Biff, Syrrus, and Achenar: Sex and Power in Two Contemporary Works.

I feel as though I dodged a bullet by electing to pursue music and game design instead of film, not out of disregard for the medium, but rather because of its corruption by the entertainment media. Every time it seems that I try to find something resembling cohesion or purpose online when it comes to reviews or Hollywood “culture”, my most fringe suspicions of space aliens controlling and systematically dehumanizing the industry are affirmed and some old, anarchist funny-bone begins to vibrate.

Perhaps most triggering presently is the website Looper.com. Somehow I found an article entitled “Messed Up Parts of Great Movies Nobody Talks About”. Of course, I should have remembered the Wattsism “Sages never gossip” prior to just DELVING in, but the face of Biff from Back to the Future was one that I could not say “no” to.

The particular piece about Biff argued that because he nearly “sexually assaulted” the protagonist’s mother he should not have been hired to wash cars for the McFlies at the end of the film. This had not occurred to me, but of course my immediate reaction was that the ending stood as a good one because Biff had finally been made to serve a social purpose, whereas he would have potentially remained a nuisance if unemployed (only because of his character) and if Marty’s father had allowed himself to hold a grudge against Biff after all of these years then he would have implied by so doing that Biff ought to REMAIN unemployed. Admittedly, I was never one to extend a helping hand to anyone that I KNEW to be a sex offender. But then again: Biff never actually succeeded in the enterprise. At any rate, social norms from the nineteen-fifties are still lost to me, so it’s surprising to hear them criticized at all. In many ways Biff was only following the customs of his time, so he was what Andy Bernard’s forefathers were: a moral middle man. Marty’s Father, the chivalrous rescuer, was drawing on an even OLDER tradition than Biff was. Frankly, I am not even aware that what Biff was trying to DO when Marty’s Father intervened was even LEGALLY “rape” at the time.

This draws my attention to an other thought that has haunted me since I finished playing Myst: are Syrrus and Achenar evil? From a neo-Liberal perspective, the likes of which would have been popular in the early nineties, their father represents the naivete of history. His Idealism, which Nietzsche would have described in his first book as “Alexandrian” and of inferior appeal, SEEMS to be a road to Hell paved with Good Intentions. His sons, depicted as harmless and enterprising boys in the Father’s Records, prove to be fully-grown men, the apparent elder of the two corrupted by megalomaniacal greed and the younger with the madness that apparently infects a Westerner who has been typecast to play God for a tribe of Treepeople (not to be confused with the AWESOME BAND).

Yet are they EVIL? After all: we cannot argue that Power is INTRINSICALLY Evil, because by so doing we would preclude the possibility of using it towards Noble ends. Nobility Itself would be reduced to an arbitrary expression of power, a la Nietzsche, and moral discourse would by necessity have to end. Furthermore, we would become guilty of DISEMPOWERING those who are Noble enough to heed us, only to EMPOWER their deviant aggressors who do not care for moral discourse.

It is not Power that corrupts, nor is it culture that enriches. Both Good and Evil must be regarded as transcendent of any sociopolitical turn of events if Heroism is to be preserved in any climate. It is not that Syrrus was “spoiled” by his well-meaning Father and “corrupted” by Power; it is rather that, supposing that he WAS Evil (which we never in fact learn for certain, except by his stereotypical semblance to a Villain) then Power would have turned his internal shortcoming into an external tragedy.

Nor is it that Power corrupted Achenar. The generic presumption is that Power robs the man of both Heart and Mind, and in this manner Syrrus would be regarded as a Loss of Heart whereas his brother would be regarded as a Loss of Mind. But aside from the comedia del arte routine that is Achenar’s antic disposition, is he ACTUALLY insane? A great deal of what he claims to be the case about Syrrus is verifiable or at least verifiably BELIEVABLE. And even if we establish him as a “Madman”, why should that make him a VILLAIN? Being “crazy” doesn’t make you EVIL, per se; it only puts you into opposition with “sanity”. Yet not all INSANITY is devoid of Reason. Hamlet himself says that there can be method in madness. The Joker, as interpreted by Alan Moore, is “hypersane”, depicting a lot of the symptoms of an intellectual nervous breakdown, the likes of which most GREAT philosophers and geniuses have exhibited at one point or an other. (Nietzsche himself was notorious for it.) Besides: not all Reasoning is Moral Reasoning. A madman is still totally capable of discerning right from wrong; he is simply unadjusted to Society, which may in fact be IN the wrong.

This question is raised, therefore: if Society was wrong to allow Biff the privilege of a sexually satisfying date, then was BIFF wrong for having complied with its dictates? Put plainly: of course not!! Biff’s shortcomings would have been by necessity products of circumstance insofar as he was conforming to the Zeitgeist of his generation. A man can no more be held responsible for that sort of thing in the nineteen-fifties than an employee of the Slave Trade can be held responsible for the Slave Trade Itself. Alasdair MacIntyre was right to condemn the Sartrean concept of radical accountability because not only does it confine us to setting an example that no one is allowed to follow without falling into Bad Faith. It all so would, taken to its initial extremes, hold Marty’s MOTHER directly responsible for having gotten into that automobile in the first place. Most of our contemporary liberal pretensions about “individual responsibility” are just watered-down Sartreanism, filtered through the feminism of that Marxist school wherein Sartre became popular as well as the psychiatric institutions that adopted logotherapy and then turned its tenets against patients and towards selling drugs to people who “should have known better” than to break with social norm but who “must have not known” because of some intrinsic defect.

The concept of an intrinsic defect is one that I have all ready entertained, but it was not without reservation. At the very least I might argue that it has nothing to do with genetic predisposition or with sanity or insanity. Nor is it the product of social circumstance, and by extension those errors which ARE the product of a society do not reflect upon the virtue or vice of its people. So Biff is in many respects only a villain of the sow; his annihilation as a threat is simply necessary for Marty to not only exist but to live happily. For all we know, BIFF might be the Hero in his own mind, and this would only be an error IF we can appeal to something OUTSIDE of the individual mind as a moral frame of reference. Without any sort of Moral Absolutism, there is no such thing as a “delusion”, because even if a Group of people can come into agreement and power about a certain “truth” it does not imply that each of them cannot simply be PRETENDING towards Solidarity in a fundamentally alienated and amoral modern environment.

From Biff’s perspective, he DESERVES to be with Lorraine, and this is in fact Noble. She might disagree with him, but she seldom cites a case AGAINST his entitlement that would classify it as self-entitlement. Both of them might be dismissed as arbitrary in their opinions, and even less so would be Marty’s father and even Marty himself, leaving the only truly MORAL agent in the play to be the Mad Scientist who made the entire possibility of Revision and Reform possible. When Lorraine resists Biff’s claims, despite having agreed to accompany him as a date to a public function, Biff attempts to employ force in order to actualize his view of what is or is not right. He is only overcome by Marty’s father, whose use of force against Biff is at best equally arbitrary and at worse moreso.

The use of Force itself is, as I’ve pointed out, not INTRINSICALLY evil, if Force is to fall under what is called “Power”. I return to Myst: if either Syrrus or Achenar is CORRUPT, it is not BECAUSE either of them was given control over the Ages. A neo-liberal reading of Myst would interpret the books to be a metaphor for History. Atrus’ account “conveniently glosses over” the barbarism of his sons in the manner that “no one talks about” the “messed up parts” of “great movies”. This is a typically Nietzschean pretension: the notion that History is written by the Conquerors and that all claims to good will and virtue are embellishments gilding the intrinsic brutality of human life. AT the very least we can agree that Nietzsche had the DECENCY not to ROB humanity of its Will to Power; contemporary society seems to condemn it on principle, falling victim to its corruption as punishment for lacking discernment in how to wield it.

Interestingly enough the “egalitarianism” of Hollywood is lost to the “elitism” of offering people privileged knowledge. To say that “no one talks” about a given Truth is to open an esoteric door. It is to set the reader APART from the Masses. It is to appeal to an Enlightened Individuality rather than an existing and Informed Solidarity. This tendency, typical of Liberal Individualism, which MacIntyre and even Zizek distrust, admits by implication that Society is ITSELF off kilter. Yet this must by definition raise the Question: is our Society’s treatment of sexuality ethical enough to be considered infallible, so much so that we might judge not ONLY of the society that preceded it by a span of half a century at least, but ALL so of the SOULS of every single moral agent that had complied with that Society’s Norms? And if progress is exponential, how long will it be before WE must suffer condemnation for what WE considered to be an “appropriate” expression of the Human Will? Will it not be even sooner than half a decade from now? Will it not cast doubt then upon how arbitrary WE are in passing judgment? With everything WRONG with Society, why must we PRESUME upon a sexual ethic that in itself is written by the Conquerors, be it a testament to the prevalence of Feminism in Media or of a lingering Machismo in daily life?

The Machismo of Biff is essentially Matriarchal because it PRESUPPOSES that he deserves to mate with Lorraine, simply because he EXISTS, he WANTS to, and she has all ready CONSENTED TO DATE him, which implies that he should have a physical incentive to leave Home, even on a Weekend, and to go through all the mechanical motions of social life that simply lose meaning without a biological incentive to humanize them. Put simply: Biff is entitled, under matriarchy, to be a lover, simply because he is all ready a Son to his own Mother, who would want him to prosper and whose Will is Binding.

The relatively contemporary machismo of Marty, which he teaches to his father, is PATRIARCHAL, because it implies that Marty’s father should mate with Lorraine in the context of a much more complicated social structure that will ultimately enthrone him as a patriarch, the reasons being that he has bested Biff in combat and that BY SO DOING he has WON THE FAVOUR of the woman. The fact that Lorraine CHOOSES Marty’s father does not for even a moment redeem the patriarchy of this ethic, simply because she CHOOSES HIM FOR PATRIARCHAL REASONS; if she chose him out of affect alone, it would cease to BE an ethic, for her affect would be out of accord with Biff’s affect, and there remains to be made a case that his desire to mate with her is inferior to her reluctance, because she has not foregone mating as a whole, as evidenced by Marty’s existence in the final version of the film’s timeline of events.

One particular critic of this line of thinking is Slavoj Zizek. Yet Zizek abounds in contradiction when he defends the supposedly “intrinsic rights” of tribes to remain “uncivilized”. He does admit to the “evils” of pre-colonial Americans when he derides Political Correctness and the Noble Savage stereotype that Disney fetishizes, yet he goes on to define the “rights of a People” (whatever in Hell that means, since it seems paradoxical and even oxymoronic to speak of what is “right” and to use the plural form “people” in the same breath) as being dependent UPON the capacity for Evil. Beyond that point, he criticizes the entire notion that an “uncivilized” people can BE civilized BY a superior race of people. Yet at this point the Arian Revolutionary commits intellectual suicide.

Myst can be read to be a similar criticism of colonialism, arguing that it begins with good intentions and technological reform and ends with despotism and destruction. Yet no sensible, rational adult can encounter an inferior people and resist the most basic human instinct, which is TO REFORM. Not only Atrus but his entire family SUCCEEDS in this task, but they only do so in different ways. Not one of them is EVIL simply for following this instinct, rather it is that the Instinct Itself is the very LIFEBLOOD of Goodness. The only true Evil I can imagine is to deny the rights of any person to do so, for if I had to accept a fallen species as being EQUAL to myself, then I would have to return to my own civilization with the conclusion that its entire nobility is arbitrary and pathetic. And this would be a lie.

What I loved most about the game when I first played it many years ago was of course the Trees, for they represent the striving of Earthbound creatures towards Heaven. Heaven in itself is an Absolute Teleological Goal that is unbound by human invention, be it technological or social. So it is that any human being, in order to be a moral agent, must presuppose his own moral instincts to be God’s Will. The road to Hell is NEVER paved with Good Intentions; it is only made possible by turning on them and behaving as THOUGH rights and wrongs were arbitrary and relative.

So it follows that Biff might have been RIGHT to try to force Lorraine into sexual relations, simply because he would have KNOWN whether or not he DESERVED this PRIOR TO her dissent. If Morality is Absolute instead of Relative, then ANY man or woman, given Reason, can figure out what course of action to take, and if Power Itself is not an Evil but rather the very LIFEBLOOD of Goodness, as it is depicted in the Hindu Kundalini, (the Solar Plexus whose energy feeds the Untouched Heart) then he was simply doing his duty as a Reformer by setting Lorraine right. This of course allows me to see the “bully” in a revised light, for I can sympathize, having spent the better part of two years entirely absorbed in one project: to persuade the woman that I loved not to commit suicide but rather to join me in romantic bondage, both of which I knew for a fact to have been superior courses of action to snorting cocaine in exchange for sexual favours which she provided, despite her ostensible asexuality, (which might have either preceded or followed the cocaine use, in either case reflecting poorly upon the predicament) to one of her suppliers, who had taken advantage of my own trust (surpassing even the unconditional love of Atrus, if that is possible to conceive) and the emotivist environment in order to gain her favour, an act of consent which, given the strong likelihood of intoxication, turns out to have been, in THIS society … (drum roll, please) Rape.

At least BIFF might not have been doing something ILLEGAL AT THE TIME. But I don’t know; I don’t even know what was considered ETHICAL at the time!!

This is something that people in my generation don’t seem to get: that you can and in fact MUST comply with social dictates that you personally disagree with. A great deal of my own pain was the result of schizophrenic social programming that told me that I HAD TO resist the System BECAUSE the System Itself had told me to. In this case, Life is not unlike the Stanley Parable, except that there is more to It than just the social machine. Neo-liberals reduce it TO a machine when they demand a priori respect to GROUPS of people and deny a priori rights to INDIVIDUALS.

When Slavoj Zizek defends the rights of tribes, he is all so defending all of their depersonalizing institutions. In many tribes that Campbell describes men had their first sexual experiences at the age of fourteen, and women did not have a say in this matter.

At least BIFF has the entire force of White Civilization backing up HIS sense of biological entitlement!! Biff only tries to take ADVANTAGE of Lorraine after she has made an Individual Choice to date him.

Of course throughout most of this essay I have spoken in hyperbole and satire. I do not mean to encourage ANY one to be like Biff. I strive only to remind them of the manner in which they are all ready bullies.

Relativism is an ethic that is weak of character but strong of will. It is Power without discernment: amorality at best and immorality at worst, the enemy of Morality in both instances. Relativism cannot defend itself absolutely; it can only do so relatively, and whilst this might seem to be to its own credit, that it is consistent in doing so, it remains by its own definition the EQUAL of Absolutism. Thus it must perpetually ACCOMMODATE Absolutism, which is superior on its own terms. Any sort of teleological progress implies Absolutism, for it is only in Absolutism that we find the moral discernment necessary to OVERCOME the mires of the Past and to Progress towards our Final Fate.

I know for a fact that if it were not for the promise of becoming better, not only better than what I was before but all so better than others, who would be made to answer to me, then I would not bother to leave the House. What would be the POINT? How can you claim to tolerate a group of people that you are not yourself a part of? Only this: the tribal midbrain can allow for it. For whereas our present knowledge suggests that the tribes of the past refused to tolerate one an other and that made them Evil, we should consider that we are Evil now for that same tolerance. What value does a man uphold when he allows women to suffer being raped because that is “their culture”? Biff is considered a villain because he is perceived to be an Individual. But an entire CULTURE probably backed him up on this AT THE TIME. The only value seems to be that of the Group; by defending the rights of an Outgroup to Simply Be, one preserves one’s own Group towards the same end, separate but equal. Perhaps therefore it was this same attitude of Tolerance that was directly responsible for the Schism between Black and White Education in the first place, the immediate consequence of which was that Black Education blamed White Education for the Schism, calling it “segregation” rather than “tolerance”.

So who is to blame? Obviously: it’s invariably those same people who PREFER to inhabit groups and who ONLY FEEL SECURE IN GROUPS. And these are the TRULY Ignoble Savages, for they will not allow their Groups to come under the Leadership of Reformers who would help them to attain a transcendent teleological goal (God’s proverbial Will) and to thereby reach towards Universal Solidarity devoid of factionalism, dogma, and war. They may defy their Society at the earliest opportunity and yet they will use social norms to their own advantage in a totally random, emotivistic, and self-serving way, earning perpetually the favour of their fellows even as they get away with rape and murder. They even scapegoat their victims by pretending to be their own victims’ scapegoats, taking advantage of the fact that society forgot that scapegoats are without sin to begin with and that only a true victim can ever be MADE into a scapegoat, and this can only happen when the victim is not treated to Justice and his grievances redressed. They are pathological narcissists and enemies of both Solidarity and Individuality, looking forward to any social outing NOT as a bitter but noble duty but rather as an opportunity to drain energy from noble people and to steal sexual, material, and social resources from their moral superiors as they march not towards Unity but rather towards Fascism.

These people are usually called
“extraverts”. And everything they claim to know about morality, in their own self-defense, they learned from introverts and bastardized.

Apparently, most of the Planet is occupied by these people. And it’s all ways been this way.

If ALL of us were this way, then Morality would only ever BE the expression of the Private Will, and only the preservation of this Will as Autonomy could be used to define sexual ethics. Emotivism would be true, MacIntyre would be wrong, and Lorraine would be responsible for all most getting raped. Yet Humanity is redeemed by those people who take their cues NOT from Society but rather from GOD, and who are thereby appointed to reform the former in accordance with the Latter and against the Latter’s Enemies.

These people are called Introverts. And we have all ways been a minority. We are defined by our will to power. Extraverts are defined by their will towards sexuality. And according to the Hindu Kundalini, the former rests above the latter. We depend upon you. But we will never be able to truly treat you as Equals. It is not in our character to do so. And you have to accept that as our inalienable right, by an authority surpassing any you could ever dream of.

Again: I speak by exaggeration, just to demonstrate a point. Being more attractive at a given moment does not make you right. Choices are not right by default of being chosen, and hence being chosen does not make you the proper choice. Consent proves nothing. Voting solves nothing. And if this was not the common sense of your society, then its norms were never binding Universals. Your tribe SHOULD be eradicated to make way for something better if it has been deemed OBJECTIVELY to have fallen behind. Your Life WOULD be forfeit if you were proven to be a sinner. The most inalienable right is not towards the preservation of one’s own life but towards the annihilation of an other’s. A solitary shooter in a hotel room will all ways surpass the soldier in dignity when the soldier would serve a corrupt government and the shooter dies a martyr in an act of protest. And if your superiors deem your life worthy of preservation, you have no right to take it.

Another part of the same article argues that for a nerd to impersonate a jock in order to sleep with a girl is a form of assault.

Is it not transparent now what this is? Is it not a blatant hegemony by a dying breed of alpha-males? What right does the woman have to reject one in favour of the other, when she can be so easily FOOLED as to be incapable of telling them apart? Is she informed by an Absolute Power when she falls into this error? If so, It probably wants her to reward the clever nerd, despite her PERSONAL pride and reservations about what ape will fertilize her egg. Anything else would be an abuse of her own God-given Will, which never belonged to her to begin with, for it was only ever a loan by God Himself.

Emotivism is a falsehood. There is never any moral proclamation that could simply be REDUCED to self-interest and personal convenience. Once any one man is guilty of it, he waives the right to blame his victims. And his guilt must be made known, objectively, in the context of a Society that attains its virtue not by the Will of its People but by the Will of a Transcendent Principle that lives in all of us. Hence the last of Kohlberg’s Stages of Morality is Religious: because we need some sort of God conception in order to coexist as Interdependent, Conscientious Individuals. Amen.

Dm.A.A.