DUAL!SM:

“Here: I know how much you like doughnuts and not selling them, so I am giving you one for free.”

The story is one that takes place in two settings: the World as It Is and the World as It Appears to the Protagonist.

The World as It Appears is one that revolves around the Protagonist. His heroism, his adherence to a strict and developing code of morality, rationality, and sanity, is directly responsible for the condition of this World as either Heavenly or Hellish. Everything emanates outwards from his deeds and thoughts, and Its Nature revolves about his ego. The Individual is the focal epicenter, and he can only function as such so long as he feels himself to be as such. His kinship with Others is a function of this position of influence, and any Other that threatens the Order of Things must be vilified to preserve It, that every resource in this World may be rallied against the offender to Its Sanctity. This is a World governed by objective moral and rational laws, and the Individual stands in intimate relationship to them as their agent and advocate.

But beyond This World there is That Other, “Fallen” World: the World as It Is. This is a World whose fundamental Being is confronted daily but whose underlying Nature remains remote, obscure. This World does NOT revolve about the Hero, and if it had eyes it might judge the First of the Two Worlds to be nothing more than one in a quadrillion snowflakes, rendered irrelevant not only by their bulk in number but also by their sheer uniqueness, for no two snowflakes that differ can claim to be kin. Already, I have represented an extreme possibility, but the underlying sense is of a World that may be absolutely Alien.

In Childhood, I know only the former plane of being. No sooner am I borne that I can fathom pain; no sooner am I nursed than I can register pleasure. Though I am unaware of it, those who attend to my physical needs, well before those needs become psychological, observe and assess these responses to be recognizably Human. They do this for years before my perceptions of these stimuli harden into patterns of consistency, initially little more than the growth of synapses in my brain. Subjectively, I am born when I first remember, whether the memory is of a juicy, red lollipop, the lurid green light of the pediatric clinic, the softness of my pillow or a pile of what appears at first to be red meat but then is revealed to be cotton balls drenched in blood from my nose. Each of these memories may be considered evidence for earlier memories; after all, how can I mistake the cotton balls for meat if I did not know the look of meat? Yet the simple fact that my eye perceived these things and that my brain retained the image is not enough for them to become “mine”; some connection must be made from the present to the past, however false that initial impression might be. It is because *I* make this mistake that it begins to constitute MY personal Reality. And, until I am given this incentive to remember, the rest of the phenomena are largely meaningless. Though I might have been thrown into the World as It Is, and though I have it on the good authority of my elders that I responded to It as It Was, it only interests me once I can convert it into that World as It Appears to Me, thus rendering it Mine.

Pain and pleasure are only two of the first building blocks. Upon this, my Moral Identity is constructed long before I even know Intelligence. I recognize quickly that when others suffer around me I too am led to suffer, whether I am punished directly or indirectly for having disappointed them. Their gestures take on significance even before I know the meaning of their words. I learn to sense anger in my Father, bliss in my Mother, and guilt within Myself. As I develop the faculty of Speech, I also learn to Hear. They tell me how to behave, prescribing decisions for me just as I first learn that I have freedom to move, to run and jump, to build and break. No sooner can I run from home than I am taught to adhere to strict limits; no sooner can I reach out and grab things than I am taught what never to put in my mouth. This is the uninspiring birth of morality. If I suffer, the World turns to Hell, and if I benefit, everything becomes Heaven. My family and friends always join me in whichever World I create, since their condition is intimately wedded to mine, as though the cutting of one umbilical cord was only ever the conception of an entire web of far more sturdy bonds. At the center of this Web, at once spider and fly, thrown into bondage but free to master it, I milk morality for all that it is worth. Being Good, Doing Good, and Feeling Good are One; Having Rights and Being Right are identical. The World has begun to depend upon Moral Laws, those which I have inherited from my elders and betters, and it is upon these Laws that I stand when I first set foot in kindergarten.

Though I would have liked to spend the rest of eternity with my parents on the playground and running through the halls of the supermarket, watching television here and accruing praise for my illustrations there, I swiftly learn that they were but the prototypes for another set of authorities: Teachers. Torn from home, I am also divorced from the Present. Up until this point, Home was simply wherever Family was; though we moved from city to city, crossing countless miles by train, boat, automobile, and aeroplane, this is my first time being segregated from both Mother AND Television this long. The Present, once unilateral, is fractured into three dimensions. My memories, first acquired as Mine, if you will remember it, are stolen and redistributed Publically in an alliance known as Parent-Teacher Conference. I experience bureaucracy for the first time, though its ominous portents had always haunted my City of Birth and cast looks of dread upon my parents that I had mistaken for my own guilt and then pondered quizzically. Subjective memory, once a frivolous enterprise that phased in and out of confirmation by Others, only occasionally producing heartache for either party in its disconfirmation, now becomes an Objective Past. Though not all that I experience can be recorded, already some elements of My World become self-aware, so to speak. Teachers begin as human objects in my field of vision, but then they remember, with terrifying accuracy, other observations I have made. Routinely, I am subjected to assessments, much as when I was an infant, but this time I am ominously lucid of the process. Little by little, memories of rather boring physical experiences, designed to instill abstract thought process, become problems as my beloved Mother rages about my “grades”. I swiftly learn the cost of treating impersonal facts personally.

My first PERSONAL memory might have been about a pile of bloodied cotton that looked like meat. Yet now I experience the same error but with an external dimension to it. What at first had appeared to be mere paper, like the medium for my drawings, but with uniform print, like books, decorating it colourlessly, with only a few spaces within which I am encouraged to create, has become a test, quite indirectly, of my precious Moral Perfection. Just as I can relate red cotton to red meat, I relate my Mother’s rage to that dim memory of this paper. When I was simply using paper to illustrate Our House, it was a consistent object. I see its development at every stage in the Present, and even if can look forward to the praise of my parents there is no separation between the conception of the Work and their approval. Yet now Paper has become a bureaucratic document. I am alienated from it to begin with, given the sheer banality of its confinements and the impersonal, compulsive environment in which it is presented unto me. I am relieved to see it disappear, though perhaps wistful that I have lost it, though after it has been made Public in this way I am confronted with My First Consequence. What had previously been a personal process by which I understood the World as private Memories has become a Public Measurement of Value. And it is out of this that a third dimension emerges: the Future. From this point forth, every decision that I make in the Present is supposed to be informed by this Imaginary (though often unimaginative) concept of the Future, so that I am responsible for my Past at all times insofar as it reflects upon my ability to plan. The Future is not simply a tool that I might use to prevent the pains of the past from recurring, for even my observation of the Future, my ability to exercise “judgement”, is constantly being assessed.

It does not take long for me to internalize this process. Eager to salvage Heaven, I focus intensely upon the World as It Appears to Me, and I strive to represent it As it Is, so that its agents of authority might smile upon me. I succeed. It is not long before my family has been extended to include a slew of impressed teachers.

I have officially become Intelligent.

Aldous Huxley said in an interview that the two essential and indispensable things are “Intelligence and Good Will”, contending that “Intelligence without Good Will is apt to be inhuman”, whereas “Good Will undirected by Intelligence is either impotent or misguided.” By measuring one against the other, the eccentric idealist manages to represent the dangers of either by itself, though he does not prove either to be necessary As Such.

You can see already why such a set of values would appeal to me. My childhood was spent mostly in this fashion: being Good and Smart. It’s not that I did not have other values, such as having Fun, which was the first word that I learned in English without its being translated to me from Russian, and which I learned well before I enter kindergarten, for it was upon entry to the Day Care Centre that its meaning dawned upon me. (This was also approximately three or four years prior to the debut of Spongebob Squarepants.) Yet “having Fun” had no Future; Being Right did. As of Kindergarten, “Being Right” meant being both Moral AND Rational. It exalted the two giants: Intelligence and Good Will.

My task was to represent the World to Itself. Its laws were both Moral and Rational; it became ridiculous to question which of these attributes came first, for as far as I was concerned the World eternally possessed Them Both, and It was Itself eternally possessed by Both of Them. My relationship to the World was thus: that it revolved about me, though I was forbidden to admit this fact. So long as I followed its rules and solved its puzzles, my Ego was comforted, and with the sanctity of this Ego I might equate the Prosperity of the World.

I have said that this is a story of Two Worlds, however. As you shall see, if you have not already foreseen it, the Ego is the Hero, though the Ego is also but a tool for the Hero’s Quest. The Ego appears in at least two forms: the manner in which it appears to the World As it Appears to Me, and the manner in which it appears to the World as It Is. Keep in mind, however, that the World as It Is may be so ambivalent to the Ego that this Ego might not even Exist therein. It follows logically, therefore, that to accuse me of egocentrism one cannot appeal to the objectivity of the “Real World”, and all such accusations originate only in the minds of Others, whose plight is one that is akin to mine, though we may be mere snowflakes to the Impersonal World.

At any rate, I only learned about the Evils of Egoism long after I established my own Identity as that of a young man set apart in both Intellect and Virtue. It’s not that I was not punished for selfish deeds in my formative years, but I did not internalize the context of the sin, so when I saw it in others I was bemused. I first knew selfishness to be an evil PERSONALLY when my classmates refused to share their snacks with me, though back then I thought their sin to be mere greed. I knew that I had done nothing to deserve this pain; my parents simply refused to buy the same snacks, and since it was a sin to ask them why, I remained puzzled by my condition. Solace came through generosity, which our teachers professed, though some kids fell back upon their own feelings of entitlement. There were even dim whispers of other parents who had engendered these greedy tendencies, but I dared not to believe these rumours.

Eventually, we learned that pride, greed, and ignorance all belonged to those villains who lacked humility, generosity, and wisdom, so the Ego became aware of itself as a potential problem. Be that as it may, my Ego was protected by the World which it inhabited. It remained a faithful servant of the only known and undisputed Gods; in fact, it was their Favourite Star. How could someone so Good and so Intelligent ever turn into a diabolical egomaniac?

It was impossible to imagine.

There is a saying that we do not see the World as It Is but rather as We Are. Joseph Campbell insisted that the World does not follow moral laws, but rather that it follows physical laws. I might take comfort, therefore, in the synthesis of these two perspectives, which are already kin, for it indicates that I was genuinely Moral, however subjectively so. MY World revolved about Moral Laws because *I* was Moral. MY World made rational sense because *I* was Rational. MY World, though it had no God, could not be called “Unintelligent”. And herein my breakdown begins.

It did not take me long to see through the Iron Cage of Rationality. Science Itself fashioned the tools to burn down its own objectivity, killing itself in the fire. I was ahead of most middle school honours students when I first watched The Matrix. “Doing a Matrix” was to them synonymous with balancing an overloaded backpack on a narrow fence. You may ascribe whatever poetic significance you want to that; in many ways, Neo is an overloaded backpack, crammed full of information he can barely contain and then perched precariously on the thin partition between two radically incommensurable Worlds.

But my classmates did not mean it that way. They just thought of all the cool slow-motion jumps in that movie. Even the philosophical significance of defying gravity was lost to them as a metaphor.

Defying gravity was something which I tried several times, but it was purely an exercise in imagination. Seeing people vanish into thin air was tantamount; I was simply parroting science fiction I’d seen on T.V. Though the dour, miserly stoicism of Scientific Common Sense was less essential to my Being than were those television programs, for it was relatively recent, it was close enough to home that I would feel subservient to it; both my parents, especially my father, were biochemists. (I say “especially my father” because my Mother might, I maintain to this day, have succeeded in literature, visual arts, or even musical theatre.)

There is, of course, something to be said for the arbitrariness of stoicism. My academic rival, when he and I were still considered close friends, (especially by our parents, who shared a nationality of origin,) would be among the first to question my sanity, when I expounded fancifully upon the Paranormal. Though he knew more of the details about the X-files, such as the names and significance of the leading characters, he had as little to do with Fox Mulder as even I could fathom. In Mulder, I had found a role model, though I was also forced often to confront the futility of my fancy. It makes sense that Mulder, Huxley, and Camus have all, at some point or another, been identified with my Personality Type.

My point is this: that some men are more inclined to live in a just fantasy than others. My rival was the more Rational of the two of us, though my intuition helped me to supplement for my weakness of Reason in matters of Pattern Recognition. One of my last triumphs over this rival came in High School, when it was I that had to be the one to tell HIM that the World was IRRATIONAL, and he, like a Sartre contending with Camus prior to the former’s visit to the Soviet Union, resisted with tacit, soft-spoken indignation, not without a bead of sweat that I could probably see even over the phone line, were that the medium. The victory was of course only a difference in temperament. As I have intimated, I supplemented for a lack of Reason by appeal to Intuitive Wisdom. It wasn’t only that Science Itself had intimated to us the possibility of an Insane Universe. Science was my rival’s instrument by which Reason might extend itself into the Cosmos and find within the stars its reflection. Science could not PRECLUDE the presence of an Order, since its design was to find such Order; it could only use its methods to upset previous Orders. My insight was an intuitive one, like that of Camus; I simply observed a pattern, and that pattern favoured Chaos.

Considering that Common Sense used to put Human Beings at the very Centre of the Universe, one can see how Science Itself betrayed its parents by throwing Earth into the orbit of the Sun, which in turn it tossed callously into an arbitrary Milky Way.

Now that I am older, I must confess that I no longer cling to Science as to a parent, for too often I see in its writings the scrawl of my old rivals from school. It is much too easy to turn Science in on itself and to reduce its claims to an adolescent’s indignation.

Yet when I last saw my rival from high school, it was I that tried to impress upon him the validity of astrology. My pattern recognition differed from his Rational Astronomy only in that I was more of a people person, whereas he was more of an extravert. Because I loved people, I saw them in the stars. Because he wanted to IMPRESS people, he wanted to DEPICT the stars. Though his was the more selfish reason, he had the advantage of a Cosmology that the hardest hearts might profess. Mine was a cosmology for neurotic men and fanciful women.

Seeing the World as an adolescent boy encounters a Woman did not help my mental state; I simply lost the shelter of academia. No longer promised a Final Reward in the Ultimate Future, I neglected my studies, though I had too much residual pride not to take every Advanced Placement Class that I could stomach and to blame my parents for the pressure to do so, though they had cynically forgotten ever having raised me. (This, like biochemistry, was also especially true of my father.) I fell into mind-numbing depression, the likes of which even my teachers noticed, quite openly. I still felt that the World revolved about me, of course, though it was no longer a reliable World, and if that was any indication of my OWN Identity, I had become unreliable.

There is a bitter design to Education. Since the age of five years old, Teachers treat us as though we were not even computers, but computer codes. Very recently I have had the very underappreciated privilege of learning how to write code in a foundational programming language referred to simply as “C”. C is good for running programs that take in user input and produce mechanical output. While we were studying this science, which I stand with others in calling an Art, we were tested on two fronts: whether the code we wrote “used best practices” (including originality) and whether it “worked”. Our Professor, Timothy Kraus, was my kind of guy, since he was both Individualist and Deontologist. In more ordinary terms, he did not maintain that the ends justified the means. In other words, for the code to “work” was secondary; the point was to write a code that could be modified and understood with ease, including by one’s peers. Getting results was just a bonus.

Of course, our professor had a keen enough eye to identify any reasons why your code would produce the wrong outputs, and he had enough discipline, if not sadistic ambivalence, to hide these reasons under a web of hints, riddles, ham-fisted jokes, and platitudes. You could bet that, if none of your codes “worked”, your codes had enough problems that you would be among the majority that failed the class.

To call results a “bonus” would appear facetious in context, though the context is often nothing more than a chokehold upon the Truth. The salient fact was that pragmatism failed. You could write a code that “did everything right”, in the sense of producing the proper outputs, and you still might fail the assignment, almost as though you had cheated.

Conversely, you could “do everything right”, producing the wrong output only owing to some bug that you had never heard of, and you’d have no way of knowing your grade. Professor Kraus might mock you for being self-entitled, or he might reward you to an extent that your more pragmatic classmates, who got the right outputs but by poor practices, were never rewarded. The means would justify the ends, as in Huxley’s philosophy, though ULTIMATELY the ends might be that both pragmatist and deontologist would fail the class, for success depended BOTH upon practice AND upon product; the instructor’s theory was that, so long as you did everything right enough times, results would inevitably come, and if you failed, it was because you had slacked off. In the end, he was just as Utilitarian as any other Boss; he simply relished his moral high ground.

You might imagine my admiration.

Most people are not even as noble as Timothy Kraus. Teachers could be called deontologists for giving up financial rewards in favour of social obligation, and it is for this reason perhaps that star pupils quickly internalize duty as ethic. Yet the very nature of contemporary education is, since kindergarten, a mechanical test of inputs and outputs, and it has been this way since I was in school (though perhaps not BECAUSE I was, if you will pardon my irony). How did I become “smart”, as a sociological identity that has haunted me since I first learned that I had a Past and a Future? Here is my most honest accounting of how it happened, for which I’ll be punished:

A World which revolved about ME, presenting itself in the Avatar of the Teacher, who was a sort of surrogate parent upon whom the well-being of my parents (and hence the World Itself) depended, asked me to identify Its Nature. I was charged with depicting the World As it Was, though I had available to myself only the World as I Saw It. (By no unfortuity of coincidence, “Saw” is simply “Was” spelled backwards, so I am referring to the World as I Was It.) Not knowing the former to exist, I presumed upon the objectivity of the latter reality. Under the threat of punishment, for which I would have felt ashamed, I had to make a series of observations, as instructed by this Avatar, and I had to use thought and memory in such a manner as to appease this new God who directed the Fate of the World.

How did my God see it, though? What is more: How did she see ME?

To my Teacher, though I had a body, with rights, and though I was loved, I was primarily a BRAIN. Brains are like snowflakes; each one is unique. UNLIKE snowflakes, however, brains can process information.

Thus I became a Code.

No one could be blamed entirely if I did not “work”. It was not MY fault, at least initially, if I produced the wrong outputs. I was young enough to be debugged if need be. Only much LATER in my lifetime could I be chastised for “not working”, otherwise known as “slacking”, and by that point no one would care what went on in my head, since “working” would be judged to be ethical only insofar as work produced Results. The job of the Teacher was to debug me in such a manner that I might eventually “work” without incident.

The tragic irony was that, long before I was put to work, I felt chastised. Far too much depended upon my success in the test. Thankfully, I had a knack for representing Reality as Its Avatar wished to be Seen. My God was pleased with my depiction. The inputs were producing the proper outputs, so how could the code be at fault? I was swiftly labelled a Gifted and Talented student, set on the Honours track, though I failed the test to qualify for it. My parents were proud, and my peers called me “Genius”.

You can see why many Geniuses go mad so swiftly and in such great numbers. Teachers did not use Best Practices.

My code remained untouched, until it was too late to do anything sensible about its bugs. At first, the System worked. As a Brain, I produced proper outputs with sterling accuracy; as the tests became more abstract, I produced brilliant and innovative results that met all of the requirements. Though I was but one of many snowflakes, the pattern of my crystals grew to fascinate my peers and elders.

Yet doubt began to creep in. Little by little, I began to learn the price of greatness, praise, and distinction. I conducted myself with enough humility to remain Morally Upright; when I failed, even by a meager definition, my outward displays of personal insecurity at least banished accusations of hubris, though I would learn MUCH later that such histrionics were considered indicative of narcissistic expectations. My studies into the Sciences had gone well beyond the curriculum, and while this impressed both family and friends, especially my rival, who was my parents’ favourite, the stronger that my ties grew to these studies the more binding was my attachment to the worldview. Watching The Matrix might have closed as many doors as it opened; like Neo, I could only return to ignorance by becoming a minor villain. I became painfully aware of my Identity as a Brain, and I internalized it accordingly. Furthermore, my peers were beginning to catch on. Though they were not philosophers, they were slowly becoming Scientists, and Science gave them no reason to reward me for my abilities. To them, I might have been the product of genetics and conditioning. The mere child of nature and nurture, I had no ethical high ground. My choices no longer mattered.

Eventually, the tests stopped. At some point, no one cares if you can produce an output. I had to go in quest of new inputs. The Moral Order of the Universe depended upon it. I was no longer trying to impress my parents; that ship had sailed with my first failing report card. My perfection shattered, it was all downhill from there. Yet entropy was known long before the fall; Hell was exposed long before God’s favourite angel lost Grace. Puberty was the start of Madness, for no academic brilliance could win a woman’s heart.

To this day, if I distinguish myself among community college students, they treat me as though I don’t belong there, since they have internalized the notion that they are unified in their academic stupidity, a stupidity passed off as apathy with the consent of their most cutting critics. What I have yet to learn was their education in the Body. As a Brain, I was heroic insofar as I produced Intelligent Answers; as a Body, I was Moral insofar as I emulated Moral Behaviour. What my peers lacked in academic heroism they made up for in spite and rebellion. Their bodies knew what my Brain could only dimly fathom, through some pretentious synthesis of bodily drives, poetry, and biology. The World of Women was lost to me since Birth.

Yet the Moral Order of the Universe did not disappear. No longer trying to impress my elders, I sought to impress my peers. No longer hungry for food, I hungered for sex. My parents, though they never starved me, remained distinct in that they were providers of the former. If my childhood was spent winning their approval, how hard could it be to win the approval of those who supply the latter? Both were mere auditors.

Education taught me to plan for the Future. Was this not to be the reward? Was Adulthood not simply a means by which the pains of Childhood might be vindicated? The Moral Order certainly made it appear to be so. I was still the Best and Brightest Star in the cosmology of the World as It Appeared to the Protagonist. If I lost a job or failed an interview, so what? I was still a genius. If I lost a girlfriend or was slighted by a prospect, so what? I was still a Saint. My virginity evidenced my moral superiority.

Besides: I had already found comfort to assuage my guilt. My peers, who envied my abilities, were swift forget me as they found themselves. Yet I no longer thought much of Ability, except by analogy to Utility. So the Moral World wanted me to be its Prophet. So be it!! Perhaps I was chosen to excel in all its tests. I had become a Marxist, and a Marxist’s ethic is the most humane: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. What could be more humble? My abilities entitled me to nothing more than the Basics. No one would envy me, for I would only ever use my powers for Good. Anyone who challenged my ethic was simply of a lesser character, though even these inferiors would benefit from my leadership. I was enlightened. Maybe I was nothing special, but my Duty was a distinguished one.

At least I had gone beyond mere pain and pleasure.

Reality as It Was, as It Still Is, had Other Plans, if plans can be ascribed to it. At the age of twenty-eight, I have yet to have maintained employment for more than a year consecutively. This last year, I earned little more than four hundred dollars, certainly less than five hundred. A stranger I met at a pizza parlour in Downtown San Diego, only six years my senior, told me that he gave up teaching because forty thousand dollars a year was too embarrassing, and he maintains that his wife is the more mature of the two of them. My wildest sexual fantasies are realities for those ten years my juniors. I have been single for ten years, and I am still recovering from my first breakup, one which left me hospitalized. A broken heart is a serious condition.

So much for Marxism!! By now, I should have been entitled to sex just by Need Alone, IRRESPECTIVE of ability.

What can I do to change this? I cannot bring myself to think myself unattractive. Every woman with whom I ever fell in love was some sort of a valedictorian. Yet I can only blame the World as It Is.

By now, I’m old enough to recognize the Two Worlds. I cannot say when it first dawned upon me; it has really just crept up. The hints were ubiquitous throughout the World as it Appeared; I only refused to believe. Unlike Fox Mulder’s catchphrase, though not unlike Mulder himself, I did not WANT to believe.

Science hinted at this World, though its proponents made a living out of finding meaning in its apparent Utility. Poetry rebelled against this World, though its finest moments of rapture came in its dying breath before a losing battle. Philosophers earned a living by offering solutions to this World, first fitting it to the World as It Appeared to Them, but then either renouncing one another in Nietzschean madness or surrendering to the Camusian Absurd. Music derived both its originality and its noisiness from it; the line between dissonance and consonance became one of taste, often simply to be acquired by those who temperamentally could.

I still know not this World’s Nature, if it can be said to HAVE Nature. Nature is really a product OF Nurture. Nature begins when one first remembers; the Identity of the Infant and the Identity of the Infant’s Reality are identical to one another. Nature for me began perhaps when I saw that a pile of cotton balls could look like meat, for they were both of course drenched (though I only recognized this later, retrospectively) in mammalian blood.

Does this Mystery give me Hope, as it does for Marcel, or does it resolve me to Absurd Protest, as it does for Camus? The distinction might as well be reduced to the tension between the constellations Scorpio and Sagittarius. Camus, in his Scorpio Absolutism and impulsivity, gives up the search for Order in the Universe, whereas the Archer Marcel looks past the problems and develops a new phenomenology based upon Wonder.

Yet the more that I Wonder, the more the problems come back. I cannot escape into my Wonder. I crave direct contact with a World that I deplore.

My conscience comforts me in telling me that I deserve no less than the traitors, liars, and deviants I’ve known. I am no more perverse, nor am I less needy. Who are THEY to reduce my entitlement, before the Gods I’ve served since Birth, to a defect in character, while they reap only the rewards of disease?

Yet the disease of doubt creeps in my Heart. Conscience does not suffice. In order for Good Will to remain potent, it requires an ally in Intelligence. If I deem it Intelligent to expect rewards for Good Works, then conscience and consciousness coexist.

Yet what if I should meet my Soul Mate, and she not only rejects my advances but does so in a manner that justifies herself with the same clarity with which I justified the advance?

At that point, the Moral Universe caves in on itself. Conscience cannot argue with the Intelligence of this new Authority, whose Identity with my own Ego has up until this point hung in Hard-earned Equality. Conscience suffers under the burden of having trusted a traitor, while Intelligence, siding with the traitor, condemns Conscience to an even graver charge: that of working against a Brilliant Woman.

The code returns garbage values.

The output is only data in semblance, since it originates from a dimension that is at once more fundamental and less useful to the User. For the first time since I was five years old, innocence is lost. It started with some assignment whose consequences proved external and impersonal. Now it ends with the recognition that all of my personal values, which I held to be my own but which I hoped to use externally, were only ever “garbage values” dumped into my mind to test its expendable utility. Once again, I am utterly exposed. And this time, it is before an even greater Public.

How is one to cope? I cannot stop Doing the Right Thing, nor can I stop Rationalizing. Even if the code fails each time, and even if my assailants scoff at my failure to learn from “mistakes”, to renounce the Teachers of my Childhood, and to “learn from their example”, I cannot afford the risk. If I err and I fail, I must bear the burden of my own failure; if I sin and I succeed, I must bear the blame of another’s loss. Less conscientious men do this gladly. THEIR egoism requires them only to be efficient, crafty, “powerful”, and ruthless. They threw off duty and practice ages ago; they got laid by breaking the rules, so they learned that deviance can produce results. Why else would students deride Professor Kraus, except that Life taught them to disregard patience as the antithesis of progress? Men everywhere are allied in the efficiency of Evil, for women worldwide are more repulsed by the grandiosity of Goodness. Even the Best Women attest to their own tendencies when they expose arrogance in a man, discarding his virtue and genius with markedly banal fatalism. I am Always Right, and it Never Matters, for Righthood and Righteousness live on(ly) as a program in my head. Most mortals can live pragmatically because their Identity is Pragmatic. They expect nothing more of the World, and they use Idealism as an expendable resource. I can delight myself in the thought of their guilt, but their behaviour evidences otherwise. It’s only a matter of time before a villain blames the Hero for the tragedy. If he takes responsibility, it is only for himself. His Identity does not require him to be an altruist, so his Soul is far lighter.

I keep waiting to Learn Something: Something of which it might be said: “it would be tragic if you died before you learn this lesson.” I want to return to Kindergarten and to find it there; I dig for it in former homes, old letters, and even on dated web pages. I dig for it anxiously, since I feel as if I will be tested on it very soon. Entire cities may be removed for me to find it. And I see myself becoming villainous.

My refuge was and remains in Relationship. The pursuit of Sex is the beginning and end of Despair. A partner supplies you with inputs, and you are rewarded for your outputs by mating. Yet what if you know that you’ve done everything right? Does your partner not then OWE you sex? Our legal system disagrees. Yet wouldn’t most PEOPLE, typically, concur?

Perhaps that would be so if most people were conscientious meritocrats. But they are not.

Perhaps my reward is right around the corner. Maybe the World as It Is has endowed me with Its Intelligence. Perhaps it has a plan for me, and any opposition is only a bug in the codes of other people.

But it is such a lonely path to walk. It used to seem that we all contended, alongside one another, with the banalities of an irrational existence.

Yet the path of Righteousness is one that one must walk alone. It always was.

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