No Means Nothing:

Consider, for a moment, that as the result of some oversight, either on my own part or that of another, I had suffered a debilitating accident that left me devoid of any cognitive capacity save for that of Justice. Cleverness, charm, wit, mercy, amiability, and compassion were all lost to me as virtues, and all that remained was my ability to fathom debt, most obviously those debts which involved my person, for without that realm I would have far less ground to judge by experience. What follows would have been what I had said to Alanna when she first returned to me, after having slept with my best friend, in the hopes of restoring my former band with him, so that she might serve as its leader. Be not ashamed for me, for I never uttered these words as written, and they only came to me this morning, yet I cannot pretend that I feel no regret in having withheld the facts they represent, nor that I would feel no pride if I should recover evidence that those same debts I had illustrated by more decorated, though less pointed, means:

 

I shall begin with what you had presumed upon rightfully. It was true, as it remains, that power is best enjoyed if it is shared. It was in this spirit that I elected to share my own power with both you and my associate of five years. This power was mine to bestow upon either and both of you as I saw fit, yet as we all know power comes with responsibility, and no use of power is without a moral dimension of implication as to the proper use of that power.

Even in surrendering my power I used my power to surrender it, for had I not had the power necessary to surrender it, I would not have had the power to surrender. What appears to be merely semantic is nothing more nor less than the most obvious fact: that the proverbial “power to surrender” is a power that is thus to be surrendered by an exercise of itself. In this case: it was power over you and him, for your association would only have been probable, as well as possible, at that point in time, by avenue of my influence. This is no megalomaniacal conceit, for I do not pretend to a power which I did not have to exercise in order for that meeting between the two of you to even be possible. Nor is it an injustice to either of you, much less a desire to oppress anyone, for this peculiar power over the both of you amounted to just that: power over both of you. It was merely power over the future of your relationship to him, which in any other set of circumstances would have been “not my business”.

In bestowing this power upon the both of you, by no means a “rightful redistribution” but rather a “generous privilege”, my generosity lay in trust. While Sartre would have called it “bad faith”, for neither of you had ever proven trustworthy, I maintain that it was “good faith” in that my trusting you was sincere; it would have warranted the qualifier “bad” only if I had not trusted you at all but had simply, cynically expected you to behave in a selfish manner which I might then turn towards my own, equally selfish but surpassingly clever purposes. While such cynical devices might very well appear familiar to you, rest assured that I have no worldly use for them, for you simply project your own cynicism.

In using my power to grant you power, I do not deny, as you have suggested, my own involvement. It is true that I had a “part to play” in this, yet insofar as I had power I was dignified in its use, and the part I played was purely incidental; I am not morally culpable for that which I did not approve. Dignity lies not only in dignity towards others but also in dignity towards one’s self, and if I have not up until this point made this clearer it is only a testament to my temperamental humility. To be humble is not to deny one’s own humility, for humility itself cannot be cause for boastfulness. So long as one has dignity, however, one can be humble and remain openly knowledgeable of this virtue, for dignity allows one’s self to become aware of one’s humility once it boils over. My humility alone might have permitted the injustice I suffered; my dignity serves to remedy this injustice at this moment.

It follows from dignity that I should have allowed the both of you to meet, but hardly more than that. For me to lose you to a man whom I knew to be lecherous, prone to delusion, deceptive even to those closest to him, to the point of pathology, would have been unbearable. Even for me to lose you to a man who was chaste, clear of mind, honest even to impersonal forces and strangers, almost to a fault, would have been unbearable, for no man should lose a woman to his best friend, and if it pains you to think of yourself as either a “prize to be won” or a “bounty to be lost”, you have only begun to imagine how much the banality of this pains me.

Even a man who was as wayward as I have described him could not have imagined that a rational agent would have willfully permitted such a loss when that same agent had all the power, initially, to prevent it. That he can fathom my indignation is no testament to our “equality of character”. Here you have begun to err: to treat as us equals, yet only insofar as saying he is no less and I am by no means greater. That both the rational egoist and the dignified altruist can comprehend the same injustice as a loss does not render them level with one another; it is simply a testament to that all-too-human sympathy which has, up until this point, allowed them to coexist, for the altruist was never too dignified to part with it and the egoist was never so rational as to descend into that rung of hell that is the absence of this most basic human decency.

So it would follow logically, even if he had not already proven his guilt by unsolicited defences, that he knew what he was doing when he betrayed my trust, as did you. The both of you employed the power I had graciously bestowed upon you in a manner that I had self-evidently, if not explicitly (for I would not even have accused you of the moral capacity for it) prohibited. This was my prohibition to make, for it was that value which I had to assign to the proper use of this power when I used power to grant power. Since the prohibition was only binding upon the both of you, it was not in itself an arbitrary abuse of my power, for my power was simply to give you that power which could only thereafter be abused by you. There were only two errors I might have committed in granting you this power: either prescribing a use for it which was undignified or bestowing it upon undignified people. The latter I confess to, though I maintain that this was a practical mistake instead of a cynical sin. The former I need not confess to, for the aftermath of that latter mistake serves to reinforce my dignity in the prohibition.

As a Romantic, I sympathize with the temptation to vulgarize gentlemen and to sentimentalize savages. Yet as a scholar I must not become forgetful of the distinction between the two. That I was betrayed not even the most savage man contests. That this was unjust remains mysterious to that savagery. In salvaging my dignity, I agree with you that in trusting savages I erred and thereby contributed to the conception of this situation. My error was in granting the both of you that power which only the both of you could receive and which only the both of you could abuse. Yet how could I have known that the both of you were equally savage, and to such an extent? I did not even bother to prevent it, for to doubt your honour felt dishonourable.

Yet note this: that while I cast the first stone upon which this was built, I was not the one to crown it nor to fortify it. My error was but one third of the practical error, and it was not even a fraction of the sin. Since we all made choices that contributed to this, we might all be considered conspirators in power. Yet because I never consented to the abuse of this power, though you both availed yourselves of it abusively, the sin belongs only to the both of you. I granted you the physical capacity not knowing your moral capacity; it was your choice to use this blissful ignorance against me. That I regret it now shows only that I’ve learned from my mistake. If I ought not to have trusted you, then that World which we ought to inhabit is the one wherein I benefit. If I cannot benefit now by its reversal, for it cannot be undone, then Justice owes me neither more nor less than whatsoever he enjoyed by your consent.

 

The vulgar feministic interpretation of “No” amounts to a tautology of identity: “No means no.” This in itself contains no information, except in that it seeks to combat the paradox that “No” could mean “Yes”, as well as the banal denial of the distinction by avenue of the inane blanket assertion “No means Yes”. (A claim that is ironically seldom coupled with its natural corollary: “Yes means No”.) The truest and most informative definition I can provide for “No” is thus: “No means Nothing.” To deny a man his due is to deny duty as a whole. To treat “entitlement” cynically, as though it “could amount to nothing more than” the will of the ego is to enthrone one’s own ego at the expense of the entitled person. Such a depravity would drive one’s self so deeply into nihilism that it would become a threat to one’s very person, and no measure of Stoic self-denial would retrieve from this pit the “will to live”. You have called this pit an “emotional black hole”, a metaphor I was immediately quite fond of, especially since you first used it to describe him. He is the nihilism and the nihilation; if Nothingness can be incarnated, he is its avatar in our circle of influence.

Can you deny that you have chosen nothing more? In denying me yourself, do you not deny yourself that same “point” to living which you first sought in me? Before you met him, you struggled to see “the point” to life. The quotation marks about the words “the point” are, if memory serves, your own, for it appears that you doubted the very existence of a “point”, and yet now I have simply appropriated those same marks to satirize your doubt, for it was so obviously self-inflicted. I was moved to deliver you from it because I perceived you to be a victim of nihilism; now I see that you are a source of it, especially within my own life, and I can see why you would thus seek your own nihilation, though I cannot say I am pleased by your attempts to implode, even if it is motivated by heroic self-sacrifice. If this is your attempt to salvage dignity by sparing me the burden of your ongoing existence, know that the burden only ever grows heavier in your absence. It was not just for me to lose you once; it is not merciful for me to lose you twice. To lose you forever is intolerable to even consider. I would much rather have you live for me than die for me; I wish to be that aforementioned “point”.

Should I never enjoy you as I am entitled to, and if the power I have given you should fade from you entirely, then I’ll be more than merely “disappointed”. I would be condemned to spend the remainder of my life seeking someone to repay your debts to me, for you remain the only woman I have ever had the right to love entirely, even if only because of the extreme extent to which you allowed my traitor to avail himself of you. Imagine what a Hell you’d make of my innocent life if the entire class of women followed your example!! Yet would even the most dignified of them not sooner doubt your debt than to shoulder it for a complete stranger? Would they not also lapse into nihilism? So long as you do not pay it, you shall make a black hole of ME, and how can a black hole escape its own event horizon?? It is powerlessness incarnate, and it is always the product, as in the cosmos, of an explosion followed by an implosion: in other words, an overabundance of power that, unrestricted by moral meaning, grows to an extent that it cannot sustain and dies.

 

[({Dm.R.G.)}]