Genius Out of the Bottle

By David Simmons

The demon is a character of every major religion and superstition that has existed throughout history. But like humans, it has evolved over the centuries.

The English word “demon” derives from the ancient Greeks’ δαιμόνιον, and to them, such beings were not necessarily malevolent. They had another word, εὐδαιμονία, derived from δαιμόνιον, that meant “happiness”. The theory was that the happy Greek was possessed by a happy demon.

The problem with demons, in practically every religion, is that they are will-o’-the-wisps. And their ability to possess the bodies of humans makes them untrustworthy allies at best and thoroughly nasty at worst, necessitating exorcism.

In the East, people remain somewhat tolerant of these disembodied beings, especially as there is a good possibility (they believe) that they are the spirits of the dead, including their own loved ones. But while they’re treated with respect, it’s believed that it’s better all around if they stay in their own world, and not try to re-enter the land of the living. For this reason, all over Buddhist Southeast Asia (Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar), you see spirit houses, little dwellings supplied with foods and drinks to entice them to stay there, and not to enter the homes of their still-living loved ones.

That’s not how Western Christians see the situation. For them, demons have completely lost their credibility. They are not to be tolerated. This remains the attitude even as the West becomes more and more secular. The ancient concepts of Good and Evil persist, even as more people doubt (or claim to doubt) those concepts’ supernatural origins.

All this has given rise to the relatively modern phenomenon of demonization – the assignation of demonic qualities to humans, or human innovations or symbols, that are seen to be so evil or dangerous that they transcend normal humanity. In Europe, the most famous human demon is Adolf Hitler. I use the present-tense “is” because the Hitler myth remains almost as powerful, and even more ethereal, than when he was alive.

It’s probably important to say at this point that demonization is not the same as slander. There is plenty of evidence that Hitler was a very bad man, so he’s not getting a bum rap. In nearly all cases, the object of demonization is pretty bad to start with. What happens is that his wickedness gets exaggerated or over-reported to proportions that either cloud the truth or assign to him traits or qualities that he did not actually possess.

To stay with the Hitler example, it’s not permissible to question the claim, for instance, that he was personally responsible for the murder of 6 million Jews. Maybe it was only 5 million, or 7 million. And maybe he personally did not know or – more likely – did not care what was going on in the concentration camps set up by his underlings. But the 6-million figure has become such an article of faith that it is actually illegal in modern Germany, a country that claims to value freedom of speech and the unfettered examination of history, to suggest it is inaccurate.

Meanwhile, anyone who points to the fact that the German economy was a complete basket case until Hitler came to power, and that he put into motion a culture of science and innovation that led to the modern freeway, the Volkswagen, and the rockets that eventually flew to the moon – sometimes by personal encouragement and funding for people like Ferdinand Porsche and Wehrner von Braun – is taking the risk of being demonized himself.

I mentioned above that demonization can be applied not just to individual humans but also to their innovations. An example of this, again from the Nazi era, is the swastika. This is an ancient symbol that was used by many cultures, mostly in the East, before Hitler decided to adopt it for his National Socialist Party. Now it is a symbol of all of the evils of the Third Reich.

But only in the West. Most Westerners do not understand that the demonization of Hitler, the Nazis and the swastika was never enthusiastically subscribed to in Asia.

Nazi action figures in a Thai shopping mall.

In Thailand, Hitler is seen as a clown, possibly a symbol of how Europeans, who think they are superior to everyone else on the planet, and who have never understood how their colonization of most of Asia was deeply resented and remains a source of shame to this day, are in fact self-deluding arrogant fools, crooks and murderers. Every once in a while, someone in Thailand uses a Hitler image in an advertisement or a publicity stunt, and local expats freak out in rage at their “insensitivity”. And the Thais get another laugh out of it, knowing that few of the offended have even heard of Shiro Ishii, the Mengele of the Japanese Empire, or even Hideki Tojo. 

Don’t get me wrong, though – I’m not claiming that Asians are less susceptible to the use of, or manipulation by, demonization. As in the West, it is most commonly used in the political sphere. In Thailand, the guy with the horns and pointy tail is Thaksin Shinawatra, who outflanked his many enemies within the traditional Bangkok-based elite (he hailed from the country’s “backward” North) and “tricked” the rural majority into electing him as prime minister for his “populist” programs.

Of course he was just as corrupt as his predecessors, and used his power to enrich himself and his family and friends like they did. But unlike them, he also kept a lot of his promises, and put in place policies that shifted much of the country’s wealth and industrial base into the formerly solely agricultural (and poverty-stricken) North and Northeast, which remain important drivers of the Thai economy. And that in a nutshell is why Thailand now is a bitterly divided country, between the royalist Central region to which Thaksin is the devil incarnate and the populous North and Northeast, which have stubbornly failed to buy into the anti-Thaksin mythology.

And this is another important aspect of demonization. Like any mythology, it has its adherents and its opponents, and doubters sitting on the fence. In Asia, the most obvious example of this is Kim Jong-un. To most people outside North Korea itself, he is the personification of evil, who keeps an entire nation in slavery. But to North Koreans, he can do no wrong. Do they believe this because if they don’t they’ll be sent to a labour camp? For some that may be the reason, but it’s more likely to be because they have been brainwashed from birth that the Kims are quasi-deities. And that’s how belief systems work everywhere.

Whether in the East or the West, demonization is a form of delusion, an altering of facts to manipulate the believers into a certain set of behaviours. It is often a form of deliberate propaganda, but in many cases it is a spontaneous phenomenon arising from a need for self-delusion. I believe that is what is happening right now, as I write this, in the United States.

The phenomenon in question is Donald J Trump. Again, there is no need to pretend he’s a great man to make this point; obviously he is not. He is a chronic liar and cheater. But lying and cheating are the hallmarks of most politicians, especially on the right wing that Trump represents. Everyone knows this, and yet it is an inconvenient truth that must yield to the mythology that a Trump presidency would turn the US, if not the planet, into Dante’s inferno.

Consider just one recent Trump comment. During his debate with Hillary Clinton on September 26, when she pointed out that he was an incorrigible tax evader, he said, “That makes me smart.” That got the Trump Is the Antichrist brigade up in arms. But the entire American business class pats itself on the back not only for evading taxes, but for lobbying and bribing politicians into making it even easier for them to do so. Everyone knows this. But the inconvenient truth must be set aside.

Some genies are cool.

Meanwhile, Trump himself – possibly inadvertently – has bought into his own demon myth by claiming to be a genius. That’s a Latin word that originally meant a demon who oversaw childbirth and, if the kid was lucky, was his guardian angel – a benevolent genie. This genie imbued the child with the characteristics that would guide him into adulthood, and special abilities – like the knack of choosing a clever accountant to help him avoid paying taxes.

So Donald J Trump is a demon not because he evades taxes, or because he thinks fat women are “pigs”, or because he thinks there are too many Muslims, but because he says so, in so many words. To watch all the crocodile tears, you would think he concocted these antisocial ideas in the Trump Tower. That’s what you would think – unless you knew, as we all do, that it’s nonsense. These ideas are in fact embraced by millions of Americans who have been too afraid, or too hypocritical, to voice them.

Let all the poison that lurks in the mud
hatch out

The 2016 US election has been criticized as post-factual. In fact, the facts were too unpalatable to contemplate, let alone deal with, long before 2016.

The United States is an intolerant, violent society where the chance of getting shot to death is astronomically higher than in any other developed culture, where for-profit prisons are packed to the rafters, where citizens are still executed. Desperate immigrants, mostly Latinos, pour into it to try to improve their lives, only to be exploited by employers so as to drive down wages, and blamed for it by white folk forced on to Food Stamps, while people like John Stumpf and Martin Shkreli and Jamie Dimon become billionaires.

But it’s not nice to talk about such things. Vote for Hillary, and more of the same – if you don’t, you’re an uneducated boor and a racist.

The subheading is a quote from Robert Graves’ I, Claudius