Lessons from the Darkness

As part of our human/animal nature, I think darkness is inherent in all of us, transcenders, sociopathic psychopaths, and everyone on the Dancefloor as well. Whatever triggers it, desperation, longing for solutions or a false sense of entitlement, when it shows its ugly face it can consume and destroy you completely and transform you into someone else entirely, brilliantly illustrated by Robert Louis Stevenson in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and numerous times by Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. Like me, they are not afraid of acknowledging the darker side within us and I think this is also a key trait to transcenders. A more modern example is David Lynch. Like none other, he has repeatedly shown this inherent darkness in even everyday household fathers and husbands and small town America, lurking underneath the surface ready to consume and possess you, most exquisitely shown in Twin Peaks. A show that I coincidentally, what I would today term as true determinist fashion, watched around the same time as my fascination with Dexter peaked. This was generally the time when I for the first time really delved into the human dark side, including my own.

There is a reason I feel a fascination and in the case of Dexter Morgan, an actual connection, with the sociopathic psychopaths or pretenders as I call them. I now know what that is. In reality, they are very much like transcenders but fueled by darkness rather than light. Studying them and understanding what they and thus humans are capable of, enables you to better understand this inherent darkness. Once you realize what humans can do to each other, under desperate circumstances or just due to icy cold psychopathic evil, it gives you better protection against the dangers that other humans constitute. Instead of always expecting other people to be nice to you because of their good nature and their ability to control their emotions, when you realize that there is severe darkness in the world, you always have your guard up in life. Pretending the darkness doesn’t exist is like a child covering its eyes when it is scared. Instead staring blankly into the face of evil, into the human darkness not only increases your path to transcending, it also makes you better able to see danger approaching and if need be, defend yourself against it. Make no mistake, the world is a cold, dark place. The universe that surrounds it is mostly made up of an empty, freezing cold vacuum. Thankfully, more and more, popular culture is starting to acknowledge this darkness, instead of pushing the traditional happy endings.

One of the best TV-shows I have ever watched, True Detective, deals specifically with this inherent darkness in the world and brilliantly illustrates it through their main characters staring at a starry night sky. There is a lot of darkness up there, and only a few lights breaking it, Matthew McCoughaney states. This is a great analogy. I like to think that the lights are primarily made up of transcenders, but as the metaphor demonstrates darkness is unfortunately by far the prevailing force in our world. “The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.” Thus ends Se7en, but as Somerset - Morgan Freeman’s character - states, he only agrees with the second statement. The world of Se7en and True Detective is our world. It is the world we live in. Deal with it. Don’t shun it. Absorb it. Study it. Learn from it.