A thought occurred to me quite strongly while watching the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie Dead Men Tell No Tales of what was specifically so appealing about the Johnny Depp character as well as Geoffrey Rush.   The movie was great by the way, and I found the opinion of many of the American critics to be completely wrong—and perhaps part of what I’m about to say is the reason they didn’t like it.  Jack Sparrow for all his irresponsible ramblings and drunken behavior is so laissez faire that his scandalous swagger was an asset not a failure.   What the Pirate’s story was essentially about was a love of life in the most un-evil exchange possible, yet the characters themelves were lawless thieves on the opposite side of what we might call legally good.  The villains were so dead in the case of this particular story that there was something very psychological going on.  It brought to my mind the problem of necrophilia—people who seek sexual interaction with the dead.  There are after all many forms of death, not just the physical kind.  People can be perfectly alive breathing with a beating heart, but still be intellectually dead—as so many people are.  What drives so many to that reality is usually some person in their life who has conquered them in some way—the way that we might break a horse or a dog.  It is possible to kill someone without physically harming a hair on their head by robbing them of self initiation.

The essential evil of government is that they inheritably seek to impose on their populations a lazy form of control because it is inconvenient to them to have people doing all kinds of different things that make it hard for governments to manage their people.  Put another way, we’ve all worked for some boss who was addicted to the power of their position where they seek to abuse their authority for the sake of control over others.  There is a desire among these types of people to make people so dependent on them that they mold their people into mindless automatons who no longer think for themselves but are always waiting for someone else to tell them how to think and what to do next.

We see this most notably in our American politics with the Democratic Party where they have a supporter base of welfare recipients, government employees, drug addicts, and sexual malcontents—they are typically the type of people who have been beaten in their life in some fashion and seek government to tell them what to do, how to think, and to define their existence.  Perhaps they come from parents who were too lazy to explain how a butterfly flies and were scolded away from thinking and asking questions because the authority figures didn’t want to be bothered with such things.  That parent might smack the child on the head to discourage further inquiry because the parent had on their mind the latest tabloid headline or some interfamily drama for which they enjoyed the misery of—because it deterred them of the realities of their own poor existence. Kids growing up with parents like that would tend to be Democrat inclined because they arrive as adults unarmed to think for themselves—and need others to think for them because they had their intellectual wings clipped at a critical stage of their lives—which I’d define as evil.

Studying the Bill Cosby case where he was a celebrity who could sleep with any woman he wanted essentially, but instead chose allegedly to drug many women into a condition where they lost consciousness.  At that point he’d have sex with them as a lifeless corpse where they couldn’t interact in return giving him complete power over their bodies—which is precisely what the necrophilia minded person would do by having sex with a dead body.  It’s usually all about having complete control over the other person.  The same could be said of people who seek out bondage such as the relationships in the popular book series 50 Shades of Grey.  A lot of times the people who want to be whipped, spanked and forcibly raped under controlled conditions are those who have very stressful jobs and they wish to surrender thought to a master who does all their thinking for them.  The sex act is painful but the surrendering of thought to a “master” is satisfying in a very dysfunctional way—because at some point in their life they learned to yield to a master.  It may have been as simple as a parent preventing a child from drinking milk before going to bed out of punishment for something else.  Once a mind is crippled from self-initiation it usually seeks to yield thought to some form of sexual abuse, drug escape, or some passive aggressive yearning for collectivist thinking. The man who wants to have sex with a woman at a bar might seek to get her drunk so that he can get her into bed—and the woman might want to get drunk so she can deny having control over her actions later.  She may want to be raped in some way but she doesn’t want the responsibility of making the decision so she gets drunk on a girls night out so she can surrender to the primal urge.  Society says she should be a bunch of things she doesn’t want to be, so to satisfy what’s been killed inside her—the tendency to be an automaton to collectivist thought, she turns off her mind and surrenders to a master in a game of abuse that started many years prior over something likely very trivial.

Back to the boss issue, when they are more concerned with the controlling aspects of the relationship—such as the dress code, the time clock, and the rules of company conduct but seem to be oblivious to the productive aspects of the job—the merit based stuff, you have someone who is functioning from a form of evil.  They do not seek to bring out the life of their employees but only to have lifeless automatons who do exactly as they are told and do not respond with any vitality of a life force.  This is the central premise of T.S. Elliot’s The Wasteland—people functioning from an inauthentic vantage point.  Necrophilia doesn’t have be only defined as sex with dead people—the same could be applied to the man who would rather look at pornography when he has a perfectly good wife in his bed.  But the wife might want to talk about curtains, cloths and kids for an hour and the guy might just want to have sex.  So rather than embark on a journey of listening to her for a while so that she might get everything off her mind so that she might then be ready for sex, he instead retreats to pornography where the images do exactly what he wants.  He is in control of what’s happening and what he sees and when he wants to see it.

Governments do not want to have a bunch of independent people running around doing whatever they want.  They don’t want thinking people to skunk up all their big government plans, they just want a lifeless body that pays its taxes and lays there waiting for some government pinhead to tell them what to do and what to think.  I would say that all governments have a bit of necrophilia in them—not in literal sexual conduct, but in intellectual attributes.

As I read the reviews of the new Disney Pirate’s film particularly of the fifth outing of Jack Sparrow it was obviously this necrophilia tendency in themselves that they didn’t like because the way Johnny Depp plays that character even as a drunken fool, his lively vitality is overwhelming—it’s no wonder that its one of the most popular characters in film history.  There was a wonderful scene in Dead Men Tell No Tales where Sparrow is about to be executed and he runs into Uncle Jack, played by Paul McCartney and they have a wonderful exchange that shows no fear of death whatsoever—a complete irreverence toward the danger they were all in.  There was nothing on earth that controlled the fate of Jack Sparrow and that’s why those Pirate films were so great.  Because they play out what we all feel, the curse of the walking dead, static controls of rigid governments, and the fantasy of living of one’s own accord under a pirate code that is rooted in 100% freedom-freedom to think and do anything you want and the empowerment that comes with it.

Most people are suffering under some form of necrophilia either as recipients or as the initiators—but in either case the psychosis is equally dangerous because it carries over into all aspects of our society from the kind of jobs we have to the relationship we have with spouses, children and neighbors.  The desire to control others or to be controlled is a very dangerous thing that in both cases seeks to fill something missing in our lives. The Pirates of the Caribbean movies can temporarily fill the fantasy that many have about living that self-initiated pirate’s life.  But in actuality they are like the dead characters in those films cursed by some mythic desire to control the masses through fear, pain, and eternal damnation. Maybe the cause was as children their parents spanked them for knocking over a lamp while trying to figure out how it worked or maybe some teacher squashed out their thinking in a classroom because the student wasn’t following all the proper instructions as the rest of the class.  But at some point most people get “broken” in and taught that someone else will do their thinking for them.  So they start yielding to authority.  But in the case of Jack Sparrow, the fantasy of so many people, he has no fear of anything—not of life and death—or even consequences.  He manages to stagger through life on his own accord and that is something to take note of.  People want to be free but like a cursed pirate from one of those movies they live either a half dead existence of their own, or they only want to deal with the half dead because of the predictable nature of the exchange.  They don’t want to be challenged with variety and thought.  But if they lived more like Jack Sparrow—not the drunkenness—but in the spontaneity for living—they’d be a lot better off as people.

Rich Hoffman

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