Snake-handling in Gomorrah

Tony Robbins, Street Takeovers, Waco, Snakes

And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues

They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.

Mark 16:17–18

Turning fear into power

If you go to a Tony Robbins event, you can burn your feet on hot coals. You have to be at the right one, specifically time-travelling to Dallas in 2016 would help. That’s when the Dallas Fire Department had the pleasure of treating many of the 22 participants who burned their feet on superheated briquettes. At most fire-walks, you’d have to try harder since most participants never get the full experience and instead leave able to stroll from their arrival gate to the luggage carousel, returning back to their grindset reinvigorated but unscathed, with no scars for chicks to dig. While the risk of burning oneself is completely real, the statistical probability is quite low and so fire-walks continue to inspire the world over.

In an alternate reality, you could imagine a certain anti-fire-walk fervor beginning if these incidents were more common. Hospitals overrun with aspiring entrepreneurs cooking their calluses as they “turn fear into power,” and bunions into medical bills. You could imagine it accelerating if the people who attended Robbins’ events were already known to be zealots, simpletons, or just anti-progressive. A whole Waco standoff outside a Hyatt in Hoboken. Outrage as a bellman is recklessly smoked by the feds.

Sometimes you go to heaven and sometimes heaven comes to you

One reason it wasn’t hard for the press to gin up support for law enforcement when they besieged the Mount Carmel Center in Waco stems from the idea that children were reportedly being abused there. In retrospect, when the ATF set fire to the building along with many of the (adults and) children inside, one could understand how it might not be the best way of looking after their welfare. But at the time, there were many people, especially those who were geographically and culturally removed from the types or people most likely to congregate in religious sects like the Branch Davidians—they backed the use of force against those Branch Davidians. From TV screens far away, many thought something had to be done, that you couldn’t just allow them to practice a religion that operated outside the bounds of secular mores around adulthood and sex. We have societies but they exist inside of other societies. Such stories live on as warnings.

Once upon a time in Hanau

Jacob Grimm was born in Hanua, a town located in current-day Germany, in 1785, and his brother Wilhelm Grimm was born the following year, in 1786.

In 1910, Finnish folklorist Antti Aarne published a catalog taxonomizing fairytales (many of them written by the Brothers Grimm) into thousands of different types. Fairytales often satisfy the dual-purpose of:

• fulfilling a parent’s schadenfreude over the karmic retribution suffered on children who are insufficiently pious and do not heed the pragmatism or values their parents extol,

• while children receive moral reinforcement encouraging them to heed their parents.

The trick is that the reinforcement comes from a story, a source beyond their parents, generating something that resembles received wisdom or consensus regarding ancient problemz. The basic bargain is that, for insolent children, bad things await. No matter how many times your parents are there to guide you, it’s often a great myth that gets you through the woods or keeps you from them altogether.

Burning barns

In 1928 an American named Stith Thomas translated Aarne’s catalog into English, while making revisions and expansions. He published a subsequent update in 1961. In 2004, Hans-Jörg Uther, a German, also revised and expanded the catalog now known as the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index (ATU Index).

In it, one such type of fairytale is titled “Burning the Barn to Destroy an Unknown Animal.” If any such inhuman force existed at Mount Carmel, one might imagine it combusted on April 19th, 1993.

Do you keep any antivenom here? Yeah, his name is Jesus.

From CBS News February 26, 2014:

The practice of snake handling in the United States was first documented in the mountains of East Tennessee in the early 20th Century, according to Paul Williamson, a professor of psychology at Henderson State University who, along with Hood, co-wrote a book about snake handlers called, "Them That Believe." In the 1940s and 1950s, many states made snake-handling illegal (it's currently illegal in Kentucky), but the practice has continued, and often law enforcement simply looks the other way.

Drifting and donuts

Why do people tend to get too close?

They wanna touch the car and try to look cool but looking cool gon’ get you smacked.

Every romantic knows that to fall in love, your first task requires locating a heart worth breaking. Similarly, every true believer knows that faith is only potential when untested by fate; for without a crucible, all you have is ego. Faith is one thing but demonstrating it is another. Making a proclamation about the future is one thing but placing a bet on it is yet another. If you want to test your faith, you must put yourself in a position to be mortally punished by your very own folly. You need Lady Luck pinning a stiletto to your throat because fair weather faith is no faith at all.

If you believe that fortune will protect you from cremating your feet or departing earth prior to your due date, walking on hot coals or handling venomous snakes aligns your belief with reality in a way so concrete and consistent, neither common sense nor argumentation will convince you otherwise. When you are unstoppable, why should they? And should you depart this earth with the help of smoke or serpents, perhaps you are not the victim of malicious forces but merely human in your predictive abilities. Things happen when they’re going to, whether you gauge them correctly or not. While intensity is not belief, you cannot believe without intensity. Which is why so many put their faith in the physics of Camaros.

100 lies one hundred x

In 1697 Charles Perrault published “Little Red Riding Hood.” In it, the big bad wolf never expressly violates the girl, but I think we get the idea. She goes through the woods to take her grandmother some wine and cake. Upon encountering a wolf, he misdirects her down a winding path, giving him time to eat the grandmother and impersonate her, while feeding the girl a story about feeling under the weather. In the original tale he eats the girl but subsequent versions allow her to escape.

I say wolf but you can tell the story is about men. The lesson is that you should not let your faith in goodness prevent you from being insufficiently skeptical of them.

The film I slept with 100 men begins like this:

A woman looks into the camera and says, “I’m Lily Philips and today I’m getting ran through by 100 guys.”

By the end you can tell that, while you can get violated by a wolf in real life, you can get violated by 100 if you film it.