PARAS!TE: FULL REV!EW.

THE ETHOS:

In the eighteenth century, during the European Enlightenment, morality plays took a turn in favour of revolutionary views, the likes of which Marx and his followers adopted to varying degrees of success and atrocious failure in the centuries that followed. Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni is a prime example of this subversive trend; the librettist who wrote those ingenious lyrics which Mozart set to music later moved to the United States. Retelling the tale of Don Juan, the four-hour epic depicts an ignoble nobleman who terrorizes peasants who are extremely civilized. (Of course, our own Slavoj Zizek might take issue with the term “civilized”, but in so doing he represents part of the problem I describe.) Admittedly, most of what Don Giovanni does throughout those four hours might even pass for admirable achievement in our present day, but only because so many men are either self-absorbed or easily pushed over. His only sins that stand the scrutiny of time are rape and murder, though one must keep in mind that, according to the old morality, the former would be hardly worse than the remainder of his lechery, since personal consent was less important, even during the Enlightenment, than conformism to standards, and even the most radical Enlightenment thinker wouldn’t have dared to suggest that chastity, as a social imperative, was simply the product of envy.

By illustrating the poor in a noble light and the noble in a poor light, the greatest dramatists of the Enlightenment managed to draw a sharp distinction between social hierarchy and moral hierarchy. Nobility was not a quality either exclusive to nor guaranteed within the Nobles, even if it was in fact the Noble Class which had produced it as a standard. So long as you could romanticize peasants as behaving like chivalrous princes, contending with a lecherous rich man, you could not only expose the corruption which wealth is heir to but also you could begin to Universalize Nobility as a standard transcending social station. The Cardinal Virtues are not simply behaviours which the Priesthood adopts because the Church can afford to sponsor them; they are archetypes that live within the very Heart of Human Nature, planted there by God, available to any thinking man. Rafael, the Angel of Forgiveness, is no different in quintessence from Guanyin, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, of whom the Dalai Lama is the avatar. Goodness and Evil transcend cultural boundaries, and they are untethered by the mortal norms of class.

This flame was not so easily extinguished by modernity as we might suspect. While Breaking Bad might have set the stage for shows like Ozark, wherein every character is deplorable, its artistic achievement was twofold: that it not only presented a sympathetic villain, but it established such a stark contrast between his villainous fate and his heroic beginnings that viewers could not help but to end up blaming the same man they were rooting for. This was precisely Vince Gilligan’s goal: to teach viewers that “actions have consequences”. His genius was in creating villains so engaging that there was no sympathy left by the end; we had already expended it.

Even more successful artistically to this end, if not commercially, is the prequel Better Call Saul. As Jimmy McGill transforms into Saul Goodman, his stoic counterpart Mike becomes a hitman. The central themes are usually conveyed by Mike himself, who doubles as a Wise Old Man and as a Gatekeeper, eventually becoming a tragic hero. One of Mike’s earliest monologues, addressed to an upstart criminal named Pryce, (an I.T. specialist who decides to sell stolen pharmaceuticals for a profit,) is upon the difference between a “criminal” and a “bad guy”. “You took something that wasn’t yours, and you sold it for a profit, which now makes you a criminal. Good one? Bad one? That’s up to you.” Mike recognizes that our moral standing in Life is independent of our legal standing. It follows logically that it is also independent of our economic standing, especially if economics can be reduced to social standing in an institution such as the Law. Mike repeatedly refuses money, even when his family’s in dire straits, when he believes that he has not earned it. This sets him apart from Ignacio Varga, who can sympathize with Mike’s robbery of a drug lord’s trucks, but not with the vendetta which motivated it. Nacho Varga doesn’t have the sorts of responsibilities which Mike has, since Mike acts also as a provider for his widowed daughter-in-law and his granddaughter, whereas Nacho’s father has always planned for Nacho to inherit a thoroughly decent family business. Mike simply retains his devotion to the Spirit of the Law, even after having quit his post as a cop in an extremely corrupt precinct. Ignacio, who has chosen to defy his father’s wishes by allying himself with the Cartel, ends up fending for life, enabling a string of murders and injuries in his wake. When he receives a blood transfusion from one of a pair of iconic Cartel twins, it represents both the duality of his nature and his transformation into a drug lord.

THE PATHOS:

By far, the evilest villain in the film Parasite turns out to have been the patriarch of the parasitic family. Not only does he do nothing to stop his family from committing the original con, acting as far less than the stoic source of moral fortitude and equanimity which his initial character foil, Mr. Park, exhibits, but his profound envy for this gentleman sparks a neurosis which, over a very short time, escalates into the most senseless act of murder. It is by no mistake that the two men wear the feathers of Native Americans at the climax of the film, for what they represent is that rage which, either robbed of civilizing grace or having never seen it, lashes out with infantile destruction at the alien world of wealth and sophistication. What the patriarch of the parasitic family represents is self-entitlement, expressed as the raw will to destroy that which it desires. Mr. Kim wants to live Mr. Park’s life; he even goes so far as to covet the wife. Yet it is his negligence, his heavy-handed arrogance, one alien to seasoned criminals, (the likes of which we see in Breaking Bad, for instance, or even Death Note,) that dooms his family, for when they have the perfect opportunity to plan their grand ascension to the plane of wealth instead they waste it, pilfering the secrets of their hosts, intoxicating themselves in a manner only native to the unaristocratic. They know neither the reserve to leave the door unanswered when the old housekeeper comes to knock, nor do they feel the shame and the disgust which would in such a matter warrant sympathy for her and her husband. It is because they fail to answer for their sins against the family, creeping about within the dark, that Kim bears witness to the act of love between Park and his blushing wife. Park and his wife are also envious, their act of love modeled after some fantasy of rundown life, but it’s a fantasy that has been planted by the daughter of the Kims, and they do nothing but to act it out in what they falsely think is privacy. The Parks are kind enough to hide their civilized disgust when they discover panties in the back of their own car, and it is nothing short of this that lands the parasitic patriarch his gig at the expense of someone younger and more qualified, if not yet “needy”, so to speak. Yet how can this Mr. Kim deplore them for what they should say in privacy? It is offense to which he only walks by his own secret path, rather than a directed insult. What he hates is not what his host DOES, but rather what the host PERCEIVES, and in that rests the seeds of a psychosis, for the narcissist, refusing to perceive his own foul stench, hates most the thought that others turn their noses up at it behind his back. It is for this reason that Mr. Kim winds up living down in the crawlspace, in the place of the same maniac who nearly killed his son and stabbed the hosts nearly to death. It seems that all is lost during the struggle between the recluse and the Kims’ son, but as it turns out it’s the early victim who will live to tell the tale. At that moment when the ritual of decency is interrupted by an act of madness, Mr. Park behaves the most responsibly, lifting the car keys from beneath the carcass of the man who nearly killed his wife and child. There is no question at this moment that Park is the Better Man, but as the stench of his assailant fills his nostrils Mr. Kim is so reminded of this stark superiority between them that he is possessed, as if by Cain, to kill the father right before the wife. Kim’s wife and son survive, but at that moment the Parks’ lives are over, where before there had been yet a feeble hope at dignity and even healing. Let us not forget that all of this went on without the Park’s say-so or knowledge; they had no idea, thinking themselves kind. Their one sin was living that one life which all the others wanted; their one error was permitting others even partial access to this life. A rational man would rejoice, knowing that at least someone kindly had been able to enjoy what he was yet to know. Yet madness works in other ways. Kim’s lust for “simple” Mrs. Park is clear when he first holds her hand, and hearing Mr. Park fondle her breast and all the while denounce his stink engenders jealousy the likes of which not even I can fathom. A True Man would sooner have confessed to all his sins in that one moment than to let the ruse go on. But the coward had no recourse but to crawl back into poverty, a circumstance that would arouse our pity but not our solidarity, for in that moment it was chosen by the victim. Kim had the capacity for murder then, but he had not the plan to do so, leaving it up to his son’s device. The women in the family, by this point, came to recognize the lodgers underground as equals, where before their senseless rivalry for ample resources had doomed them nearly to exposure. Yet the lies the daughter wove came back to haunt them, for just as the ladies of the family were ready to thus offer up their peace, the lady of the Parks came carrying a cake which had been baked not just to celebrate the birthday of her son but to help him to cope with trauma, a trauma fabricated by the Kims. It’s in this moment that their son tries to murder the lodgers, all for wanting what he had, just as his father kills their host for having only what they wanted. Hence the madman becomes the latter foil for Kim.

THE LOGOS:

One of the peculiar qualities of the Park family which is typical of underdeveloped characters (in developed countries) is just how little we truly know about them. This fact renders it impossible to blame them without making irrational inferences from outside the text, which would be a major faux pas in the Post-Derridean contemporary world. For instance, we cannot call them “capitalists” in the Marxist sense any more so than we might call Andy Bernard’s ancestors “slave owners”; though neoliberal Oscar Martinez would love to be able to prove Nellie’s inflated claims to be factual, Bernard is accurate in describing his ancestors as “moral middlemen”: conscientious, hardworking participants in a corrupt Social Order which, by a Kantian estimation, required them to conform in spite of personal reservations and subjective doubts. As far as we are aware, the Host Family in Parasite is most likely tantamount to this, only because most people in their estimated income bracket (presuming upon the quality of their luxuries) are in the same position: they are not business owners, so they are not capitalists in the Marxist sense. If they were brought up in a “bubble”, they surpass in dignity those nouveau riche who have had to “work to get there”. While it is charming and sadly endearing to hear people from the ghetto share their dreams of wealth and power (and one often does, as I have, having spent a lot of time in urban sectors and encountered many locals,) one recalls that, were they better educated, they would not speak so proudly of their entrepreneurial dreams and realities. By the most economically left-leaning, liberal definition available, the one supplied by the notorious Karl Marx, those who manage to move up the social ladder by their will and work alone are in fact MORE corrupt than those who are born into “privilege”, since such upward mobility requires them to make a PROFIT, which Marx systematically proves to be directly proportional to and, in fact, synonymous with, exploitation, selling out their fellows in the process. This process of “selling out” is precisely what the Kim family demonstrates. Conversely, the Park family exhibits behaviours which are far more emblematic of another archetype, that of the Child: Innocence. While their patriarch exhibits the stoic condescension of his station, his actual choices, though they always portend unrelenting cosmic retribution, are invariably advantageous to the Kims, whom he grows to trust as much as his childlike wife does. The Parks, though they retain internal feelings of disgust, never allow these personal biases to skew their public behaviour, extending an attitude of trusting compassion even to their hired help, except for when they are MISLED, calculatedly, to make cancellations. While this ideal is one to which we might feel rightfully entitled, it’s not a frequent fact, so we ought to be grateful to the Parks, for they exhibit all these graces willingly and willfully. To the same extent as it is “easy” for them to be good, it is just as easy for them to be evil, and their choices therefore act as the definitive arbiter in the revelation of their character. If the Kim family finds within the depths of that character a private contempt, it is only because the Kims have betrayed the trust of the Parks by creeping into their private, innermost lives. When government entities in countries purported to be Leftist behave in this manner, Snowden supporters worldwide profess that the government betrayed both the People and its own Ideals for them.

If Parasite is a metaphor, then who are we to read it just one way? Are the Kims not, in fact, more akin to the capitalists in the works of Marx than the Parks are? Foremost anti-capitalist Slavoj Zizek holds a similar interpretation of subtext in The Sound of Music, insisting that the more subtle viewer will notice extremely proto-Fascist tendencies in the villagers who serve as that film’s protagonists, whereas the Germans they defy are tantamount to a Nazi’s conception of the Jewish Elite. If we can systematically demonstrate that the Kims exhibit the violent, sociopathic, and exploitative tendencies of a nineteenth-century Industrialist, then how can we continue to sympathize with them, as liberals?

Hidden Leeches: So, Who Were the Parasites?

Of course, here the director himself offers a counterintuitive interpretation of his own work, by suggesting that the Parks were Parasites as WELL. Of course, such an observation could never absolve either party of its crimes, for crimes are often crimes not just against an “exploited party” but also against an Overlying Law; if anything, being equated with the Parks in dignity gives Mr. Kim far less excuse for envy, unless he cares nothing for dignity itself. Yet such a degree of sophistication in moral calculation is probably lost already upon any class of people that calls the Parks “parasites”.

The most narcissistic delusion is that of Godhood, and since a God can deny his own delusions from a position of Divine Authority, any man who believes himself to be a God is the most hopeless case in this regard. What is the significance of Divinity? A Deity is like a genie without the shackles; he or she can will anything into existence, at least enough so as to satisfy his or her own needs. It is only in Buddhism that the Gods are considered unhappy in direct proportion to their power, and that is only because Buddhism rejects power.

A self-made man is a God Incarnate: an entity who fashions, by his or her own volition alone, the entirety of his or her own conditions. It does not take a Freud or Jung to see this grandiosity for what it is. Yet, somehow, when we see people relying upon other people, we treat them as though they were less than human, as though human beings were Gods and Goddesses. While cooking and driving are hardly metaphysical powers, (I, myself, possess at least one of them) it’s not a mark of shame to hire a private cook or a driver. This is because human beings are communal creatures; as Alasdair MacIntyre said, (and as I quote, quite shamelessly, for I agree with him*:) we are “dependent, rational animals”. The Parks are not exploiting the Kims by providing them with a source of income in exchange for a service. While the most cursory reading of Marx would call this “exchange-value” into question, the seemingly generous NATURE of the Parks, already exposed by their willful and “easy” goodness, leaves it up to them to decide how MUCH to pay the Kims, and it leaves it up to us to infer that it’s probably a “fair amount”, hardly synonymous with exploitation.

*Not only do I quote him because I agree with him; I am also unashamed in doing so, because I agree with him that there is nothing to be ashamed of herein.

Post-Shamanic Human Beings form societies based upon the division of specialized labour, and while this division lends itself to hierarchical structures it also makes possible a state of interdependence wherein ethics and commerce, working hand in hand, ensure both the production and the distribution of resources which possess Marx’s “use-value”. Yet the lingering credibility of Marx, especially in the current Zeitgeist, is not in his depth of research into the statistics of the prior centuries, an academic rigour the likes of which we do not find in millennials. It’s rather in the shocking accounts of factory conditions that Marx sets his morality play, in terms so plain and detached that they prefigure the ominous stylings of Realism and Modernist Theatre. At first blush, the Kim family’s living circumstances seem most reminiscent of these stark conditions. Yet no tragedy is complete without a villain and a tragic hero. In the case of the Kims, they are both, because of their choices.

Since ethics remain ethics irrespective of personal conditions, and as we have demonstrated that the most liberally sound people are those who do not change social class, wherever they may be situated, it would be daft to agree with Mrs. Kim’s drunken assertion that the Park family’s kindness is inauthentic because it comes easily as a function of privileged wealth. Our only warrant would lie in an even baser presumption: that people only do good things to feel good, and only when it requires neither effort nor sacrifice. When you see how instinctive depravity is for the Kims, it’s unsurprising.

The Sins of Kim:

We know very little about the Parks, but we know almost all there is to know about the Kims. The son betrays his best friend in the first half hour of the film, if I am not mistaken, seducing a young girl whose death he eventually brings about, thinking only of his own alienation. This same son, an adolescent boy scarcely older than Yagami Light, takes it upon himself to murder a man far less fortunate than he, who in turn attempts to kill his “Gods” upstairs. The Kim family’s matriarch shows no recrimination in getting members of their fellow working class fired to make room for narcissistic dreams of upward mobility. Where is that sense of Marxist Solidarity in the Sub-basement, when for the first time the Kims have to confront the impact of their enterprise upon an even lower class? Are these the sorts of people to presume that wealth is heir to malice? If so, it’s clearly the poor characters who are living in a bubble, unaware of even themselves, for it would take just one look in the mirror (provided by the character foil of the Squatters) to see that, in this Universe, wealth is not inversely proportional to loyalty and kindness, but directly so. The poor people are the most murderous, the wealthy are the most generous, and if this were not so, we wouldn’t need to stoop to the childish claim that it’s “easy for them to be good”. Yes: it WOULD be easy, except that the Kims, simply by CONTENDING this, make no attempt to BE good, sealing by this excuse the fates of all involved. Their power is neither that of privilege nor labour, but of duplicity and ruthlessness. While it seems tautological at first to use their claims against them, since it was precisely that same claim about privileged morality that I sought to disprove, a simple accounting of willful immorality ought to expose that claim for what it is: a pragmatic LIE, one believed by the liar, as all narcissistic fantasies are. It’s iconic, therefore, that the one member of the Kim family who dies, rightfully, is the daughter, for of all of them this counterfeiter is the most blatant con artist, without whom none of the criminal enterprise would have worked. If you can be fooled into sympathizing with her family, you are among the naïve.

The Park Family is the only family which lives a Good Life, both morally and financially. Yet hundreds of years of progressive theater and Leftist economics prove that this is not always the case. Often, rich people suck, and poor people rock. Yet what you find in the Parks is a consummation devoutly to be wished. Critics who grow queasy at the sight of a Westerner interpreting Korean economics and reinterpreting Modern Korean Art would do well to recount the North Koreans who protest Modern Art; dissent can be manufactured under authoritarian regimes. While we DESERVE artistic license, Nature does not entitle us to it. By the same token, while Nature does not entitle everyone to the Good Life, financially, we all DESERVE it, insofar as we are willing to work towards it MORALLY. The Parks do not exploit anyone to get ahead, so they are not capitalists. Yet they use their wealth in a thoroughly moral fashion, suggesting, with dramatic irony, that it would be wasted upon their hired help, though they themselves never seem to believe this, even inviting their employees to their son’s birthday party. The Parks cannot be expected to give it all up to charity and to join a protest in the streets, and this is precisely BECAUSE they live in South Korea, whose closest neighbor to the North would gobble up a Leftist uprising in a jiffy. (Probably taking a full accounting of resistors to the fight, ensuring that their families would be cursed for future generations.) As a Moldovan citizen born in Moscow in 1991, believe me when I say that I am NOT just your typical white American in holding this position. The complacency of the Kims is only natural, and, in Asian fashion, they elevate Nature to an Art. If you still believe that they should be Marxists instead, consider how much sympathy the poorest of the poor characters – the Squatters – have for North Korean propaganda.

IN SUMMARY:

Bong Joon-ho’s submagnum opus Parasite is not a film about “class” any more so than the O.J. Simpson trial was about a red-handed glove. (Of course, that trial was hardly about “race” either, by the same token.) Parasite is a film about parasitism, envy, sociopathy, madness, and the murder of innocents for socioeconomic, ideological reasons. The truest tragedy is that the men who wrote and created the film don’t even seem to recognize what they have done. Mr. Kim bewails his own sin and resolves himself to his retribution. The lingering sympathy that conventional viewers apparently feel for him is symptomatic of a far more devious sociopathy.

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

Things I Still Don’t Understand in Media:

Things I Still Don’t Understand in Media:

-          Why people dislike Kali from Stranger Things.

-          Why people dislike “Fly” from Breaking Bad.

-          Why people dislike Charles McGill.

-          Why people dislike Andy Bernard.

-          Why Wikipedia cites the protagonist of Mulholland Drive as having “failed” when she was visibly betrayed by a sociopathic lesbian lover who laughed at her misfortune.

-          Why the same protagonist commits suicide even after having secured her own Justice.

-          Why people dislike Jennifer Love Hewitt for her idealistic optimism on the Question of Technology.

-          What ever happened to Gabe from the Office.

-          Why Hollywood idealizes the Sciences but not Philosophy in general.

-          What the hell is so hard to understand about Inception?

Dm.A.A.

Biff, Syrrus, and Achenar: Sex and Power in Two Contemporary Works.

I feel as though I dodged a bullet by electing to pursue music and game design instead of film, not out of disregard for the medium, but rather because of its corruption by the entertainment media. Every time it seems that I try to find something resembling cohesion or purpose online when it comes to reviews or Hollywood “culture”, my most fringe suspicions of space aliens controlling and systematically dehumanizing the industry are affirmed and some old, anarchist funny-bone begins to vibrate.

Perhaps most triggering presently is the website Looper.com. Somehow I found an article entitled “Messed Up Parts of Great Movies Nobody Talks About”. Of course, I should have remembered the Wattsism “Sages never gossip” prior to just DELVING in, but the face of Biff from Back to the Future was one that I could not say “no” to.

The particular piece about Biff argued that because he nearly “sexually assaulted” the protagonist’s mother he should not have been hired to wash cars for the McFlies at the end of the film. This had not occurred to me, but of course my immediate reaction was that the ending stood as a good one because Biff had finally been made to serve a social purpose, whereas he would have potentially remained a nuisance if unemployed (only because of his character) and if Marty’s father had allowed himself to hold a grudge against Biff after all of these years then he would have implied by so doing that Biff ought to REMAIN unemployed. Admittedly, I was never one to extend a helping hand to anyone that I KNEW to be a sex offender. But then again: Biff never actually succeeded in the enterprise. At any rate, social norms from the nineteen-fifties are still lost to me, so it’s surprising to hear them criticized at all. In many ways Biff was only following the customs of his time, so he was what Andy Bernard’s forefathers were: a moral middle man. Marty’s Father, the chivalrous rescuer, was drawing on an even OLDER tradition than Biff was. Frankly, I am not even aware that what Biff was trying to DO when Marty’s Father intervened was even LEGALLY “rape” at the time.

This draws my attention to an other thought that has haunted me since I finished playing Myst: are Syrrus and Achenar evil? From a neo-Liberal perspective, the likes of which would have been popular in the early nineties, their father represents the naivete of history. His Idealism, which Nietzsche would have described in his first book as “Alexandrian” and of inferior appeal, SEEMS to be a road to Hell paved with Good Intentions. His sons, depicted as harmless and enterprising boys in the Father’s Records, prove to be fully-grown men, the apparent elder of the two corrupted by megalomaniacal greed and the younger with the madness that apparently infects a Westerner who has been typecast to play God for a tribe of Treepeople (not to be confused with the AWESOME BAND).

Yet are they EVIL? After all: we cannot argue that Power is INTRINSICALLY Evil, because by so doing we would preclude the possibility of using it towards Noble ends. Nobility Itself would be reduced to an arbitrary expression of power, a la Nietzsche, and moral discourse would by necessity have to end. Furthermore, we would become guilty of DISEMPOWERING those who are Noble enough to heed us, only to EMPOWER their deviant aggressors who do not care for moral discourse.

It is not Power that corrupts, nor is it culture that enriches. Both Good and Evil must be regarded as transcendent of any sociopolitical turn of events if Heroism is to be preserved in any climate. It is not that Syrrus was “spoiled” by his well-meaning Father and “corrupted” by Power; it is rather that, supposing that he WAS Evil (which we never in fact learn for certain, except by his stereotypical semblance to a Villain) then Power would have turned his internal shortcoming into an external tragedy.

Nor is it that Power corrupted Achenar. The generic presumption is that Power robs the man of both Heart and Mind, and in this manner Syrrus would be regarded as a Loss of Heart whereas his brother would be regarded as a Loss of Mind. But aside from the comedia del arte routine that is Achenar’s antic disposition, is he ACTUALLY insane? A great deal of what he claims to be the case about Syrrus is verifiable or at least verifiably BELIEVABLE. And even if we establish him as a “Madman”, why should that make him a VILLAIN? Being “crazy” doesn’t make you EVIL, per se; it only puts you into opposition with “sanity”. Yet not all INSANITY is devoid of Reason. Hamlet himself says that there can be method in madness. The Joker, as interpreted by Alan Moore, is “hypersane”, depicting a lot of the symptoms of an intellectual nervous breakdown, the likes of which most GREAT philosophers and geniuses have exhibited at one point or an other. (Nietzsche himself was notorious for it.) Besides: not all Reasoning is Moral Reasoning. A madman is still totally capable of discerning right from wrong; he is simply unadjusted to Society, which may in fact be IN the wrong.

This question is raised, therefore: if Society was wrong to allow Biff the privilege of a sexually satisfying date, then was BIFF wrong for having complied with its dictates? Put plainly: of course not!! Biff’s shortcomings would have been by necessity products of circumstance insofar as he was conforming to the Zeitgeist of his generation. A man can no more be held responsible for that sort of thing in the nineteen-fifties than an employee of the Slave Trade can be held responsible for the Slave Trade Itself. Alasdair MacIntyre was right to condemn the Sartrean concept of radical accountability because not only does it confine us to setting an example that no one is allowed to follow without falling into Bad Faith. It all so would, taken to its initial extremes, hold Marty’s MOTHER directly responsible for having gotten into that automobile in the first place. Most of our contemporary liberal pretensions about “individual responsibility” are just watered-down Sartreanism, filtered through the feminism of that Marxist school wherein Sartre became popular as well as the psychiatric institutions that adopted logotherapy and then turned its tenets against patients and towards selling drugs to people who “should have known better” than to break with social norm but who “must have not known” because of some intrinsic defect.

The concept of an intrinsic defect is one that I have all ready entertained, but it was not without reservation. At the very least I might argue that it has nothing to do with genetic predisposition or with sanity or insanity. Nor is it the product of social circumstance, and by extension those errors which ARE the product of a society do not reflect upon the virtue or vice of its people. So Biff is in many respects only a villain of the sow; his annihilation as a threat is simply necessary for Marty to not only exist but to live happily. For all we know, BIFF might be the Hero in his own mind, and this would only be an error IF we can appeal to something OUTSIDE of the individual mind as a moral frame of reference. Without any sort of Moral Absolutism, there is no such thing as a “delusion”, because even if a Group of people can come into agreement and power about a certain “truth” it does not imply that each of them cannot simply be PRETENDING towards Solidarity in a fundamentally alienated and amoral modern environment.

From Biff’s perspective, he DESERVES to be with Lorraine, and this is in fact Noble. She might disagree with him, but she seldom cites a case AGAINST his entitlement that would classify it as self-entitlement. Both of them might be dismissed as arbitrary in their opinions, and even less so would be Marty’s father and even Marty himself, leaving the only truly MORAL agent in the play to be the Mad Scientist who made the entire possibility of Revision and Reform possible. When Lorraine resists Biff’s claims, despite having agreed to accompany him as a date to a public function, Biff attempts to employ force in order to actualize his view of what is or is not right. He is only overcome by Marty’s father, whose use of force against Biff is at best equally arbitrary and at worse moreso.

The use of Force itself is, as I’ve pointed out, not INTRINSICALLY evil, if Force is to fall under what is called “Power”. I return to Myst: if either Syrrus or Achenar is CORRUPT, it is not BECAUSE either of them was given control over the Ages. A neo-liberal reading of Myst would interpret the books to be a metaphor for History. Atrus’ account “conveniently glosses over” the barbarism of his sons in the manner that “no one talks about” the “messed up parts” of “great movies”. This is a typically Nietzschean pretension: the notion that History is written by the Conquerors and that all claims to good will and virtue are embellishments gilding the intrinsic brutality of human life. AT the very least we can agree that Nietzsche had the DECENCY not to ROB humanity of its Will to Power; contemporary society seems to condemn it on principle, falling victim to its corruption as punishment for lacking discernment in how to wield it.

Interestingly enough the “egalitarianism” of Hollywood is lost to the “elitism” of offering people privileged knowledge. To say that “no one talks” about a given Truth is to open an esoteric door. It is to set the reader APART from the Masses. It is to appeal to an Enlightened Individuality rather than an existing and Informed Solidarity. This tendency, typical of Liberal Individualism, which MacIntyre and even Zizek distrust, admits by implication that Society is ITSELF off kilter. Yet this must by definition raise the Question: is our Society’s treatment of sexuality ethical enough to be considered infallible, so much so that we might judge not ONLY of the society that preceded it by a span of half a century at least, but ALL so of the SOULS of every single moral agent that had complied with that Society’s Norms? And if progress is exponential, how long will it be before WE must suffer condemnation for what WE considered to be an “appropriate” expression of the Human Will? Will it not be even sooner than half a decade from now? Will it not cast doubt then upon how arbitrary WE are in passing judgment? With everything WRONG with Society, why must we PRESUME upon a sexual ethic that in itself is written by the Conquerors, be it a testament to the prevalence of Feminism in Media or of a lingering Machismo in daily life?

The Machismo of Biff is essentially Matriarchal because it PRESUPPOSES that he deserves to mate with Lorraine, simply because he EXISTS, he WANTS to, and she has all ready CONSENTED TO DATE him, which implies that he should have a physical incentive to leave Home, even on a Weekend, and to go through all the mechanical motions of social life that simply lose meaning without a biological incentive to humanize them. Put simply: Biff is entitled, under matriarchy, to be a lover, simply because he is all ready a Son to his own Mother, who would want him to prosper and whose Will is Binding.

The relatively contemporary machismo of Marty, which he teaches to his father, is PATRIARCHAL, because it implies that Marty’s father should mate with Lorraine in the context of a much more complicated social structure that will ultimately enthrone him as a patriarch, the reasons being that he has bested Biff in combat and that BY SO DOING he has WON THE FAVOUR of the woman. The fact that Lorraine CHOOSES Marty’s father does not for even a moment redeem the patriarchy of this ethic, simply because she CHOOSES HIM FOR PATRIARCHAL REASONS; if she chose him out of affect alone, it would cease to BE an ethic, for her affect would be out of accord with Biff’s affect, and there remains to be made a case that his desire to mate with her is inferior to her reluctance, because she has not foregone mating as a whole, as evidenced by Marty’s existence in the final version of the film’s timeline of events.

One particular critic of this line of thinking is Slavoj Zizek. Yet Zizek abounds in contradiction when he defends the supposedly “intrinsic rights” of tribes to remain “uncivilized”. He does admit to the “evils” of pre-colonial Americans when he derides Political Correctness and the Noble Savage stereotype that Disney fetishizes, yet he goes on to define the “rights of a People” (whatever in Hell that means, since it seems paradoxical and even oxymoronic to speak of what is “right” and to use the plural form “people” in the same breath) as being dependent UPON the capacity for Evil. Beyond that point, he criticizes the entire notion that an “uncivilized” people can BE civilized BY a superior race of people. Yet at this point the Arian Revolutionary commits intellectual suicide.

Myst can be read to be a similar criticism of colonialism, arguing that it begins with good intentions and technological reform and ends with despotism and destruction. Yet no sensible, rational adult can encounter an inferior people and resist the most basic human instinct, which is TO REFORM. Not only Atrus but his entire family SUCCEEDS in this task, but they only do so in different ways. Not one of them is EVIL simply for following this instinct, rather it is that the Instinct Itself is the very LIFEBLOOD of Goodness. The only true Evil I can imagine is to deny the rights of any person to do so, for if I had to accept a fallen species as being EQUAL to myself, then I would have to return to my own civilization with the conclusion that its entire nobility is arbitrary and pathetic. And this would be a lie.

What I loved most about the game when I first played it many years ago was of course the Trees, for they represent the striving of Earthbound creatures towards Heaven. Heaven in itself is an Absolute Teleological Goal that is unbound by human invention, be it technological or social. So it is that any human being, in order to be a moral agent, must presuppose his own moral instincts to be God’s Will. The road to Hell is NEVER paved with Good Intentions; it is only made possible by turning on them and behaving as THOUGH rights and wrongs were arbitrary and relative.

So it follows that Biff might have been RIGHT to try to force Lorraine into sexual relations, simply because he would have KNOWN whether or not he DESERVED this PRIOR TO her dissent. If Morality is Absolute instead of Relative, then ANY man or woman, given Reason, can figure out what course of action to take, and if Power Itself is not an Evil but rather the very LIFEBLOOD of Goodness, as it is depicted in the Hindu Kundalini, (the Solar Plexus whose energy feeds the Untouched Heart) then he was simply doing his duty as a Reformer by setting Lorraine right. This of course allows me to see the “bully” in a revised light, for I can sympathize, having spent the better part of two years entirely absorbed in one project: to persuade the woman that I loved not to commit suicide but rather to join me in romantic bondage, both of which I knew for a fact to have been superior courses of action to snorting cocaine in exchange for sexual favours which she provided, despite her ostensible asexuality, (which might have either preceded or followed the cocaine use, in either case reflecting poorly upon the predicament) to one of her suppliers, who had taken advantage of my own trust (surpassing even the unconditional love of Atrus, if that is possible to conceive) and the emotivist environment in order to gain her favour, an act of consent which, given the strong likelihood of intoxication, turns out to have been, in THIS society … (drum roll, please) Rape.

At least BIFF might not have been doing something ILLEGAL AT THE TIME. But I don’t know; I don’t even know what was considered ETHICAL at the time!!

This is something that people in my generation don’t seem to get: that you can and in fact MUST comply with social dictates that you personally disagree with. A great deal of my own pain was the result of schizophrenic social programming that told me that I HAD TO resist the System BECAUSE the System Itself had told me to. In this case, Life is not unlike the Stanley Parable, except that there is more to It than just the social machine. Neo-liberals reduce it TO a machine when they demand a priori respect to GROUPS of people and deny a priori rights to INDIVIDUALS.

When Slavoj Zizek defends the rights of tribes, he is all so defending all of their depersonalizing institutions. In many tribes that Campbell describes men had their first sexual experiences at the age of fourteen, and women did not have a say in this matter.

At least BIFF has the entire force of White Civilization backing up HIS sense of biological entitlement!! Biff only tries to take ADVANTAGE of Lorraine after she has made an Individual Choice to date him.

Of course throughout most of this essay I have spoken in hyperbole and satire. I do not mean to encourage ANY one to be like Biff. I strive only to remind them of the manner in which they are all ready bullies.

Relativism is an ethic that is weak of character but strong of will. It is Power without discernment: amorality at best and immorality at worst, the enemy of Morality in both instances. Relativism cannot defend itself absolutely; it can only do so relatively, and whilst this might seem to be to its own credit, that it is consistent in doing so, it remains by its own definition the EQUAL of Absolutism. Thus it must perpetually ACCOMMODATE Absolutism, which is superior on its own terms. Any sort of teleological progress implies Absolutism, for it is only in Absolutism that we find the moral discernment necessary to OVERCOME the mires of the Past and to Progress towards our Final Fate.

I know for a fact that if it were not for the promise of becoming better, not only better than what I was before but all so better than others, who would be made to answer to me, then I would not bother to leave the House. What would be the POINT? How can you claim to tolerate a group of people that you are not yourself a part of? Only this: the tribal midbrain can allow for it. For whereas our present knowledge suggests that the tribes of the past refused to tolerate one an other and that made them Evil, we should consider that we are Evil now for that same tolerance. What value does a man uphold when he allows women to suffer being raped because that is “their culture”? Biff is considered a villain because he is perceived to be an Individual. But an entire CULTURE probably backed him up on this AT THE TIME. The only value seems to be that of the Group; by defending the rights of an Outgroup to Simply Be, one preserves one’s own Group towards the same end, separate but equal. Perhaps therefore it was this same attitude of Tolerance that was directly responsible for the Schism between Black and White Education in the first place, the immediate consequence of which was that Black Education blamed White Education for the Schism, calling it “segregation” rather than “tolerance”.

So who is to blame? Obviously: it’s invariably those same people who PREFER to inhabit groups and who ONLY FEEL SECURE IN GROUPS. And these are the TRULY Ignoble Savages, for they will not allow their Groups to come under the Leadership of Reformers who would help them to attain a transcendent teleological goal (God’s proverbial Will) and to thereby reach towards Universal Solidarity devoid of factionalism, dogma, and war. They may defy their Society at the earliest opportunity and yet they will use social norms to their own advantage in a totally random, emotivistic, and self-serving way, earning perpetually the favour of their fellows even as they get away with rape and murder. They even scapegoat their victims by pretending to be their own victims’ scapegoats, taking advantage of the fact that society forgot that scapegoats are without sin to begin with and that only a true victim can ever be MADE into a scapegoat, and this can only happen when the victim is not treated to Justice and his grievances redressed. They are pathological narcissists and enemies of both Solidarity and Individuality, looking forward to any social outing NOT as a bitter but noble duty but rather as an opportunity to drain energy from noble people and to steal sexual, material, and social resources from their moral superiors as they march not towards Unity but rather towards Fascism.

These people are usually called
“extraverts”. And everything they claim to know about morality, in their own self-defense, they learned from introverts and bastardized.

Apparently, most of the Planet is occupied by these people. And it’s all ways been this way.

If ALL of us were this way, then Morality would only ever BE the expression of the Private Will, and only the preservation of this Will as Autonomy could be used to define sexual ethics. Emotivism would be true, MacIntyre would be wrong, and Lorraine would be responsible for all most getting raped. Yet Humanity is redeemed by those people who take their cues NOT from Society but rather from GOD, and who are thereby appointed to reform the former in accordance with the Latter and against the Latter’s Enemies.

These people are called Introverts. And we have all ways been a minority. We are defined by our will to power. Extraverts are defined by their will towards sexuality. And according to the Hindu Kundalini, the former rests above the latter. We depend upon you. But we will never be able to truly treat you as Equals. It is not in our character to do so. And you have to accept that as our inalienable right, by an authority surpassing any you could ever dream of.

Again: I speak by exaggeration, just to demonstrate a point. Being more attractive at a given moment does not make you right. Choices are not right by default of being chosen, and hence being chosen does not make you the proper choice. Consent proves nothing. Voting solves nothing. And if this was not the common sense of your society, then its norms were never binding Universals. Your tribe SHOULD be eradicated to make way for something better if it has been deemed OBJECTIVELY to have fallen behind. Your Life WOULD be forfeit if you were proven to be a sinner. The most inalienable right is not towards the preservation of one’s own life but towards the annihilation of an other’s. A solitary shooter in a hotel room will all ways surpass the soldier in dignity when the soldier would serve a corrupt government and the shooter dies a martyr in an act of protest. And if your superiors deem your life worthy of preservation, you have no right to take it.

Another part of the same article argues that for a nerd to impersonate a jock in order to sleep with a girl is a form of assault.

Is it not transparent now what this is? Is it not a blatant hegemony by a dying breed of alpha-males? What right does the woman have to reject one in favour of the other, when she can be so easily FOOLED as to be incapable of telling them apart? Is she informed by an Absolute Power when she falls into this error? If so, It probably wants her to reward the clever nerd, despite her PERSONAL pride and reservations about what ape will fertilize her egg. Anything else would be an abuse of her own God-given Will, which never belonged to her to begin with, for it was only ever a loan by God Himself.

Emotivism is a falsehood. There is never any moral proclamation that could simply be REDUCED to self-interest and personal convenience. Once any one man is guilty of it, he waives the right to blame his victims. And his guilt must be made known, objectively, in the context of a Society that attains its virtue not by the Will of its People but by the Will of a Transcendent Principle that lives in all of us. Hence the last of Kohlberg’s Stages of Morality is Religious: because we need some sort of God conception in order to coexist as Interdependent, Conscientious Individuals. Amen.

Dm.A.A.

Dream Alpha:

Dream Alpha: Frank.

A group of us broke into the Federal Compound that housed (what we would discover was the late) Frank Pentangeli. There he lay, in his bath tub, still bleeding from fresh flesh wounds to the wrists. The water was overflowing, doused in blood, so we were stepping into a Swamp. Above him re(a)d, in blood, the epigram “ha provato troppo duro.”

I was told to pull his last trigger. I leant in to turn the water off. My superior informed me that “to turn those knobs will be to put an end to his crusade of poison.” So I did. The hot water shut off easily enough. Then I reached further, that I might cancel the cold.

I found myself alone, within a replica of this restroom. The colours had been inverted. I was in the Upside Down. Strange vegetation covered all the walls, the floor, and ceiling. Bizarre fungal germs haunted the air.

I covered my mouth and discovered that my fingers had transformed into sausages. Before me lay a skeleton, in the exact same pose as Frank had been. He was covered in moss, vines, and ooze. His mafia ring glistened on the pinky that lay upon the floor.

I moved towards the mirror. Through the grapevine I could see myself. I was Pentangeli. I returned to the corpse skeleton. Gingerly I removed the ring. I put it on.

I was in a giant court room. This was the Supreme Court Hearing. The Chief Justice asked me to identify myself. I said “Frankie Five Angels”. He asked me to produce my legal name. I gave it as Francis Pentangeli.

Time seemed to warp. Suddenly I was talking to an other Justice, further to my left hand side, but to what was the right hand side from the perspective of the Judicial Branch. I was asked if I could produce a Corporeal Patronus. I told them I could. I was commended for this and then asked for a demonstration. I told them I would need my wand. It was produced for me. Under strict surveillance, I produced an Owl. It flew around the room and then perched on my shoulder.

The Chief Justice called order in the Court. The Prosecuting Attorney asked me what the Italian phrase over my bath meant. I replied that I wrote it whilst dying, and it was about one of my rivals in the Rosado Brothers. It meant, “He tried too hard.” I explained that the Rosado brothers had infiltrated the Catholic Church and were attempting to corner the market by selling indulgences. So I did the only reasonable thing that a Scorpio could do and pinned ninety-nine* theses to their door. The Court laughed. The Chief Justice told me that while I might find it amusing that I did that, the Court does not.

*Historically, it was an act of insubordination by a Scorpio, following this exact pattern, that produced the tradition of Protestantism.

A witness was produced: my Brother. He told the Court something in Italian which was promptly translated by the Prosecutor. The Prosecutor explained that while the blood was mine, I did not write it. It was written BY one of the Rosado Brothers. As it turns out: after I murdered one of them, the other sought revenge. Finding that I had committed suicide on the advice of Tom Hagen, he wrote the epigram to describe ME.

The remaining Rosado brother was produced to the Witness stand. He spoke passionately about how Frankie had crucified his brother in a Church restroom. The motive was simple: to send a message to any one who seemed all too pious.

Tom Hagen asked if it was not possible that Frank had other motives. Was it impossible that to ascribe a vendetta to Frank that was so childish and daemonizing would in fact only evidence projection on Mister Rosado’s part? Was it not evidence for a vendetta on the ROSADO’s part, equally irrational to the SUPPOSED vendetta of which Frankie was accused, and perhaps EVEN conclusive of the fact that the Rosado brother’s story was at worst a hoax and at best an exaggeration?

Then the evidence came in. As it turned out: the nails I used to crucify the dead twin were of the same brand and make as the nails that I used to pin my theses to the Church door. Only one smith manufactured these nails, and it was an old friend of mine back in Sicily.

I awoke on the floor, dripping wet with blood and water. I could not have been out for long, because mere moments later I was hoisted by two of my comrades in the Invading Party. Very briefly I wondered, deliriously, about whether or not they had let me lay there for that long. But then I realized that they wouldn’t have allowed it on principle, and dreams (and Visions) last a lot longer in subjective time than in “real” time.

A friend of mine had done the honours of turning off the cold water. We had to escape, and quickly. But then I realized that my friends were under arrest. I HAD been out for a long time, after all; the subjective was real. I was informed that two of my comrades, only after they had identified themselves, were permitted to pick me up; the cops, being assholes, might have let me drown or choke on Frank’s Old Dirty Blood.

We were put in the back of a cop car. I was asked to identify, as we began to drive, (I would rather say “we” than “the driver”) the cause of Frank’s death. I mumbled deliriously that he had tried too hard. The officer asked if he tried hard in the right direction. I amended my original statement with a simple “No”.

A trial was held in a court that was a little smaller but yet reminiscent of the Supreme Court from my Vision. The Prosecutor, a dead ringer for the prosecutor from the Vision, announced that on MY account as a witness (I was surprised to hear my name, given lingering delirium.) Frank died by trying too hard in the Wrong Direction. The only sensible retaliation that the Law could produce would be too try even HARDER in the RIGHT direction. He slammed his fist against the podium, which was situated far from me on the right side of the Court Room (but the left side from the Judge’s perspective) on the word “Right”.

We were released from custody shortly after the Joker’s testimony.

Apparently, we were never read our Miranda rights. Our arresting officers were disarmed. We went Home.

Dm.A.A.

Spoiler Warning: PI.

4:35 P.M. 2/21/2018

Restating my presumptions:

Darren Aronofsky’s Pi is essentially an emotivist work of religious fiction with strong Occult implications.

Evidence:

The piece revisits the story of the Free Masons. Max is blessed with the Name of God, ostensibly. The capitalists want it so that they can operate the stock market in their own favour. The Hassidic Jews want it because they believe themselves to be God’s Chosen People. It makes sense that he would withhold the Holiest of Truths from the former. But what about the latter?

When Meyer first appears, he is an immediate mirror for the protagonist. Max and Meyer are seemingly living at cross purposes, although they are in actuality seeking the same end by very common avenues; they are both mathematicians working with a data set.

The parallel is not lost to Max when he presents his zealous speculations to his former professor. Yet Saul dismisses Max as being pseudo-scientific, condemning this strain of mathematical thinking to the realm of “numerology” because it lacks “scientific rigour”.

When I first watched this scene as a stand-alone piece on YouTube, eight years ago or so, it must have triggered me to the extent that a butterfly pushes against the interior of its cocoon. It was precisely the sort of pretension that the children of professional scientists are raised on. And it is, as the story heartens me to admit, a lie.

The truth is that Saul himself only gave up on unraveling the MEANING of the 216-digit number (or, as the Hassids posit, the 216-letter Name) because he was, as the protagonist his former pupil intuits, intimidated by it. At the end of the film, when Saul dies, Max discovers, all too late, that Saul was speaking from his own experience as an impure person. Informed by the Jews, Max understands the significance of the Number because he has lived to tell (and to withhold) the tale. The Ancient Jewish Myth states that those who are impure will die upon hearing the name of God. When Saul dies but Max lives to witness the aftermath (pun not intended consciously) Max understands himself to have been Chosen, pure of heart, and so he becomes a martyr, destroying what is left of the code by burning up Saul’s record of it and proceeding to drill a hole in his own brain. The ultimate scene shows Max gazing in placid contentment at some leaves, wistful and without conviction. It has become no longer a pattern to him but a simple thing, like Basho’s frog. Cleansed of the name of God, Max is reborn a simpleton, and he attains oneness with Divinity by living the life of an ordinary man.

All of that is very well. But the path towards Nirvana and ignorance is a troubled one. Mahayana Buddhists write with contempt about the pratyeka-Buddha: an all-but-holy man who attains Enlightenment and then does nothing with it for Humanity or for Society. Alasdair MacIntyre would call such an individual, in contemporary Western terms, an emotivist. He is not truly motivated by virtues such as loyalty to the Common Good. He is doing it all for himself, and not without vanity.

When Saul discourages Max from going too far down the proverbial rabbit hole, citing the positivistic dogma of confirmation bias, it is a clerical warning rather than an intellectual argument. Saul represents the Scientific Community as well as the Church that it found its conception in. Group thought in every generation threatens to restrict the Roving Soul that Terence McKenna rants about and to confine the intellect to the Intersubjectivity of Peer Review and Holy Communion. Max knows that this is a dead end, and he would rather spiral out of control than to confine himself to the Known and Academically Polite (read: pretentious). The distinction betwixt numerology and mathematics dissolves as Max teams up with Meyer to unriddle the Mystery. The Mystery consumes Max in a Marcelian fashion as he ceases to be a “biased” observer and becomes PART OF WHAT HE OBSERVES. Hence the film reaches Heisenberg grade.

(And yes: that last part was as much a reference to the filmmaking of fellow Aquarian Vince Gilligan as it was an homage to the theoretical physics of the twentieth century.)

Of course, confirmation bias is bogus. Only in a very controlled environment can any one say, with certainty, that patterns are inevitable, equally insignificant intrinsically, and only of importance to the extent that an arbitrary subject INTERNALIZES them, to the exclusion of the rest. Not only are patterns not inevitable in an ostensibly “chaotic” Universe. It is all so not inevitable that one would NOTICE them and FIND MEANING WITHIN them. To presume upon a psychoanalytic interpretation, wherein any man of above-average intelligence would notice them, to the detriment of himself and his fellows, is clinically naïve. (In both senses, of course, of the term “clinically”, both as a practitioner and as a potential patient.) Beyond that, it is intellectually arrogant to so enthrone the individual intellect to suggest that it COULD do that to a person and that an organized intelligentsia such as the Scientific Community, working in concert with Psychiatric Companies, Courts of Law, and Law Enforcement, as well as the Media and the General Public, would be NECESSARY TO restrict the intellectual quest of such a person. If the Will can produce Synchronicity, it must be only in concert with God. And at this point the religious maniac is the least pompous of all agents. But as the Zen people say: the student who has attained satori goes to Hell straight as an arrow.

Max’s willfulness helps him once. When he accepts a lift from Meyer for the first time, he is not acting merely out of arbitrary bias. He spares himself a much more dangerous ride with the salespeople and his other stalkers. Psychoanalytically, one might posit that Meyer helped Max in a manner that any one of those well-meaning parties would have; the only drawback would be that Meyer was Max’s Chosen Guardian, and since Max is intelligent enough to fool himself, he is surely clever enough to accept help only from a man who will humour his neuroses.

But Aronofsky sticks it to Big Pharma when that same saleswoman demands the rest of Max’s code while her cronies have a gun up to Max’s head. It turns out that Max was not just a drugged-up paranoiac; he was right to suspect those who were motivated only by money. And it is not long thereafter that we discover that they are bent on using nothing short of the NAME OF GOD for a strictly worldly purpose. All of a sudden, Max’s rude dismissal of their materialism seems a lot less pretentious and a lot more pressing.

Denying them the remainder of the code, part of which they stole from his garbage, is a heroic move, and it is perhaps his only decisively good one. (Note that to be heroic here is the Category and to be Good is only one Part of that; the rest is vainglory.)  After all: not only were they out to jinx the market from the very beginning. Their ruthless ignorance in using PART of the code resulted in a Stock Market Crash. Naturally, they lost ethos.

But when Meyer saves Max for a second time from their clutches, the Jews are made to look less noble. Again Max finds himself bullied and pressed for information. But something peculiar happens when Max confronts the Rabbi. Rabbi Cohen is a man of contradiction that perhaps can only be found in religion. He is as severe as he is amiable. Yet one cannot judge of his demands based upon affect alone. Since capitalism has all ready failed, one cannot weigh the priest by the scale of salesmanship. Rabbi Cohen is blunt: Max is impure, and he is but a vessel for a message that was INTENDED FOR the Hassidic Jews. Max refuses to surrender the message to them. And it is precisely at this moment that Max becomes an Emotivist. When he told off the salespeople, he appealed to a Value; he was searching for something greater than materialism. But even materialism is a higher end than simple vanity; at the very least it is palpable. Max alone FEELS the significance of the Number. And he has no interest in testing any hypothesis that it might be of value outside of his head, to which he has been condemned by social forces and the weight of his own burden. So again he is no longer WITHIN THE WORLD, a part of the Mystery he is investigating. He has again REMOVED HIMSELF and become merely a biased subject. And he even admits that the 216-digit numeral is “just a number”.

Again, Max finds a mirror in the Jews. Meyer mirrors Max by studying the Torah whilst Max studies the Stock Market. Rabbi Cohen mirrors Max Cohen as his namesake, citing the Legend of the Cohens and their shared ancestry and culture. Max breaks both mirrors in his pursuit of God’s Truth. And he ends up absolutely Alone.

When Max refuses to give the number he has memorized to the Jews, he ceases to be a Jew. To be Jewish is truly to believe the Jews to be God’s Chosen People. But Max instead calls HIMSELF God’s Chosen Person. And he refuses to give up God’s Gift, arguing that the Rabbi is himself IMPURE. Max does not argue for his own PURITY. He only argues for the Rabbi’s IMPURITY.

There are two Gods, from a secular ethical standpoint: the Just God and the Narcissistic God. The former is a projection of the Rational, Empathic Conscience. The latter is a projection of the narcissistic ego.

To the man of Reason and Heart, an impure man who is cornered into admitting his own impurity has no further argument until he ATONES for his misdeeds. An impurity or sin is literally an error, and the most fundamental error is HARM TOWARDS ONE’S FELLOWS. Only by atoning for the misdeed can the impure man be made pure and only then can he judge of his fellows to that same extent that their own deeds are harmful. Until then, he is subservient to his victims.

But to a narcissist, God is a Scapegoat. Since the narcissist elects to worship himself, he calls himself the Scapegoat. Since all men fall short of his own standards, all men fall short of God. No man can judge, therefore, of another man, at least not justly. If the narcissist is judged, he appeals to God’s forgiveness and condemns his critic. The narcissist cannot escape criticism for long, but he can enthrone his vices at the moment that it is most convenient to reveal them, calling them by the name of one last virtue: Honesty. In truth, nothing can stop him from judging Others. Since he is his own God, he can judge of other men liberally and then repent, knowing that God (himself, as opposed to God Himself) would forgive him. So the narcissist is never TRULY honest; he simply perverts the meaning of the virtue itself, divorcing language from substance in the manner that MacIntyre describes in the first chapter of After Virtue. The narcissist IMPLIES moral superiority so long as he can get away with judging others, and he REFUSES moral inferiority, appealing to Divine Equality, at the very moment that he has been exposed. This is called Shifting the Goalposts, and in Kierkegaard’s philosophy it is the crucial distinction betwixt Christianity and Christendom. In other words: the former God makes secular sense. But the latter God is a pathological lie.

When Max refuses to supply the Jews with the information they have spent generations in search of, he behaves narcissistically. Any one can choose to say that he was himself Chosen to be the Recipient instead of the Messenger. If someone takes something or someone from me and I feel entitled, I can claim to have been the rightful Recipient, and my thief can call me a mere Messenger, electing himself the rightful Recipient. The thief can appeal to any number of arguments to defend himself, but which of them is one that he will stand by when the tables have turned? If he is a narcissist: none, until they RETURN. Emotivism says that both of us are EQUALLY WRONG, and this is satisfying to the sinner who does not answer FOR HIS SIN but rather projects it upon others as an excuse to withhold what God gives him that it might be of Service. The thief might claim that I am narcissistic for claiming a person, place, thing, or idea as my own. But he is DOUBLY so for not only DISPOSSESSING ME OF IT but pretending that I was but a MEANS TO SERVE HIS ENDS.

Admittedly, the impurity, in this context, of the Jews is no longer in question. Rabbi Cohen has no shame in treating Max as a means towards the ends of the Synagogue. But what sets him apart from the capitalists is that he has the God of Scripture, and perhaps decades of scholarship, on his side. If God INTENDS for Max to deliver the message unto the Jews, and if the name of Cohen carries that meaning, then Rabbi Cohen is simply serving God by demanding the message of Max. And in so doing, he is serving a Just God who would not take kindly to an uninitiated everyman who has all ready messed up once (letting slip the Name of God to fall into the hands of the capitalists) damaging the Jewish Project by withholding that information from his superiors that would enable them, perhaps, to set things Right.

The matter of the thief is resolved not by appeal to personal feelings of entitlement but rather to Universal Values. The narcissistic thief has no interest in sharing what he steals nor of serving others; all that comes his way belongs to him by default. He is at once the disease and the cure, and he refuses to cure those whom he infects because he believes the cure to belong to himself, heedless of the fact that both the disease and the cure that comprise the entirety of his nature were given TO him by Greater Forces. The narcissist scapegoats those who are without sin, for only a sinner can do so, yet he pretends to be their scapegoat. Only once he is exposed to the elements of Charity, Good will, and Justice is he exposed for an agent of the Devil.

At every step, Max moves closer to a Transcendent Realm. But is it God, or is it the Devil? The number is 216 digits long. This is six to the third power, analogous to the sign of the Beast. The last number to appear in the film is 56,664. The Jews themselves might be worshipping the Devil. But it does not pardon Max.

When the thief steals, he appoints himself to have been Chosen, and he appoints his victim to be the Messenger. The victim is made to LOOK LIKE an equal of the thief when he himself insists that it was HE that was HIMSELF Chosen. At any point, claiming to have been Chosen is in SEMBLANCE Narcissism. But this is not to say that only the victim of a potential theft can be Truly Worthy. Often a narcissist, when asked to atone, will refuse to be “robbed” of his own autonomy in doing so. So even a thief can be MADE TO LOOK LIKE a potential victim. How do we tell them apart? Simply: It takes one to know one. A thief will recognize in others potential thieves. Hence Max projects his own errors upon the congregation. A virtuous man would THEORETICALLY, therefore, see Max as more than just a means to an end, by the same token as a thief sees all others as potential thieves. But virtue would afford one the opportunity to see not only PERSONAL value but COLLECTIVE value. So one cannot preclude the purity of the Rabbi in the ultimate assessment of the situation at hand. The Rabbi has the Group on his side. Yes: if the Rabbi is narcissistic, he will turn on this Group at the earliest opportunity. But there is at this point no evidence yet that the Rabbi has even a trace of self-service. We only know that Max refuses to help them. When the narcissistic thief steals, he does so in total apathy towards his fellows. When the narcissist is stolen from, he does so with hypocritical indignation. At every point, he refuses to believe in any value greater than self-interest. And this is the principal pitfall of emotivism: Isolation.

Both the thief and his victim can claim to be entitled by the Will of God. The victim has the moral advantage in this discussion of having been unjustly used as a messenger, and he can just as easily claim to be impartial AS a messenger, making the most of the authority that his position presents him with. The victim can claim that the Thief defied God. But the Thief can one-up the VICTIM by pretending that NO ONE can defy God, but that the victim is attempting to do so by possessing himself of Godlike omniscience in judgment. Beyond that, either party might be narcissistic. If I compare my own experience to that of Max, I might find myself in Max’s position, so that my thieves are represented by the Rabbi. But they might argue that to the same extent that I find Max repugnant I am myself his equal, and if I claim him to be heroic they might argue that he is just as self-entitled as are they. The process of Leveling robs us of all distinctions and leaves audiences only to argue by analogy, fruitlessly. And this is but a stalling tactic for narcissistic entities.

The way out is found in Marx: to give unto every man what he needs and to take from every man only that which he can afford to give. Max can afford to share his secret because it does not rob him of his own knowledge of it. He would be doing more than only serving the Jews. He would be making Public the Truth, which supposedly should serve all men. Yet he arbitrarily refuses, deeming it too dangerous, apparently, because his own mentor could not withstand its portents. So Max, imitating the teacher who was a martyr in service of Truth, becomes a martyr in service of Ignorance.

The matter is not even only as murky as determining whether or not a thief is narcissistic. We all so do not have the luxury, under emotivism, of knowing WHO THE THIEF IS. Max appears to be the rightful recipient of God’s Message. But from the Rabbi’s perspective, it RIGHTFULLY BELONGS TO THE JEWS. If your postal worker claimed your mail as personal property, he would be a thief. Would he not?

Again: it is only by embracing a super-personal value that a person can hope to fathom Super-Personal Intent, such as of a Super-Personal Entity, be it Diabolical or Divine. Christendom and pseudo-Judaism cannot do this. The pratyeka-Buddha cannot do this. But the Virtue Ethicist can. As a virtue ethicist, I find myself in the position of the Rabbi. I was stolen from, and I demand reconciliation. But my thief is playing the part of the victim. I know this because he refuses, at every turn, to serve the HIGHER GOOD. And so he admits to his own narcissism, earns the label “thief”, and becomes a villain worthy of retribution. And it is not hard to find him in the likeness of the anti-hero Maximilien Cohen. If Max is correct in assuming that out of Chaos the initial Order may be reconstructed, then it is only by rejecting the absurdities intrinsic to emotivism that Man can attain harmony in Virtue. Max dies a Satanist who only cares for how God’s Message makes him FEEL. He has no right to refuse to share this message with Humanity, even to set right the mess he has made as God’s Messenger, because he has no REASON to outside of whim and fancy. It is only by identifying this failure in others that we can discern thieves from victims, narcissists from their prey, and the self-entitled from the Truly Chosen. If the principle of “As Above, so Below” holds Truth, then we must behave as Just Gods in service of a Just God, instead of emulating the Narcissistic God that people so often accuse the Jews of worshipping: the Devil.

7:01 P.M.

2/21/2018

Dm.A.A.