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.

Fallen Heroes and the Ability to Lead by Example Only

Unfortunately, because they are only human, frustrations and best intentions sometimes drive transcenders to the dark side. This happened in fiction to Anakin Skywalker (Star Wars), Ozymandias (Watchmen) or Harvey Dent (The Dark Knight), all committing murder and/or genocide in order to do their own perception of good, but also numerous times in reality. History have treated many leaders harshly in retrospect, yet in their own time they might have been hailed as saviors by their subjects. As aforementioned Harvey Dent forebodes in The Dark Knight; ‘You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.’ This can be certainly be said for many revolutionaries of the past. Robespierre, Mao and Stalin for instance. Toppled one tyrannical regime just to form their own.

From their own point-of-views even the starkest pretenders might perceive themselves as transcenders, serving the greater good. Adolf Hitler, Osama bin Laden and countless other pretenders committed the transgressions they did because they felt they were fulfilling a higher duty. Be it the right of the Master Race, God’s Will or whatever, they believed they had the right to kill others to achieve what they perceived as the greater good and they used the Trinity of Control to persuade entire populations to follow their causes. The easy answer to this conundrum was that they, as well as the other historical leaders mentioned above, were never true transcenders but rather a more fundamentalist pretender, or maybe even a dancer, playing to the tunes of previous pretenders. Intelligent yes, no doubt, they came a very long way towards their respective goals, but they never left the Dancefloor of Existence and were throughout their endeavors still controlled by other powers than their own, even if they did not perceive it that way themselves. Regardless of where they originated, one cannot dispute where they ended, at the very peak of pretendence, conceiving themselves as all-powerful Masters of the Micro-Multiverse and using that self-imposed title to deal out death and judgment over entire population groups. As such they remain as stark examples of how to manipulate the Dancefloor of Existence into submission by utilizing the Trinity of Control.

In contrast, true transcenders are their own masters and possess the humility to never force their opinions on others but rather just shine a clear bright light down onto the Dancefloor of Existence, like a lighthouse beacon, slowly shining through the smoke, strobes and all-encompassing chaos of the Dancefloor, at times getting through to individuals who as a result manage to escape to a more enlightened place. They lead by example rather than by force. They may employ the Trinity of Control but only to people willing to listen. Transcenders are in it for the species, pretenders are in it for themselves. But the dark side is always there and the longing for a quick fix solution to our species’ most serious problems can drive even the most well-meaning transcenders into darkness where they suddenly no longer see the light and resort to reprehensible actions like the examples given at the beginning of this post. Self-imposed transcendence is a bit of a paradox, because assuming that title could send you on a path to the dark side, given how darkness seems to persist in all of us at some depth. More on that to follow.