El Camino del Medio: Jesse Pinkman's Virtue.

The proper function of art is to inspire sympathy; the proper function of propaganda is to invoke judgement. Art achieves sympathy (as well as empathy, which in some senses is more important) by two routes: one is by portraying a character with whom the viewer wishes to identify, reminding the viewer of the difficulties of the heroic (virtuous) life under adverse circumstances, and the other is by portraying a villain whom the viewer despises, but while propaganda seeks to uphold a prejudice by demonizing this villain, art toes the line, inspiring sympathy for the villain’s victims.

In Breaking Bad, foremost of the victims was Jesse Pinkman. Initially presented as an aimless junkie with a deviant occupation, he quickly becomes the puppet of a man whose station we are all taught to trust, even in America: his high school teacher. One can only begin to imagine the response that Breaking Bad must have received in Japan or in India (countries which actually value education) when the revered sensei resorts to petty blackmail in order to coerce the young Pinkman into pushing the limits of an initially harmless business.


It may be true that Jesse’s associates were not so kind, but further backstory (especially in the seminal spinoff Better Call Saul) reveals that they were all corrupted by their employers. As for the product itself, whatever moral errors young Pinkman commits in selling an incredibly depraving drug are absolved to some considerable extent by the fact that, unlike Mr. White, Jesse is not exploiting an addiction which he does not himself have, and unlike other dealer-users like Tuco Salamanca, he never allows the drug to corrupt his character, only clouding his judgement. It is safe to guess that, in Pinkman’s case, he was his own first victim, a user long before he was a pusher. While that may seem to corroborate a judgement made against him later, casting doubt upon his identity as a victim of forces beyond his control, two facts remain apparent: that, explicitly at least, he is the only TRUE victim of his own actions at the start of the story, so that still sets him apart from his associates, and that even this affront to his health pales before the tragic losses and traumas that his oppressors impose upon him and one another.


Furthermore, it is his ability to take action against these injustices when OTHERS are the victims, even when he is himself an accessory or even a puppet to these crimes, at great personal risk, and often to an extent that he would not go to in his own defense, that sets Jesse Pinkman apart from his associates. By the end of the series, he has had plenty of opportunities to become as corrupt as his initial employers, yet instead he GROWS in fortitude and virtue while everyone about him, on both sides of the law, descends into depravity and sociopathy. Truly, his name is neither red nor white, neither bloody or pure, but in between. 

Viewers naturally fell in love with Jesse, citing him as a Soul too pure to survive a world of sociopaths. Perhaps, of course, I am confusing him for Gale Boetticher, whose death is directly overseen by Jesse, though only once Walter’s influence and Gustavo’s presence have become foreboding, and only on behalf of Walter and his family, and only in the wake of a child who was murdered after also being used to commit murder. Yet Gale’s eulogy is Jesse’s defense; Jesse was also, in practice, a civil libertarian who simply gave consenting adults what they would have gotten otherwise. It was not until Walter came along, with his existential crisis, that Jesse “broke bad”, and his conscience made this a process of character growth that, by the end of the series, molded him into the only consistently heroic character. When Jesse DOES survive, viewers are relieved to see some justice in a broken world.

By contrast with his middle-class parents, whose influence upon his early life can be inferred by the infuriating, narcissistic prejudice with which they treat him when he needs them most, Jesse truly exhibits the Judeo-Christian virtues, even as they are defined by contemporary secular thinkers such as Zizek. Slavoj Zizek contrasts Christianity with Buddhism, for instance, by describing it is a religion of the Fall: an expression of love attained not by rising above the base qualities of life but rather by falling into them. Like Christ, Jesse keeps the company of prostitutes, drinkers and gamblers, becoming one with them but never surrendering his innocence. Any pragmatic error that endangers him is the result of either compassion or righteous indignation, often in defense of the innocent and even, sometimes, out of forgiveness for the evil. He rushes into battle with no thought for the morrow, and he even acts as the family scapegoat for his brother, who only maintains the appearance of a perfect child but who, like all other characters in the Breaking Bad universe, indulges in a contradiction, though it’s one that Jesse makes no attempt to engender and, in fact, helps to abate, without any overt hypocrisy.

Walter admires Jesse for having done something “special” at a young age, yet it is Walter’s own station in the middle class, against which Pinkman has rebelled, that allows him to exploit Jesse early on. Pinkman’s rebellion is only justified once we see the extreme impersonality of his family, a group of people who seem as base as their pretensions are lofty, severed from the World in a state of complacency that is either shameless or delusional. Unlike his parents, Jesse goes straight down into the pits of Hell, at first only to make a living by doing that upon which his own happiness, however chemically contrived, depends, though eventually to protect all of the people that he meets and gives his word to along the way. The hero of old always did precisely this, though more powerful forces mocked him for defying his fate. Yet it is ultimately Jesse’s ability to chart his own course that creator Vince Gilligan, who seems nonetheless to misunderstand Jesse, considers Pinkman’s final achievement.

The only question that remains is this: if Jesse is truly a self-made man, is he responsible for his condition? Does a man who has to decide only between the two basest of human instincts, which are greed and fear, have the right to charge him thousands of dollars for those risks which Jesse never benefited from, (for he had refused to run away from unfinished business and bad karma) only to deny him his freedom over less than two grand? Such a gatekeeper is certainly not the pinnacle of morality that Jesse imagines him to be, and as much as he may preach that Pinkman made his own luck, his insistence that “tugging on heartstrings” is of no consequence, an echo of Jesse’s mother, is easy for him to say, for apparently not only does the miser have no heartstrings (nor values, outside of a hypocrite’s feelings of monetary entitlement, like Anakin Skywalker’s owner), but were HE the “snitch” that the Nazis had captured, he might certainly be more left-leaning in his personal politics.

Jesse is not responsible for what happens to him, because, by definition, that which happens to us is NOT what we do, and the value of what we do rests upon what we ALLOW to happen to other people. Jesse neither allows harm to come to others nor imposes it, except in those situations where less conscientious men and women present him with a dilemma wherein it would be a lie to say that he had had a better choice. “Better”, in Jesse’s worldview, is not so simple as that which benefits and preserves him. If Walter demonstrates that the root cause of misery is the pursuit of happiness, then Jesse’s refusal to prioritize his own happiness over the well-being of others is not to be regarded as the cause for his own misery. As for Jesse’s initial attempts to pursue his own happiness, it is fair to say that he had no way of knowing that a legal course of action would be the best course of action. Mike teaches us that there are good criminals and bad cops; the McGill brothers remind us that the law is imperfect. Walter teaches us that it is quite easy to build a criminal empire whilst sheltered in the comfort and reputation of the suburban middle class. Jesse’s parents demonstrate the extreme naivete, narcissism and hypocrisy of this group of people, which both educated liberals and meth heads will despise in equal measure, though Jesse forgives them, however diplomatically. The entire Breaking Bad universe is set up to call our notions of propriety into question, and only Pinkman and his friends remain to provide moral guidance, often through their defiance of what is given, whether the dogma is legal, spiritual or psychotherapeutic. Jesse cannot put things right, but he alone battles wrong.

Why, then, are we inclined to blame him? It is simply because we all have the predisposition to break bad and to rationalize it. When we defend the actions of evil men and women by treating them as though they were the consequence of actions by good men and women, we seek to protect ourselves. We avail ourselves of our felt omniscience as an audience, as though we might learn from the mistakes of the heroes. Yet life has but one overlying tragedy, and that is the absence of compassion. As actors in our own life dramas, we have no way of knowing what our fate will be. Whether we adhere to an idealized notion of legality, such as Skyler and Jesse’s parents do, a romantic conception of the American Dream, a libertarian doctrine or a vendetta, our choices are more or less arbitrary and their consequences impossible to predict; hence the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is irrefutable in contemporary drama. All that we have is what we do, and the truly heroic characters are those who act out of spontaneous compassion, whose self-interest never crosses the line of depravity until it is pushed. Jesse Pinkman, in BOTH incarnations, remains pure.

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

KRUX:

I know what happened. I can tell you how it happened. I can show you who’s responsible and everything. And I can clear my name of wrongdoing. Only: you seem not to want to believe that I am innocent. You want so fervently to think I’m not a victim of what other people did, or that my well-meaning and disciplined intentions are somehow mistakes that you can learn from. I guess you want to believe that this will never happen to you, or that there’s no reason for you to make the sacrifices and to take the risks I did. Or you just want to blame me because I’m here, in front of you, and, if you’ll notice, I alone take responsibility for everything I did. It simply troubles you that I did everything right, and still I must live with others’ wrongdoing. But that’s a reality I’ve come to grasp. You can learn all you want from my mistakes. It won’t help you to prevent making your own mistakes. Your only hope is to learn sympathy for those who made those mistakes in good faith rather than becoming the problem. Then you’ll appreciate kindness when YOU are the victim.

Dm.A.A.

BODETH: Philosophical Reflections on BoJack Horseman.

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.”

Albert Camus.

The Horse That Crosses Every Line: How BoJack transcends Epistemological Distinctions.

For a show that is so self-referential, postmodern and memetic that it appears at first to have absolutely no subtext, drawing upon its overtness for both its comedic and artistic value, BoJack Horseman certainly lends itself to a lot of speculation by fans. Perhaps that is a part of its brilliancy; after all, it is bound to attract a sense of humour that loves to deconstruct projections and to denounce attempts to make sense of nonsense, so fan theorists are likely to be ridiculed for their desperation to find a “hidden” meaning underneath all the layers of explicit satire and criticism. Yet, if we are to be honest with ourselves, the postmodern, no-holds-barred format of the show’s writing, one that seems only to restrain itself as an ironic reference to censorship, litigation, and Scientology, is almost as suffused with references, nuances, and in-jokes transcending class and creed as a post-structural philosophical text by Deleuze or Derrida. Even considering what is “overtly” overt, it is all too easy to THINK that one understands the situation as it has been presented, yet further analysis and review will prove this presumption false. In effect, everything in a show’s presentation is “overt”, whether it is registered consciously or unconsciously by the viewer. To draw a definitive line between “text” and “subtext”, in a show so contemporary and free of form, is already to become the target of a satirical metajoke. Yes: it’s all right there in the open. But like Gustavo Fring from Breaking Bad (or the extremely manipulative woman in Vince Gilligan’s early work on the X-files), the show’s meanings are “hidden in plain sight.” What is “overt” is simply that which is “overtly” overt, and that sense of its being “formal” or “explicit” text is derived directly from its meaning crossing the threshold of a viewer’s consciousness. As such, it is wrong to say that viewers “read too much into” the show, for there appears to be no definite point at which the reference is “improbable” or “projected”, just as there is no definite line at which a viewer may be considered “slow” or “misinformed” for missing a given joke or reference. As much as it pains me to admit it, anything goes in analyzing this show, and what at first appears farfetched seems irrefutable upon reflection.

BoJack Kills: the fringes of BoJack Film Theory Regarding Suicide.

The leading question is, therefore: will BoJack die? More specifically, fans are curious to see if he will kill himself. There is plenty of foreshadowing throughout the show leading up to every tragic outcome, whether it is Sarah Lynn’s death, Butterscotch Horseman’s affair, Diane and Mr. Peanutbutter’s divorce, or the lobotomy of Beatrice’s mother. BoJack’s suicide is also heavily referenced. Some radical theorists even suggest that he has already killed himself and that the events of the series thus far take place in a surreal afterlife, such as in two psychological films whose titles I will not divulge so as not to spoil them for fans of mind-bending psychological drama.

Knowing your film history can certainly help you to catch some subtle jokes and references throughout BoJack, and if his death is alluded to by reference to other cinematic deaths then we might gather evidence to corroborate these morbid theories. The details are chilling when one digs into them. One of the most revelatory episodes regarding BoJack’s depressive self-destruction is Stupid Piece of Sh*t, wherein BoJack inexplicably stops his car halfway down Mulholland Drive. Some viewers have pointed out as well that Naomi Watts’ character in One Trick Pony has a split personality when she loses herself in the role of a young woman named “Diane”, who I should note was at some point a server who served coffee.

The paragraph above essentially functions as one long reference, though regarding what I shall not divulge. Needless to say, fans of both works will marvel at the parallels. After all: some of those details, which are extremely overt, only seem to serve a function in the context of a film reference that also carries deep existential weight. Yet are they conclusive??

Breaking BoJack: how BoJack descends into Madness.

If BoJack has, indeed, killed himself in a previous life, then the events of this series are likely to lead up to a reliving of that event. The perversion of our contemporary world in this case not only serves a satirical purpose but is central to the plot. Why is the “D” removed from “Hollywood”, without any sensible ramifications? Why are anthropomorphic animals running about like in one of Aesop’s fables? Why are most of the celebrity names changed, though not all? Is it impossible that BoJack is in fact only DREAMING that he was once a successful actor, only to discover, by degrees, that he was a colossal failure? Again, parallels to the aforementioned film are striking, and further research in quest of fellow observers noticing the same details only produces more details corroborating this theory independently. Yet if we must draw a line, let’s examine the “hard facts”.

But You Can’t Make Him Stop Drinking: Alcohol and Revelation.

In It’s You, BoJack claims that there will be plenty of onlookers when he kills himself, as if he knows. Intoxication produces more insight and clairvoyance for him, time and time again, than do his attempts at sobriety. If, in fact, he is living in a Dream, then only intoxication can produce this, though plenty of characters try to steer him away from it.

The Duality between dream and intoxication is found in Nietzsche’s early work on Drama and Music, known as The Birth of Tragedy. The observation is not premature, since Nietzsche, like Sartre, is referenced, however passingly, in Season Five (according to a parody of one of his quotes on Flip McVicker’s white board.). If Apollo and Dionysus represent conflicting states of consciousness, then the only means by which to escape one is to indulge to excess in the other. When BoJack “escapes” reality, he also comes to terms with it, though what he comes to realize is difficult to accept.

Most of the really “positive” influences in BoJack’s “life” try to steer him towards sobriety. Every woman who claims to love him, be it Wanda, Hollyhock or Gina, tries to lead the horse to sobriety, by various methods, whether it is Wanda’s hands-off approach, Hollyhock’s admonition, or Gina’s overt interference.

All three of these women represent his positive qualities. Wanda is successful in the industry which BoJack despises, knowing nothing of his history. Hollyhock represents his childlike innocence and relatively normal insecurities. Gina is grounded and professional, representing his ability to settle into happiness instead of chasing greatness.

Conversely, the women that tend to lead him back INTO hypnosis are those who represent more negative qualities. Beatrice Horseman represents the inability to love, a deeply repressed maternal instinct that only comes out when she, too, is no longer in her “right mind”. Sarah Lynn represents the temptations of the celebrity lifestyle: a source of existential despair but also a great convenience. And then there is, of course: Diane, for whom we stole the “D” from Hollywood. Of all supporting characters, she is perhaps the most obvious character foil; since Zoes and Zeldas, it’s suggested that she and BoJack share a personality type, even if only as a stereotype. Diane has far too many hang-ups to list, but it’s safe to say that, despite superficial differences in ideology and policy, she and BoJack represent the same difficulties adjusting to modern life.

All three of these women take part in drinking and even drug-taking with the hero. Beatrice actually forces young BoJack’s curiosity about cigarettes, Sarah Lynn goes on several benders with him, and Diane binge drinks with him on multiple occasions. Diane, too, has revelations whilst under the influence of amphetamines, dreaming up multiple “Dianes” she has not yet discovered, yet another reference to dissociative identity disorder surrounding the name “Diane”. While it is, in fact, Diane that ultimately brings BoJack to rehab, this is only after she has divorced Mr. Peanutbutter (thereby effectively becoming “another Diane” and fulfilling her own drug-induced prophecy). At this point, it is likely that she is about to become a “positive influence” in BoJack’s life, perhaps even romantically, as Mr. Peanutbutter proposed to Pickles the waitress. Yet, like all other “positive influences”, her solution is inauthentic and serves only to forestall what appears to be inevitable.

Two Tracks to Run In: Does BoJack Have a Choice?

The most obvious overlying metaphor is that of running: running from problems, running in circles, running from nothing, running up a hill. BoJack’s role model is a race horse who committed suicide; Diane wrote the book on Secretariat, so why WOULDN’T he dream that she wrote a book about him? Perhaps he committed suicide in the hopes of becoming great? After all: he mentions that “only the greats die young”. Some intellectuals are said to have committed suicide so as to become gods. Is BoJack the god of his own Universe, not in the Christian sense of a God who is omnipotent and omniscient, but rather in the Hindu sense of a god who has forgotten his true identity and has surrendered control to the dream he has fabricated for himself? It’s not as though BoJack’s decadent lifestyle does not already agree with this metaphor.

At the end of Season One, BoJack is informed that he is a young person’s hero. At the start of that same episode, we see Secretariat’s suicide overtly. In Season Two, BoJack and Diane lament the studio’s decision to overwrite Secretariat’s tragic demise. Is it impossible that this expresses Bob-Waksberg’s own fears of his tragedy being censored by Netflix? I suppose that the creators have had some years by now to work that out with the Wandas, Zeldas and Turtletaubs that they have to work with. Yet even this process serves a reminder: we all have a choice. BoJack’s existential struggle is that he cannot take responsibility for his own happiness. He feels too much guilt for pursuing happiness, so he only submerges himself in things which will make him miserable. Perhaps, if this show is truly a form of Purgatory, he is reliving his last few years in order to set things right: to win the Race of Life. Sure: in Secretariat, it ends up being COMPUTER BoJack that gets the good ending. Yet is it impossible that our hero might LEARN something from that movie which he sabotaged and then abandoned, like so many other dreams? Perhaps there truly are two lanes for him to run in. If taking responsibility for one’s own happiness proves only to be another form of self-destructive narcissism, as critics of Sartre have demonstrated in recent generations of philosophical inquiry, then perhaps the goal for BoJack is NOT to attain happiness by chasing it but rather to FIND it as a byproduct of living meaningfully. He still has a chance to make things right, and he is known for doing just that. Season One ends with a successful audition for his favourite film. Season Two ends with a selfless but sincere act of friendship towards Todd Chavez, after a failed attempt to restore his friendship with Charlotte. Sure: all of these bridges are burned eventually. Yet what about his relationship with his sister? BoJack may not always do the right thing or even try, but when he gives it an honest effort he does make some progress. The only problem seems to be that for every step forward there are two steps back. But what if this is not the case? What if the steps backwards are simply steps in a new direction? After all: he changes. What at first appears to be a terminal narcissist proves to be a deeply scarred child. He may win yet.

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

FAUST things FAUST:

Whether it’s the neoliberalism of U.C. Berkeley, the technocratic elitism of U.C.S.D, the positivism of Dartmouth, the dismissiveness of Yale, or some other set of inherited prejudices, higher education succeeds, as most dangerous cults do, in reinforcing the worst predispositions of the prodigious child’s ego, and the honours “track” in grade school affords us so much privileged insight into these predispositions that they are laughably characteristic when they appear in the graduate. These schools succeed in their project of (shamelessly literal) indoctrination not by simply presenting the(ir) foundational texts before the students AS THEORY, but rather by SUBMERGING the young mind in a close-knit echo chamber that is saturated with these unconscious prejudices by social suggestion, their survival becoming dependent upon conformity. This often happens when the child is for the first time separated from the family for a long time, often with the expectation of encountering the “real world” in which one’s every action is of consequence to one’s literal survival. And one sees it growing like a cancer, beginning with the freshman’s naïve love of novelty and ending in the senior’s fully actualized cynicism. By the time that one might be reminded by the likes of Socrates or Nietzsche that what is most important one has known all along, one has sacrificed too much for the ideals of the establishment, upon which one has begun slavishly to depend, to be able to transcend either one’s trauma or the fallacy of sunk costs. Like a gambler, the graduate continues to put more and more time and money into the method, only to lose more and more of his or her heart. It’s no surprise that a professor such as Martin Heidegger, operating in one of the most pretentious and strict societies in recent history, indicated that we do not create culture, but that it creates us, and we do not possess freedom or use technology; THEY possess and use US, respectively. Nothing is closer to a Deal with the Devil than Academia, and if one must defensively demand a citation as proof, I refer you to DOCTOR Faustus.

Dm.A.A.

PS9(555!)

Ninth Post-Script:

In the relatively conservative societies of the past, where liberals of our general sentiment and sensibility lived cloistered on the sidelines, writing from the prisons and outside the protection of a nationality, growing up and assuming a social role, except in the case of the child prodigy, meant to agree to certain dictates, for without them there would be no social order and no ethic. Yet the function of moral propriety was always more than merely narcissistic conformism. Its function was expressed in teleology, the process by which mankind ascends closer to Godhood with each subsequent generation. The closer that we come to that Ideal, the less we need to rely upon stricture and structure, for it was only ever aimed at reform and to atone for sins inherent to the times. As those sins are purged OVER time, the need to discern “worthwhile” occupations from “meandering” and meaningless ones lessens, for the entire function of the distinction was to bring us to a point wherein that same distinction will have served its purpose and would cease to be necessary. One does not need to know the destination to understand how such a passion burns to its own destruction. So it is in matters of economy. Fiscal conservatives only PRETEND that we live in the largest welfare state in history; in many ways, our welfare lags behind others. The establishment of this state, however, was aimed at the same goal that all moral reasoning aims towards: the common welfare. To oppose welfare is to oppose everything which is “good”, and the most traditional definitions for “good” will corroborate this. So it is that, as we come closer and closer to living a truly decent common life, dogmas which were previously necessary cease to be, having run their course. It is like a code that will continue to run only until it has fulfilled the function for which it was designed. Hence “teleology” means literally “the Movement of God” or “the Movement Towards God”. We are all God, in disguise, moving towards the realization of our own True Nature.

And to think that people continue to hate the hippies!! By this definition, they were the most spiritually advanced and morally refined of all generations.

Already “growing up” has less to do with doing that which is “necessary for survival” and more to do with that which is “intrinsically rewarding”. Already we begin, within a time referred to as “the Future”, even now, to live, for the first time, perhaps, within the Present. Already individual identity and conscientiousness begins to outshine social order in merit. Occupation ceases to be judged by social utility but rather by the capacity for the Individual to rise above the myopia of the partisan tribe.

Already, the paradigm of “identity” grows upon the remnants of “society”. And this is because “society” was only ever a stepping stone towards this transmutation.

Remember: our ancestors had to make sacrifices so that WE might not have to. Only those who failed to meet this challenge deferred it unto us. THEY had to live “the right way” so that WE might someday be able to live “our own way”. It was always prefigured that it would be so. Their lives cannot have meaning unless ours has a different meaning.

Live your own life.

Dmytri.

The Draft as Rape: an Existential Parallel.

Why are you such a pushover?

It’s because I am humble.

And yet you brag about it!

I confess it.

I always find it hilarious that people in this country are so harsh towards rape but so forgiving of conscription. I mean: what is the difference between the two, really?

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

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

ARTFUNK:

The proper function of art is not to be progressive, advancing human society towards some final objective or providing a steady flow of revolution and reform to keep restlessness at bay. The proper function of art is to act as an expression of universal human truths that each generation rediscovers time and time again, often one individual at a time. Considering this, the entire meme of progress appears rather absurd. The human condition remains the same at its most fundamental level; only external diversions in culture seek to suppress this. The same threats that man and woman encountered four hundred years ago remain imminent today. The role of the artist was to arm the mind against these forces, so that the tragedy depicted in the work of art would remain a work of fiction. The great geniuses were always edgy, defying the timeless tendency towards egoism in all its forms by pushing the envelope. This egoism includes the tendency to take offense, especially when none is intended. In previous generations, men like Mozart, Handel, and Joyce could get away with overstepping boundaries and blazing trails, not because they were the products of a liberal scene (which was not the case) but rather because they did not rely too heavily upon the opinion of the common peasant, often depending instead upon the patronage of a wealthy benefactor who recognized their genius, however grudgingly. Today, art is disguised as policy and reform. Works are only considered relevant in so far as they break ground, but not because they reaffirm values which are more fundamental and timeless than the status quo at present. Men like Shakespeare and Kafka are esteemed because they allowed for certain liberties that have been taken for granted today, yet that is not what made these men so great. Rather, it’s that they were not afraid to TAKE those liberties as means towards another end: that of expressing a Truth. Truth has been reduced to a political and linguistic construct, comparable to propaganda and almost invariably synonymous with it. But what Faulkner observed was not of relevance because of its relationship to Fascism; rather, he saw the world through an exceptionally, breathtakingly keen lens that has not been tarnished over time. Time is the enemy; eternity is the goal. The problems of our contemporary culture are twofold, both derived from “progressive thought”: on one end, works that are OFFENSIVE are repressed, not under conservative auspices, but rather under LIBERAL auspices, barring any serious consideration for their liberal value by contrast with the egoism and complacency of dogmatic “liberal” critics, who saturate the consuming public. On the other end, if a work is not progressive and liberal ENOUGH, there is no audience for it, and it can only be progressive and liberal insofar as it appeals to trends within groups. Our society has not become more free and progressive by seeking to dissolve tradition; it has confined us to redundancy. In democratizing culture, it has allowed culture to kill genius.

Dm.A.A.