Somewhat Dangerous Children Of The Privileged Class - A Quick Look Behind The Temple Of Satan

HAVING HAD A SLEEPLESS NIGHT last night, I looked farther into The Satanic Temple and was not that surprised to find out that one of the influences on its founders was one of the more putrid books of the last years of the 19th century, Might Makes Right, a Darwinian-white supremacist, proto-Nazi, male-supremacist tract written in opposition to morality and the good will that is essential to egalitarian democracy.  His general thinking is a mish mosh of junk, the kind of typical watered down junk that instructed pop and not a little of the allegedly higher brow atheism of the entire 20th century and into this one.   I wasn't that surprised because I had read that the atheist Satanists were really big on assertions of "individualism" a word I have come to distrust because it so often hides selfish, egocentric, conformists.  Most of the "individualism" I've seen can be boiled down to those and, oddly, a rather limited range of consumerist and hedonistic short-term goals.   Sort of like the stunts mounted by The Satanic Temple. 

The American left, any left, really, that takes this kind of pop-Darwinist-Nietzschean-materialist-amoralist-bullshit, the rebellion of the eternal toddlers against not getting their own way or even consistently knowing what that is seriously, on the basis of some notion of "fairness" to them in their amoral stupidity, is stupid.  Their rebellion is bound to be counter-productive as their philosophical basis is bull shit, their discipline non-existent, their goals, inevitably being the opposite of equality, economic and social justice.  If you want to see that, here's from the interview linked to above, by the republisher of Might Makes Right and the guy who is most often presented as the major figure in the Satanic Temple, Lucien Greaves (one of a number of aliases he uses).

And, yes, we are adding to LaVey. LaVey is an excellent jumping-off point, but his work was a product of its time, and it’s appropriate to recontexualize it to today’s reality. LaVey was active during a time in which, for decades, the United States was on a dysfunctional spiral of increasing violence. As a result, LaVey’s rhetoric tended toward Social Darwinistic Police State politics. Since 1995, violence in the United States—and, in fact, the world over—has been in decline, and we’re now in a position to evaluate what’s working for us, and where we went wrong previously. Certainly, a strong and effective police presence is a contributing factor, but we also find that autocratic governments breed social violence. We also find that Social Darwinism, interpreted in brutal, strictly self-interested terms, is counter-productive, and based on a simplistic misinterpretation of evolutionary theory. We do better when we work in groups, where altruism and compassion are rewarded. We are social animals. That said, however, I believe in a system that runs meritocratically. Also, revenge is a natural impulse, without which justice would never be served. We should do our best to mitigate the pain of those who are suffering, whoever they are—but also be diligent to punish the misdeeds of those who behave unjustly to those around them.

NOTE that great big "however" ALWAYS LOOK FOR THE "HOWEVER" EVEN WHEN IT ISN'T THERE because with these guys mouthing the requisite mitigations of their essential sameness with the kind of gangsterism that really runs politics and almost all establishments.   I would look at Greaves and the republisher-interevewer Shane Bugbee to wonder what in their CVs would lead anyone to assign them to the kind of "merit" that he's calling for.  I looked and they both seemed like rather stupid slackers to me.  

You always get that with what is essentially a recapitulation of  Darwin, Nietzsche, a few other enemies of equality and morality from the enlightenment that so quickly decayed into romantic era decadence.   Not without a lot of attention getting let's pretend.  I doubt it's got much durability to it, with the number of broken links I ran into, it doesn't look like they can even keep their URLs current. 

The title.  I think the biggest danger they pose is to the real, religious left that is either a contradiction of the "meritocratic" elitism, the Darwinist inequality and, ultimately, the materialistic amorality of such brats or it is nothing.   That left too often gets wrapped in in some meat-headed attempt to be fair to them and provide them with some kind of misguided fairness.  The idea that all ideas merit us wasting our credibility, our very limited resources, our very limited time, etc. on their stunts has cost us an enormous price and, worse, those whose equality, economic and social justice depend on us not getting side tracked by a cheap carny side-show riffing off of junk such as this is and always has been.