"Hail Satan?" (2019)

[Belacqua]

I think it's logically pretty coherent but you could certainly disagree with some of its tenets on a fundamental level depending on what type of person you are.

Since you didn't want to teach me about post-LaVey Satanism, and Gae only told me about what it has in common with Protestantism (e.g. self-reliance), I went ahead and read a little bit about it. You were right that my ideas of Satanism were not based on the popular American brand.

LaVey's version seems to grow pretty clearly out of the Romantic movement. Remember when Blake did his "demonic" reading of Milton he said that Milton was "of the Devil's party without knowing it." After that the Romantics began to take a different look at Satan, with the idea of the doomed Romantic hero in mind. Shelley set the image for this by associating Satan with Prometheus, making both of them into heroic figures who dared to defy the powers that be out of a love for independence and self-determination. After Shelley this view of Satan appeared in literature a fair amount, but I didn't realize that somebody had started a religion about it.

The difference between LaVey's version and the Romantics, apparently, is that for the Romantics Satan's defiance was always tragic. Punishment is always an intrinsic part of the Satanic or Promethean story. There is something at stake--risk, skin in the game. To remove that is to take it down to the level of a comic book. 

Satanism in Europe continued to say that there was danger involved, whether it was literary or religious Satanism. Goethe made it clear that Faust had a price to pay. French Satanists like Pèladan believed they were risking sempiternal damnation. Or even inviting it. 

Probably the change in the tragic theme began with Nietzsche's Übermensch. As an atheist, Nietzsche didn't believe that we are punished for our transgressions. In a sense, he says that we are all pre-punished by the fact that the world is chaos, and, as he has Silenus say in The Birth of Tragedy, it's better never to be born. So the Übermensch is one who faces this from the beginning. Overall, though, the Übermensch is very much a Romantic figure, a defiant genius who's just head and shoulders above us normies. 

So it looks as though LaVey has continued this tradition by making it more palatable for Americans. There is no risk of damnation. There is no punishment built into the heroism. Satan becomes a sort of symbol of independence and self-determination. The trouble here, though, is that as so often happens, complete deracination means that any unique meaning is lost. If Satan is no longer associated with damnation, then what makes him any different from Harry Potter or Iron Man? 

This reminds me of a routine that Slavoj Žižek does. (Sometimes Žižek does serious philosophy, but then sometimes in speeches he has sort of comedy routines, like an intelligent version of George Carlin.) He talks about how America is the country where you can find coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice cream without fat, "meat" made of tofu, etc. In serious moods this leads up to the fact that America has religion without responsibility, war without sacrifice, voting without democracy, etc. And we can add Satan without damnation. 

The Wikipedia page about LaVey's Satanism says that he intended it for non-conformists. You let us know that conformists are also welcome. I believe you must be correct in this, since any movement that grows and becomes popular becomes impossible for non-conformists, by definition. And the fact that this group of Satanists in the movie commercial (in the OP) want to get their group recognized by city government and get a statue on the lawn means they are seeking conformity with the structure of their community. Since their Satan is a deracinated, safe Satan, however, I don't see what would stop every little group from demanding its own statue. Whenever two or more of you are gathered in his name, you can declare a Harry Potter religion or a Hobbit religion or whatever. Eventually the whole lawn would look like the granite version of a Disney gift shop. 

Ever since Sigmund Freud's nephew got tobacco companies to pay Suffragettes to smoke in public, American movements for independence have been integrated into the commercial economy, or they get shut down by the forces of capital. Now I guess it's Satanism's turn. The documentary makes this group into a Disney story -- a rag-tag group of misfits who are misunderstood by the community, but who don't pose any threat, and are really good at heart. The happy ending comes when the small town mayor acknowledges that we can all just get along. Success here is measured by how well the group integrates itself into the mainstream. As I see it, this actually eliminates what used to be an alternative to the mainstream. 

Just a little bit, if we don't take it too far, there are parallels with gay rights. I am absolutely in favor of equal treatment and equal rights for everyone. At the same time, bringing gay people into the world of expensive weddings, expensive divorces, traditional bourgeois marriages, etc., homogenizes society. André Gide, for example, wrote eloquently about how the world of gay men and women in Paris was a counter to the mainstream, a different set of relations with a different set of values. There was the open and mundane world, and there was the underground gay world, and he valued them both. It was the same in Edo Period Japan, and remained so in Mishima's day. Again, to be clear, I am against discrimination, but I am in favor of alternatives. And real alternatives don't petition the government to have their statues put on the court house lawn.

When the Satanists start demanding that they can serve openly in the military that will be really funny. The movement based on a Promethean independence figure will go abroad to serve US petroleum imperialism.