Observations

Kaizen means “improvement” in Japanese, and this word gained worldwide usage when Toyota established it as a key part of their workflow process. In that context the meaning specifies “continual improvement”. Everything and everyone has room to grow, clarify, correct, and become more effective. We all have the power, authority, and reason to make those improvements in ourselves and the world around us, for as long as we live.

You might wonder what this could possibly have to do with Demons; we assert that our purposeful exercise of that power, exalted by aesthetic and ritual, makes potent spirit creatures of us.

First we set a higher bar. We want to sleep better at night and live better while awake. We want our actions to have greater positive effect. Each of us wants to feel respected, appreciated, and desired; yet we also want to fulfill ourselves in those ways without needing external validation. Just as importantly, we want other people to feel that way too.

Even if you think you don’t deserve to “want” so much, try reaching for it anyway. Even if sabotage and disappointment have plagued your life, to the point that such a high bar of respect and desire seems like a pipe dream, you have the power to make one small change after another that will eventually add up to a less awful experience.

Secondly we catch ourselves whenever we slip up, and correct our course back to the direction we wanted. Bruce Lee said “mistakes are always forgivable, if one has the courage to admit them.” We own our missteps honestly and openly, and we apologize or make reparations as needed. That does not indicate any weakness — in fact it takes a truly strong person to do so and then follow it up with positive change. That follow-up exemplifies kaizen.

The sincerity of our admission will show in whatever we do next. Redressing a bad move doesn’t mean just saying “sorry”, out of guilt or resented obligation, like a child; it means learning a better course of action to take instead, and taking it.

Ideally we will correct our path on a regular -even frequent- basis. Everyone loses their compassion momentarily, like when tired or hungry or stuck in traffic. Everyone has buttons that get pushed. We all make biased snap judgments that turn out wrong. That’s no big deal, assuming of course you didn’t kill or or seriously injure someone in that moment. What we do about it, how we clean up our mess, makes a much bigger difference.

A mindful approach means we witness all of this striving and slipping without passing judgment. We observe, decide how to do it better, and keep moving. When driving, if your car drifts a bit to one side of the lane, you simply adjust your steering, you do not freak out. Life requires continual steering adjustments. You don’t need to feel bad about any part of this.

By the same token, everyone else who tries their best to do the right thing will also slip up, and it serves no purpose to shame them for it. Too many “social justice warriors” hold each other to impossible purity tests, and ostracize anyone who fails to keep up some absurd level of performed perfection at all times. Not only does their particular cause suffer from the infighting, but the individuals involved in it become fearful and unable to work together, which critically hobbles the entire population of supposed “warriors” for positive change. We need to have compassion for each other, even when one of us screws up, in order to achieve our goals.

Demonkind continually grow and change. We dump apathy into the nearest waste bin, it does not serve us. A path of kaizen and mindfulness guides us to better things, no matter where we start.

How do we reconcile the introspection and thoughtful eccentricity, that would lead a person to visit this website, with the message of community building and sharing that we promote? By definition we have all turned our backs on the mainstream society that demands unquestioning conformity and blind faith. For many of us that means solitude, introversion, or at least some general distrust of the people around us. Certainly in the age of the internet it means reliance on the mediating barrier of our phones and laptops. How do we step outside our comfort zone to help others in a meaningful way?

We recommend reading Temporary Autonomous Zone by Hakim Bey. This 1985 text strongly influenced and inspired the founding of Demonkind, though not every word he wrote corresponds to our current message. For example his essays on chaos and ontological anarchy strike a vital fire in our hearts, but their reactionary positions sometimes conflict with our ethos. Essentially TAZ promotes the idea of creating groups, places, or systems in which people can share a creative experience, free from the programming of Big Brother, and independent from the culture of mass consumerism.

Burning Man also grew out of the TAZ premise, with many successes to their credit; unfortunately the massive financial cost of participation limited the range of people who could get involved. By contrast we hope to encourage everyone to find a way to participate in our philosophy, with practical actions in their own immediate surroundings, without class barriers. For example, instead of having a colossal art party in a remote desert, give someone a hand-written note saying how much you appreciate them; or come up with a ritual chant that you and a friend can recite in solemn tones that inevitably make you both laugh.

Bey addresses the barrier created by our phones and Facebook and such, writing:

The TAZ desires above all to avoid mediation, to experience its existence as immediate. The very essence of the affair is “breast-to-breast” as the Sufis say, or face-to-face. But, BUT: the very essence of the Web is mediation. Machines here are our ambassadors–the flesh is irrelevant except as a terminal, with all the sinister connotations of the term.

Here is a recording of Bey reading an essay entitled Immediatism, which aptly names and describes the issue (note however that other groups have also claimed that term with wildly unrelated definitions). Demonkind suggests using the internet as a tool for organizing face to face interactions, and not relying on it as the only way you relate to other people. We further suggest that you completely delete Facebook, as it fosters a culture of mediated experience, as well as tracking your every move and monetizing your existence.

But what about introverts? More than anyone else, loners must work to step out of their comfortable solitude. We create our own reality by changing our patterns and changing the way we talk to ourselves. Just because you don’t want to do something doesn’t mean you can’t do it; and further it doesn’t mean that your preference has some permanent and inviolable quality. Challenge yourself! Step out even though you know you may fall on your face. It might get awkward — but so what? You’ll find that you lived through it, and that the embarrassment or disappointment did not actually cause the world to end.

You may also find that the rewards reaped from making the effort, and the rewards of successfully helping someone else, end up far outweighing the cost of the initial discomfort. The “warm fuzzies” alone are worth the price of admission, but by making repeated efforts over time you create a system that fosters a newer, better reality for you in all aspects of your life. We grow stronger together than we do apart.

Even someone who absolutely cannot break their personal solitude can still support in a less-mediated way. You can buy art or music directly from the artist. You can write actual paper letters to your senators, congress people, or local business leaders. You can organize get-togethers for other people. You can leave surprise notes or money for others to randomly find, or buy coffee for the next person in line.

Apart from the literal togetherness of interacting immediately with people, we encourage the sense of togetherness with others in the spirit of compassion, regardless of context or short term actions. The whole point of Demonkind is that we can create a togetherness, through shared values and shared inspiration, without the regressive and reality-defying dogma of mainstream religion. We make this blessing a reality by changing the way we interact with the world around us.

Though our philosophy has strong spiritual elements, we also rely on free thought and the scientific method. The former provides a path for liberation from programmed beliefs, and the latter provides rigorously tested theories upon which we can base our understanding of the world. These methods have tremendous power, but they don’t provide any moral guidance, and they have no aesthetic or lasting culture. We intend to remedy that absence by reclaiming the art and icons of oppressive religion to our own purposes.

Aren’t Religion and Atheism Mutually Exclusive?

The word religion has no fixed definition, but it generally means a set of teachings about the nature and origin of life; and it typically implies the expectation that followers will believe its teachings on faith alone, without evidence beyond the dictates of its prophets, priests, and interpreters. Scientific inquiry also provides information about the nature and the origin of life, but it does not require faith — scientists from any culture can test all claims for repeatable soundness.

Both freethinkers and scientists demand reliable evidence to support their beliefs; and the total lack of reliable evidence anywhere for gods, devils, heaven, hell, angels, prayer, etc. naturally steers many people to atheism. Religionists often point to aesthetically pleasing natural wonders as “evidence” of a divine creator, but when you ask them about teeth that rot, or little children who die of cancer, they can only hand-wave about some unknowable master plan. The same goes for the “power of prayer”, which they declare whenever things go well for them, but when life goes wrong they chalk it up to God having “mysterious ways”.

Apart from science, some of us may have actively rejected religion because of its use as a brutal regime of oppression, whether in our personal lives or on a global scale. But atheism by itself does not provide anything positive to live by. Religion provides both a code of ethics (though often terribly flawed) and an emotional and psychological comfort that you may not find by staring clear-eyed into the godless void. We have compassion -not pity, but supportive love- for people who rely on those comforts to help them survive a brutal and cruel life. People need a moral code, and accountability to that code, but the morality has to come from a sense of unity with the rest of life on earth, rather than from the perversely-interpreted rulings dictated by power-hungry men claiming they speak for a god.

Some freethinkers use phrases such as “good without god” and “do what thou wilt”, asserting that they naturally come to a positive morality on their own, without the tyranny of theism dictating its rigid (and almost always exceedingly hypocritical) judgments. However nearly everyone, even you, thinks of themselves as a good person making the best choices under the circumstances. Even the most selfish, callous, and cruel people think that; so atheists cannot assume any natural righteousness.

The state-ordered atheism of Stalin’s regime illustrates an extreme example of this problem. The Russian Orthodox church and the Tsarists had already built a national culture of submission to their ultimate authority; when Stalin took over, he imposed atheism not as a means of freeing the citizens, but of stripping all power from the previous authoritarian masters, and seizing that power for himself. He installed himself as a secular “god” and forbade the worship of anyone or anything else. So while free thought can typically lead to atheism, atheism does not inherently imply free thought.

In fact the current “New Atheist” movement has a terrible problem with racists using the platform to promote their ideology, because atheism in general has no structural means of preventing or responding to such twisting of the language of logic and reason.

Therefore, as with almost all “isms”, both theism and atheism fail us when we take them too absolutely and exclusively, or when we use them to abuse other people. Atheism by itself does not cover the internal (moral, social, spiritual) needs of humanity; while religion addresses those needs but only by convincing people to worship something that doesn’t exist. The stricter the doctrine, the more absurdly cruel and arbitrary it becomes.

The Internalized Subjugation of Faith

Religious indoctrination means not only convincing people to believe in their own subjugation, to a “master” (or multiple masters) who they cannot actually touch or see, but further convincing them to teach their children and neighbors to believe the same thing. The oppression passes from generation to generation, enforced not by armies or powerful priests, but by the subjugated people themselves.

They will even fight endless wars over these beliefs–eagerly carrying on the dirty work of those in power who rely on unquestioned obedience. Consider the bloody “Troubles” of Ireland: one faction believes the whole island should submit to the Church of England, while the other faction believes they should all submit to the Vatican, and the factions will tear each other apart for the offense of having a different colonial subjugation indoctrinated by their parents.

Faith binds people’s thoughts and emotions, limits the world they can witness, and locks them into a trajectory of fatalist submission. The language of most prayer takes the agency and responsibility out of your hands. People who have suffered through slavery, war, and generations of oppression have historically turned to prayer for some hope of relief. With one abuse after another from those who hold the power, and fate seeming stacked against you, it can feel like you have no other options but to pray. If people have faith in an eventual salvation then they can hold on through another day. In this way, and this way alone, prayer works — as a psychological buttress against forces that could crush us.

But salvation comes from our own hands, not from the fantasy of a future savior in the sky. Actual salvation comes from real actions such as starting mutual aid societies, underground railroads, food banks, protest groups, and other means of taking back your lives and communities. With as much cruelty as we see in the news and in the streets every day, we have endless reasons to work for each other’s well being, and endless evidence that the magical sky hero will never come.

O faithful, do you not think your parents and neighbors have prayed fervently and faithfully for justice, for generations — and do you not see that their prayers have gone unanswered? Do you really think any sort of “mysterious master plan” will make sense of the outrageous miseries imposed on untold millions of people every day? And listen to the prayers! “I beg for mercy”, “please take my suffering away”, “I submit to your will”. That language cannot make you free.

Most people believe in the religion their parents and community believed in, and they only believe what they do because of indoctrination from childhood. Of course when your parents and your entire community share a culture that seems fundamental to them, it can feel like abandonment or insanity to even consider breaking away from those traditions. But remember that even their established beliefs have a fairly short or localized history; if you look farther back in time, or outside that community, the ancestors and the rest of the world have different beliefs and practices. So why cling to the ones that they taught you as a child?

Stevie Wonder sang “when you believe in things that you don’t understand, and you suffer, superstition is the word”. He may have added the phrase about suffering to distinguish “bad” superstition from “good” faith; but you know the faithful have suffered terribly, while believing in things that they don’t understand. Their belief might help them to feel better for a moment, but it does not address any of the root causes of suffering, and its internal language works against the will to break free.

Demonkind Encourages You to Free Yourself

We treasure freedom of thought, supported by science and compassion. We appreciate a plurality of viewpoints though, so we do not shun believers in faith, unless they use their religion as a tool of oppression. From the side of atheism we take the study of life through the persistently questioning work of science. From the side of spirituality we take the poetry, the sense of exaltation, the intimate connection to something grander than our tiny individual selves. Additionally we absolutely love the rituals, costumes, ornate altars, and other dramatic trappings of the occult and mystery schools, so even the atheists among us will take those symbols back from the religions of dominance, in the name of Demonic culture.

We have all seen how public discourse has increasingly sunk to infantile levels, with people screaming nonsense insult names at each other instead of addressing the actual issues, and using memes instead of logic. This strikes us most poignantly in the instances where one person pleads for compassion, generosity, and inclusiveness, and the opposing person responds with “Cuck! Beta! Libtard!” Aside from the obvious disparity in quality of both thought and communication between them, the one shouting insults has completely misunderstood the nature of strength.

They think that by yelling, claiming to be physically tough, and belittling any more considerate expression, they have demonstrated strength; but in fact they have only shown the weakness of their position. Even if they magically busted through your phone or computer screen with tanks and guns and muscles bulging, they would not have supported any facts or reason on their side of the discussion at all. Of course when they do provide some sort of “evidence”, it comes in the form of recycled propaganda like memes or talking points from “news” sites that in fact exist only to incite violent divisiveness. This includes repeating the mantra that people who disagree with them are all mentally ill, stupid, or demonic. We see that last one all day, every day on Twitter, and the irony makes us laugh. They associate compassion and kindness with spineless crying frailty, but they do not understand the inner strength required to be kind.

Firstly we quote Al Capone: “Don’t mistake my kindness for weakness. I am kind to everyone, but when someone is unkind to me, weak is not what you are going to remember about me.” This line implies fierce individual retaliation, but Demonkind prefer to think of it as referring to strength in numbers. When we stand up for our values, including kindness, we show others that they too can resist the tide of knuckle-dragging meme-fevered jingoists.

Secondly we have long observed that people who freak out the worst about issues like gender and sexuality tend to be very insecure in their own bodies and feelings. “NOT ME” they will shout, pounding their chests, but why else would it bother them so much to think of a gay or trans person next to them in a bathroom? They panic about gays “turning people gay” because they think their own sexuality, or that of their children, can be changed with the wave of a magic hand. When they screech about feminists “killing masculinity” you have to ask why their masculinity was so flimsy in the first place that it needs to be defended against someone they think is inferior.

In reality it takes absolutely nothing away from us to let another person express their identity in peace. People who scream obscenities, when they encounter a different way of living, scream because they get frightened easily, and because they cannot handle the cognitive dissonance of seeing the terrible chasm between their supposed goodness and the way they actually treat other people. If we have real personal strength we can let someone else take their turn at the wheel without losing even a drop of our own power. Their strength does not diminish ours, their accomplishments do not diminish our own. The catch is that we may mistakenly assume we already have that kind of strength.

Really we all have to train and condition ourselves just like athletes, testing ourselves with ever greater intensity, to build those “muscles” and reflexes of personal integrity. This takes purpose, deep self-awareness, and willingness to challenge our own assumptions on a daily basis. We all live in contradictions; the difference between a hypocrite and a healthy person with integrity is that the hypocrite cannot admit when they are wrong, and they refuse to change.In order to make healthy changes, we need to actively listen to others when they have constructive critiques. Only a weak person, or we should say someone having a moment of weakness, gets defensive.

To examine our own weaknesses and “evils” in the deeper recesses of our minds and hearts is what Jung referred to as katabasis, or the night sea journey of the hero, where we travel into the underworld of death to retrieve some treasure. If we stay there, we die. So we build our inner strength, training ourselves by testing our actions against our values, for anabasis: the equally difficult journey back to the outer world.

Having returned, we possess riches and powers that greatly outmatch anyone who has failed to take this journey, and whose “strength” reveals itself as merely stubbornness, the rigidity of fear, and reactionary bluster. We see their attempted bullying force revealed as hollow, fearful, and frankly quite fragile, and it does not shake us.

Most people think they have an inherently good grasp on truth and objective reality, but in fact we only know a tiny fraction, based on our narrow perspective and what we choose to believe from very limited sources. The whole truth contains a multitude of other truths, even though we typically can only see one thing at a time as true. The rest appears distorted or opposite, making it seem false. We get closer to the bigger (truer) picture by seeking diverse viewpoints, and by acknowledging the many, sometimes apparently conflicting, entirely valid elements that we may not have thought of on our own. We call this prismatic perspective, referring to the way a prism receives natural light and reveals the bands of individual colors that had combined together to form that seemingly pure light.

What is soup? Is it vegetables? Water? Spices? Clearly it contains all of those, in infinite combinations. Similarly, almost every single issue that people argue about contains a prismatic spectrum of components that come together to create the overall problem, even though the people arguing act as though only one or two positions exist. They will go to astonishing lengths to reduce deeply complex systems down to two sides they can fight over. By contrast Demonkind believe, as John Cleese recently said, that “interconnectedness and complexity describe the world better than binary thinking does.”

Can we honestly call any person just good or just evil? We all “know” in theory that everyone has both good (constructive) and evil (destructive) thoughts or behaviors in them; but in spite of that knowledge, politics and religion make us talk and act as though everyone else out there has only one dimension. People charge “if you agree with so-and-so about this point, you must also agree with everything else they have ever done”; or “if you believe in X, then obviously you believe in Y, which we condemn.” But then look at the convoluted stories we tell to justify it when someone we like does something we do not like.

Many people seem incapable of seeing or admitting that all the major religions deal in guilt, fear, and brutal atrocities while at the same time providing charity, comfort, and culture to their followers. In this paradox, both things are equally true. A religion can hold noble ideals, while its most ignorant and dogmatic followers absolutely befoul those ideals by imposing poisonous interpretations on the rest of us. It defies logic to label any one religion as the most violent, or to defend another as “the religion of peace”.

Demonkind recognize that we all contain a range of such paradoxes. At the same time as our dedication to science directs us away from superstition, our compassion and our appreciation for the prismatic richness of humanity directs us to respect and protect people of all faiths, as long as they don’t try to impose anything on us. That “live and let live” clause makes a critical difference because it marks the blood-soaked dividing line between the noblest and the foulest sides of any spiritual identity, the very point where a culture or a personal experience becomes a toxic system of oppression.

Another seeming contradiction appears when a religious or ill-educated family refuses to provide medical care or vaccines to its children, and laws based on science must step in to correct them. On the one hand we want freedom from intrusive laws, but on the other hand we want to avoid public outbreaks of preventable disease. This shows the error of holding too rigid a dogma on any position, since the context and consequences can change everything dramatically. We address this further in the page about free speech policies.

Abortion, warfare, and meat-eating all require someone to die in order that someone else will thrive. Too many people draw a hard line based on reductive definitions rather than looking at the many personal and contextual factors that go into these decisions. We will make healthier choices if we acknowledge and address the truth of these prismatic facets rather than making up a simplified one-sided story to justify what we want to believe. Demonkind apply our values to the specific case, and its context, to seek the answer that leads to the greatest potential for healing; and we appreciate that the bigger picture turns on more than one difficult concept at the same time.

We also recognize the value and the beauty of having multiple perspectives, multiple flavors, multiple languages, and multiple paths. If you only see one side of a thing, you cannot know the whole thing. And you can’t see all sides of a complex issue by yourself, no matter how smart you think you are. We need to take in a plurality of views and of histories in order to grasp the situation fully.

To foster a healthy multi-facted experience, we ally ourselves with other left-hand path, pagan, ancestral, and universalist spiritual groups, even when any given one of those groups might not return the favor. We support them as fellow travelers of nonconformism, primal rites, and shadow culture.

Our words create our reality. Literally, the language we use shapes the terms in which we understand the world, and the stories we tell ourselves shape our beliefs about ourselves and about everyone else. But other people have their own realities, equally meaningful and valid, and they may use utterly different language to create and perceive the same world we also live in. We can’t assume that our own narrative and our own gaze tells us everything we need to know.

At the same time, we do not fall for the extreme end of cultural relativism, in which nobody can judge the actions of people in a different culture. Acknowledging the realities that other people experience differently from ourselves does not mean abandoning our values. But we cannot make wise choices about how to act on our values without seeking out those other perspectives. Valuing a diverse prismatic assortment of people around us, and listening carefully to them, makes our lives and our understanding much richer and deeper.

It also usually means a better variety of food and music to enjoy.