Spoiler Warning: PI.

4:35 P.M. 2/21/2018

Restating my presumptions:

Darren Aronofsky’s Pi is essentially an emotivist work of religious fiction with strong Occult implications.

Evidence:

The piece revisits the story of the Free Masons. Max is blessed with the Name of God, ostensibly. The capitalists want it so that they can operate the stock market in their own favour. The Hassidic Jews want it because they believe themselves to be God’s Chosen People. It makes sense that he would withhold the Holiest of Truths from the former. But what about the latter?

When Meyer first appears, he is an immediate mirror for the protagonist. Max and Meyer are seemingly living at cross purposes, although they are in actuality seeking the same end by very common avenues; they are both mathematicians working with a data set.

The parallel is not lost to Max when he presents his zealous speculations to his former professor. Yet Saul dismisses Max as being pseudo-scientific, condemning this strain of mathematical thinking to the realm of “numerology” because it lacks “scientific rigour”.

When I first watched this scene as a stand-alone piece on YouTube, eight years ago or so, it must have triggered me to the extent that a butterfly pushes against the interior of its cocoon. It was precisely the sort of pretension that the children of professional scientists are raised on. And it is, as the story heartens me to admit, a lie.

The truth is that Saul himself only gave up on unraveling the MEANING of the 216-digit number (or, as the Hassids posit, the 216-letter Name) because he was, as the protagonist his former pupil intuits, intimidated by it. At the end of the film, when Saul dies, Max discovers, all too late, that Saul was speaking from his own experience as an impure person. Informed by the Jews, Max understands the significance of the Number because he has lived to tell (and to withhold) the tale. The Ancient Jewish Myth states that those who are impure will die upon hearing the name of God. When Saul dies but Max lives to witness the aftermath (pun not intended consciously) Max understands himself to have been Chosen, pure of heart, and so he becomes a martyr, destroying what is left of the code by burning up Saul’s record of it and proceeding to drill a hole in his own brain. The ultimate scene shows Max gazing in placid contentment at some leaves, wistful and without conviction. It has become no longer a pattern to him but a simple thing, like Basho’s frog. Cleansed of the name of God, Max is reborn a simpleton, and he attains oneness with Divinity by living the life of an ordinary man.

All of that is very well. But the path towards Nirvana and ignorance is a troubled one. Mahayana Buddhists write with contempt about the pratyeka-Buddha: an all-but-holy man who attains Enlightenment and then does nothing with it for Humanity or for Society. Alasdair MacIntyre would call such an individual, in contemporary Western terms, an emotivist. He is not truly motivated by virtues such as loyalty to the Common Good. He is doing it all for himself, and not without vanity.

When Saul discourages Max from going too far down the proverbial rabbit hole, citing the positivistic dogma of confirmation bias, it is a clerical warning rather than an intellectual argument. Saul represents the Scientific Community as well as the Church that it found its conception in. Group thought in every generation threatens to restrict the Roving Soul that Terence McKenna rants about and to confine the intellect to the Intersubjectivity of Peer Review and Holy Communion. Max knows that this is a dead end, and he would rather spiral out of control than to confine himself to the Known and Academically Polite (read: pretentious). The distinction betwixt numerology and mathematics dissolves as Max teams up with Meyer to unriddle the Mystery. The Mystery consumes Max in a Marcelian fashion as he ceases to be a “biased” observer and becomes PART OF WHAT HE OBSERVES. Hence the film reaches Heisenberg grade.

(And yes: that last part was as much a reference to the filmmaking of fellow Aquarian Vince Gilligan as it was an homage to the theoretical physics of the twentieth century.)

Of course, confirmation bias is bogus. Only in a very controlled environment can any one say, with certainty, that patterns are inevitable, equally insignificant intrinsically, and only of importance to the extent that an arbitrary subject INTERNALIZES them, to the exclusion of the rest. Not only are patterns not inevitable in an ostensibly “chaotic” Universe. It is all so not inevitable that one would NOTICE them and FIND MEANING WITHIN them. To presume upon a psychoanalytic interpretation, wherein any man of above-average intelligence would notice them, to the detriment of himself and his fellows, is clinically naïve. (In both senses, of course, of the term “clinically”, both as a practitioner and as a potential patient.) Beyond that, it is intellectually arrogant to so enthrone the individual intellect to suggest that it COULD do that to a person and that an organized intelligentsia such as the Scientific Community, working in concert with Psychiatric Companies, Courts of Law, and Law Enforcement, as well as the Media and the General Public, would be NECESSARY TO restrict the intellectual quest of such a person. If the Will can produce Synchronicity, it must be only in concert with God. And at this point the religious maniac is the least pompous of all agents. But as the Zen people say: the student who has attained satori goes to Hell straight as an arrow.

Max’s willfulness helps him once. When he accepts a lift from Meyer for the first time, he is not acting merely out of arbitrary bias. He spares himself a much more dangerous ride with the salespeople and his other stalkers. Psychoanalytically, one might posit that Meyer helped Max in a manner that any one of those well-meaning parties would have; the only drawback would be that Meyer was Max’s Chosen Guardian, and since Max is intelligent enough to fool himself, he is surely clever enough to accept help only from a man who will humour his neuroses.

But Aronofsky sticks it to Big Pharma when that same saleswoman demands the rest of Max’s code while her cronies have a gun up to Max’s head. It turns out that Max was not just a drugged-up paranoiac; he was right to suspect those who were motivated only by money. And it is not long thereafter that we discover that they are bent on using nothing short of the NAME OF GOD for a strictly worldly purpose. All of a sudden, Max’s rude dismissal of their materialism seems a lot less pretentious and a lot more pressing.

Denying them the remainder of the code, part of which they stole from his garbage, is a heroic move, and it is perhaps his only decisively good one. (Note that to be heroic here is the Category and to be Good is only one Part of that; the rest is vainglory.)  After all: not only were they out to jinx the market from the very beginning. Their ruthless ignorance in using PART of the code resulted in a Stock Market Crash. Naturally, they lost ethos.

But when Meyer saves Max for a second time from their clutches, the Jews are made to look less noble. Again Max finds himself bullied and pressed for information. But something peculiar happens when Max confronts the Rabbi. Rabbi Cohen is a man of contradiction that perhaps can only be found in religion. He is as severe as he is amiable. Yet one cannot judge of his demands based upon affect alone. Since capitalism has all ready failed, one cannot weigh the priest by the scale of salesmanship. Rabbi Cohen is blunt: Max is impure, and he is but a vessel for a message that was INTENDED FOR the Hassidic Jews. Max refuses to surrender the message to them. And it is precisely at this moment that Max becomes an Emotivist. When he told off the salespeople, he appealed to a Value; he was searching for something greater than materialism. But even materialism is a higher end than simple vanity; at the very least it is palpable. Max alone FEELS the significance of the Number. And he has no interest in testing any hypothesis that it might be of value outside of his head, to which he has been condemned by social forces and the weight of his own burden. So again he is no longer WITHIN THE WORLD, a part of the Mystery he is investigating. He has again REMOVED HIMSELF and become merely a biased subject. And he even admits that the 216-digit numeral is “just a number”.

Again, Max finds a mirror in the Jews. Meyer mirrors Max by studying the Torah whilst Max studies the Stock Market. Rabbi Cohen mirrors Max Cohen as his namesake, citing the Legend of the Cohens and their shared ancestry and culture. Max breaks both mirrors in his pursuit of God’s Truth. And he ends up absolutely Alone.

When Max refuses to give the number he has memorized to the Jews, he ceases to be a Jew. To be Jewish is truly to believe the Jews to be God’s Chosen People. But Max instead calls HIMSELF God’s Chosen Person. And he refuses to give up God’s Gift, arguing that the Rabbi is himself IMPURE. Max does not argue for his own PURITY. He only argues for the Rabbi’s IMPURITY.

There are two Gods, from a secular ethical standpoint: the Just God and the Narcissistic God. The former is a projection of the Rational, Empathic Conscience. The latter is a projection of the narcissistic ego.

To the man of Reason and Heart, an impure man who is cornered into admitting his own impurity has no further argument until he ATONES for his misdeeds. An impurity or sin is literally an error, and the most fundamental error is HARM TOWARDS ONE’S FELLOWS. Only by atoning for the misdeed can the impure man be made pure and only then can he judge of his fellows to that same extent that their own deeds are harmful. Until then, he is subservient to his victims.

But to a narcissist, God is a Scapegoat. Since the narcissist elects to worship himself, he calls himself the Scapegoat. Since all men fall short of his own standards, all men fall short of God. No man can judge, therefore, of another man, at least not justly. If the narcissist is judged, he appeals to God’s forgiveness and condemns his critic. The narcissist cannot escape criticism for long, but he can enthrone his vices at the moment that it is most convenient to reveal them, calling them by the name of one last virtue: Honesty. In truth, nothing can stop him from judging Others. Since he is his own God, he can judge of other men liberally and then repent, knowing that God (himself, as opposed to God Himself) would forgive him. So the narcissist is never TRULY honest; he simply perverts the meaning of the virtue itself, divorcing language from substance in the manner that MacIntyre describes in the first chapter of After Virtue. The narcissist IMPLIES moral superiority so long as he can get away with judging others, and he REFUSES moral inferiority, appealing to Divine Equality, at the very moment that he has been exposed. This is called Shifting the Goalposts, and in Kierkegaard’s philosophy it is the crucial distinction betwixt Christianity and Christendom. In other words: the former God makes secular sense. But the latter God is a pathological lie.

When Max refuses to supply the Jews with the information they have spent generations in search of, he behaves narcissistically. Any one can choose to say that he was himself Chosen to be the Recipient instead of the Messenger. If someone takes something or someone from me and I feel entitled, I can claim to have been the rightful Recipient, and my thief can call me a mere Messenger, electing himself the rightful Recipient. The thief can appeal to any number of arguments to defend himself, but which of them is one that he will stand by when the tables have turned? If he is a narcissist: none, until they RETURN. Emotivism says that both of us are EQUALLY WRONG, and this is satisfying to the sinner who does not answer FOR HIS SIN but rather projects it upon others as an excuse to withhold what God gives him that it might be of Service. The thief might claim that I am narcissistic for claiming a person, place, thing, or idea as my own. But he is DOUBLY so for not only DISPOSSESSING ME OF IT but pretending that I was but a MEANS TO SERVE HIS ENDS.

Admittedly, the impurity, in this context, of the Jews is no longer in question. Rabbi Cohen has no shame in treating Max as a means towards the ends of the Synagogue. But what sets him apart from the capitalists is that he has the God of Scripture, and perhaps decades of scholarship, on his side. If God INTENDS for Max to deliver the message unto the Jews, and if the name of Cohen carries that meaning, then Rabbi Cohen is simply serving God by demanding the message of Max. And in so doing, he is serving a Just God who would not take kindly to an uninitiated everyman who has all ready messed up once (letting slip the Name of God to fall into the hands of the capitalists) damaging the Jewish Project by withholding that information from his superiors that would enable them, perhaps, to set things Right.

The matter of the thief is resolved not by appeal to personal feelings of entitlement but rather to Universal Values. The narcissistic thief has no interest in sharing what he steals nor of serving others; all that comes his way belongs to him by default. He is at once the disease and the cure, and he refuses to cure those whom he infects because he believes the cure to belong to himself, heedless of the fact that both the disease and the cure that comprise the entirety of his nature were given TO him by Greater Forces. The narcissist scapegoats those who are without sin, for only a sinner can do so, yet he pretends to be their scapegoat. Only once he is exposed to the elements of Charity, Good will, and Justice is he exposed for an agent of the Devil.

At every step, Max moves closer to a Transcendent Realm. But is it God, or is it the Devil? The number is 216 digits long. This is six to the third power, analogous to the sign of the Beast. The last number to appear in the film is 56,664. The Jews themselves might be worshipping the Devil. But it does not pardon Max.

When the thief steals, he appoints himself to have been Chosen, and he appoints his victim to be the Messenger. The victim is made to LOOK LIKE an equal of the thief when he himself insists that it was HE that was HIMSELF Chosen. At any point, claiming to have been Chosen is in SEMBLANCE Narcissism. But this is not to say that only the victim of a potential theft can be Truly Worthy. Often a narcissist, when asked to atone, will refuse to be “robbed” of his own autonomy in doing so. So even a thief can be MADE TO LOOK LIKE a potential victim. How do we tell them apart? Simply: It takes one to know one. A thief will recognize in others potential thieves. Hence Max projects his own errors upon the congregation. A virtuous man would THEORETICALLY, therefore, see Max as more than just a means to an end, by the same token as a thief sees all others as potential thieves. But virtue would afford one the opportunity to see not only PERSONAL value but COLLECTIVE value. So one cannot preclude the purity of the Rabbi in the ultimate assessment of the situation at hand. The Rabbi has the Group on his side. Yes: if the Rabbi is narcissistic, he will turn on this Group at the earliest opportunity. But there is at this point no evidence yet that the Rabbi has even a trace of self-service. We only know that Max refuses to help them. When the narcissistic thief steals, he does so in total apathy towards his fellows. When the narcissist is stolen from, he does so with hypocritical indignation. At every point, he refuses to believe in any value greater than self-interest. And this is the principal pitfall of emotivism: Isolation.

Both the thief and his victim can claim to be entitled by the Will of God. The victim has the moral advantage in this discussion of having been unjustly used as a messenger, and he can just as easily claim to be impartial AS a messenger, making the most of the authority that his position presents him with. The victim can claim that the Thief defied God. But the Thief can one-up the VICTIM by pretending that NO ONE can defy God, but that the victim is attempting to do so by possessing himself of Godlike omniscience in judgment. Beyond that, either party might be narcissistic. If I compare my own experience to that of Max, I might find myself in Max’s position, so that my thieves are represented by the Rabbi. But they might argue that to the same extent that I find Max repugnant I am myself his equal, and if I claim him to be heroic they might argue that he is just as self-entitled as are they. The process of Leveling robs us of all distinctions and leaves audiences only to argue by analogy, fruitlessly. And this is but a stalling tactic for narcissistic entities.

The way out is found in Marx: to give unto every man what he needs and to take from every man only that which he can afford to give. Max can afford to share his secret because it does not rob him of his own knowledge of it. He would be doing more than only serving the Jews. He would be making Public the Truth, which supposedly should serve all men. Yet he arbitrarily refuses, deeming it too dangerous, apparently, because his own mentor could not withstand its portents. So Max, imitating the teacher who was a martyr in service of Truth, becomes a martyr in service of Ignorance.

The matter is not even only as murky as determining whether or not a thief is narcissistic. We all so do not have the luxury, under emotivism, of knowing WHO THE THIEF IS. Max appears to be the rightful recipient of God’s Message. But from the Rabbi’s perspective, it RIGHTFULLY BELONGS TO THE JEWS. If your postal worker claimed your mail as personal property, he would be a thief. Would he not?

Again: it is only by embracing a super-personal value that a person can hope to fathom Super-Personal Intent, such as of a Super-Personal Entity, be it Diabolical or Divine. Christendom and pseudo-Judaism cannot do this. The pratyeka-Buddha cannot do this. But the Virtue Ethicist can. As a virtue ethicist, I find myself in the position of the Rabbi. I was stolen from, and I demand reconciliation. But my thief is playing the part of the victim. I know this because he refuses, at every turn, to serve the HIGHER GOOD. And so he admits to his own narcissism, earns the label “thief”, and becomes a villain worthy of retribution. And it is not hard to find him in the likeness of the anti-hero Maximilien Cohen. If Max is correct in assuming that out of Chaos the initial Order may be reconstructed, then it is only by rejecting the absurdities intrinsic to emotivism that Man can attain harmony in Virtue. Max dies a Satanist who only cares for how God’s Message makes him FEEL. He has no right to refuse to share this message with Humanity, even to set right the mess he has made as God’s Messenger, because he has no REASON to outside of whim and fancy. It is only by identifying this failure in others that we can discern thieves from victims, narcissists from their prey, and the self-entitled from the Truly Chosen. If the principle of “As Above, so Below” holds Truth, then we must behave as Just Gods in service of a Just God, instead of emulating the Narcissistic God that people so often accuse the Jews of worshipping: the Devil.

7:01 P.M.

2/21/2018

Dm.A.A.