Article: The ADPAS Categories

Watership Down corollary: Cowslip's Warren: the warren of the snares, location on map: C4.

Architectural analogy: Take the 54 blocks in a Jenga set and sprawl them out across the floor. The horizontal exposure represents facticity (homonomy), and the lack of vertical exposure represents a lack of transcendence (pattern of vicarious living).

Dogmatic Nihilism

Primary Example: Christianity (the Anointed One)

Doctrine and Dogma. Monotheistic. Goal: Escape Satan, Sin, and Hell. Christianity, like Buddhism, seeks to derive its values from the external world and finds the external world lacking. But unlike Buddhism, Christianity's facts are derived not from the external world but from phantasy. � ��"There is no meaning in this world--but there is in the next! There we find our justification for meaning as well as right and wrong, and there we find the hope for a better world. But isn't it strange? Some people don't realize that we live in a fallen, sinful world. How can we go about convincing them that this life is a mistake so that we can then help them escape?� ��

Other Examples: Kierkegaard, Monotheism in general, Fascism, Totalitarianism in general, Maybe Plato, Kantian moral theory5, the Inquisition, Al-Ghazali, psychopathy, ritualism.

Monotheism is inherently problematic. Compared to monotheists, polytheists tend to get along with one another. � ��"You have your gods, we have ours. No problem.� �� Monotheists don't get along with anyone. They don't get along with polytheists, and they don't get along with other monotheists. Genuine peace among monotheists is only possible to the extent that they don't take themselves seriously (liberal Christianity, for example). The polytheist methodology is something akin to, � ��"This is what it looks like from our perspective. How does it look from your perspective? Okay, how can we work out some common understanding?� �� In contrast, the monotheist perspective starts out with the assertion, � ��"We are totally right and everyone else is totally wrong. The reason why there are bad things in the world is because not everyone does what we want them to do. Solution: All we have to do is get everyone in the world to believe exactly what we believe and to do exactly what we tell them to do. Then everything will be perfect, forever!� �� Even if this were possible, which it isn't, to the extent that it becomes a reality it is horrible. It is the very definition of tyranny. It closes down innovation and turns individuals into slaves. Monotheism, like totalitarianism, has only ever come into being under the most dire and unstable of circumstances--as a last ditch effort for some aspect of life to at least survive in some form. Its maintenance has always come at the cost of science, social welfare, and individual liberty. The reason Europe and Canada, for example, are not prone to the same religious fanaticism (or violent crime, for that matter) as the U.S., I would hypothesize, is because their social welfare programs prevent them from yielding a sea of desperate and easily exploitable masses. (Of course this is merely a hypothesis. Correlation is not causation--a basic principle of science which is often lost on the larger populace and which we all need to be steadfast in recognizing.) Within the U.S. there are certain aspects of the Religious Right who would like to see the social services that do exist dismantled, so that their roles can be taken over by churches--something that should give pause to those that praise them for their love of charity. The continual splintering that occurs in monotheism should come as no surprise, given how artificially imposed a perspective it is from the outset. So really the difference between monotheism and polytheism is the difference between violent, balkanized, disastrous polytheism and unified, cooperative, sustainable polytheism.

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This structural pattern is exemplified by monotheism on the religious level, totalitarianism on the state level, and psychopathy6 on the individual level. On the cellular level it is called cancer. It exhibits the appearance of strength--converting or destroying all around it--but it is fundamentally unstable and ends by destroying itself and destroying its host. It's a � ��"Lose-Lose� �� scenario. Cancer is of course the most acute form of this and it runs its course rather quickly. In the religious sphere this is comparatively very subtle and slow in its operation--though in the time-table of the human religious experience monotheism has not been around for very long at all, and within that time it's done considerable harm. Whatever level it is operating on, however, its behavior is the same--disregard for its internal components and external environment.

Dogmatic nihilists often consider themselves idealists, and the term idealism has traditionally been used to describe this perspective, but they are not idealists in the sense that I mean because--well, because they think life is bad. They think life is so bad that they seek to escape into a fantasy that is its antithesis--as opposed to dogmatic idealists, whose fantasies are used to reinforce the processes of life, or pragmatic nihilists, who seek shelter in knowledge rather than fantasy.

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Archetype: The Crusader / Inquisitor.

Watership Down corollary: Efrafa, location on map: D15.

Architectural analogy: Take the 54 blocks in a Jenga set and try to build an upside-down pyramid (with one block as the base, two blocks on top of that, three blocks on top of that, etc). This structure has both horizontal and vertical exposure (and thus both facticity and transcendence), but it has them in the wrong place (pattern of vicarious living and pattern of noncommitment). Thus it is more structurally unsound, not less. Though it forms an interesting mirror image of pragmatic idealism.

Dogmatic Idealism

Primary Example: Tenrikyo (Divine Reason)

Doctrine and Dogma. Panentheistic. Goal: Live the Joyous Life. Tenrikyo derives its facts from phantasy--there is a mother/father God; the universe was created 900,099,999 years before the year 1838 (not as bad as 6 thousand years ago, mind you, but still wrong); human beings were created in Japan; the first man was made from a fish; the first woman was made from a snake; various animals were made into our organs; Tenrikyo's foundress, Miki Nakayama (yes, a woman), became the Shine of God the Parent on October 26, 1838, etc etc. But its values are derived from phantasy as well. What is the purpose of life? � ��"To be happy. And life is wonderful!� �� They seek to create the Joyous Life here on earth. Does Tenrikyo, deriving its concept of reality from phantasy, have an idea of sin? It does, though in that its values are positive, this has a less destructive incarnation. There are � ��"dusts of the mind� �� that get in the way of one's experience of joy and that one must brush away, but the goal is still happiness in this world (in general, everything that we call � ��"superstition� �� would also fall under this category of cultural OCD for dogmatic idealists). Christians want to escape to heaven and have their enemies sent to hell. Buddhists want to escape to Nirvana and have their enemies reincarnate (in hell, as animals, as hungry ghosts, etc) where their suffering will either merely continue or actually increase. But those of Tenrikyo wish only to reincarnate as human beings in this world forever--and this fate they assign to all human beings. � ��"And isn't it wonderful! Why would you ever want anything else? This world is a wonderful, beautiful place. Let's live together in joy forever!� ��

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