RETURN:

I used to think of emotivism not as a statement of supposed fact but rather as an ethic: that we OUGHT to make decisions based upon emotion alone, since that is our only option. I had no realization that the very grounds for emotivism as a theory precluded the notion that we “ought” to be emotivists; it simply confined us to it by the force of nihilistic reasoning and negation, mitigated only by individual conscientiousness.

My bizarre tendencies to react aggressively to minute details were not the product of self-interest but of an obsession with the Truth and with Righteousness. My hostility towards the general public was a response to its rejection of these principles. No one could threaten me with a guilty conscience to the same extent that I was terrified of seeing the evil which would pass for convention. If I ever bore a guilty conscience, it was to protect me from this deeper realization. Now that I know what I’ve seen, I feel no fear in fighting it, since I do not doubt that I must, forever.

By contrast with these eccentricities was my seemingly cavalier disregard for very conventional fears. But since I knew that I could not allow myself to become an emotivist, acting upon emotion alone, for I had other means by which to judge and different coping mechanisms to employ, I did not subside into disgust except in the most extreme circumstances. If I ever seemed to react prematurely, I foresaw these circumstances before they happened. It was not illogical of me, nor can it be said that the measures that I took to prevent this outcome had brought it into being. It is not a fallacy if the slippery slope is real, and one can never be accused of pushing someone down that slope by trying to save her, pulling her back. If I ever overreacted, it was because I recognized the symptoms of an evil I could not accept. If I ever seemed insensitive, the frequent reminders of this evil, well before it showed itself before the World, had desensitized me. It was with shock and relief that I saw that ordinary people still cared.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]