A Pride of Nitwits

I don't believe in Satan as some guy out there with horns and goat legs. That version is based on the mythological Greek god, Pan, and he doesn't exist, either. But if I did believe in him, I'd likely think of him as a mediocrity, a goofus who can't stand to be mocked and ridiculed.

If he's a human, he's likely to be some bumbler that no one takes seriously until he gains political power and starts World War III. He'd be a self-deluded, incompetent, self-proclaimed (but false) messiah, out to remake the world in his image. He'd think he was one of the Good Guys, and, most probably, a lot of the public would, too.

But whatever version he takes, whether Satan Version 1.0 or 1.1, I agree with John Milton, when he wrote in “Paradise Lost,” that Satan's main sin is Pride. And when you have a bunch of people afflicted with that kind of pride, who have enormous political power, then you have, instead of a pride of lions, is a pride of nitwits. Dangerous nitwits, to be sure, but nitwits nonetheless.

Thomas Aquinas defined Pride as "inordinate self-love [as] the cause of every sin...the root of pride is found to consist in man not being, in some way, subject to God and His rule."

There is an amusing little book by Dana Facaros and Michael Pauls called “The Traveler’s Guide to Hell: Don't Leave This World Without It.” It defines pride as "the mother of all sins... the thin line between righteousness and self-righteousness."

There is also a website, "Seven Deadly Sins", which defines pride as "excessive belief in one's own abilities that interferes with the individual's recognition of the grace of God. It has been called the sin from which all others arise. Pride is also known as Vanity."

The sin "from which all others arise," the site says. I believe that's true. Here's another way of putting it: hubris is the only true crime that exists, because it is the basis for all other sins, all other crimes.

Those other sins, of which pride is supposed to be the basis? Envy, gluttony, lust, anger (wraith), greed (avarice or covetousness), sloth. These faults are not only inherent in every human being, they appear to be the main traits of the State. If that's true, political power is one of the worst powers there is, the one that is most easily abused.

Charles Panati, in his book, “Sacred Origin of Profound Things,” claimed the Greek theologian Evagrius of Pontus was the first to draw up a list of the eight worst offenses. From least to worst they were: gluttony, lust, avarice, sadness, anger, sloth, vainglory, and pride. He considered all these sins to be fixations on the self, with pride the worst.

My own self, my own ego, as the center of the world! Russell Kirk, not only an influential conservative thinker but also a fine horror writer, in one of those horror stories, "The Peculiar Demesne," correctly described this "monstrous ego," with its blind, false pride, as the "source of all evil."

Late in the Sixth Century, Pope Gregory reduced the list to seven, combining vainglory with pride, sadness with sloth, and adding envy (Aquinas later denied that sins could be ranked this way). Like Evagrius, Pope Gregory ranked the sins from least to worst: lust, gluttony, avarice, sadness, anger, envy, pride. Again, pride was the worst. In the 17 Century the church replaced "sadness" with sloth.

At one time nearly all people knew the list of the Seven Deadly Sins, along with the Heavenly Virtues: faith, hope, charity, fortitude, justice, temperance, prudence. I suspect more laypeople today are familiar with these lists than our leaders, who appear to unwittingly be crypto-pagans who believe in Might Makes Right.

There are also the Seven Contrary Virtues, first listed by Prudentius in his poem "Psychomachia" ("Battle for the Soul") in 410. These virtues are: humility, kindness, abstinence, chastity (which does not mean celibacy), patience, liberality, and diligence.

The Seven Contrary Virtues stand opposed to the Seven Deadly Sins: humility against pride, kindness against envy, abstinence against gluttony, chastity against lust, patience against anger, liberality against greed, and diligence against sloth.

The Greeks called pride by the name "hubris," which the dictionary defines as "excessive pride, wanton violence." Are excessive pride and wanton violence related? Surely. History confirms it almost without exception. They certainly are related today.

The Greeks personified hubris as a god, one who lacked restraint and dwelled among mortal men. Imagine that. Right here among all of us. The Greeks saw hubris as followed by nemesis: destruction, retribution and vengeance.

The story of pride, of hubris, is clear: it's always followed by some sort of nemesis. What kind? Who knows, specifically? But hubris is always followed by nemesis, as pride is always followed by a fall. One only needs to have one eye half-opened to see this.

The Purpose of the State is to Turn You Into a Machine

A few months before I turned 12, I read H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. I was never the same. Since at that age I was very susceptible to science-fiction, the novel had a profound effect on my 11-year-old sensibilities (you should have seen what Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Fighting Man of Mars did to me – I read it at least 20 times within two years).

It wasn’t until college that I was taught about one of the main themes in the novel – the Machine State versus the Natural State. The Morlocks represented the Machine State and the Eloi the Natural State. You can see the same theme in “Star Wars,” where Darth Vader (who is half machine) and the Storm Troopers (who are identical interchangeable cogs) represent the Machine State and the Ewoks represent the Natural State.

The Machine State is supposed to represent evil and got its start during the Industrial Revolution, mostly because of the horrid conditions imposed on factory workers in England by law by the owners (the government even took the workers’ land from them in the Clearances, to force them into the cities to work in the factories). The ghastly conditions in these places are why William Blake referred to them as “dark Satanic mills.”

There is nothing inherently wrong with machines. They’re amoral, neither good nor bad, and can be used for both. All they do is amplify our natural abilities, which is why there exists Cooper’s Law: “All machines are amplifiers.”

However, since machines can be used for horrendous evil – depleted uranium, cluster bombs – writers often concentrate on the bad instead of the good. These days, writers have gone beyond seeing the use of machines as bad things and are now concentrating on people being turned into machines, i.e., Darth Vader and the Borg.

It wasn’t until that particular English class in college that I was also taught the Wells portrayed the Morlocks as what the English working classes would evolve into, and the Eloi, what the English upper classes would turn into. In other words, what the poor and the rich would evolve into.

If you apply some free market political and economic theory to Wells’ contention, you’ll find the Morlocks and the Eloi are what happens to those who use what Albert Jay Nock in Our Enemy the State called the Political Means of force and fraud instead of the Economic Means of persuasion and political and economic liberty.

The Political Means are what produces the Morlocks and the Eloi. Or, to use some of the terms of the more Machiavellian of political scientists, the Masses and the Elites. Or, to use some older definitions, the Sheep and the Wolves. Only now, you might call them, paraphrasing James Burnham, the Machines and the Managers.

The evolution Wells wrote about will never happen, but I certainly understand his point, and like all good artists he was, as Ezra Pound wrote, an antenna of the human race. He looked at what he saw in his time and extrapolated into the future. For that matter, if you want to understand the future, look to the past. The farther you can see into the past, the farther you can see into the future.

History is in fact the same old tired story over and over – the Machine keeps growing and growing, just like the Borg, until it takes over everything. Why? “Why do you resist us?” complains the Borg Queen. “We only want to improve the quality of your lives.”

As both Aesop and Jesus noticed, all tyrants call themselves benefactors.

Since Wells’ time, the idea of the Machine State has evolved. The most famous archetype of the Machine State is Darth Vader. Later it was the Borg from “Star Trek.” Vader was a fun villain at first (the first time I saw “Star Wars,” everyone hissed at him) but the Borg were never fun. And they were far more frightening than Vader or anything else in “Star Wars.”

In all the cases above, what we’re dealing with is the idea of the State trying to turn everyone into a machine. It’s not as outlandish as it sounds.

“G.I.” means “government issue” and soldiers are expendable cogs. The military tries to turn them into – what else? – “killing machines.” They even use drugs to achieve this goal. The perfect soldier would be what the Greeks called Myrmidons – ant-soldiers.

Soldiers aren’t even supposed to be conscious. Smedley Butler, author of War Is a Racket, said that when he was a Marine, he never had a thought in his head.

And, not surprisingly, the members of the Borg (all of whom were kidnapped) have little self-consciousness – it’s why they make such good warrior-ants.

Parenthetically, in the movie “Starship Troopers,” I couldn’t figure out whose side I was on. The Bugs represented a very regimented Machine State, but then, so did the humans with their “soft fascism” (some of the people in the theater were yelling, “Kill Doogie Howser!”). It was the same as wondering if you should support the Nazis or Communists in World War II.

Leftists of whatever kind see the public merely as checkers to be moved around as they see fit. The public isn’t exactly human to them, and if you’re not human then you can certainly be considered a machine.

And isn’t the purpose of public schools to turn graduates into working and consuming machines? John Taylor Gatto has documented that extensively in his book, The Underground History of American Education.

Under political and economic liberty, people fall into their natural roles. Under the heel of the State, they are things, cogs in a machine, and are expendable. This is why in the 20th Century up to 200 million people died in State-created wars.

One of the things leftism is dedicated to – indeed one of its main characteristics – is to make people exactly equal. Of course, if people are exactly equal – an impossibility – then they are as interchangeable as parts in a machine.

The human race has only two alternatives: the State, or liberty. The Political Means or the Economic Means. Force and fraud or persuasion. Checkers or people.

As Alfred North Whitehead wrote in his book, Adventures of Ideas, about the difference between persuasion and force: "The creation of the world -- said Plato -- is the victory of persuasion over force . . . . Civilization is the maintenance of social order, by its own inherent persuasiveness as embodying the nobler alternative. The recourse to force, however unavoidable, is a disclosure of the failure of civilization, either in the general society or in a remnant of individuals . . . .

"Now the intercourse between individuals and between social groups takes one of these two forms: force or persuasion. Commerce is the great example of intercourse by way of persuasion. War, slavery, and governmental compulsion exemplify the reign of force."

As things stand now in the United States, one percent of the people own 40% of the wealth. This did not happen through the free market. It happened by that one percent using the power of the State to appropriate the wealth of the other 99 percent.

You might consider that one percent to be the Eloi and the other 99 percent to be the Morlocks. At least that’s the way things are headed. If the Elites (I use that term neutrally) had their way, the Masses would be working ten to twelve hours a day and be living in North Korean cinderblock apartments and living on oatmeal and potatoes.

In Wells’ novel, the Morlocks turned the tables and used the Eloi as food, just as hundreds of thousands of years before the English upper classes had used the power of the State to feed off of the working classes.

Poetic justice, you might say.

States never last. They self-destruct. As I write this, local and state governments are going bankrupt. No wonder, either.

When things start to collapse, I expect to see some revenge from the proto-Morlocks against their oppressors. Wells certainly predicted that.

Revenge against oppressors is, after all, a natural thing.

I'm Okay; You're Not So Hot

The title of this piece refers to the the attitude of every person, country, ethnic group and tribe that has ever been toward Outsiders. This belief -- which is really, "We're human, but you're not quite -- or not even close," has been one of the pre-eminent causes of war and genocide throughout history. Technically, it's called narcissism.

One of the few decent contributions that Freud made to psychology was his study of narcissism. Wacky he certainly was, but he made up for it by being a superb diagnostician. He was the first that I know of who wrote about "infantile grandiosity." Adult grandiosity has been noticed for thousands of years. The Greeks called it Hubris, always followed by Nemesis. The Bible speaks of "pride going before a fall" (the correct translation of "pride" is the same as "Hubris"). Satan's catastrophic flaw was that of pride, or a completely unrealistic and self-deluded grandiosity that led him to believe he could be God. But Freud was the first to locate this grandiosity as starting in our infancy (Thomas Hobbes came close when he noticed, "The evil man is the child grown strong").

Psychologists of the Object Relations School believe that every infant goes through a period of splitting their selves--and the world outside -- into "all-good" and "all-bad." In a sentence, the "all-good" is grandiose; the "all-bad" is envious, rageful, and hating. Those who don't outgrow this, when they grow up, are afflicted with (among other things) Narcissistic Personality Disorder or, much worse, Anti-Social Personality Disorder (those with Anti-Social Personality Disorder used to be called psychopaths or sociopaths). Hitler is a prime example of a psychopath; so is Clinton, but he is a much lesser danger, although I don't have the same conviction about his evil Marxist wife. Satan, too, is the story of a psychopath--grandiose, rageful, hating, envious. Psychopaths have no conscience, leading them to believe people are things to be exploited and manipulated for their benefit. They are almost always quite charming, as Clinton is ("con man" means confidence man, since they are very good at gaining your trust).

I am familiar with only one fiction writer who has consciously written about our tendency to split things into all-good and all-bad, and that is the humorist Tom Bodett, who, in his book "The End of the Road," writes about a liberal vegetarian bubble-headed woman who cannot stand the fact her true love has joined the Army. And she cannot forgive him. "Tamara's personal iron gates were guarded by a demon that painted everything black or white," writes Bodett. "Black or white. And she was the only cold judge of which was what. This was black, and her demon would not let her see the light even as it burned inside her." The result? She leaves him, forever. "And Tamara Dupree, soldier of conscience, paragon of wholeness, went out to her bus, looked at the lit, empty windows of a Holiday Inn, and fell apart." Hubris, followed by Nemesis.

Probably the most well-known writer who unconsciously portrayed everything as black or white was the narcissist Ayn Rand, who tried to elevate her mental illness to the status of something divine (she grandiosely called herself "the perfect woman" and the "second- greatest philosopher ever," and denigrated her opponents as "sub- humans" living in "a hell"). Her long-time friend, the psychologist Alan Blumenthal, diagnosed her as suffering from Narcissistic, Paranoid, and Schizoid Personality Disorders. If you know what to look for, all three of these disorders are easily discernable in Atlas Shrugged.

Unfortunately, all of us are prone, in greater or lesser degree, to splitting the world into "all-good" and "all-bad." Tragically, it is part of our nature, and we especially engage in it when under great stress. One of the problems is that we don't know we do it. Since we can't stand the rage, hate and envy in ourselves we cast it onto others. This is scapegoating. We blame the other person. They're the ones responsible for my life, my problems, and my bad feelings! The perceptive and wise story of the Garden of Eden explains it well: Adam scapegoats Eve ("It's her fault!") and Eve scapegoats the serpent ("It's his fault!") The serpent, not at all surprisingly, is a symbol of envy, meaning envy is the basic cause of narcissism and scapegoating (this is exactly what Object Relation theorists have concluded, a few thousand years later). This is also why one of the Ten Commandments reads, "You will not envy." Envy oftentimes leads to murder and theft -- two of the other main prohibitions in the Commandments.

The worst eruptions of rage and hate I have ever witnessed came from envious people. And it was directed at people who weren't much better off than they were. It was then I realized the envious are truly greedy -- no matter how much they're given, it's never enough. What they really want is to drag everyone down to their level. No matter how much taxes are raised on the rich, it will never be enough for the envious.

Rage may be hot, but hate is ice-cold. Only that kind of complete cold-heartedness could allow people to pilot planes into buildings, knowing that children and babies would die.

Every tribe that has ever existed has grandiosely called itself "the Humans" or "the People," devaluing outsiders to the status of sub- or non-humans. Group narcissism, Erich Fromm called it, in such books as Escape From Freedom. Group narcissism explains why tribes could do such bizarre things as treating their own with great kindness and spitting outsiders' babies on spears. Every religion has tried to overcome this Original Sin of ours with such commandments as "Love your neighbor as yourself" or "Do to others as you would have them do to you." The Golden Rule, as C.S. Lewis has pointed out in The Abolition of Man, exists in every religion.

I find it curious, and somehow significant, that the word Jesus used -- "Gehenna" (mistranslated as "Hell" in some Bibles)--is a valley in which infants were sacrificed to the idol Moloch. Much as the "Palestinians" are doing today with their children, and in the same area. Human sacrifice is a form of scapegoating; it's also based on our narcissism. Little noticed is that when Jesus drove the money-changers from the Temple he also drove out those selling pigeons and doves for sacrifice to God.

Nations are just tribes writ large. They grandiosely call themselves "the Fatherland," "the Motherland," or speak of "God and Country." I've come to the conclusion it is possible for the citizens in nations to be hypnotized into a mass psychopathology. If they couldn't be then all those millions of soldiers would not have marched off to be slaughtered in WWI and WWII (I've had this fantasy for years that when governments try to start wars everyone in all the countries involved says, "Naw, I don't think so...I'm just fine in my recliner here. Beer?")

Propaganda works by appealing to our narcissism. Propaganda dehumanizes, then demonizes and scapegoats "the enemy," then calls for their destruction, supposedly leading to peace. Steven Spielberg, for a good example, did a despicable thing in his pro-war propaganda film, Saving Private Ryan. He did not portray one of the Germans as a human being. All are cowardly, murderous, shaven-headed thugs (and being shaven-headed they are as interchangeable as cogs. And cogs are things, not humans). I wonder if he's familiar with All Quiet on the Western Front or the movie, The Boat?

The U.S. government, sadly, is no different than any other government in the history of the world. We were founded as something truly different, but now it has gotten to the point where our government has relegated many other nations -- outsiders -- as Not Quite Human. It has meddled for decades in the internal affairs of other countries, supporting murderous tyrants who have slaughtered and abused their citizens. Is it surprisingly the US government is absolutely hated by so many people in the world? That it is called "the Great Satan"? The USG is engaging in a type of human sacrifice: "We have to sacrifice them to save ourselves."

I honestly thought after the collapse of the Soviet Union we were looking at new era of peace. I did not believe the American Empire, without the Cold War to restrain it, would just simply explode across the world, interfering and meddling in nearly every country's business. We have troops in 140-145 countries, and some of the lunatics in the administration believe we should have troops in every country. If other countries had troops here, how would we feel about that?

When you apply the concept of narcissism to politics, it explains many things. Let's take Osama bin Laden (who I now believe is dead). Here was a guy with grandiose, unrealistic fantasies covering up the humiliating fact his religion had its Golden Age 1000 years ago and has been left behind by the West. The Islamic countries are so weak we can conquer all of them, although I'm sure it would be a Pyrrhic victory because of guerilla warfare and the loss of domestic liberty. I'm sure bin Laden was eaten alive by envy, hate, and the desire for revenge. I'm also sure he scapegoated the West and blamed all problems on it (I think one of the reasons the WTC was targeted because the essence of envy is to "bring down" the envied. I'm sure most of the Third World envies us and wishes to bring us down, even if they go down with us).

Yet, for all his delusions, bin Laden was right about the US government committing genocide in Iraq. After all, we had to sacrifice them to save ourselves. And it certainly was "worth it," as the oozy Madeleine Albright put it (whenever I see her on TV, I close my eyes and see Jabba the Hutt).

While everyone else was narcissistically idealizing bin Laden as some sort of satanic genius, I instead saw him as a deluded, envious nut, who covered up his humiliation and feelings of inferiority with grandiosity, and who had no idea of what the United States military could do to anyone who got in its way. Stupidity is envy's retarded little brother.

Much of the Islamic world scapegoats Israel ("That country is the cause of all our problems"). If Israel ceased to exist would the Islamic Golden Age bloom again? Nope. What would happen is the standard of living of everyone in the area would collapse. Then someone else would be found to fix the blame upon. And you would find people saying, "We need another 60 years to overcome the fact Israel was here for 60 years," just they way I've heard Americans say, "We need another 300 years to overcome the fact we were slaves for 300 years." It's denying self-responsibility, the bane of humanity.

The United States scapegoated alcohol and tried to get rid of it with Prohibition. What we ended up with is organized crime, which still plagues us. Currently the State is scapegoating drugs, which is why we have that catastrophic failure known as the "War on Drugs."

The essence of narcissism is abuse. In a sense, all countries, politically, are psychopathic in their dealings with other countries. They try to exploit, abuse and manipulate them. This is why I consider the State to be a satanic entity. It's chaos intruding into order.

Narcissists also can't take a joke. They are completely lacking in a self-depreciating sense of humor. That's also of the main characteristics of the State. And most politicians, too (when I think of the typical politician, I think of C.S. Lewis' description of Hell: "a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance and resentment").

The U.S. government has been narcissistically abusing the citizens of other countries, treating them as expendable things, while seeing itself as "good" (This is why Dubya said, "They hate us because we're good"). Foreigners returned the favor and flew planes into our buildings, treating us as things. So we returned the favor again, speaking of "the axis of evil" and "the evil ones" while bombing the rubble in Afghanistan into even smaller rubble. It sounds like children hurling insults at each other--"You're the Great Satan!" "No, I'm not, but you're the Evil Ones!"

Right now the US government is trying to scapegoat Saddam Hussein, who, like Manuel Noriega, used to be a "friend" of the US (Henry Kissinger once made the comment that as dangerous as it was to be an enemy of the US, it was fatal to be a friend). Whether or not this is going to lead to an unnecessary war I am still not sure.

Because governments are consistently psychopathic in their dealings with each other, and because they are consistently trying to scapegoat each other, the best thing countries can do is have as little political dealings with others as possible. They should engage in little more than free trade.

Around and around and around we go, and when everyone learns their lesson no one knows.

Sucking Your Thumb

Years ago I owned a taxi. I noticed something interesting about many of the five-year-olds girls I took to and from kindergarten: many of them sucked their thumb.

What surprised me about it is that every time they did, they calmed down. Some of them got very rowdy in the car. But, as soon as the thumb went in the mouth, they were calm and quiet.

I remember one little girl in particular. My taxi had a bench seat, so I stretched my right arm across it. She would lay her head on my arm, turn her head so she could see me, put her thumb in her mouth, and be completely calm. Not a word out of them or any of the other thumb-suckers.

I know that sucking your thumb goes back to an infant’s feeding behavior. And everyone knows about pacifiers, which today are apparently called “binkies.”

I have seen adults suck their thumbs or binkies. I saw an obese woman in a motorized scooter, who had binkie in her mouth. When I mentioned it to my girlfriend, she said she had heard of adults using them to try and stop smoking.

Maybe, or maybe the woman was just nuts, just as the woman I saw in an elevator sucking her thumb was nuts. In her case she was coming out of a public mental-health center.

I once asked my mother if I sucked my thumb. She said no, I sucked my little finger and the ring finger on my right hand. Incidentally, I know a woman who once, when about 11, took a picture of her 12-year-old sister, asleep in bed, sucking her thumb. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of adults still do it in private.

I’ve read that kissing runs back to an infant’s feeding behavior, too. Sounds about right. If you think about it, it can be considered odd for adults to press their mouths together (I wonder what aliens might think the first time they run across this behavior in humans?).

Since many women babble way too much. I have an idea: all men should carry binkies. When a woman won’t shut up, just stick it in her mouth. It should even be a law.

It would be a much more pleasant world.

School-girl Tasered for Playing 'Scissors, Paper, Rock'

A six-year-old school-girl was recently Tasered by police, then cuffed, taken to the police station, and placed in a cell for playing 'scissors, paper, rock' at school.

"We have a zero-tolerance policy for violent acts," said the principal, Richard "Dick" Less. "We found her playing 'scissors, paper, rock' and immediately called the police. They stormed the school with a SWAT team, asked her what she was doing, and when she made a fist, then scissors, they Tazered her. We can't tolerate this kind of behavior among children. It leads to a lifetime of violence and drug addiction."

"She was putting my officers' life in danger," said Police Chief Richard Cranium. "She threatened them with her fist, then used her index and middle finger to make scissors. She could have killed one of the officers, or all of them. We can't be too careful, even with a first-grader. Generally, we just kill people who do stuff like this, but we give her a break because she was six years old."

Both Less and Cranium said they were following state law, and had done nothing wrong. "We were just following orders," both said.

The mother of the six year old girl, whose name is being withheld, said the whole thing was ridiculous. "What in the world is this country coming to when principals and the police lie with a straight face and say a six-year-old girl could kill people with two of her fingers? Are they on some kind of power trip, or what?"

"It was awful," said one of the girl's classmates, who saw the incident. "The police smashed the windows and threw in these things that made a lot of smoke. Then they jumped in screaming and yelling and pointing guns. They were dressed in these helmets and boots. When she showed them 'scissors, paper, rock' they screamed and shot her with this thing. She fell over and started twitching. I was really scared."

"They put these cuffs on her and dragged her on the floor to outside the school," said another student. "Then I saw them throw her in the back of a car and drive away. They were calling her names like 'perp' and 'terrorist.' Then they were giving each other high-fives and saying stuff like, "So you think we'll be on 'Cops" for this one?'."

The six-year-old girl, who was in a cell for four hours before she was released, was hosptialized briefly. Doctors said she was okay, and there would be no lasting effects. "Not physically, at least," said a doctor who wished to be anonymous. "She's a little banged-up from being dragged on the ground by her hair, but otherwise she's fine. Psychologically, we don't know. I don't think she'll be playing 'scissors, paper, rock' ever again, though."

Police said felony charges are pending, and hope the little girl gets the maximum sentence of 20 years. "We have to nip it in the bud," said SWAT team member Barney Fife.

Snake in the Grass

When I was in college my girlfriend mentioned to me a guy she knew had told her about me, "You can do better than that." I had met him once and had a short but pleasant conversation with him. Why, I wondered, would he say such a thing about me?

The answer was immediate: he would have liked to take her away from me. He envied me. She was a cute one, it was true. Cute and smart, the kind he wanted but apparently couldn't get. So he wanted what I had. He was, to use a common expression, a snake in the grass. He was talking behind my back.

We use the term "snake" to refer to someone who is a backstabber. Apparently, this particular meaning has been used for thousands of years. Think of one of the best-known myths in the Western world, that of the serpent in the Garden of Eden.

Traditionally, the serpent in the Garden is a symbol of envy, because he wants to bring Adam and Eve down because they are the favorites of God. The word it's translated from is "nachash," which is a very interesting word indeed.

It doesn't literally mean "serpent." It has several interrelated meanings: to hiss or whisper like a snake, enchanter, prognosticator.

The word "enchant" means "to chant," as in hypnotize. Same thing as a "spell," meaning "tale," or "the use of words." The serpent used words in an attempt to cast a "spell" on Eve, to get her to do what he wanted so he could bring her and Adam down.

That's what the envious do. They don't come out and say, "I envy you." Usually they can't even admit it to themselves. Of all the Seven Deadly Sins, envy is the only one that isn't any fun. It is, in fact, one of the most corrosive feelings in the world.

Helmut Schoeck, in his magisterial work, Envy, described envy as "a drive which lies at the core of man's life as a social being…[an] urge to compare oneself invidiously with others." He considered it inborn. Perhaps it is, although the intensity varies in the person, from intense to almost non-existent.

Schoeck came to some surprising conclusions. After showing the ubiqitiousness of envy in primitive cultures, including the superstitious terror of arousing the envy of their gods, and that it was a crippling barrier to progress, Schoeck argued that one of Christianity's greatest achievements was in freeing people to progess, for it "provided man for the first time with supernatural beings who, he knew, could neither envy nor ridicule him," and who offered strong moral condemnation of envy.

Of all the myths I am familiar with, only that of the Garden of Eden condemns envy as a truly bad thing, because it sees it is essentially the cause of the overwhelming majority of evil in the world.

Private property, Schoeck claimed, emerged not as the cause of envy, as egalitarians assert, but as a defense against it -- "a necessary protective screen between people," deflecting envy that would otherwise be directed at people onto material goods.

The envious are subtle about their envy, they backstab, they whisper, as Iago whispered to Othello. They attempt to tell the future, to prognosticate. Essentially what my envious backstabbing acquaintance was telling my girlfriend was, "If you leave him for me, it will be better for you." He was attempting to cast a spell on her, to get her away from me. He just wasn't very good at it. Actually, he was terrible, because he was so obvious. But as Aesop noticed, envy always shows. Whenever you see someone trying to pull someone else down, it is almost always caused by envy.

In the myth, when God catches Adam and Eve, Adam blames Eve, and Eve blames the serpent. Blaming other people for our problems is the first defense everyone engages in, and is, as M. Scott Peck has noticed, the genesis of evil in the world. He called it scapegoating. The myth tells us most scapegoating --blaming others for our problems -- is caused by envy. Perhaps not all of it is caused by envy, but probably almost all of it.

That myth, thousands of years old, is a wise and perceptive one. It tells us envious people whisper behind our backs in an attempt to bring us down. They are never upfront. They attempt to cast a spell on the intended, to tell them how wonderful their future will be if they listen. After all, the serpent did tell Eve, "surely you will not die."

The clearest example of envy in a movie I'm familiar with is Amadeus. Salieri is eaten alive with his envy of Mozart. So what does he do? He devotes his life to ruining Mozart, and doing it in such a subtle, devious way that Mozart always thinks Salieri is his friend. Salieri does it behind Mozart's back, he whispers to people, he attempts to cast a spell on them. He is a snake. Of course, he blames Mozart for his failures as a musician. And he ends his life in an insane asylum.

Of all the political systems in the world, the one that has been the most destructive, that has caused the most deaths, is socialism. The heart of it, that which it's based on, is envy. That's why socialists are egalitarians. If everyone is the same, they think, and has the same, then there will no envy. Instead, this attempt to bring Heaven to earth instead bought the worst Hell the human race has ever experienced.

The one political system that is the least conducive to envy is the free market. As the ancient Greek philosophers noticed, the benign form of envy is admiration. At least under the free market, people have a chance to be upwardly mobile. They can attain the same heights, or close to the same heights, as those they envy. They can admire them instead of envying them.

The problem with the human race is not that people are stupid or evil. They're half asleep, hynotized. I am reminded of Kaa, the snake in Kipling's The Jungle Book. In the movie Kaa enchanted his victims by singing to them (and the word "nachash," can also mean "singing"). Kipling also wrote that "words are the most powerful drug ever invented." He was right.

Envy will never be gotten rid of entirely, as long as people are half-awake. It is, as the serpent tells us, part of our animal nature, and will be until our animal nature is overcome, if such a thing is possible. But if not possible, envy can at least be minimized.

Collecting Stray Puppies

I used to collect stray puppies, and by stray puppies I don’t mean dogs: I mean people. I’ve quit doing it, although I still collect stray dogs, specifically pugs.

One stray puppy I collected was a guy named Ray. He had been a drug addict for about 25 years, until he died in his late 40s from a self-inflicted drug overdose. He was living with me at the time he went into the forest with a six-pack of Pepsi and handful of Seconals.

That’s one reason I no longer collect stray puppies. There’s another.

I put Ray in the back room, which had been screened-in porch at one time. He ended up with some goofy drug addict girlfriend whom he brought over to my apartment quite a lot.

One day, while in the apartment, with Ray and his girlfriend in his room, I heard her say, “Go ahead, do it, do it.”

I knew exactly what was going on: Ray had his pistol against her head.

I got up and walked out of the apartment. Somehow, I intuitively knew it was the best thing to do. If I did, I knew things would end peaceably.

I came back 15 minutes and it was all over.

Ray later told me his girlfriend had told him he had held his pistol against her head. He did not remember it, being so high. She told me about it later on and decided perhaps Ray shouldn’t be her boyfriend anymore.

I did not know a person could be so high as to hold a pistol against someone’s head and not remember it.

A few months later Ray took his last trip into the forest.

Hikers found his bones six months later. I had to deal with the police, the first one of which had the attitude I had killed Ray. Did he think we were homosexual lovers and I offed him in a fit of jealous rage?

The second one was a detective, who at least had a brain. But both wanted into apartment, which was not going to happen without a search warrant.

Ray was the last stray puppy I collected. These days, I stick to pugs.