A Rant About Some Bullshit on the Internet.

I can’t believe I’m writing another post. Seriously. This is getting ridiculous.

First of all, happy 4^th, my darlings. America and freedom and soldiers and blah, blah, blah, this isn’t what the post is about, moving on.

I came across this video on my newsfeed, posted by Nero Bellum, the singer of Psyclon Nine, the band that my invisible/imaginary followers are probably damn sick of hearing me purr about (side note, they’re coming to Columbus in September! AHHHHHH! :ahem:.) Now, this video is the kind of thing I usually go out of my way to avoid, because all it does is fill me with useless rage and frustration. And piss me off it did, as well as most of the fanbase on Bellum’s Facebook page. The video is peppered with angry comments ranging from “not this bullshit again” to “fuck all Christians.” And I completely understand why. For most members of the subculture of dark glamour, this is the millionth time someone has railed against them with the impotent self-righteousness that Christianity is so well known for. Psyclon Nine’s themes as a band do rail against Christianity, beautifully and poetically, so I’m sure they get shit like this all the time. This isn’t so much what bothers me about the video. Christianity vs. anti-Christianity in any form, whether it be “Satanism” or logical thought, is an old dance, and the closer the religion comes to its death throes in America, the worse it’s going to get with stuff like this (hello, Westboro Baptist Church.)

Ladies and gentlemen, the aesthetic paragraph break, plus a sexy picture.

What bothers me about this video is that this isn’t the cautionary tale through life experience that it’s pretending to be. It’s an unintentional reveal of the psyche of a simple minded and self-loathing individual who has probably been screaming for help his entire life. The Christian church, the gothic underground, and every other location of extremes (skinheads, hippies, far-winged Democrats and Republicans, etc) are filled to the brim with people like this. This is a person so base and closed-minded that he can only view the world in extremes. He went from drug addict to reborn to Satanic to reborn again. He lived from one far side of the pendulum to the other, and he sees the world like a 1930s comic book: Good and Evil, Light and Darkness, Truth and Fallacy.  People like that are drawn to Christianity because that is, at its core, what it preaches. People like that are also drawn to places of “total darkness”, or what the simple minded perceive as “total darkness”—the goth scene, Anton LeVey, eyeliner and fishnets and wallet chains, oh my!—because of their inability to think outside extremes.

Look, here’s the dirty little secret. Life isn’t black and white. This world isn’t black and white. There is no Good and Evil and there are no definitive answers to what it is always right and what is always wrong. Anyone who believes they have these answers are being deliberately obtuse and living with blinders on so they can’t see the full picture*. The reason people do this is because some cannot live in a world that they do not understand, they can’t handle not having answers. They must live within unchanging extremes because that’s the only way they’re able to figure out where they stand, how to live, whether or not they’re living “right.” For many people, it stems from a fear of death (most religions provide an “answer” to what happens when we die), but for others, like this guy, it runs so much deeper.

I’m no psychologist, but I think this video reveals enough about this guy for anyone to be able to figure out his life’s story. This is a guy with limited intelligence and no true sense of identity. According to what he says about his age, he was in his fucking 20s when he had his first girlfriend. It’s a solid assumption that he has been a socially awkward person most of his life with little connection to other people. That, paired with his voice (sorry dude) and mannerisms, also makes me feel pretty safe in assuming that he was at the very least neglected by his peers, if not ridiculed or even bullied.  Barring sociopathy and similar disorders, no matter how antisocial we are, as human beings, we long to connect, to have a sense of belonging. That is what drove this guy to Christianity and to what he calls the goth scene—both establishments, in their sermons and lyrics, have a very strong message: We know what we are talking about. And we welcome you. It wasn’t Satan speaking through sinister beats or Jesus spewing love juice out of a minister’s mouth. It was him searching for some shred of stability and human connection in his life.

People like this drive me nuts. One, because they are someone who so desperately needs help and not a single person in their lives has recognized that and given them true aid, and two, because they inevitably try to impose their defective worldview on others, more often than not condemning one extreme they had been a part of in favour of the other. This guy has swung multiple times—condemning Christianity with Satanism and currently condemning the entire goth scene with “Jesus”—and he will swing back again. I guarantee it. Once he realizes that the church doesn’t actually cure his anxiety and depression and other psychological baggage, he’ll be embittered and once again seeking solace in “the darkness.” Or he will once again escape into drugs, which have no answers or friendship but take away his pain. It’s a tragedy.

As for his plea for Nero and others to “repent”, that is truly sad and infuriating. I understand the impulse from the many Christian friends I have who have feared for my immortal soul and begged me to see the light of ignoran-er, salvation. But for this guy to say that he “loves” Nero, man, and he wants him to repent for his sins, man…it just shows that this guy has the mentality of a child of divorce wishing his parents would get back together. That, or a preteen whose heart swells with hope when she hears that her favourite celebrity is newly single. First of all, we all have our affinities/obsessions with celebrities, but when it boils down to it, we don’t know them. We don’t love them like their family does or their spouses do. We don’t know them at all. Secondly, to say that you love someone, then ask them to turn away from everything that they represented to you makes absolutely no sense and just drives home the fact that you don’t really love this person, you love the feeling their art gives you. Asking Nero to turn to Christianity is like asking Bill O’Reilley to be liberal. It’s just not who they are. It sounds to me like he’s looking for validation, that in converting the man he worshipped during his “dark phase” to his personal new way of thinking, he could then feel that he’s made the right choice.  This just proves that nothing, nothing at all has changed in this poor guy. He still has no sense of identity, no sense of stability, and still craves connection to others that he obviously is not getting.

And as this random rant winds to a close, I do have to say I hate how he focused on his depression and anxiety and insinuated that he was like that because he was in the goth scene. Look, here’s the truth. Members of the goth subculture do have a lot of emotional issues on the whole. AND SO DOES ALL OF MANKIND. I think the only real difference is that goths are more genuine about their emotions. They wear their hearts on their sleeves where others sweep their issues under the rug. The same can be said for any artistic and imaginative subculture...like the Joker, they paint who they are on the outside, rather than keeping it hidden inside. That makes them more genuine than most people you meet on the street. It really bugged me that he tried to pin off his psychological baggage on the music he listened to or the clothes he wore. Blaming the problem on the symptoms is classic denial. I have depression and anxiety too, dude, but I was born with my little black heart. I was a freak long before the situations that caused my personal psychological issues occurred. I don't pretend that listening to Combichrist and Suicide Commando caused my problems. Grow up.

In short, this guy is a misguided moron with a lot of issues that need to be addressed. The world is not black and white. Priests aren’t good and goths aren’t evil. The angel and devil on your shoulders are just you. No one has the answers to questions you have to discover for yourself. So stay off fucking Youtube and see a psychiatrist, dammit.

Oh, and btw, what the hell was with this guy and trying to make a connection to evil and San Franciso, California? Oh, no, everybody avoid San Francisco....they have the best Pride parades!

*Funny tidbit. Even the most archaic schools of thought on what is ‘evil’ change with the times, locations, cultures, etc. I remember when Hot Topic first cropped up at a mall close to my hometown, and one of my friends’ parents refused to allow her to go into the store because Hot fucking Topic was “evil.” The mother’s exact words were “The entrance even looks like the Gates of Hell.” Hot. Fucking. Topic. The Gates of Hell. Today that is absolutely hilarious, but to my tiny Evangelical cow town in 1998, Hot Topic was terrifying.

....all right, I can't resist getting one last shot in. I seriously hate how people see Goths as evil and devilish. Come on. The devil is supposed to be God's greatest adversary, right? He's supposed to be so diabolical and so manipulative and deceptive that we are drawn to him and tempted by him. Why then would the devil hang out with goths, less than 1% of the population of mankind? Wouldn't it benefit him better to, I don't know, blend in? This is another issue with seeing the world in black and white. I'm willing to bet that if Christians thought about it, the devil would probably look more like this:

Than this:

If the devil was such a worth adversary, I'm pretty sure he'd have figured out that you catch more flies with honey, people.