If you’re coming at it blind, Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible can make for a rousing rebuke of christian BS.  Particularly the idea you should love your enemy is mocked as hypocrisy and foolishness.  Well, I don’t know if one should feel as bitter about one’s enemies as I do, but the idea of loving those bastids is profoundly wrong.

That said, the book is rotten to the core.  Much of it was repurposed from a proto-nazi book called Might is Right, and another big influence was Rand’s objectivism.  Dude said evil is live backwards, christians be asking us to live shadows of a real life, so doing evil equals living, something something yadda yadda.  But somehow this morality shook out to being much the same as mainstream christianity in LaVey’s country – this wonderful land of genocide and slavery.  The poor and the disabled are only allowed to live until they’re inconvenient.  Anybody you regard as an enemy can be completely dehumanized, oppressed, segregated, exiled, or slaughtered.  Real daring, Anton.

The specific part I want to address is his big tirade against “psychic vampires” – people seeking sympathy or help from you, who always take and never give.  We all know people who drain our mental health, one way or another.  (I believe there was a big running joke on What We Do in the Shadows about it, but I’ve only seen gif compilations of the show.)  Sometimes they just have an energy that hits you the wrong way and they ping you with it so hard that you lose hp by the minute.  Bip Bip.  Sometimes they really do need more of you than they can ever give back – the gratitude won’t make you even close to whole after the ordeal is done.

But most of us need to get less selfish, not have our callousness reinforced with polemic.  That thesis is ableist as all hell.  Either we think the disabled should be helped or we don’t, right?  The sloppy middle ground as it plays out in reality is bad for everybody.  And there will be disabled people who drain your emotional reserves, but they need help just the same, from somebody somehow somewhere, or their suffering is just another failure of our species to live up to our potential as thinking creatures.

I’m getting into all of this because I’ve been thinking about people with paranoid delusions again recently, for some reason.  They’re so freaking exhausting.  Here’s an interesting wikipedia article on a guy, James Tilly Matthews, whose ideas may sound familiar to you.  Supposedly, near the end of his short life, his delusions had fallen away.  May the same happen for everybody with such problems, and not at the expense of their well-being.

I’m given to understand that the recommended way to handle paranoid delusions is to not question or contravene them, just see what you can do to help the person in unrelated ways.  Like at an old folks’ home, a lady with dementia thinks all her things are being stolen, you say “That’s terrible, what would you like for lunch?”  I’m sure there’s no one-size-fits-all for it.

But equally sure we don’t need to banish all the exhausting people from our lives wholesale, leave them in the terrifying margins of civilization.  We don’t all have to put ourselves out any more than we can, but we do need to figure out how much we can do, and do at least that.  One man’s psychic vampire is another’s disabled person that needs whatever help we can give.

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