I recently came to the troubling realization that people-shaped puppets are taking over the world.

Hear me out.

I submit that pretty much everyone you see either has a hand up their posterior or, at the very least, is sprouting strings.

While they might look, act, and sound like human beings, they’ve become little more than hand puppets or wooden dolls on strings.

This is a no good, very bad, thing.

So today, I’d like to go over the two main kinds of puppetry we increasingly see before offering the only way I know to remove the hands and cut the strings.

Touchy Feely Puppetry

In the eighth grade, my class of roughly forty students was divided in half.

The boys went to the gym, and the girls went to the Language Arts class.

There, us ladies were shown a video on mammograms and given a mercifully brief introduction to what we could expect when it came time to get a pap smear.

To be clear, there is every reason to fear.

Anyways!

When we came together again, the boys were intent on demonstrating the manner in which they were told to routinely check themselves for testicular cancer and muttering darkly about something called a prostate exam.

Come to find out it’s basically men’s pap smear equivalent!

What can I say?

God is a God of justice.

Amen?

Amen.

In either case, all of us, girls and boys alike, were varying shades of horrified at the prospect of someone else’s hands rooting around our insides.

And yet…

And yet.

So many of us today are enduring perpetual pap smears and prostate exams because we’ve become little more than muppets directed by touchy-feely hands.

And when I say feely, I mean feely because, from what I can see, feelings are almost all that’s directing the way people-shaped muppets act, talk, and think.

Dr. Feelings is in elbow-deep, and a growing demographic are increasingly beholden to his hand as evidenced by the fact that excuses like these are given again and again:

“The heart wants what it wants.”

“It feels so right.”

“I just couldn’t help myself.”

Color me unimpressed.

Honestly, I when hear stuff like that, I have to stop myself from asking,

“Do you like having a perpetual pap smear/prostate exam?”

And more to the point…

Is Dr. Feelings the one who should be in command?

Some people say yes.

During a 1948 debate on the existence of God, atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell Russell told his interlocutor, Father Frederick Copleston, that Dr. Feelings got to have his way with him.

Frederick Copleston: “What’s your justification for distinguishing between good and bad, or how do you view the distinction between them?”

Bertrand Russell: “I don’t have any justification any more than I have when I distinguish between blue and yellow. What is my justification for distinguishing between blue and yellow? I can see they are different.”

Copleston: “Well, that is an excellent justification, I agree. You distinguish blue and yellow by seeing them, so you distinguish good and bad by what faculty?”

Russell: “By my feelings.”

One wonders what he would have said if asked,

“Dr. Russell, in some cultures, they love their neighbors. In some cultures, they eat them. Both on the basis of their feelings. Do you have any particular preference?”

It would have been interesting to hear what Russell said.

Especially if he hadn’t eaten lunch yet.

After all, Dr. Feelings is cannibalism’s fiercest advocate.

Why shouldn’t hunger decide what is wrong and right?

Cookie Monster is clearly living his best life.

And yet…

I would submit that muppets do not make the best decisions.

And maybe you agree!

Maybe you’re like,

“Pfft. Dr. Feelings doesn’t control me.”

I commend you for being in the minority.

However!

That only covers puppetry from within, and there’s also a without parallel to being a muppet.

It’s being a marionette.

Stringy Puppetry

As a child of the 2000s, I was raised under the “because I said so” model of parenting.

“You don’t have to want to, you just have to do it” may as well have been tattoed across my dad’s forehead, and it was a line he used to great effect.

By and large, I was obedient because

1. I was afraid of getting punished and
2. I was a kid. At the end of the day, I did what my parents said.

Thus, as a child, I was basically a marionette, doing what I didn’t want to do because I was afraid and/or passive.

Now, hear me.

When it comes to kids, I don’t object to this.

Nine times out of ten, kids should listen to their parents because otherwise we’d probably all be pre-diabetic or dead before the age of ten.

HOWEVER!

The problem I see is that adult marionettes are increasingly a thing.

Can you imagine an adult sized marionette?

The visual is horrifying.

And historically, the results have been equally so.

Obedience based on fear and passivity does not often take us where we want to go.

In 1968 during the Vietnam War, an event occurred that is known as the My Lai Massacre.

Over a period of roughly four hours, American soldiers murdered, raped, and mutilated over three hundred Vietnamese civilians–men, women, and children.

Made to give testimony about what led up to and occurred during the event, the participating American soldiers echoed a common thread:

Fear.

Fear of the Vietnamese and fear of their commanding officers.

The former incited the massacre.

The latter sustained it.

In both instances, fear of external actors, be they Vietnamese or their superiors, made the men akin to marionettes.

They did what they were told to do, even as some of them broke down and wept.

Another manner by which people can become marionettes was highlighted in Dr. Stanley Milgram’s infamous 1961 experiment where participants were instructed to deliver increasingly severe electric shocks to test subjects.

The experiment was designed to test the power of authority versus the power of personal conscience when asked to harm another person, and obedience to authority unequivocally won the contest.

Every participant, when prodded by the overseeing experimenter, shocked the test subject up to 300-volts, and over half of the participants went all the way up to 450-volts.

In Dr. Milgram’s Obedience to Authority, he offered two explanations for the results of the experiment:

1. A person who has neither ability nor expertise to make decisions, especially in a crisis, will leave decision making to the group and its hierarchy. The group is the person’s behavioral model.
2. A person comes to view themselves as the instrument for carrying out another person’s wishes, and they therefore no longer see themselves as responsible for their actions.

They become either a cog or an instrument, but in either case, both explanations rely on the person being a passive participant.

A marionette.

Which is all well and good until someone ends up dead.

At this point, I hope I’ve convinced that people-shaped puppets are bad, whether in the shape of muppets or in the shape of marionettes.

I mean, for one thing, puppetry has not so great externalities.

Cannibalism. Massacres. Electrocution.

All not so great things.

But most problematic (at least to me) is that fact that if you’re a puppet, you’re not actually free.

You’re essentially a slave to feelings, fear, or passivity.

I think slavery is a very bad thing, so to conclude this post I’d like to offer my thoughts on how to best remove the hand and cut the strings.

Panning Puppetry.

In John 8:31-32, Jesus says to Jews who had believed him, 

“If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

Truth is an incredibly powerful thing.

If feelings, fear, and passivity are rock, paper, and scissors, Truth is the dynamite that blows them all to smithereens.

And yet…

There are a lot of people that resist the Truth for self-imposed slavery.

Artistically, this sad reality was expressed in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where in one memorable scene, John “The Savage” goes on a tirade, trying to liberate the soma-stupored from their self-induced slavery, crying,

“But do you like being a slave? Do you like being babies? Yes, babies. Mewling and puking! Don’t you want to be free and men? Don’t you even understand what manhood and freedom are?”

The scene concludes with John being taken away as the others scrabble for the happy-dappy pills he’d been trying to throw away.

They don’t want to be free.

They’d rather be drugged into stupefaction than reckon with what freedom might mean, and I suspect it’s because freedom in the true sense of the word is an incredibly demanding thing.

When Jesus says,

“The truth will set you free,” that freedom comes with responsibility, something that is anathematic to our modern, libertarian sensibilities.

To most people today, especially in the West, freedom means autonomy (i.e. getting to do whatever we want without restraint).

However, in reality, the truest, highest freedom is not simply freedom from but freedom for.

Yes, Truth will remove Dr. Feelings’ hand and cut fear and passivity’s strings, but it will also demand self-control, bravery, and acts that are supererogatory.

In recent history, I think Martin Luther King Jr. is a tremendous example of what it means to be liberated by Truth and truly set free.

His commitment to non-violence, willingness to endure abuse and death threats, and persistence in the face of rabid segregationists and imprisonment are all hallmarks of a person who’s been liberated from the puppetry of feelings, fear, and passivity and has given themselves to being truly free.

Would that that might be me.

Would that that might be everybody.

Because Lord knows I’ve had enough of people-shaped puppetry.

That’s all for this week!

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