Menninger could not see into the future.

I write almost exactly 40 years after the publication of this book.

My critique of Menninger comes precisely from the place where he could not see.

That contributes to the beauty of what I am about to say, which is also what I have been saying.

The answer to the title question, Whatever became of sin?, is “political incorrectness replaced the term”.

This implies that the horizontal axis that Menninger attributed to “sin”, that is, “crime(sin(symptom))” is actually “crime(political incorrectness(symptom))”.

In short, Menninger confounded the Progressive symbolic order with the Christian symbolic order.

He could not see the future development of the Public Cult of Progressivism.  He was immersed in it.   In the late 1960’s, the Public Cult of Progressivism and the private cults of the New Age Movement (white magic) and Satanism (dark magic) were “in the water”.

As a trained psychoanalyst, Menninger could “hear” (that the word “sin” was no longer used) but he could not fully “interpret” (what the loss implied).  So he presented the “interpretation” that he had at the moment.  Like all psychoanalytic interpretations, what he wrote was provisional.

OK.  The last blog was a hypothesis.  I have not demonstrated that this “way of projection” is sufficient to categorize Public – or Sovereign – Cults.

Certainly, when a Christian “names a sin”, she is not projecting an agenda into “a void of another person” according to the logic of Menninger’s mandala in the same fashion that the Progressive does.  The sinner knows this.  The Christian does not want to coerce the sinner into “becoming good”.  She wants the sinner to “convert”.  The sinner knows this.

The Christian aims to save “souls”.  The Progressive aims to “save” everything else.

This contrast is significant.

Menninger’s mandala may be valuable in discerning the nature of “religion”.

What is the nature of Progressivism?

Sovereign religions – Public Cults – are constructed on the mythology that the rulers are “holier and wiser” than the populace that they lord over.

If “what the rulers say” is defined as “equivalent to think^divine”, then they may declare particular actions to be “the equivalent of sin”.  These declarations reflect a superior – perhaps, superhuman – conscience^{beyond good and evil}.  This state of conscience defines the “golden calf”.

Disobedience by the populace must be (by deduction from the vertical nested form) due to think^group (a set of incorrect beliefs that puts “what the ruler has declared to be the equivalent of sin” into context) and conscience^lacking (a less than clear conscience, that is, bad intent that makes disobedience possible, a state of conscience that defines the “scapegoat”).

These deductions are projected onto whoever appears to be disobedient.

Then, on the horizontal axis, the accused exhibits a symptom (that is, an abnormality that made the disobedience possible) and must be punished severely for the crime (in order to show that the ruler’s “equivalent to think^divine” carries the prestige of law^essential and puts the disobedience into a normal context).

After naming the “sin” (in this case, “the political incorrectness of owning a gun”), Progressives deduce what the other components of the vertical nested form must be.  Then they project those deductions onto their opponents, creating straw man (or witches) to incinerate.

At this point, I suggest that the claims that gun owners suffer latent aggression (a symptom) and that “they should be outlawed” (a crime) appear as complements to the Progressivist projection of think^incorrect and conscience^incorrect onto their political opponents.

Second example: Political disagreements are often framed in psychiatric terminology.

The second amendment right to own firearms was designed to allow the individual citizen to resist an intrusive government.  Progressives want gun control because gun ownership increases the possibility of individual resistance to their sovereign religion.  Their “concerns” are precisely what the Founding Fathers intended.

Consequently, Progressives have declared gun ownership to be “politically incorrect”.

Progressives claim that their political opponents suffer from the “symptoms” of latent aggression because they unconsciously remain “racists, sexists, polluters, homophobes, and the like” (despite denials) and unwittingly desire to resume the oppressions of the past (read Ann Coulter’s Mugged in order to appreciate the irony).

Why else would they cling to their guns?

But that is not all.

Progressive think^correct rejects think^{FoundingFathers} for a variety of cryptotheological reasons.  The Founding Fathers were “patriarchal” and condoned “racism”.  In making such claims, Progressives project a think^incorrect onto the Founding Fathers that they did not hold.

Progressives also deduce that their political opponents exhibit conscience^incorrect – not because they want to protect themselves from an intrusive government – but because “if you own a gun, you want to hurt someone”.

Such Progressive claims are projections of their own latent aggression.  After all, they are “better people than racists, sexists, polluters, homophobes, and the like”, desire to become the oppressors of the future and intend to exploit any tragic situation in order to further their political agenda.

Simply put, Progressives demonize their political opponents by attributing to them a think^group and a conscience^lacking that their opponents do not hold.

[Perhaps, the phrase “deliver us from evil” in the Lord’s Prayer is more than an afterthought.

What if the phrase were worded: “Deliver us from an evil beyond statistical necessities”?  What would the phrase indicate?

An evil inhabits the spontaneous order in which we are embedded.  What is this evil?

The spontaneous order exhibits statistical processes.  Statistics mean that there are winners and losers.  Natural good and natural evil coexist.

Could this be the evil?

On the other hand, where would the statistics be, if the order did not exist?  Without the spontaneous order, neither natural good or natural evil exists.

Could this be the evil?

Could “the lack of statistical necessities” be simultaneously our ultimate limitation as well as the ultimate privation of good?

So what are we asking when we pray, “Deliver us from evil?”

Are we asking God₃ to never stop Recognizing Himself₂?

Are we asking God not to slip into the Nothingness₁ of “the possibility of Recognition₁”?

Are we asking God not to let us slip completely out of being?

Are we asking God to Stay In Being?]

Here are examples of “crime contextualizing political incorrectness” and “ a claims that political incorrectness is made possible by symptoms belonging to the political opponents of Progressivism”.  Each has a twist.

First example: Environmental policies designed to herd people into densely populated “urban zones” and out of “nature zones” presume that people are “criminals” (that is, “polluters”).  In short, today’s (non-political) people are punished even though rapacious industrial practices (“of people with power”) are becoming a thing of the past.  Non-political people are contextualized as “polluters”, even though the Progressives have no idea how they would behave without sovereign “herding”.

One cannot question the viability of such policies, because to do so would invite the label of “anti-environmentalist”.  As seen before, Progressives will project a think^group onto the “politically incorrect person”.  Anyone who questions is labeled “hater of the environment”, irrespective of the victim’s worldviews.

This is exactly what was done during the “witch hunts” of old.

As it turns out, this people-herding environmental policy may invite disaster simply because the resulting social construction cannot handle any catastrophe in which the people in the urban zones must find shelter elsewhere (example, war or plague).

Have you watched any disaster fantasy movies about this?

Chapter 9 is titled: “Sin, So what?”

Menninger began his reverie by asking: How can Man control Man?

Did he realize that one question answers the other?

In order for one human to control another, the both parties must surrender personal responsibility, what the vertical nested form denotes “conscience^free”.  Also, both have to give up the concept of “sin” as a product of individual responsibility and a cause for individual guilt.

This had already occurred decades before the humorous and catch-all term “political incorrectness” was popularized.

Political epithets – so popular from the 1960 to 2012 – convey all the implications of “sin”.  “Anti-environmentalist”, “sexist”, “racist”, “homophobe” and “fundamentalist” imply personal responsibility (for the accused), identify something to be eliminated, expect further action and restitution, and impose a cost or penalty (of lost reputation, if nothing else).

Similar to “sin”, if not more so, “political incorrectness” has been criminalized and symptomized.  In the next two blogs, I present two examples, each with a twist.

Why did Menninger mention this particular sin?  In a way, the answer addresses his foundational question, “whatever became of sin?”.

The lie about the Lusitania was a sin.  But so what?  The lie was politically correct.

On the horizontal axis, the “disposition” that made this politically correct act possible was “the psychology of collusion”. The legal system rewarded the ones who perpetrated this politically correct action.  The law^essential burdened the citizens with war.

Thomas Sowell has pointed out in many of his writings that this – above all – accounts for the failure of the American experiment:  Progressive politicians have not paid for the consequences of their politically correct (but sinful) actions.

On the vertical axis, the conscience^lacking of political “self-anointedness” (also see Thomas Sowell’s works) made the politically correct deception possible.  The think^group of Progressive expertise put the deception into context.  President Wilson and his highly educated cohorts were convinced that they could “save democracy” by autocratic means, such as willful deception and propaganda.

The symbolic order that is Progressivism was already yielding social constructions one hundred years ago.  Wilson came to power 40 years after Lincoln had defended the Union.  Wilson was the servant of the subsequent Union-god, a god that would establish itself as sovereign without “establishing a religion”.

In the same way, the air-god Enlil, ruled over Nippur through both palace and temple.  There was no separation between state and church.  Enlil defined the symbolic order, just as Wilson’s Union-god does today.

Following the “sin of affluence”, Menninger covered the “sins of waste, cheating and stealing, lying, and various cruelties.”

Of all these, I would like to cover his “sin of lying”, consisting of a single vivid example of deception.

The sinking of the passenger ship Lusitania by German navy boats in May of 1915 was a tipping point.  American sentiment turned in favor of joining the War in Europe (now known as World War 1).

The Lusitania was carrying a cargo of munitions and a false manifest that claimed it carried no weapons of war.  The United States Government withheld information about the false manifest from its citizens in order to arouse American anger against the Germans.  President Woodrow Wilson wanted the USA to enter into the war to “save democracy”.

In September 1917, the Wisconsin senator Robert La Follette announced that the Lusitania was carrying munitions at the time of the attack and the President knew about it.  The Senate tried to expel him.  However, their “cries of treachery” were only a screen hiding what they all knew: La Follette’s claim was valid.