Taking Ownership of My People:

The consumption of people implies the question of their ownership, for anything and anyone that can be lost must at some time have been found and acquired, and any one that can belong must at some time have been stolen. Marxist thought indicates that all resources are intrinsically owned by all beings, and insofar as one of the most humane corporate disciplines is that of “human resources”, humans are owned too by all beings. The saying “everyone belongs to everyone” is not just some sort of propaganda from Huxley’s Brave New World, for as was the case with all twentieth-century propaganda its evil was not in the ideal it presupposed but in its falling short of that ideal. The ideal Huxley pushed for was the very state of bliss that drugs had brought him towards, a state of mutual compassion wherein every being takes the feelings of one’s fellows as one’s OWN, and thereby one takes OWNERSHIP of all people and all their feelings CUMULATIVELY. The hellish aspect of the Brave New World was nothing more than the other edge of the sword of drug use, for if one relies upon the drug to have the ecstasy one does not take ownership OF the mystical experience, and as such it belongs to no one, and so does one’s self. One loses the sense of Belonging that is every human need, and this is why D.A.R.E. taught us as children that one of the three “B’s” of social needs was to Belong, knowing that the desire for Belonging was what drove people to drugs and that the drugs drove that same person away from that very need. The addict only IMAGINES himself to belong to any one, for all around him either leave or they are drained by his mere presence; if that does not happen, the drug itself takes the lucky exception away from his fellows permanently. All that can be lost is at some point stolen, and so it is that people can be stolen, for if anyone can be disowned then everybody can be owned; to belong WITH someone is therefore no different than to belong TO someone, for one can never belong to one’s SELF except within a fantasy. In some sense, even the feeling of being a separate self is not the product of nature but a distortion that’s created by abuse and by exclusion, and one takes ownership OF one’s self in self-love only once the true love for one’s fellows has been lost to the addiction or whatever the abuse might be. In this sense, the ultimate nihilism is to be found NOT in the phrase that “everyone belongs to everyone”, but rather in “no one belongs to any one”, and the entire tragedy of Brave New World is such that while it preaches the former it actualizes the latter, though even more tragically so (for all tragedies are, by definition, preventable) the former does not NEED to produce its opposite; it simply does. Marxists understand that all beings belong to one an other in the state of nature, but that the aggressive act of competition, an artifice that is INTRODUCED to the state of nature as sin was imported to the Garden of Eden, creates the possibility of loss, for it creates the possibility of private ownership. When Kresten took Alanna from me, very literally, he stole her, and when he said that I did not own her nor her feelings he was claiming to own both her and her feelings, but exclusively. I did not require private ownership of her before the fact for this to be an act of theft, for in fact the very initial act of theft, that original sin that loses our bond with Eden, was the decision to claim her FOR ONE’S OWN, and this I’d not yet done except in hopes and dreams. In fact, it was my very unwillingness to do so at such an early stage of courtship that the parasite condemned within its host as though that had been cowardice upon the same host’s part. I did not “make a move” upon Alanna because I had been no capitalist then; I wanted to share her, and if she needed me to some greater extent than she needed some other man, then I would be available to her and to that same extent, without great conflict. Nothing has yet disproven that she needed me, for only in my absence did she die, and those who stole her not from me alone but from this World I had constantly to correct that they might serve her as she needed them to serve her, for I would have served her without question and the thought that anyone would fail her was rivalled in horror only by the thought that someone whom I’d once taken great ownership of, calling it “my” friend and resisting the urge then to DISOWN it, for it wanted not to be disowned, would have stolen her not for her own benefit but for its own consumption. TO consume a person is to steal that person from the World, and every time I made an effort then to salvage her identity, as though it were my own, I was met only with further and fruitless competition, fruitless by the very nature of the fact that its own claims precluded mine and did so arbitrarily that they were by the same token themselves precluded. I was not penalized for my failures but rather for my successes, for all of my rage and blame was testament to the extent I had to go to COVER FOR the failures of a narcissistic thief, and to that same extent I had to be a saint to tolerate such sin the sinner claimed that no one could belong to such a saint, for no one was so pure. Yet in my mind she was still pure and virginal as when I’d met her first, and I could be scapegoat for her sins. Even the sin of scapegoating I was made scapegoat for, for though I had been without sin in this same circumstance, and all the accusations otherwise had never touched her, I had constantly to suffer her rage, though it did not belong to me as it did to our mutual oppressor, and in turn she had to stomach that rage which that same oppressor was heir to upon my part. But even those who hate totally have all ways been known to be the superiors of those who love half-heartedly, and in hating those who had used us both I remained blameless. I did not take ownership of my own rage for it did not belong to me intrinsically; it was common karma. It was “my” rage, but it was all so hers and his rage, too, for it could only have been product of the three of us in a state of devious, unnatural discord. What Alanna did or did not do did not entitle her to Kresten any more so than it did to me, not even her consent, for no sense of “autonomy” takes precedence over true social duty to one’s fellows, which all ways has been thus: insofar as one’s actions affect one’s fellows, those same fellows have as much say in one’s actions as the actor does. The pursuit of an autonomy that transcends that is nothing short of sin, and though we all are prone to sin the error only becomes evil once the sin itself is owned rather than disowned, made public instead of being sacrificed as is the scapegoat that would carry it, taken for an example and internalized as though it had been virtue, as though all of us belonged then to that standard that would tear the group of us apart. The Hindus knew that ego was the menace, for they knew that prior TO the ego all manifestation was a state of MUTUAL IDENTITY. Even Heidegger, in his Nazism, claimed that the a priori state of nature was a state of “mineness”, and it was within that spirit that I found her and I made her mine, before all other men did, only BECAUSE I had CARED enough to find her before they did, for before they met and they stole her from me she was not “my friend” to any of them, either by their definition of “mine” (that is: theirs) nor by mine. Kresten could not at that point yet have called her “his” friend, saying “my friend” to mean his friend, nor could he call her yet “my” friend, saying “Dmitry’s friend” to mean my friend. She was nothing to him when I first met her, and she proved to have been nothing to him when she died, for he had used her by that point and left her so hopelessly, suicidally alone that she could then belong to no one. She could not belong then to herself, for there was then no self-as-object that could be “owned” by a self-as-subject; there was only one sweet person in the clutches of the Devil, striving for Escape. Now tell me, reader: is this a delusion, or is it the very Height of Reason? What delusion now remains that would contradict these claims?

Dm.A.A.