Noel and the Preacher

Noel, my astonishingly gifted younger son, is a tall, strong young man who habitually carries a stout blackthorn shillelagh wherever he goes, so it is rare for anyone to succeed in making him feel threatened or intimidated.  His fellow musicians can’t do it.  The people he works out with can’t do it.  His professors can’t do it.  But religious zealots can.  I recently wrote of his concern that Mormon missionaries were imperiling his immortal soul, concluding that the path of prudence would be to kill them all before they were able to get him sent to Hell for failing to be converted by their unconvincing sales pitches.

Now, however, he is troubled by a more general and pervasive danger: street preachers, of whom the campus of the university he attends is unaccountably quite prolific, and who, he is now convinced, are utterly, irretrievably, and probably dangerously, insane.  They frequently accost him on the “Diag”, a walkway that diagonally transects the quad which is more or less the geographic center of campus and which he must perforce travel several times every week.

A typical interaction with these Christian-sales-reps-without-portfolio goes something like the following:

Preacher (often carrying placard announcing imminent end of world): “You must repent your sins and accept Jesus Christ or you will burn forever in Hellfire!”

Noel (glancing up from Mozart libretto): “Beg pardon?”

Preacher : “You must repent your sins and accept Jesus Christ or you will burn forever in Hellfire!”

Noel:  “What sins?”

Preacher:  “The unholy trinity that consumes college students: sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll!”

Noel: “Well, I’m actually a virgin, have never done drugs or alcohol at all, and while I enjoy a few works that probably qualify as rock, I’m primarily into opera, which is my major at this university, and my intended career.  So, am I okay?”

Preacher: “My son, if what you say is true, your self-discipline is admirable, but as things stand you are still doomed to burn in Hell throughout Eternity.  Man is born in Sin and must accept Jesus Christ to be saved through his sacrifice and passion and thereby attain to the Kingdom of Heaven.”

(Street preachers apparently tend to speak in capital letters somehow.)

Noel:  “His sacrifice?  What sacrifice?”

Preacher: “Why, his death upon the cross, of course. “

Noel:  “What happened after that?”

Preacher: “Why, he rose gloriously to Heaven and now Sitteth for all Eternity on the Right Hand of The Father.”

Noel: “Won’t that get uncomfortable after a while?”

Preacher: “Huh?”

Noel: “Never mind.  So he was crucified, which must have hurt a lot.”

Preacher: “I can’t imagine anything more horrible to which a person could be subjected.”

Noel (eyeing the preacher wistfully): “Oh, I can.  Lots.” Then “and Jesus knew this was going to happen?”

Preacher: “Yes.”

Noel: “And that he would then go to Heaven and live in glory and splendor at God’s right hand forever, eternally blissful?”

Preacher:  “Of course.  He is God and knows all things.”

Noel: “And this is what you call a sacrifice?  Three hours of intense pain followed by an eternity of unimaginable wonderfulness, of which he was absolutely certain?  To my way of thinking that sounds more like a shrewd bargain.  Lots of people die in awful agony at least comparable to what Jesus suffered, without the consolation of knowing that in a very short time they would be in line for everlasting comfort and happiness.  That’s like calling buying Starbuck’s stock at 70 cents a share in 1992 a risk if you knew for absolute certainty that it would climb 6000% in less than 20 years.  Some risk.  Some sacrifice!”

 Preacher:  “Well, He died for your sins.”

Noel: “Which, at the time, I hadn’t committed and, as far as I know, still haven’t.”

Preacher: “Man is born with a sinful nature.  We all sin, my son.”

Noel: “So, whatever sins I’m guilty of, I had no choice but to commit them, even though I still don’t even know what they are?”

Preacher:  “Oh, no.  We have Free Will.”

Noel: “The film about the killer whale?”

Preacher: “Huh?”

Noel: “Never mind.  So we have free will and can choose whether to be sinful or virtuous, but we are bound to be sinful.  Bound by what?”

Preacher: “Our sinful nature.”

Noel:  “But what must we do to be saved?”

Preacher: “Read the Holy Bible, son.”

Noel: “And if we do all the things it says to do in the Bible we will be saved?”

Preacher: “It is the Holy Word of God.  It embodies The Law.”

Noel:  “I have read the Bible, but some parts of it are hard to follow.  Like it says in Samuel, that we should go and kill the Amalekites and all their pets.  I was going to, but I didn’t know where they were.  There didn’t seem to be any in my dorm or at the music school.”

Preacher:  “That’s the Old Testament, son.  Jesus brought the New Covenant.”

Noel: “So, does that mean that all the stuff in the Old Testament about not touching dead bodies and not boiling your kids in their mother’s milk is obsolete?  We can do it now?”

Preacher: “All that stuff was ancient tribal folk law and was replaced by Jesus and the New Covenant.”

Noel: “But doesn’t Jesus say in Matthew “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. ¹⁸ For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished”?

Preacher:  “I believe that every word in the Bible is true…”

Noel:  “Except for the stuff in the Old Testament that Jesus said shouldn’t be changed but that you say was rendered obsolete by his sacrifice and death.”

Preacher: “Er…”

Noel: “And the Old Covenant, the one with Noah, where God said he wouldn’t ever destroy the world by flood again?  That’s off, too?”

Preacher: “Every word is true.  But Jesus brought the New Covenant to replace the old so that all may be saved.”

Noel (glancing nervously at the sky, which is getting overcast):  “So, the Old Testament is out.  But Jesus tells us how to live righteous lives, right?  He gives us the Beatitudes, you know, who’s blessed and all that.  He reiterates the commandments – not the original ten about keeping kosher, but the one’s people are always wanting to use to decorate court houses.  He tells us to love our neighbors and to do unto others as we would have them do unto us.  Don’t pray in public, that stuff…So we know what we need to do in order to be saved.  Live a righteous life, you go to heaven.  Great!  Things are definitely looking up, no pun intended.”

Preacher:  “No, my son, no one may enter the Kingdom of Heaven but through the acceptance of Jesus Christ as their lord and savior.”

Noel: “WHAT???!!!”

Preacher: “That’s right.  No one may enter the Kingdom of Heaven but through the acceptance of Jesus Christ as their lord and savior.”

Noel: “So if you’ve been very virtuous and adhered steadfastly to the laws and not boiled your kids in their mother’s milk and not worshipped any idols, then if you’ve accepted Jesus you get in?”

Preacher:  “Yes, son.  But here’s the really good news:  even if you’ve been very sinful, as I once was when I was your age, drinking and using drugs and fornicating with loose women and listening to the Devil’s message in the godless music of rock and roll, you can still accept Jesus as I have done and be forgiven and be guaranteed admission into the Kingdom of Heaven, as I have been.”

Noel:  “How do you know?  That you’ve been forgiven?”

Preacher:  “I know it in my heart.  It is what Jesus promised, and I believe in His Word.”

Noel:  “But what if you’re just very righteous and follow all the dictates of the law, and don’t boil your kids and love your neighbor and don’t mess with dead bodies or consort with temple prostitutes or commit murder, and you give to the poor and minister to the sick?  What if you don’t accept Jesus?  I mean, not that you reject him as such, and hurt his feelings, but you just don’t find in your heart that you “accept him” per se?”

Preacher: “No one may enter the Kingdom of Heaven but through the acceptance of Jesus Christ as their lord and savior.”

Noel:  “YOU GO TO HELL??!”

Preacher: “Of course.  No one may enter the Kingdom of Heaven but through the acceptance of Jesus Christ as their lord and savior.”

Noel:  “And boil forever in a lake of burning sulfur?  That has to be worse than being crucified! Just because the whole Jesus thing never quite resonated…?!”

Preacher: “No one may enter ...”

Noel: “ENOUGH ALREADY!! I GOT IT!!!”

Preacher:  “Peace, my son.  One need only accept that which is given.”

Noel:  “Let me be very sure that I fully grasp what you’re telling me.  I can be the worst person ever.  I can boil my kids and worship idols and fornicate with dead temple prostitutes while out of my skull on drugs and listening to “In a gadda da vida”, I can be the love child of Charles Manson and Adolf Hitler, if at the last moment before I succumb to the combined effects of tertiary syphilis and amphetamine psychosis I accept Jesus Christ as my personal savior, then I get into Heaven and spend the rest of Eternity soaking up the unspeakable joys of being in God’s presence?”

Preacher: “Yes, my son, you do.  That is the Good News of Jesus Christ!  Is it not glorious?”

Noel (turning a fine shade of scarlet): “And I can be the finest, most noble, loving, righteous, law-abiding, charitable, faithful, honorable and humane person ever to walk the earth, I can love my neighbor as myself, I can do unto others only as I would have them do unto me, I can sell all I have and give it to the poor, I can starve to death on a dung heap so that widows and orphans may have bread, but if after all that I neglect to formally accept Jesus Christ as my personal savior…?”

Preacher: “Why, naturally you go to Hell for all eternity.”

Noel: “And boil in the lake of burning sulfur…?”

Preacher:  “Of course.”

Noel: “Nelson Mandela simmering away next to Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Einstein and Mozart, the Dalai Lama, the Buddha, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, Leonardo da Vinci and William Shakespeare, Ludwig van Beethoven and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Vaclav Havel and me?”

Preacher:  “Yes, son.  That, I’m afraid, is the, well, Bad News of Jesus Christ.”

Noel:  “So, there’s basically only one rule:  accept Jesus Christ and you’re in business, fail to do so and you are cosmically screwed.”

Preacher:  “Yes, my son.  You have seen the light.  Praise be to God…”

Noel:  “THEN WHAT IN THE NAME OF ANYTHING REMOTELY REASONABLE DO YOU NEED THAT 1200 PAGE RULE BOOK FOR?”

Preacher:  “The Bible?  Oh, that’s the true and undiluted Word of God.”

Noel:  “But what the hell good is it?”

Preacher: “It is the true revealed…”

Noel:  “Yeah, yeah.  But all those hundreds and thousands of rules about what not to eat or touch, all those commands to kill these people and not kill those people, the admonition to be fruitful and multiply, the decrees that one must only do so under certain very narrowly defined circumstances which are still not specified…none of that matters at all?  Billions of copies of that book are spread all over the earth, the subject of paintings, plays, operas, books, pamphlets, poems, entire college courses, entire institutions of higher learning, and the only part of it that has any significance to the long term prospects of any human soul is the requirement to ‘accept Jesus Christ as your lord and savior.’ In your heart.”

Preacher: “Er…”

Noel: “You people are batshit crazy, you know that?  You want people to read your book, YOU SPEND YOUR LIFE READING THAT BOOK.  And every bit of it is utterly irrelevant except for that single eight word punchline.  You are batshit crazy.  Shit of bat, declared in your book of irrelevancies, by the way, to be a bird.  And not a kosher bird, because it eats bugs.  The divinely inspired folks who wrote this thing could tell that a bat ate bugs but couldn’t tell that it wasn’t a bird, and they had to formulate an elaborate and utterly nonsensical rationale for why one SHOULDN’T EAT BATS???!!  You people don’t make sense.  You don’t even TRY to make sense.  You don’t even feel there is VALUE in making sense.  In fact – and here’s the bottom line, I guess – you think it would be an insult to God to even attempt to apply the rules of logic to the most important thing in the human universe, and you think people ought to be consigned to eternal torture because of it.  You are crazy.  You are dangerous, and you ought to be locked up.”

Preacher: “No one may enter the Kingdom of Heaven but through the acceptance of Jesus Christ as their lord and savior.”

                “So then I bludgeoned him to death with my stick, Dad,” Noel concluded.  “You have to destroy their heads, like in the Bruce Campbell movies, right?  I’m going to get a samurai sword or a battle axe.  I don’t think the stick will last indefinitely, and I’ve got a terrible feeling that there’s a lot more of ‘em where that one came from.”

Reviving the Economy

Products - Everything Google

The economy is going to hell, but then it didn't have far to go when Barack Obama took office. Conservative mouthpieces make a great deal of the fact that, under Obama, the deficit has risen from $8 trillion to $14.1 trillion in one term. What seems never to be mentioned is the fact that Bush inherited a $5 trillion surplus from Clinton. This means that Bush was guilty of a $13 trillion overspend, or $6.5 trillion per term, as compared with $6.1 trillion for Obama.

Clearly, somebody needs to do something to get us back into the prosperous groove we were in only eleven years ago (long years, to be sure, but still only eleven of them. Obvious things include:

1) getting us out of our T.E. Lawrence act in the Middle East. Stop the wars and bring the soldiers home and immediately give them the opportunity to fill federally-created jobs to shore up our physical infrastructure.

2) get all our strategically unnecessary military bases out of foreign countries. The Soviet Union is no longer trying to take over Europe, but we're still pretending that they are. It's an expensive hobby and one we cannot afford.

3) Stop giving tax breaks for LT capital gains on stock trading other than IPO's.  Only stock purchase at an Initial Public Offering (IPO) actually helps capitalize new enterprise growth.  Gains from IPO stocks should be taxed minimally to encourage investment.  Gains from secondary stock trading should be taxed like any other gambling proceeds.  Same for dividends.

Give SEC some real muscle and a mandate to make Wall Street behave.  The rules exist.  Enforce them.

4)  Legalize marijuana and TAX IT.  Saves money on DEA activities, keeps a lot of people out of the criminal justice system, and generates big revenue.  Everyone wins except foreign drug traffickers.

It's not that hard.  It only requires good faith (always hard to come by with politicians), rationality (ditto), and a genuine commitment to problem solving.

The idea that cutting taxes will revitalize the economy is not economics; it's an unproven article of faith, and those who peddle it are faith healers dealing in not science but revealed religion.

The Mormon Dilemma

                It’s the classic parental dilemma.  My 21 year old son Noel, a junior in college, comes home for the weekend with a question on his mind, a question for which he desires a father’s guidance.

                “Dad,” he asks, “Is it alright to kill Mormon missionaries?”

                One does not want to give a kneejerk response to such a question, so I temporize:

                “Why would you want to do such a thing?” I ask, thinking of a number of possible reasons.

                “Self-defense,” he answers.

                “Are Mormon missionaries threatening to harm you?” I ask, naturally concerned.  Visions of my child being run down by battalions of white-shirted, dark tie wearing bicyclists swim before my eyes.

                “Well, they seem to intend to, anyway.”

                “How do you mean?”

                “Well, they keep wanting to tell me about their religion.”

                “Now, Noel, I agree that can be pretty annoying, but hardly in itself a real threat to you, right?”

                “They seem to think it is, anyway.  It’s their religion.   They ought to know if it’s dangerous if anyone should.”

                “Fair enough, but what makes you think they want to harm you?”

                “Okay,” Noel says, “They keep coming around wanting to teach me about being a Mormon.”

                “Sure.  They can’t help it, I suppose.  Probably genetic.”

                “Whatever.  But they say that if they tell me about their religion and I am not converted, I must go to Hell, because I will have knowingly rejected the word of God.”

                “Lots of religious types will send you to Hell for a lot less.”

                “Naturally, but the Mormons say that if I haven’t heard the word of God, I am merely ignorant, will not be punished for this, since God is just, and I go to Heaven.”

                “So, if they leave you alone, you go to Heaven?” 

                “So they say.”

                “And if they fail to convert you, you go to Hell?”

                “Apparently.”

                “So, if they give you their pitch and fail to convert you, you are knowingly rejecting the word of God and will be consigned to eternal torment from boiling in a lake of flaming sulfur?”

                “Exactly.”

                “So, they have a pretty great responsibility to convert you.”

                “You might think that a just and compassionate God would make sure they succeeded. But I’m not confident about their ability.  I know a lot of people to whom the Mormons have talked but who were not converted.”

                “And these folks are going to Hell?”

                “No doubt about it, at least in the Mormons’ minds.”

                “So, in terms of mens rea – the mindset of wrongful intent  - if they leave you alone, you go to Heaven and live happily ever after.”

                “Presumably.”

                “But if they tell you all about their religion and you are not convinced, then you go to Hell?”

                “That’s the deal.”

                “So, if they leave you alone, you’re fine.  But if they attempt to convert you, they are placing your immortal soul in the very real danger of eternal damnation?”

                “Correct.”

                “So their efforts to engage you in theological discourse constitute a conscious intention on their part to needlessly imperil your soul.”

                “I think it’s bullshit, of course, but such seems to be their conscious intent.”

                “Kill ‘em all.  After all, it’s not just your soul they mean to endanger.”

                 It’s very important for parents to really listen to their children.

               

A Meditation upon The Fall of Man

            In the film version of “Men in Black”, Agent K (played by Tommie Lee Jones) says to Will Smith (soon to be Agent J): “Fifteen hundred years ago everyone “knew” the earth was the center of the universe.  Five hundred years ago, everyone “knew” the earth was flat.  And fifteen minutes ago, you “knew” that people were alone on this planet.  Imagine what you’ll “know” tomorrow.”  Here Jones uses the verb “to know” to mean not the possession of a fund of factual information but an uncritical certainty of the validity of one’s beliefs.  It is with this meaning of the term that this meditation on the meaning and implications of Man’s Fall from Paradise is concerned.

            But what was the misdeed that got mankind expelled from the Garden?  People tend to think that the offense was sexual, but there is nothing in Genesis to indicate that sex had anything to do with it.  Others, notably Milton, assert that the first sin was simply the disobedience of God’s command, and this was certainly one aspect of the matter.  However (and this is the crux of my thesis), it is worthwhile to consider the nature of the command violated by Adam and Eve.  They were not to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  Satan (or, the serpent, conventionally assumed to have been either Satan or his agent) tells Eve that, if they eat of the fruit of this tree, they will ”become like the gods, knowing good and evil.”

            It occurs to me to wonder (after the manner of people) why God, who wants people to be good, should object to people being able to accurately distinguish the good from the bad.  This is conventionally understood to mean that the sinners sinned in desiring to be like a god, of whom one characteristic is knowing what is good and what is evil.  But maybe another explanation, one less suggestive of a god with an inferiority complex, can assist this inquiry.

            I do not believe that the real meaning of this episode and the language used to relate it is that God didn’t want people to understand their moral duty.  Knowing good and evil need not mean possessing a fund of factual information concerning what things are actually good and what actually evil.  It can equally mean (and this is my interpretation) a mindset of the sort Jones references in the film, namely an uncritical certitude of the validity of one’s opinions – in this case, opinions concerning what is good and what is evil.

            If this is the violation that occasioned Man’s Fall, then what God objects to (in addition to disobedience) is the desire to live on the basis of uncritical certainty.  And why does He object to this?  Because if mankind is the pinnacle of God’s creation (which seems to be implicit in the entirety of Scripture), and if mankind’s great distinguishing feature is his capacity to think analytically and critically to understand, discover, and solve, then to desire uncritical certainty is to reject God’s greatest achievement.    And that is something to which even a loving god might reasonably object.

            What is God’s response to this sin?  He expels Adam and Eve from Paradise, where they needed not toil or suffer but needed only do what was rational, namely, take care of the good thing which had been given them.  And thereafter, their punishment consisted of living in an imperfect world in which, in order to survive, they must perforce make use of their intellect, of their problem-solving ability to extract food from the earth and to protect themselves and their offspring, who would now be vulnerable to myriad threats and problems never encountered in the Garden.

            This interpretation of The Fall asserts that what God wants is for people to make constructive use of the magnificent, powerful brains which are His greatest creation.  What Satan wants, by contrast, is for people to function according to an uncritical certainty that what they believe to be right is absolute, immutable, and not subject to debate.  This unreflecting, unquestioning, uncritical certainty is the essence of all absolutist ideologies throughout history and has thus been the common feature of most of the heinous and catastrophic episodes of human history, from Hitler to Stalin to the Thirty Years War in Central Europe, to the Wars of Religion in Sixteenth Century France, to the Spanish Inquisition, to Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the killing fields of Cambodia, and all their offspring, imitators and progenitors.  The common element that made each of these atrocious developments possible has been a readiness to assume an uncritical, unexamined certainty of the rightness of the cause, of the wrongness of the opposition, and, hence, of the holy necessity of acting implacably to destroy the evil.

            Today, as throughout history, it is this same uncritical, unblinking certitude of the rightness of the cause which impels fundamentalist religious militancy (whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim or other) to wreak havoc upon a world which craves peace, security, and the opportunity to live happy, productive lives in the joyful exercise of their God-given capacity to inquire, to learn, to problem-solve, ever striving to recreate the safe, sufficient world in which we originated and which we lost because we were seduced by the easy allure of uncritical certainty.

            In sum, for those who doubt the presence of Satan in the world, his handiwork is to be seen and should be recognized wherever his agents, armed with unreflective, uncritical certitude are on the attack against reasoning, analytical  thought, and constructive problem-solving, whose purpose is to enable mankind to progress, through the positive, humane employment of God’s greatest gift in the benign pursuit of that all-sufficient rational paradise, which is where God wanted us in the first place.

Predicting Jared Loughner

                The slaughter which took place in Tucson has shocked, outraged, fascinated and repelled people the world over.  It has also raised a number of questions.  Sadly, these are mainly the same questions such events always raise and for which answers seem never to be found.  Many of the questions focus on the availability of guns, and in a nation that holds about 250,000,000 privately owned firearms one has to wonder what it will take to guarantee peace and security for the law-abiding majority.  But as events in Oklahoma demonstrated, a truck load of commercial fertilizer and fuel oil can wipe out hundreds of lives if only the mind behind the truck is sufficiently evil.  Guns just make it a lot easier.

                The question, then, which inevitably comes to the fore in the aftermath of such tragedies is, if the evil mind, the mind filled with savage inspiration, is indeed the critical element, why are not such fiends systematically ferreted out from their hiding places among their harmless neighbors and locked away someplace safe?  In retrospect it is obvious to all that Jared Loughner was a nut, right?  A raving lunatic who alienated and terrified all around him, a cherisher of violent fantasies, a loner.  It all adds up.

                But, of course, it doesn’t.

                Fact is, it is exceedingly difficult to accurately identify those persons who will commit statistically rare acts such as murder and suicide.  Psychologists are aware of the reasons for this, but most people, groping in the dark for comprehension of the Tucson horror are not.  It goes something like this:

                In western industrial society as a whole roughly one person in ten-thousand is a murderer.  Obviously, the incidence of monsters like Loughner can be reasonably estimated at thousands of times more rare, maybe one in ten million, but I will stick with the smaller figure for purposes of this illustration.  If someone produced a test for identifying murderers, it would seem to be possible, by employing admittedly rather Orwellian means, to identify the really dangerous folks and, well, put them away.   Right?  Sorry.  Consider the following:

                Suppose that Smith’s Practically Perfect Test of Homicidal Potential is 95% accurate.  That is, it correctly identifies 95% of the murderers it tests, and it only falsely labels 5% of harmless persons as murderers.  Bear in mind that, within the field of psychology at its present state there is no test for anything  which is even remotely so precise.  The MMPI, by a wide margin the most thoroughly researched and scientifically normed instrument in the psychological arsenal, cannot even distinguish male from female to anything approaching this level of accuracy.  Bear also in mind the difficulty of constructing such an instrument given the fact that, by the time the Loughners of the world have identified themselves to our scientific curiosity, they are usually dead and therefore of no use in the development of test norms.  But even granted the possibility of constructing so phenomenally accurate a test, our problems, far from being over, are just beginning.

                Let us say that Smith’s imaginary test is administered to 1 million people chosen at random from the population.  If one in 10,000 is a future murderer, that means our sample contains 100 will-be killers.  Smith’s test accurately identifies 95 of these and we haul them away to some humane but secure environment to live out their lives in confinement where, presumably, they won’t kill anyone.  True, 5 of the 100 escape detection, but surely we are now a great deal better off than we were, right?  Well, it depends on your point of view because, as you will recall, Smith’s test also incorrectly identifies 5% of harmless subjects as killers-to-be.  Our sample, therefore, contains 999,900 benign individuals, of whom 5% or 49,995 will be wrongly labeled homicidal, and these, too, will be isolated from society and confined.  Thus, even with Smith’s near-miraculous test (which is, of course, a fiction), in order to preempt the murderous destiny of one “real” killer we must essentially destroy the lives of nearly 500 innocents.  This seems to defeat our original purpose, which was to protect the innocent from unwarranted harm.

                What this means, for the benefit of those who feel that the government (or somebody) should identify all these dangerous people before they strike, and get rid of them, is that it cannot be done.  Not within anything approximating a free and humane society.

                Unfortunately, no one can reliably identify the Jared Loughners of the world except they themselves.  Only they are privy to the diabolical fantasy world in which they live and evolve their ghastly masterpieces.  They usually end up killing themselves anyway.  If only, one thinks, they would recognize the monsters they have become and kill themselves before they pollute the innocent world with terror and grief.

                Probably some of them do.