When the cruel person acts as the Instrument of God, she blasphemes.

Who is she blaspheming?  The God of Her Instrumentality or the God Beyond Her Instrumentality?

The reputation of Christianity may be trashed whenever the Bible is used for “seeking the thrill (without conscience)”, but that does not tell the whole story.  What has really happened?  The ideologue-blasphemer has interpreted the words of the Bible in a way that anoints her with Power.

She has transformed The God Beyond Her Instrumentality into the God of Her Instrumentality.

In many ways, this transformation from Epicurean to Sadist captures the difference between concupiscence and cruelty and the difference between the planes of “doing” and “perversion”.

Concupiscence() seeks all sorts of fulfillment^selfs.  That is the nature of “being in the state(with Cupid)”.

Cruelty() seeks the rush of anti-fulfillment^self, where the victim is deprived – like those little crawfish in the marsh of Peters’ childhood – of her legs and claws.  Watch her squirm at the debasement!  What fun!

Unfortunately, you can only do it once to each crawfish.

So perhaps the nature of “cruelty” is “seeking the thrill(without conscience)”.

Just as Cupid’s arrow takes over the person’s heart or “state of being”, perverse instrumentality (“without conscience” in its myriad of possibilities) removes the most important hindrance to the thrill of debasing others.

The Marquis de Sade was so complete a perverse instrument of “the Pleasure of Giving You Pain”, that he longed for nothing more than the pure thrill of acting without conscience.

Today’s sadists are not so agenda free.

Today’s sadists pose as “the Instruments of Some Higher Order that Will Take Away Your Pain”, like National Socialism, Communism or Progressivism.  In this way, the pleas of their victims float like incense above their Lack of Conscience and fill the nostrils of a Divinity Who Feeds Off Love.  Look.  We have taken away the Pain of Your Own Conscience.  Too bad that also required putting that probe into your brain.

Do you know why you are here?

You are here to give us the thrill of destroying your conscience.

Today’s Sadists have transcended their Master.

At the point, Peters brought up the issue of Sadism.

The word comes from the name of a member of royalty – or, perhaps, if you will excuse the pun – a royal member who spent half of his life in prison for petty crime and debauchery.

What better place to pen one’s life-style setting treatise?

The Epicurean motto was: Seek pleasure and avoid pain.

Sade asked: What if your pleasure comes from other’s pain?

Then the motto transforms into: Seek thrills and avoid good conscience.

How do describe cruelty?

Peters started with childhood memories of little cruelties committed by children “just because they could”.

He continued by envisioning the many cruelties committed in history.  The primordial image of “the wolf” raises its head here.  Who is afraid of the big bad Wolf?  And weirdly, biological observations of wolf behavior occasionally confirm the intuition of the folklore.  Talking to them is useless.

Peters moved on to specific cases of torture.

In all his examples, individuals act as instruments of a Political Power while inflicting cruelty.

Peters pointed out that the cruel person has two faces: The face of the one who tortures others and the face of the regular family person, living an upstanding life, who is just like you and me.  He called it “doubling”.

“Doubling” may be defined as “the wolf putting on sheep’s clothing”.  The person in sheep’s clothing talks a shifty technical vocabulary that masks the wolf’s predatory procedures.

In the same way, dictators “hold elections” in order to “appear legitimate”.  The whole charade is bogus.  The words are changed in order to advance the Powerful.

Once every word has been “redefined” by the “Powers That Be”, cruelty becomes the social norm.

The same ploy is evident in people diagnosed with Antisocial Personality Disorder.  These people can act with exceptional cruelty.  At the same time, they can manipulate words in order to seem perfectly normal.  They will not play by the rules.  Instead, they create the rules as they go along.  They are wolves in sheep’s clothing.

Beware of the Apparently Normal Person who manipulates Words for the Advancement of the Powers that Be.

Thoughts on Sin by Ted Peters (1994) Cruelty 7A

Step 6 on Peters seven steps to Radical Evil is titled Cruelty: Enjoying My Neighbor’s Suffering.

Cruelty is one level above Pride.  Cruelty takes place on a plane that puts the situational plane of “doing” of “justification^self(concupiscence())” into context.

At the moment, I do not name this plane.

The words “willful” “inflicting” “causing anguish and fear” describe a situation of willful “ignorance” or “blindness” of “the victim” while, at the same time, a “knowledge” or “agency” of a “higher force of righteousness”.

Cruelty is like concupiscence.  It is pleasurable.  It is addicting.  But unlike concupiscence, which is all about “me”, cruelty is all about “my treatment of you”.  Cruelty is inherently relational.

Peters said that cruelty is a “perverse pleasure”.  In saying this, he inadvertently uses a term that figures in the writing of the Slovene Postmodernist Slavoj Zizek, whose foundational works were written between 1989 and 2000.

A “pervert” is “a person who becomes an instrument of a Power”.

In the remainder of Chapter 6, Peters wrote about justification of faith.

Justification^God refuses to co-opted by our habits of justification^self and scapegoating.

In order to appreciate the richness of Peters’ intuition, I associate “sacrifice” with the divine point of view and “scapegoating” with the human.

Now, consider a general formula for the nested form in the plane of “doing”:

Justification^X(state of being^Y(with desire^Z)

Apply that general formula to the divine and human points of view:

Human justification^self:  The rhetoric of “sacrifice” identifies the good (Pharasees, Saducees, and Roman players) and damned (Jesus, alleged King of the Jews)

Divine justification^God:  The rhetoric of “sacrifice” identifies the good (Father) and the damned (Son of the Father) in a relation of infinite love

State of being^human: the joys of mob action and political intrigue in the spectacle of a public crucifixion

State of being^divine: the accomplishment of an incomparably unique yet intimated theodrama that realizes – or fulfills – many Old Testament prophecies and resonates with – or redeems – many pagan themes

With Cupid^human: The craving to steal the life and authority of the scapegoat Jesus for their own

With desire^divine: The craving to reveal Jesus as the Messiah.  That is: Jesus is the Way That God Recognizes and Loves Himself and The Mediator For All Humans through taking and redeeming the mantle of the Scapegoat.

Girard argued that his scapegoat formula gives a coherent reading of the New Testament.

Certainly, his formala gives new impetus to Jesus’ command to “turn the other cheek”.

For Girard, Jesus was a scapegoat, not a sacrifice.  Christians went wrong when they interpreted Jesus’ death as “sacrifice” (and thereby consciously identified themselves as the justifying^self “good”).  Interpretations of Paul’s Letter to the Hebrews 9:26 often have this character.  But, Peters argued, not all interpretations do.

Peters concluded, in his typical chatty tone, that St. Paul’s characterization of Jesus as the “final sacrifice” and Girard’s characterization of Jesus as the “final scapegoat” are the same.

What does that mean?

By Peters’ accounting, Girard’s analysis starts when the Moral Breakdown truly begins.  That is, the Moral Breakdown arrives when a cultural crisis obliterates the stable social differences produced by punishing the “representatives of the Moral Breakdown”, that is, the scapegoats.

Does this mean that the Moral Breakdown is always postponed, even at the moment of its arrival, by changing the “type of person” who goes into the empty slot of “scapegoat”.

Let us say that some Christians have convinced enough people to admit that the Bureaucracies of Modern Law and Welfare are travesties.  Then the Bureau and its attendant outlets in the Conformist Progressive Media will blame these Christians for – well, any number of things – in order to show that these Christians embody the Moral Breakdown (it would not be happening if not for them).  Mob action ensues. The Christians become scapegoats.

Justification^self(“state of being”(“with Cupid”)) becomes:

“The nominal ‘missions’ of the Bureaucracies of Law and Welfare are identified as ‘good’ and the questioning by Christians ‘bad’ in a rhetoric of sacrifice(the state of joy that comes from mob action (while craving for respectability))”

Girard’s model suggests that the Moral Breakdown has been going on since the beginning.

The drama of Modern Law and Welfare portrayed in the previous blog – not only parallels the Lord’s curse on the serpent, but – substitutes a “scapegoat” (the norm-deficient daughter of a welfare mother) for “the real thing” (the Spiral of Violence that would occur if the Bureaucracies of Modern Law and Welfare were both accepted for what they are: cruel failures of compassion and justice).

As long as the victim (the criminal child of a fatherless welfare family) is identified as the representative of a Moral Breakdown, the Moral Breakdown will be postponed.