On 19 April 1995, a man named McArthur Wheeler robbed two
banks at gunpoint, making no attempt whatsoever to conceal his face from the
security feed; and when the police came to his door, scant hours later, he said
incredulously, “But I wore the juice!” As it transpires, Mr. Wheeler had
discovered that lemon juice renders ink invisible—and, working from this
premise, had attained the conclusion that a man doused in lemon juice must
therefore be invisible to cameras. A Cornell professor, David Dunning, was so
struck by Wheeler’s confidence in his own magnificently imbecilic stratagem
that he and his assistant Justin Kruger went on to conduct a major
psychological study of the interplay between knowledge and self-assuredness,
ultimately concluding that the less one knows about a given subject, the
likelier one is to think that one knows all about it.
Theology, experience, and common sense all attest that the
same inverse proportion holds true in the moral sphere. Not only does sin
darken the intellect and deaden the conscience, but the Thomistic principle
of connexio virtutum (ST I-II q. 66 a. 2) means that a deficit in
any one virtue diminishes our capacity for all the others as well—and, of
course, the more we sin, the less receptive we become to transformative grace,
hence the likelier to sin again. “To the one who has, more will be given; from
the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away” (Matt. 25:29).
This accelerating descent from cesspool to whirlpool would
be a deadly peril even if human nature were left to its own devices; but in the
supernatural warzone of daily life, the danger is exponentiated by invisible
leviathans seeking to hasten our downward spiral to oblivion. We ought to be
able to recognize these spirits as deceivers; unfortunately, “discernment of
spirits” (1 Cor. 12:10) is a gift of the very Spirit from Whose grace the man
in the maelstrom has removed himself. In other words, the more we morally blind
ourselves through sin, the easier it becomes for agents of darkness to blind us
even further.
Only Socrates, the wisest man in Athens, knew that he knew
nothing: the less we know, the more we’re apt to think we know. Glimpsing only
the very topmost tip of the titanic submarine monolith of ice that is the
global skein of religious, political, economic, and cultural machinations at
work behind every well-lit snapshot we see in the news, we’re hardly in a
position to guess which surfacing bubble is the result of vast, chthonic forces
moving in the deep, and which is the result of a nearby guppy’s hiccup.
I recently wrote a post arguing that immortal
deceivers, if they exist, might very well act irrationally—either because they
want throw us off their scent, or because existing in Hell has literally driven
them insane. (Think of the Devil encountered by Ivan Karamazov, who swears his
only desire is to be a 300-pound peasant woman and light a Christian prayer candle
in simple faith!) For this reason, I believe the distinction we naturally tend
to draw between “a crazy conspiracy theory” and “a theory” is less useful than
we think.
To recapitulate: you can’t get smarter if you’re too dumb to
know you’re dumb, and a bad person left to himself will do bad things and thus
get worse. All of this is exacerbated by the fact that moral badness retards
the intelligence and opens one’s soul to demonic influence—which in turn leads
to accelerating worsening, thus opening one’s soul all the more, and so on, in
a downward spiral that only leads to one place. With our flawed finite
intelligence and flawed concupiscent consciences, we aren’t able to see the “big
picture” and comprehend how every minuscule happenstance of ordinary life slots
together to fabricate the giant stage of worldly affairs; but one thing we do
know is that it’s bound to be stranger than we can possibly imagine. No
fictional character would rob a bank while covered in lemon juice.
Now, with all that being said, I would like to direct your attention
to the following: He-Man and the MOTU Proprio.
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