The Religious Suffering of Punch the Monkey and his Stuffed Animal

Mu Dang is not tragic. Mu Dang is just cute. And as you know, I’ve already made a video about the meaning of the cute. This though. This is a more significant… This is a more significant dynamic that we’re looking at. Why it’s making impact on the culture. So I’ll give an alien view and an angelic view. The alien view to start. I think about William S. Burroughs. I think about what he described as the junk drive. So all of us kind of normal people are… But as I’ll get to, not all of us watching are normal.

The average person in the old days lived on libido. They lived on their natural drives. And then you take something like heroin. And you shoot up. And that becomes it. That’s now what you live for. It’s better, you know, as I say, better than sex. Heroin. Better than sex. This is why an addict is going to operate solely for heroin. They’re, you know, the libido is greatly lessened. This is something Burroughs goes quite in depth on. So in this way, Punch is kind of like a junkie. He’s like a homeless addict from the point of view of the other monkeys who are doing monkey things.

You know, they’re doing their monkey things. And then there’s this kind of weird other monkey who doesn’t care at all about the monkey things. He only cares about the toy. He only cares about heroin. He only cares about this thing that gives him comfort that makes him feel good. So that’s one reading, is that this is kind of a look at addiction. And it’s very easy to sympathize when the outsider is not an outsider to you, but an outsider in their own culture. This is a problem that many people make.

They, you know, kind of morally leap. It’s something Nietzsche talks about. You know, anybody is willing to love a martyr. It’s very, if you are, you know, somebody who suffers for their ideas makes it seem like their ideas are worth suffering for. And this is often not the case. Then the other, there was a tweet that the meme intelligence agency co-host Blair sent me. Which says, you guys probably don’t know, but this, you know, punch is like a chud punch is like some kind of chud monkey. This is also true. A chud being, you know, a internet freak.

So that’s also very true. You know, we need only look at the waifu pillow to see a very perfect sympathy. What would you think if you saw a guy carrying around a waifu pillow at all times? You would do the same thing as these other monkeys. You’d be like, all right, get away from me. I don’t want to know you. Go be on your own and be freaky on your own. You know, this is the state of the internet addicted individual who has abandoned humanity, abandoned the normal way of living, the neat.

They have gone solely into the internet. That stuffed monkey, that stuffed orangutan is like the internet to punch. It’s the internet and it’s heroin. This is a very negative reading of the situation, of course. But I think that it’s apt. I think that there are people who sympathize with him. In some registers, they know that they are like him. They know that they are like punch. They know that they are an outsider and a freak of nature. They are somebody other people don’t like. They don’t get along with others. And that’s one way.

And now we kind of get to very, very, very similar, but angelic. The angelic read. The angelic read is that punch kun is a whimsy maxer. Punch kun is so in love with playing and fun. He doesn’t want to stop. He doesn’t want to do boring, normal monkey things. He wants to make his life more meaningful and fun. And I think that there’s a validity to this, you know. He is an attempt at a crowned and conquering child, at a child who is stepping away from the old world and the old way of doing things and moving into a new way, a new form of doing things.

And who is best expressed? Who is the best expression of this? But of course, Jesus Christ. And in this we can think of Christ bearing his cross and punch bearing his little stuffed monkey, dragging it along the way. A great weight on his shoulders which he cannot pass from him, in spite of how he may want to be. It is his fate. It is his fate. It makes me think of the holy mountain. There’s like a crucifix factory and the beggar is brought in and they cast him as Christ and he carries his own crucifix around.

And this image always stuck with me very vividly. I wrote a poem about it over a decade ago. So it’s interesting to see this kind of image re-emerge in the collective popular conscience. Conscious. So, you know, think about what the Beatles said. The Beatles described Christ very well. The fool on the hill. Nobody wants to know him. They can tell that he’s just a fool. This is punch. Punch is, you know, doing something radically different and new. And this is very, very disturbing and unpleasant to the monkeys who are doing things the normal monkey way.

He is, you know, I don’t, we don’t have the monkey language. We don’t know if it means that much to him. We don’t really know what punch thinks about what he’s doing. Though I have no doubt that monkeys worship. It’s part of the reason that a baboon was picked for Thoth by the Egyptians. You know, baboons appear to worship the rising sun. They will, you know, watch it rise and help it. You know, they’ll raise their arms and help them, help the sun rise. This, this is a perfect example, you know. This is a Virgoan, a Virgoan Christ monkey, as opposed to the Piscean, which is normal Christ.

You know, Virgo is the monkey-like Thoth, whereas Gemini is the Ibis-headed Thoth. So altogether I think it does kind of become one thing, you know, junkie, internet addict, whimsy-maxer Christ figure. That’s one thing. You know, they’re all, it’s different moral understandings, six, seven. It’s different, you know, it’s different forms of one dynamic, but ultimately it is that one dynamic of the stranger in a strange land, the willing or unwilling self-induced stranger, the other, the othering of oneself. So therefore it’s no surprise that many people sympathize and relate with Punch-kun.

Or, on the other hand, some, like John Stuart, he did a little talk and he said, you know, the other monkeys are probably right. There’s probably something very wrong with Punch. And I mean, yeah, most definitely there is. Who, you know, who are we to judge the nature of nature? How can we say that the other monkeys are wrong and they should have sympathy for Punch? You know, it’s all a repeating and recurring dynamic. And it’s important, I think, to escape from this dynamic. The crushed small one is nothing to attain to. We should not love and want to be like that.

We should not want to be a martyr. This is something Nietzsche talks about extensively. You know, we should want to be a great hero for what we believe in, to live it to its fullest. And if the only life that heroin, the internet, whimsy is definitely not this case, or Christianity has to offer is being a suffering, crushed, miserable outsider, then what is it offering in our real lives, in our material lives, outside of, you know, good and evil? Well, these are some of my thoughts on Punch the Monkey, and I hope that you’ve enjoyed it.

And as always, remember, memes matter. [tr:trw].