A certain someone I know told me about an upsetting incident that he recently experienced at the factory where he works.  He had gone to another area of the shop to get some information from someone he had known for a while, a man of about 60, and got one heck of a surprise when he approached him.  Instead of a “hello” and an answer to his request, the man showed him a picture on his pocket phone.  It was, as the man stated proudly, a photo of his male member.  “What the hell are you doing?” said this certain person.  “Oh,” the older man said innocently,” this is the picture I send around to pick up chicks.  Everyone my age does it.”
 
            This someone knew better, and just after he told me the story, he said, “I’m going to look up this guy.  He must have priors.” After about ten seconds on the phone, he almost jumped in shock. “Holy shit!  He’s a class B felon and did ten of twenty years for molesting a minor under age 13!” A little more probing brought him the additional information that the older man had been a school teacher at the grade 2 level.  Obviously, he was not a teacher any longer.
 
            How could someone hurt such a young child?  How could he have no remorse for it, but instead continue his perverse sexual lifestyle?  And how could a rational man not know that he would eventually be caught for such crimes and be sent to prison where he would get the worst treatment by his fellow felons than any of the murderers and rapists among them?
 
            Back in the olden days of the early 20th century, there were a few philosophies on life that were all the rage in the social sciences.  There was Marxism, of course, and eugenicists and Nazis, all of which fell out of favor, at least for a while, after WWII and the cold war era of the 1950’s.  But there was another one that lingered on, sometimes having strong surges, which is affecting Western nations in subtle and not-so-subtle ways to this day.  Most don’t think of it as a social theory, but it has become increasingly apparent that it is. 
 
            It is usually referred to as Freudian psychology, and anyone who went to college during the last century is at least a little familiar with it.  When I was in graduate school in anthropology in the 1980’s it was no longer in style, as it had already run its last renaissance in the previous decade, but it was still necessary to discuss it. In anthropology, the main purveyor of this theory had been the “Father of American Anthropology,” Franz Boas.  Coming to America from Germany in about 1890, he was a contemporary and countryman of Freud, and he spread Freud’s culture-crashing theories among his students.  Most famous of his students was Margaret Meade, who he sent to Polynesia with explicit instructions to prove Freud’s theory on sexual repression.  Repression, had said Freud, was at the base of our discontent with Western Civilization, and although he knew that all societies had some forms of sexual taboos, he considered them so excessive in the West that they were causing neurosis and personal misery, and even war.
 
            Meade went to Polynesia and came back with exactly what Boas wanted, made popular in her wildly successful book, Coming of Age in Samoa. In this, she reported on a hedonist’s dream, where adolescents had sex without restraint and almost without pause.  Many took this to mean that we not only could, but should follow their cultural model.  Wouldn’t it make us happier?  Wouldn’t it cure us of so many neurosis and, by golly, even end war?
 
            Freud was more subtle than this, and Meade backpedaled on the simple conclusion people had made, saying that a nice middling degree of repression – exactly how to measure this she left uncertain – is necessary so that people are not forced into sex that they did not want or were not ready for, but the die had certainly been cast.  Hugh Heffner went on to use an increasing liberalization to market mammary glands, and ‘Free Love’ began its reign not long after that in the late 1960’s.  Along with the Pill and no-fault divorce, the West jumped into a brave new world that promised more pleasure and happiness, a social universe that would give us ‘Love, not War. ‘
 
            Divorce, AIDS, gay marriage, NAMBLA and MAPS, and confused and “transitioning” children have followed, along with rising crime, nihilism, drug addiction and even greater neuroses.  Wars have certainly not ceased.  What went wrong?
 
            To begin with, Freudian psychology, like most theoretical premises, did not function nearly as well in the real world as it did in the library and study.  Life is more complex than anything people can imagine, and in hindsight it is easy to see that any basic instinct imprinted into humans cannot be let run wild, as is does in the non-human natural world. 
           
            As it is, cows eat.  Humans dine.  We, too, have been given the instinct and need to eat, but we have turned such need into cuisine, and often times, into feasts. If we consume everything we want at the moment, most of us are in for big trouble.  Personally, in a world without restraint, I would be hefting around scores more of excess pounds, suffer rotten teeth and diabetes from chocolate candy, a diseased liver from alcohol, cancer of the lungs from smoking assorted herbs, and a whole host of other maladies from things we have made available for excess and vice. 
 
            Fortunately, we are taught by the wisdom of our elders - and more and more now by our departments of public health - that we have to eat our greens and moderate our appetites concerning everything that we really want.  This is because our specie’s ingenuity has taken the basic needs of consumption and expanded the possibilities in so many ways that we have made the world a trap for excessive consumerism.  Clearly, our intelligence and creativity have given us much more than what we need to survive - so much more that to let go and ‘just do it’ will lead to an early grave.
 
            Almost needless to say, so it is with sex.  Long ago in a class on the ancient Middle East I read of the habits of the court of pre-Islamic Persia.  For one year or month, the “in thing” might be to have sex with boys dressed as girls, the next, girls dressed as boys, the next, orgies of opposite sexes, then of same sexes, and so on in nearly infinite variety.  The satiety only lasts for a while, and if all things are doable, then the participants must begin looking for a more exotic high. We read of Jeffrey Epstein and Orgy Island, with Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew and many others of the jet left unnamed, going along for the ride.  They don’t need 13 year old girls - there are whole penthouses of willing 18 year old's available for a price - but they must have the thrill of gliding above societal law.  It may be that some perverse acts are compelled in a few people by repression, but far more brutal acts occur from lack of restraint.  Tiberius had his pool full of children he called “the little fishes” who performed for his wishes until he grew tired of them and sought the thrill of throwing them off the palace cliff in Capri to watch them split open on the rocks below.  It is doubtful that he ever had any sexual restraint imposed on him in his life, and certainly none in adulthood.
 
            The point being, as most societies have understood for eons, is that the lack of sexual restraint leads, at the very least, to brutal conflict.  In the natural order, human males are often like mountain goats butting heads during rut, except that our rut never ends. You can’t run a village with that going on all the time. Further, somewhere in our moral evolution we happened on the novel idea that along with getting every sexual desire fulfilled comes the suffering of those who often unwillingly serve them. See dead ‘little fishes,’ above. 
 
            So where is Margaret Meade’s middle ground of restraint?  She could not name it, and I suppose no honest social scientist could, but we can get a good idea from the consequences of one level or another endured in a society after a few generations.  Ours has very obviously flown over the coup, big time.  Man/boy love is coming to a theater and media outlet soon, and then to a legislature near you.  “Love is love,” after all, isn’t it?
 
            Fortunately, until now at least, societies have not been run by social scientists.  They have been ordered primarily by long-held religious beliefs.  Some of these only serve the masters in a theocracy, it is true, but others have stood the test of time through many periods of change and history.  Catholic Christianity is one of those.  Even I, as a practicing Catholic, believe that some of the rules of sexual restraint of the Church might be excessive, but the results of those rules have long proven to have outperform our liberated society.  The (social) world was not a happy place in the past, but it held us together; the (social) world is not a happy place now, and it is disintegrating.  We must come again to understand that the human capacity for thought has given us free will that has enabled us to live beyond our natural instincts.  In scripture, this led to the destabilizing and cursed knowledge of good and evil. So it is that we have to hold back, and we need the wisdom of a divine source to know exactly how and when to do so. 
 
            Yes, I believe that there must always be some flexibility in the rules, as our complexities reach beyond our understanding, but there must also remain a firm and immovable foundation that guarantees the reproduction of the species, the unity of the family, and respect for the individual.  Such, in its own way, is how the natural world is ordered and maintained; and such it is that we must make it for ourselves.  The same hand that orders nature must be sought by all of us, with particular note given to those who show themselves to be guided by selfless grace.  Only in this way might we steer ourselves back to a more perfect natural human order.    
 
 
 
 
 
              
 
           
 
             

It is two weeks later and things have changed, as I knew they would.  More so, the good that I thought might have poured into me from Medjugorje seems to be taking its stride.  Or so I pray.  The wonderful truth is that the delirium from sickness and lack of sleep and general jet lag and dysphoria have subsided and left me back in good ‘ol Wisconsin.  It is cold and gray and achingly normal here, true, but it could be way worse.  

Back to normal: just a few days ago I was dragged along to dine at a Mexican restaurant with my wife’s church women’s group, which is normally not of any interest to long-married men.  We know what most women talk about most of the time – not the Packers - and most of the time it leaves us bored out of our gourd.  But this is not always the case, and with the beer and tequila flowing at a little faster pace than normal, things actually got interesting.  

First off, there was the curious insight from our friend’s husband, who was sitting with her, related to the astonishing fact that he had technically died just a few months before as they slept peacefully together at home.  She is a nurse, and she woke to notice that her husband was not breathing.  At all.  She felt his pulse and there was little to nothing there.  She then pounded on his chest several times, so hard that three ribs were broken, and finally brought the heart beat back.  Then came the EMP’s and a three day coma for the guy.  What is interesting is that he admitted to not remembering anything of his life for two weeks!  Other facts were missing from his life, too, but otherwise he was talking and thinking with his normal, vivid alacrity.  

What surprised me about this was, first, that his wife had brought it up, which obviously made him uncomfortable.  It must have been the Margaritas.  And second, and the most ‘curious’ tidbit of all, was his response to this question: “So, no ‘come to the light’ moments or loss of fear of death for you?” “No,” said he, “there was nothing in that darkness, not a thought.  But I have lost all fear of death.  Death is a great nothing, so I now have nothing to worry about.  It is ultimate peace.”  

Which made my wife wonder how he understood what ‘nothing’ was if he really was in a state of nothing, but it was the insight about ‘nothingness’ that surprised me because he is Catholic.  Catholics live to avoid Hell and achieve Heaven.  Eternal life is the final and strongest point of the faith.  And yet, he longed for this peaceful nothing, so much so that he had made a pact with his wife, that she would not save him if there were a next time.  They were both in firm agreement on that.  An interesting thing to ponder, but there was much more to come from the table discussion.

It was probably from talking about death, but Medjugorje and the outing of the demon naturally arose, much to everyone’s interest.  I mentioned it in the last blog/essay above, and it can be seen on UTube now (Marija’s Apparition, October, at the Castle.  In my last essay, I said the vision had taken place inside, but the video shows that it had occurred in an outside courtyard).  After the apparition of Our Lady, the screaming of the so-called demon was interminable and quite convincingly not of human origin.  In the video we never get to see just from what woman – surely it was a woman by the undertones - it came.  It lasted for many minutes, stopped, and then droned on for another few minutes.  Which might make us wonder: if demons exist, then what of that dreamless, lifeless nothingness in death described above?  If there is something more on the other side of the curtain, why would we think that there is nothing there to fear – or to long for? 

Back at the table, the talk continued about death, demons, and then finally, the prophecy.  This is the most significant claim that has come from the visionaries.  As long-time readers of these essays might recall, the visionaries at Medjugorje predict a major re-alignment of the world within their lifetimes, or at least within the last of one of their lifetimes.  Such it is that they have set themselves up like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose founder, Charles Russell, claimed that the end of the world as we know it would come with the death of the last soldier from WWI.  The last, I believe, has died, but where is that brave new world?  For that new world was to be radically different and better, after an apocalypse.  So it is for Medjugorje.  There is little wiggle room left there, either.  The claim is time sensitive, and the change will be huge: many will die, and a “permanent marker” from God will be set at Medjugorje leaving no doubt as to its supernatural origin.  

The man who had died and been brought back nodded his head when I said that this might bring an end to this most unusual attraction.  The youngest visionary is in his early fifties, so the end as we know it should happen within the next 30 years.  Most had to agree with us cynics on this – that if the big change did not happen, Medjugorje as a pilgrimage site would be all but finished - but the discussion did not end there. Rather, we speculated on the “end of the world as we know it” scenario.  

Now, with two exceptions, everyone there was in his or her 60’s or 70’s and we all know what old timers always think of the younger generations’ world: chaotic, immoral, heading into decline and collapse.  So it has often been since the days of Plato.  Still, it is interesting to note that most there did not gasp at the thought that the Medjugorje prophesy might be a great delusion or hoax.  It simply didn’t matter because most agreed that the world was on the brink, regardless.  No, not on the brink, but already over the brink, now in freefall.  Most were simply waiting for the laws of moral physics, the spiritual double of the formula of acceleration, 9.8 metered per second per second, to kick in, plunging us into some awful depth at a greater and greater speed.  This was all said so matter-of-factly, as if talking about the inevitability of winter. 

Cynic or no, I had to take into consideration the sincerity of the visionaries and length of time they have made their claims (and indeed, the visionary who we stayed with, Mirjana, might be the most genuine, sincere person I have ever met), as well as the seemingly objective view of a world in serious decline.  Among us elderly, there was certainly a kind of consensus that something really big is in the works.

It gets even more alarming, though, as I have heard much of the same from my son and his 20-something friends.  Most think the near-future will be worse than we oldsters believe, because they do not have our faith in God’s purpose and in such prophecies as those from Bosnia-Herzegovina.  They do not believe in God’s redeeming virtues, but rather in raw nature’s wrath.  Like Druids reborn, God for them does not reign from beyond nature with love, but from within nature with steely, unremittent justice - and woe to us who have sinned with such greed and avarice against our great Mother. 

Certainly, we might remain skeptical of demons and of apparitions of the Virgin Mary and of prophesies of the End of the World as We Know It.  However, many cannot help but perceive from a clear-eyed and rational perspective that other worlds, or other realities, do exist beyond our limited senses and minds, and that our human world cannot continue for long on its current path.  Of the latter, I am reminded of the silly song from 1969 (number one on the charts!) “In the Year 2525” by the one-hit wonder duo of Zager and Evans.  Let me conflate some lyrics from the song to give the general idea: “In the year 2525 ...ain’t gonna be no husbands or no wives…everything you think do and say/is in the pill that you took that day…”  Yeah, it’s looking something like that, isn’t it?  In a world where morals are being consumed by science and her discoveries, what is NOT coming next?  Which horrors out of so many – genetic manipulation, mind control, biological warfare, nuclear proliferation - will consume the world as we know it first…or last?  

Clearly we must change our current path, and almost as clearly, there are many different paths to take.  As it stands now, if raw nature is in charge, our future will be one of vast destruction, and soon, and then barbarism; and if God is in charge, vast destruction might be just as necessary to change course, except that this course will ultimately change things for the better.  One way or the other, though, major change is coming.  We can feel it as well as reason it.  Maybe the Jehovah’s Witness’s timing is just a little off; perhaps the visionaries of Medjugorje might be a little off as well.  Still, in consideration of everything, I do hope their apocalyptic vision, at least one or the other, is true, for we are better off in God’s hands than in nature’s.  

So I will be praying for greater faith and an end to this era, not because I hate humanity and the world, but because the better part of me cherishes it all.  Better the terror of demons and the bitter pill of divine justice than Mother Nature’s pure fury, or worse: the sugar-coated pill from Big Brother that will give us eveything that we are allowed to think, do, or say.