INSIGHTS OF A MADMAN

A collection of commentaries offers a guided tour of one man’s psychological evolution.

In this ambitious book, Rabii seeks to chart his personal and intellectual development from “an immature, ultra-religious snot who regurgitated only what his environment fed him, to the adolescent inquirer who clung to some of the doctrines of his obscure faith but was slowly developing his own perspectives, to the idealistic adult who finally broke the chains that locked him into certain ways of thinking and replaced his childhood belief system.” The author explains these new ways of thinking in these pages. He is dismayed by many things, from the emphasis on power and money over compassion to the continued poor treatment of women in many parts of the world to what he sees as “the cultural neglect of the right side of the brain.” Rabii goes over the autobiographical details of his earlier life (which he covered in his 2018 book The Life and Times of a Black Prince in America) and mentions that when he left the religion of his youth at the age of 45, he began his current journey. The key tools on this odyssey were the author’s “theories,” for which he uses the acronym “GUDLLERT”—“God, the Universe, The Devil, Love, Luck, Evil, Retribution, and Terror.” The central preoccupation of these “theories” (they aren’t actually theories but rather speculations) is the nature of good and evil and, by the author’s extension, the nature of God and the devil. GUDLLERT No. 3, for instance, posits that the traditional God of the Bible doesn’t exist because such an absence would explain the enormous extent of human evil. As a result, God “protects no one from the beastly aspects of man,” a conclusion that allows Rabii to expand on human malevolence throughout history.

These vivid and thought-provoking philosophical ruminations are deftly grounded in real-world facts (as well as several uncredited, jarringly graphic photographs). But these reflections also grapple with metaphysics throughout. GUDLLERT No. 5, for instance, “alleges an organic force in the Cosmos that is the opposite of creation and feeds off all things that contribute to returning the Cosmos to a negated state of being.” This tendency can be a bit frustrating for readers. When Rabii comments that “if one day, science possessed irrefutable proof” of God’s “existence or non-existence, a comparison of the after-effects would be quite noteworthy,” the author reveals the bias that runs throughout the book. Science doesn’t need to demonstrate the “non-existence” of the supernatural. Rabii writes in his various GUDLLERTs about a broader interpretation of what God is, but he also contends that the natural world “did not just pop out of nothing or ‘evolve’ into existence.” He tells his readers that “the sun, skies, and trees do exist, and their existence means, at least to me, that they were created.” And “if they were created, then ‘something’ created them.” The energetic, free-wheeling nature of his philosophical speculations sits awkwardly alongside this kind of creationism and implies that he hasn’t in fact wandered very far from his strictly fundamentalist upbringing. The author’s underlying contentions never quite seem to accommodate the possibility that there are no gods or devils at all.

An intriguing, bumpy, and argument-starting collection of reflections about good, evil, and God.