Why are you such a pushover?
It’s because I am humble.
And yet you brag about it!
I confess
it.
I always find it hilarious that
people in this country are so harsh towards rape but so forgiving of
conscription. I mean: what is the difference between the two, really?
Look upon sex, for instance: it’s
a primal, selfish act that is nonetheless the expression of a deeper, more
selfless longing for solidarity with another. Now, there is nothing
intrinsically NOBLE about sex. Sure: it may be necessary for the survival of
the species, of one’s own gene pool, of one’s own family line and legacy, but
to presume upon the value of any of those things one must presume upon the value
of one’s own birth and subsequent life. It’s noble for us to transcend
nihilism, and it is permissible for us to yield to our own carnal longings,
even if we must rationalize them accordingly. Yet for this to be attained
JUSTLY a great many things must happen; sex must be justified, usually by
rationalization and via romance. War, too, must amount to more than mere animal
instinct if it is to attain any decorations in the Public. Now: we all know how
we (have agreed to) feel about the use of force, coercion, and even persuasion
and hypnosis towards the ends of sex; to rape is to reduce the Other to a means
for one’s own pleasure, often out of undisciplined desperation. Now, if we
actually CONSIDER our reasons for being hostile towards rape, might we not have
to extend those same reasons to conscription? After all: one cannot stop human
beings from fighting and killing with any greater ease than one can stop them
from fucking and procreating; the nineteen-sixties stand as evidence for this
fact. No one can rightfully be FORCED to have sex, however essential it may
APPEAR to the fulfillment of another’s passions, for while these passions can
be rationalized by appeal to the ideal of survival, that REMAINS AN IDEAL. Must
your genes survive? We need not go so far as to demean you, blaming either your
genes for your bad luck nor vice versa, nor either upon this mysterious quality
of “attractiveness” and its opposite and lack thereof, if we wish to dismiss
the perception of reproduction as being biologically imperative. We just take
it in our stride that there is no necessity for everyone to mate, though most
may have that desire. Why, then, must we pretend that the perpetuation of a
nation, of the life of one’s family (at the inevitable expense of other
families), or of a way of life is an ABSOLUTE? Obviously, any one of us, acting
independently, may act in such a way that ensures the preservation of these
things, and ethics verily emanate from this tendency. Yet must the felt need to
rationalize these tendencies be allowed to grow to national proportions? We may
be capable of acting heroically in independence of one another, but must this
become a collective goal, and CAN it? Can an entire nation TRULY be unified in
righteousness, or is simply the act of national unification a symptom not of
genuine compassion but merely of a sublimation of primitive instincts? Honestly:
how often has humanity been right in a group, by contrast with the number of
times it has been wrong? In asking this, I know I can’t address a group, but an
individual. The individual’s ability to transcend the animal instincts is one
of the most indispensable of freedoms. If sex is base and unnecessary, then one
must never be compelled by force or coercion to participate in it, though some
tribal societies have been known to do that. So it is with that instinct we
call war. Instead of treating conscription as a necessity by which the “noble”
warriors might succeed in leading the “ignoble” cowards, might we not instead
admit that that nobility is self-righteous and arbitrary? After all: what is a
greater arbiter than force? The will to survive is one of man’s most ensnaring
passions because the fear of death is one of his most depraving phobias, and
the willingness to die “for one’s country”, at the expense of one’s own
conscience, can hardly amount to more than a sublimation of that same fear, for
when one surrenders one’s conscience one does not dissolve one’s ego; rather,
the ego is directed so far outwards, identified so completely and extravagantly
with a “noble, patriotic cause”, that its connection with the Soul, its
solitary source of compassion for the Other, whether expressed as an individual
or an ostensibly rival group, is severed entirely. When social justice takes on
this quality, it becomes proto-Fascism. When love takes on this quality, it
becomes destructive obsession. Let’s not deny that there is just as much
dignity in sex; after all, one process produces the family and the other
protects it. Yet neither is an expression of that family’s true potential: to
restore unity within the larger Human Family. Those who cannot fathom this goal
are inhibited, and for them to inhibit others, under the auspices of altruism
and sacrifice, is a perversion of altruism and sacrifice. To die for your country
(or, more accurately, your corporation!!) is never to overcome the fear of
Death, but rather to rush directly at Death with a battle cry, hoping to kill
Death itself, crazed with the obsession of survival. That which must survive is
a carrier of one’s ego, just as one’s child is, and often this is more than an
analogy, for the child is literally the motivator and the excuse. If one
survives the battle, one might then subject the child to the same torment,
insisting that only to die for one’s children is noble. One feels guilt for
surviving, but not for killing; rather, one regrets that one did not die in
such a manner that one would be remembered as a hero, so now one must secretly
wish for the death of one’s children and the survival of one’s grandchildren by
avenue of that same sacrifice. If one’s own children fail to die, they are to
raise one’s grandchildren to inherit the tribal burden: to become a sacrifice
to the gods, so that the entire family may be immortal. It is a karmic pattern
so deeply ingrained in human history that only the very few so accept the possibility
of defeat that they can surrender totally, as conscientious objectors to the
fight itself. If you are clinging to survival, surrender is no way to protest
war, for any war worth protesting must have the same outcome: one’s own
annihilation. Yet if survival ceases to pervert by becoming an ideal, treated
as an end in and of itself, then dying nobly takes on different meaning. There
is no longer the need to sublimate, at that point. Neither must one force
others to die, whether they are one’s own kin or some more distant relative of
the human family tree. At that point, too, one regards the rapist NOT as a
personification of the Devil, who lives within one’s own heart and hides behind
every noble impulse. One simply sees the rapist as a confused human animal,
trying to force others to participate in a carnal act that, like war, is not of
absolute importance. And the conscription officer is no more dignified.
[({Dm.A.A.)}]
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