The Devil became concerned his polls were tanking so he called his apprentices together for an emergency meeting to see what could be done to improve the ratings.
‘We are in serious trouble,’ he told them. ‘People are getting woke and seeing God everywhere, even in each other. They are beginning to care about the planet. They’re converting to Tofu. Before long we will all be out of a job. What bright ideas do you have?’
The first apprentice, who had advanced degrees from the Halls of Malfeasance in Pure and Applied Delinquency with minor subjects in Mischief and Annoyance, stepped forward. ‘We could tell them there is no God, Master,’ he slavered. ‘They will despair and throw themselves into debauchery.’
‘Not bad’, replied the Devil, ‘but then humanity is like that already. Something in them just seems to know about God even if its only by the fervor of their denial. You will have to come up with something better than that.’
The second apprentice, a hideous 8th dan black belt in Unscrupulous Roguery from the infernal dojo Egregious Perversion, now spoke. ‘Oh Great Master, we could tell them there is no Hell. They will get all emboldened and go out sinning without fear of consequence till they fall into your grasp.’
‘Hmm, better,’ mused the Devil, ‘but as before, humans just seem to have this inner voice thing which tells them about Hell and sin. What about you?’ he asked the third assistant who hadn’t been to Uni or worked out much but had grown up on the mean streets of Malediction in the district of Goings-On. He was seasoned in Fiendishness. ‘Well,’ he suggested, ‘you cannot tell them there is no God and you cannot tell them there is no Devil. What if you just told them there is no hurry? What cannot be achieved by sins of commission may be brought about by sloth’s indigence…’
‘Brilliant,’ exclaimed the Devil, ‘ nothing will ever get done. Entire governments will shut themselves down. With all the time in the world they will sit around and debate endlessly while everything goes to, err, comes to Hell. Without any imperative or any spur to action, they will lapse into apathy, divisiveness and partisan interests which will make it even more difficult for Good to intervene. Instead of saving the planet and each other they can all just watch ‘Naked Dating’. We’re back in business, boys!’
Something shared by the ‘mono’ faiths, despite their antagonism, is the idea that redemption may be had if only you are devout and acknowledge your transgression, at some point. Paradise is likewise, somewhere over the rainbow, at the end of your hard journey. There’s no hurry, provided you are sorry for your sins before they switch off the life support. There is no urgency, provided you can make your peace with God in the time it takes for someone to figure out how to work the defibrillator.
So we have this weird paradox, One God faiths with their emphasis on salvation-at-some-point rather than by deed-in-the-moment, can wind up proliferating the very evil they claim to stand against because everyone has permission to prevaricate endlessly, having magically found a way to project conscience into the future where it will not spoil the denial and double standards of today.
Forget about it.
When Gerald Ford took office in the White House in 1974 one of the first things he did was to change the way phone calls were monitored to and from the Oval office. You might think this was done to boost security and accountability in the wake of the Watergate debacle and Nixon’s disgraceful departure from office. After all, it was the all important tapes that sealed Nixon’s guilt, tapes that could have been ‘lost’ without specific security monitoring protocols being set in place. In deed, further oversight might have brought them to the surface much sooner.
So, you’d think the Ford administration would beef up the staff in the Situation Room and introduce state of the art technology to enhance the monitoring and storing of communications from the world’s hottest phone.
In fact he did the opposite. There was no hurry to respond to what happened. No urgency to change. There would be time enough for all that. Meantime the staff was reduced to a few stenographers and taping in any shape or form was stopped entirely. Accuracy of transcription since 1974 is ensured by comparing notes. Its like the Stock exchange using an abacus.
Ford was making sure what happened to Nixon would never happen to him. For as long as there was no hard evidence of a physical recording of anything there could always be the loophole of plausible deniability. Maybe three professional stenographers could all make the same mistake. It could happen to any body. That’s a nice suit you’re wearing, it would be a shame if it got all messed up.
Our not-being-in-any-hurry has got us a President, a man so unhurried he can’t finish a sentence, who doesn’t care about plausible deniability either, nor any moral qualm he doesn’t have an eternity, an omnipotent arsenal of magical rebuttals to resolve. The threat of impeachment has morphed from Nixon’s resignation into Trump’s campaign strategy in four short decades. How about that for a return on your nefarious investment?
The problem looks like Trump but he is only the head on the pimple. The real problem is that there is no urgency. Complacency has been drip fed to us for decades. ‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good folk do nothing.’ JFK. To paraphrase the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard, ”we have forgotten how to be anxious about the right things.” This failure, along with the magical fantasy that we have an eternity to remedy it brings a pall of deadness to life which is the psychological prefiguration of climate holocaust. It is the very opposite of urgency, the drive of love and involvement you see blooming in the youth and environmental activism of Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion.
I once knew a man, getting on in life, who stayed in an idyllic country retreat. His main preoccupation was his loneliness, beneath which there lurked a silent yet unrelenting bitterness. Despite the fact that he had otters in his garden, the local women were apparently unimpressed and had failed to form an orderly queue at his gate. You’d think the otters would be enough to ensure a steady stream of romantic interest. Despite the failure of his game plan he never thought to revisit his premise. There was plenty of time. He wasn’t in a hurry.
There weren’t many at his funeral when he died. It’s said the otters did not attend.
There are times to sit back and chill. But sometimes life requires our urgency, our personal action, getting involved. Spirituality is not something you do on your own, like masturbation, or wait around for it to arrive, like public transport. The ego’s redemption depends upon relatedness today and not that we might be magically airlifted to safety tomorrow. It’s about renouncing the comforting narcissism which refuses to take responsibility for its actions and sacrificing what I want to do for what needs to be done.
