The Devil's Party: A History of Charlatan Messiahs (2024)

I enjoyed this one, although it meandered and included (yet again) material from Wilson's other books, but on the whole it was a good overview of a number of messiah's and cults, written in Wilson's usual engaging prose.

A few good concluding points, but also some things that to me suggest he has never really got to the core of the issue with these charlatan messiahs, being too quick and keen to fit it in to line with his own theory of how to stop the leakage in ones mental concentration, as he calls it.

We can take hope from the failings of many charlatan messiahs, not because they were merely deluded and we can take their methods and use them without delusion. No, we are all susceptible to delusions on one level or another and to categorically deny this would just be hubris and a kind of mask that colin wilson criticises in the charlatan messiahs in this book. We can take hope because they are the early failing and sprawling attempts to find meaning in a new and much more complicated reality we now find ourselves in. The whole world of humanity is now interconnected to degrees and in ways never seen before. This gives us much greater influence in one sense, it also means there are innumerably more hidden and unintended ripples and ramifications of our own actions and beliefs through the social fabric.

For this to not get out of control we have to exercise great caution to not succumb to things such as paranoia, hatred and criminality and self delusion and narcisistic estimations of ones own importance. Just as we can send an influence out into the world much quicker, it comes back at us much quicker also. This creates a tendency to hide behind masks of normalcy, safe predictable roles that stop us from standing out from the herd. But we cannot hide in this state forever without stultifying the human spirit.

The attempted forays outside of normalcy are dangerous and liable to failure in this new more complicated than ever social reality of human beings. But we must still venture out and it is a trial and error process like learning anything new. Extreme criminal acts cannot be lightly forgiven, but also they cannot and should not be simply dismissed and forgotten when they recur often and indicate a critical issue in our current social malaise. I prefer to see it as a reality we are all striving to adjust to and dial into, rather than as a normality that some people fall woefully short of. This way we can respect and potentially learn something from anyones experience, rather than merely dismissing it as below our higher, more enlightened state.

This piece of self indulgent crap better get better soon or its on the fire pyre I tell you.