Possession and Retreat
Years ago, I read a popular novel titled The Possession of Joel Delaney by Ramona Stewart, about a young man in the late 1960s, possessed by the spirit of a Puerto Rican serial-killer in New York City. At the height of its fleeting popularity, film-producers turned it into an unpleasant movie that starred Shirley MacLaine.
The plot concerns Norah Benson who has to take care of her ne'er-do-well brother Joel and wonders if the spirit of his deceased former-roommate Tonio Perez has taken possession of him. She listens as Joel speak fluent, sinister, New-York Spanish, like Tonio who grew up in Spanish Harlem.
Norah does what any educated, agnostic, White person would do, the consults a psychiatrist hoping he can find a solution. "I studied his face," Norah writes. "It looked sad and sympathetic but also careful. . . . I couldn't bring myself to say 'possession,' as if the word would transform me into a trafficker for table-rappings."
The psychiatrist also declines to use the word possession. He tells Norah, "Let us say a weakening of the personality to the compulsive process." The Possesssion of Joel Delaney appeared perhaps a year before William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist, which also explores a case of demonic posssession and a woman consulting a psychiatrist to help her teenaged daughter.
The Exorcist works much better. Blatty uses superior craftsmanship, character development, and a more focused plot-line. But I retained this one sentence in my memory about the "weakening of the personality to the compulsive process," because of its topicality in modern-day American society—the weakening of the will to the dictatorial process.
"Personality" and "will," after all, refer mostly to a person's ego-strength; and "ego" has to reside in the same New-Age dog-house as "bourgeoisie," "capitalism," and "greed." The left-wing bloggers of Facebook moralize about little else. Look up "The Ego is bad." on YouTube. The number of nay-sayers really surprises me. You almost don't need to hear them speak. Their solemn stares into the camera say it all.
Like so much of modern-day leftist rhetoric, you can trace it back to Marx's Communist Manifesto: "And this abolition of the state of things is called by the bourgeoisie 'abolition of individuality and freedom.' And rightly so! The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom."
Marx never mentions "bourgeois power," although the reality of the bourgeois power-structure irks leftists more than anything else—bourgeois empowerment through wealth, business connections, and social exclusivism. "By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions, production, free trade, free selling and buying." He opposes free-trade in bitter terms.
A few paragraphs later, Marx continues "You must confess that, by 'individual,' you mean no other person than the bourgeoisie, the middle-class owner of property. This person must indeed by swept out of the way, and made impossible."
But as I read Marx's words, it occurs to me that they could only appeal to people who have no use for bourgeois freedom and independence. That other people can succeed by using their individual strengths only antagonizes them. Their mentality resembles the words of the psychiatrist in The Possession of Joel Delaney: "a weakening of the personality to the compulsive process." Such a person can only respond to an unoriented herd-instinct.
In other words, Joel's mental state deteriorates into a mob mentality, mass hysteria, and the human dyad of paranoia and dependence. Deprived of personal character and conscience, he could do just about anything. If American politicians cannot comprehend the wisdom of bourgeois freedom and independence—despite Marx's negative judgments—they are not serving the constitutionally-based freedoms that this country represents.