my neighbor cthulhu; how lovecraftian lore gives you a peek inside a paranoid mind

Turns out that if you really want to understand the far right mindset, you should listen to fewer TV pundits and start reading H.P. Lovecraft instead.

If you’re a big fan of science fiction horror, you’ve probably read your fair share of H.P. Lovecraft’s deeply influential work, then learned about the man, shuddered, and could never look at those equally haunting and gruesome tales in quite the same way again. Maybe even doubly so if you ever looked up his cat’s name.

For those who don’t know, Lovecraft was a racist, and no, I’m not talking racist when comparing turn of the 20th-century views to today’s. No, we’re talking about racist to the point that virulent bigots of his day were telling him “maybe tone it down a notch or two?” in response to his letters. This little historical tidbit even got some of today’s aficionados of the genre to which he was so instrumental, asking whether they should keep reading and recommending his works.

Now, while some would venture to say no, it’s not quite as simple as that. Stories can evolve and acquire new meanings which don’t require us to ignore the man behind it or to say that his works achieved their effect in spite of his negative traits. If anything, the Cthulhu Mythos is with us today precisely because Lovecraft was a bigot’s bigot. Without his fear of anything new, the unknown, and the unfamiliar, he could’ve never committed it to the page with all those signature layers of dread, panic, and disgust.

His true talent was in being able to accurately channel our primal fears into text, and we respond to it on a downright subconscious level. He took and elevated the typical template for Puritan New England horror stories about the evil things that lurk in the darkness of the woods beyond the edge of the village, and updated them, turning the metaphors that cast Native Americans as demons into alien horrors. And by doing so, he gives us a glimpse into the mind of a terrified xenophobic racist.

Portuguese immigrants who married West Africans on their sailing journeys become weird fish people worshipping some grotesque amphibian deity. Indigenous people turn into primitive savages who paint themselves with blood to sacrifice children and young virgins to kick off midnight orgies. Followers of voodoo bow before their dead-sleeping alien deity Cthulhu. New politicians and ideas become tentacled monsters roused from their slumber only to drive humanity insane before slowly consuming it.

The world is dark and anxious, filled with eldritch dangers and horrors lurking behind every corner, and every unfamiliar stranger or newcomer is hiding a horrifying secret involving sexual perversions, ritualistic disembowelment, or both. You’d never want to live in such a disturbing reality if you could help it. And having considered that awful perspective, could we look at rural, red state America and ask whether they see their blue state city-dwelling counterparts in full blown Lovecraft Vision™?

the shadow over new york, and l.a., and san fran…

Given all their invective and loudly advertised fears on social media, could it be that when they look at residents of big cities, they don’t see fellow citizens but deformed fish monsters, products of unholy unions between alien amphibians and hapless, not-too-bright humans? Do they see new ideas and leaders coming from big cities as the march of alien gods preceded by armies of cultists who do unspeakable things in the dark while pretending to be normal by day? Hell, one of the even lesser Trumps went so far as to say that “Democrats aren’t even people” on national TV.

Just consider the central premise of the most popular conspiracy theory on the right today: QAnon. Even unmasking Q as Ron Watkins — a guy who runs hosting services for some of the web’s worst denizens — hasn’t killed it because it’s a vast theory-of-everything that ultimately boils down to one very simple premise. If you disagree with the GOP and conservative establishments, you are a cannibalistic Satanic pedophile working for a malevolent New World Order, full stop.

With today’s right-wing rhetoric so hyperbolic, and its politicians’ agendas so widely reviled, there are innumerable very vocal dissenters, especially when gerrymandering and the Electoral College greatly dilute the voices of the nation’s majority, and to the still vast army of QAnon adherents all that means only one thing. Just about everyone out there is a cannibalistic Satanic pedophile.

And this is on top of their social media feeds hyperventilating with gloom and doom, detailing ever more nefarious and harebrained plots by foreigners and Jews — yes Jews, it’s always the Jews with these kinds of conspiracies — to effectively replace the brave anti-Satanic patriots with amoral, dirty foreigners and making them reliant on government handouts, and their politicians using fear not just as a critical part of their platforms, but as their whole pitch.

“Vote for me, or the globalist monster will come to your house, rip your face off, and sell your kids and grandkids into sex slavery on Mars. All your neighbors, friends, and family are either actively plotting against you or refuse to believe that a nefarious alien evil is about to befall the nation.”

Now, I get it. All of this seems like an abstract thought experiment. But I think that it’s worth conducting because before you try to solve a rift between opposing sides, you need to understand how they see each other, otherwise even the most elaborate and well-crafted message by the highest-paid and successful political consultants in all the land will fall flat. And if the division between the right and the rest of the country was just a matter of policy and fine details of its implementation, there would be little taste for the kind of vitriol we see today.

Who gets that riled up about caps on tax brackets, deductibility of luxury goods, or drug price negotiations? Listen to interviews with those still attending Trump rallies. Do they passionately yell about policy proposals and economic indicators? Do they demand a debate over the finer points of campaign finance reform and geopolitics? No, they repeat half-baked conspiracy theories in short snippets and promise their fealty to Dear Orange Leader, hallowed be his name in the House of MAGA.

So no, it isn’t policy. The differences are framed as far, far more existential, so much so that having their oracle unmasked as a gamer dweeb from Manila changed pretty much nothing about their beliefs, they just stopped talking about Q. Far too many TV pundits and self-proclaimed moderates want to view the current divide as a matter of miscommunication. That it’s just a clash of values and priorities, so if they remind the rest of the country that we’re all after the same goal, that all we want to do is make sure we can prosper and take advantage of all the resources we have at our disposal, we’d all get along again.

But that’s not at all how the right sees the current schism. No, as far as the American right is concerned, they are engaged in a life or death battle with existential threats, ones they may very well no longer see as entirely human anymore, but as monsters hiding under a cloak of humanity, almost like a society of ghouls struggling not to sink our teeth into every “proud patriot” we pass on the street. And this is both disturbing and critical to understand.

You can’t negotiate with someone who you see as a fellow person with different ideas and upbringing while to them, you’re just a tentacle of a monstrous alien creature and when you talk, instead of hearing what comes out of your mouth, their mind plays the grumble of a bottomless, monstrous stomach and gnashing of fangs. They simply do not and cannot hear you, much less understand you enough to have opinions on what it is you’re trying to express. They’re far, far too consumed with fear and desperate for anyone to make them feel safe again. This is why they’re willing to vote for destructive politicians even if they hate these politicians to their core without fail.

the dark power of escalating, dehumanizing fear

Likewise, this is why the politicians in question invest so much time in trying to terrify their constituents out of their minds. They want to create and justify a perpetual state of emergency in which all norms and rules must be suspended to survive a supposed existential threat. If those rules just happen to make their primary donors more money or put their friends in positions of enormous power and influence while removing any check or control on their actions, well that’s just the price society must pay for being saved from the Illuminati/Antifa/Reptoid/MS-13/Satanic cabal.

Question this arrangement, and you’ll be accused of being an agent of evil because you tried to lift the curtain and show who controls the generator of fear and why. Of course, this is not to say that politicians sit around dreaming up of conspiracy theories all the time. (Although some probably do.) No, my bet for what really happens is a lot dumber. Politicians use existing and popular conspiracies going viral on social media as excuses for their greed, megalomania, and incompetence so instead of blaming their objectively terrible leadership and demanding better, their voters are pointed at convenient enemies.

Sure, they might hate the system and want truly positive change, but if it means their political opponents or people they’re trained to envision as monsters also get a better education, cheaper healthcare, or higher wages, they’d rather burn it all down. It’s not that they truly love the way things are, it’s that they hate you more.

We’re also still entertaining the widespread excuse that the only reason some people have such visceral hatred towards their fellow citizens is because they’ve simply been brainwashed. But they have agency and could’ve easily ignored the fear-mongering and conspiracies, and instead, they chose to believe the absolute worst about their friends, neighbors, and family, regardless of the source. Some may have been pushed over the edge but others are — and let’s not mince words here — just bad people who let themselves rot to the core. We shouldn’t be wishing them ill, but neither should we expect them to pull a mass Ebeneezer Scrooge one fateful morning.

As their fellow citizens suffered from a pandemic, they laughed about how more hard-hit blue states and cities were at first, downplayed the dangers of the virus, and were downright giddy to sacrifice older Americans and those in ill health so they could get a haircut and a drink at the bar. They’ve more or less tried to set up the death panels with which they threatened their voters in 2008 but far less formal, simply justifying their choices of what they think were acceptable casualties in their quest to pretend that life is normal, and seemed perfectly fine if those dying from a new disease aren’t members of their ethnopolitical tribe.

Even when they are, the response we got from them was some riff on “no one lives forever” and a shrug. Two years after the onset of the pandemic, there was a strong, deadly correlation between voting GOP and dying of COVID complications. In fact, a resident of a red state was almost a third more likely to have made good on the threat that they were going to vote for Trump if it was the last thing they did. They refused to treat the pandemic seriously, vilified the vaccines, paid the price, and refused to have their faith shaken, no doubt holding this deadly obstinacy as a point of pride.

But this antagonistic, politics-and-culture-are-existential-war philosophy has one last nasty and painful surprise in store for all those who ascribe to it. By constantly telling its adherents that anyone who even remotely disagrees with them on anything is an enemy, and encouraging them to devote their lives to making their targets miserable at any cost to win “the struggle,” even to their own health and finances, they create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

At some point, many of the targets will finally refuse to take the abuse and fight back, both affirming their abusers’ worldviews and turning a once imaginary conflict brewed in the mind of the perpetually aggrieved and paranoid in search of some way to assert power, into a real one.

And that’s the ultimate price of bigotry and conspiratorial fervor. They create the very conflicts, miseries, and divisions those who fell for the siren call of self-destructive rage, fear, and sociopathic disdain say they want to avoid, tearing apart families and entire nations in their wake, squandering trillions and decades of social cohesion and goodwill necessary to keep nations running.

It’s the equivalent of punching yourself in the face until you bleed and attacking very confused bystanders after accusing them of assault, then wondering why you’re now in the middle of a fight and getting seriously hurt in the process. Just like the — white, male, and usually well-to-do — protagonists of Lovecraft’s stories, you allowed evil to dominate your thoughts, hijack your life, and drive you mad with obscene obsessions until your sanity shattered and you ended up summoning the very things you feared, assuring yourself that you had no others choice and were doomed from the start.

note: This article was originally published on Rantt in March of 2020, and is updated for style, and outcomes of the pandemic. I thought it would be a good idea to bring it back and do a little remixing given some of the topics that were recently covered.