The D-Word

Do I really need to spell it out for you?

I’m not a big Notes guy. But I guess this one landed near the mark, so I’ll add a few more thoughts.

Following the usual pattern, Westman’s manifesto was quickly scrubbed from Teh Intarwebz. Not quickly enough, however. The scrubbers are either getting lazy or overworked. Maybe there’s a shortage due to the USAID drought. Why they scrub is never reasonably explained. If you asked one point blank, maybe they’d give you one of those shrugging “Eastasia” type answers. But anyway, they were late to the party this time.

You can find the video pretty much everywhere, now, of Westman’s hands leafing through page after page of unbroken, oddball Cyrillic code. Such codes are a common feature in cases like his, whether written or spoken. The imperfections of its translations hardly matter. For the kind of thing that infested him, spreading confusion is a feature, not a bug.

“I feel like there is some kind of god or higher force controlling me. I sometimes notice how I suddenly start writing things that I don’t even think of myself. It"s as if someone is putting these thoughts in my head. I used to think that all of this was nonsense, but now I’m not so sure.

“Maybe there is really some kind of higher mind that communicated with me this way.

“I often notice how my body does things automatically as if by itself. I can just walk down the street and suddenly realize that I don’t even remember how I got there. It scares me but at the same time it makes me curious. Maybe people are all controlled like this, but they don’t notice it.

“Maybe I am the only one who has noticed it and that's why i feel special.

“But I don’t know if that's good or bad.”

Let’s start with the last part: He doesn’t know if being controlled by an alien mind is good or bad. He only feels “special” for noticing it.

Robert Westman wasn’t special at all. And though he was clearly attacked, and though his attacker’s support staff included his own family and church parish, he also wasn’t a “victim” in the sense of being innocent of his crimes. He is at least as culpable as a drunk driver who ran over a bunch of kids in the road. We could call out the bartenders for getting him drunk, his buddies for not grabbing his keys, etc. But the true picture that emerges from his writings is this: Robert Westman made a series of very bad choices, and those choices opened the door to a thing that was eager to take the wheel.

He calls this hijacker a “higher mind”, and even a “god”. I’m sure it was very flattered by this assessment, that it giggled coquettishly in between barfing tracts of pigeon Russian into his mind’s ear. But a creature of this kind seldom genuinely laughs (and when it does, the joke’s on you).

With that in mind, here’s a comment from the initial thread I wanted to respond to at length.

Much of what

Korpijarvi

has written here sounds like the depiction of a wound. On that, we agree: Westman was clearly wounded. We might quibble over the length and depth, the myriad of tangled causes, or how common or rare such injuries are on our current battlefields. But I will stipulate that his wounds were long and deep, of the sort that require a lot of care.

Now: why do we care for such grievous wounds? Why do we stitch them shut when we can, keep them dry and covered? After all, even big wounds can sometimes heal on their own, with fresh material flowing in to fill the gaps. The reason is the threat of alien bodies: infectious bacteria, parasites, and other creatures that invade and nest in the exposed material. These are the sorts of invaders that can turn an otherwise healable wound fatal.

It’s important to understand that the wound doesn’t cause the infection. That was the mistake made by "spontaneous generation” theorists and related tautologies. The wound simply provides an aperture, an open gateway for the invaders to enter through and set up shop. We should also understand that, as holonic creatures, our bodies are made of bodies, congregations of living material which we can exert great influence over via our human minds

Now: extend the conceptual map of wounds and invasive species to the mind. Damage occurs: tearing open and hollowing out voids, which then become ports of entry for alien minds. Like the parasite, the invader doesn’t care about the fate of the host, even though his physical death will leave it homeless. It nevertheless steers him towards a horrific fate, in which he ruins his own body and the bodies of others beyond repair. The invader uses every tool to hand in this endeavor, including the host’s own feelings, memories and language powers.

It lifts the curtain only slightly, here and there, and probably by accident. It chooses to communicate through coded, foreign languages, for example, and offers tantalizing glimpses of its true identity and nature (as seen in some of Westman’s artwork). But the reason I chose this page, of all the pages, is because Westman, for all his wounds and sins, actually noticed this invasion process: this alien mind setting up shop, and gradually gaining control over the holonic conversation.

Tragically, other close relatives and clergy didn’t notice it. They instead turned to allopathic treatments, to drugs and perhaps even to nightmarish surgeries. But most of all, they turned to a model of insular, emergent mind and plastic identity that excludes the kind of invasive species Westman noticed. They noticed only the tall grass, not the lion.

Now: a critic might just say something like “That’s not how minds work, Bisone,” then kick back his heels, confident that he knows how minds work. After all, it’s outrageously backwards to claim that minds are in control of flesh! And the next morning, when he is dressing himself in the mirror, shaving his face and brushing his teeth, he won’t notice at all that he is seeing the exact phenomenon he claims is fictional play out. He won’t even spare a thought about it, because no one bothers expending mental energy on things that are obviously true, such as mind preceding matter.

We tend to only expend that kind of effort on complex and layered illusions, on towers of cards built out of ever fancier jargon. Often times, it’s in pursuit of cold, hard cash, which explains the psychopharmaceutical industry. But there are other incentives in the mix. Even simple ego can do the trick. We expel long and convoluted theories of causality in order to showcase how clever we are, and consequently how dumb everyone else is.

Meanwhile, the lion lays low in the tall grass, licking its chops. A patch of jungle chaos suddenly turns into a tiger and eats you. The parasite wriggles into the void, feeds and multiplies. There are other species like that in our world, including pathogenic fungi like ophiocordyceps unilateralis, that appear to literally commandeer the host’s body, pull its strings like a puppet as it sends it off on a suicide mission.

The invader we are dealing with in cases like Westman’s is a thousand times more horrific, owing to its humanlike intellect and somewhat recognizable motives. But it is still alien, and still ultimately fatal. As

Harrison Koehli

and I once discussed on a podcast, the closest comparison humans can make might be that of a “super-psychopath”, who merely emulates human qualities as part of its sophisticated camouflage.

Westman thought he was “special” because he noticed it. But human beings have noticed these creatures in nearly every generation of mankind who ever lived, in every corner of the world. Westman’s awareness alone could not save him. Neither could the Church, the potentates of which have been running around blind and feckless for a long time now. We might even say the Vatican itself has become a host, for the kind of supernatural monster who covets the chair of Peter the way human psychopaths covet corporate boardrooms and government offices.

What could’ve saved him? Some would say an exorcist, but I think it might be Sola Fide. Faith alone. Maybe the former assists with the latter, the way a good doctor can help foster a patient’s natural ability to heal. I’m no expert.

From what I’ve read of his “manifesto”, I do know that Westman was not faithful. He was strident, lazy, arrogant, petty, self-consumed. His wounds were very attractive for their lack of care, including his own. He took the easy paths down, into a self-aggrandizing victimhood that mirrors Lucifer’s in the aftermath of the Fall. That is what we see in the various portraits of the New New Left, as the masks are ripped off to reveal ever more clownish and grotesque faces.

And so, the most sensible answer to cause is “demonic possession.” They used to even include it in the DSM, but have since found fancier words to replace it, words that discount any notion of intelligent souls, which treat minds as hallucinatory byproducts of deterministic machines, to be fed steady diets of patented potions and theories of consciousness that dissolve all accountability for their choices. We see that pattern copied up and down all structures of organizational authority these days.

Was the possession aided and abetted by the society at large? By the lax upbringing of a spoiled, wayward child? Oh, yes. And Westman is accountable himself for his crimes, which I’m sure he’s discovering right now, as his precious identity is torturously unbound. While a demon can influence material in many ways, it may not actually choose for you. Like Dracula at your doorstep, you still must ultimately agree to let it in. Otherwise, the demon’s mission is a bust. Anyone can kill a man. Even a small child with a loaded gun is a deadly threat. But to convince him to kill himself, and to take innocent lives on the way out? That’s a banquet feast of suffering and confusion, tearing open lifelong wounds in all observers. Even the arguments we have over their existence in the aftermath is music to their ears.

The demon spoke, and Westman chose to listen. Though weakened and wounded by the evils of the world, Westman could have chosen Christ’s mercy instead, more powerful than any monster on Earth or in Hell.

So walk in faith, cool cats and kittens. You’ll notice far more than just the demons prowling the ether.

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