THE AGE OF THANATOS, OR THE DEMONIC AND OUR WORLD

L”ENFER, DIRK BOUTS, 15th CENTURY

Today we’re going to talk about what’s happening to our world. Really happening to it. Beyond the bullshit. And what’s happening to us, as a result.

You’re not going to like it, it’s going to be a difficult, strange, and unsettling read. I strongly recommend you don’t read this, in fact. Go watch some dumb shit influencer selling you their dumb shit plastic smile, no, that’s not a mind game, I Really Mean It. This is 100% Not Safe For Most People to Think About.

Except me. I think the time has come to begin writing what I actually think, but I don’t think the time has come for anyone to read it just yet. So maybe this will just be a secret diary now. I don’t know. Or maybe I’ll write it all up, seal it in a bottle, and…

I.

“The eye of Heaven beholds the just of men,
And the unjust, nor ever in this world
Has one sole godless sinner found escape.
Stand then on Heaven’s side.”

That’s from Sophocles. From one of his last plays. Where Oedipus, history’s most tragic figure, begs for one last redemption. To be buried in hallowed ground.

We’ve come to a point now where fascists are lecturing the Pope. Trump posted an AI video of himself as Jesus, after mocking the Pope, who criticized Trump for making war. JD Vance stepped into the breach, and still is. This is the lunatic place we’re at. Go ahead and chuckle. Now: what does it mean?

It’s just pure demonic energy.

Laugh, chuckle in outrage, splutter your coffee if you must. Umair’s finally lost it, guys. He’s talking about demons. Am I? How do you know? Maybe I’m one. Maybe nothing is real anymore. Maybe I just mean “demons” in a metaphorical way. We’ll come to all that.

It’s been on my mind for months now. I sense it around me. Do you? Some of us are finely attuned to it. We’ve become attuned to it, in many cases, through trauma, suffering and pain. Or we were born attuned to it, sensitive, literally, possessing a strange set of senses that others don’t have, which are hard to explain. I get bad feelings before things bad happen. For much of my life, I wrote it off. I didn’t listen. Now I do. I’m a much better everything since I do, husband, investor, person, thinker.

Jung called all this synchronicity. The unconscious at work. And so we don’t need mystical explanations of demons. The human mind is mysterious enough itself. But do I just mean it this way? Let me come back to Jung, once I explain what is happening in, to, our world.

Our world is now possessed by demons. Yes, I mean it. We’ve been talking about Thanatos, the death drive, one of humankind’s primal instincts. And the demonic energy now surrounding us, that I think some of us are beginning to viscerally feel, is its expression.

And furthermore, to add insult to injury, I think it’s totally OK and reasonable for thoughtful people to actually begin to describe all this as demonic. We’re going to talk about precisely that, psychologically, mythologically, cosmologically, spiritually, and morally.

Laugh, laugh with me. Go ahead, be outraged. It’s cool. I know it’s faintly ridiculous to talk like this, for the modern mind. But should it be? Here we all are wondering: how can so many things go so wrong for a world at once? Here I am, able to teach you every equation I know and then some. Y = G + C + I - (X-M). That’s GDP, by the way. Does any of it get us much of anywhere anymore? Let’s cut to the chase and try thinking in a new way, or maybe a very old one.

Our world is now possessed by demons. Thanatos. Death drive. The dark impulse. The demonic energy is now practically screaming off the charts around us.

We will come shortly to the matter of if they’re “real” or merely “metaphorical.” Does it matter much? If I say to you, that isn’t a demon, that’s sociopathy, or psychopathy, which ontological hairs are we splitting? You might say: the difference is, call an exorcist, or a shrink. And both exorcist and psychiatrist will probably say, call the other one first, and then get back to me. After that, they’ll both likely agree that something is very, very fucking wrong in our world today. Something demonic, which is to say, psychopathic, or sociopathic, if you want to use modern terminology, take your pick.

Yet these modern terms haven’t served us well. To say that someone or something is sociopathic—we all know it. And it means nothing anymore. Less than nothing, in fact. Because…remember Sophocles?

Sophocles is teaching us something profound, and something terrible. “The eye of Heaven beholds the just of men, and the unjust…stand then on Heaven’s side.” The poet here puts it better than both exorcist and psychiatrist.

We come to expect that we exist in the moral universe. Amongst and amidst spiritual and moral order. In a moral universe, it’s true that monsters exist, too—but it’s also true, precisely because monsters usually end up in labyrinths, not on thrones, that there is some measure of justice. The point is simple: in any conception of a moral universe, we expect some form of justice to prevail. Any kind at all. Natural, human, institutional, divine. Let us distinguish three categories: from above, from beyond, from within.

So. Where is it? How the fuck did we end up in a world where demons appear to be running everything? Are they real actual literally fucking demons, or just people with intentions indistinguishable from demons, or people possessed by demons? What the shit is happening? Does it even matter, except to say: our civilization is apparently now possessed by the demonic?

Justice means many things, but I don’t want you to imagine here laws. Let’s dispense with human justice for a moment. Just go back to our primal conceptions of beings in a universe in which some force, origin, source, force exists, of which we are descendants and children. We’re not demons, and so this primeval oneness is good, and therefore, brings moral order to being, too.

So we imagine that there is some form of justice in the moral universe. And to this we ascribe the names of the gods. The gods may be stern or merciful, they may be capricious and mercurial, or they may be anything at all. But their purpose, so far as we’re concerned, is justice. Hence, the last judgment. The last supper. The resurrection and the light. And Oedipus, begging, at the end of his terrible life, to be buried, at last in hallowed ground, because all his mistakes were no fault of his, he wept, before his daughter, a beggar, dressed in tatters, pleading to Theseus and Zeus. Do me justice, he pleaded. See me, Eye of Heaven.

Again, put aside the modern conception of justice, which is about laws and jails. Understand that we have felt from the beginning of the human experience this way. In us, there are feelings like hubris, overreach, a grasping too far—and the sense that all these incur the wrath of heaven. We will be punished for them, by fate, by the gods, by Heaven itself. In this notion, all cosmogonies and eschatologies are born and end. From this, we kneel and kiss the soil and give thanks for life, instead of cursing it bitterly.

What has gone wrong in our world is that the eye of Heaven seems to have gone blind. We are ruled by the kinds of figures who are made only of the stuff the gods should have punished by now. Hubris, violence, overreach. The Pope warned: no man should aspire to omnipotence. Sophocles’ ghost smiled, because this, too, was the message of all tragedy.

But today we come to a terrible epiphany. Where is the eye of Heaven? Where is it to be found? Why is it blind? Why is it that hubris and overreach and terrible desires like omnipotence and omniscience aren’t punished? But in fact rewarded? Shall we happily conclude that the gods no longer exist, like Nietzsche did? It’s easy to do that, and we style Nietzsche too much as a rebel. Harder to have faith. But that’s not my point.

It’s this: we are realizing something terrible about ourselves, the world, and even history. Nobody is there and nothing is there to ensure a just universe. And we have this sense, suddenly, that we are orphans. And the most vicious amongst have come to rule. Lord of the Flies, except for a civilization, which is what it was always about.

The kinds of figures who have power over our world now are, it has to be said, and it has to be said openly, I think, are revealing themselves perhaps as some of the most evil people to have existed, maybe ever, in the story so far of humankind. And evil is not just a childish game: who did something bad, mommy. It is about, first and foremost, what we wish, desire, and want. The obscene and the monstrous. The demonic.

The mighty river of love has run dry in our age. But who turned its water to dust? And what is all that doing to us? Do we even see evil at work in the world around us—really notice it at all? Click, tap, swipe. Who gives a fuck about this metaphysical shit, Umair, hey, I just want people to smash that like button!

Am I the only who senses that our world is now awash in demonic energy? I doubt it. But I wonder who will have the courage to say it aloud. And to investigate what it means. What does it mean, then?

Desires like omniscience and omnipotence are not ones that the normal human mind accepts or embraces. It shrinks from them. It forces them into the darkness, represses them, precisely because they are so terrible that they are a kind of eternal violence and ultimate annihilation.

If I say: I want omnipotence, I am also saying that you are nothing.

If I say: I want omniscience, I am also saying that you are nothing.

You have no freedom, will, choice. Nothing you do will ever matter. You will never have a single thought or idea. You will never truly love, feel, or know anything or anyone.

I am all that exists.

Now think about our world today. The kinds of figures we are confronted with genuinely desire omnipotence and omniscience. This is what the authoritarians and techno-barons openly dream of.

We are ensnared in their dreams.

What does that make us? What does that leave of us?

What would Sophocles say to us?

And is this why the Eye of Heaven has gone blind?

II.

What does all this have to do with demons? What the fuck is Umair talking about these days? Jesus, someone shut this asshole up, already.

What is a demon? A demon isn’t just the personification of a sin or an evil. A demon is in anguish—eternal anguish—because of the sin or evil they personify. And there is only one way to expiate the suffering, which is the reverse of the way of Christ. To possess.

Christ gave his body, and millions upon millions of the faithful are reminded of it at every Mass. They take the host into themselves.

But the demon possesses our body. Do you see the inversion? It’s only the first one, and we are not talking in strictly Christian terms.

Every civilization has believed in demons. We are the first ones not to. We might think that makes us very sophisticated, but if you ask me, it only reveals the limits of our ignorance. Because demons are very, very real. Whether or not we believe them to be “entities” inhabiting the ether or mere metaphors makes them no less real at all. Whether we say: forces emanating from the unconscious make this person sociopathic or psychopathic makes them not one shred less real. Perhaps only more so.

And so the fact remains that there are energies within us that can only be described as demonic. But that much needs careful and delicate explanation.

What does the demon want? What is its purpose? It possesses a body, but that much is just spectacle. The demon can’t truly “own” a soul, or even consign it to hell. The vomit and spit and shrieks are a show.

The demon is there to teach us: nothing in this life is ours. Not even our bodies, selves, minds, limbs, skin. Nothing. And in this way, the demon confront us with the most terrible of truths, which is of our transience and fragility and mortality. Here is a thing that is made of nothing, just shadows and darkness, and it can take us away from ourselves, like that. This is how evanescent we are.

How slight our grip on existence is. It’s barely a fingerhold, and we cling to it, stretched above an endless abyss. This is what Heidegger described as being-in-itself. We could just call it: being human.

The demon is a thing which says: I am omnipotent. I am omniscient. I can take everything you have, are, will be. I know your deepest desires and thoughts, and I will use them against you.

I annihilate you. The goodness in you, the beauty in you, the love in you, until all that is left is the terrible, awful truth: you are nothing but evil. You are just like me. You are just like the devil. And there, just like that—they are not so alone anymore. This is the purpose of a demon. Annihilation, but through the dark testament, the revelation, that after the goodness is stripped away, which is merely superficial, at the core lies the secret truth of a person, which is just appetite, hunger, hatred, envy, malice, rage.

And in that horror, we lose our faith. Not just in the gods, but in existence itself. And with it goes the idea that there could be any order to the universe, from moral to spiritual or beyond. All is lost. Even death is not a consolation anymore. There is only one thing left to us, to become the annihilation we fear. This is the demon’s game.

Contrast the demon. The angels are serene. Even if they are warriors and guardians, what marks them out is their serenity, and they feel this inner calm because they know that God’s victory is eternal. It is without beginning and without ending. But here, for us, fragile, mortal things, the struggle is what’s eternal, because we are trapped in time. The demon is not serene. He is made of pure anguish, because he is trapped in time with us. He only has so much of it to make his presence felt, and to emerge victorious, through possession.

And so comes the role of the exorcist. The exorcist is there, in the now familiar telling of the story, to recite his incantations, and with the power of God, to cast the demon whence he came. But what is God? Who is God? God is light which became Logos, the word. Light illuminated the chaos, and the word, the symbol, brought order to it. The demon, too, has a place in this order, which is to tempt us. And the name of this order is: justice, which is also truth, which is contained in beauty, and from whom goodness flows.

God is generous, expansive. He gives. It is his nature to give. And when Oedipus begs Zeus for his dying wish, to be buried with dignity, it is precisely only because he, like us, imagines: the power of expansion, of creation, is precisely this. This generosity is the birth of all things. Is is the nature of God, which we also call love.

And it is this power the exorcist invokes to cast out the demon. “Casting out” must be understood. It is not merely a rejection. It is an exile. Just as Lucifer is exiled, and that is his punishment, so too are the demons. But the demons do not live in hell. That is why Lucifer is a lonely being. When a demon is cast out, where does he go? He goes nowhere at all. He becomes something like a seed. He returns to the shadows. And the shadows are in us, as Jung says.

Now think of the algorithm and the model. Think of the authoritarian and the fascist and the techno-baron. Do you see the demon in them, or the angel? Are they after cold, total, absolute omniscience and omnipotence, as ultimate power, or the generosity, the primal impulse, the love, of the creator, towards fragility, mortality, and humanness?

In our world, demons are very real. They always have been. But they have never been more real, in fact, than now.

III.

I know that this is complicated and difficult writing and thinking. To many people, it will be…LOL…like an alien language. Maybe it is. Who knows?

Let me try and come to my point now, which is that our world is possessed by demons, or awash in demonic energy, which is the expression of Thanatos, the death drive.

Demons return to the shadows, where they hide. What are the shadows? The shadow is what we repress, Jung says. And you might conclude: Umair is saying that a demon is just a repressed desire. That is partly what I’m saying, but it’s way too easy to simply stop there.

There are desires that we repress all the time. We see people we find “attractive” walking down the street, and just smile to ourselves, and reassuringly hold our partner's hand. We dream of fortunes, but aren’t foolish enough to press go on the “gamble away your life savings” button.

The demonic is very, very different.

There are desires that the normal human mind wants no part of. That it finds repulsive and grotesque and repellent. It’s nauseated and sickened at the mere thought, the mental image. I’m sure I don’t have to give you examples.

Let us call these desires: fantasies of annihilation. Here, I don’t mean the childish wish we’ve all had: “I wish you were dead,” we’ve all said to our parents, in a teenage tantrum.

I mean true fantasies of annihilation. You may be turned on by being tied up or what have you, but this isn’t a fantasy of annihilation. It’s a fantasy about control and power. A fantasy of annihilation is very different, and I suspect that most of us have never had one. We don’t need to repress them because we don’t really have them. Have I “dreamt of killing my wife”? LOL. I’m sure she has me. That’s not a fantasy of annihilation, either.

A fantasy of annihilation is the desire, the wish, to possess. I don’t want to possess anyone I love. Do you? Truly? No, we’re not speaking sophomore year feminism here, objectification. I mean: in the demonic sense. Do you want to possess your child, wife, partner, potential lover? To know their every last thought, to repaint their every mental image, to control every movement of their limbs?

Of course not. What I’ve just written should repulse most people. Chill them. It’s about as unnatural an idea as a mind can have. Precisely because that is what annihilation really is.

Annihilation isn’t just murder. Murder is killing someone. Annihilation is possession, which is inhabiting them.

This is the demonic.

Now think of the world around us again. What do the authoritarians want? To inhabit us. To control us in exactly the way above. Every movement of our limbs, every image we have, every word we say, everything, all of us. Now think of what technology wants from us, or is already doing to us. It’s the same thing: it controls our every last action, thought, mental image, and intention.

Omniscience and omnipotence are annihilation. They are fantasies of annihilation. No sane or normal human mind wants such things. We create gods precisely because we ourselves cannot bear the responsibility. The grotesque and terrible weight of it. Would you want to know every thought every human being on earth has? Are you fucking kidding, that’s repulsive and disgusting, it’s a form of mass rape. But guess what, the authoritarians and techno-barons drool over precisely this.

IV.

Here’s what I think.

The world is now possessed by demons. The demonic, Thanatos, is now trying to possess the mind, body, and soul of humankind. In a way that history has rarely, if ever, seen before. If you imagine I mean witches are to be burned at the stake, and that I’m demanding an Inquisition, please relax. That’s not what I mean at all. What I mean is: goodness, truth, and beauty are slipping away from us, mocked as stupidity and futility, derided as worthless. And in all this, a certain kind of dark energy, whose object and subject, wish and fantasy, is totalized annihilation, is coming to inhabit humankind, institutionally and systemically, mathematically and literally, socially and technologically, multidimensionally.

Let me make it even clearer, because I think that a great deal of the future of human civilization now hinges on us grasping where it really is right now, which is: possessed by Thanatos

Oedipus was history’s most tragic figure. And in his first act of penance, he tore his eyes out. Why? Precisely to say: I am not a god. I never had omniscience and omnipotence. I never wanted them. I couldn’t have known the terrible nature of my sins. I wanted only human things: love, mercy, justice, truth. Those were enough for me. And yet the gods punished me, though they are the omniscient and omnipotent ones. Why?

Only the demon and the serpent teach the answer to Oedipus’s riddle. Though they themselves do not know it, either.

The demon possesses us, and attempts to prove through us, falsely, that the devil has omnipotence and omniscience, that he is greater than God, and therefore, the eternal struggle is lost, and all human suffering means nothing, has no redemption, no purpose, no meaning. Better to cast your lot with the devil.

The serpent says: you. human one, are exiled from the Garden now. And your only way back is through omniscience and omnipotence. Perhaps if you know all, and you can accomplish all, somewhere, in that tangle of all possibilities, you will find your way back to the primeval state of perfection.

What is the answer to Oedipus’s riddle? What was Sophocles trying to teach us? Why is there this strange, perfect inversion of Jesus giving his body to redeem us, and the demon possessing ours, to abjure us? What lives in Jung’s shadows?

Oedipus committed no sin except being born human. That alone was enough to damn him, the most ill-fated of men. And in the end, he asked for only thing. Mercy. A good death. A home under the stars, that would be a boon to his children. And through him, we learn: the fantasies of omniscience and omnipotence are the most dangerous things of all. Had Oedipus known, might never have had to tear out his eyes, and live as a beggar, wandering from shore to shore, in rags. But then what would we have learned, about fate? And forgiveness? And mercy? And gratitude? Love? Nothing at all.

Oedipus could have been many men. Damned by the gods, for nothing at all, he alone would have been justified in the demonic. And yet he chose to try and find redemption. Redemption is always a giving act, because love exists only in this form. Jesus gave his body and his earthly life, Oedipus tore out his eyes. The Buddha answered every question he was asked.

And the question before us, too, is the same. What are we giving? Giving is never easy. It is not a trivial matter. This is all that exorcises the demons. What does the exorcist do? He gives, and through the act of giving, the demon’s annihilation is revealed as a game, a gambit, a bluff. A person is not just the evil in them. The truth of each of us is not just the dark shadow in us. That much is always there. But is not all that is there.

But unless we give it, what prevails, in our world?

The Eye of Heaven, which we also call moral order, or goodness, isn’t like our eyes. It can see what is there, and also what is not there. And in that, only its vision discerns: what, that could be, is given, and what isn’t? In our world, the questions are all those. Because if all we go on giving is the desperate, crying, insatiable darkness in us, to the worst among us, then this is where we will remain, and continue to be, and things will get worse.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)