Three Years Later:

It is not the absence of pleasure that produces pain, nor is it the presence of pleasure at one’s own expense, but rather it is pain itself that produces pain. In the same manner that one cannot derive an ethic from facts, but only from other ethics, one cannot derive pain from the condition of pleasure, but only from other pain. My pain was derived, therefore, from Alanna’s pain. Anything else is extraneous. Yet it remains my pain, and that I have to live with in her absence. Yet what I do NOT have to live with is the blame for it. My condition need never cast doubt on my own role in producing the condition. All that I ever needed to have done I had done, correctly, by the point that my condition came into being, and nothing that I have done since can I be justly blamed for, because no one is in a position to institute justice, since no one can undo the injustice for which I was never compensated. No one has the RIGHT to cast doubt on my intentions when it would even begin to vindicate those who all ready DEMONSTRATED their own depraved motives. The fact that my righteous actions produced disastrous results, for both myself and for those that I care about, would never cross a rational mind to reflect poorly upon me, for the simple fact that a righteous PERSON cannot be responsible for such outcomes, and only an ignoble and depraved person can be blamed for them. Insofar as one demonstrates one’s own righteousness, by valuing righteousness as the ultimate end, one must concede all of this to me without question. It would be to add to egregious depravity to deny any part of this or to entertain any suspicions whatsoever.

Three years ago tomorrow I met Alanna in a Parking Garage at San Diego State University. I learned swiftly about her condition. From that point forth, every action that I took was motivated just as much by her own well-being as it was by mine, and to the same extent that the former was demonstrably my motive the latter was vindicated, for her interests ultimately became the totality of my own.

Yet there are still those who would question me. I am no longer confused about what happened. Nor am I shocked at their denial of these facts. Yet they remain confused.

The first most salient argument against these remote critics is this: that I did nothing wrong. To begin with, I did nothing to DESERVE the disadvantage nor the disrespect towards me. To that same extent that I would not have wished harm upon any one I am not MORE deserving of it unto myself, as though the former cause were mutually exclusive with the latter (a thought I tremble at), but rather LESS so. It is all ready sufficiently ridiculous that those entities who could behave AS THOUGH their interests were mutually exclusive with mine could be permitted to live and even to PROCREATE in my place, when even the thought of existing in a game of zero sum is absolutely inconceivable and intolerable to a moral person.

The second fact arises in response to the second plaint: that what was done was practical, despite the fact that it produced the most tragic results possible for anyone who loved the coveted love object. Somehow I am made to bear the blame for this tragedy as though it were my doing, as though by behaving as I was SUPPOSED to I simply volunteered to become some sort of scapegoat for those over whom RIGHTFULLY I should be ruler, but who turned out to be my ongoing oppressors by their sheer EXISTENCE. How can this be conceived? The stretch is one my own mind would have never made: that her decision to be faithless to me is justified not ONLY by my best friend’s decision to be DISLOYAL to me, but all so by the implication in her choice that I was somehow unattractive to her, for reasons I may never know and that I’m unentitled towards knowing, and that she made the only choice she sensibly could in light of this nebulous detail.

But the Devil lives in such details. The fact remains that I cannot be PENALIZED for what I did not do wrong, and so much LESS can I be penalized for what OTHERS *did* do wrong BY ME. The lingering caveat is that Alanna owed me no faith. But this changed at the moment that I INTRODUCED her to the other oppressor; any attempt to skew the obligation implicit to that can amount to no more than sheer pragmatism, for it argues from the FOREGONE CONCLUSION that their mutual happiness (AT MY EXPENSE) was a just end and that therefore any means used to arrive at it (even if it meant reducing ME to a means) was justified. Obviously, the very decision to defy my will was a reduction of me to a means in place of an end in and of myself. The pleasure at my expense was not the source of the pain. It was rather the affront to ALANNA’S OWN SOUL that had produced such aggravation in my own condition, for how COULD she go on living having done that? It was obviously out of pity for her that I forgave her, and I retained the right to blame only the impersonal entity that had persuaded her to corrupt herself in a manner that that entity itself had all ready long ago been corrupted. I alone, as blameless victim, can be the judge to weigh their Souls against one an other. How much more unsettling it was therefore to hear her defy my authority by denying her own superiority to that entity!!

Every part of my jealousy, in light of these facts, has been rationalized effectively. Man is not, as Heinlein posited, a rationalizing animal AT THE EXPENSE of being a rational one; it is rather his ability to rationalize EFFECTIVELY that renders him rational. This I have done unassailably. No part of my reason can be REDUCED to jealousy, because jealousy clearly stems FROM it. All that remains is a chronicling of my virtues. Whenever I have successfully mediated a conflict, there lingers a temptation to self-identify with the aggressor in that conflict, hoping to forgive those whom I believe to have done me wrong. But I do more than believe; I KNOW. My successes in mediating ought never to cast DOUBT on my own integrity, as though any act of heroism can be punished by accusations of hypocrisy where an other act of heroism by the same hero were concerned. If I am capable of managing the affairs of others, how much more heroic I must be in managing my own!! After all: the community invariably OWES me that respect in exchange for my services; if I can defend them, they ought to be able to defend me, especially if I have had to, up until this point, defend myself. If it is any testament to the virtues of those aggressors whom I have reconciled that they are able to reconcile, then it is TO THAT SAME EXTENT that those aggressors that I was NOT able to reconcile ought to be disregarded as subhuman. And I myself need not be regarded as an aggressor in such a conflict. If my Father, for instance, can only make peace with my Mother by ceding his own convictions, then what does it say of my own adversaries that NEITHER the approach of ASSERTION on my part NOR the approach of CESSION has worked, but rather that one attempt was made as an excuse to negate the other? No man can be so unreasonable. So I need never fear, as a man, that I will become the equal of such an aggressor. And even in the wake of tragedy, I have the comfort that I may someday see my lost love in the Next Realm. I retain not only the virtue necessary to Ascend to that Plane, but the AUTHORITY to ascertain that she has done so as well. So may she rest in peace.

Dm.A.A.