The Psychological Function of Hell

Devils and seducers-Picture is from the Vision of hell by Dante Alighieri, popular edition, published in 1892, London-England. Illustration by Gustave Dore
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It can be useful to compare belief systems to home appliances and our mind to an electrical socket. As long as an appliance has a plug which will fit in the wall-socket it can draw power, regardless of whether it is an appliance which is in good running order and does something useful or a faulty appliance which shoots out sparks which cause the house to catch on fire and burn down. We will often come to believe something which conforms to some psychological need, regardless of whether it functions well to meet that need over the long term. It may be a false satisfier. When this is the case, trying to argue against the belief based on evidence can be futile. What is needed is less to understand the belief system as to understand the nature of the need which causes us to be attached to it. We want to understand the nature of the socket if we are going to find a better appliance to plug into it.

Reading religious texts has led me to contemplate the concept of Hell. Some texts spend a lot of time talking about who will go to Hell and graphically describing it’s torments.

Jordan Peterson, in his series of lectures on the psychological significance of the Bible stories, argues that religion has to be more than “the opiate of the masses,” because, if you just wanted something to make you feel good, you wouldn’t have the concept of Hell. 

There are strengths and weaknesses to this argument. Some see religion as a tool for controlling “the masses.” In this context perhaps the opium comparison fits. A drug dealer has the addict wrapped around his little finger. How? Because if the addict doesn’t get his dose, he suffers withdrawal symptoms. His heaven becomes a hell. Either way, it works as a pacifier. The addict is either too wasted or too sick to stand up for himself.

However, I agree with Peterson that religion is too complex and meaningful a phenomena to be dismissed in this way.

I agree with him that we can look on the concepts of Heaven and Hell as representing states of being in the world. If we go down the wrong path our life can certainly become a hell. Take a happily married man with children. One day he is tempted to have an affair. From that point on his life becomes dominated by the fear of being found out. When he is, his family breaks up and he sees his children growing bitter. He knows that his simple mistake may have negative consequences into future generations, when he had hoped he would be the rock on which his children would get their best start in life. That’s a common form of hell. For someone else it might be ending up in jail.

I experienced my own hell while in hospital for a breakdown - a time when my mental suffering was so great I begged for death. The mistakes I made that took me to that point were mistakes in thinking. It wasn’t a departure from moral behaviour, as far as I’m aware. And my aim in my writing has been to try to help others to avoid ending up where I did.

Peterson’s focus has been on how the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps and Soviet Gulags occurred. What is it in us that makes us capable of turning our world into Hell? From this perspective, the religious texts make some sense. If such events occur because of the collective effect of individuals abandoning moral responsibility and honesty in their own lives, then it is not beyond the bounds of probability that we could make real the horrors of the Book of Revelations. We really could all go to Hell.

The problem is that the idea of Hell, as it occurs in religion, is often not functional. Sure there are real hells and potential hells, but does the concept that we might have our flesh burned off endlessly for eternity inspire in us the kind of behaviour which will prevent us from bringing them upon us?

If we take this idea literally, what kind of cosmic order does it speak of? If we lived in a state where order was maintained by the threat of torture, we would rightly consider it the most oppressive of dictatorships. And in such a state, it would be hard to achieve anything positive. Living in permanent fear doesn’t bring the best out of people. Imagine if someone pointed a gun at your head and told you to assemble a piece of Ikea furniture, telling you that if you didn’t have it successfully assembled in half an hour they would blow your brains out.

And belief in Hell is not a defence against becoming a participant in the kinds of atrocities seen in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. People who professed a belief in Hell have been known to burn people alive or crucify them. Hell could easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So how might this idea have developed and what is the need which it satisfies, albeit in a pathological way?

First, lets look at another psychological phenomena which fits a similar pattern - the mental illness known as obsessive compulsive disorder. This is an anxiety disorder in which a link forms between an anxiety and a ritual. A person may be obsessed about the possibility of catching a deadly disease and feel that, in order to protect themselves, they have to keep washing their hands with fresh bars of soap, perhaps unwrapping and disposing of the paper wrapper around the soap while wearing rubber gloves. Or someone may feel that, if they don’t line all of the books on their bookshelves exactly straight, one of their children will die. This is a form of what David A. Kessler, M.D. calls “capture”. [Capture : Unravelling the Mystery of Mental Suffering, 2016]. The mind has a tendency to come back to anxious thoughts - in a field of neutral information, such thoughts have a charge of significance - and so the neural pathways to those thoughts become more well-developed. If there is something which soothes that anxiety then the mind will get into the habit of associating the anxiety to that which soothes it, and so what starts as the equivalent of a dirt track becomes a superhighway circling endless around between the anxiety and the soothing ritual. This individual condition gives an idea of the socket into which the religious belief appliance can be plugged.

If we want to see how the religious conception of Hell originated we need to go back to another religious story, that of Adam and Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. This is a symbolic way of acknowledging the birth of idealism. Idealism, in this context, means the idea that we should set a standard for our behaviour and try to maintain that standard through self-discipline and group discipline. This is the beginning of criticism. This is fine except that it gradually leads to an undermining of self-acceptance. Thus we come to resent some of the criticism. Eventually it lead to feelings of guilt, which turned our attention back towards ourselves making us more selfish and ego-embattled. It generates anger. So the story of humanity can be understood as a conflict between idealism and the wounded ego. This expresses itself as a battle between discipline and defiance, which at base is defiance of criticism.

For society to hold together we need to maintain discipline. This is what we mean by civilisation - it is our defiance we are attempting to civilise. But self-acceptance is always being eroded and the defiant impulse becomes increasingly strong.

We know that we need to restrain our defiance of moral principles so that the society on which we all depend can be maintained, but the more the pressure builds the harder that is.

I think this is where a concept such as Hell may have become perversely attractive. Normally we would think that beliefs motivate behaviour, but I think that, sometimes, behaviour can motivate a belief. You know that maintaining your discipline is important. You don’t want to suffer the individual consequences of misbehaviour. And you recognise that society is dependent on such discipline. But that is a rational motive, and what you are trying to restrain are some pretty powerful emotions or drives. Now what if someone told you that people who broke the law would suffer after they died? You might actually welcome that idea, because it might be just what you need to motivate you to maintain your discipline.

Unfortunately, this is liable to be a negative feedback loop. It helps to motivate restraint, but it doesn’t solve the problem of the erosion of self-acceptance which is driving the defiance which needs to be restrained. Thus, in order to be effective, the stories about how terrible Hell is have to get worse. And the worse they get, the more we are captured by them. And, of course, as with the person with obsessive compulsive disorder, reassuring rituals become locked in by this capture.

When we see people who place a high importance on the threat of brimstone and hellfire we can see that they are people who are having a hard battle restraining their appetites, or they are people who are cynically manipulating such people.

If we learn to cultivate unconditional self-acceptance we can heal the spirit of defiance at its source, live according to the necessary moral principles without internal struggle and discover our spiritual relationship to the universe and our fellows. Thus can we leave Hell behind us and know Heaven.

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Why Do We Have a Dark Side?

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What produces the dark side of we humans?

Some think that we are instinctively competitive and that the roots of our dark side can be found in our underlying animal tendency to form a dominance hierarchy.

We are biological entities with biological needs. It makes sense that a shortage of something we need might lead to conflict in the absence of a very strong cultural structure to restrain that tendency. If there is a shortage of food we might fight over what is available because our desire to remain alive overrides any disinclination to deprive others.

Among other animals there is often a breeding imperative which leads to competition for a mate. Does this apply on a biological level for humans? That’s hard to say. As intelligent beings with imagination we don’t have to follow our instincts. If we don’t listen to what our instincts would tell us about what food is healthy to eat, why would we think that we listen to our instincts when it comes to striving to win the most biologically healthy mate we come in contact with? Of course we often do put a great deal of effort into winning a particular kind of mate, but is it for biological reasons or psychological reasons? A millionaire’s trophy wife will win him the envy of his peers, but she may not necessarily be the best breeding prospect.

One of the factors which has given us the power to dominate the global environment as a species is our ability to cooperate and to override our instincts with the use of our intelligence and imagination. When faced with a food crisis, I imagine that chimpanzees don’t have much option but to fight it out. We humans can come up with a strategy for rationing the food and setting off in search of a new home where food is more plentiful.

We are less likely to compete for biological reasons than other animals, and yet, as a species, we have been far more brutally destructive for reasons which are not immediately obvious.

We follow the pleasure principle and the pleasure principle, in the absence of the kinds of dominating biological factors which lead to conflict amongst other animals, fosters love. The most pleasant form of life for us is to live in a close community, easing the burdens of life through cooperative strategies and sharing the sensual pleasure that comes through affectionate interaction of all kinds.

So what is the darkness that plagues us, standing in the way of such a blissful existence?

Psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich points out that the stifling of natural drives channels that energy into malignant symptoms. Our instincts are to love, to engage in productive activity, to learn, and to enjoy an erotic relationship with another individual. Hatred is generated by the frustration of the instinct to love. This can be the self-hatred characterised by depression and other forms of mental illness or hatred felt towards others.

But it is not simple barriers which impede the loving instinct in this way. We can see plenty of evidence that love is able to stand firm in the face of the obstacles life throws at it. It is when the loving instinct is frustrated at it’s very base that it gives rise to toxic secondary drives.

Love is a form of communication characterised by openness, honesty, spontaneity and generosity. Only if we are capable of being open, honest, spontaneous and generous in our relationship with our own self can we interact lovingly with others. Any lack of honesty with self will compromise our honesty with others. When we fear aspects of our self this compromises our capacity for spontaneity. We don’t trust ourselves to be spontaneous. And if we are not generous towards our self, then we won’t be able to be generous toward others without resenting the fact that we are treating them better than we treat our self. The ability to love our self is central to the ability to love anyone else.

So what threatens our ability to love our self? To love our self is to accept our self. Why would we fail to accept our self? What makes us feel that we are not worthy of acceptance?

From The Function of the Orgasm by Wilhelm Reich

I think the answer is idealism. It’s necessary for us to have some kind of system of thought to guide our behaviour. We need to understand that some forms of behaviour will lead to bad results for us, either directly or because they lead to bad results for others, which will be disadvantageous to us as well. But it is possible for such a system to be so strict or so harshly imposed that it comes to oppress us. It is one thing to be guided by a gentle hand and it is another to be kicked and shoved and berated by the one who would direct our behaviour. There are times when doing what is right is intrinsically very difficult. The question is whether our guidance system helps to foster courage or leaves us weak by undermining our capacity to feel good about ourselves at all. If idealistic expectations, either personal or from peers, are too strict, they will tend to engender in us increasing levels of resentment towards them. This resentment will then spill over into our behaviour towards others, and, in the extreme, can manifest as a drive to inflict suffering or death upon the innocent and defenceless.

How does this work? Well, if you feel oppressed by the demand that you be good, if you experience this demand as something which gradually erodes the self-acceptance which is, metaphorically speaking, the floor of the house in which you live, so that you just get angrier and angrier as you are backed further and further into the only remaining corner, the one thing which might give you some temporary relief is to rebel against that demand, to respond to its demand that you do the best thing by deliberately doing the very worst thing.

How did I come to this conclusion? I looked into myself, into the heart of my own darkness. I remember once seeing footage of a group of men attacking a pod of dolphins with machetes. They hacked and hacked and hacked and the bay was filled with blood. Everyone was saying : “How horrible! What monsters those men are!” I was thinking : “Hacking dolphins to death might provide a kind of relief.” This was at a time when I was prone to depression. When we are depressed we don’t love ourselves and we don’t get any consolation from the love of others. It’s almost worse to be loved when we feel we don’t deserve it. Either the other person is a fool for not realising how unworthy of love we are, or we are a fraud for not disabusing them.

I could have identified with the dolphins. Many, including many depressed people, probably would. I don’t know why I’ve always had a tendency to identify with victimisers rather than victims when confronted with these kinds of scenarios. But this tendency has an advantage for someone who wants to understand human problems. If our imagination tends to take us into the position of a victim then we may have the basis for extrapolating what is going on in their mind when they are being victimised. But if we want to understand why it is happening we have to understand what is going on in the mind of the victimiser.

I don’t think that this impulse toward defiance of the good is the only reason for the victimisation of the innocent. Another element is the resentment of the unlovable for the loved. The individual whose self-acceptance has been eaten away until they are backed into that final corner, cut off from all capacity for joy, hounded by condemnation on all sides, unable to defend themselves because their behaviour has been genuinely destructive, is the rejected of the world. How are they going to feel when people talk about how much they love the cute dolphins? What about when they see the devoted mothers dropping their children off to the pre-school? Isn’t that the darkest point to which a human can sink? The point at which a young man may take a bunch of guns to that pre-school.

We can say that the school shooter, the terrorist, the child molester, is a individual starved of love. So what are we to do? We have barely enough love for ourselves and those closest to us. We can’t go throwing our precious love into the black hole at the heart of the sociopath. It wouldn’t do any good if we did.

So what can we do about the problem of evil?

If we understand the roots of the problem in the tendency of idealistic demands to undermine self-acceptance, then we can develop a culture of unconditional self-acceptance in our own lives. If such a culture really does foster love, courage, creativity and an enhanced capacity for problem solving, then it will spread quickly. Eventually it will spread even into humanity’s heart of darkness, bringing the redemption which is urgently needed to free us from our capacity for evil.

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