Moon's Psyche

by Allen Tate Wood



From our research we can speculate on the nature, the character of the human consciousness which has acted as the vehicle for this "new, ultimate, final truth". The Divine Principle ideology is a psychic artifact. It is an objectification of the heroic struggle of a defiantly innocent and untutored mind to wrest order from chaos, to find a solution to age-old problems and questions which are part of the fabric of human existence. In analyzing the D.P. Theory of History, in meditating on its meaning, in wading through its labyrinth of faulty syllogisms, sweeping generalizations, contradictory hypotheses and outright distortions of the facts, we began to get a sense of the intelligence, the personality struggling among these fragments for meaning. It is one that is interested in but incapable of order. Its hunger for order has led it to manufacture a beautiful dream image of history. It believes that history can not only be rewritten but actually transfigured by the procrustean superimposition of one image; it is at war with what exists; it believes in the efficacy of deception; it is unacquainted with the conventions governing scientific methodology.

In psychiatric language we would say it is an obsessive-compulsive character whose paranoid ideation has produced an elaborate fantasy image as a defense against the intrusion of a hostile and unpredictable world. In short, the primitive magical consciousness of a frightened child. Voegelin, in his article "Wisdom and magic of the extreme", gives us the type of Moon when he says, "the philosopher is confronted with the phenomenon of a diseased consciousness which understands its own deformation as the possession of a magical power to transfigure realityā€¯.

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