Photo by Anthony Quintano, from Welcome to Hell World 8/25/25
Many say we live in hellish times. Let’s unpack what that might signify, as there are conflicting accounts going around as to what qualifies.
We all know what Dante found when he toured Hell. It was well organized, with a specific place and punishment for each type of sin. As you can see below, many of the ten circles are appropriate for our current leader and his associates.
Besides Dante, few have gone to Hell and come back to tell of it. But it happens in this new novel by R. F. Kuang (herself a graduate student) about two grad students in Magick who make their way to Hell via incantations over pentagrams to find their thesis advisor and retrieve the stranded professor back to Cambridge so they can get their degrees. With assistance from Orpheus and Dante. Reviewers say it’s a good but often tedious read and an amusing send-up of academia if you like that sort of thing.
It’s called Katabasis, which literally means “a descent into the underworld.” In modern usage, Kuang explains, it signifies overcoming “the lowest of the lows, really entering their own personal hell, and then coming back up to the surface.” Hell seen as being within you, like a smoldering ember in your abdomen you need to dive deep extinguish.
Hell need not be a physical place. According to Sartre, Hell is other people, which makes sense given how Hell on Earth tends to come to pass. It’s a line from No Exit (script here), and that title suggests what makes it most excruciating is not so much the torture Hell metes out but the prospect of eternal damnation. As Dante’s inscription says, Lasciate ogni speranza, o voi ch’intrate.
In the public imagination Hell is beastly hot and full of fire and sulfuric pollution (see lead photo), which apparently doesn’t bother the sadistic demons who whip you while telling you to have a nice day. By that definition, I suppose El Salvador’s CECOT prison could qualify as a mini-Hell. It represents a more accessible form of Hell; instead of some huge cavernous flaming pit, we are provided with mini-purgatories. Smaller ones are called torture chambers, medium-size ones called detention centers, and larger ones called camps where refugees from assorted Hells on Earth huddle in some hellhole. At least where they came from there’s freedom of movement.
You hear references to Hell all the time. Besides the aforementioned “Hell on Earth,” people say things like “Hell and high water” (isn’t that an oxymoron?), “Holy Hell!” (another one), “Life (work, whatever) is Hell,” “Baltimore (or some other big city) is a Hellhole,” “That’s a Hell of a ” (often spelled “helluva”), and of course “Go to Hell!” (more politely phrased as “Go to the Devil”). It’s an all-purpose metaphor for whatever repels you.
I keep up on its varieties by reading this guy’s trending newsletter:
Despite it’s scary title, you will find a powerful current of humanity runs through my friend Luke O’Neil’s well regarded blog, Welcome to Hell World. Luke is a widely-published journalist who also writes storybooks, one of which just came out. His beat encompasses a spectrum of needless and heedless human suffering, typically born of intentional depravity. It’s a helluva job to undertake, chronicling forced misery, and I’m sure it takes a lot out of him, but somebody needs to bear witness and Luke has sacrificed much of his well-being to do it. And Luke has kindly offered my readers 50% off on a subscription (that’s under 10 cents a day). Take advantage of it by clicking here.
One of Luke’s recent lines I liked:
I’m told that we can’t post our way out of fascism but they quite literally posted us right into it.
Think about that in the context of right-wing propaganda that ended up influencing enough people to elect Trump, twice. Were it not for so-called conservative think tanks, talk radio, cable news, and social media spewing counterfactual overwrought outrage for decades and decades, we might still have a political system that relegates fewer good people to Hell.
While the first Trump Administration was awful as heck, I consider this one to be genuinely Hell. Hell in the sense that it condemns vulnerable people to painful perdition. Hell in the sense that it invades neighborhoods with masked avengers and armed soldiers, veritable demons.
Who but Satan’s envoys would snatch food from the mouths of poor babies or medical care from their families? Who in the Devil utters lies and then denies having said them? Who would want to deliberately crank up the heat on the planet? Who habitually sins and gets paid for it* Who would bear false witness by insisting to post the Ten Commandments in public buildings, having violated the bulk of them?
You don’t need to be devout to feel these precepts are righteous. If you ever wonder what’s the right thing to do, read the Lord’s memo to Moses. You can also watch the movie if you’re not in a hurry but it kind of obscures the main point.
But if you’re tired of being told what not to do, you can’t go wrong with this affirmation from Jesus, described by Kant as a categorical moral imperative:**
Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.
Everyone knows these words. Most of us learned them by first grade as the Golden Rule. Yet, they’re so hard to live by because others, especially those with power over us set a bad example by disregarding them. Or they think their selfish acts have no impact on others. Afraid of losing out, they invert the rule to “Do unto others before they do it unto you.”
Maybe it’s because they believe they’re in a zero-sum game of competition for scarce resources, in which one person’s gain is another’s loss. They forget that we need one another and kindness is its own reward.
To counter this perverse thinking, just ask them “What would Jesus do?” whenever you have the chance. And ask yourself, whenever in doubt. No matter what your spiritual leanings, it can’t hurt.
Have a helluva nice day.
* See Flip Wilson
** “Kant’s ethics are organized around the notion of a ‘categorical imperative,’ which is a universal ethical principle stating that one should always respect the humanity in others, and that one should only act in accordance with rules that could hold for everyone.” — Immanuel Kant in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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