A Tale of Tyranny:

The Scorpio archetype is often the least readily understood, most often misunderstood, and most tragically understood sign of the Western Zodiac. Its function primarily is the preservation of Justice for the downtrodden. Suppose that a child is born to an inattentive and dogmatic father. The father, reeking of privilege and condescension, casts out all his children to fend for themselves, for he has no further need for them. Hitherto his other children were forced into servitude, and their lingering “debt” to him for his “kindness” bound them to a path that barred the way to charity. So it was that MOST of the outcast children perished in agony whilst the tyrant enjoyed the complacent boredom of privilege. But one survived. And that was the Scorpion. Scorpio is the outcast and rejected child that grew up on its own in the wilderness. It learned the law of the land, not the law of the kingdom. It had no education in civilized life, but was raised by wolves, an outcast to both its own kind and its foster parents, a perpetual alien to the world of Intersubjective Relationship.

Scorpio’s skills in fending for its self at all costs imbibed it with the notion that all life is a game of zero sum. Survival is for the fittest and the perpetuation of the predator is all ways at the expense of the prey. Friendships were neither entitlements nor sources of amusement, except when the weaknesses of friends became cause for amusement, even then at the expense of the amusing. Friends were resources to serve the Utilitarian purposes of the Quest, to be protected jealously only insofar as they might be put to use. At times sacrifices had to be made, and so Scorpio cast off its weaker friends and found stronger ones to fill the place. At times even the stronger friends had to be challenged and robbed. All friends were potential enemies, and enemies had to be kept closer than friends could ever be. A friend of strong but generous character was to be exploited; its generosity was its weakness, and its strength was its utility. The outcast child of a King would not be “fooled” by generosity, for the King had only ever been generous so far as it would privilege his preferences. Generosity was the instrument of Privilege to use towards the ends of Injustice. Justice was only to be found in the wilderness.

I have spoken of a Quest. This Quest’s purpose was Justice. To be redeemed, to validate its existence, Scorpio had to work its way back into the Kingdom. Its entry went largely unnoticed, though rumour of a creeping shadow or a band of thieves grew swiftly. Scorpio infiltrates the Kingdom of its slighted birth by avenue of the catacombs: the network of sewers and burial sites that the Royals do not wish to see. (This is the story of Jak and Daxter in Jak Three.) It is a cat burglar that climbs up the fire escape ladders to reach the rooftops and that sets up a network of spies to infiltrate the palace, as in Sly Cooper. Finally it comes to the throne of the King, who does not remember it. The King asks: “Who are you?” and the Scorpio replies: “I am your outcast child. You have violated me. Your irresponsible activities of privilege have wound me up in this wretched state, clawing for survival. And I watched you live in privilege. Now I shall collect what is owed to me.”

So the King is overthrown, the outcast avenged, the children redeemed, and Order and Prosperity restored under the banner of Justice.

Of course we who have had the privilege of living in the City know that this entire account is one-sided, and as Jung attests: one-sidedness, though it lends momentum, is a mark of barbarism. As our philosophers keenly remind us: Romanticism begets Fascism. Kierkegaard insists that all passions burn to their own destruction. So it is that, like Anakin Skywalker, and plenty of anti-heroes before him for that matter, Scorpio is inclined to become an agent of the very force that it had been born to vanquish. And, true to form, it will not know this, for it has not enjoyed the privilege of our education. When it receives information it grows combative, for it is clever enough to deconstruct any narrative. It is not yet wise enough to see its self in a mirror as it repeats the karmic history of the human race even as it scoffs nervously at the thought that any one could outsmart it. Fate outsmarts it; its adversaries are mere messengers of fate for the tragic anti-hero.

Truly, our privilege is not a privilege but a right, and our right is our power, our power our responsibility. When the Greeks eliminated the “right to fail” they rose above the barbarians. But the Scorpio will only scoff at such sophistication, reminding us that “barbarian” was a Greek invention, as though to make us forget of the horrors that that word had properly signified. The slighted outcast of the Kingdom will retort by drawing our attention to Daemonides and the cruelty of sophistication, as Vonnegut does in his books. Yet when has any one of us seen brutality in the kingdom such as has been the work of a Scorpio? Leo inflicts pain out of its ignorance. Scorpio inflicts pain on purpose. And every Scorpio fears vampires moreso than Zombies, for the weak-minded evil can be controlled, its moral weakness an added convenience. A strong-minded evil is not only a veritable adversary but a Black Mirror that the well-meaning public cannot cloud in all their appraisal of the Scorpion’s “beneficent” agency.

Let’s return to the present day, then.

The Scorpio’s intent is of course to raze the Kingdom to the ground and to establish a wilderness. When the Scorpio man does not wish to work, for all avenues represent the agency of the King, he becomes a radical Marxist, daily reminding his friends that life is a matter of subjective, relative fact, that freedom lies outside the walls of the city, that morality varies from class to class, that nothing can be possessed and nothing is required, and that to subordinate one’s self to servitude is to enslave all of one’s peers by example. His seemingly easygoing spirit draws in the downtrodden, humble souls who find their disillusionment under the supervision of a monarchical and absurdly tyrannical and arbitrary “boss”. Yet even in his sloth the Scorpion plants the seeds of a later hegemony. It is EASY for him to say that the boss’s oppression is necessary; he has never HAD one. He can pretend towards having been oppressed by the system and by his family, for those of his peers who have known such injustice would gladly open their hearts to him. Their affect predates their intellect in so triggering a matter, and it is long before they realise the startling fact that he had only ever been a “victim” of his own frivolous misadventures, and that he was never met with the prolonged cruelty or serious threats that they had to labour through. But by that point he has all ready accused THEM of having been false victims, so what can they say to retort? He has cheated them of their revelation before a jury of their peers, for long before they realized that his victimhood was a show he convinced the hard-nosed realists that victimhood is self-imposed and the bleeding-hearts that HE has been victimized by the people that were in fact his own prey. He might fear reproof eventually, that his prey will catch up with him, but shelter is in the arrogance of the survivor, for he has never known an adversary who is more prone to recover and avenge than himself. The only evil he fears is in the mirror.

What he obscures by brutish and unbelievable dishonesty is the simple fact that pain is not necessary. His own pain was not NECESSARY, except towards the ends of his own survival. On the WHOLE, his entire condition was a tragic error on the part of the King, so it was never justified. But having established himself as his only end he saw pain as a virtue, and so it would be a blessing to those that he would have to hurt in order to perpetuate the only value he had: himself.

Underneath the lie is the truth that he should have admitted to begin with: that it was IGNORANCE that created pain. That it was PRIVILEGE, that it was PREFERENCE, and that it was COMPLACENCY that all conspired to oppress. That we are not all victims in this life whose goal is to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. (As Watts reminds us, this is traditionally an expression for the impossible and idiotically futile.) A victim by necessity requires an oppressor, and it is either the Ignorance or the AMBIVALENCE of the parasite that makes possible the pain of the host. When the Scorpion dismisses the sufferings of his friends, humiliating them by praising their bullies, he obscures this fact. He himself becomes-bully, and then by playing the role of a victim he obscures the fact of bullying once more. Finally the true victims recognize him for a fake, once they have moved past the shock and disbelief that any “person” could be so cruel as to use them in their innocence. Until then they cannot be brought to believe it, even as they criticize him daily for his villainy and he rages against them for their own “oppression” of his appetites. Yet his appetites are all ways parasitic. He depends entirely upon the kindness of jaded and broken people who can, at least for some short time, be made to feel, against all Reason, that he is every bit as jaded and broken as they are. He can never reciprocate their kindness, and so he pretends towards an injustice in the relationship, early on, and holds them in his illusory debt until he takes from them, by force of cunning, and often by force of law or plain physical aggression, more than they can afford. THEIR lives become secondary at that point, even in their own EXPERIENCE, to HIS. And at that point his existence is seen to be an error, his birth the mistake of the King but his survival the mistake of his own. And yet by then it becomes seemingly too late to stop him, for he has all ready set up a network of his peers who would gladly act as jury in a Kangaroo Court, believing fervently that their proprietor is innocent and that his adversary is guilty.

So it is that when the Scorpio man FINALLY gets a job it is not long before he turns from Marxism to the opposite extreme: Fascism. The spirit of vengeance permeates this transformation as much as any other, poisoning his every word. If HE, the central purpose of existence, must be made to suffer in servitude (though of course by his own device and for his own purposes, for he was never in fact a victim and suffered little in the way of “coercion”, save for negligible peer pressure) then so must ALL men. The very friend he had had who had to answer back then to a “boss” must NOW answer to the SCORPIO. For if the “boss” was necessary, is not the pressure of one’s peers?

Of course, I was that friend. It evidences my point that I refer to myself so late and so secondarily in this piece, as though my only function was to be the friend and tool of a narcissistic manipulator. As much as it pains me to admit, I become more relieved by the moment. If any doubt is cast upon my own victimhood it is only because the account its self comes from such a position of renewed strength now that any thought of my becoming a “victim” again would be ridiculous. And so one might wonder if I was ever a victim to begin with.

There are several ways to identify one’s own victimhood. One may never prove it effectively to others, at least not until one is in good company again, and victimhood inevitably perpetuates its self by drawing the victim away from good company by every deceptive device available. Yet once one knows that one has been abused, one must swiftly recognize this: that one has not the right to fail. All counselors, professional and unprofessional, who will shelter the victim’s ego but prevent its healing by its own empowerment are part of the oppression. The truth is that one does not get to choose misery. If one chooses to remain a victim the abuse will inevitably perpetuate its self. As Marion Woodman attests: the feminine can be every bit as cruel as the masculine. To do nothing in the face of danger to one’s self is to do nothing in the face of danger to others. One’s self is an end in and of its self, and as a part of the Whole, the primordial Unity, it may be the force that saves and heals an Other. It is not that the Self is a means towards the Other’s ends, but rather that when the Self has been actualized most beautifully then it merges with the Other.

The second step is to admit that pain is not necessary. Nature does not hate us. All of our suffering comes from expulsion from the human community which is our birthright. This includes the Scorpio’s suffering most notably. The Scorpio becomes the very oppressor that he had set out to destroy. He has not brought Justice to the Kingdom. He has become-the-tyrant, and unlike the Old King the New King rules by vindictiveness and a surpassing cruelty. The Old King banishes his own children to the wasteland. But the New King reduces the entire KINGDOM to a wasteland, and HE becomes the predator at the top of the food chain.

The third step is a simple test of character. We all co-exist by generosity. Generosity is not peculiar to the King. It is the network that we have all ways used to survive even under his arbitrary tyranny. The fact that this virtue cannot be stolen from us, but only repressed by the King’s privilege, (a fact subtly overlooked in the Romanticism of the Scorpio’s Tale) makes it possible to render the egoism of the monarch a sort of joke. The jesters in Shakespeare’s plays love to joke about the mortality of the King who is allowed a short time to “monarchise, be feared and kill with looks”. The ignorant and negligent tyrant can be made a secret joke by the people so long as the people are unified, even if their unity is non-violent. In FACT, it is the very non-violence of their union that prevents them from falling prey to the radicalism of the Scorpio. Why appoint a beneficent dictator when your neighbor can simply “hook a brother up” (provide)? Was it not all ways THIS generosity that the Scorpion had used to navigate his way around the city, all the way to the top of the palace where his rival slept?

The third test is to ask one’s self: have I given all I could? If I have housed a thief, if I have healed a traitor, if I have funded a swindler or promoted an invader, then I am innocent. It is HE that used his Will to render evil in the midst of my goodness. I can never be blamed for being so “stupid” as to be ungenerous, for that is to suggest that it had been INEVITABLE that my “friend” would betray me and use me. To say that is to preclude the possibility that the Scorpio would have chosen Goodness over Evil. It would be to dispossess him of that RESPONSIBILITY for his actions. If *I* am to be blamed, HE cannot be. I can only be held responsible for the fact that I WAS generous, and that such generosity was blameless, for if I should withhold resources from my peers I would be the evil. The evil Scorpio all ways maintains a gap between what he CAN do and what he WILL do, for it is only so that he can avoid mersion with the human community. What he reserves for himself he does to serve as a reminder of his own autocracy, not simply his autonomy. However noble the cause, if he must be coerced into it, he will refuse, even if he does not hesitate to use such coercion towards his own perpetuation-as-parasite. So long as he has your next meal under lock and key, he can persuade you to do “this for me”. He can even convince you that you owe it to him. Yet most of what he has to give was either stolen or given with a grace that he does not possess.

Generosity is the arbiter. Without it good and evil are reduced to equals, and again the veil of tyrannical ignorance is cast over the eyes, for we then forget the fact that pain was the work of evil. So long as I know that I’ve given all I could to my treacherous friend, I know that he was treacherous. And I require no vindication from my peers in this matter; they are all ready turned towards the devices of treachery. He will tell me now that if they are all ready turned then I’ve all ready lost. But in fact I’ve won. For beyond this tragic kingdom is an other that rests on a higher plane. There my new friends wait for me. There they can help, because they care. They know their privilege to be a right that I reserve. They have only to see the TRUE me, the bruised child that the Scorpio rejects as weak even as he exploits that weakness. He does not recognize the “weakness”, by avenue of which I provide for him, as strength. And so if I can take this journey into the deep indigo Heavens, if this path is available to me and closed to my traitor, then the less time that I have to spend professing my pain and position to a crowd of dishonorable thieves, the better off I am. If they are all ready turned-to-Evil, then I owe them no account and no warrant, for it was only for their sake, out of generosity towards their character, that I would have ever spoken. If they cannot reciprocate such generosity, I am absolved of all my karmic debt.

Dm.A.A.