feotakahari

I used to say that people create the Jesus they need most, imagining their personal Jesus as a reflection of themselves with all their flaws reframed and justified as virtues. I’d like to take it a step farther–people create the world they need most, even if it takes them their whole lifetimes.

Take John C. Wright, a very smart, very arrogant writer who thinks the only possible reason you could disagree with him is that you haven’t read as many books as him. He used to be a strident atheist, and while this gave him plenty of opportunities to be smug, it still felt like he had the capacity to see and understand things about the world that weren’t exactly how he wanted them to be. Then he had a stroke, started hearing the “voice of Jesus” in his head, and redoubled his fervency as a Catholic. He’s found new life and vigor in ranting about how gay people and feminists are ruining the world by going against the will of God, because he now has the ultimate authority to appeal to and the ultimate book to point to when he wants to claim he’s more learned than you. I’m not saying Catholicism is bad, but it was both bad for and necessary to Wright, because it gave him free reign to be what his worst impulses always inclined him towards being.

Or take Tatsuya Ishida, who used to be an offensive but empathetic chronicler of society’s dropouts. His comic Sinfest always carried the feeling that there was something fundamentally wrong with society, and a strong implication that this wrongness related to sex, hedonism, and selfishness. However, he was never able to clearly label the problem, so he was never able to blame or ostracize anyone for it. His characters remained lovable even at their lowest points, and they were beginning to form support networks and develop into decent people. Then he discovered feminism, and suddenly his entire comic was about ways in which men dehumanize women. Every issue was reframed in terms of men’s sexism and selfishness, and any attempt at nuance was rejected as a trick to undermine and manipulate women. Feminism let Ishida believe in a world that had an understandable, fixable problem, and if that single problem was too simple to cover the whole world, then the world could simply shrink to fit his understanding. Again, I’m not saying feminism is bad, but it was bad for Ishida, because it gave him what he’d always wanted.

This post was inspired by an article about past-life regression, written by an author who didn’t believe but clearly wanted to. She talked at length about her personal anxieties that could be quelled by the belief in lives before and after this one, and she almost made it sound compelling to set aside the world you know and embrace the world you need. But I can’t help but wonder, if she chose to see what she wanted, are there things she would then become unable to see? And what would that mean for the people around her, if in some way they were part of the unseen?