Life as an Empty Box

the relationship with satan is a little hit or miss

Give me a minute, and let me show you something without framing or a narrative. Then I’ll talk about it, but first just notice it. The company founded by Walt Disney has a new show for children¹ about a middle school girl who has an awkward dilemma: She’s the Antichrist (as her mom reveals to her one day, after a weird day at school), and her Cool Dad is Satan, who has lots of funny lines about what a wild guy he is. Funny teen girl dilemmas follow, like this one time her parents show up to a party — which, like, super bummer and everything, but it’s even funnier when your dad is actually, literally Satan.

Okay, you don’t believe me, but watch:

No cultural gatekeeper takes this as Satanic: It’s just a story, just make-believe, a fun way of doing a fresh take on an old story. There’s no actual darkness to it — it’s just television. Read the review from Variety: “It’s a story about puberty and growing up, as well as adjusting to being part of an atypical family.” Danny DeVito does the voice of fun-Satan-dad, which is neat, but Variety laments that “the relationship with Satan and Chrissy is a little hit or miss.” The Hollywood Reporter review summarizes the show as being about a girl who’s dealing with being a teenager spawned by Satan, “all the while trying to figure out who she really is as her own person.” It’s kind of John-Hughes-Breakfast-Clubby, jocks and geeks and parties, but in hell. Ultimately, this review concludes, the show is saved by its “freewheeling, good-natured vibe.” Which is what you expect in a show about the fun relationship between Satan and the Antichrist.

It seems, lately, that lines are being crossed with increasing frequency and intensity. For the first time in the history of the country, a former President of the United States (whose party is out of power) has had his home raided and searched by the criminal justice officials of the other party, which finds itself in power. For the first time in the history of the country, the current President of the United States has delivered a bizarre, blood-lit rant about half the country being monsters.

Erick Erickson @EWErickson

Staging by Leni Riefenstahl.

But no lines are being crossed, because there are no lines. Satan is a television character; immorality is impossible in a culture without morality, without a moral framework and moral anchors. Lacking principles, no one in power can violate any. They’re completely adrift, completely free, and completely ruined. They can go anywhere, and they often do. You can’t sin when nothing is a sin. Well, except for using the wrong pronouns, but more or less.

Now: There are people who are not adrift, who have moral reference points. I continue to believe they’re the majority, geographically prevalent and often thick on the ground, morally attuned as communities and families in a global and national milieu of amoral disconnectedness.

So we have people who see no lines, traveling freely across discarded boundaries, watched by people who are appalled by line-crossing that the line-crossers don’t perceive at all.

Walter Kirn @walterkirn

This is very important to understand. I wrote a book about it based on personal experience. It is not that sociopaths and psychopaths believe their lies are true. It is that they don’t believe in truth at all. They believe only in useful and convincing performances.

See also this essay from Dr. Robert Yoho, “Guess Who Passes the Psychopath Test?”

Psychopathic lying is successful because normal people do not believe that anyone lies as a routine. Debates with sociopaths are useless. No matter what we say, no matter how much evidence is given, it has no meaning for them. Their sole goal is to fool us into classifying them as normal so they can continue to deceive, control, and use us….

When major positions of power in business, government, industry, and society are filled by sociopaths, a downward spiral begins. The normal people eventually recognize what their leaders are and devise survival strategies.

We’re there, though it’s hard to place “there” on a map. We can see that a significant share of power and status — in politics, in economics, and in culture — belongs to people who have no perception of social rules or moral limits at all. And we see that some lines need to be reimposed, urgently and firmly.

After a few years of, “but these are the experts, right?” it feels like the beginning of the phase in which everybody finally knows the game and the stakes. In this version of the story, the little boy points out that the naked emperor has no soul, and the people begin to notice. And then?

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1. A commenter points out that Disney’s Satan show is for Adult Swim, and marketed to nominal adults.