Warning: this post deals with violent and graphic content – continue at your own risk.

As your initiation into the shadow world, let’s take a wild and dirty ride through the deranged mind of one of the most infamous names in hardcore punk music history…

GG Allin was a walking taboo who gained notoriety in the 80’s for his outrageous and disturbing music and stage performances. GG’s act generally involved stripping naked and defecating on stage, eating his feces, smearing it all over himself and throwing it at the audience, all the while performing his songs, microphone-in-hand. He was almost always covered in his own blood from self-inflicted injuries. He was known to physically attack members of the audience and was imprisoned upwards of 50 times for assault. GG had even pledged to commit suicide on stage, but happened to be in prison when the prospective date came to pass. His shows inevitably led to chaos, violence, and police involvement.

There’s no doubt about it, GG’s act was extreme, and he quickly attracted a cult following of people who wanted to prove that they were tough enough to survive one of his shows unscathed, while bearing witness to such an appalling and spectacular display of degeneracy.

In a short autobiography GG wrote called “The Sickest of the Sick”, he details the horror of his early upbringing:

“The first 5 years of my life were infested with sickness & violence. It consisted of living in a log cabin… with father, mother, & brother… We lived in darkness. Father hated light… We were prisoners to father, and father was a prisoner of himself. He always had planned to kill brother and I, then commit suicide with mother. This was brought to our attention on many a blistering occasion. Father despised pleasures around the cabin and would consciously not allow any enjoyable items to enter into our home. If he found anything in our possession that we enjoyed, he would take it out in the woods behind the cabin and bury it.”

GG’s father, Merle Sr., dug the graves of his wife and boys in the cellar of their cabin, which remained as a constant reminder of the looming threat of violence and death. On top of that hellish mind-fuck of an existence, GG was actually born “Jesus Christ” Allin. Merle Sr. fully believed that GG would be the next Messiah. And there you have it folks, the disease of religious fundamentalism brings it’s ugly pustule to a head again!

This is a disturbing point worth digesting for a moment. “Daddy says I’m God himself but he’s also going to kill me and bury me in the cellar..” Do you have any idea what that would do to the mind of a child? How could any 5 year old reconcile the chasm of opposing forces developing in his own mind? For GG Allin, he became an adult with a Messiah complex, coupled with an extreme and compulsive fixation on sadomasochism, danger, and death.

“They go to church on Sunday and eat the body of Christ, why can’t my followers come and eat the body of GG Allin?”

GG Allin on Jerry Springer, 1993

Merle Sr. refused to let his family have anything that would bring them any joy at all, and as a sensing type and a dominant, GG would finally get his way by making all the most disgusting and vile taboos into his pleasures and ultimately into his way of life. When GG got older and had escaped the brutal rule of his deranged father, he rebelled by utterly rejecting the superego part of himself, as well as any and every rule, limit and restraint on his behaviour. He fully embraced the pure and unfettered expression of his Id, and all the unhinged compulsions that came with it.

“I’m not doin’ this for the money, I’m doin’ this because it lives inside of me.”

It wasn’t an act for GG, it was the only way he was able to express his early trauma. Unfortunately his denial was so profound that this expression became extremely unhealthy for himself, dangerous for others, and ultimately led to his death at the age of 36.

“That sort of made me a warrior soul at an early age… I distanced myself from people and that’s what makes me strong, because I don’t have to deal with anybody. I’m really content with being myself.”

Instead of consciously acknowledging and processing his inner conflicts, GG externalized his pain, unconsciously spewing the contents of his shadow upon his gawking audience. He appeared to hate the outer world, but unconsciously, he hated himself.

GG Allin personifies some of the deepest and most repressed shadow urges of humanity, and as such, goes down in history as one of the most shocking and vile individuals of the 1980’s and 90’s.

“These people over here would rather shelter their kids, they would rather sensor them, they would rather keep them from the real world. What you see in my show, you’ll see on the streets, you’ll see what’s happening in urban America, not in suit and tie land..”

And there we have it. A kernel of truth at the bottom of a putrefying pit of blackness. People would rather not acknowledge that people like GG exist in the world. They do. And we live in a society that creates them. That is the darkest fact of all.

“Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering”

C.G. Jung

To have a real chance of changing the world, we need to take a real long, dirty look at the darkest parts of our society and figure out how they got that way. For what it’s worth, GG brought a spotlight to the deranged and impoverished mental worlds that most of us will never have the displeasure to set foot in.

In the future Hyperian society, a child just like GG Allin will have actual protection from religious brainwashing and horrendous abuse. A meritocratic government will actually care about each and every one of its citizens, instead of letting them languish in atrocious conditions. There will be measures in place to identify and appropriately guide children with naturally dominant characteristics.

Who knows how GG might have turned out differently if he had been raised in a loving and proactive family, who were living in a loving and proactive society. No doubt he would still have a shadow, but it’s contents might have been vastly different, more manageable and likely, less extreme.

In the universe, there are neutral minds, positives, negatives, and synthesized minds. In the Hyperian world of the future, there will still be negative and positive minds, but everyone will be guided from birth by only the most talented and meritorious synths, towards reason and towards wholeness, to eventually become synthesized minds themselves. We must create Unity in society and that means every mind counts! That is the vision of the future, and the ultimate Hyperian mission.

Next on Dark Matter, we’ll flip the script and look at a highly inspirational and uplifting story; a dissection of an incredibly powerful mind indeed…

Ad Astra!

– Eva