The Monster

"[We] are not servants of some God; we are our own gods." says Michael Aquino, Satanist, paedophile, and Oprah guest.

"The Jewish people as a whole will be its own Messiah." wrote Baruch Levy in response to Karl Marx's request that he write something that he could masturbate over.


And then there's Anthony Robbins. Robbins is a fellow who found a way to offer paying customers the closest thing to a religious experience imaginable without actually having a deity involved. Best I can make out Robbins replaced the deity with the self. Whether his devotees get it or not they have effectively posited themselves as gods and are praying at their own altar.

I know a fellow who met his wife at an Anthony Robbins meeting. They married and had a son, and whether it's Robbins' doctrine or not, they thought it would be a good idea to loudly and frequently tell this boy that he was a genius. I'd only see them a couple of times a year but each time, within the short space of a few hours, I'd hear half a dozen public declarations as to his genius.

I'll admit that it's possible he was a genius, really I have no idea. All I know is that I never saw anything that impressed. But what is certain is that he believed he was a genius. He was special and he knew it. And when his three brothers were born and inexplicably weren't told that they were geniuses and thus were fairly normal, he ruled them like a tyrant. He was never not pummelling them, stealing their shit, or being pissed off that someone other than himself might be the centre of attention. At one social gathering I asked him if he could do me a favour and not beat, knock down, or otherwise sit on any of his brothers for the next hour. He said okay and yet thirty pathological seconds later he had one of them in a headlock.

School was the same. There, he was precisely the bully from hell. By the time he'd been kicked out of two high schools it seems he'd wised up enough to be somewhat less obvious. As for the acid test of his genius by way of school marks, um... who knows? His mother who'd spent the first ten years of his life telling everyone who'd listen what a genius he was seemed to go uncharacteristically quiet on the subject.

He could come good this kid - it's not impossible. Anyone who's seen Michael Apted's 7Up series would know that anything can happen. But regardless I'm going to call it - if you want to make a monster, start with a regular human and tell them they're a genius. Tell them they're special. Tell them they're better~over~above everyone else. Hell, tell them they're chosen by God. That'll work just dandy.


And anyone rolling their eyes at the disorganised witlessness of the above parental flattery and who imagines that their heavily codified, honed-over-centuries version is vastly superior, well... you don't get it. The result is still a monster.

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Part three below.