Tag Archives: sin

Individualised Subjects

There is a trend in America — and likely elsewhere — to decontextualise events like the mass shooting last week by turning the perpetrator into a completely autonomous, loner, mentally disturbed, ‘sinful’ individual. I’ve heard this from both religious and non-religious people over the weekend. However, I’ve begun to wonder about such a move — especially the last one (the ‘sinful’ part). In discussing this with ministerial figures, they were quick to differentiate ‘killing’ (especially that ‘sanctioned by God’ in the HB/OT) and ‘murder’. For him, at least, there is a prior commitment to accept the literal (well, literal in English at least) wording of the Biblical texts as being directly from God and, therefore, to reject seeing the language of ‘divinely-sanctioned murder’ as political insertions by religious and political leaders of the time. This person was also quick to declare the actions and life of the shooter as ‘sinful’ as a result of his final act. Yet, I wonder if the share of ‘sin’ extends far beyond simply the act of shooting children in a school room. Ignoring the additional argument that ‘guns don’t kill people’, I want to explore the ‘sins’ of the community which far outweigh the shooting of American children.

First, while the shootings occurred in Connecticut, the American military has been involved with an ongoing campaign of murdering people indiscriminately in Pakistan. This includes children just as innocent as those in American elementary schools. When this fact is brought up in conversation, most people shrug their shoulders as if it is an inconsequential number (as is attributed to Stalin: ‘if a person kills a dozen, it is a tragedy; if five million, a statistic’). Interestingly, there was another mass killing on Friday in China. While this did make mention in the news, it was lost soon after in the deluge of speculation about the latest shooting in the US. Apparently, it is only newsworthy to the media when American children are gunned down by posthumously ostracised ‘individuals’.

Secondly, there is the looming question of gun control. This shooting — like the many before it — has rekindled the debate regarding gun control. There is a liberal knee-jerk reaction every time which shuts down this debate in the name of ‘respect for the victims’ — as if it would not be respectful to discuss a way of preventing further instances. It is a myth to say that outlawing handguns and removing them from public access will not affect how ‘criminals’ can acquire weapons — as if there is a gaping hole in the government’s oversight of its borders whereby guns flow freely. I believe the issue stems from an American romance with the Wild West in which laws were suggestions and ‘individuals’ could interpret ethics and legalities by the gun. For these people, outlawing guns would be a tragedy because they think by giving a person a gun, that person is empowered as a defender, equipped with deadly force, trained as sharpshooter, and prepared to become a vigilante at a moments’ notice. Never mind the fact that the overwhelming majority of mass shootings are not stopped by average citizens with guns (and in fact, those who have tried to do so have become part of the body count) but by people who are actually trained and prepared to deal with mass shooters (i.e. the police and military). In other words, the general American romance with the mythological Wild West is one in which lawmakers and upholders of the law are also individuals decontextualised from their positions as government employees. They are freed from the constraints of the legal system and community mores in order to protect it. The same could also be said of the military. This kind of liminality makes the individual somehow superior to the urbanites who rely on civil services. It also implicates the desire to return to a post-civil society in which laws are relative to the individuals who are the sole and final arbiters of law (a la Judge Dredd).

Third, there is a meta-narrative which develops around each of these shootings whereby the assailant is a mentally unstable individual who must bear the complete guilt, shame, and sin of his actions against a ‘tight-knit’ community. Time and again, the police and the media work together to sell the story of the lone gunman who had serious signs of mental instability and was able to acquire (legally!) numerous weapons prior to his assault on the community. Rarely, if ever, does the ‘tight-knit’ community actually see the warning signs of such an individual, yet they are quick to excuse their own lack of care (how ‘tight-knit’!) for the assailant. In other words, if the assailant is an outcast of the ‘tight-knit’ community, it is mutually decided between the person and the community.

Fourth, the meta-narrative of ‘tight-knit’ communities is made to decontextualise the location from its embedded-ness in a city. Newtown, CT, for instance is a suburb of Danbury and part of the greater New York City region. Columbine is a suburb of Denver. Oftentimes, these ‘tight-knit’ and ‘non-city’ communities are part of an urbanised landscape. However, this decontextualisation is done to fabricate a fantasy of a Wild West town in which legal systems are superfluous and all the citizens of the town are as closely connected as can be without being related.

To speak, then, of the ‘sins’ of the shooter is misleading at best. Had the community been as close to its fantastical utopian narrative as it claims to be, the event of violence which actually occurred would not have happened. The ‘sins’ of the community may be that of the narcissist whereby nothing and nobody is of a concern except for the ‘tight-knit’ community which has a bad history of excluding people who do not fit the orthodoxy of the community. Adam Lanza, for example, was a stranger in his own community, alienated by the very narratives which construct Sandy Hook and Newtown as ‘tight-knit’ communities. If that is the case, then his violence was more than just violence for the sake of violence but also a cry of desperation for the community to see its narcissistic reflection. To put this in terms of ‘sins’, Adam Lanza was the sacrificial scapegoat by which Newtown and Sandy Hook can continue their ‘sinful’ practises of alienating those who live within their borders. Please do not misinterpret me here: yes, Adam Lanza shot and killed dozens of people; however, it is short-sighted to blame him as an individual for the sins of the community which produced him as the alienated individual.

Credit Money

This is a very short hypothesis I’ve been thinking about. Basically, money itself has no existence any more except as a measurement of debt and the means by which one is enslaved. While this may have been realised decades before now, it is fully obvious. With the automation of salaries (e.g. direct deposit) and goods payment (e.g. direct debit, monthly debit, etc), one lives without money. One must work to pay bills, but there is no longer any tangible exchange because everything is now virtual. We could remove money and capital from the entire project and nothing would change in the process — people would still work and they would still have the same things.

However, this is based on the argument that people would refuse to work if not forced. That is, without the weight of debt, people would do nothing. This would suggest, then, that there was never a time when people were not in debt. Even egalitarian agrarian communities must have been in some kind of financial debt for them to begin to collect and produce beyond the needs of their community in order to trade goods! The fallacy of such an argument should be obvious for we can trace historically when debt enters the social consciousness. Humans have lived and worked without the force of debt. Perhaps the only solid position in which debt has been necessary is in a post-slavery capitalist economy primarily because debt in cases like this serves to ensure a dichotomy between owners and workers which is almost indistinguishable from the dichotomy between owners and slaves. To work is to be a slave.

Such sentiment has become popular in theological parlance when speaking of the death and resurrection of Christ. Humanity is treated as being indebted to Christ and God (doubly so!) and, therefore, must repent and serve Christ out of the guilt of debt. This is the penal substitution theory. Humanity is mired in guilt of sin before God. Then, Christ pays God the debt of sin humanity owes. Therefore, humanity is indebted to Christ through repentance of the (already-paid) sin and subservience for the grace of such sacrifice. Christian missions and evangelism takes on this aspect of service and repentance. This is particularly noticeable in evangelical circles where one’s ‘witness’ centres on how one has changed into a better person because one has acknowledged the guilt-sin-debt.

For me, however, this sounds very twisted. It misses out on the story of liberation from sin-guilt-debt because it performs an act of double-think in which liberation is sin-guilt-debt so that one must become a willing slave in order to be truly free. However, I want to focus on a different interpretation of atonement. The dual nature of Christ is often used to displace the debt of guilt. On the cross, Christ takes on the sin of the world, but it is destroyed with the human nature of Christ to keep the God nature clean and pure. Rather than paying the debt humanity owes to God (and thus keep the system of debt), Christ erases that entire logic and thus allows humanity full access, communication, and equality with God. Christ is no longer the passive vessel of exchange that magically balances the accounting books of God while putting humanity into further debt but the active destroyer of sin-guilt-debt. Humanity is therefore freed from God and the debts of sin, able to walk away. Salvation and redemption is thus the starting over of the human-God relationship. In other words, the death and resurrection of Christ is a gamble by God that erases the logic of sin-guilt-debt in order to allow a free relationship in which one willingly partakes service not as a servant but as a partner in the act of redemption itself (perhaps best seen as in terms of an adopted child).

The language of debt and credit is erased so that the work of God continues in and through people. Perhaps, though, it may be better to term such activity something other than work for the Christian is not a slave to God. However, this also returns us to the human social economy of debt. Perhaps the way through capitalism is not in the erasure of money but rather the erasure of debt. The liberation of humanity from itself requires a re-thinking of human social relations which removes the possibility of slaves — both those captured or sold and those waged — so that people can ‘work’ without debt.

Remembering the Immemorial

A thought occurred to me recently which I think makes an interesting position for us. If we take Jeremiah 31:34 (also quoted in Hebrews 8:24) seriously and literally, then the ‘new covenant’ (which Christian theology says is the one created through the death and resurrection of Christ) means that sins are not just forgiven but they are erased from memory. This is especially the case in the Hebrews paraphrase/quotation (less so across translations of the original passage in Jeremiah). God promises to ‘remember their sins no more’. This is more than just forgetting or ignoring them; it is an active erasure from memory.

This story seem to be similar to the plot of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It’s an excellent film, but I’ll give a short summary of the plot for readers who have not seen it. The film begins with a couple (Joel, played by Jim Carrey, and Clementine, played by Kate Winslet) who has hit rock bottom in their relationship. Clementine undergoes a procedure by which her entire relationship with Joel is erased from her memory. When they cross each other and Joel discovers this, he enters a state of depression and undergoes the same procedure. The bulk of the film deals with the erasure of Joel’s memories (starting with the most recent). As the erasure goes further back in time, Joel begins to lament undergoing the process because he realises that their relationship was not as bad as he thought it was. In fact, he tries to keep hold of their shared memories. Yet he is unable to remember anything about their relationship (only a meeting place). If the film was darker (which I tend to prefer in these kind of plots; the ‘original ending’ of Butterfly Effect is similar), it would have ended here with the complete erasure of their memory. However, to give the film a ‘happy’ resolution, it ends with Joel and Clementine meeting each other and discovering that they once had a relationship together. Clementine warns that it could happen again, but both are willing to give it a try again. A ‘dark’ interpretation of this would see the ending as the endless cycle of happiness–>pain–>erasure–>renewal, but the ending is too open-ended to guarantee such reading.

However, God’s erasure of sins is not the same here. The sinner remembers all of it — and this marks the transformation of sins into guilt. It’s closer to 50 First Dates than toEternal Sunshine because one party remembers it all. What we have instead is a relationship in which the human sinner bears the burden of remembering the ‘bad’ details in the relationship while God has erased them from memory. The result of this is one of (at least) two possibilities: a sense of guilt in the sinner through which she must be always penitent for her misdeeds or a twisted sense of power in which the sinner can therefore abuse God without recourse. In either situation, the God-human relationship, when seen as a normal human relationship, is an abusive one. Perhaps the best way Christian theology can become relevant for people today is by disavowing that abuse and finding other ways of relating to God.

Ideological Delusions

Nietzsche writes in one of his better-known fragments, On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense, that the concept of ‘truth’ is an illusion which we have forgotten as such. This forgetting of the illusion is driven by the desire for knowledge; in other words, it is the desire for truth that transforms illusions into knowledge and masks them further by calling them ‘truths’. The power of desire turns against all possible opposition by declaring that lies are deceptions of the real that utilise real words to fabricate a false image. Nietzsche’s larger focus here isn’t an attack on epistemological frameworks but on the language that already validates those frameworks:

In a similarly limited way man wants the truth: he desires the agreeable life-preserving consequences of truth, but he is indifferent to pure knowledge, which has no consequences; he is even hostile to possibly damaging and destructive truths. And, moreover, what about these conventions of language? Are they really the products of knowledge, of the sense of truth? Do the designations and the things coincide? Is language the adequate expression of all realities?

Our language formulates arbitrary abstractions that rarely (if ever) ‘really’ exist. Take for instance, the concept of ‘leaf’: it exists as an abstract class that is always instantiated differently. The qualities of ‘leafness’ are made so that one can say a lettuce leaf is a leaf just as much as a maple leaf even though the two have different qualities as well. Another example would be that of ‘worm’ in which its definition is slippery enough that it could be twisted to also designate the concept ‘snake.’ In other words, the language of ‘truth’ is at best metaphors. The cynic in Nietzsche sees in that language something a bit more sinister, that which will become the Will to Power breaking through language. Correct perception can only be an aesthetic relation; that is, perception is art. It follows from this that powerful speakers will be able to paint perceptions and to mask them as something more than perceptions–as ‘truth’. It is in this vein that I wish to turn to the primary focus of this article: concepts we (Americans and possibly the West in general) have deluded ourselves in believing.

Free Propaganda

Three concepts which the US has consumed wholeheartedly are the illusions of freedom, its cousin democracy, and capitalism. These began to be consumed en masse after WW2 during the beginnings of the Cold War, but it must be kept in mind that these are strictly arbitrary and their influence can be found much earlier. In order to paint America and the West as being radically different from the USSR and communism, we began to market to ourselves these differences. It is during this time that the phrase ‘under God’ was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in order to differentiate America from atheist Russia. However, all of this was a marketing ploy, much like the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ for the actions in Iraq. We’ve been able to see the fruits of this marketing in the last 20 years once the Cold War ended. We’ve deluded ourselves further into thinking that our military actions in various places (post-collapse Russia, Yugoslavia, Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc) as spreading freedom and democracy (oh, and capitalism, of course). Ironically, we have never been a free nation. Our freedom has always had qualifications, some quite reasonable (e.g. restricting murder) and some less reasonable (e.g. restricting ‘free speech’ obscenities). The way the marketing works is that our ‘freedom’ is only a relative measure typically used in comparison to what is perceived as the most oppressive nations (e.g. USSR, mainland China, East Germany, etc). We’ve then taken this relative comparison and made it an absolute statement: not only are we more ‘free’ than (insert oppressive nation) but we are truly ‘free’ and all that the concept contains. What this rhetoric produces is not only the belief that ‘we’ are ‘free’ but that there cannot be anyone more ‘free’ because we ourselves are already ‘free’. By utilising this language and forgetting the relative nature of the original claims, we have created a situation in which one cannot think of ‘freedom’ outside of the restricted concept we’ve been marketed. While the US is not as overtly oppressive as Oceania from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, we’ve created the paradigm of the perversion of fascism it utilised.

The same also goes for the concept of ‘democratic.’ There are countless occasions in which we’ve elected one president under the guise of repairing the problems of a previous president (e.g. Obama’s election), but what we’ve failed to notice collectively is that the executive branch uses this in order to further abuse its privileges and abridge ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ in order to give us a ‘better’ place (e.g. the original PATRIOT act). As long as people continue to vote reactively, we will continue to see the restriction of ‘freedom’ under the guise of a ‘good-natured’ president that is trying to restore ‘freedom.’ In contradistinction to this, the ‘restoration of freedom’ is a re-interpretation of the concept of ‘freedom’ in light of the new, limited ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. Another useful example is the American Civil War in which we quickly discovered that a state cannot peacefully leave the union (further echoed in Texas v White). We may begin to see this issue rise again in cases like Montana and Georgia. The US Constitution names the government as a republic (and only a ‘democracy’ with qualifications) and requires/guarantees all states within to have the same kind of government.  In other words, we’ve created our own definition of ‘democratic’ so that we ourselves are the epitome of such and there can never be another who is more ‘democratic’. We have forgotten how we became ‘democratic’ and refuse to allow others that same path.

Our last illusion is that of ‘free market capitalism’. In some ways, we can never have a ‘free market’ society because we are only human and it will be abused however which way possible. We have also been able to paint the West as the only source of ‘free market’ capitalism even though mainland China (which is still ‘communist’) has allowed ‘capitalist’ growth beyond what the US could imagine. In a ‘free market’ system, there are no absolutes except the abstract concept of value. Everything has a value and this is always in flux and depends on the production of desire (through marketing techniques). Capitalism is the believing machine that believes in humans who, in turn, provide for its very survival. Yet we have forgotten that even capitalism is an illusion created in the past few centuries. Capitalism subsists in the world by managing the production of desires through marketing and advertisement; ‘You need that $50,000 car to feel happy‘ which then leads to ‘you need that $75,000 car to really feel happy.’ This process of a never satisfied desire is very familiar to psychoanalysis, as it is a manifestation of the unchecked ego. It is by its very nature never satisfied for the satisfaction of its desires implies the end of its existence. The unchecked ego transforms its process of desire by desiring desire itself; this provides the vehicle for it to exist indefinitely as the desire of desire is one that can never be satisfied. Capitalism is able to survive by tapping into this process and equating objects (e.g. cars, food, phones, computers, etc) with that desire–but only temporarily. The team of capitalism and ego have wreaked havoc on the individual and, by extension, society by reducing the individual to a set of desires and an illusion of freedom. You are free to do what you desire, as long as you are happy in doing it! Fortunately for capitalism, the means to enjoy desire also includes the proliferation of capitalism.

Escaping Freedom

In short, we are slaves to our own desires. Capitalism abuses this enslavement and has helped us delude ourselves into thinking we are free. We have never been free; but we willingly delude ourselves into thinking such and ignoring it by buying things to satisfy our displaced desires. And it is this distinct lack of freedom that we find in Paul’s letter to the Romans:

Did that which is good, then, become death to me? Absolutely not! But sin, so that it would be shown to be sin, produced death in me through what is good, so that through the commandment sin would become utterly sinful. For we know that the law is spiritual – but I am unspiritual, sold into slavery to sin. For I don’t understand what I am doing. For I do not do what I want – instead, I do what I hate. But if I do what I don’t want, I agree that the law is good. But now it is no longer me doing it, but sin that lives in me. For I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my flesh. For I want to do the good, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but I do the very evil I do not want! Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer me doing it but sin that lives in me. So, I find the law that when I want to do good, evil is present with me. For I delight in the law of God in my inner being. But I see a different law in my members waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that is in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.

Paul’s escape from this ‘freedom’ is servitude, slavery by choice. It is a wonderful working of rhetoric of Paul here in that he short circuits the concepts of freedom and slavery by arguing to be free is to be enslaved and to be enslaved is to be free. Because of ideology, mankind is never free…and because of this, whichever ideology is the most prevalent will always be the most corrupt and it will always delude us into thinking we are free.

Returning now to Nietzsche, who sees the rhetoric in Paul; Nietzsche also sees in Paul the very reactive nature that continues the cycle of ideology (cf The Antichrist). For Nietzsche, the real escape isn’t choosing another ideology (e.g. religion) but moving past ideology altogether and returning to active thinking. In other words, freedom is to actively shape one’s own reality by taking controlling of one’s own ideology. That is the true power of the overman in Nietzsche (cf Thus Spoke Zarathustra). It is with this purpose in mind that the mad man in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science proclaims the death of God. It is not because some entity known as God is killed by Nietzsche (for that already happened 2000 years ago at the hands of Jewish ressentiment according to Nietzsche) but that the ideological Master that was erected in place of that God is now dethroned and revealed to be the powerless creature of ressentiment. Freedom is the power to create values, something which mankind has long since forgotten. This is the same power that capitalism wields over us now and the revolution isn’t finding a better ideology (e.g. socialism, communism, etc) but the radical revaluation of ideology itself to show the chains that always bind us.