Why Good People Don’t
Get Laid. (if They are Smart.)
One of the more
disturbing discussions that I had with Joseph was, of course, upon the topic of
Involuntary Celibacy. This is a mounting health concern which affects me
personally as well as it affects me intellectually, and I have spent considerable
time exploring it, both consciously and unconsciously, if only to atone for
time which might otherwise have been spent practicing sex.
The contention made,
by someone using an online forum, was that there is no such thing as a suicide
by an involuntary celibate, since those who kill themselves for lack of consensual
sex are murdered by society.
The counterargument,
which infuriated me as much as I hope it will infuriate my readers, was
expressed in the following ejaculation: How great it must be to be so ENTITLED
that the World should literally OWE you happiness!!
Of course, my
instinct was to scream at the respondent. Despite the terrifying conditions
which involuntary celibates report, by no means short of social anomie, the
condition remains a rare affliction, aggravated in its psychosocial impact by
its very rarity. It would appear to be nothing short of savagery to accuse the
ordinary person of willfully perpetuating it; ordinarily, I content myself in
the thought that, were it better known, then it would abate, for the cure is so
readily available that one might laugh until one cries. The sheer thought that
a human life would be wasted for lack of intimacy would have appeared tragic to
me at any age, in any age, even the most stringently religious and repressive
one. One can only hope, for those in whom the erotic instinct is sublimated as
self-murder, that they are truly not missed, as many of the conscientious ones
expect. As it stands, however, a frequent jibe on the part of neoconservatives,
directed at involuntary celibates, is that they initially imagine themselves to
be attractive by the authority of their parents, who, after all, are seldom celibate
and far more seldom virginal. The very fact that this relationship arises,
presuming that the neocons retain at least SOME relevance, would seem to
indicate that the death of the involuntary celibate, resultant from the nature
of this depraving condition, is more tragic than simply the Death of One Man,
which appears tragic by itself only insofar as men (in the generic sense, referring
to people of either gender) value themselves as ends in themselves. Furthermore,
if any of the pressure to procreate or die originates within the family of the
sufferer, it does imply as well two salient points: one is that there is, in
fact, a social objectivity to claims made by the parents on behalf of the
sufferer’s redeeming and even distinguishing qualities, for those moments
wherein the parents are relatively miserly with praise substantiate the
conditional nature of the praise itself, though that might hardly satiate the
deeper longing for unconditionality. The other point is that the parents
themselves take part in what the primary writer referred to as “social murder”,
implying that not only the society but the very privilege of procreation
retains a hypocrisy which can prove clinically fatal. Yet, as I maintain, it
would be far too barbaric to accuse any ordinary person of perpetuating the
process consciously.
If I had, therefore,
not to scream but to calmly instruct, hoping to suppress, with some futility,
my passive aggression, I would respond thus: “I do not NEED to imagine being
entitled to happiness. The World DOES owe me that, and you do It a disservice
by suggesting a Life outside of this conviction.”
In doing so, I
defend everyone.
Instead of putting
my efforts towards the future, I should like to suspend Utopian goals in favour
of social obligations as they are understood in the Present, informed by
History.
The ethic of the
contemporary age is an ethic of weakness, rightfully so, for its hidden
strength is not only in power but in the capacity to use power in the service
of the powerless. Neoconservatism, conversely, might be the perfect character
foil for modern ethics, for it is an orchestrated (but nonetheless unrehearsed
and poorly composed) attempt to sabotage modern morality and to restore society
to the Old Ways.
The old ethic is, in
summary, an ethic of strength, but more specifically it is an ethic BY the
STRONG, FOR the Strong. Man emerged from the Jungle by the primal force of
will, as dictated by a chaotic Nature. He formed societies as a playful
expression of this same will (to) power, an enterprise made serious only to the
extent of the leader’s anger, which had to be made the object of a fear; hence “seriousness”
emerged out of the synthesis of the tyrant’s unrest and the subject’s terror. When
a “person of authority” (literally: the “mask of creation”, in which case an “author”
is tantamount to a policeman or the leader of a gang) impresses upon a subordinate
the “seriousness of a matter”, (as it ought to be remembered, in the terms of
Watts, the seriousness of an “illusion”, which in itself implies “playfulness”)
he means for the recipient of this information to sympathize with the officer’s
wishes; it follows logically, therefore, that the emotional content of the wish
in question must at once include the fear (or desire) of the recipient and the
desperation of the authority. What we describe, therefore, as “seriousness” is
essentially a synthetic compound of phobia and neurosis, though the nature of
the synthesis is such that it disguises the components; were the leader to
TRULY appear “desperate”, or were it confessed that the subordinate were
genuinely fearful, the matter would appear comical.
Anxious to control
their populations, the tyrants of old joined forces and established various
paradigms of seriousness, which were internalized by their subjects as ethical
obligations. One of the functions of these systems was to eliminate weakness in
the population, specifically by eliminating weak people. Jordan Peterson’s
theory that the most “conscientious” and “hard-working” members of a society eliminated
all the “slackers” long ago confesses to my own theory herein. While Peterson embarrasses
himself as a Nietzschean by equating strength in “sharing labour” with moral
clarity, (as opposed to sharing resources, just as he prefers “equal opportunity”
piously and deontologically to “equal outcome”) he does illustrate the nature
of tyranny in a society ruled by serious meritocrats. What Peterson omits,
presuming upon the prejudices of his audience, (who must have a lot of willpower
and nerve to even attend him,) is that it was not that being immoral made you
weak; being weak made you immoral, and the nature of this was again obscured,
referred to as the vice of “sloth” (laziness). The Old Morality was designed
entirely to oppress and to suppress human weakness, and even at its most pious
and religious it envisioned a God who was far more terrifying than any tyrant,
to whom laziness was sin. In the West, Sensitivity only truly became a virtue in
men (here, I refer specifically to males) in the nineteenth century, and it was
promptly swallowed up by Nationalism. It took a century of atrocity and
upheaval thereafter to teach Humanity a lesson about the consequences of rule
by the use of unregulated force. If you encounter anyone nowadays who professes
a nostalgia for the Old Morality, that person has probably at some point sympathized
with Nazism, unconsciously or outspokenly.
Is it not most
authoritarian, though, to imply that women ought to be FORCED to sleep with men
to whom they are not otherwise attracted? Let it be made unequivocally clear that
this was NEVER the proffered solution. What was called into question was not
the means by which an involuntary celibate attempts to “ascend” to sexual
activity, but rather his* right to do so.
*Here, I use the
generic “he” again to refer to sufferers of both genders, though I confine gender
to two.
Traditionally,
virtue was defined, under numerous paradigms, as “that which is owed to a man”.
In this case, “man” again functions as a root word to represent all human
beings; if “Superman” must be made “Superperson” because the instance of the
suffix “man” implies “man” to be the category, then a “woman”, by the same token,
is a “man”, generically. More importantly, the passive term “is owed to” implies
a debtor, yet who “owes” anything “to” the man of virtue? In this instance, “Society”
is both the authority and the debtor; in the absence of a target of the man’s
own arbitration, the debt is sublimated by the general public. The Old Society supervised
the payment of debts by holding the weak accountable to the strong; the New
Society not only supervises the payment of debts to the weak, but it in itself
promises them, for it is the Society Itself which must ultimately pay. Social Welfare
Programs epitomize this.
When the involuntary
celibate contends that his brethren are “killed by Society”, he alludes to this
New Morality. He contends that, whether by birth, good works, or faith alone, there
are those among us who suffer a form of social exclusion which is intolerable
to them, and they deserve better. His interlocutor then mocks him by prompting
us to “imagine” a World wherein some principle of Justice recognized this
entitlement. Yet an entitlement remains an external, objective factor. Even if
only the entitled party recognizes its value, the very nature of moral language
implies that some people are truly worthy. Ordinarily, one would look to people
of authority to determine personal worth. Yet as the result of what Kierkegaard
calls “leveling”, democratic societies increasingly and exceedingly, perhaps
even excessively, have moved away from traditional models of authority in
favour of egalitarian, individualistic ones. When I say “individualistic” herein,
I do NOT refer to a social order which EMPOWERS the Individual as an end in and
of himself, but rather I refer to a sort of mob rule which is motivated by the
coagulation of self-interest. Furthermore, the work of Kohlberg indicates that
MOST individuals never mature past conventional moral reasoning. The function
of an egalitarian mob is to suppress Individuality and to fetishize various
aesthetic trends in its wake; the function of the Judge, therefore, is not to
impose the Law upon the People, but rather to adapt it TO them, effectively
yielding to the mob at the expense of the Individual, both as an imminence and as
a possibility. This condition accounts for the Absurd nature of the Kangaroo
Court as it has been caricatured by Franz Kafka, etc. It also accounts for the
deep-seated distrust that modern people have towards the Law, reflected in
contempt for law enforcement. Left to his own devices, betrayed by the very System
of which he is a Juror, and surrounded by self-seeking egomaniacs, the modern
man finds no recourse but to judge his own worth. Hence the valuation of “entitlement”
is internalized, and one always runs the risk of falling into “self-entitlement”,
the overvaluation of one’s own social value.
Yet the most
dangerous evil remains a collective one, and it rests in the abbreviation of “self-entitlement”
as “entitlement”. This absurd reduction implies that ALL feelings of personal
value, expressed as social debt, can amount to nothing more than personal
pretensions and projections. In summary: you can deal with involuntary celibacy
by retaining the internal conviction that you deserve better. What kills people
is the felt sense of worthlessness, the tendency for self-pity, a response to
social injustice, to become redirected as self-loathing, consenting to the
suggestion that the injustice was the fault of the victim. That people should
force themselves to love anyone or anything is not reasonable; that they should
never blame the other for loving THEM is an absolute imperative. One can
content one’s self with celibacy by knowing one’s self to be entitled; what is
impermissible is to challenge this feeling of entitlement, for by so doing one
upsets every attempt at moral order.
[({Dm.A.A.)}]
