"Belief in the devil (and all his works) is, I believe, an attempt to grapple with the same fear that drives and sustains Pizzagate and The Storm, the same fear that drove the Satanic Panic and the Salem trials, and the blood libel, and all of the other expressions of that same fear that are re-emerging now “in 2010s clothing.”
That fear is something like the question posed in a classic Mitchell and Webb sketch: “Are we the baddies?” It’s the fear, the ever-present suspicion, that we’re not good.
We’re not afraid that there might be monsters out there in the dark, we’re afraid that there might not be. We need those monsters. We want them to be there because without them, without their superlative, extravagant, ridiculous-on-its-face evil to contrast ourselves favorably against, we would be forced to reckon with ourselves as we are. As long as there are Satanic baby-killers, we can think of ourselves as relatively good.
FB: Ach this is so wise "I think these folks cannot be receptive to reality until they’re persuaded that reality might somehow, someday allow them to think of themselves as good. That, in turn, requires convincing them to reconceive of goodness as a pursuit rather than as an identity — to start understanding goodness as something they might do instead of something they can possess, to start thinking in terms of better than I was before rather than in terms of better than those people over there."
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