The urge to save humanity is almost always a false face for the urge to rule it.

- H.L. Mencken

 

My companion attacks his friends, he violates his covenant.

His talk is smooth as butter, yet war is in his heart.

His words are more soothing than oil, yet they are drawn swords.

- From the 55th Psalm

Saw a film the other day on the streaming film service, I forget which one, entitled The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley. It was the one about Elizabeth Holmes and her impassioned desire to make a diagnostic test that would contribute to eliminating all known diseases because she's just that kind of a person and it never really matters how much you must lie to show how stunningly magnanimous you really are.

Holmes' pathodicy was so hardened that she didn't even know how deceitful and destructive her actions were. She fooled thousands of investors into dropping millions of dollars into her lie. Her deception resulted in false diagnoses and false hopes for treating conditions that could have been addressed with proper attention. It was all fully rationalized by adherence to that splendid inventor's creed:

"Fake it 'til you make it."

As this nightmare unfolded there on the screen, you could kind of tell that Holmes really didn't seem to grasp the magnitude of her duplicity. If she did and continued to perpetuate it, then how much more evil was that. Either way, why did she behave this way? What are the key elements involved that move anyone to do these things?

While there are indeed so many aspects to this question, and while this treatise is merely a rough sketch, I've come to the realization that it has a lot to do with this concept pathodicy. I'm introducing this idea as a particular thing, although some have already given it brief consideration — at least from what I've found. What I share here may also be more regularly classified in the psychological literature as something else, and that is fine too. This is more of a philosophical, even a theological consideration, just as important part of human existence as anything else.

Pathodicy is the principle of the rationalization of fixing someone else's suffering with all means necessary for the implicit purpose of fixing one's own suffering. It is founded on the emotional dysfunction of being unable to maturely distinguish particular evils occurring within one's purview and one's own painful insecurities. A calcified pathodicy leads to the effort of gaining relief by committing any questionable, even savage act necessary, or enlisting a powerful entity to do it instead (mostly a government agency, often a criminal racket) — so driven is he or she to end their codependent agony.

If I believe you are hurting, you must let me fix you or I myself cannot stop hurting. If you prevent me from doing that you are just as much a part of the problem, and it is too painful to put off doing something. Often times you'll hear it bleated like a mantra, "At least do something!" The trick is if you are not doing that something they think you should be doing then you're more a problem. This entire body of death is ruthlessly exploited by World Operatives all the time to rally the faithful.

Pathodicy comes from the Greek pathos (feeling) and the suffix -dicy (justification). The concept doesn't mean we don't feel deeply or love deeply or minister to others deeply. It doesn't mean we don't have some self-interest related to doing things to make others' lives better — that's a very good thing that moves us to labor and invent and build and maintain a decent society. Yet because we are fallen beings tempted frequently out of our typical abandonment fears, we are all extraordinarily susceptible to the power of the pathodicy.

Ultimately it has to do with motives, it is about how we act out of our plausibility structures. It definitively involves the System's certified shakedown offices exploiting the insecurities of those without Christ and viciously afraid of death, manipulating their sentiments with the interminable desire to shout to the world "Look at me and how caring I am to others!" It never goes away no matter how much good you have done. Activating the pathodicy is a habitual routine for so many richly living by the seductive things the authorized World Ops tell them.

Just look on the lawns of many homes, particularly those in entrenched ideologically liberal enclaves.

When you see a "Black Lives Matter" sign out front, the "privileged" resident is saying to you "I'm a white person who is racist just like you other white people are and you should join me in acting on my guilt by doing extra nice and special things for black people." They may care about black people, I'm not going to say they don't, but the only reason they have that sign up or do any lobbying for or rallying in or contributing to the cause is only to energize their pathodicy.

In a number of places I've now seen this sign: "When I wear a mask that means I care about you." These people have been browbeat with the grand metastasized lie that there is some monster disease out there that will kill you if you don't wear a mask, so they are convinced if they do their part in what they're told to do they will be commended as the best kind of good people.

Look at these pronouncements. Not only are they based on heavily disseminated propaganda, but they say little about anybody but themselves.

Jesus said a lot about this. "Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your father in heaven." (Matthew 6:1) Here's a particularly sobering one: "Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you, for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets." (Luke 6:26)

Are you in good with the System? Are you sure? No worries, you may be, you may be incessantly paying the proper tribute and that's fine. Caesar needs his cut. Everyone has at least some desire to be seen as a good person, that in and of itself is not a bad thing.

Then there is what Cain did. Remember how much he thought of his brother? Wasn't as much as he thought of himself and how he demanded God approve of his offering. This is why the pathodicy is indeed the animating force behind the human sacrifice required for Cain's current governing apparatus to do its job. It is best to make any prosecutorial action look really good and wholesome to serve the purposes of the required seven-fold vengeance strength.

Then I can be seen as my brother's keeper and be justified.

It is mind-blowing to look out on the horizon of humankind and see so many people in lock step with the pathodicy, and it is so exceptionally administered people don't even know it is consuming them.

 

In The Inventor was a fascinating presentation by behavioral economist Dan Ariely. I have been extraordinarily critical of behavioral economics because of the brazen and often completely silly assumptions made (even as the behavioral economists' whole enterprise is railing against brazenly silly assumptions — go figure). But Ariely is truly on-point with this one.

He did an experiment in which a subject would roll a die, but before rolling they had to note "top" or "bottom." If whichever number came up that's the amount of money they'd get. For instance if the die roll was a 6 and the subject noted "top," they'd get $6. But if they noted bottom, they'd get $1. The trick is they didn't tell the researcher which one they picked. They were, of course, expected to be honest about it. Would the subject admit they put "bottom" if the die roll was a 6? Turns out the subjects made a bit more money than the odds would merit. Not a surprise.

Interestingly Ariely did a couple more things. First, while doing all this he gave a lie detector test to the subjects, and he discovered that they did indeed lie quite a bit. But the second thing he did was the most telling, and damning. He did it again but told the subjects that the money they were awarded would be going to charity. He found that not only did they lie even more about their die roll predictions, but the lie detector failed to detect their lies.

It is perfectly fine if it is for a good cause.

 

The massive benefits of being a non-profit tax-exempt 501(c)(3) racket.

 

Non-profits are exceptional ways to manifest the pathodicy. Everyone wants to feel justified, really that's what most people want. It is natural. In the Kingdom one is justified by Christ's blood, that's the only way it can happen actually.

The World showcases any number of ways to look like it can happen and one of the best is smothered in the unassailable virtue of fighting for social justice. What a terrific way to distend the pathodicy. Be zealously fighting for justice in a social way.

It should be noted that the idea of social justice was invented by a Jesuit, Luigi Taparelli, back in the 1840s, and he did it because observing his contemporary world he desperately wanted those in the Catholic Church to prove they could be their brother's keeper in newer, more innovative ways. The Company has fastidiously and ingeniously expanded it until today it has taken on its present form, as Eddie Scarry notes in a Washington Examiner piece:

 

The social justice movement [has the power], and that power is reinforced by Hollywood, the news media, academia, and much of the Washington political establishment. Social justice ideology first spread through the universities and from there, to the other hubs of American culture. It went from university academics, who taught it to their students, and then flowed from them to screenwriters and journalists. What's seen in Hollywood entertainment and in national newspapers, on the TV news, and on the Internet becomes a piece of our collective culture. With enough repetition, it's then absorbed into the mainstream. This is how social justice ended up everywhere.

 

Joel Kotkin in his "The Pandemic Road to Serfdom" calls it the clerisy. Great term, I want to use it more often — the dutiful SJW leadership as it were. Like the clergy in the Middle Ages, the ordained hypnotists today are "the media, academia, upper bureaucracy, and the ever-expanding 'non-profit' sector... this new middle class [enjoying] something of a symbiosis with the oligarchic elites who mainly finance non-governmental organizations and the universities."

This vigilant pinpointing still neglects to include the most significant part of the clerisy initiating the whole thing: the Society of Jesus, the organization with the actual divine mandate in the service of Cain's agency to inform all of them about what they're supposed to say and do and bilge into ill-equipped minds. They're the only ones capable of spreading the spirit of the pathodicy in so many brilliantly blinding ways.

The coronavirus hysteria: "If I can contribute to saving that one life it is worth destroying thousands of livelihoods by shutting down the economy."

The racialist hysteria: "If I can make one victim of racism feel better it is worth accusing all white people of committing the worst discrimination."

The socialist revolutionary hysteria: "If I can rally enough people to enlist government in expropriating wealth to make sure no one has any less than anyone else it is worth making everyone equally destitute except for the oligarchs who look really good doing all this."

Think it is just the Elizabeth Holmes of the world who're the sociopaths? The narcissists? The whatever epithet we can use to blap the proper excuses? This added remark from Dan Ariely about the power of the pathodicy is quite appropriate:

"She was basically doing what everyone else was doing."

 

What about Jesus, I mean, didn't He have a desire to save people, you know, offering salvation to others and all that?

Yes, certainly, except He didn't make many friends doing it. Remember what happened to Him only because He was blisteringly honest about His intentions? Do you know what happened when He told people about Who He really was? There in the sixth chapter of John?

Huh. That we're closing this writing with another gospel's chapter six. Wonder if that means anything. There are only six sides to the die... anyway...

And that as much as Elizabeth Holmes dealt with blood (that was the way she did her fake diagnostics), Jesus there in this featured Scripture speaks of blood. As in...

"You must drink my blood if you want to live."

Ee-yep. Everyone did it — they left. Everyone in their pathodicy took off — they weren't getting any miraculously generated free meals this time. He's simply not doing things the way I think he should so I can feel good. Who is this Jesus fool anyway? "Drink his blood"? What does that mean?

There were a few who stayed. The words of Peter were so simple, yet so awesome, indeed shared after Jesus earnestly asked, "So, what about you?"

"Where else would we go?" Peter replied, "You have the words of eternal life."

As Jesus pointed out so profoundly, you can only have life if you give up the life you feverishly clutch, the pathodicy you bite and devour to feed.

Identifying the pathodicy is a start to seeing the stunning distinction between the World that wants to serve you for dinner, and the Kingdom that awaits your attendance at the Marriage Supper of the Lamb.

 

No, the Lamb is already the Guest of Honor. He already gave His life for you, and you just happen to be the other guest of honor.

 

Just make sure you're wearing the wedding clothes He gives you.

 

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