But I Wore the Juice!

On 19 April 1995, a man named McArthur Wheeler robbed two banks at gunpoint, making no attempt whatsoever to conceal his face from the security feed; and when the police came to his door, scant hours later, he said incredulously, “But I wore the juice!” As it transpires, Mr. Wheeler had discovered that lemon juice renders ink invisible—and, working from this premise, had attained the conclusion that a man doused in lemon juice must therefore be invisible to cameras. A Cornell professor, David Dunning, was so struck by Wheeler’s confidence in his own magnificently imbecilic stratagem that he and his assistant Justin Kruger went on to conduct a major psychological study of the interplay between knowledge and self-assuredness, ultimately concluding that the less one knows about a given subject, the likelier one is to think that one knows all about it.

Theology, experience, and common sense all attest that the same inverse proportion holds true in the moral sphere. Not only does sin darken the intellect and deaden the conscience, but the Thomistic principle of connexio virtutum (ST I-II q. 66 a. 2) means that a deficit in any one virtue diminishes our capacity for all the others as well—and, of course, the more we sin, the less receptive we become to transformative grace, hence the likelier to sin again. “To the one who has, more will be given; from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away” (Matt. 25:29).

This accelerating descent from cesspool to whirlpool would be a deadly peril even if human nature were left to its own devices; but in the supernatural warzone of daily life, the danger is exponentiated by invisible leviathans seeking to hasten our downward spiral to oblivion. We ought to be able to recognize these spirits as deceivers; unfortunately, “discernment of spirits” (1 Cor. 12:10) is a gift of the very Spirit from Whose grace the man in the maelstrom has removed himself. In other words, the more we morally blind ourselves through sin, the easier it becomes for agents of darkness to blind us even further.

Only Socrates, the wisest man in Athens, knew that he knew nothing: the less we know, the more we’re apt to think we know. Glimpsing only the very topmost tip of the titanic submarine monolith of ice that is the global skein of religious, political, economic, and cultural machinations at work behind every well-lit snapshot we see in the news, we’re hardly in a position to guess which surfacing bubble is the result of vast, chthonic forces moving in the deep, and which is the result of a nearby guppy’s hiccup.

I recently wrote an article arguing that immortal deceivers, if they exist, might very well act irrationally—either because they want throw us off their scent, or because existing in Hell has literally driven them insane. (Think of the Devil encountered by Ivan Karamazov, who swears his only desire is to be a 300-pound peasant woman and light a Christian prayer candle in simple faith!) For this reason, I believe the distinction we naturally tend to draw between “a crazy conspiracy theory” and “a theory” is less useful than we think.

To recapitulate: you can’t get smarter if you’re too dumb to know you’re dumb, and a bad person left to himself will do bad things and thus get worse. All of this is exacerbated by the fact that moral badness retards the intelligence and opens one’s soul to demonic influence—which in turn leads to accelerating worsening, thus opening one’s soul all the more, and so on, in a downward spiral that only leads to one place. With our flawed finite intelligence and flawed concupiscent consciences, we aren’t able to see the “big picture” and comprehend how every minuscule happenstance of ordinary life slots together to fabricate the giant stage of worldly affairs; but one thing we do know is that it’s bound to be stranger than we can possibly imagine. No fictional character would rob a bank while covered in lemon juice.

Now, with all that being said, I would like to direct your attention to the following: He-Man and the MOTU Proprio.