People on the right now feel they're in the depths of hell. We on the left may soon be re-entering the depths of hell. This article explores Dante's and Sartre's views of hell and how we might relate

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Jean Paul Sartre's most famous quote, "Hell is other people," was acted out by his story, No Exit, about three people, put, for eternity, in the same room with each other, which becomes hellish torture.

There are many versions of Sarte's story NO EXIT on youtube.

It was hellish when Bush and Cheney were elected-- for Democrats and those on the left. It's hell for right wingers and tea partiers and a lot of progressives, with Obama as president.

Now, we on the left face more hell, or hells, as the possibility of a right wing takeover of the House and maybe the senate seems more and more likely. A bronzed Luciferic John Boehner looms large in our near future.

image source from wikipedia. Painting by Michelino

I was browsing one of a number of versions and translations of Dante's Divine Comedy I've collected over the years. Dante created a trilogy describing visits to hell, heaven and Purgatory; Inferno, Purgatorio and Pardiso. Each part is broken into different levels, where different souls go. For example, Hell is, according to Wikipedia, broken into three parts--

...the three main divisions of Dante's Hell:
Upper Hell (the first 5 Circles) for the self-indulgent sins;
Circles 6 and 7 for the violent sins; and
Circles 8 and 9 for the malicious sins

Dante's Purgatorio is where people who indulged in the seven "deadly" sins, or what Dante called the "roots of sinfulness." These sins are what politicians and their partners in crime lobbyists tend to engage in-- wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony.

level 9 of Dante's Inferno, etched by Gustave Dore

At the deepest, lowest level of Dante's hell, level nine, Satan sits, frozen in ice, to the waist, crying tears from the six eyes of his three faces. His wings generate cold winds that maintain his frozen situation. Satan is at the lowest level because he betrayed God. Satan is ignorant, impotent and full of hate. Sound familiar?

Slightly higher up in Dante's hell, supposedly in not such awful circumstances, are people who betrayed their lords and benefactors.

I have to wonder where we'd put today's politicians. Surely, most of them deserve at least deserve Purgatory, for their self-indulgent sins-- the ones that lobbyists tend to buy them with. But then, these politicians have also betrayed us, their constituents. Dante didn't have a place in hell for that category, but he did have one for people who betrayed guests. Times have certainly changed though, or at least we thought they did. Now, would the Lords be considered banksters and heads of corporations?

Then dear reader, there's you and me. It seems that we are facing a descent into hell again, as John Boehner, already tanned from his fiery visits to hellfire, prepares to ascend the Infernal throne where, certainly, the leadership of the house of representatives rests.

Why are we, on the left, facing another visit to hell? It hasn't been that long that we departed from hell, in 2006, when the house was first won.

Then again, hell, perhaps not Dante's but other science fiction and fantasy versions, has always had a way of deceiving its denizens, of fooling them into grasping at false hope.

Perhaps we've never left hell.

Or perhaps we climbed into Purgatory and thought we'd reached heaven-- things do tend to be relative.

But now, we face political monsters worse than we imagined-- yes, worse than Cheney, worse than Bush, worse than Santorum.

Dante and his guide escape from the depths of hell by going even deeper, through the center of the earth until gravity reverses itself, coming out in another hemisphere, under a starry skied night.

Perhaps we on the left must truly face the depths of hell before we face the reality that politics and elections are truly, pathologically broken, that even justice is broken.

We live in a world that is guided by corporate and consumerist values and systems which cannot satisfy us. These fail to satisfy liberals and they will fail to satisfy members of the teaparty.

When those on the left and the right all hit bottom and realize that the problem, the roots of hell grow out of a broken political and election model that keeps a pathological system in place, perhaps then, we will, together break free of the system, dig ourselves out of the pit we find ourselves, our nation and in fantasies about Democracy and justice stuck within.

Authors Bio:

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

more detailed bio:

Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.

Rob Kall Wikipedia Page

Rob Kall's Bottom Up Radio Show: Over 400 podcasts are archived for downloading here, or can be accessed from iTunes. Or check out my Youtube Channel

Rob Kall/OpEdNews Bottom Up YouTube video channel

Rob was published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com for several years.

Rob is, with Opednews.com the first media winner of the Pillar Award for supporting Whistleblowers and the first amendment.

To learn more about Rob and OpEdNews.com, check out A Voice For Truth - ROB KALL | OM Times Magazine and this article.

For Rob's work in non-political realms mostly before 2000, see his C.V.. and here's an article on the Storycon Summit Meeting he founded and organized for eight years.

Press coverage in the Wall Street Journal: Party's Left Pushes for a Seat at the Table

Talk Nation Radio interview by David Swanson: Rob Kall on Bottom-Up Governance June, 2017

Here is a one hour radio interview where Rob was a guest- on Envision This, and here is the transcript..

To watch Rob having a lively conversation with John Conyers, then Chair of the House Judiciary committee, click here. Watch Rob speaking on Bottom up economics at the Occupy G8 Economic Summit, here.

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