RETROREC: an Open Letter.

Retroactive Reciprocity:

The Messiah came too late

Now it’s God who has to wait

For while He cooked up His Great Plan

The burden fell to Common Man.

What we salvage of His Word

Helps us cope with the Absurd.

That which He has careless written

By contrast, our hand at last has

Smitten.

That which He has set in motion

Owes him no longer devotion.

Stronger for his absence leaves

No man naive who lonely grieves.

All the prayers that went unheeded

All because God never heard

Made it clear that He conceded

To us every careless Word.

Dm.A.A.

You know, there is one refuge I have found in all of this. I had forgotten it, but it’s something I must fall back upon. I should be proud of my virginity, since I equate it with moral superiority.

Now, if you disagree, do hear me out. It’s actually very simple and self-evident.

One might wonder: what does sexuality have to do with morality? I mean: clearly if being a good person does not guarantee that I will lose my virginity, then why must losing my virginity make me a worse one? Yet, as an egalitarian, it should be obvious that it must be one or the other. It’s precisely BECAUSE so many good people might go their whole lives without once having known sex, for entirely nebulous and absurd “reasons”, with absolutely no promise of reprieve, that we must retain this one silver lining. The world does not revolve around the ego of the person who surrenders morality in order to have a higher chance at getting laid; that person makes a sacrifice, and that’s what sex should be regarded as. Yes: to the narcissist, it’s only logical that sex and morality should be entirely divorced from one another; recognizing that morality cannot be employed as a means to a satisfying end, the egoist regards it as inferior but seeks thereby to retain it once the end is met. But being fair means that there has to be SOME sort of compensation. Either being good entitles you to having sex, or not having sex makes you better. It doesn’t get more liberal than that. Besides: it’s not like people who ARE moral consistently can be convicted of the same egoism; morality must be regarded as transcendent if it is to be effective, and since all people benefit from being treated as equals, it’s in our nature to be moral.

With Alanna, there was an unspoken understanding, even before she confessed the extent of her sins to me, that the experiential superiority she had to me was counterbalanced by the moral superiority I had to her; in this way, and ONLY in this way, we retained the fundamental equality which we had when we first met, as virgins. The very moment she gained one leg up over me (vulgar pun intended?) she lost the other. Sex was a trade, (pardon the term “sex trade”) and people must remember that it’s called LOSING one’s virginity FOR a REASON. People who try to talk around this problem want to call the loss of one’s virginity a “sexual debut”. But certainly for many people this debut never comes. We don’t have to live good lives DESPITE this fact; we have the right to live good lives BECAUSE of it. The fact is: if being good does not guarantee sex, plenty of people have a better chance at having sex by being amoral, like the traditional depiction of the Joker, doing good things part-time, when it is convenient, and reaping the benefits of an egalitarian society that rewards good behavior even in people for whom bad behavior is a totally relative option.

Calling us equals DESPITE the fact also does no good. Unlike race or gender, (engendered gender, in the original sense of the word) sex is a choice, like goodness. I used to think that being virginal made people more attractive by default, since every person who has ever had sex was a virgin for a long time hitherto. I found you attractive since I thought that you might be a virgin. You still are, regardless, but I know now that not everybody feels and thinks this way. Why should I feel inferior because of it? Simply because in Practice people use their past experience against me, threatening to turn human sexuality into the sort of dominance hierarchy we find tragically in other parts of the animal kingdom.

It is healthiest this way: a balance of extremes. One person may possess an experience which the other may never have, despite the fact that it would only take the other five minutes to change this and set the former on the course to outrageous pleasure and success. The former retains a virtue which the other may never win back in this lifetime, even by avenue of a willful celibacy. Pardon another vulgar pun, but I can’t help it: Man’s Extremity is God’s Opportunity. This way, children will think twice about losing it, and those who do think twice will feel no insecurity in waiting. The Christians were ingenious, and as millennials we can retain what they got right and use it against all that they turned into elitism.

One might ask: but does this not predispose people to needless guilt? In fact, it dispossesses those people of guilt who need the comfort most, for we will feel inferior regardless of your rationalizations, and so long as we are systematically excluded we will find some moral rationalization by which to blame ourselves, once we have realized we can’t blame you for having what we want. At least we need not blame ourselves for wanting what you have!!

Then one might ask: but is this not a gateway to emotional blackmail and spiritual abuse? You might expect non-virgins to be lured into compromising circumstances in such a moral climate, but in fact it is not so. They know they can’t undo their past, so it is up to them whether to drag their fellows to their level. This way, each time a non-virgin rejects a virgin, the virgin may smile, for the non-virgin chose to protect the virgin’s moral superiority, and by the disparity between them there is genuine equality even in separation. And the non-virgin may be grateful that the virgin was willing to give all that up out of sheer love, however myopic the expression might seem (and you must admit that it’s far more grandiose in this light). The fact is: we do betray our virgin friends when we become non-virgins, especially when we reject them later and forbid them to follow in our footsteps. The least one can do is say: it’s for your own good; you are my superior in virtue, and you’re better off this way, though I may hurt you. I start to speak in poetry just thinking it.

Alanna wanted me to cope by believing in God. I did, for some time. But I have someone better now: Myself.

Thanks for showing me the Light.

Now you know that it’s All Right.

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

RENEG:

Do you want to know why I hate you?

It is because you chose yourself over me.

But not only did you do that. You then blamed ME for it.

It was you. No man can tolerate it. No boy can imagine it. I could not have prevented it; I had no way of knowing it.

It was up to you.

Nothing can justify it.

No human being can prioritize one’s self over another human being. It is impossible.

You are in NO position to scapegoat me for that. You are not even human.

My only intent: to protect Humanity from YOU.

I can’t give up on it.

I don’t depend upon others parasitically.

They simply inform my actions.

I do not make the rules; I only enforce them.

Symbiosis is absolutely dependent upon that.

YOU are the disease. YOUR interests. YOUR semblance of priorities.

And don’t pretend you do not KNOW this to be true.

You should have learned by now what human nature is, and that you do not belong to it.

Human Nature serves Humanity. ALL of it.

I cannot afford the conceit of suicide.

Alanna’s death was only her last mistake.

I shall live to outlive you.

I shall be the stronger one.

Humanity will survive.

Through as many incarnations of the Soul as are required, I will see to it that some day no child knows hunger, no man or woman knows rejection, and all memory of egocentrism is eradicated.

You cannot possibly win. People are much too intelligent. We have evolved beyond you.

This is no narcissistic fantasy. Some day, all men will remember their duty. And only then will I be happy in their company, for only then will they be men.

I do not make the rules. I am simply the messenger.

Dmytri.

A Christmas Kresten:

Kresten:

You accused me of holding others to impossible standards. Perhaps Alanna made that accusation. I cannot remember now. But you called me a moral perfectionist. Yet it was you. You held me to impossible standards. I will never know the life of reciprocal relationship. How can you call the travesty surrounding Alexandra a relationship? How could you hold that against me? It’s been ten years since anyone has “formally agreed to date me”. How can anyone require that of me? The formal agreement is the reward, not the prerequisite. But I may never be rewarded. Alanna is dead. There is no escaping that fact, except by following her own route. Perhaps I ought to consider it with more seriousness. I do love the Japanese for that, among other things.

I hope you are happy to see me reduced to this. You have won, after all. Fascism has come to this country. What else is a “formal relationship” except for an elaborate social conspiracy? I thought I’d found a commiserator in you. But you were only ever one of them. Shame upon you for pretending towards solidarity with me.

I can change neither the World nor myself. I am too weak. What others take for granted are a fantasy to me. No amount of authenticity, pain, anxiety, talent or reasoning can contend with the argument “but I am already happy”. I have nothing to offer. So be it. I can take. I’ve done that my entire life. You know that best. It takes one to know one. But if I die before you do, if my conscience catches up with me before yours does, then know that you must carry the torch for the leeches in my stead. I do not doubt it will be me that gets to see Alanna first in Heaven. After all: she was innocent, and I knew that from the moment I first met her. An empath picks up on things like that. But no one ever told you empathy was creepy. Like all truths, you had to realize it in the domain of a private genius, using convention to contend with it until the Truth came to Light. That is why I feel betrayed by the World. Because people are so fucking self-entitled, and yet not one of them regards me as entitled. They will kill you for stepping on their lawns, but they won’t spare you the fruit of their garden.

I can see them now as you must see them. And my one advantage over you – my empathy – has made no difference.

Oh, well. I guess I cannot save them for themselves and from each other, after all, and since no one saves me from them, I ought to save myself.

Alanna died because she was innocent. I failed to prove otherwise.

I was innocent as well.

Only you were the aggressor in that situation. Even if I die before I can prove it, I want you to remember that.

Regards,

Dmytri.

P.S.: tell Tony to keep off of my property. It’s what you do best, not that others’ property ever meant much to you.

The Rapist or the Warrior? Choose Your Own Adventure!!

Let us weigh two evils against one another: rape and warfare. Wherever they are not equated in action, as a “strategy”, the one is condemned as though it were the basest of human evils, whilst the other is exalted as though it were the noblest of human sacrifices. Both are acts of violence, involving some considerable element of risk to the actor, guaranteeing suffering, almost invariably, to at least one of the parties. One of the two is an example that, once followed, propagates the deaths of millions, yet the other only tends to result in death when the aggressor fears for his or her own well-being after the fact, or when the resistance with which he or she is met is in itself so violent that he or she must resort to surpassing means to surmount it. (I must confess that, at this moment, I speak like an amateur tactician.) One of these evils is carried out by highly regimented mobs of unthinking people, mostly men, who act under orders and appeal to vague notions of “collective” or “national” identity; the other is most often carried out by individuals who consistently provide their own, imaginative justifications for the violence. Both are carried out to serve a fairly basic human interest, though the warrior tends often to fight to seize power, whereas the rapist wants only to feel sexual satisfaction. One is considered inevitable to human life, whereas the other is considered intolerable. Imagine if conservative men raised their sons to be rapists instead of warriors!! How does one reconcile, therefore, this cognitive dissonance? As we have learned by now in our maturity, experience can do nothing to contend with logical contradiction; it only reinforces the desperation with which the thinker must produce a solution. One solution would of course be that of radical(ly) satirical action: for instance, to hold a food drive for rapists fighting the good fight. Another is to establish a new form of moral hierarchy, one informed by the principle of non-violence instead of the pursuit of power in “groups”. I can say, with some certainty, that I owe nothing to temperamentally violent people who must find an outlet for their baser instincts through “national identity”. I can hardly imagine any set of circumstances wherein I might call that a “service”, and I would seldom hesitate to venerate the rapist with surpassing honours, for his or her example is one that I might wish to follow should I believe that a need more basic than the will to power could truly be fulfilled by no other avenue. I would, of course, present this case before the General Public in the format of a public service announcement, since there is plenty of evidence to suggest that most adults prefer to have sex. (I should note, however, that I have found absolutely no evidence for either the phenomenon of “sex trafficking” nor the equally absurd statistic which claims that people in their teens and twenties, ON AVERAGE, manage to so bypass every legal stricture and moral convention that they first mate before they reach thirty years of age, even in so repressive a society as the United States.) Supposing also that someone were to contend that he or she was not an aggressor but simply “answered the Call of Duty” by responding to an external aggressor, I would be speechless, only because one knows the relevant retorts by the time on reaches Middle School:

1.               How can you be certain that the Other is the instigator?

2.           How are you less guilty for fighting back?

3.           Why presume upon the integrity of the status quo?

Yet none of these retorts seem to hold up against the greatest intoxicant of ethical thought: the Group. And that is one drug I have yet to take, and which I stay avoid at every corner where it may be sold.

It’s obvious what motivates the Individual to “take up arms against” foreign agents. One fears for one’s own well-being, including all that one belongs to and all that belongs to one’s self. It would be comforting if such a concern could be universalized, but instead of beginning to consider that the aggressor has already thought it through, one instead seeks solidarity with some wretched FRACTION (otherwise spelled “faction”) of the Global Family and begins to take part directly in the destruction and betrayal of this family. While such acts of self-defense are understandable in small communities, such AS families, wherein one has grown sufficiently accustomed to the aggressor so much so that domestic abuse is something one cannot project any honour upon, it is precisely BECAUSE people can be so violent once cut off from the General Human Body that simply fighting to “protect one’s family” (the originally violent environment) is paradoxical. The outcome is even more disastrous when that family is the Nation. It seems that only identification with the Species truly produces harmonious results, for the Human Species has produced enough civilized ideals to account for actual heroism: the protection of the Global Environment, human and non-human. How is one to protect the Species whilst murdering members of it? One might entertain the conceit of disowning enemy combatants from the Human Family, as if on the authority of a patriarch. One might begin to imagine that others are perverse genetically. Yet any movement in such a depraving and delusional direction would only assure that those who are most well-acquainted with one’s self regard one’s self as being doubly base. One might project the virtues of a gender role such as “being-a-man” upon the act of warfare, yet this would never stand the test of reason; one would have to institute a double-standard by which other violent men, such as rapists and robbers, are scapegoats for the sins of all men. Perhaps in such a paradigm women too could participate, as though part of the war effort, by insisting that rapists are simply those men who lack the “courage” to be warriors? But what courage can be found in numbers, when one acts not on one’s own devices, when every action of one’s body is absolved of responsibility because some stranger, to whom superiority is arbitrarily accorded, commands it? Who decides what interpretation of an “order” is valid? Clearly, the adult male must laugh upon the entire process, since it is such a hysterically tragic subversion of the entire process of maturation: the Growth of the Mind as an Autonomous Agent. The rapist RETAINS that; the warrior surrenders it “with valour”. It is disturbing, furthermore, to imagine that any man who is not violent ENOUGH to “win a lady’s favour” (as though ladies still favoured gentlemen, who must by definition remain “gentle”) would sooner be suspected of a predisposition to rape than the warrior. Clearly even the most retarded Freudian (or is “regressive” the progressive term?) would not think to dismiss all moral deductions to this end as though they were MERELY the sublimation of sexual frustration in an “inferior man”, for that would be tantamount to saying “you want to rob me of my right to genocide just because you can’t get laid like I can.” It is self-interested, indeed.

I suppose that our last line of defense lies in this: that the Pacifist knows not where his own Goodness comes from, and that only through the disciplined used of violence can civilized ideals be protected from undisciplined violence. But how has our hard-nosed advocate treated the obverse: undisciplined Peace? How many insecure men would not outwardly open fire upon peace-loving hippies, whether they trespass upon the Public Office Buildings or simply his manicured lawn? And what about the disciplined use of non-violence, such as the likes of King, Gandhi, and Gyatso have demonstrated in every generation to  be effective? How would you classify this very article? It might move you to violence in the defense of Every Thing Which You Believe In, (welcome to the Real World, as they say) but am I the aggressor, truly? The answer to that can be found in one last question: who is truly attacked? A human being, or an all-too-human ego?

If it’s the latter, better go back to rape, for the sake of the body count.

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

ZEDONG:

“Yeah, that’s funny. Look: I know that most boys want to trick-or-treat as Adolf Hitler once, just for a laugh, sooner or later. But come on. Seriously. [Pause.] Oh. OH. So you ARE serious? Well: in that case, since this is your department, where can I acquire a gun? You wouldn’t happen to have a spare one on you, would you?”

I don’t see what the big deal with China is, all of a sudden. I had known about their one-child policy for what feels like forever, but somehow only now some British comedian has taken to poking fun about it. Personally, I am not moved by MOST of the logistics that are swimming to the surface regarding China. I once sat in on a lecture by a woman who was supposed to be one of the leading experts on the country. I must have had Tibet in the back of my mind, since I had formerly studied Buddhism, and since I was leaning more towards Taoism at the time, I wanted to know how the Taoists were affected by Xi Xinping’s policies. She simply gave me this Look like I had raised an irrelevant question, responding that she either had no knowledge or no interest in Taoism, as though no one else in the room (not true) did either, and she continued her lecture upon how China was reverting to the sort of “dictatorship” it had under Mao Zedong, having burned a bridge with me by avenue of which she might have been able to substantiate her claims. I began to visualize a Stalinist dictator, based upon what little evidence she provided, but largely my projections were supplemented by thoughts of my father, with whom I did not get along very well at the time, since he had become miserly in his financial support of my lifestyle, a lifestyle that, as far as I could remember, had remained unchanged and consistent since I was a child, a time when, unlike adulthood, I seemed to hold a great deal of authority, especially in academia, at least enough to make decisions regarding wealth and its proper distribution. Over the years, political differences notwithstanding, my father grew to respect me again, but that only made it more difficult to project my conception of him upon the supposed villains of the global political scene. I had always been raised to FEAR men like Mao Zedong, Vladimir Lenin, and Fidel Castro, though as more and more of my peers began to accuse me of behaving like these men, I began to wonder if I could not identify with them. Plato’s concept of the Philosopher King certainly put my mind at ease as I am sure a Mass helps to assuage the agitated Catholic’s guilt, so when I heard it used to described Chairman Mao I could not longer draw a clear, defining moral line. I guess that, for the first time, I was growing up, and it had absolutely nothing to do with the acquisition of money or status; in fact, all attempts that followed to acquire either only served to reinforce what I discovered during this cocoon period, and when those luxuries DID come (for how could I treat either money OR status as necessities, when both choke the flow of material wealth?) they came only by virtue of my idealism and the fine men and women who shared it, to a qualified extent. A lot of this can be traced to the fact that my teachers, who ended up hiring me, had read a lot of the books that I was reading. Maybe that strange woman who equated Xi Xinping with Mao Zedong had very little in the way of evidence to substantiate her claims, but Karl Marx certainly did, which is why some of the footnotes in Capital, Volume I (the first installment in a trilogy, already longer than the entirety of The Lord of the Rings) take up the majority of the page, and not in the infantile manner that Campbell describes a dependent scholar but with zealous attention to detail and no small part of analytical wit and cutting satire. Frankly, I find it a lot more moving than John Oliver.

So: what’s the big deal with China? Why do people continue to mock its government for its fairly self-evident policies? Don’t get me wrong: I love my sister, and, when asked how many children I would like to have, (a shockingly endearing question, since I’d never thought that I controlled that) I replied, of course, that I would ask each child if he or she would like to have a sibling, and that would be my decision, given that my partner would consent to this, which, as I’ve stated, I had not considered to be within my control. I may be thankful for my sibling, but I know that this is but a privilege. I may not ever have the privilege of having children of my own, despite the accolades I have accrued over the years. Like money, children cannot be “acquired”; they must come to you when ready. I would be blessed to have but one child, and since both my parents had been only children (in the sense of “only child”, but maybe also in the other sense) I would not consider it unnatural or confining. I certainly wouldn’t ascribe their faults to this condition. Solitude is one of those few, precious gifts that can either be squandered or exalted, and though I miss my sister now that she’s in University, I do my best to cultivate my psychic independence in her absence. I can do this, because I don’t have to live with overpopulation. If I did, I’d probably do that which I would normally never consider doing: vote. And I would vote only in the spirit of putting an end to voting altogether, by electing an official whom I deem worthy to resolve the most Hellish problem that the World has Ever Known: Other People.

It should be obvious why Chinese officials regulate the offspring of their people. In Sound Design, it’s good practice to put a filter on certain waves so that when they reach a given frequency they do not “clip” and turn into unexpected Square Waves. If one can filter the frequency of a waveform, certainly one can regulate the frequency of pregnancy, and it would be done for the same purpose: to render the overall composition more harmonious. (Music resolves everything.) In less esoteric and more materialistic terms, the One-Child Policy may be understood entirely in terms of physical Common Sense: the Government simply can’t AFFORD population growth at this time. It’s responsible for ALL of the country’s children, both yours and your neighbour’s, and since you know that you are no better than your neighbor, and neither can you ever be, except to that extent that that same neighbor imagines himself to be better than YOU, there is no counterargument. The State only has the physical capacity to feed a certain number of human beings, and what would you expect for it to do otherwise? Is it to simply ALLOW certain children to starve whilst others prosper? Certainly, no one would want the country to go down the road of those heartless dictatorships wherein individual liberty is mistaken for predation. Only the most oppressive dictatorships are plagued by social stratification, wherein children are born as either princes or paupers, depending entirely upon the inheritance of their parents, wherein hard work and loyal social service are actually condemned by those who regard exploitation as though it were a more attractive form of masculinity, wherein a rigid and alienating social order is preserved only by the complacency of those who can afford to live comfortably and the misery of those who can barely afford to live at all, and certainly at the expense of any dreams of “upward mobility”. No one who has the POWER to protect the new generation from that can begin to tolerate this possibility. It’s not that these officials do not care for Humanity; rather, they must live in lifelong awe at how human NATURE subverts Humanity Itself. Hence only the few who have sufficiently transcended the Human Condition to be able to inform it could ever return to the Ordinary World and to teach the Right Way. Admit it: YOU would do the same thing, God willing.

Fidel Castro was once asked to account for human rights abuses in his country, and he responded, at some length, as was his style, about human rights abuses worldwide. He had not simply evaded the question; he responded as though he had been waiting his entire life for the interrogator to acknowledge these abuses. Castro had spent a lifetime combatting these evils; the critic was preaching to the Choir. People treat Communism like this: imagine that your house has sprung a leak. You try to amend it with plaster, but you accidentally spill the plaster onto your carpet. Now the carpet is ruined. But one ought not to blame the plaster, much less to ignore the leak. People treat Communism entirely like that. Failing to solve the problem, they blame the solution, misattributing the problem itself TO the solution. What Castro was fighting remains a problem to this day; we have not even come close to resolving it, and our society is so saturated with it that it has begun to appear natural. One does not blame the Communist nor Communism for attempting to resolve the problem. One can only blame those who pretend that there IS no problem.

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