The Nature of Hell

Since we are on the topic, and since today is Pretty Lady's ad hoc Day Off (unless the phone should happen to ring, which, strangely, it never seems to do on Thursdays), Pretty Lady has decided to explain What She Means by Hell. In the spirit of serious debate, she has even come up with some Biblical support for her assertions, by the efficient means of hanging out in her spare time with a Bible-thumper or two, who obligingly gave her the quote.

However, to please the Humanist contingent, she will not start with Biblical rhetoric; instead she will hark back to the hectic days of her Freshman year, when she and a group of hyperintellectual companions went, on a lark, to see Sartre's 'No Exit.'

(For those one or two of you who were thankfully spared a sophomoric infatuation with Jean-Paul & Co., let me summarize the plot: Three people find themselves in Hell. Hell is a room with three people in it. These three people are an Intellectual, an Adultress, and a Lesbian. ((The reasons for these people being committed to Hell are taken as read.)) They all proceed to attempt to seduce, impress, and scorn the others, with circular degrees of success and failure. In short, they are all trying to prove their own validity at the expense of the others.

They all fail at this; once the Intellectual seduces the Adultress, he despises her, and only wishes for validation from the Lesbian. The Lesbian despises the Intellectual, and only wishes for validation from the Adultress, who despises her forthwith; the Adultress wishes for validation from the Intellectual, who despises her, having seduced her.

Thus the French.)

At any rate, once Pretty Lady and her hyperintellectual friends had left the theatre, Pretty Lady's Greenwich Village friend laughed, with knowing cynicism, and declared, "Hell is other people." Proving by this casual comment that intellectuals are, all too often, petty narcissists who utterly fail to grasp the point.

Indeed, Pretty Lady is not entirely sure that J.P. himself grasped the point which he so elegantly illustrated; posthumous publication of his much-vaunted correspondence with S. de B.V. has proven that these two superior minds spent the vast majority of their private lives in despising everyone around them. Ipso facto, creating a lovely little Hell of their very own, on this very earth which, they purported to believe, was the only thing allotted to them.

For the point, as Pretty Lady understands it, is that Hell is NOT Other People; it is the natural consequence of treating other people as though they were the mining grounds for the aggrandizement of Self. This process does not ever work as intended. Other people have this pesky habit of failing to submit to cannibalistic agendas; they continually exhibit symptoms of having Minds of their Own. So troublesome of them.

However, if a person instead chooses to accept for all time the notion that the validity of Self is bestowed by a loving Creator, and that all others are equally valid and complete, all this mutual scrabbling and cannibalism simply ceases. There is no reason for it. One's Self stands revealed as a manifestation of the Divine, and all one's brothers equally so. Thus there is nothing to do but dance around and celebrate.

As a case study of what happens when one applies the principles of Sartre on a large scale, Pretty Lady would now like to present the example of Lagos, Nigeria. Astute readers will recall that the primary export of this African 'megacity' is the 419 scam, which is too familiar by now to anyone with an email account, to require explanation. Pretty Lady was saddened, but not surprised, to learn that the entire city is run upon 419 principles. Very little honest, paid employment is available; this does not stop 600,000 eager individuals from streaming in from the countryside every year, in the hopes of Making it Big. It is one vast, filthy, sprawling slum, whose inhabitants steal, cheat, lie, manipulate and control one another in the vague hopes of attaining the supreme role of Lord High Kleptocrat.

For this, indeed, is the template that all denizens of Hell Lagos are following. In the 1980's, the corrupt Nigerian government first gained control of All Industry; then the government sold All Industry, and absconded with the proceeds. It is no wonder that their only lasting cultural Myth is of millions of dollars' worth of ill-gotten gains, sitting in a bank somewhere, waiting for someone to come and claim it.

What most struck Pretty Lady about this tragic history is that, although life in Lagos is one of unremitting misery, nobody ever leaves. When the author asked them why, the answer seemed to be, 'because then we'd have to admit to the folks back in the village that we weren't such big-shots after all.' In other words, Pride.

All this is a very long-winded explanation of why Pretty Lady cannot understand why people are so all-fired worried that God will send them to Hell. Darlings, here we are. As soon as we forget to love God, accept Grace, and scratch for some personal validation at the expense of our gorgeous Neighbor, here we are. God has nothing to do with it. God is merely sitting there, loving us, and patiently explaining that we are doing this to ourselves. He has many methods of explanation; He may exhort, command, threaten, suggest, illustrate, plead, nudge, whisper, coax, tease, cajole, wheedle, sing, poeticize, and dictate long books of instructions in different languages. But he cannot force us, because he cannot force a piece of Himself to be anything other than what it is.

Which brings Pretty Lady, at last, to that Biblical quote she promised you.

And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem were saying, "He is possessed by Beelzebul," and "by the prince of demons he casts out the demons." And he called them to him and said to them in parables, "How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but is coming to an end. But no one can enter a strong man's house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man. Then indeed he may plunder his house.

If we are divided against one another, darlings, we cannot stand. If we wish to see our brother in Hell, there we go with him. If we love and forgive him, we are loved and forgiven.

Any questions?