Transcribed by: Frau Jaeger
Does Anton Szandor LaVey Want Your Soul? No. He Has Much Better Taste Than That
It’s a cool Friday night in San Francisco, and people are everywhere in their exorbitant ugliness. They’re sprinkling their oblong bodies with noxious perfumes. They’re stuffing their throbbing little gullets with hot, oily foods. Their faces slacken in cretinous simplicity as they chug-a-lug one martini after the next. They’re cruising the city for a quick score, seeking to drain their genitals of mucilaginous goop.
We circle a restaurant district in a futile quest for free parking. Block after block, and not an inch of curbside space. Cars zip past us in a hellish stream of lonely red taillights. TOO MANY FUCKING PEOPLE!
A thumbnail-sized spider scuttles across the windshield. Its moonlit body assumes the hue of white chocolate. Quietly effortless, its balletic presence rises above the depressing humanoid muck.
So does the glowering aura of Anton Szandor LaVey, whom we meet in a French restaurant after throwing up our hands and paying for parking. Accompanied by biographer/sidekick Blanche Barton, LaVey cuts quite the figure in his black suit and gangster hat. His severe Transylvanian features compensate for the innocuous, pasty-faced nobodies who fill the dining room. Unlike most neo-pagans, he’s charming and doesn’t smell bad.
Over appetizers, we discuss the global clump of human mulch, serial killer Carl Panzram, self-fulfilling surnames such as ‘Goad," and how to get rid of one’s enemies. While lapping up onion soup, I making a passing remark about my boundless contempt for Homo sapiens.
"I can see we’re going to get along," he says with the faint tremors of a smile.
Why the fuck not? A friend of the devil is a friend of mine, and Anton Szandor LaVey might as well be Satan’s press agent. More than anyone else, he brought Satanism out of the closet. Blending what he called "nine parts social respectability [and] one part outrage," he founded the Church of Satan in 1966. The self-proclaimed "Black Pope" has counted among his followers Sammy Davis Jr., Kenneth Anger, and Jayne Mansfield. He also penned The Satanic Bible, a lean, nasty tome first published in 1969. But most people, since they can’t read, would probably know him as the guy who played the devil in Rosemary’s Baby.
The details of his past have been disputed by lettuce-smoking navel gazers, but I’ll accept his version: He was born April 11, 1930, in Chicago. An only child, LaVey sensed that he was innately different from his peers. Genetically Satanic, he had a "vestigial tail" surgically removed during adolescence. In his teens, he worked as a lion tamer and keyboardist. While pumping the ivories as a tent show organist, he noticed that the same pious-faced men who attended revival meetings also drooled like apes at strip shows. later, while working as a crime photographer, LaVey toured the grisliest, basest nooks of human depravity. He concluded that if there were a God, he was indifferent to human suffering.
LaVey came to believe that any religion which denies man’s carnality was doomed to fail, describing Christianity as ‘getting people to feel guilty for breathing and charging them for the oxygen they breathe." Declaring that "life is the great indulgence - death, the great abstinence," he crystallized a philosophy which rams a hairy fist up the clenched sphincter of all ‘white-light" religions. While other belief systems deal in the ego’s dampening or annihilation, Satanism attempts to nourish it, preaching anti-mystical rationalism and creative vengeance.
Acknowledging that humans have a Jungian need for ritual, LaVey melded applied psychology with appropriately dark theatrics. He doesn’t accept "Satan" as the persona is understood in Christian theology - it would be rather stupid to worship a fallen angel whose damnation is sealed at an omnipotent creator’s hands. For LaVey, Satan is the creator, or at least a convenient symbol of nature’s dark, randomly brutal forces. The devil’s a lusty archetype, a superhero of the liberated id.
As leader of the "Alien Elite," LaVey promotes a pruning of the gene pool through "bright supremacy." Far from espousing noble savagery, he advocates strengthening the police to keep all you assholes in line. He yearns for a future of android slavery and self contained environments. In a statement which won our hearts, he claims that "population is the biggest problem facing us now."
After chowing down on frog’s legs and chocolate mousse, we were directed to his black Victorian mansion, a harsh edifice which nearly recoils from the houses around it. As we settled into his parlor after feeling our way down an unlit, tomblike entrance, Herr Doktor indulged us an hour-long taped interview. I expected him to sound like Bela Lugosi, but he spoke in the measured tones of a Midwestern barley farmer, an accent subversive in its unassuming normalcy. He closed his eyes as he retreated within his pinkish dome to fetch his answers, raising his lids at the end of each soliloquy.
He then wowed us with an organ concert featuring "Yes, We Have No Bananas;" "Mister Jack and Missus Jill" from the all-midget epic The Terror of Tiny Town; Bach’s "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor;" Wagner’s Die Walkure;" sundry circus ditties, Sousa marches, and spaghetti-western themes; and Nat King Cole’s "Answer Me."
An unscripted conversation went on until five a.m. As I sipped coffee from a pentagram-emblazoned mug, we covered such occultic topics as the pyromaniac film The Flaming Urge, miniature-pony farms, and SCTV’s Shmenge Brothers. Basking in LaVey’s genteel misanthropy, I found him to be keen-witted and palpably repulsed by a devolving, illiterate populace. I realized why he’s considered a threat - beneath his shaven pate lies a formidable brain.
But you can’t trust anything I’m saying, because when I wasn’t looking, LaVey slipped some demons - thirteen or fourteen of them, I’m not sure - into my soul. Every Friday night since the interview, after ordering out for Thai food, Debbie and I perform ritual murder. So far, we’ve bagged six preschoolers, two metalheads, and a pregnant woman who was waiting at our bus stop. We recite the Our Father backwards at midnight, and Satan appears to counsel us. He even got us cheaper car insurance!
I’m brainwashed, you see, hoodwinked by the Great Liar. I’m a Satanic zombie, a Mephistophelean marionette controlled by dark angels I never should have fucked with. I started out as a journalist, but now I’m the devil’s mouthpiece. To all yea who dare tread this perditious path, take heed: Satan ensnares minds with his seductively flawless logic. You MUST close your eyes and ears to logic, or it will DEVOUR you.
Why does Satan get so much bad press these days?
Well, because, I would say a lot of it is the threat of Satanism is coming closer and closer to the surface. And it’s nothing that can simply be vanquished as a paper tiger, as a convenience, or a theological need, or some kind of entertainment device, but it’s becoming now a very real force, philosophy, concept to be reckoned with. It’s something that holds a mirror up to not only collective identities, but what people like to think of as individual identities. And it’s overlapping, naturally, into many areas of endeavor that people never thought something called "Satanism" could. By that, I mean music, aesthetics of all kinds, literature, popular culture, and it threatens to become something that is, in fact, very threatening to not only the present economy, unless it modifies its machinations to fit, as well as to the social order as we have known it for many, many years. Probably centuries.
Comment on the concept of equality
Well, naturally - I say "naturally" as a Satanist - I don’t believe in equality. I don’t believe there’s anything equal. If you’re going to dissect it or analyze it, even in the sense of quality control or something that’s seen under a microscope or if a spectrographic analysis is made, there are going to be tiny differences in everything, even if they’re rubber-stamp-type things or mass production things. Nothing is really equal. And it might be quite similar, but when we’re dealing, as I assume you’re asking, in human beings, very few human beings are equal. The most equal of human beings, I would say, would be on the lowest level. Because there are, I mean, God must have loved them, ‘cause he made so many of them. But when you get higher up the evolutionary scale - or social order, whichever you prefer - you’re going to find more differentiation in human beings as you ascend. And then, of course, the higher you go, the more unequal you find those from the ones at the bottom. What is usually meant by ‘equality’ is really ‘common denominators.’
But I feel that the question that would normally be put to me would be "Well, who are you to say who is equal and who is not equal, or who’s superior and who is inferior?" And my only answer to that would be simply based on the product or the impact that these individuals have on the cosmology as we know it, our world. And the contrast between the performers and the audience - those who are the performers in life are certainly not equal to the audience, who occupies a much vaster space than the performers onstage. That isn’t to say that everyone has to be a performer, but certainly, as far as inequality is concerned, the performer, or the stimulator, as I like to call him, is someone who deserves a little more, if you want to call it, subsidizing, than the person who needs stimulation and gains stimulation from that performer. As far as I’m concerned, the greatest need of human life is stimulation. That allows these spores in this great yeast mold to know that they’re alive, that they’re actually functioning. They feel something. The stimulation is sort of like a cattle prod or a mild shock. Anything will do to give these people an awareness that they are indeed alive - they have a functioning nervous system. I call them people because, to me, the word ‘people’ is not a positive thing. It is very much a derogatory expression.
And the second most vital need would be identity. Obviously, collective identities - that is, herd mentalities - seem to be in the majority. And of the herd mentality, people in the world - and again, I use that derogatorily - people - there are very few, or fewer, certainly, that are not collective in their identities. In other words, they haven’t gotten their identities from something that’s been prepackaged or mass-produced, but they’ve found something a trifle different to get more of a personal identity. And this is not to say that it’s less important to them than it is to the people, but it still, to me, is probably the second-most important human need.
And getting back to equality, or staying with equality, rather: The whole concept, the entire concept of equality is simply one of wishful thinking or flight of fancy that, very much like the concept of reincarnation, will allow the lowest to feel that they are equal to the highest. And the concept of equality, with that in mind, is designed to keep the lowest satisfied, to serve as pap, or serve as a sort of cosmetic indulgence or enticement to the lowest so that they, too, can feel that they are of the same stuff as the highest.
We’ve been talking for awhile, and you seem well-mannered and reasoned. When are you going to rip my heart out and eat it?
Oh, about sacrifice and that sort of thing? Well, I believe in sacrifice, but not necessarily on an unlawful basis, or one by which you would be apprehended, convicted, tried, and prosecuted or executed. This isn’t to say that I’m against human sacrifice, it’s just simply that I’m against the entanglements or the punishments or the social inconveniences that [laughs] performing human sacrifices might entail. So, when I talk about symbolic human sacrifices, I say it with the awareness that we are living in a world that frowns upon a Darwinian sort of thinning out of the species, so there are ways of sacrificing, performing human sacrifices without necessarily going out with a butcher knife and killing people.
One of these would be to demoralize or to, in some way, fragment the potential victim or victims into feeling their worthlessness or becoming aware of their own uselessness. And by demoralization and the ensuring, I guess you could call it, breakdown of these kinds of people, then you are in fact performing some sort of human sacrifice. But not cutting the hearts out of people, and if there’s any of that sort of thing to be done, it would be certainly ill-advised to boast of it or to speak of it.
I would say that every society has its anger and hatreds, boiling rages, either individually or collectively. War is a perfect example of that, and that’s an area that intrigues me and perhaps titillates me, even, because it gives entire countries a chance to advocate, if not cutting the hearts out of human victims, certainly shooting them down in wholesale lots or blowing them up. And yet, one need not feel any pangs of conscience when there’s a convenient enemy during times of war by doing this sort of thing. So, when we are drawing comparisons about human sacrifices on a personal scale and on a mass scale, we certainly realize, or must realize that if these sort of things are done on a grand enough scale, such as war, they’re perfectly acceptable. So it’s, as I assume you mean, on a personal level that we’re treading on a little more, uh, controversial ground [laughs].
Based on what you can glean from the New Testament, give a psychoanalytic profile of Jesus. What type of human was he?
Yeah, that’s a question I find interesting in that it changes as far as the needs of the believers are concerned. And if, for example, we’re living in the 18th century, the psychological profile of a Jesus type of divinity would be different than the psychological profile that would be analyzed in the 20th or 21st century. The current trend - I say trend - is to accept a Jesus type or a Christ figure as having some sort of strong drives, a great deal of anger and perhaps rage, and the "New Jesus," in the sense of the Second Coming type of Christ, would, in all probability, be the kind of guy that would go out and kill a lot of people rather than one who would die on a cross. And that would simply be because of changing needs, changing myth-needs and needs that fit, of course, the social order as it stands. I think the name would not necessarily change, just as often it remains the same throughout the centuries, but there is a distinct possibility - and that’s why I use the term "the Second Coming" - there is a distinct possibility that the need, the myth-need for a new Christ will be transferred to one name that is more conducive to outrageous behavior, or anger, or revenge, or retaliation, or justice in the old sense of le talons [the law of retaliation], and that would be Satan. And that would provide the Christ figure, but in an updated version by a different name. So really, it’s just a question of finding a need and filling it.
I guess the gist of the question is, a human being who would say, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," somebody who would say you have to give up al worldly goods and put on sackcloth - give your opinion of the driving forces in a person like that.
I can only see that as an extreme form of masochism, whether it’s self-realized or unrealized. To me, Christianity as it has been practiced or advocated is a life-denying, rather than life-affirming, thing. It has been said before, and I’ll say it again, reiterate, that wearing a cross around one’s neck - the cross being the object of the execution or the destruction of the godhead or the spiritual leader - is no different than wearing an electric chair around your neck if he had been electrocuted or a gas chamber around your neck if he died by cyanide eggs. So, venerating the object of one’s hero’s or role model’s death, to me, is rather silly. It always has been. And as far as Satanic "atrocities" go, there’s nothing that can match a child’s first impression when it walks into a room or becomes aware for the first time that what it is eking on the wall is either a painting or a plaster statue of a man with his chest ripped open, with his entrails coming out, and with his brow torn by what appears to be barbed wire or thorns, that sort of thing. That’s the stuff of which hack-and-slash movies are made. So, I don’t ever want to hear anything about Satanic horror flicks, or any kind of supposed atrocities that are poisoning the minds of young people, because these kinds of horrors have been presented by Christianity for centuries to young people, and it’s probably the only taste, as a matter of fact, they’ve got of these kind of things for a long time, until Hollywood.
So, I guess, would you be saying that Jesus had maybe a sexual need to be crucified? He got off on the humiliation and torture?
Oh of course, yeah. I feel with that kind of masochist, rejection, destruction, I mean, self-destruction, and punishment are definitely the things that he would get off on. And the jokes that we hear and we have heard pretty well sum all that up.
Like, one of my favorites is: The guys are standing in the doorway of their little house watching Jesus being whipped and beaten with a big cross on his back up to the hill where he’s going to be crucified. They see his lips moving, and one of the guys says to the other, "What’s he saying?" And he says, "Well, I don’t know." He says, "Why don’t you go up to where you can hear him?" He says, "I don’t know whether I should go up there or not. I don’t want to get hit myself." And the guy says, "Well, go on, it’s not gonna hurt. Maybe you can get an idea. He’s saying something. I don’t know what he’s saying." So finally, the guy goes up and sort of quickly sticks his head in front of Jesus before he gets completely past the row of houses, and he hears him singing, "I love a parade...."
It’s one of those sort of things. And it’s like the other one, where he’s up on the cross, and he’s motioning to Peter and trying, mumbling, to get Peter to come to him. And Peter’s out there in a crowd of centurions, and they’re throwing rocks at Jesus, and they’re trying to torment him as much as possible. And finally, Peter inches his way through the crowd and gets to the foot of his mentor. And he says, "What, what my Lord? What? What is it you have to say to me?" And Jesus looks down at him and he says, "Peter, Peter - I can see your house from here."
And so, there was no great problem Christ had, I mean, if you’re talking about psychologically. His only problem was what the rest of the world saw in his problem and subsequently took as a role model for their own masochism. But I don’t think he, if he was as he is portrayed, felt that he was unjustly put upon. He probably felt that without this martyrdom, without this kind of masochistic satisfaction, it wouldn’t have all been worth it. Of course, that’s not what we find in latter-day interpretations, psychological interpretations, of Jesus. And I can understand the reinterpretation, because it is essentially to create a more humanized man out of Jesus, one who is not a masochistic martyr, but one who was really put upon and unjustly maligned, and as in the case of some figures of history, like Wilhelm Reich, really crucified. And I think it’s more of a convenience to psychologically see him as that after the fact. It’s not like we suddenly have discovered psychoanalysis, because Freud has been around a long time now. It’s taken a while to sort of catch up to the fact that maybe - or the supposition, it’s not a fact, certainly, but the supposition - that Christ may have been a real ballsy guy and really was struck down in the prime of his life. Or somebody that was essentially Promethean and went against the grain. That could well be. Of course, I don’t accept the reality of Christ as a living man. I accept only the reality of a myth-need, and the Christ figure to me was something that just sort of fit at the time when it was promulgated, and he has been historically accepted sort of as a given, contrary to historical evidence that he never even existed.
Let’s clear up one of the biggest misconceptions about the Church of Satan - by "Satan," of course, you mean an anthropomorphic being with horns and a tail, right?
To us, Satan is not an anthropomorphic being. Satan is certainly an anthromophic image, though, which is a little different from an actual being. And the anthropomorphic image of Satan is pretty well fashioned in that it is bestial as opposed to ethereal, or cherubic, or patriarchal, or avuncular. Satan is seen as somewhat of a dashing, or rakish, or, perhaps, feral animal type of image. And, obviously, these depiction’s are something very much like talismanic magic conserved to reinforce the concepts of the philosophical ideas behind Satanism. So, I wouldn’t do anything to dispel that image. Satan as a divinity or as a deity with a pitchfork and a tail and cloven hooves and a beard and all that is certainly more viable to imagine than Satan as a guy that looked like a bespectacled accountant that was sitting behind a desk, even though there have been deviations in the public image of Satan.
Sometimes a Satanic figure has been depicted as a very heavy, or corpulent, individual with lewd sort of features - the kind of appearance you might associate with one of the Caesars. And other times, Satan has been seen, certainly many times, as a woman, or in the body of a sexy woman. And other times, Satan has been seen as a sort of grey or wizened old wizard with little hairs sprouting out of either side of his head, the sort of alchemist look about him. So, there have been other interpretations that are anthropomorphic that do work. And yet, the one we keep returning to, anthropomorphizing Sata, is the guy that looks like the devil, as devils are known. But this isn’t a person, we believe, that’s out there somewhere just sort of waiting to be called forth and appear in a puff of flame and smoke, but rather someone that walks among us and perhaps even walk with the person who is dedicated to the concept of Satan, so that when someone would ask, "Have you ever seen Satan?" that person might be able to say, "Yes. Every time I get up in the morning and shave and look in the mirror. Or every time I fix my hair or put on my lipstick," [laughs] or something like that, if it happens to be a woman. And that would be just as valid an answer for the anthropomorphic concept.
One of the most profound things that I read that you said was that truth never sets you free, that doubt is much more likely to at least lead to freedom. Can you say why that is? ‘Cause when I interviewed Tom Metzger, the White Aryan guy, he said, "I don’t believe in equality. When they say all men are created equal, I laugh, because nobody in power believes that." And something just clicked. And the same thing happened when I read that, that doubt it....
...That’s right. I agree completely with that, that no one in power believes that. No one in power believes that. They would never be able to admit it except to their cronies, perhaps, in closed rooms. If they were all to get together, I know pretty much what kind of notes they would compare. And believe me, there would be some across-the-board similarities, and one of them would be that there is no such thing as equality. And their constituents, their disciples, would not necessarily be told what they are in public interviews for an audience.
About doubt setting you free....
Yeah, as far as the truth setting one free. Truth is a very much a subjective thing. Because there are different kinds of truths, just like there are different kinds of love. I believe truth and love is, or are, words and terms that can almost be used interchangeably, because they bear this attribute, or this quality of, "Which kind of love do you mean?" Or in other words, you could say, "What kind of truth do you mean?" There’s the kind of love that’s romantic love, maternal or paternal love, filial love, love as an aesthetic expression, like I love a particular object of art or a painting, a design of an automobile, or something like that. And truth is very much to me the same sort of commodity. Truth is able to be seen as the facts as we know hard facts to mean - applied, hard, demonstrable evidence can be said to be the closest thing to the truth. At least, to me it is.
Then there is, of course, more subjective truth, which can be altered or manipulated according to the dictates or the needs of what truth is supposed to be. Propagandists are experts at that sort of thing. So, if we are to believe the truth as we read it in print, or in factual evidence supposedly given by vested interests, should we really accept that as truth simply because it is put down by experts? We’re getting to a sensitive area with me, because I detest experts, or so-called experts. I distrust experts. Anyone that has the word ‘expert’ after their name immediately, to me, conveys the impression of someone who has just sort of hung out his shingle and become self-styled, whatever. And I feel that the truth coming from these kind of people is absolutely invalid.
But I should get to this other definition of the truth, and that is that the real truth that matters is the truth that matters for you. That fills, or fulfills, your particular personal needs. And that could be very negative when we’re talking about masses of people or humanity in general, because what their needs for truth happen to be are fulfilled in the National Enquirer and TV. That’s as much truth as they need to know and, of course, that is truth to them. And if it works, then that’s true enough, as true as they need it to be. But it’s a rather important point to me, being a Satanist, looking at these things like truth from a Satanic perspective. Do we really want to give these people the truth, because if they had the truth, what would they do with it? How would they react or respond to it? Would they be able to live with the truth? I don’t think they would. So, is it really fair to say that the people that print things like the National Enquirer are fogging people’s brains? What they’re really doing is dealing in fogged brains and brains that are scrambled to start with, and they’re telling the truth according to the gospel of what their particular role models seem to put forth.
The meaning it had for me, too, was that it seems like the people who are most convinced that they’re right are frequently, or almost always, the dumbest people. Maybe the beginning of intelligence is the ability to question what you believe in.
Yeah, and the most righteous, the most self-righteous people, I have found, are not only the stupidest people, but the people who want to believe as the truth what most likely isn’t the truth, but simply the truth that fits their own needs. Now, their needs generally are to destroy anything that’s beautiful, anything that’s fine, anything that’s of quality, anything that’s promethean or pioneering, anything that’s worth preserving - in short, they’re a pretty loutish crew, and anything that’s of value, they really want to rip apart. They will elect a person to office that in the first place is a Hobson’s choice - who is, perhaps, the lesser of two evils. And in the second place, once they have elected that person into office, then they’ll spend the rest of the time, the remaining time of their attention span with this person, trying to destroy him. So I can’t speak too highly of the discriminatory powers of the masses, because they have their own idea of the truth, and they have their own idea of what’s right and self-righteous. And what makes them feel good, or better, or right, is what they’re gonna opt for in every case.
And as a Satanist, I prefer to attract or to draw out the kind of people that don’t have to wear the mantle of a good guy or self-righteousness but are willing, as you expressed in your own editorial views, willing to stand forth and say, "Look - you know, I’m not a nice guy. I’m not Simon Pure. I’m not trying to save the world. I don’t want to be a messiah. I don’t wish to pin any good-guy badges on myself. I just want to say things the way I feel it, and the way I want others at least to give me a chance to say them. And if they don’t want to, they can tell me I’m full of shit or whatever, but at least I’ve had the opportunity to express these these views without the sanctimonious, hypocritical whitewash or varnish or sugarcoating of trying to say, ‘Well, I’m trying to build a better world by saying these things.’"
Isn’t the fight against stupidity a losing battle?
Yeah. To me, I’ve written my list of the seven deadly sins - how many of them were there?
Blanche: I think there were nine of them.
Anton: Nine. Yeah. I sometimes forget myself. It’s like the old cliché, "I only work here [general laughter]." But the Nine Satanic Sins - the first one, the top of the list, is Stupidity. [Note: the others are Pretentiousness, Solipsism, Self-Deceit, Herd Conformity, Lack of Perspective, Forgetfulness of Past Orthodoxy’s, Counterproductive Pride, and Lack of Aesthetics.] To me, stupidity is the stuff that is needed, obviously, in the world, and the Christian concept would be to say, "Well, we’re all sinners. We are all born or conceived in sin." To me, I would say, "You are all sinners by Satanic standards. You are conceived in sin, and you are able to polled through yours lives in sin, and you will always be sinners." But to me, the great sin is stupidity. So, you could just; instead of the word ‘sin,’ substitute it with stupidity: "You are conceived in stupidity, you’re born into stupidity, you live out your lives in stupidity,. So, therefore, you are sinners." And I would accuse them, just as a Christ figure would accuse the minions, his minions, of being sinners, I would accuse these minions of being sinners, too.
That’s a better concept of original sin, I think: You’re born stupid.
Yeah, I think that’s very well put. That’s a much better concept of original sin, that it’s stupidity.
Blanche: Yeah, born into ignorance and work from there. If you choose to.
Anton: I mean, I’ve been quoted as saying, "the world is full of stupes," and I only started saying that after I sort of got tired of saying, "The world is full of creeps." And there will always be stupid people. There’s a need for stupid people. The stupider, the better. When Nietzsche said that man, or the over-man, must be eviler, I would say, "If that’s the case, then the common man must be stupider." Constantly stupider. And this degenerative process is what we’re seeing right NOW, more than at any time in the history of the world, and if it is allowed to run rampant without an alternative or two or three to at least run interference for it, then it’s going to envelop the planet, and we’re going to be a dead planet. But that’s not going to happen, because natural law will always prevail, despite man’s efforts to quash it. So there will always be something like a Satan or a Satanic concept to run interference for this raging overabundance of stupidity.
We’ve already seen that Satan dresses better, dances better than God - uh, is he funnier than God too? How does humor aid the Satanist?
I think a Satanic figure that would be humorless would be intolerable. The old adage that "I laughed that I might not cry," I think [laughs] applies to Satan, or the image of Satan, or the concept of Satan. Because, concerning the sorros of Satan, his dismay at seeing this fucked-up kind of world, would necessitate that he had to have a sense of humor or some kind of concrete outlet for his dismay or for what would be devastating to him. Because how could such a figure or figurehead be able to live in such a grim world?
I’ve been accused of being an unhappy person deep down inside - a miserable, cynical, misanthropic person. I admit that I’m misanthropic. I admit that I’m cynical. And I do admit that I’m often rather miserable, perhaps, to other people. But if I am miserable at times it’s only because, as Sarte said, "Hell is other people." Because they make me miserable. and I’m actually a very happy person. I want to be a life-loving, happy person. I just happen to be living in a death-seeking, misery-loving world.
I’ve found the most superficially happy-go-lucky people seem to be in a constant state of denial of reality.
Blanche: Yeah, there’s also that sanctimony if you compare the images of the white-light religions with Satanic images. Satan never allows himself sanctimony.
Where does this need to deny the way things are come from? Is it that if people admitted how shitty things were, they’d just fall apart? I have trouble understanding that myself - what’s this need to gloss over things? if you know deep down that it’s fucked-up, why do you need to think otherwise? What’s the motivation? Is it just an elaborate defense mechanism?
Blanche: [to Anton]: On the part of most people: Why do they watch Oprah Winfrey and forget about what’s happening to the rest of the world?
Anton: Because I call it "masochistic America." Or you could say, "the masochistic Western world." it varies in some degrees from nation to nation - not much anymore. It’s because their lives are so barren of any personal meaning that the surrogate lives of these shows, of these ongoing digressions, become as real to them, or more real, than their own lives could possibly be. And so, the nature of the show, the nature of the program says it all. Their lives wouldn’t be complete without the stimulation. Again, I use the word ‘stimulation:’ of chaos, and disharmony, and problems. There is no way that they could possibly be happy unless they were miserable. And, of course, their miseries are small miseries. Tiny miseries. That still gives them plenty of time to make other people miserable. Which is, of course, what they do. So, if they had big enough real problems, then they wouldn’t have time to make other people miserable. And they wouldn’t, perhaps, be as misery-loving.
But they just get stimulation in doses that are palatable. Just enough to satisfy them. By that, I mean eustress, rather than distress. Fun fear, rather than real terror. I think that it would be fun sometimes - I mean, not fun for them - but, certainly, it would be stimulating for me occasionally to see how these people react under true distress. Because I think that’s the only thing that takes them away from their soaps and their theater of disturbance that they seem to crave. And when something really happens, like an earthquake or a plane crash or a disaster or a catastrophe, then it’s no longer eustress. It really gives them what they want, but double or triple in spades. And they can’t deal with that. And that’s when you really see them for what they are, the frightened little creatures that they really are. They want so badly to live in this gradual decline, this gradual imperative to die, but on their terms, sort of like the Epicurean masochist that says, "Hit me here. No - a little higher. Not quite so high, a little bit further down than that. But no, no that’s too hard." and that’s the way I sort of feel most people are - they crave uestress, fun fear. And when they get into real distress, it’s the sort of thing they can’t take. They might be able to dish out to others, but they can’t take it themselves.
The only thing people generally respond to in the state of distress that they seem to crave, gut not be able to cope with when it finally comes, is fear. And pain. Now, I don’t mean fun fear, but I mean TERROR. I mean real fear. And pain - by pain, I mean physical pain. I mean pain like TORTURE. And I believe that most people need periodic does of fear and pain in order to sort of reinforce the meaning of life for them. They even have coined the term, "No pain, no gain." And, "The sale begins when the customer says, ‘No.’" And the whole concept of business procedure, where you’re fighting these interminable odds at all times, and if the door slams in your face, it’s a victory, not a defeat. And all success courses and aggressiveness seminars.
Blanche: Yeah. Winning Through Intimidation.
Anton: And winning-through-intimidation techniques are proof of this. That most people really respond to what is most abrasive and what is most painful and what is most inconvenient. And here’s the real, to me, the blow off on the whole thing is, without these things - like, these inconveniences, these pains, these turmoils - there’s be no security. That is, verily, their security. It is their habit, it is their security. So, take those things away from them, and you do them a disservice. From time to time, give them REAL pain, and real distress, rather than eustress, and it will be like a rejuvenation for them, a shot in the arm. That’s why wars, catastrophes, disasters, are necessary from time to time. Speaking as a sort of devil [laughs], if I were in that position, I would say, "Well, we’ve gotta have a catastrophe here, a disaster here from time to time, an earthquake, a tidal wave, whatever it is. A war. Something to really get people shaken up."
I’d like you to comment on what we were talking over dinner about seeing a paradox - that what society would consider the most evil outcasts are invariable the most considerate types of people. For instance, Debbie’s boss is a guy who has a business called [SELF-CENSORSHIP! SELF CENSORSHIP!], and he speaks in this real glazed voice on the answering machine: "I hope this finds you in a happy and healing place." And he’s a ruthless bastard! What is the principle behind that, that the most seemingly good people are often the most ruthless - evil in a truly negative sense? And Russ Meyer, yourself, and other people that society in general might consider evil are the most considerate and accommodating type of people. How does that work? I want to understand the physics behind that.
Because they don’t have to cover up their meanness or their pettiness or their insecurity or their true dastardly nature. Because it’s all up front. I mean, somebody like Russ Meyer - obviously, he’s putting out material, putting out a product, that makes no pretense about being enlightening or redeeming or in some way a form of salvation, unless you want to say it’s salvation for poor, repressed souls that need to be released. and, obviously, people who are not wearing good guy badges are more up front, and they can afford to be nicer, because they’re getting this meanness out, right out in the open. They’re wearing it on their sleeves like an armband. They’re sort of like the black widow spider with the hourglass on its abdomen, saying, "Look - you know, don’t mess with me, because I’m really a pretty mean customer." Or the rattlesnake when it rattles.
Blanche (to Anton): You always talk about sleeping on the floor, too.
Anton: Yeah, I always felt that if you sleep on the floor, you never have to worry about falling out of bed. And when you get yourself in this exalted position of self-righteousness, then it’s very easy to drop down a notch into what could be called degradation or disfavor. And so, the pretense has to be kept up even stronger than ever, lest you slip. And that’s why there’s a bigger smile, a more mellifluous voice, and a more godly or saintly approach in a public sense. And it’s failure insurance, really.
What pisses you off more than anything else?
A lot of things do, and I don’t deny it. I’m not trying to say, "Oh, these things just roll off like water on a duck’s back," and all that sort of thing, like I don’t pay any attention to these things. I think if you don’t pay any attention to any of these things and they don’t get to you, you don’t get that concentration of energy or that controlled adrenal force or energy that can make magic happen, if you want to call it magic. It has to be for real. You have to really get worked up. It might not be too good for your system - stress is pretty bad for you - but, I mean, let’s face it, it gets things done sometimes if it’s controlled and contained, and this conservation of energy translates. Sometimes a bottling up of rage and hate, bad feelings about things, anger, is often very powerful, very potent. Because you let a little of it loose, and it’s like a lightning bolt.
And if you’re going around waving your arms wildly and punching at the air like a punch drunk fighter or raging all the time, that’s not going to really accomplish anything either. That’s just as bad as taking the self-righteous approach. Like the frothing-at-the-mouth kind of guy with nothing to say but vitriol about everything and anything, that has no sense of aesthetics, that can’t appreciate beauty, appreciate anything in life, that is just totally, "Whatever it is," like Groucho used to say, "I’m against it...."
Let’s see - what pisses me off? I think the Nine Satanic Sins cover what pisses me off pretty well. Generally, I have my list that would be on a scale from one to ten. Of course, I don’t like shit-disturbers. that would be right up near the top of the list. That would be people who do not have direction or who take the individuals, the institutions, the objects that should be venerated or should be given consideration, and again, as I said earlier, try to tear these worthwhile things down just simply because they’re better than who the shit-disturbers is. And they can’t be allowed to live or flourish, even as simple as their wants may be. Because, however simple the wants of the superior person may be, it’s still the stuff of which resentment is made from the person who wishes to destroy it....
What pisses me off? I don’t like blaming leaders for everything. Leaders are really not anything more than sounding boards for the people that either vote them in or follow them. And when people say, "I was only following orders," or, "I really don’t feel this way myself, but I was sort of led into this." People that blame leaders. I don’t care whether the leader is someone like Stalin or someone like Hitler or someone like Manson or someone like a guy that happens to have a group of followers that will just simply - like Tom Metzger is a perfect example - be blamed for what the knuckleheads or the dunderheads or the stupes do to, perhaps, overextend what they have said. EACH LIVING CREATURE, whether it’s human or otherwise, should be held responsible for ITS actions.
OK. I’m sure you’ve been blamed for what the knuckleheads have done.
Of course. And I probably will continue and never, never cease to be blamed.
What do you think about anarchists?
The new self-conscious "anarchist" are humans of little or no value who have turned ineptitude into a movement. They are writers who have nothing worth saying, musicians who have nothing worth playing. Yet they think themselves to be the "cutting edge," when invariably their blade is a butter knife. I’ve yet to see one with real talent or ability. They resent anyone with plan, purpose, or direction - especially aesthetic discipline and harmony. They’re like the hippies who considered any of the aforementioned "hang-ups." If you happen to be on their team, when you shit, it’s "performance art." If you’re otherwise, you could spend a lifetime perfecting a skill and go unnoticed. Anarchists wear their badges of aimless disarray well, though, and silently proclaim, in that manner, how they really want themselves to be. If they want to wear rags, let them toil the fields. Put them in a slave labor camp for the benefit of the elite.
Are animals really more noble than people?
I wouldn’t squash a spider, but I could kill a human being. A spider is being the best spider he can be. He’s fulfilling his purpose as a spider. He meshes perfectly with nature’s overall scheme. Nothing in nature is wasted, and I can’t say the same thing about people.
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