devil

SPEAKING TRUTH: Dis devil in dis world

Last updated: November 5th, 2018

Television comedian Flip Wilson always drew a laugh when his feminine character Geraldine exclaimed in contralto voice, “The devil made me buy this dress!” The line is funny because everyone in the audience is already intimately familiar with the techniques of putting a good face on rotten behaviour. So common is the practice that the dishonest stupidity of it tends to be overlooked until some self-centred Geraldine comes along and demonstrates, in dramatic manner, just how ridiculous such a state really is.

Flip’s mythical “devil,” in whose hands Geraldine is helpless putty, is perhaps a little old-fashioned nowadays, for the devil has lost the prestige he once enjoyed as the prime meddler in human affairs. Apparently he’s passed his baton on to other more updated and modern imps who do their mischief under a variety of pseudonyms. For, although we may laugh at Geraldine’s simple-minded attempts to pin the blame for her own failures on someone else, people everywhere are doing exactly the same thing in slightly more sophisticated fashion.

The aristocrats of modern-day devils—those deemed to exert the greatest power and therefore held in highest esteem—bear the complex psychological names of various neuroses, anxieties, compulsions, obsessions and phobias. If, for example, a person behaves in an especially erratic and irrational manner, the diagnosis is that he has a neurosis. This condition confers certain advantages to one so afflicted. For one thing, he undergoes an immediate change of status: he’s no longer a person but a patient and a patient cannot be held accountable for his actions. The fringe benefits are good too, for the patient may compare the efficacy of his devil with that of others and, with any luck at all, his symptoms may eventually be recorded for posterity in a book of case histories.

Not everyone, of course, has the money or the knowledge to entertain a high-class, well-educated devil. The more seemingly ignorant the person, the more primitive his devil will appear.  Extreme examples of this (aside from Geraldine) occur in ancient mythology where the devils were called, oddly enough, gods. There is, for instance, the story of the Roman god Dis, god of the underworld Hades. A fierce and unyielding character, Dis personified strife and, because he possessed a helmet that rendered him invisible, it was he who was blamed for bringing discord and dissensions to the world which men inhabited. Although Dis was non-existent as a person, the discordant state which he represented is just as real today as it ever was in primitive times. His name is today a prefix denoting failure, negation, refusal, a reversal of the true state. Such words as disease, disagreement, dissent and dissatisfaction are the primary terms for describing the present state of the world. And, as in primitive times, the cause of these dis conditions is still believed to originate somewhere other than in the people involved.

Hades, the mythical kingdom over which Dis ruled, was not a place but a state of mind. Once the surface veneer is removed, the state of people today is not so very different from what it was centuries ago. Only the names given to the supposed causes of human strife and unhappiness have changed. Where the trouble was once ascribed to capricious gods, it’s now thought to lie in faulty political, economic and social systems. “Change the system this way and that, and you will solve the problem.” But this approach, no matter how grand the intentions and the language, is no more viable than Geraldine’s problem-solving methods. There’s an inherent dishonesty in it, a dishonesty which avoids the truth that the real cause is the subnormal, subhuman state of consciousness that individuals maintain in themselves and express in their living.

Dishonesty, like all other dis conditions, is not anything of itself (even as a language prefix dis is a parasite requiring attachment to the body of a genuine word if it is to have form and shape). Honesty, however, is a strong and vigorous quality which stands of itself without need of crutches. As Mark Twain once remarked, “If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything.” And the truth encompasses much more than words; it involves every aspect of living, including attitudes that are true to the nature of life.

There’s only one true state of being, one enduring reality, and that relates to the quality and character of life itself. Life is constantly in the process of unfolding the beautiful design of its own nature, and man rightly shares in that fulfillment as he is a genuine expression of life’s character.

To be genuine, to express honesty, we must first come down to cases with ourselves. This would include a recognition that, despite all our education and supposed cultural achievements, we’ve been worshiping devils. The devils created by our own dishonest rationalizations may be more abstract and symbolic—may appear more sophisticated and respectable—than Geraldine’s, but they are devils nevertheless. When we stop contending with life, stop trying to justify our own failures to express the true state of being, we find that there are no more devils.  There is no employment for them.

[su_panel background=”#f2f2f2″ color=”#000000″ border=”0px none #ffffff” shadow=”0px 0px 0px #ffffff”]Robert Moore, a retired magazine editor and school teacher, resides in Cody, Wyoming.

image: Magdalena Roeseler (Creative Commons BY)