Even as an entirely too earnest fan of ’60s-’70s “Classic Rock” as a teenager, I still found Pink Floyd‘s best-selling 1979 double-album The Wall to be a little pretentious, over-stuffed, and outlandish. I mean, it narrates this bloated, interminable story about an unstable celebrity with creepily-incestuous vibes who is obsessed with walls, and who rises up to become a popular fascist leader targeting minorities and “queers” for extermination. I mean, where was the real-life applicability there?
Nowadays, of course, the only part of The Wall that I find outlandish and unrealistic is when the protagonist suffers a crisis of conscious in the finale, and puts himself on trial for his crimes. Such, needless to say, does not feel like a plausible outcome at this point.
But then, per our own Book of Mormon, it will be in the next life–at least, according to Alma 11:43, at the Resurrection, “The spirit and the body shall be reunited again in its perfect form; both limb and joint shall be restored to its proper frame, even as we now are at this time; and we shall be brought to stand before God, knowing even as we know now, and have a bright recollection of all our guilt.”
Similar sentiments are expressed in 2 Nephi 9:14 (“Wherefore, we shall have a perfect knowledge of all our guilt, and our uncleanness, and our nakedness”), Mosiah 3:25 (“And if they be evil they are consigned to an awful view of their own guilt and abominations”), and Alma 5:18 (“can ye imagine yourselves brought before the tribunal of God with your souls filled with guilt and remorse, having a remembrance of all your guilt, yea, a perfect remembrance of all your wickedness, yea, a remembrance that ye have set at defiance the commandments of God?”).
What all these scriptures share in common is a conviction that sociopathy is only a temporary, mortal state–that our natural state as spiritual beings is one of sympathy and empathy for others–one that we will be fully restored to along with every other joint and sinew in the Resurrection. But, as Alma himself is careful to teach his son Corianton, “the word restoration more fully condemneth the sinner, and justifieth him not at all” (Alma 41:15), precisely because if we have spent our mortal probations doing nothing but violate our inborn divine empathy and sympathy via the incessant exploitation and oppression of others, then we will spend Eternity tormented and tortured by how we have treated others. “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these, ye have done it unto me” warned no less than the Savior himself in Matthew 25, and is perhaps why Moroni warns us that “ye would be more miserable to dwell with a holy and just God, under a consciousness of your filthiness before him, than ye would to dwell with the damned souls in hell” (Mormon 9:4).
In the finale of The Wall, the final judgment brought down against the protagonist is to have his own private wall torn down. He is no longer able to sociopathically keep himself cordoned off from the sympathy of the human race. But this is not a liberation or redemption for him; no, this in fact is the full fury of his punishment, the thing that tortures him the most. How fascinating that the very thing the righteous look forward to—the Atonement and reconciliation of the human race entire, where there will be “no manner of -ites,” neither rich nor poor, bond or free, but all made free together, and equally partake of the heavenly gift—is also the thing the wicked hate and fear the most. Whether we experience the Atonement as a divine reward or an eternal punishment depends entirely on the condition of our own heart.
Jean-Paul Sartre is often quoted as saying, “Hell is other people,” but that’s not quite right–Sartre didn’t say that, but a character within a Sartre play said it. And which play? No Exit, his 1944 one-act play about a trio of recently-departed souls awaiting their eternal punishment within a waiting room of hell, whom, as they snipe and needle each other, slowly start to realize that the waiting room is hell. Because they had rejected human sympathy while alive, their punishment is to be around like-minded people in death. In hell, their walls are torn down—which for the Saints is cause for celebration, but for the damned it causes wailing and gnashing of teeth. Again, for the sorts of people who already despise other people to begin with, there can be no greater torture than being around other people. Mass-deportation is the ethos of hell. The line “Hell is other people” is not a statement of fact (Sartre was an atheist, after all), but a reflection of one’s mental and spiritual state.
It is also here worth remembering that Sartre wrote No Exit during the Nazi occupation of Paris; he saw first hand the mental state of people who are obsessed with walls and exterminating others. They incessantly get rid of other people because they themselves already feel that “hell is other people.” And despite Sartre’s complete lack of religious faith, he could see plain as day that even in military victory, the Nazis were already living in a hell of their own creation.
It is likewise worth recalling that the climactic line, “Hell is–other people!” is shouted by a character as he demands to be let out; the door to the waiting room in fact promptly opens, but he falters, and goes back to sit down. As Moroni predicted, he is more comfortable dwelling with the damned souls of hell; and as Hugh Nibley once said, the worst part about being in hell is being comfortable there. His damnation–that is, his inability to move on and progress–is entirely self-inflicted.