Satanism and Libertarianism

Hold on, don’t worry. I’m not about to write about how you should eat your children. And I’m not going to advocate either Satanism or Libertarianism. I don’t subscribe to either.

But like a lot of people, the Satanic Bible by Anton LaVey caught my imagination in the 1980s, for morbid, adolescent reasons. Yet when I finally got a copy and cracked it, I was always surprised at how mainstream its precepts were. That’s probably unavoidable, since you can’t really found a self-sustaining creed on psychopathic principles. Who would want to join up, if there were simply the promise of being betrayed and injured? Recently, I got interested in the Satanic Bible again, because of this profile of Gaahl, a prominent Satanist in Norway, and the singer in a notorious black metal band. And what’s striking is that its philosophy, more than anything else, resembles libertarianism with some magic thrown in. It’s less Jeffrey Dahmer, and more Ayn Rand. To wit, from the excellent Wikipedia entry:

LaVey makes it very clear that although Satanism is an uncompromisingly selfish religion, he defines selfishness according to what an individual truly wants. Therefore, if a person should honestly care for another person and wishes to express love, then he should do so wholeheartedly; a truly selfish person can acknowledge that if a person is loved by him, then they are important by virtue of his love. This can be compared favorably to the arguments of ethical egoism—that what sometimes benefits others can be beneficial to oneself, but that one must always have one’s own interests first in mind. LaVey never suggests that love is not a natural emotion in man, and on the contrary suggests that loving select individuals is very natural, but he does claim that to love all people is not only a philosophical mistake but is in fact impossible and even damaging to the ability to truly love those few individuals who deserve it.

LaVey explains that hatred is likewise a natural emotion in man and therefore not to be shunned. He makes clear that hatred should be directed at those who deserve it by virtue of their actions to offend the individual, and like love, it is senseless to universally apply hatred to all mankind. He muses that while Satanism strongly advocates both individual love and hate, because white-light religion has such a strong aversion to acknowledging hate as a natural feeling in man that to merely mention that Satanism permits individuals to hate their enemies, Satanism is automatically portrayed as a hateful religion, a claim he maintains is false and ignorant of the true ethics of Satanism.