Humpty Dumpty

On Voting and Gnosticism

Disclaimer

Hello. Some of you are going to find what I talk about in this post extremely stupid. I’m self aware enough to know that and I’m okay with it. Just, you know, fair warning. However, it’s also one of those things that you’re going to think is stupid now but which is going to sit with you and gradually gnaw away at your mental resistance until you realize I was right. This process may take months. Again, fair warning.

Taxidermied Dictators

Henceforth to be identified with Vladimir Lenin.

Matt from Quantum of Conscience coined a term not long ago. “A Stuffed Lenin.” This is an updated name for a concept which has floated around our “community” (if a vague online collective of people on the knife’s edge of sanity can be called such) for a while now, what we used to call a Humpty Dumpty. Yes. Like the egg.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;

All the king's horses and all the king's men

Couldn't put Humpty together again.

So, basically, the idea of A Stuffed Lenin or a Humpty Dumpty is a piece of culture which is artificially carried forward through time. The term refers to something (art maybe, or a poem, or a myth or a story) which is artificially promoted to the masses. It is repeated over and over again throughout the years to ensure that it stays relevant in society. We say artificially promoted, because in most all cases the piece of culture in question doesn’t seem good enough to garner such prolonged attention on its own merits. As strictly artistic pieces, they just don’t seem good enough to endure for so long, and yet they do. Something (not someone, some thing) pushes them.

For example, why do we all know the nursery rhyme about Humpty Dumpty? It’s not very good is it? It doesn’t go anywhere. It’s not part of a larger story or a grand epic. There are no other characters, no plot, no egg-based redemption arcs. No. Those four lines are the entirety of the Humpty Expanded Universe. A simple AABB quatrain with no apparent meaning or purpose for its existence.

So… why is it so popular?

That’s a Humpty Dumpty. That’s a Stuffed Lenin.

Most of the people in our “community” (again, biggest of scare quotes) posit that Humptys and Lenins exist becaue there is embedded in them some nugget of Truth. In other words, inside these Stuffed Lenins there is something you’re supposed to listen to. Something you need to hear. Something, maybe, that let’s you in on the nature of whatever game it is we’re all playing down here on Earth. In its most prosaic form I suppose you might say that we believe there is something in these Stuffed Lenins which rings true to our subconscious mind. We are therefore drawn to remember and repeat them, over and over again, even if we can’t really say why.

All the kings horses, all the kings men. But Humpty couldn’t be pieced back together again.

Lenin is similar. Yeah, the actual guy. The ugly bald one. The soviet fellow. You can still go see him, did you know that? Yeah he’s still around. Currently his body is stuffed like a taxidermied deer and on display in Red Square in Moscow where he has laid in state since 1924, almost a century now. Why is he there? Nobody knows. Sure, he was a big player on the world stage, but so were FDR and Heinrich Himmler and you don’t see them mummified outside of D.C. or Berlin. I mean, yeah, Vladimir helped jump-start Communism and I suppose some people like him for that but… does anybody really care that much? I mean, really?

Like an incorruptible Catholic saint he lies peacefully asleep.

They don’t. Last I heard the mausoleum is only open to the public about three hours a day and much less than seven days a week. Obviously this is to avoid the awkwardness of having the place be empty almost all the time. If you crowd everyone who wants to go into a tiny window of a few hours then the mausoleum won’t look totally deserted. Admission is also free because, as Matt said, if they charged so much as a nickle nobody would bother. On the whole I would say that people’s level of concern for Lenin’s corpse rivals their daily concern with the canon of Mother Goose nursery rhymes. Meaning that it’s zero.

And yet the man has a team of scientists working round the clock to keep the flesh from falling off his bones. If I had to guess I’d wager that he’s more wax and formaldehyde than man at this point.

Why?

Well, I can only speculate that, like the Humpty Dumpty rhyme, something about his corpse being there is important. Not to you or to me maybe but important to Something. Something out there in the universe.

The Humptys

I feel the same way about a lot of what passes for our “culture”. Most of it simply isn’t good and yet, it persists. For decades or centuries sometimes. Americans having bad taste is certainly part of the explanation but can’t be the whole of it as they also have shockingly short attention spans. They might well enjoy something bad completely organically, sure. But if they did they would forget it just as quickly and easily. For something to stick around in the public consciousness for generation after generation, especially something as low quality and trivial as Humpty Dumpty, it has to be serving a purpose. It has to be telling us something.

“Yoshi you are reaching! There’s no greater meaning in Lenin’s stuffed corpse or an old nursery rhyme. This entire concept of a “Humpty Dumpty” is nonsense.”

I hear you.

As a counterpoint though I would offer all the numerous little bits of myth and art and culture which are dropped into our laps from birth. Things which we know to be false but which we nevertheless find repeated to us over and over again. It’s almost as though Something believes it is important that we hear these things. Even though it also seems to be important that we know they are not true.

For example. Columbus thought the world was flat. Everybody knows that and was told so as a child. Simultaneously, everybody also knows it’s a big fat lie. Despite knowing it’s a lie, children to this day continue to hear the falling off the edge story, that people in the 1400s were afraid of sailing out into the ocean too far and falling off a literal cliff. Why does this myth persist and why has it for decades, when everyone saying it knows it isn’t true?

It’s a fair question.

Or what about the Moon being made of cheese? Clearly it isn’t, so why then does it seem that every generation of children is told it might be? More importantly, why does this idea stick in their minds? We hear all kinds of things as kids, most of them untrue and most of them we forget. But, “Moon’s made of cheese,” we remember. That sticks. Something in our subconscious believes it is important for us to remember that saying even though we all know it isn’t literally true.

Why?

Or what about blowing out a birthday candle to get your wish? Or wishing upon a shooting star? I don’t think many of us believe those things and yet we latch onto them as ideas. They imprint themselves on us. We feel compelled to repeat them to the next generation. As though, somehow, it were important that we do so.

There are many examples. These are just a few. The world is full of Stuffed Lenins and Humpty Dumptys. Probably you can even think of a few yourself without much trouble. They are never anything overly significant or important. Just little ubiquitous tidbits here and there that don’t seem to have much point for existing other than to stick in our brains. Why do these memetic memory worms exist? What gives them their power? Why do we latch on to them so hard?

The Gnostic Road

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

Yesterday there was an election. I don’t know who won and I didn’t vote and I don’t care. Like everyone else I used to care, sure. But I’m wiser now. I think by age forty-five or so, at the latest, you should have grown out of the notion that voting is a useful expenditure of your time. To not do so is, in my estimation, a sign of arrested development. I mean no offense here. Probably most of my readers don’t agree. Heck, most of you probably went to the polls. That’s okay. This is a place of respect. Your decisions are your own.

But just…

I want to ask you something...

It is possible, maybe, that the reason Humpty Dumpty has stuck around for hundreds of years is because it’s there to tell you that you shouldn’t? Vote, I mean.

Look, I dunno, we all come into the world and we all get into a lot of trouble and we all fall and get broken while we’re here. Is this not so? And, when we break, the natural instinct is to look around for someone to fix us. Right? I mean, that’s natural. It’s what babies do. A toddler falls and bumps his head and he’s supposed to cry for mommy to come and fix it. Yeah?

Yeah.

At some point you have to grow out of that though.

Is it possible that politics is a way for you not to? Is it possible voting is just a way to keep holding onto the apron strings?

What I mean to say is that the world is full of people in their fifties, sixties, and seventies who are still waiting for Mommy or Daddy to come and fix it. They’re sad, angry, depressed, hurt, and by-God they just want someone to hear their crying and come and pick them up and make it all okay. Like Mommy used to. Fortunately for them, there’s no shortage of people in this world willing to step up and try to do just that. “Vote for me,” they whisper. “I can stop the ouchies. I will kiss your boo-boo.” Or you know, maybe it’s, “Buy my product, it’s just like mommy’s hug.” The bad part is that these are all lies of course. There are boo-boos nobody can make better for you. You actually can’t be put back together again. At least, you know, not by all the king’s horses or all the king’s men.

All the kings men.

Look, I’m Catholic. It doesn’t take long hanging around a parish to realize that the child-like desire for someone to come along and make it okay plays a huge part in the religion. A lot of parishioners want a Mommy. They want Daddy. Heck they even call the guys up front in the fancy robes Father. And you know, The Church is pretty good at providing you with a surrogate parent, if that’s what you’re after. You come in those doors and you don’t have to worry about a thing if you don’t want to. Father, Daddy, will tell you what’s right and what’s wrong. He’ll tell you when you need to come and worship and when you can stay home. He’ll even sit down in a booth with you and listen to all the naughty things you’ve done and tell you it’s all okay. No need to think. No need to try and figure things out on your own. Just show up on the regular and do what Daddy says and you can be sure you’ve got your Good Person Card and can feel okay about all the complexities of life.

You give up your agency and, in return, they take away your guilt and that pesky problem of making decisions.

Not a bad deal honestly.

Except, I mean, sometimes Daddy rapes children. You know. As happens.

Listen, I’m not even saying that there’s anything wrong with such a set-up or that you shouldn’t do it or that it isn’t theologically sound to have a priestly class. I’m just pointing out that there’s an element of parental replacement and life-long infantilization in the psychology surrounding it. Or at least their often is. I don’t think that being infantilized by The Church is a necessary condition for membership but people seem to wind up there more often than not. Probably because they want to. Like I said, never having to think for yourself is a great deal.

Isn’t that what everybody in our society wants? To be able to just listen to the experts? They shriek about it all the time. “Somebody tell me what to do and what to think so I don’t have to have any responsibility for getting it wrong!” If you don’t want to defer your morality to a priest you can just as easily defer it to a scientist or a to a doctor. They’re priests too after all, just a different kind. For whatever behavior you want validated you can find a man with a degree to say its rooted in evolutionary biology, and therefore okay. If you want off the hook for screwing your life up and to not feel any particular pressure to fix it, there are likewise legions of doctors ready and able to diagnose you with a mental illness that makes all of it not your fault. If you’re an absolute bitch to people, and want to continue to be without blame, they hand out bipolar disorders out like candy. Hey, and you get free drugs too.

Like I say.

Having a Daddy is a good deal. Responsibility melts away.

The only problem is, so does your humanity. You never grow up. You become an old child, and there are few things more repulsive than an old child.

Politicians, scientists, priests, popes, gurus, doctors, experts, the state itself. There are endless numbers of would-be surrogates ready to treat you like a baby. It’s not their fault. Supply and demand. People really, really, want to give up their agency. They want to give up their inner light. Their inner knowing that guides them on the path. They want to subjugate their conscience to rules and norms of behavior. Why wouldn’t they? Choice is hard and being wrong is scary.

But.

Maybe that’s just what you’re supposed to do. Choose. Be wrong. Maybe you’re supposed to try.

After all, the rhyme is that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t put you together again. The rhyme doesn’t say that you can’t mend yourself. Maybe that’s why Humpty Dumpty sticks in our brains. Maybe that’s the message our subconscious is longing to hear.

This, of course, is Gnosticism. Technically a heresy. Sure. I admit it. I don’t know what you want me to do about it though as I’ve lived through the failure of every single institution I was supposed to put faith in. All of them. I’ve watched them all fall down. My earliest political memory is the government lying about weapons of mass destruction so some of my highschool buddies could go to the middle east and get their testicles blown off by a grenade. I was there when the financial system melted through a mass of fraud and not a single person was held accountable. Promises of Hope and Change that never came. A ridiculous man swearing up and down that the swamp was going to be drained. I’ve witnessed The Science™ change a hundred times over since I was a kid, back when Dinosaurs didn’t have feathers and we were all going to die because the O-zone had a hole in it. I’ve watched The Church change her doctrine in real time, all the while flatly denying she was doing so. My highschool teachers were dummies who didn’t have a clue. The police officer who taught our D.A.R.E classes was later arrested for selling drugs.

For better or worse, most of my life I’ve had to figure out myself, and one can’t help but become a bit of a Gnostic under such conditions. Bootstrapping one’s politics, philosophy, means of income, and religion will do that to you. At some point, if you’re an honest person and recognize that the instituions have failed you, you’ve got nothing left to go on but your gut. You innner light.

Cause at the end of the day the king’s men can’t fix you.

Heck, they can’t even fix the holes in the road.

So maybe voting is giving away your power. And wouldn’t that be ironic? If it were exactly the opposite of what they claim?

I mean, think about it, how many ballots have you cast in your life? Did any of those ballots ever make things better? Have you ever voted your way out of even one of life’s problems? If not… do you really think you’re ever going to?

In your heart, does this look like a bunch of empowered people? Or are they people trapped in a system that offers them no escape?

I’m not telling you how to live. For my part I try to have as little to do with anyone claiming to be an “authority” as possible. This is surprisingly very doable. It turns out that if you don’t want somebody to pretend to be your parent they can’t really force their parentage on you too much. But, most people do want that. They do want somebody to pretend and that’s fine. It really is. I’m not here to tell people what they should or shouldn’t want.

I think though, in your heart, that maybe you know that all such things are futile. I think that’s why you heard a nursery rhyme about an egg falling off a wall when you were four and never forgot it. I think it stuck with you because your soul knows its true. Because all the kings men, all the power of the institutions of the world, aren’t actually able to make you happy.

No. You have to find that within yourself. Within others you have relationships with. You have to find that in nature and in living the good life. You have to be your own king (or queen). You have to sit down and make your peace with God.

As to why the moon is made of cheese I can’t say. Nor do I know why we all have to be told that Columbus was afraid of falling off the edge of the world. I think maybe those things stick with us because when we look up at the full moon on a clear winter’s night we all know inside ourselves that there’s something magical about it. Something more to the story than it just being a space rock. Something that maybe, in a weird way, we consume, like cheese.

Don’t know about Lenin though. That one’s just weird.

The Kingdom of Heaven is within you. Namaste.