit monster to destroy its Frankenstein.

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The End of It All

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations have been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage. -- Alexander Tyler

These governments, nations, civilizations -- these groupings of men -- only last as long as the moral level of its great and common men remains high. Once Tyler’s cycle has been gone through, the civilization is gone, and so are the people who formed it. Heard anything lately from the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, or their former empires? Alexander Tyler’s words assert democracies have a short life span because living in a republic or a democracy places sterner demands upon a people’s inherent sense of self-discipline than having discipline imposed upon them by a king or dictator. No self-discipline, soon no democracy.

Our very way of life is based upon interlocking faith and trust in our fellow citizens and their institutions.

Will the insurance company pay off on the claim? Will the younger generation allow payroll deductions to be made to support Social Security and pay off the national debt? Will the older people support public schools to educate the young to indoctrinate them to support these government programs? Will that policeman protect me from the black mugger or will he plant drugs into my car and commit perjury to put me in prison and seize my property under asset forfeiture? Are the elections honest or are election laws disqualifying new candidates and ballot fraud going on? What if the electricity and telephone service is cut off and stays off? If welfare programs are eliminated, will the poor riot? Are terrorists, corporate polluters, or government agencies putting toxins in the water supply for their own reasons?

If these social connections are cut or damaged, an increasingly complex system breaks down and becomes less able to repair itself whenever people or their government become less decent or able. In fact, a society composed of chaotic me-god worshippers is ungovernable by even the most sprawling state-god. The state-god cannot advance beyond the level of its least common denominator.

This moral decay occurs at the lowest and highest levels of the social order. Much like the question as to the chicken and the egg, there is no definitive accounting as to whether the rulers or the populace first succumb to the me-god-state-god sickness. Like a cancer, it is formed by a union of pathogen and proper environment, slowly grows during latency, speeds up under optimum conditions, and eventually kills the body politic unless excised.

It becomes most noticeable and demoralizing at the highest levels first. A fish always rots from the head down. Politicians sell themselves to the highest bidders and make up laws to benefit the special interests. The special interests get monopolies, licenses, and special favors from the new legislation passed through like dung from the state-god beast. As the beast gets hungrier and hungrier, it eventually overruns and destroys its environment and starts to cannibalize itself.

At the lowest and middle levels, at first the state-god is viewed as the machine that will cater to all the several me-god’s wants. But as the state-god gets hungrier and insists on being fed at the expense of first some, then all, a state of incipient civil war expands to encompass every member of the social order. Sooner or later all the natural victims are eaten, leaving the predators, large and small, to fight it out among themselves.

Since there are fewer members of the ‘elites,’ they got to live at the top of the social-order food chain, they were in charge, should have known better, and have further to fall, etc., etc., the collapse of civilization will affect them the hardest. Indeed, they are often the very first to be purged, the exhalations of their me-gods gulped down without a trace by the malevolent dragon of the state-god, as witness what happened to the Czar, his relatives, and hangers on due to the Bolshevik Revolution. Then the proletariat get their turn to reap the whirlwind, as witness Russian history.

Our Amerikan turn is coming up. We will elect the me-god archetype Bill Clinton to run our ‘land-of-the-free, home-of-the-brave-puke-puke’ state-god right into the ground with the end result that we all will get what we deserve when our State-God munches us and our individual me-gods.

--Martin Lindstedt
9/28/96

A prettier version is available at "The 11th Hour"

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