Ethical Reflections

The fifth (and final) section of my philosophical system, completed.

Egoism

Good and Evil

When will mankind move beyond good and evil? The question speaks its own importance, but does so in a manner that makes it seem unassuming, unbecoming even—but it does this deliberately, for deep down this question of morality is perhaps the most staggering and implicating in history.

What is the good and what is the evil? Nothing but a value judgment, I say. The whole of morality is bound in feeling, composed in sentiment, expressed in action, and reflected on in contemplation.

The lengths to which we as a species go under and stay under with respect to our crude barbarisms is tremendous, to say the least. I’ve never been more assured in the fact of mankind’s stupidity than in seeing the lengths we go to in order to justify to ourselves all the morals we commit to, but which we feel the need to justify—as if anyone had to justify anything. The need to justify is itself a value, and so can only be grounded circularly—tautologies are the decadent man’s last line of defense, after all.

Man fears the unknown like a child does the dark, and so, in order to get around this darkness, he strives to start his own fire—his own self-illumination—from hitting together two sturdy propositions he thinks lead to a sound syllogism; a final conclusion which (so he thinks) any rational person will have to agree with. But who’s going to tell our bright-eyed logician that these lines of reasoning reveal only one thing—the total capture and capitulation to sickly values, herd morals, existential ideals not his own?

Whenever a man says he will reason upon a thing, he really means to say he will provide excuses which justify his already held belief. Morals are nothing more than beliefs wrapped up in personal justifications for them. Everywhere a man acts, he exposes the morals of his drives—whether they be conscious or unconscious is not important here. If a man affirms a thing as good or bad, he merely relates an autobiographical fact about his psychology. The most interesting subject in all the world is psychology for this reason—who doesn’t find the inner workings of their psyche fascinating, and who would willingly wish to forgo knowing anything about their mental health?

Indeed, I wish to emphasize the point: philosophy in modernity should really turn to existentialism on account of its physiological basis—the morals which speak not on behalf of reason but on behalf of man. Where morals are, there’s man, and where there’s man philosophy must not be far behind.

The whole of my philosophy may rightly be summarized as the musings of an existential psychologist. I pass judgment on all things in the world, speaking my heart as best I can, and that alone is enough to sustain my very existence. Philosophy, to me, is nothing but the subjective reflections of its authors; in a sense, it’s their biography made objective by making their personal abstractions tangible, comprehensible, moving, and consolatory. All thoughts must be comprehended in the brain, and on account of their content moved by the spirit and understood in the heart. The best philosophers are those who speak personally—that is, of their conditions alone—for in that we see the whole of a man’s morals: his temperament, interests, passions, and future goals.

Again, what philosophy is to me is nothing more than the personal (subjective) considerations of its author made to appear objective in writing—writing which lays out before the reader all the reasons and arguments on behalf of a trifling thought. The desire to hide the autobiographical aspect of all writings is really only a prejudice affirmed out of custom, nothing more. If a man cannot freely give his extemporaneous thoughts on everything under the sun, then he can hardly be called a man at all, for the whole point of writing philosophy is to discover what your own wisdom decided to reveal to you in the moment you were considering it.

At every moment in the writing process, there’s a necessary pause which must be taken in order to arrange and rearrange the thought just had; and in this interval of time, the whole of the mind’s energy is focused sharply to a single point, and in this act perfecting what chance and passing reflections were good enough to develop into in that exact moment. If a man were completely in command of his thoughts, writing would be just as easy as thinking. But because a man cannot think what he wishes at will at all times, he must be patient with himself and wait until the right thought arises on its own accord. More often than not, too, he must reread the sentence he just wrote out in order to get a feel for where his mind was going with that thought. As it so often happens, the mind forgets what it was just thinking because of the constant impressions which existence forever confronts us with at all moments. So long as a man is conscious, he will have nothing to say on account of how much there really is to say in each experience.

Alas, the plight of every writer—unable to say what they feel at all moments because of how overwhelming each passing second really is. Even if one was given their whole life to write a piece, it would likely be insufficient—for, as it often happens with writers, time is but a false consolation on account of its giving them a false sense of security with respect to their productivity. A man is only productive in writing insofar as he is able to gradually accumulate words on the page which he is thoroughly happy to read. A writer should want to make every thought they have something worthy of being read—that is really the key to every good composition. Have it be filled with honest reflections on all things, subject matter be damned, and to hell with consistency too. The mind is inconsistent, and so a writing should likewise be if it is to best reflect nature and the writer’s own heart.

My own writing style is, in fact, the epitome of my values. I’m the greatest psychologist to have ever lived—not on account of my reading Nietzsche or Freud, but on how well I turn my subjectivity into objectivity—that is, how well I reflect the state of my mind as I write the first thing which comes to it. A writer without style is really a human being without character. I can’t even take teachers of composition seriously anymore, especially when they teach their students about “writing principles” using bullet points—to say nothing of those useless writing workshops, in which nothing gets written down and the most trite nonsense is praised highly for its “originality.”

No! I’ve read too many great authors, and written too much personally, to find anything worthy of the label “original” or “special” in any modern writing, even by the most well-read person. Nobody knows how to write psychologically anymore; I mean it—everything written today sounds distant from the author’s heart and reads like a shopping list rather than a scene which depicts something in the world. Few truly know the amount of labor that goes into saying less than you really think—editing is a hard art, perfected only through use, removing all signs of verbosity and ensuring no dishonesty is present anywhere.

In writing, the greatest indication of a person with strong values, a powerful will, and true honesty is how playfully and artfully they write their sentences. If a reader isn’t stunned by the integrity of a sentence, either the author failed at conveying their heart, or the sentence simply flew far above the reader’s head—more often than not, however, it’s the author’s fault, for ideas are common to all, but the way in which those ideas are presented is not. It is this which actually makes an idea either memorable or forgettable—how well it reflects the author’s subjectivity. Without subjectivity there is no honesty. Honesty is among the highest values a person can hold to, not only because it corresponds most with nature but because it allows you to accurately draw your own character.

Call it good, call it evil, call it whatever you want—just let it be honest. The morals of a man are made up of his life, and so, whenever he decides to write an account of his soul, he must do so after the manner of his own soul. Indeed, I say verily unto all you: speaking without first consulting the heart is akin to speaking ill of God, for that’s tantamount to speaking ill of yourself, which, if you respect your own person, you should avoid.

The more a man limits his innate impulses, the greater chance there is of him denying life. So long as a man is made to feel apart from himself—always the result of dishonest values, values not his own—the more willing he is to affirm what is bad for him and deny what is good for him. What is good for man? That which increases his power, of course.

Life has always been a struggle for power between competing powers, and the desires born in man from this war of powers, which lead to the development of his identity, are fought within himself. The spirit within moves from a will of its own, totally unknown to the individual, and in this movement heightens the sense of honesty with respect to what is life-affirming, what is powerful for the individual. The will to affirmation is really what lies behind each form of power. It should be said, too, that there are as many powers as there are desires—for desires are born out of the urge to affirm what spontaneously attracts us and draws us in; if this is denied, then so too is life.

Good is merely the label given to a moral that, if brought into action, affirms our power—that improves some aspect of our character. Evil is precisely the opposite: a drive that is denied life out of a stronger denying force. One can view, simultaneously, good and evil dialectically and existentially.

Whenever the desire to live is lacking, this is the result of a life-denying, herd-like morality—a morality which interprets the breaking of a norm as worse than actually executing the designs of a powerful impulse. Existentially, the person is made subject to a weaker passion—the urge to conform and remain in a state contradictory to one’s drive—and so, in such a person, the will to affirm is weakened by the assumed superiority of a weak moral, ultimately a drive which seeks to deny life itself.

Weak morals make sickly people, and thus it’s no wonder most people today live lives totally at odds with what they envisioned for themselves. People cannot feel the passions which rest beneath their skin because their psychology is so indoctrinated with ideals not their own—totally foreign drives which have no relation to their own powerful designs.

Modernity can best be represented by a lone shipwreck clinging to the driftwood of some decrepit moral—a moral which got them where they are now: a sickly, infested, life-denying monkey floating upon an endless sea of nothing, which very much resembles what is in their heart—nothing. The world today is nothing more than a jungle in a box, cut off on all sides by four walls, left with nothing but your own sickening morality to soothe your anxiety with—a morality which you call faith, heaven even. If it wasn’t so comical, I would pity you, for clearly you are trapped in a life you would rather be free from than actually living through. Sick, poor, demented fool.

Modern man is beaten over the head with a cudgel of depravity. Everything which he is told to affirm is not his own, and everything which he is told to deny is really what affirms his life—what increases his power, what makes him excited to live, and extremely agile with respect to differences in values.

Notice how the freest man—the man who stands firmly without fear of comparison with anyone—is always the one who feels at home within himself, who knows his will intimately.

You can’t consider life amorally, as if you were merely a spectator watching the passings of existence without needing to input anything yourself. That would make you either a nihilist or a relativist—which, no doubt, I’ve shown by now is impossible. It’s really a meaningless statement because every drive which compels action is carried out subjectively. To say you live life without considering yourself in the matter is to say you’re already dead—it’s a type of existential suicide. You continue your life on the basis of its meaninglessness; you literally affirm nothing, and in doing so affirm something.

I suppose denying life is still a kind of life, but it’s not the kind of life I would be happy to live personally. My morals belong to that race of men who conquer and dominate whole nations—my ancestor is El Cid after all. I wish only to affirm that which is strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich—in short, perennial with the Earth.

My philosophy is really my will to life made manifest in how I objectify my own subjectivity. Whatever negates the strong is really weak, and vice versa. There can be no honest discussion between good and evil without first going beyond them. In doing so, you recognize their very subjective nature, and thus you’re easily able to transcend them. And in doing that, you will only that which is powerful.

As I type this, my hands feel as if they are moving across a piano—that’s how powerful my impulse to write truthfully is. It’s perhaps the strongest aspect of my character: a kind of omnipotent resolution with respect to my own character.

Dear God, how hard I try to be a mirror to the world, to reflect life through my own mirror rather than those of others.

The evil is the good, so long as the power which compels a man to do evil is for his good.

Sin

It may be necessary for future men to commit sin in order to prevent the world from falling into the state it’s in now.

Sin is but evil affirmed unwillingly, and who would ever will evil? Me! I would. I would will evil, for I am evil. Of course, with respect to subjectivity, we are all condemned by another man’s ethics already to hellfire and brimstone—in that case, we are all evil already in the eyes of another. The sickly passions with which most of these life-deniers assure themselves are enough to make even the iron gods of the underworld move to tears out of laughter.

The most staggering innovation within the mind of man was his ability to forget that he willed his own values—affirmed his morals without the need to ground them in anything outside of his power, his desire to do them and nothing more. In this respect, man fell for his own trick of forgetfulness, and in this sleight of hand paved the way for all varieties of herd moralities currently found propagating in the world today.

Our whole course of life is fought against with hands tied, all the while every day we inch close to death, drunk off the heights of our own despair, increased by our perceived weakness—our inability to effect change—and, on top of all this, man must remember that he shares his misery with no one but himself ultimately, and that all this suffering and endless toil was performed on him for no other reason than that he lives.

Do I die from life? So be it. I live in spite of every sin I commit as a result of it. Everyone understands sin but few are willing to go through with committing one. Why? Because they were told not to. There was a point in the history of mankind where all acted on impulse alone, and on this account the morals of the group all circled around the morals of the strongest. Every “I will” affirmed by a noble individual was, over history, transformed like Proteus into something unrecognizable—something weak, decaying, life-denying, in a word: evil, if I may moralize about it.

Where have all the yes-sayers and life-affirmers gone? Where is the passion in any human being breathing today? Tell me where; I want to know desperately. All I see from people today is a kind of demure nonchalance, a tepid indifference towards everything, really. Man today feels like a slave to his reason, and so he is rational and skeptical about everything, but impractical in the degree to which he takes his doubts. Agnosticism abounds in everything a person thinks today, and as a result, man is left to wander aimlessly on his little placid isle of ignorance. He seeks, but for what he knows not. There’s little direction and less purpose in all things considered by man today. Make yourself subject to reason alone, and you’ll find very few arguments that can be made on behalf of life that are convincing enough to sustain it throughout.

Whenever a writer thinks on life, they must play two parts: stenographer and psychologist, but psychologist more so, for the questions concerning life—a Lebensphilosophie I really mean—are those which can only be answered when the mind is consulted. To not recognize your own subjectivity is to fall flat from the start with respect to existential investigations; again, without recognition of the self in any personal capacity is to miss the point of philosophy and contemplation completely. What good is this life if it cannot be examined for the sake of understanding it?

Who is bold enough to attempt to understand life, however? Me, for again, I am an evil man, spurred on by my values, wanting nothing more than total victory and domination over all life-deniers alive. Should you be a life-denier in my presence—perish beneath the dust! If a man cannot confront what prevents him from living, he ought either to avoid it or get used to it. Complaining doesn’t fit an educated man, for more often than not the educated ones are responsible for creating all the problems in the first place. Life would be good enough if man had only himself to worry about, but this world is populated by one too many fools and halfwits who think they know anything at all.

To think how far we’ve fallen collectively as a species when the life-deniers are in the ascendant, and every ascension just leads them closer and closer to their darkness. You would do anything to clear that darkness too, wouldn’t you? No wonder you affirm whatever is easy for that very reason—you’d sooner give up your freedom of thought than do the hard work of working through your own mind psychologically; you’re afraid of the skeletons you’ll find, and the overwhelming blackness which surrounds it—all emptiness, all vanity, all wind, all that which your life is presently. Sadly, sadly, sadly—that is the only creative act you can muster with each breath you take. Your work of art? Nonexistent. Creativity? Empty. Originality? Nowhere. It’s good enough, however—you speak from the heart: honestly, simply, comprehensibly, in order that the masses may feel themselves in your plight: that’s honor enough.

Thoughts about life mean nothing if they’re not arrived at through some sort of activity. If a man doesn’t hit upon a great discovery whilst he walks through the forest, or bikes up a mountain, or listens to inspiring music while showering, it is not a thought worth putting to paper. A philosopher who wishes to write well must be many things: a poet, a prose stylist, an aphorist, an essayist, a journalist, a jogger, a music enthusiast, a friend, a son, a student, a teacher, a lover, a hater, a hero, a villain—yeah, in a word, human! That is what a writer must ultimately be above all else: a transcendental eyeball, an idle spectator of the affairs of the world, all the while not neglecting your own life, for that is most important of all. You presumably know yourself more than anyone else, and so you should defer to your own experience on all existential matters always.

Again, and this bears repeating, you have to be truthful in all things you; everything that concerns your own being must be considered with the full weight of their implications, as well as the gravity of each individual experience as it comes rushing into your consciousness as you move through the stream of your own spirit. Your language, or style rather, should be as near to the experience itself as possible. In prose, the greatest takeaway I’ve found in all my experience is that you should generally be a realist (after the manner of, say, a Tolstoy or Flaubert) until you become ridiculous. Books only serve to acquaint us with ourselves, nothing more. A man doesn’t take away anything from a book that isn’t already in him. The style of all writers should exactly follow that kind of reasoning: there is nothing within your mind that is foreign to you—your only real impediment is finding the most exalted way to represent your ideas, that is, finding the right garb worthy of such graceful thoughts, existential thoughts that epitomize your entire existence. That’s another thing too—the shorter the better, for it’s easier to follow along with; more often than not, having a larger word count means you said too much, and as a result fell into prolixity rather than brevity. Say only enough to capture the idea in the best way possible, but not so abbreviated as to leave it open to interpretation from the reader—I’ve always been of the opinion that if one writes too loosely, they risk being misunderstood, which is really the hallmark of bad prose.

You see now, dear reader, how many sins a writer must necessarily carry with them through life if they’re to have anything interesting to say; such is why I often make the remark to young writers that the greener you are the more it will show in how consistent you are—only beginner writers feel the need to stay attached to a thought for a whole page, whereas experienced writers let go after a single period if need be. You can never become too attached to your own ideas; be like water, reflect nature, become whatever you are put into, ride along the wave of your streaming mind. Prose is meant only to be a medium for your soul; the soul knows not where it moves, but it does so nonetheless.

Every experience could be inspiration depending on how it’s tethered. There’s potentially enough to go off from a single impression if you’re talented enough as a writer, but this is a hard thing to master, for more often than not the mind can become quickly confused—a single experience gets driven out by another, and this by another too. Now, picture that happening many times each second—that is what the mind does whenever you attempt to put thoughts to paper. Though you write nothing and your mind appears idle, in reality you’re doing the hardest part, which is ruminating, filtering, waiting for an idea, or inspiration, to strike you silly, upon which you suddenly find yourself capable of expressing anything and everything.

At every moment an image hits our eyes, it’s turned upside down, and our brain must do the hard work of turning it right-side up again. This effort should also be applied to our thinking. As writers, it’s our duty to place whatever idea we have on a firm foundation—we must place it back on its feet, though it was formerly standing on its head.

We sinners, old and new alike, understand all too well what the importunity of the herd is, and why it’s directed toward us; they condemn what they do not understand, and so, instead of seeking to understand, they prefer to ridicule us and launch attacks against our character through false generalizations. In this respect, we’re no different from the men persecuted at the hands of the Inquisition. So much for charity and humility. I’ve found both are used arbitrarily in practice but are taken as universal in theory. Who cares though, we’re better at tolerating life than they are anyway. I see nothing in the notion of sin at all, for like with good and evil, it is merely a label that reflects the values of whoever wields it.

How many great writers make themselves foolish on account of wanting to say more than they already have. How many tomes could’ve been turned into pamphlets if only the writers knew how to structure their thoughts around their spontaneity rather than around certain constraints—constraints which limit the scope by which one can express themselves, the death of all true writing. Every writer who writes with the goal of saying something unique is bound to fail, for novelty can never become the object of a piece solely, on account of its instant commonness the moment it is said. To speak a little more on constraints, they’re a great sin, full stop—for the moment one writes under their conditions they delude and destroy the naturalness and spontaneity of their writing. Structure is sin so far as I see it. I get much more enjoyment out of an author who writes as they think rather than one who writes merely for the sake of writing. There’s nothing easier than to write incoherently and nothing harder than to write coherently; these antipodes negate each other through their favor or neglect from the reader—a book only survives, after all, by those who read it.

To write for the sake of filling up the page or passing the time idly rambling to yourself, if done under duress, is not really a creative activity; it is merely filling up the page to make it seem like you’re busy. How slow the time moves when we write without drive, desire, impulse, or even love. Sin… that is what this writing amounts to—an endless sea of blasphemies scribbled out on behalf of our boredom. It helps if you write something that appears to make sense on the surface, but down below is really trite nonsense made obscure. Everyone muddies the waters in order to make what they say appear deeper than it already is.

At once, however, the soul is lifted up and strengthened by the approach of life; dear Lord Almighty, this sensation of life, life, life—how powerful your effects are upon the soul. One second I feel no desire or inspiration at all in my style, the next I have prussic acid in my pen, and I develop my ideas after my own understanding, after my interpretation, rather than those of others.

Sin has never made sense to me as a topic. How could a man be punished for having committed a supposed ill that was not done by his hand but rather his ancestor’s? Etymologically speaking, sin derives from Proto-Germanic sundiō and potentially the PIE root for “true” (snt-ya-). Old English synn (transgression) identifies the sinner as the “real” or “true” offender. This etymology aligns with the Latin sons (guilty), framing sin as an ontological “truth” of guilt. So we see how the word was always steeped in morals from the very beginning—always about judgments being passed on to another, as if the values of one man should mean anything to another.

The religiosity was always in the word from the start, and thus the herd mentality always had the upper hand in that respect. It seems, once again, Nietzsche’s genealogical method bears out the truth of where our morals really came from—ressentiment born out of the herd’s need to feel powerful like the masters, but not in a way that actually challenged their strong, earthly values. The need to conceal weakness in the form of strength gave birth to sin after many difficulties—indeed, it almost dropped dead from its mother’s slit, but, alas, to our great detriment, this groveling disability—a twitching cancer—survived, and thus changed the whole world.

From that point on, the world would be marred in sin, and every weak, herd-like member of society would suddenly find themselves on equal footing with the actually strong ones—those with values corresponding to their power, not their lack of power, but what they were actually able to perform through exertion. Desires, from this point forward, were to be the exact opposite of what they were traditionally considered: the inversion of values, the transvaluation and mutability of the human soul—once perched up on high in full glory and honesty of what it actually was with respect to the world—was, at first, made equal with herd values, and not long afterwards was placed below herd values; and so was the death of real values, strong values justified on power rather than metaphysics—man entered the world thinking only in terms of what his energy could get him, and, so far as the future is concerned, will leave it cursing his power and wishing to die abjectly, in complete humility and subservience to God—the ultimate metaphysical concept—rather than leaving the world happily knowing all was acquired on his own behalf from his own power, and nothing more. The greatest sin ever committed was making blasphemy against the Holy Spirit the only irredeemable one (Matthew 12:31–32, Mark 3:28–29, and Luke 12:10), because that’s the same one that gave sin its power in the first place. Such a cruel joke history always plays against us.

Punishment

Punishment is a crime only if it’s committed against the strong. Those with power do not fear the chidings of the insipid. The morals of a society are a reflection of the overall concessions made on behalf of the weak in order to repress the strong. There have always been more weaklings, and weak-minded followers of tradition, than bold individuals who consider life after their own experience alone. The conflict that arises between both factions of humanity is the clearest divide conceivable. Where one uses its power in numbers, the other uses it in will—in power, in a will-to-power which seeks only to affirm, to act, to do in the name of the personal and powerful.

Crime is merely a color, or label rather, given to an action not in line with the already assumed herd morality. Punishment on behalf of a crime is really a crime against the powerful, for every so-called crime is merely the legal opposition to an action carried out on behalf of an impulse; the will which strove to uncover power within man was hit upon, and thus unleashed tangibly in action, but in a form considered immoral by the majority, with their insipid, sickly, life-denying values of humanism outright. But what has morality ever meant to the strong? Nothing more than the protestations of the dominated, wishing for a bit more leniency and charity with respect to their treatment. But why should these Untermenschen—these wickedly stultified moralists, preachers of fairness and equality—receive anything, especially considering how unfit, stupid, demented, and without question immoral they truly are?

It has always been the desire of the weak to become like the strong. The urge to dominate and overpower is ever-present. Those who say organization say oligarchy, do they not? Even those utopians who wish for nothing more than a homogeneous, global culture of love—who speak as Jesus did: humbly, sickly, decadently, ascetically, always in phrases easily translatable into terms of compassion and harmony among all peoples—seek for this to become universal. They don’t know it, but when they say universalism, they mean a winning out of their values over all others—they want power but in their direction, and a gradual decline into oblivion of all opposing powers, and they’ll get it too, so long as they continue to distort nature around language and ideology rather than substance, rather than reality, pragmatics, facts on the ground, etc.

Politics today is really a long crime against humanity, for the only function governments serve today is to increase the administrative bloat in a nation to the point of making it impossible to do anything positive. This is why I’m the way I am. This is why I wish for evil to make a comeback: because the good that has been preached since the beginning has led to the gradual development of a new psychological type within man over millennia—the egoist—which has been detrimental ever since. The egoist is one who resolves with all their heart to be as insufferable and life-denying as possible, and justifies it on the basis of being spiritually superior to others on account of their hatred for their own life. No wonder everyone in politics today is either a sheep or a paid lobbyist to argue on behalf of businesses rather than their constituents.

We see where the power truly lies today—in money—and that is what has corrupted the public at large and made them herd-like and sickly in all respects: everyone alive today is contemptible on account of their love for money—all of them worship the dollar as a new Molech—and on account of it organize their whole lives around the acquisition of it, and in doing so enslave themselves to powers not their own. All this, on account of it being false to them personally, results in existential doubt and self-conceit where no conceit is justifiable. These people are so debauched and wicked they invert morals as they’ve been traditionally understood, and on account of that try to reevaluate things in their own favor—in doing so strive to make their weakness their greatest strength, and all their decadence the truest form of moral conduct. Like I said, these people are sick. The whole world is sick and suffers on their behalf, and goes along with it all because they’ve convinced everyone else that this sickness is in fact the greatest sign of strength.

So long as the strong continue to let the weak rule, we shall forever find ourselves in this cycle of samsara—this utter nightmare of having evil preached as good, where strength is punished as a crime merely because it’s life-affirming. And to think, there are those today who would argue contradictorily—not in a dialectical manner, mind you—that strength is weakness and weakness is strength. It’s not dialectical because it never wishes to see the negation made concrete—it prefers, rather, to remain in the abstract in order to make it easier to justify through jargon and fallacies, to make it an endless debate of circular negations that never resolve into anything tangible, but rather go back and forth between nonsensical points of minutiae. This is what most of philosophy has become today, by the way—analytical retardation in the highest degree, arguing over premises and debating over definitions and grounds rather than pragmatically accepting what is and going from there onto real matters.

These life-deniers pull the wool over our eyes in an attempt to make us see nothing, and rather hear only what they wish for us to in order that we may imagine the world after their image rather than our own. It’s a very slick ploy they play, making everything the opposite purposefully in order to debate the merits of its dialects—as if there were anything debatable in what they actually argue—rather than dealing with the real facts of the matter on existence.

It reminds me of the Middle Ages actually, where the scholastics would argue over the metaphysics of transubstantiation, or the attributes of God—meanwhile the people they were preaching to were already well-off, and used God’s word only to sanctify their own privilege: where do you think the divine mandates came from, after all, which resulted in hereditary monarchies? Men of God, my ass. These Dark Age scholars were in as much darkness as is possible to be in with respect to truly strong values; they preached a better life to come after while slavery was still widespread—they justified slavery, mandated it in some cases, and classified the inhabitants of the New World as beasts in human garb. The sickness of these people was so powerful that values have never been the same since they were gotten in their clutches.

This is why the strong need to return at all costs, even if evil should be unleashed as a result, even if crimes were to occur as a result, even if half the population of Earth were to perish. Nothing great in history has ever been achieved without equally great suffering on behalf of it. The truest men alive today are those who have read Friedrich Nietzsche and understand what is coming: the prophecy is being played out before our eyes once again—a new world war, a new hallowing out of humanity, a new stack of bodies, a new end, an old beginning, a beginning so long and drawn out it will be mistaken for the end when it is only halfway through.

This is what crime has to be today—it has to be considered evil in order that the people have something to toss their discontent at, and thus dissipate their power, a power which could potentially be harnessed for the sake of emancipation. But no: so long as these spiritually backwards people continue to run the game of morality—promoting the most barbaric inversion of reality possible—we shall forever find ourselves arguing over things already played out and useless in the context of the present struggle.

The masses need to be educated just enough to see past the veil of decadence which is constantly over them as they live, but not so much that they get bogged down and form their own ideological groups which weaken unity overall, and which, in truth, are the same in everything but name when we get down to it. Reality will always be the final arbiter when it comes to praxis. What makes a political movement, or, more generally, a transformation in the values of a culture, is a radical break from the traditional interpretation of the material conditions.

As I’ve said, the greatest crime in our century thus far is how wicked our moralists have become—promoting life-denial par excellence, and wishing to subjugate the whole world to this wicked yoke, a yoke from which they may pull as they please and cause a whole new valuation with respect to morals, a decadent one at that. So long as bad is deferred to instead of the good, we will always be plagued by stifling, stultifying anti-life propaganda spewed by those who have an innate hatred toward everything beautiful and human, powerful and artistic, creative and passionate.

Mankind is a fickle thing, and would take a false narrative over an honest truth; and such is why the evil are praised and the good left to languish and decay in neglect. Our war today is not even really material, but rather existential; it’s a war of interpreting reality rather than reality itself. If people were actually pragmatic with respect to politics—or the real world in general, getting over that false dichotomy between the “real” and “apparent” aspects of it—there would be no argument over how decadent, decaying, and corpse-like our situation presently is. But no! The existential is cast aside for the sake of a group—the affirmation of a tribe’s position over your own individual position—and so, instead of remaining honest with respect to yourself, you allow yourself to be more easily molded by whatever group you enter into that may or may not have similar positions to your own.

This is all nonsense, for as I said earlier—those who say group really say oligarchy. I wish I could call it my own, but it, in fact, goes back to Robert Michels’s Iron Law of Oligarchy, which states all organizations—even those championing democratic ideals—inevitably devolve into rule by a small, self-perpetuating elite. It suggests that the technical and tactical necessities of organization (bureaucracy, specialization) create this inevitable concentration of power. This is why any political actor must first and foremost be an individualist, and only after that affirmation can power be investigated properly—no longer being subject to the fancies of a group but rather made compliant with the power of individuality.

Politics is but morals mandated by law and enforced through violence. It’s a kind of war made on behalf of whatever the dominating morals are at that point in time; and this is why the only answer to the question “what is to be done?” (asked in the context of our material conditions) is “nothing!” For so long as the dominating morals are against change and progressive voices, there will never be tangible change made on behalf of them, politically at least. It may be the case that we of today are simply born too early to bring about true change; we may have to wait at the gates of Rome in order for the savior to cast off his robes and reveal himself, but only when the end-times are actually upon us, if you know what I mean.

The dominating norms of culture are the norms of the ruling class, and so their herd morals win out at the end of the day—for remember, what is good is evil, and what is evil is good: all of morality today has been reversed for the sake of making the weak appear strong and influential—when in truth they’re not worthy of comparison even with worms—they’re beneath dirt, in fact.

Let it never be forgotten that culture, as we know it, is made only through our interpretations of the present material conditions we live under. Reality is perspectival, which is why morals and culture are malleable in the first place; if it weren’t for power having the kind of influence it does over the drives of people, there would be no differentiation between actions—everyone would do as they have done before, and there would be one homogeneous diffusion of similarity amongst all people. Obviously this is not the case. Every human being is unique because of their individuality—that is, their character as developed from their genes, environment, and will—and so, even within the most conservative and tribal groups you have an obvious difference in temperament, aptitude, interests, and dominating passions. This is also why all attempts to objectify subjective criteria never work—you always ignore the outliers, and generalize so superficially that everybody feels cheated by those statistics. They don’t represent anyone really; you merely objectify their subjectivity, and in doing so isolate their traits from their character, thus making them alienated from themselves.

Culture is only built from the ground up. Wherever there is an opportunity to express dissatisfaction with the current conditions, there is potential for creation to be had, and thus culture to be made. It is in this act of evaluating, however—this spotting and judging of something unsatisfactory—that leads to our expression in the first place. The drive which compels us to seek change amidst the disgusting is what power truly is: power is the impulse to go against, to negate, to overcome that which weakens us, and it applies to all aspects of human perception; every object has power, but it is only realized for the subject.

Culture, morals, mores, ethics, politics, good, evil, bad, ugly, charitable, greedy, humble, boastful, wise, stupid, etc.—all are but subjective interpretations of the apparent world. Nothing is so great as to find the interpretation which perfectly harmonizes with our own nature: that is the teleology of power, finding the right way to view a thing in order to grow from it. Culture is power made manifest in our interpretation. The more in agreement the culture is on what a strong and noble value is, the more we can say that culture is strong and noble.

Regarding culture more generally, I effectively agree with Friedrich Nietzsche on every point except the aristocratic one. My ideal society would not be Athens under Pericles—as Nietzsche had it—but rather a society in which every citizen could become their own Pericles, their own Plato—in short, their own philosopher-king. Nietzsche argued that would be impossible because not everybody has the same drive or impulse towards greatness, nor are the material conditions abundant enough to allow everyone to pursue their passions even if they wanted to—but it must be remembered that Nietzsche is arguing against that position morally, not philosophically.

The only real objection he has that’s plausible—and is, in fact, the same objection made by objectivists and neoliberals alike today—is the implausibility of it on material grounds. But material privation today is purely man-made—it’s a distribution problem more than it is a Malthusian limit. Resource extraction, which is perhaps the only good thing capitalism has given us, still far outpaces the rate by which we reproduce, and so the argument really falls flat when considered pragmatically. A better world is possible.

The culture war today is waged on behalf of ideas and fought over rhetorically rather than physically—that is, powerfully. It’s a war of attrition with the hope that one side will capitulate to the other in order to avoid a boring stalemate. It’s really the weakest form of power possible in our world today, which is why it’s so prevalent, not just in politics but in how people think overall. I must repeat it again: it’s a war of ideas—a war made moral rather than physical, that is, morals supported by threats of tangible violence rather than making violence (power) the starting point of all moral valuations.

This lack of emphasis on power is precisely what has led us to where we are culturally today—with the ever-increasing advance of decadent priests who relish in conjecturing when the end-times are actually coming. I no longer have tolerance or patience for these kinds of people, and I want nothing more than their total expulsion from all the lands on Earth—yeah, they should live wherever Atlantis once stood, and nowhere else. These prodigies of sickly morals are the most insufferable people imaginable, and to think they derive strength from our despising them—convincing themselves that their spiritual strength is increased on account of all the rightful contempt thrown at them. So far as I’m concerned they’re the biggest criminals in history. Crime will forever be rampant so long as weak morals are considered superior to strong ones. Until the next reevaluation of morals occurs—and believe me, dear reader, I want nothing more than for that to happen—we as a species will forever find ourselves confused existentially, and as a result of this confusion will turn towards Christ rather than Dionysus.

Collective Striving

Man

All my writings concern nothing else but man and his nature. Now, with a topic as broad as that, one would rightfully consider me a fool to think it could be epitomized in a book, let alone a single phrase; and, as far as my reason has allowed me to see into the question of man, I would have to agree with all those who called me a fool—those who say that existence is so vast, and the human spirit so indomitable, that a thousand Shakespeares and Tolstoys put together could never fully exhaust the ineffability contained in a single hour of life.

What is a man to do though? With life being so vast, how could one possibly expect to live happily within it if at every turn he is met with some misfortune or inconvenience which turns his tranquility upside down—he would think the whole point of life was that very inconvenience if he only considered it in the immediate moment, which, I’m afraid to say, most people do. The wisdom of a man is not necessarily proportional to his experience, but proportional to how much he has reflected on his experience. The less a man thinks existentially, that is, about himself, the less he will view his life from the proper perspective, which is broadly rather than narrowly.

Avicenna on this point said a very wise thing: “I would rather have a short life with width rather than a narrow one with length.” It is the width, or depth, of a man’s soul that makes him someone, not whatever he narrowly delves into for the sake of his subsistence alone. Modern man is stultified in his introspective capacities because he doesn’t spend his time thinking about anything worthwhile or profound—even most men’s dreams today are purely material, egoistic, financial, and this type of thinking is considered practical by the herd and justified on the basis of their present responsibilities. You see now how deep the problem runs.

Man’s issue is that he cannot overcome the state of his material conditions, and all existential interventions are hopeless for the simple fact that he has built his personality around those very material conditions. The very psyche which comprises a man’s whole being today is influenced in such a way as to see no other way but through with respect to the system by which he lives; he is hopeless not because he cannot do anything, but because he doesn’t feel like his actions will get him anywhere within the system as such, not realizing that this type of thinking is precisely what’s keeping him down.

He thinks it his duty to operate within the system, rather than overcoming it by recognizing he doesn’t have to “win” within it in order to view himself as accomplished. Man needs no approval from the system which crushes him in order to feel like a complete man within it; in fact, the sooner he breaks this mental chain the sooner he will find himself liberated and free, powerful and finally in command of his destiny.

Culture at large, and specifically socialization through media and advertisements, is to blame for this present malaise—this sense of emptiness and nihilism which is so clearly borne out on the faces of the majority today. Look around you, see the picture and believe the truth: life is made meaningless when it’s constrained to only a few status points, rather than considered in light of all the heavenly beauty that surrounds us every second, and which only a man with a mind toward the infinities could apprehend fully and derive a great deal of contentment from. In that sense, we’re to blame for our own misery.

Most people are unable to see it, however, because they don’t understand that their participation in the system is a capitulation to it; again, however, because they’re already brought up in it, and made to feel like they have to work within it without resisting it, they come up with justifications for why they have to accept it as it is, done in order to ease their hurt pride at the fact that they’re unable to be as successful as they’re indoctrinated to believe they should become (from the media)—all lies, false, damnable lies. This world is rotten at its core, and I fear the majority can never break free from it until they realize what confines them, and how their very thinking is not their own, but rather manipulated and swayed from on high by forces they’re not even privy to.

If a man cannot take into his own hands the powers of his mind, he will forever be subject to another more crafty than he who does not have his best interests at heart. This is in a very real sense analogous to man’s relationship with the state—this seemingly omnipresent abstraction which watches his every move and habit and, worse still, which manipulates those very actions. The state is so large and powerful—especially in terms of its ability to quickly humble a man and take away his every liberty—that a man cannot be himself, in that he must follow its rules and regulations, or else face the consequences of a broken injunction he was unaware of, and to which he was never a partner in making, nor consented to.

Such is the use of a state—I dare not even legitimate it by calling it that: nothing more than a foreign entity with the power of a police force to back it up; it would make sense, too, that under every legal code lay hidden the true legitimator of all those statutes—power. If such is the case, why develop systems of common law and formal court procedures if all actions are fundamentally subject to the same force—power!—which seeks only its execution and nothing besides? All is the same in its eyes, is it not? Why the formality? Why the façade of civility and “right conduct” if it all ends the same way—with the state having the right to exercise its power over every citizen without any recourse on behalf of the citizen equal in power?

The man against the state, when considered from the perspective of power alone, is like a mouse pushing against a mountain; it will never budge, and so the mouse is better off looking for a different place to burrow a hole into. So long as one lives within any state-like structure, they must conform themselves to its rules lest they suffer more headache than they’re able to put up with.

Everywhere man is in constant agitation against his very condition. No matter where on Earth you find people, you shall surely be met with suffering and misery not far from them. So long as a man is unable to consider the experiences of his life honestly, he will forever be doomed to adopt wholesale narratives not born from within his own soul—narratives which strive to account for and explain every fact of his life by correlating them in a dishonest manner; this will not do, and can never do, not only because it’s unphilosophical but, more importantly, it’s not existential.

To approach philosophy non-subjectively is really to approach it by walking backwards—constantly having to look back in order to make sure you don’t walk yourself off a cliff. Every philosophy without subjectivity is really a philosophy without personality: where the life of man is of no concern; where the questions of meaning, ground, and origin are not considered; and where the implicit contradictions within existence are not wrestled with—all this serves to indicate a life-denying philosophy more than anything else. Philosophy started out as nothing more than a search for wisdom—wisdom here meaning subjective truth, a truth which gave man a sense of assurance whilst strutting about in the world, totally lost in the immensity of it.

Philosophy without wisdom is empty, life without philosophy is blind. A man who goes his whole life never having a serious reflection on the immensity of his everyday actions is, I would suppose, completely immune to the significance of his own existence. Life is a dream, death is an awakening—but while we live, we ought to find that which makes the lucidness of it enjoyable, meaningful, impactful, worth repeating endlessly. A man who approaches the questions of life without any philosophical depth is sure to come to uninspiring answers about it and, more likely than not, will repeat what he always has done, but this time with more conviction that he’s right, and thus defend his ignorance more belligerently than before.

The purpose of man in my view has always been the deliberate striving to become what he feels he was meant to be. The essence of existentialism, in that respect, is the act of culling useful precepts for life from those much wiser than you presently are—precepts which provide order to the chaotic mass that is the essence of a human being. Man is both a quantity and a quality.

His heart is the measure of all things, and his judgment upon all his experience is not to be considered impressive unless it’s tethered with reflections of a philosophical sort: he must go beyond the surface of his experience, and inquire into the hidden love or hate that rests behind every sensation—he must burrow deep into the ground of his being until he finds what troubles his soul; if this is not done, it is all over with him, for his spirit will have no movement, and his heart will stagnate at the most common sensations and not see the divinity within them.

A man with every material pleasure but no wisdom is a happy beast. A man with no material pleasures (or very little) but much wisdom is a philosopher. A man with both may rightly be called a second Solomon, and this should come as no surprise, for wisdom allows you to see the vanity in all material pleasures but also gives you the mind to make the most out of those pleasures. On this point Schopenhauer, as always, is supreme:

Ignorance is degrading only when found in company with riches. The poor man is restrained by poverty and need: labor occupies his thoughts, and takes the place of knowledge. But rich men who are ignorant live for their lusts only, and are like the beasts of the field; as may be seen every day: and they can also be reproached for not having used wealth and leisure for that which gives them their greatest value. —On Books and Reading.

As one can see, it’s the intellectual development of an individual that matters, that raises their soul to a higher level than it presently is. A man with riches but no intelligence is no better than a herd animal. It’s not the riches which make the man but how he carries himself in a world where his life means very little in the grand scheme of things. How you resolve to move through life knowing you’re already dead is really the mark of a tremendous mind, and, I should add, an extremely moral one too. An existential philosopher may be described as someone who understands the importance of their own consciousness.

Life is incomparable. We human beings are truly unworthy of the task of unraveling the mysteries of it; even if it had no mystery ultimately, we would still ascribe to it a mystery for no other reason than out of our ignorance. This very thing which we call life—this ever-present fact of consciousness—is tremendous; indeed, that we can comprehend all of it in the manner we do is indescribable. Without this comprehensive capacity, there would be nothing. All the world would lose its beauty, and no culture would be possible, for we would be unable to see the grandeur that lies before every sensation of Earth. Life for man, as far as I’m concerned, is only important given how well he can make use of his time; if it is spent on a thing not in line with his nature, he will be miserable, and if it is, he will be cheerful.

The whole of a man’s life can be summarized as the collection of events which played out in time from his birth till death, but as one can see, this doesn’t paint a full picture, only giving the outlines of an existence. What a man does, however, is what matters. Not necessarily what he does for a living—as nearly everyone today is concerned with, once again revealing how narrow-minded and uncultured we are—but what he does with his time in general.

A man may do nothing or everything, but to most he’ll still be just another guy eking out a living—not praised highly at all; but if a man makes not only a good living for himself but for those around him, he is great, and if he makes a good living for the whole world, then he deserves to go down in history like Shakespeare, Goethe, Mozart, and Beethoven. How does a man achieve this status of greatness though? By becoming wise, that is, by acquiring wisdom.

Wisdom is nothing more than an intuition about life that concerns the individual—an intuition about how a person should act according to what is in them as individuals given the situation they’re faced with. It’s all ultimately about upliftment, or as Kierkegaard called it upbuilding; an uplifting of the soul in order to see the spirit which dwells upon the Earth. A man must see what’s beyond him if he’s ever to think of the world outside of his immediate experience; that’s what it means to be existential—to anchor yourself to something which you cannot see yourself, but which you feel completely, and which upholds you even in the worst of moments. To continuously look for what anchors life, that is the goal of all good philosophy in my book—and is perhaps the most important question which a man can ask himself.

Man is the continuously seeking creature, never satisfied, always wanting more—in that drive, however, is all that we are, and is what makes us great.

Family

Families are all alike in that their happiness is bound in love, and that their unhappiness is always unique to themselves.

I struggled mightily to come up with that first sentence. I’m utterly perplexed by the subject of this essay, in fact, for the family has always been so intuitive to me as a concept that to feel the need to say anything on it seemed a waste of time. When looking into the history of the family, however, and finding that the origins of it have been of great interest to many people all throughout history—to say nothing of how different the original family units were—I supposed it a subject with more depth than it originally let on.

Families arose originally out of a need to establish a lineage: a map of relations that could reveal who was related to whom—and in the case of tribes, who would take over after the leader died. It was for this reason that many have theorized the first hunter-gatherer tribes were matriarchal rather than patriarchal; you could always tell who the mother of a child was, but not necessarily the father.

When the change took place is hard to date, but many have suggested that once agriculture became integrated into human social organization—and, as a result, led to the creation of civilizations—it was no longer necessary for women to be at the head of the family structure, since men were away from their wives far less—thanks to food being grown rather than hunted for—and thus made paternity more certain. It should also come as no surprise that once men took control, women were considered inferior—and this lasted for millennia, the effects of which we still feel in modern misogyny which, I’m afraid to say, has gained in popularity in the past few years.

To reiterate, the ancients viewed relationships primarily through a genealogical lens. What was important wasn’t love, commitment, fidelity, or even honesty, but strict hierarchy—order, if you will; a kind of order that made it very easy to determine who was to inherit the kingdom after the leader died. More often than not, polygamy was practiced, and this is where every famous internal struggle between households was born—out of an inability to determine who was the true heir to the kingdom.

Notice, too, how I’m speaking strictly in terms of hierarchy, and how I’m making reference primarily to lineage among nobility; that’s because the concept of the family as we know it today arose out of the nobility. The first families were essentially formed out of a desire to create dynasties to rule over the lands in which they lived. This was best seen in Ancient Rome, where famous clans (often claiming descent from mythological figures—such as the Gracchi, Fabii, Decii, Drusii, and Marcelli) would intermarry for the sake of consolidating their power, rather than losing a great portion of it through conflict between them.

Marriage was transactional, and so not established in the same way we have it today—again, it was never about love, but power; it was about maintaining status, keeping peace amongst the powerful, and ensuring the continuation of that power indefinitely. Of course, if that be the goal, it’s all doomed from the start, for power can never be sustained by a single person or family or dynasty alone—rather, power comes and goes in waves, and the more powerful the wave, the further it washes onto the shore, and in so doing leaves a greater mark upon the sand.

The family as it was practiced for most of history, like the monarchical principle, is dead—and thank God for that. It should be noted, too, that most cultures throughout history established families after the manner described above, and we still see hints of its barbarism and primitiveness today. For example, getting married today, at least in a Christian context, still carries with it that barbaric connotation of the daughter being property—to be walked down the aisle by the father in order to offer her up to the husband, and in so doing becoming his property, changing her last name to finalize it (traditionally, anyway). The transactional element never left it—in fact, we cannot help but couch it in financial terms.

Insofar as there is any philosophy in the concept of the family, it is only so existentially. In all honesty, I feel the subject is treated better historically, anthropologically, sociologically, or literarily—especially literarily, because there you could delve into the individual psychologies of each character, and in doing so paint a picture of reality in words.

Authors are the real explainers of humanity, because they tell what people are composed of, rather than merely what they’ve done or wish to do. An author knows how to put into words what can, normally, only be understood through personal experience; the greatest authors, for this reason, are often the best at providing description with philosophical insight—at creating correspondences between the characters and the reader. If the words of a writer do not transport you into the setting or psychology they’re writing about, I would scarce be able to call them one—they’re merely scribblers of nonsense, wasters of ink, idlers in the grove of prose, ramblers without wisdom, etc., etc., etc.

Never trust a writer who’s unable to speak his heart honestly. The death of all good prose is faking the spontaneity of it; in seeking to make it look effortless, you overwork it—creating drafts never to be returned to, going against what the heart calls forth from within—and as a result confuse the various sentiments each sentence is trying to convey, and in doing so make what you say ridiculous and pompous rather than simplistic and natural. If a sentence cannot stand on its own—if it could not be turned into a chapter on the beauty or honesty or truthfulness of it alone (as Laurence Sterne was one to do in his Tristram Shandy)—then it is not worth writing at all.

One should write the first thought which arises in their head; from there, write the next thought down, then the other, and the other—not long after that, you have yourself half a page of truthful ideas: from that point, take the mean of that half-page, and organize it so as to make it appear coherent. The hardest part of writing is being able to do this, however: to reconcile the deliberate (careful, thoughtful, rational, preparatory) aspect of it with the spontaneous (clumsy, extemporaneous, irrational, illogical) aspect of it.

The most common piece of advice given throughout all of history on writing is this: have something to say. In my opinion, it’s very fair advice, but it doesn’t address the actual issue implicit within all composition: how does one find something to say, or, better still, if they have something to say, how do they write it so as to make it accurately reflect what their heart wanted it to be?

You see, the deliberate aspect of writing wants you to be constrained, and to write only what is consistent with the last idea written down; but the spontaneous aspect wants you to write as the thoughts appear, which more often than not are conflicting and do not follow from what you just wrote. With this being the case, what is one to do?

This contradiction can only be overcome by doing a mix of both. One has to think deliberately but write spontaneously. You should organize and edit your writings to make them appear concise and deliberate; but you should write them as if none of that mattered at all. You must do both. It cannot be gotten around. If you try to rationalize it, or come up with reasons to justify it to yourself, you’ll find yourself more in contemplation than in writing.

As I’ve already said, write down the ideas as they come—that is the “have something to say” from earlier—and afterwards concern yourself solely with the style and coherence of it; in doing this, you may find yourself moving whole paragraphs around, or, more painfully, having to delete whole sections because they couldn’t be placed anywhere without ruining the flow—such is the fate of many sentences. Above all, the most important thing is simplicity. The shorter the paragraphs, the better—the same is true with chapters in novels. Brevity is the highest mark of genius in a writer.

Never let the deliberate aspect overtake you, for that always leads to writer’s block. Writer’s block is nothing more than a repression of the spontaneous aspect of writing. In my experience, it’s much better to be possessed by spontaneity than rigidity—you write more as a result, and from that you can at least have something to show for all your efforts, rather than staring at a blank page trying to develop a whole paragraph in your head before putting it to paper. Anyone experienced in writing will agree with me that—whether you write by hand, phone, or keyboard—you normally end up changing what you initially thought you were going to say in the act of writing it out. Notice my phrasing here, “in the act of writing it out”; that exact process is where the deliberate and spontaneous aspects of writing collide, negate, and synthesize each other—it’s there that writing actually gets done.

Personally, whenever I start a composition, I have no idea how it is to start or end. In fact, I don’t even give myself an ending to work toward—rather, I set a timer for three hours and hope at the end I’ve said enough of what I think to be satisfied with it from that point forward. The hardest part is always the first sentence, but from that single idea can come a whole composition—it merely depends on how well you’re able to flow spontaneously with that initial inspiration.

Every writing, like every musical impromptu or extemporaneous oration, is really a leap of faith—a leap into the depths of your conscience which, if you haven’t been there before, you have no idea how to navigate the immensity of. It’s for this reason that most people are utterly dumbfounded by the simplest questions you ask them (questions that aren’t commonplace—small talk—or surface level, that is): they’ve never thought about them, because they normally don’t think about anything that isn’t immediately before them, that doesn’t affect them personally, that doesn’t concern someone they know; most people today are totally superficial, and that’s why their talk is so common, vulgar, lame, boring, unintelligent, incoherent, illogical, confused, and everything else—they don’t think at all about anything outside of their egoism, and so they’re more often than not unable to fully appreciate a genius like Goethe or Emerson—to them, it’s merely words on a page; they read in order to comprehend, not to feel, and such is why they’re so uncultured and desirous of narratives not their own. On this point regarding the masses, Schopenhauer makes the following observation:

Meanwhile, hear what Thomas Hood says of them (Up the Rhine): “For a musical people they are the most noisy I ever met with.” That they are so is not due to their being more prone to making a noise than other people, but to their insensibility, which springs from obtuseness; they are not disturbed by it in reading or thinking, because they do not think; they only smoke, which is their substitute for thought. —On Noise.

Alas, a substitute for thought has always been what the majority secretly want—they’d die before thinking for themselves on any matter, even existential matters that concern them and them alone.

In writing, an author must strive to say only what is true for them, for in that they speak for all mankind. True genius in writing is saying something that could be applied to everyone living today. That’s why the ancients are still so revered today, even though the age in which people read them during their leisure hours is long gone, and probably never returning.

I think we ought to return to the topic of family, however.

Not being so good as to openly show my affection toward my family, my love is very deep for them nonetheless. Though all my misery at present stems from them, so too did my birth, and so, on that account alone, I feel I owe an eternal debt of gratitude.

I’m only as great as I am thanks to my family. I am born from them, and shall die being a descendant of them. I’m quite pleased with how family life seems presently overall, however.

I suppose no family life could be perfect—if all were, where would literature come from?

I find in reflecting upon all my past miseries—again, caused entirely by my family—that, if it weren’t for those experiences, I would not have fallen in love with the things I have, and in that sense would not have come as far as I have with respect to all my interests.

In order to get over all that was done to me, I threw myself entirely at all that was important and necessary for me, and in doing so have become quite competent in many aspects of life which I wanted to be. I know all of it doesn’t seem like much, especially considering my age, but I feel the process of working hard and overcoming my ignorance for the sake of them (my interests) was itself a very necessary aspect of my character development. I owe everything to my family, including the leisure they afford me now to work out my thoughts on every aspect of life, philosophically at least, before actually entering into it. On this account, again, I owe them my very soul.

Though I’m not a family man myself—and at present have no intentions of ever starting one—I do understand that family, for most people, is all they have (all they have as an activity which gives them meaning or a purpose for living, that is)—and so, let the rabble make kids; for Christ’s sake though, raise them yourselves: keep the phone and television away from them for as long as possible; make them love nature; teach them charity, kindness, humility, humbleness, and empathy; and lastly, let them wander through life freely in order that they may discover what they really love in life—and only step in to offer support, guidance, or warning when they’re on the precipice of a bad decision, nothing more, nothing less.

Custom and Convention

Custom is synonymous with habit, and so far as it relates to life will always fall under the banner of convention. Custom is made conventional when it’s adhered to over a long enough time span to be considered inseparable from the actions of the person. In that sense, custom is really a habitual moral that has been practiced for long enough that it becomes ingrained as a necessary aspect of life.

What we make a custom is nothing more than what we value enough to not live without. Life itself is a custom. To live is to give the world value, and in doing so you make the world a more habitual place—that is, you make it more familiar to yourself, and as a result make it more tranquil. Allow the world to flow over you with all its beauty, and in seeing the good within it, place a value upon it, making those sensations the things you constantly return to when you find yourself in a setting or state of mind which has no value for you.

Certain things are natural customs—natural in that we do not purposefully value them, but rather that they’re things we do on account of our nature—like breathing, blinking, and thinking. Others are artificial—artificial in the sense that we’ve been conditioned to do them either from external influences (society, parents, culture) or internal ones—like exercising, tooth-brushing, and saying “bless you” when someone sneezes.

Customs, given that they’re habitual actions, are often associated with particular types of people, and from this fact has given rise to every characterology, archetype, and stereotype imaginable. In this we have every stock character in literature possible. Indeed, it could be argued that every “unique” individual is so only insofar as they’re viewed abstractly, on their own, in the absence of everyone else—the moment a person is placed into a crowd, however, what makes them unique disappears, and they’re made to stand as a number amongst other numbers, instead of as a singular human being with an entire story behind their eyes.

It is for this reason I find crowds terrifying things. That endless mass of humanity rips me from myself, and I begin to feel like a single grain of sand within a massive beach. It’s utterly horrifying how quickly we’re to forget ourselves when surrounded by others. That too is a habit—but one which must be tossed aside and forgotten about.

Conventionality is often derided as a bad thing on account of how commonplace it is, but I find the conservative nature in me wanting to argue on its behalf. Without conventionality there would be no regularity to anything in life. Every day would have a childlike quality to it in that all would seem to appear as if for the first time—and while this sounds great for a creative spirit, the world is run more by calendar and custom than by the fancy of an artist. The world today is practicality embodied, epitomized in every carefully considered decision—from logistics, to coordination, to bookkeeping, to bill paying, to alarm clocks, to arithmetic: all of this is the rational man made triumphant—rationality valued on account of its consistency and delivery.

Where would man be without the pressures of the external world to keep him grounded to the Earth? He would think after his own manner, and on account of his foolishness come to many crazy ideas about how things ought to be, never looking at how things already are. Damn the external world for that though! A man can no more consider the world honestly today than a pigeon can play chess. We’re not allowed to transcend the external world even in our imagination. The best we can do is affirm a restrictive realism, a boring, boilerplate methodology of viewing reality—seeing everything in terms of its quantifiability only, and never seeing the uniqueness in experience. What should be common is seeing the uncommon in the everyday. We should all make the unconventional conventional—because what modernity promotes as appropriate for life is really anti-life: it’s calculated and processed, already figured out and made strictly for utility and quick entertainment only.

Where has all the fun gone? It’s been dead for a long time, I’m sorry to say; replaced by a lifeless replica that could never simulate what the real thing did. What’s considered fun today is escaping reality; really, all that means is being able to forget the realism of the world for a moment, and, in a sense, seeing everything like a child again—imagining things for the sake of it, and finding every experience in life, even the unpleasant ones, as interesting opportunities to learn from. One must remember that there are no mistakes in life, only happy accidents; happy in the sense that there’s potential to grow from them. Without this happy view of life all you’re left with is a cold, crude pragmatism—a pragmatism without any soul, without any individuality, without any subjectivity. Such a world views truth as something to uncover from an experiment, rather than something to create for yourself from your own experience.

Custom today is programmed and artificially enhanced rather than organically grown from within our own souls.

On an individual level, custom is necessary so as to remain consistent in our habits (in order that we may find ourselves doing something productive with our time and beneficial to ourselves); but on a societal level, especially taken to the extent it is today, it’s very hard to look at societal customs and consider them as anything but monstrous. They destroy creativity, stifle free thought, and turn the making of habits and routines for man into the very point of his existence. Man’s teleology today is to question nothing, agree with everything, and make the only ambition that of quantifying every experience. The end of custom in modernity is to value those things which make you more indistinguishable from everyone else.

This is why the modern world can be said to have no real culture outside of avarice and commodified entertainment designed to be consumable and easily forgettable. There’s hardly any depth to anything today because depth is actively discouraged. It’s as if society at large is performing a type of artificial selection—selecting only those attributes within people which are highly agreeable, conflict-avoidant, low in openness, and conscientious to an abnormal degree; in a sense, making everything so ordered and rigid that any deviation from it would risk collapsing the entire system.

This is a rod which we have fashioned for ourselves, and now we’re using it to flagellate those who go against the system. It’s as if we’ve all collectively agreed to do nothing purposefully in order to maintain the order and stability we have now—even if that order and stability is leading us right off a cliff. This is how modernity dies, not boldly and confidently but cowardly and sickly—decadently is perhaps a better word. We’ve all become so averse to adversity with respect to the world at large that we would rather have our entire culture sacrificed than do anything ourselves to actually make that change come about; it’s as if we’re trying to make change by remaining in stasis, and having time do the work for us; these people forget that history and culture are byproducts of humanity, products of human effort and ingenuity, not products of passing epochs only.

It’s ironic too, because the impulse to value “reasonable” customs—or numerical deductions drawn from evidence from a variety of sources—was a product of the Enlightenment itself. It was the Enlightenment’s attempt to place man in control of nature by valuing only that which could uncover what nature is: in making everything quantifiable, it was thought possible for man to subject the world around him to his will—in extracting all the data from reality scientifically, it was thought all could be known, and thus a utopia could be built on Earth from facts alone. It was modern man’s first attempt to overcome nature, in the same way man, centuries earlier, tried to overcome nature spiritually through religion.

Every few centuries, man tries to overcome the world using what the zeitgeist thought was the most effective tool. More often than not, however, it’s a byproduct of our ignorance to assume our tools are capable of uncovering what the world is—let alone to know how to interpret it. Our values are decadent precisely because we still cling to this notion of truth—we still believe there’s something out there for us to uncover, something real and supposedly very powerful; and in this uncovering, we have been quite successful—just look at how far science and medicine have advanced since the 1800s—but this success is what we suffer from today, for we have lost all humility and scale with respect to how far our instruments and methods may probe into nature.

To reiterate, our values today are, in a word, scientific—and the reason is on account of their actual success, but this success is only so in one respect, but not in all respects, and it is here where our modern values fail us. We’ve all been left so awestruck by the success of science, and the scientific method more broadly, that we’ve left all things to it and it alone, not realizing that in doing this we would find ourselves confronted with problems—primarily existential—that science could never provide us an answer for. This is the problem with narrow thinking: it leads you to assume, incorrectly, that all things could be solved with the same approach, even if the effective method works only under restrictive conditions. The whole world at present seems to be caught in one giant category fallacy, claiming science as having the answer for all things: from historiography, to philosophy, to economics, to sociology, and even to politics—dear God, could you imagine a purely scientific politics!—as if science had anything to do with any of those subjects.

The customs of today are really the customs of what we thought worked in the past. But history is forgotten every generation, it seems, and so every lesson that was learned has to be relearned the very next generation. Nothing new lies under the sun, but we humans have a way of forgetting everything so thoroughly that all which the sun shines on may as well be looked at for the first time. What we value becomes what we do, and in doing we make customs that go on to become traditions after long enough.

It would be nice if rationality were tethered with wisdom, but because man is so confused in his approach to valuing things, and because he is so easily manipulated by circumstance and biased reasoning, he more often than not goes astray in everything that is demanded of him intellectually. Also, because the average person is not intellectual they will find thinking for themselves a very foreign concept, and so, like a child, adopt whatever narrative they’re exposed to rather than arriving at one for themselves. Hence why trying to find culture among the masses is like trying to find diamonds in a dunghill.

For an intellectual, the highest value isn’t knowledge, or even wisdom, but thinking itself. For a man to adopt this, however, he must first renounce all his past idols of worship, in order to build himself up anew, and usher in a new era for his own individuality. This is nothing new. This is Nietzsche’s transvaluation of all values. What man needs today is enough confidence within himself to look upon the old customs and conventions with scorn and contempt—deep contempt: hatred even! Man needs to overcome. The values we cling to must be shot off a cliff, and our new values must be so strong and impenetrable that any future values that come against them will in no way alter them—like firing a bullet into a mountain.

All that we suffer today is downstream from our sickly values. Decadence will forever be the norm so long as we think changing our values is harder than suffering them. People internalize their narratives to the point of making them seem unalterable, and when confronted with disappointments in reality they blame themselves rather than the sick mentality they’ve adopted which got them there in the first place. This is the way of the world presently. It is unfortunate, and it was avoidable, but I suppose you can’t blame a cow for chewing its cud. Man will forever be decadent, and die happily in his decadence, so long as he believes that value was his liberation. And so it is with our current customs and conventions.

Labor

Labor finds a place in all men’s hearts, for it is through it that they live at all. It is also for this reason that it often comes under their censure, for labor is difficult but necessary—and very few men like the idea of having to work at something even when their lives depend upon it.

Sloth is the common sin of every ambitious person, for our energy is so slight in comparison to the tasks we set for ourselves that more often than not we use our human frailties against our goals, and justify our laziness from our natural tendency to forgo the labor necessary for them to be put into action. If labor were not necessary for anything, in that all our needs would be taken care of by something other than ourselves, mankind would find itself in the midst of some utopia. Alas—with this not being the case, man is so made as to live on with the hope that all his labor will come of something, and even if he knows it will provide for nothing aside from his own subsistence, he will happily live on either from faith, habit, or responsibility.

The simple man lives best, for his wants are few and his necessities are not beyond the limits of his nature. Very few men achieve what they want in life, but most, at the end of it, are satisfied usually with having had the courage to live as long as they have. Life must forever be sustained through an effort on behalf of it in order to live. To live is to labor, and to labor is to use power for the sake of achieving a desired end—to obtain a certain thing which was valued on behalf of an impulse which we were not privy to but which controlled us nonetheless; in that sense, labor is the expression of power in the external world, and hence comes all our actions and future drives unbeknownst to us.

To be successful is really a kind of tragedy. The vanity of man is such that no matter how successful or accomplished he becomes in the world, he will always find something to gripe about, something which he feels is lacking within his life—and on account of this feeling would willingly make himself miserable in order to know what it is like to be a failure once again.

Most people who become successful (in the colloquial meaning of that term at least—which is really to say financially) do so on account of a constant sense of dissatisfaction with themselves in the world; they work harder than anyone in order to ensure their labor brings them what they want; and what they want in this life more than anything else is to rid themselves of feeling like a failure. This constant self-flagellation eventually does land them success, but because they’ve made that the whole point of their life—to no longer feel like a failure by finally accomplishing something great—they’re made to suffer from having finally achieved their goal.

It reminds me of Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. The same is true with man’s ideas regarding his happiness. The moment he thinks he discovers what will make him happy, he labors on behalf of it until it is achieved—but the moment it is achieved, he loses the drive that compelled him to live, and in so doing is made distraught and fears this present void which now faces him. If a desire is made the justification for life, the moment it’s fulfilled, all meaning and purpose vanish into air, and the more you feel life has cheated you by making you believe a lie that was touted as truth.

But the vanity in man is even more vexing than that, because in the process of accomplishing a desire, you’re actually made to believe that the whole of life consists in laboring towards its end—in a sense making it seem like the truth of life is the labor done on behalf of it, but this is false. Labor alone can never be the end of life itself: only meaningful labor—labor on behalf of things which are valued not out of vanity but out of meaning—can be considered a true end. Life takes on endless forms and reveals itself in innumerable varieties. With such being the case, it’s no wonder every man who contemplates the fate of his labor when considered from the perspective of the universe finds all to be for naught—his every action suddenly becomes distasteful to him, on account of his valuing those things which in comparison to infinity are nothing.

I say again, to achieve a labor is really a kind of tragedy. Man knows labor only in the context of his subsistence and maintenance, but when considered existentially—from a philosophical perspective that is—man finds all his reasons for living circular, groundless, and failing the slightest tests of scrutiny. It’s a very troubling thought: that all our lives are spent in labor on behalf of nothing but ourselves, and in this are made miserable the moment we’ve achieved enough success to no longer labor for the sake of life; all things follow this path perversely, for the ends of life are not eternal but material, and on account of their transitoriness are made to fall into oblivion the moment we pass away.

It’s seemingly always been the case that if a man cannot affirm himself objectively, that is, eternally and with complete assurance, he is made to feel the remoteness and smallness of his being totally, and as a result is made scared by how empty his life suddenly becomes from this perspective. Thus, man adopts faith, or proclaims himself the only “true” moral arbiter—the only honest judge of life, the only singular individual: his subjectivity is made the whole of his life—for it’s considered the totality of his being, without which his identity would drop dead—and as a result must strive to find all things in life meaningful from his personal perspective alone, hopefully with as little influence from others as possible, for that only corrupts the purity and honesty of his own individuality.

Our new faith today is no longer religious but egoistic, and spiritually lacking in all regards. The whole of man must turn in agony at the thought of all these competing drives, all these conflicting and contradicting positions, not finding a true place in his heart; having no repose in anything he thinks regarding life, man makes labor a substitute for thinking—and this is why the common folk appear so content and jovial even when their labor affords them no rest from material struggle; they view material struggle like a spiritual struggle, and are thus empowered by the thought of having to work with no rest all their life in order to sustain it—in the same way an intellectual or philosophical man labors all their life to find a meaning to life, as if it had an answer to it that was unchanging, eternal, and true for all times. Both are excruciating, but both are necessary labors for the sake of life.

An intellectual may find much wisdom in the simplicity of the poor, but the poor will never find anything in the ideas of an intellectual; because they do not think through life in a strictly rational manner, they know in an intuitive sense when the intellectual is lying to themselves in order to justify what they ultimately cannot, and so they spot in full clearness all the fallacies and sleight-of-hand deliberately employed to muddy the truth of their heart, which the brain always strives to override with reason and rationality.

Reason and rationality have done very little for man existentially, and such is why they ring so hollow whenever someone offers consolation to a suffering man in the manner of a reasonable proposition; things subjective will never be overcome through objective (rational) means—unless, that is, you’re the kind of person who finds meaning strictly in being right, or having the most logical and evidential position to hold to, which, if that’s the case, more power to you, but remember, you’ll never find final answers that way. If you live life only seeking final answers, you’ll surely be disappointed. You come to reason with the hope of placing a yoke on life, in order that you may control the movement of its direction, and in doing so have your rationality tread out the whole field of existence, finding nothing but a few dead roots, made so by the lack of water from the spring of life.

This is the life of modern man, heavy with labor but light in reflections upon the purpose of it. The purpose is often arrived at when you realize how little there is to really reflect upon. That’s the hard truth of it. It’s a truth an intellectual, a rational man who fears contradiction like the plague, could never arrive at on his own; it’s something he must arrive at himself, because it’s something that reason can never arrive at on its own—only an existential philosopher could affirm faith and dread reason at the same time; you must be able to do both, for without both, life is merely a circle of confusion whose circumference increases in proportion to our ignorance of it.

Wise things are often said but very few truly listen, and this is because most wise things are either platitudes we’ve heard before, or are things which seem absurd on the face of them. Absurdity, however, is what comprises the whole of life. Yes, without question! Life is an absurdity, precisely because we can have no answer to it that is final, and so must always live knowing in the back of our minds that what we think regarding it—what we consider final in it—is really only our temporary conclusions, but never the final one. That is why a man can only know what he has become in the final moments of his life, rather than at the start of his life, or midway into life in the midst of his most successful stride career-wise.

I tend to find the most comforting thought in life that which reminds me how soon it will be over, but how far away that is from me presently. Life is a dream, death is an awakening. Where love is, there too is God. All my labors on behalf of life have only ever been done for the sake of discovering within myself that immovable rock upon which to found my church. My skill in composition, my knowledge in history, my command of all philosophical schools of thought, my charm, my shyness, my introversion, my introspection, my consistency, my honesty, my love, my hate—in short, my life—has all been done on its behalf, for the sake of discovering where the love is amidst so much incontrovertible misery and suffering. Surrounded on all sides by undeniable meaninglessness, I had to make for myself a light by which to shine upon the whole world, in order that I may not forget what is important to me personally, so that I can affirm life in the end and look upon all things with a smile and say to myself, “It is good.”

Thinking is a kind of labor much like consummation, at least to an intellectual—but unlike consummation, there’s very little enjoyment in thinking whenever life is touched; the moment someone becomes existential in their perspective, they instantly seem to adopt a cold or reserved countenance, for life is a grave subject, upon which no epitaph can ever be sufficient to represent it in its whole totality.

The absurdity of everything in life is born in the fact of its self-evidentness to everyone who lives; without life there would be no reason, and so no conception of life itself, thus rendering life a meaningless conception to anything not living—at least in an existential sense. Such is why the ancients were wont to ascribe a metaphysical aspect to all things, thinking all things on Earth must be living in the same way we human beings live. We can never overcome ourselves except in death, but we can move beyond ourselves while we live by making the direction of all our actions that of power—a power powerful enough to give the whole of life meaning, to transcend the absurdity of it, to reject nihilism and embrace existence in full. Nothing is more powerful than an individual who knows themselves—who knows the task that is before them, and who, in looking upon it, hasn’t the slightest indication of fear at all with respect to it.

Whenever man thinks of labor with respect to life, he always does so with respect to himself, and this is because so long as he must expend energy in maintaining himself, he’ll always find something to labor upon. Labor’s size is comparable only with the passions of man, and that’s why it’s nearly infinite in size. One must look upon life from an infinite perspective if it’s to have any semblance of coherence; but at the same time one must beware not to venture too far into the abyss of life, for it’s hard to return from without falling into nihilism. If only it were possible to live without reflection, without feeling the need to subject everything to correction and modification on account of its success or not: in short, if only it were possible to live on instinct alone—then suddenly all would come into focus, and I would find myself living not as I wish but only as I will, and nothing more.

Often these consolations arise in my mind whenever I feel I’ve discoursed enough on life and seek to forget about it so as to return to it with new vitality and vigor; alas, this is temporary like all things, and is in the end as useful to me as writing only to burn the paper is to a writer—but given everything considered so far, I would like to think it would resonate with some people troubled and afflicted with the same mental anguish as I am. This damnable anguish on behalf of our desire to subject the whole universe to our reason, to find the why behind everything, to leave no secret unknown, to die having known that all was uncovered by you and you alone. That is the state of my ambitions. Indeed, this whole work was undertaken with the hope that somewhere along the way I would discover how pointless and meaningless all my labors on behalf of life—for the sake of understanding it in its totality, that is—really are.

I suppose I now see my work for what it really is—just another man’s attempts at comprehending life in as systematic a way as reason could allow. But what of me after this work? What is to become of me after this great labor? I suppose, in that particular case, all my labors and expositions are like dirty rags, worthless in the presence of life itself; such is why I suspect I have yet to truly live life after the manner of a true laborer, a person who courts off a third of their day for the sake of sustaining themselves in it. That’s what modernity has considered life anyway, and in spite of it being heartless and pointless in the highest regard—for, again, life cannot be an end in itself without making it instantly meaningless—it still commands a slight amount of respect, not for what it is or what it does but on account of its presence—a presence so powerful that all assent to it without even remote pushback.

Our desires or necessities are considered mandatory by us insofar as we feel they’re prerequisites to action—that is, required to go into effect in order for us to begin acting in the world. We all play our parts, some more than others, but overall we play at least a little; we even play when we see no point, out of nothing more than boredom. William Shakespeare said it best:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. —As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII.

While I wouldn’t have used seven to number the total stages on life’s way personally, I would’ve numbered it nonetheless—but perhaps only with three, or two, or maybe only one stage on life’s way—that of life itself, or life and death, or life, death, and the absurdity in between.

The good, the bad, and the ugly of life are all that we’re granted while we live. It’s very common for those who think much on life to consider it meaningless and absurd in the end, and perhaps the hardcore rationalist realist has a point here, but I can see no reason, personally, to live if life weren’t able to be affirmed in all its contradictions. I often think that those who reduce life to the point of making it the sum of only a few of its parts have only ever seen life through the lens of what their present concerns are.

Every so-called responsibility is really a self-justification for not experimenting with life, being too scared of the consequences that may result from it all going wrong. That’s one of the main reasons people have kids, after all: they want to give their life meaning the easy way. By bringing another life into the world, you forgo your own egoism and turn it into a pure form of individualism—that is, living for yourself for the sake of another, not purely for yourself alone. It’s much easier to have a child, I would suspect, than it is to discover the meaning of life philosophically.

Everything regarding life has already been thought by another; every supposedly new revelation we have regarding the point of existence is really just some old consideration dressed in new garb. If all we thought regarding life were true, then all would seem absurd—and to be fair, all is absurd, but not in the way most people mean it. It’s not absurd because all is true, but it’s absurd because we assumed that the truth of it is what really gives it power, rather than merely thinking the thought itself. The thought itself is what is powerful. The labor done in having considered some aspect of the world is great, but greater still is our vanity in assuming that it had validity outside of us. This cannot be helped, I suppose, for so long as man thinks it his duty to arrive at the truth rather than make up his own truths for the sake of his life, he will forever hold to this decadent value—a value fit only for the narrow-minded and presuppositionalist.

Create your own life in the act of living it. That is where all our labor must be dedicated. Anyone who lives outside of themselves will only ever see their shadow in the mirror rather than their true image. Philosophy has been around for a long time, and so those who enter into the study of life—rather than into the living of it—find all the philosopher’s theories about it worthless, and rightfully so. There’s only so much a man with real experience can take hearing someone whose only knowledge was arrived at through theory. Theory not grounded in experience—in life, that is—is useless and empty talk. Everything is empty if it is not seen existentially, in the light of perspectivism.

What we call life is only the temporary awareness of our conscious labors for the sake of maintaining it. All organic life-forms such as ourselves are destined to die. We live in order to die, and all of man’s attempts to justify his existence fall to the ground when reality presses the truth of itself on everyone. Existence is fickle; we are short-lived; all shall fall into the abyss of oblivion never to return, and the universe itself shall one day die. So be it—live anyway! That’s really the only labor we should ever commit ourselves to wholeheartedly: living life itself.

Wealth

So long as there is an uneasy class, a class which has not its just power, it will rashly clutch and blindly believe the notion that all men should have the same power. —Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution.

Wealth is an abundance of a commodity which is valued not just by yourself but by the culture at large. Wealth is nothing more than a moral evaluation in that sense. What is often considered as wealth today is understood strictly in financial terms, but that is not my fault. Our society has become so decadent that it can’t see wealth in any other context but that of money. This idea has become so ingrained in our collective psyche, in fact, that it’s almost impossible to speak of wealth today and not have our minds instantly filled with images of large piles of cash or mountains of gold. It’s for this reason that there’s very little philosophical content in the concept of wealth—for it’s already been taken over by economists, bankers, financiers, accountants, asset managers, and quants.

Whatever existential speculation lay hidden in wealth has long been driven from it, and it has been so thoroughly cleansed of any morality that those with money think themselves above everyone else. Such is the power of moral evaluations: they could make a whole society turn against itself, against its own best interests—so long as a sense of order and consistency is provided; in other words, if it meant those in power could be given greater control of the reins in order to crack down on the majority and maintain the status quo by any means necessary. The herd has always been willing to take order over chaos, even if that order meant keeping them poor, hungry, and unable to rise beyond their material conditions.

Such is the way of the world, always to be governed by the herd—even those with power are herd-like, for they still capitulate to the will of the majority, a thing nobody believes in theory but which we all go out of our way to ensure works in practice: monstrous order!

A tyranny of order is really all it is. It’s self-made dependence on a societal scale—a world scale, in fact. Every nation on Earth has seemingly become so captured by wealth and big business—privatization, in a word—that it’s easier to envision the end of the world than a world in which wealth and big business do not exist. The very necessities of life are captured and controlled by asset managers, people who couldn’t care less about the lives they could easily immiserate on account of their stinginess or spitefulness.

The world is one long chain of logistics thanks to globalization and free trade, and everyone has become so dependent on everyone else that the power of nations will sway like the business cycle so long as the capitalist mode of production is the a priori assumption agreed upon by every country—as if it were a mathematical axiom, except in this case that axiom leads to inequality and endless avarice. The world is wicked precisely because it has been captured by wealth in this manner. Everyone is vying for a smaller and smaller cut of the pie as the years go on, and in doing so raises the competition needlessly and sparks more outrage and distrust among the workers.

When you step away from it all for a second and take in the full depravity of it, you see how false it all is, and how artificial and phony everything is deliberately designed to be—an endless cycle of hours worked, meals eaten, hours slept, and wrinkles added. For what end is all of this? Shhhhhhhh! You’re not supposed to question it. The system wouldn’t like that. I would say I’m shocked, but again, it’s a coffin we made for ourselves and which we sleep in every day, merely waiting for the last day to come—with the hard part already done, all we’ll need is a plot of earth in which to be buried. That’ll be the end of the system as we know it, and perhaps of mankind as well.

There’s always an implicit assumption made whenever criticizing the status quo, for people think that to question it seems to imply you’re also questioning the order and stability it provides—and, in a sense, yes and no.

Yes, in the sense that the status quo is only maintained by a collective agreement of its legitimacy, of which the moment this is eroded the whole society quickly plunges into chaos—for the moment supply chains are disrupted and paychecks are no longer processed, things will come apart within weeks.

No, in the sense that the majority does not want to be plunged into chaos and disorder—we simply want the order the status quo provides to be done in a more equitable manner. It’s not that we wish the system to collapse entirely, but rather that we wish for it to be reconsidered and changed—changed so that the majority no longer feel the need to venerate money, to praise greed, to want only what is luxurious and trifling in the end.

Either way we’re damned, because to accept the status quo is to accept the current material conditions, which is the very thing we’re rebelling against; and to reject the status quo is to call upon a revolution, and thus a new era of politics for the world. The world is currently caught up in an abusive relationship. On the one side you’re getting physically assaulted daily, and on the other you’re left without the means to support yourself if you leave. This is the world we’ve built for ourselves. We made it like this. Our cultural values ushered in this era of barbarism, and now to revolt against it threatens an even worse situation than the one currently.

You see, this prophecy has always been self-fulfilling—it could’ve only gone one way, and the way it’s playing out now is precisely what was predicted by men like Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Statistics are more accurate than people would like to believe, and, sadly, in large groups, human nature becomes no different from an electron—its position and momenta are as close to known as is possible to get without complete certainty.

The problem, too, is that change is possible, without question. Most people already agree on what the main issues are, and I would go as far as to say that we also know what the solutions are; it’s not a question of method at this point but rather of will—the will, that is, of overriding our collective indoctrination. People think relying on the masses to spark change is like building a castle on sand, but they forget: under liberalism, the will of the people is sacrosanct—almost all-powerful. The people hold all the power in society, not the asset managers or the billionaire CEOs—most of their power is perceptual, not actual. Their wealth is but numbers on a screen, but they’re not the ones in control of the logistics—the workers are.

Every worker is really a temporary servant fulfilling a contract they’ve agreed to for the sake of being paid for their own subsistence—but take that hierarchical relationship away and what do you have? One versus many. The employees against one boss, or perhaps the boss and their lackeys (the managers). It’s not a question of who would win, though—we all know who really holds the power once the structure of hierarchy is stripped away.

The legitimacy of the power structure is maintained on two things: the threat of individual punishment (which is what legitimizes it), and the threat of broader societal collapse (which is what—supposedly—substantiates it). The latter case is purely theoretical, and therefore of no interest to the practical man who considers these things as they actually appear before him. The former, however, is very much real—for the means by which a person maintains themselves and survives in the world is threatened the instant they’re punished (I really mean here fired) for speaking out against the unfairness and cruelty of the mode of social organization. Like I said earlier, these systems are deliberately designed with power imbalances in them so as to make it that much easier to crush revolts and to deny strikes.

Again, however, all this could be overcome very easily in my opinion—we simply have to remember who’s really in charge, who really holds the power in all iterations of social organization. The people are prevented from claiming their own emancipation out of fear that the moment they do so the system will come down hard on them and ruin their life; and so the desire to simply exist in the system as it is now is carried out through a self-imposed complacency. We’ve internalized our own weakness as individuals in the face of the power structure so thoroughly that we can’t imagine rising up and crushing the infamous chains which repress our spirits and which make our true freedom impossible.

There can never be true freedom so long as man earns his living from another. For those of you who claim modernity is structured so as to maintain order rather than increase fairness or quality of life, I say to you: “Why support such a system? Why bow down to a system that actively limits your freedoms and which would take away more of them if it could get away with it?” Who is bold enough to say that poverty is a great thing, and that suffering for the majority is the goal of every government, so long as those who dish out the suffering do so freely, liberally, within the regulations already set by the government? Is there anyone? Is there one brave soul who would freely agree with such a position—a position which, I believe, will be viewed a century from now in the same way we today view those who were against the emancipation of slaves during the 1800s—with scorn and contempt.

We have to move past our fears by collectively coming together and destroying outright the principle of individual punishment—punishment for speaking out against the systemic cudgel with which we’re repeatedly beaten over the head. To live within the system is to capitulate to it to some extent. There’s no moral consumption under capitalism in an abstract sense; if we all took that principle seriously, we would’ve overthrown the system long ago and replaced it with something more equitable and less degrading.

Alas, these are the dreams of a socialist who would awake to find himself a mere Democrat. All my railings against the system really mean nothing—and I sometimes think shouting into the sky and shaking my fist would be more useful to the cause of socialism than writing an essay on it, trying to awaken class consciousness and solidarity within my readers. I sometimes get the feeling that the working class already know on an intuitive level everything I’ve already said, but again, given how integrated everything is, and how brainwashed everyone is with respect to their relationship with capitalism, maybe the best thing to do is simply read more theory and wait for time to run its course on this corpse of an ideology. I honestly don’t know anymore, to be honest. We’re a long way away from a Eugene V. Debs-type figure ever coming back in American politics. It is not all hopeless, but it certainly seems so—especially with respect to change in a positive direction.

If I may, let me quote Theodore Roosevelt’s Square Deal Speech, for I think the sentiments of it are quite in line with the topic:

The welfare of each of us is dependent fundamentally upon the welfare of all of us, and therefore in public life that man is the best representative of each of us who seeks to do good to each by doing good to all; in other words, whose endeavor it is not to represent any special class and promote merely that class’s selfish interests, but to represent all true and honest men of all sections and all classes and to work for their interests by working for our common country.
[…]
We must treat each man on his worth and merits as a man. We must see that each is given a square deal, because he is entitled to no more and should receive no less.

The life of labor on behalf of obtaining wealth is barbarous so long as no accumulation is possible for those who are paid just enough to pay their bills and expenses only. We sowed the seeds of our own destruction. It’s over with us. Culture is dead, and we have killed it. Nothing shall return. All is defamed. There is no sacredness in anything anymore. What was once holy is now demonized. Let us all die already, in order that we allow for clearer heads to prosper in the future.

In my view, every individual can have a wealth of their own—a wealth outside of money—so long as they have an idea of their own merit and a knowledge of the worth of their own ideas. Our culture, however, is so organized as to place wealth as the highest value, and in this sense makes everything subordinate to it. Thus we have a totally abhorrent system of social relations, and have indoctrinated everyone with the belief that if they’re materially constrained or struggling financially that’s somehow their fault; and as I’ve already said, this kind of thing gets spread throughout the entire culture, so much so that a struggling man in Maine understands everything a struggling man in Montana is going through.

Wealth is the one thing everybody wishes for but which nobody wants to work for. It’s quite a shame, too, because one cannot live today without money, and so wealth is praised all the more because of its necessary status among the common people. These are decadent values which were determined from the start, set by the ruling class and made to be fought over and justified for and against by intellectuals and wannabe politicians. It’s all so tiring, especially when you see how ignorant they all really are. It’s just one name-drop after another, seeing whoever crammed the most number of obscure, slightly related facts to impress dunces—I may as well be presenting a syllogism to a siamang. I hate it all. I really do.

Wealth is more often fallen into than gotten by work. This is a fact which holds true for all of history, and which few today would actually doubt; but, as a seeming law of nature, those who fall into wealth also fall out of it relatively quickly. Those without money but who wish for nothing more than to have a lot of it are almost always hedonists, and so they spend it liberally should they get it (usually from the lottery or some lawsuit), and lose most of it within a year of obtaining it. Wealth is only a means to obtain what one wishes. Since it’s the abstraction of all value, its potential use is infinite, and so those who are unable to find happiness without having a lot of it often go to great lengths to get it—and so naturally fail in proportion to how hard they try to obtain it. Wealth will always be viewed as something admirable so long as people value it.

For myself, I’ve always found wealth the most contemptible thing a man could desire, for, again, those who want it do not value it for its own sake—as intellectuals do knowledge and culture—but for what it can get them: a house, sports cars, women, status in the eyes of other equally avaricious people, food, clothes, a plane ticket to some desired destination, and even an education. Yes, people spend tens of thousands of dollars each year for information they can obtain from the quickest Google search or from their local library. I’m speechless at the stupidity of the world! Wealth poisons everything because it rips the humanity out of every subject and subjugates them to a wretched series of arithmetical calculations: it reduces the most heavenly subjects to a comparison of magnitudes. It’s anti-life, and is only associated with life insofar as it’s necessary to sustain it.

Everybody needs money, but not everybody needs wealth. Wealth is only wanted by those who are too stupid to find other ways of empowering themselves in the world. Any blockhead could go to school for eight years and become a doctor for the sake of a six-figure income—it doesn’t impress me. Show me a man who’s flat broke writing original philosophy and then maybe I’ll be impressed.

As you can probably see, dear reader, wealth is a subject I have no love for, for—living in America—it’s beaten into the minds of everyone that if they don’t treat wealth as a good in its own right there’s something wrong with them, or they’re lazy, or they have few if any worldly ambitions. I’ve always wanted to live my life with very little, for I never found worldly ambition an honorable thing to pursue. I couldn’t care less about how hard a person works, or how much they sacrifice for the sake of their family—I don’t have the same intuitions about life as they do. To me, someone whose whole life is dedicated to supporting their family is a waste. As Arthur Schopenhauer said, “Marrying means to halve one’s rights and double one’s duties.” You can apply the same logic to having children; in fact, it’s worse, for you don’t just halve your rights but divide your rights by how many children you have. This world is maddening, and this obsession we have with wealth is only further proof of how bankrupt, corrupt, decadent, and insipid we all are within it.

Curse wealth to hell, and anyone who sees it as a good.

Institutions of Conflict

State

The state stands before us like a monster in need of decapitation. Though often considered the controller of men’s passions, the state itself is composed of men subject to the same defects as the people it claims to rule over; and so, the instant it imposes any restrictions on what it can and cannot do, it equally applies to itself in that regard. In that sense, a state must have as many limits on itself as it imposes on its inhabitants.

I say again we are confronted by a monster. There’s something vicious in its aspect. Everywhere we turn we are met with it, and no matter how far we run from it—it always finds us, standing there, waiting. Whoever let this unsightly beast into our presence must have been playing us some cruel joke (for the world is full of jokes after all), but I fear this is no joke—for, indeed, this is our reality. What we live in now is the state, and our state is totally upended by what the state thinks is right for us.

The battle between it (the state) and us (ourselves) is tremendous. A battle perhaps incapable of ever being fought, for were we to come to blows, the whole world would go out with us. Fighting is natural as a mode of self-defense, but senseless fighting? What good is that to any man who would like to preserve peace? Peace is really a lie, for what most men mean by it is the ability to overtake an enemy through force—and force is a prophylactic which, as soon as it wears off, returns itself to barbarity. The state presents itself to us calmly, but we know better.

In every impulse to be free is found an impulse to obey. Everywhere we turn we are in chains so long as the conduct of our lives is to be controlled by the state. For every person who would willingly offer their opinion, a thousand others would go along with a narrative. Freedom has, for most of history, been an anomaly—it didn’t even register for the Greeks, who considered the order of man hierarchically. Such being the case, our repression now is merely a new interpretation upon an ancient (barbaric) pretext that finds its place in the heart of every so-called aristocrat. I believe it. By nature there are those who, born in fortunate circumstances, mature in the world thinking themselves superior to others on account of their status and position in the world alone; such is why all these wannabe Übermenschen despise the concept of merit—it would end their delusion of grandeur, which is why they must never afford the commoner the means by which to achieve excellence: they would roll back education and workers’ rights if they could—animals!

In every desire to express what is truly felt, the state has a way of chilling the flame kindled in man’s heart and repressing it with cold indignation; nay, repression offered by the state returns the desire unfulfilled, or, rather, beaten, hanged, drawn, and quartered—killed by death itself. Man must find himself without being himself in the modern state today, and that is why most men are wretched creatures currently: empty souls whose whole life is focused on generating profits for another.

Life in the state today reduces man to only a man: human, all too human for that very reason. One must transcend the merely human by honestly being a human. What is the truest form of freedom offered man today? That of picking between two options—life or death—neither of which satisfies him. It is impossible to live humanly anymore.

Whatever humanity lies hidden within every man today is purposefully kept a secret. Nobody wants to be known by anyone anymore, for everyone feels a sense of competition and insecurity merely by being proximate to others. The sole function of the state—if it may be thought of as an organ for analogy’s sake—is to drive out what little uniqueness and creativity remains in the hearts of men. I know no better form of life denial than the present state of the state—modernity gone berserk, turning a human being into a numerical being, profit-driven and dopamine-deprived. It’s almost hard to stomach the present conditions.

When I look up at the sky and see those giant clouds calmly looking down on me—beckoning me as it were—I begin to see why the state does all it can to drive passion from my heart: this sense, this encounter with reality as it really is, this apprehension of the true truth of the world; all this is so powerful, and so mind-altering, that anyone who gets a taste of it will no longer feel beholden to the dictates of the state. You transcend the state when your own freedom is recognized by only yourself.

One only needs nature to teach them the true gospel of this world: that all is beautiful, that life is worthwhile, that people are fundamentally good (in principle at least), that the state corrupts all, and that each individual is worthy of our love, grace, and charity. I know no more liberating ideal than love conquering all things. The day love triumphs over the world is the day the barbarity inherent in man becomes a vestigial organ—or perhaps more accurately, a vestigial impulse.

The impulse common to all men is survival. That is first and foremost, and was, in fact, the very first impulse—for consciousness, I suspect, was born in man’s realization of his own strife amidst the clutches of reality: in short, his suffering born in his desire to survive till the next day.

After self-preservation comes preservation for those other than ourselves. Here lies the origin of all community, and in this is also born strife between men existentially—that is, man against man for things other than survival. The egoistic perspective was first formed after the bare necessities were established consistently enough to no longer have nature as the only controller of our passions. From this point on it was a battle of wills. The will of man was determined by the strength of his individual will: whether by force, cunning, or strategy, it mattered not, so long as one was made the clear victor by the end of it.

The state, in that sense, was and is formed around the implicit agreement made between the two parties (the rulers and the ruled) that one is clearly stronger than the other. This is the most conniving aspect of the state: that its power is implicit rather than explicit, and so it gives the inhabitants a false impression of who is really in charge—the people in theory, the rulers in practice. The goal of statecraft (politics), in my view, is to turn that reality on its head: in practice the people should always have the power. On this point, I wish to be anti-aristocratic and say that the majority—herd values and all—should be given the reins of power, in order that positive change may come their way for once in their life.

Mankind must achieve full freedom, not maximize freedom for only a select few on the backs of those who really want the same thing. It has always struck me as odd that a wealthy person would willingly live in a nation that has homeless people—a nation wealthy enough to house, clothe, and feed every one of its citizens many times over. Those who would want the exact opposite—those who want a return of barbarism and slavery more or less—have a psychology that understands the language of power only, and couches its language in terms of power only—on account of the belief that it’s objective, or true without doubt—but has no real concept of love for others: it only sees the other as something to be overcome, rather than making themselves the only thing that should be overcome. It is competition strictly for the sake of dominating another. Worthless!

Where there’s no love there can hardly be a state at all, for without love a state is nothing but a senseless accident of mutualism—a very precarious thing which can just as easily fall into parasitism and barbarity.

The element of power must always pervade throughout the state. The state can be structured, however, in such a way that changes the drives which influence the motive of power. If the motive of power is influenced, then the final action taken will be different than what it would have been originally. All human actions are motivated by a certain moral impulse from within. Here it is made obvious that all actions are ethical—as well as being subjective—and as such are made manipulable and liable to change depending on external and internal factors. Those that argue for freedom will always do so post hoc; that is, they justify the conclusion already believing in it. In that sense, they weren’t really free, but rather made a slave to the idea of their own freedom. That’s the power of freedom: it can make you argue we don’t have any. In fact, that is the highest form of freedom in my view: being able to argue against it—to argue you really have no free will at all.

Anybody with a word on the matter must really shut themselves up forever when they find all their arguments for freedom don’t compel a man who sees every argument for it as merely a reaction or undirected impulse against the absence of it. The source of our freedom really emanates from a source unknown to the defender of freedom. Whoever says “freedom” really says “lie,” for what they proclaim on account of their experience can never get them to freedom itself; they apprehend the quality of a “free” experience, and on that account strive to make it substantiated in the world by asserting it must be prior to them by reason of it being embodied in them, in so doing making freedom metaphysically necessary to man.

Freedom, as it is understood by most today, is an aspect implicit in consciousness—for to be conscious implies you’re free to the extent that your awareness will allow you to be (you have to be conscious in order to be aware of your own freedom); but everyone forgets that freedom itself is conditioned by external forces which you are not free to control, and as a result can never be derived freely—that is, from its own experience—without being circular.

I’ve always wondered why philosophers, in seemingly every age, have tried to provide reasons for the positions they hold by grounding those reasons in things outside of prejudice. Every time an argument is put forth that contradicts a man’s philosophical position, he will gladly run through a litany of logical fallacies (formal and informal) which all somehow dismantle the validity of the opposing assertion. But what empowers the assertion? Reason? Validity? Truth perhaps? No! None of these things. Drive. Impulse. Will. Power. Yes! Power and power alone. “Thy power be done” is really what should be said instead of will, for will is merely the name ascribed to a multitude of powers—all drives which seek to dominate one another, the winning drive being expressed in action. And to think, people assume this expressed action as something done freely.

What does freedom even mean? Not colloquially but philosophically. Freedom is a farce colloquially. Philosophically—merely pedantic. It may be said that freedom is simply a type of liberation in which the actions are free subjectively, but objectively forever mysterious. Freedom as a concept falls flat the moment you recall all the accidents that occurred to you that led you to where you are presently. One mistake and you would’ve been done for in all likelihood. I leave it to the philosophers to argue over things like compatibilism. For someone like myself, all the puffed-up jargon spewed forth by philosophers gives me an indication of their stupidity only.

I will never find the stupidity of man shocking. The times are ripe for blasphemy against the strong, and the overcoming of the meek over the powerful. Even if there was free will, most of mankind would throw it away in ignorance.

The domination of man by the state is established on the disparity of powers; and one must never forget that power is a value, much like kindness or charity. And so, modern man, sickly in his values (disparaging his own power), preaching only love and love alone, can never get anywhere against the state, and the reason is all too obvious to those privy to the plays of power: modern man does not value his values highly enough—that is, does not respect the drives which influence him.

The most clear sign of a modern man is moderation with respect to his desires. No impulse is carried out without first offering it up as a sacrifice to reason. In this sense, no man can act as he truly wishes, for he understands on an intuitive level that his actions will be checked by another, and as a result must be subject to another person’s power. Now imagine this but on a national scale, and at once do you see what I refer to: the state is the ultimate decider or judge with respect to what is good for man’s conscience to carry out. Freedom is thus made subject to everything but yourself. Do you see now why I find it difficult to take seriously?

Every drive made subject to the power of the state is to be made, through its judicial branch, illegal should it interfere with the state’s power. The concept of law itself disproves freedom, for every statute is written in the hope that people will not break them—seemingly to imply that the will of man is strong enough to resist crime so long as he is free not to commit any, but when has man ever lived in such conditions which confer on him perpetual peace?

Again, laws are compiled in digest on the assumption that lawyers will use them to prove their guilty client innocent; as is the case with such things, there is much trickery, slyness, and a torrent of lies constantly promulgated out into the world.

You must see by now how the state schemes. Everything is merely for show with them. They lie and do what they must in order to maintain their power, all the while we weaklings tell the truth and as a result suffer what we must at the hands of the strong. Things are rigged from the beginning, and nobody bats an eye at how large the gap is between the average citizen and a state in terms of power. This is why I say that citizens must become more wicked and more full of ambition if their demands for change are to be actually realized.

The organization of moral impulses is established by the state, and it quells all resistance simply by labeling all that is against its will as bad—maintaining it through nothing more than the monopoly it has on violence, the most primitive of all instincts, and for that reason the strongest. In this labeling, however, is found an evaluation of weakness; the truly strong would not need to regulate the impulses of others in order to feel safe. This is why even the supposedly strong in the state currently are really weak, for they would never be bold enough to enforce their will alone.

Will, in so far as it has any power at all, is most felt on an individual basis—and this sense gradually weakens the broader one’s view becomes, the more one enters into culture at large and sees what the herd values overall. Culture at all moments is merely the sum of values contained within it: make a society worship nothing but wealth and the power it gives you, and what do you have? America.

The state is established by the people, but those same people are considered enemies within it so long as they exercise their will contrary to what is expected. Hence the origin of all herd values: the impulse to obey, to live according to reason, and to repress as much as possible any sense of instinct—that is, honest evaluations with respect to the heart.

The state is a parasite that uses the population as its host. It feeds and lives off us without providing us anything in return but the supposed sense of “order,” “regularity,” and “freedom.” This last is the most damning of all, for the state is literally the enforcer of laws—thus, as anti-freedom as an entity can possibly be. Such is the state, a sorry mess of polis and tyrant.

Government

It is a characteristic failing of Americans to look in the clouds for what lies at their feet. An example of this is given in their considerations upon government. Government, in the proper sense of the term, means nothing but order established by a curtailing of certain values which most within the society deem harmful.

The whole body politic is seemingly formed headfirst. All things that relate to values today are considered first in the mind and secondly in the heart; such is why all is reduced to reason and calculation, and on account of that drives the life out of everything. There’s very little honesty in those who consider the world factually, all too evidently. They subject all considerations to rationality, and on that account forget that reason itself is a value that serves to make all things interpretable, even if there’s very little content to be interpreted.

What serves the faculty of understanding is to be praised above all—but, like all deniers of life, the sickly impulse to mendacity (the impulse to speak lies as truth—and argue them as if they were from the heart) takes the helm, and makes all things a part of a larger rational project, seeking to categorize and systematize all of life on behalf of order and consistency, justifying it from its external utility rather than existential utility.

When the organizing principles for values are made subject to reason, they always depreciate and become life-denying. What is affirmed in spite of reason is truth, for that is a feeling that is made on account of the value itself, rather than the implication of those values in connection with other people. Even if there were only one person on Earth, values would still exist—for there would still be judgment on behalf of the individual: “what is considered good or bad for me” would be the question they would still have to ask themselves. One cannot escape values even if they tried to. Just like with time, space, and causality, one cannot help but interpret the world through personal, subjective stances—and every value that tries to reject value itself is fated to become a meaningless tautology of denial and morose skepticism.

So long as the impulse to deny exists, there will always be those who use it against themselves and call it powerful—those who affirm the negative for the sake of making it positive. I know of nothing more degrading to humanity than reducing its complexity for the sake of comprehensibility, and yet this is the a priori assumption that all have adopted out of habit, due to socialization—conditioning on behalf of what is common, rather than what is powerful on behalf of individuality. Where are the truly strong moralists today? They no longer exist, for nobody today has a true moral impulse—even our drives have been made subject to arithmetic, and our preferences have all been documented and logged consistently to the point that data companies know more about us than we do ourselves.

People are no longer interested in the personal ravings of a genius, even if those ravings are prophetic. What matters today is keeping face, going along to get along, keeping calm and carrying on. It’s all nonsense—slop fed to us as if it were cuisine. I can no more understand modernity than I can bear it. The weight of society is seemingly always on our shoulders. We’re all so interconnected, and made so close to each other on account of our technology—to say nothing on behalf of our decadent, lazy, slothful, lifeless habits—that everything today is passed through a sieve of conventionality. Even the most exciting things are made mundane by how familiar they already are to us; nothing excites because what is expected is carried out with perfect efficiency.

Order rules all, and any deviation from what the heart demands is devalued and deprecated on account of it being different, and nothing more. All our values have been axiomatized, and likewise have our feelings for anything human: art is stared at and judged by its technique and history, rather than sentimental content or existential value; film is made subject to comparison with the director’s last film, and takes into account their psychological disposition rather than looking at the story told by the movie itself; the same applies to love itself—every day becoming more and more commodified and transactional, rather than established on mutual appreciation for the other.

What little is left of humanity is only maintained by those who love others unconditionally. Love is the first and last source of humanity. Let all things perish but this. Without it, there would be more immorality than there already is; indeed, it would make men believe morality is supposed to be immoral. In truth, I believe this. I believe in being immoral for the sake of our morality. A man must toss aside what is valued by others for the sake of finding what is valuable in himself. Only then can he make a truce with reality, and start acting on his own behalf, rather than on behalf of what others expect from him.

What is loved by us today is largely determined by what we have loved in the past. Those who have consistently tried to be themselves all their life have only ever shown life great respect, and in this they have been full human beings, the greatest living among us. If the past were nothing to us, we would freely make ourselves anew each day; however, because few are able to do this, and are brought up being told that the circumstances of today carry over into tomorrow, they always feel limited in what they express, limited by the constraints of their present mood. If a person could see themselves for what they really are, they would have no inclination toward anything life-denying—that is, anything false, things representative of their shadow rather than their true figure. They would simply embody their present feelings freely, and on account of that freedom do what they feel they’re supposed to on their own account.

There’s a very strong aspect of truth in Rousseau’s doctrine that man is born good but corrupted by society. As I interpret him, what he really means is that man, as part of his nature, has a natural desire to do things which gratify him—and in that sense Rousseau’s idea of mankind is thoroughly existential—but, on account of society, which is controlled by the passions of the populace but restrained in accordance with the government’s will, man is made to feel distinct from his own person; the “man” in mankind is taken out, and as a result is made subject to forces not born from his own will.

It is the government which controls man more than he does himself, not unlike how a person is always controlled by his parents, in some sense, so long as he lives under their roof. There’s always a sense of implicit indebtedness to living in society, but in truth this is an illusion; man has only ever been born for the sake of his own happiness, and for the sake of spreading his values on account of his personal honesty and beauty stemming therefrom. The magnanimity of man can never be cultivated so long as he’s forced, on pain of hunger and struggle, to eke out his existence doing something not in accordance with his personal (existential) values. This is not a problem for most people, for they have no ambition higher than mere order, comfort, and regularity—but for those who see more to life than mere procreation and slothful bliss, this existence is a hell, and any form of governmental oversight is to be considered hateful and anti-human.

The corrupting of man’s values begins in the material conditions he’s born into, and in this respect the government is always to blame, at least in some regard, with respect to how he turns out—for it must never be forgotten that life is impossible to bear for most people if they were constantly having to view it honestly; such is why values are what they are today, always false for the sake of making the real world appear more pleasant and tolerable than it really is. In this sense, we’ll always be corrupted so long as the government is able to limit the passion of the heart as far as they have. This is done primarily through violence, either physical or financial, and on that alone is the government upheld, for it is legitimized only through how much it can restrain the power of people—thus weakening their values by forcing them to go along with everything.

A world in which the government presides over everything a man can and cannot do only serves to make him distant from life—it turns honesty into a calculated procedure done in accordance with a given scenario. Everything today seems more a premeditated bargain than genuine interaction—but again, only feels like it. In truth, most people are as clueless and confused about everything as you are. Only men stuck in their perfect realms of reason assume human beings are rational in all respects, and on account of their reason make decisions rather than merely reacting to everything as it comes to them—which is what people actually do.

This is the catch-22 of modernity, the logical paradox we can never reconcile ourselves to: we must forget ourselves if we’re to survive for the sake of ourselves. Life presents us with the impossible and demands that we overcome it by thinking it possible, rather than solving it simply by not considering it a problem at all. It’s for this reason most people are actually made miserable. The world is structured in order to make them miserable, but they think they’re the ones responsible for their misery; in a sense, they’re both right and wrong: right in the sense that their misery is justified, due to it being not from them but outside them; but wrong in the sense that they make themselves more miserable by internalizing the external (systemic) issue as a personal failing, rather than as a governmental or organizational one.

We’re all made to live as if everything is okay as it is, rather than changing the world for our emancipation—that is, our total freedom and liberty to live as we will, not hampered by material conditions any longer. In truth, life would be paradisiacal if our only struggles were existential rather than material, because that would mean the only problems we face are spiritual, artistic, ethical, human; hard problems, no doubt, but problems which we can dedicate our lives to solving, rather than forgoing them for the sake of keeping ourselves fed, which in my view is really the true tragedy of modern life.

Where have our values gone? They’ve been wiped clean from our memories and have been replaced with the values of conformity and anti-humanism. There’s very little today in terms of vivacity, for what animates is considered a distraction from the practical, the real, the calculable, and thus the dead. Life denial is really the only common universal value today. On account of the government—whose sole purpose is to restrain the will of the masses on behalf of the will of the powerful, all while weakening the masses’ desire to will in the first place—we’ve all been funneled through a hall of power which is leading to our certain death.

We can’t even afford to think of a better world today because time is money, and the worship of money is the single greatest form of life denial everyone shares on account of its necessity to live. What else can I say? The government causes the injury and then sells the solution at an exorbitant rate; and the solution isn’t even really a solution, but a temporary antidote to the actual pain—it’s a distraction from the reality of our situation, in order to make it appear better than it actually is.

I’m not interested in providing the world a modern Plato’s Republic. I want to provide a new morality by which people can use to judge the world so as to achieve true freedom. Politics doesn’t interest me, for it’s become nothing more than sophistry—arguing to the public why the values of the strong to dominate the weak (the public) are really a good thing. It’s lies, lies, and more lies; and not even noble lies, but lies that are life-denying and corrupting for all future times.

There’s very little a man can do today, however, because to challenge power risks a collapse of the world order as such—since order and consistency have been built on a foundation of misery and suffering which, were it to end, would bring more suffering than there already is presently. This is a situation where things are deliberately made too big to fail, because if they do then everything along with them fails. We’ve brought this on ourselves, and government today is not in any way interested in fixing, changing, or altering it.

If all men were capable of honesty, the first thing that would collapse is government. Unsurprisingly, everything we hear from the media today is a lie because the media is an apparatus of the government, and acts on behalf of their values—corrupting values perfectly matching those of the powerful. As such, nothing has meaning behind it anymore, for what is the point of meaning if it cannot strengthen the values we already hold to? It’s all so tiresome, and the more one thinks about it the more they see how hopeless it all is. People are too practical-minded today, so much so that they can’t imagine anything that transcends the boundaries established by the powerful.

The government is really a synonym for the powerful, and as a result all values have become defiled, made weak, cripplingly so; and every ambition revolves around becoming powerful on a personal level, rather than increasing the existential power of everyone. So long as people are made to live in a world that doesn’t respect their humanity, we’re going to formulate values that serve as bulwarks against our humanity.

Sans life, sans culture, sans everything.

Monarchy

A popular government is the worst curse to which human nature can be devoted, when it is thoroughly corrupted. Despotism is better. A sober, conscientious habit of electing for the public good alone must be introduced, and every appearance of interest, favor, and partiality reprobated, or you will very soon make wise and honest men wish for monarchy again; nay, you will make them introduce it into America. —John Adams, Letter to Joseph Hawley, 25 August, 1776.

There can be no free government without a democratical branch in the constitution. Monarchies and aristocracies are in possession of the voice and influence of every university and academy in Europe. Democracy, simple democracy, never had a patron among men of letters. Democratical mixtures in government have lost almost all the advocates they ever had out of England and America. Men of letters must have a great deal of praise, and some of the necessaries, conveniences, and ornaments of life. Monarchies and aristocracies pay well and applaud liberally. The people have almost always expected to be served gratis, and to be paid for the honor of serving them; and their applauses and adorations are bestowed too often on artifices and tricks, on hypocrisy and superstition, on flattery, bribes, and largesses. It is no wonder then that democracies and democratical mixtures are annihilated all over Europe, except on a barren rock, a paltry fen, an inaccessible mountain, or an impenetrable forest. The people of England, to their immortal honor, are hitherto an exception; but, to the humiliation of human nature, they show very often that they are like other men. The people in America have now the best opportunity and the greatest trust in their hands, that Providence ever committed to so small a number, since the transgression of the first pair; if they betray their trust, their guilt will merit even greater punishment than other nations have suffered, and the indignation of Heaven. If there is one certain truth to be collected from the history of all ages, it is this; that the people’s rights and liberties, and the democratical mixture in a constitution, can never be preserved without a strong executive, or, in other words, without separating the executive from the legislative power. If the executive power, or any considerable part of it, is left in the hands either of an aristocratical or a democratical assembly, it will corrupt the legislature as necessarily as rust corrupts iron, or as arsenic poisons the human body; and when the legislature is corrupted, the people are undone. —John Adams, A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, Vol. 1, Preface.

Monarchy stands before every free man like a leper to a healthy one. In our day and age, even the notion of monarchy is treated similarly to slavery: something so self-evidently degenerate and against normality that any serious consideration of it is viewed scornfully. And I suppose people are correct to do this, for there are certain intuitions that arise in each age that appear to all so obvious that anything counter to them is labeled absurd. I think it also has to be remembered, however, that these intuitions may one day become not so intuitive—for so long as man is made subject to the objects of force and power in the world, he will find himself thinking something in one era that in another would’ve had him burned at the stake, or crucified, or placed in a brazen bull.

I believe every age reveals its morality clearest when there’s actual agreement on what is considered good and evil. There are certain types of morality that force themselves upon everyone on account of the age and the times they live in; and so, naturally, man has never been the same in every era—only similar enough to feel the same sufferings on behalf of different material conditions.

What is popular is merely what is accepted by the public as good, and this can turn at the drop of a hat—even the most innocuous events can cause great applause or dismay in the whole herd of humanity; politicians know this better than anyone, for they are the masters of lies; and comedians know how to use it for humor—commenting on the world presently so as to gain laughs in the future (should the joke be good enough).

As for what makes the judgment in any way valid, it is impossible to determine and should only be left to philosophical speculation. Any man who seriously concerns himself with the world—that is, who looks at it beyond his own immediate circumstances—will find that all things in life are really a matter of historical prejudice. This is why the question of monarchy has to be considered seriously, for we already hear people today speaking of top-down rule and hereditary principles—again, real people who clamor for and defend the notion that a king, in some sort or another, should return.

And this is but natural, I suppose, for so long as the times are hard, there will be plenty of reasonable men who make unreasonable demands on the rationality of another for the sake of getting them to adopt an idea they both know deep down is flawed and not returning, even in their wildest imaginations.

The history of ideas and culture will show that for as long as civilization has been a thing, the majority of mankind has always been placed in a yoke which to break free from would mean certain death. With death being the only alternative to life, men throughout time have put up with more things than they’ve probably wanted to; and as a result, the adoption of certain values has been made customary out of them once being done so out of necessity.

It is a sad but true fact that the fundamental basis, or operating principle, of life is self-preservation, and if that means committing philosophical suicide or believing in things you otherwise wouldn’t for the sake of your survival, then there goes your pride, and your humanity too—for man is prideful insofar as he values his own thoughts above those of others.

Ideas are, more often than not, not a man’s own, but rather are readily received notions and readymade ideas plucked from the heads of others and presented to us for the first time as if drawn from our own direct experience. Ideas not our own are dangerous things, because if not arrived at through personal experience, the experiences of others will become our own dogmas, passed off as original to us when in truth they don’t even belong to the person who told us about them. This is why every truth must really be rediscovered on its own for everyone; for every truth is the same, but every story behind how it was arrived at is different.

A man who has too much time on his hands and who suffers very little from the world will often see everything through rose-colored glasses. This is why children, in fact, are so naïve yet so joyful to be around; their ignorance is so charming and amusing to us—not in the least because it helps us see the world in a gentle and humane manner—that it encourages and revitalizes whatever dead passion was slumbering in us with respect to life. If one can grow dear to life, one can have a much broader perspective with respect to everything, and so can be made to see the world in a more harmonious manner.

It is with great regret that we often forget that time in our life when we were free from anxiety, that time when we were able to see the world as a child does; but the demands of reality are a bit too real, and what makes a man suffer on account of that realness is his inability to find the art or creativity in it. The world would undoubtedly be a better place if the rose-colored vision of it were true, but because it’s not, most men have consigned any vision of a better future to the flames of pessimism, rather than making the goal of their life to become a means of change within it. Change is only born from within out of love for the beauty contained in the world.

If man were not capable of seeing love in the world, he wouldn’t care either way what happens to him or anyone else; it is because he is able to look past himself that he can see any reason at all for changing it. These are, I feel, the intentions behind those who claim to want monarchy; it’s born out of a desire to see the world improved as they understand it and as they value it. So long as there is strife in the world, values will overtake facts, and what a man thinks good for the world will become the dominating passion through which he sees everything. This is why we have to remove the prejudice altogether and make everything a value rather than a fact-feeling distinction.

A fact is a feeling for what is assumed to be true, and evidence is only used on “truth’s” behalf in order to convince others who already value “the true” in the same “objective,” black-or-white manner. In reality, when you remove the sophisticated veneer of intellectual jargon and approach the propositions subjectively, you instantly see the underlying values working at heart, and it becomes just as subjective as your own rose-colored version of the world. In this sense, all must think of a better future, but should constrain their imagination only to what belongs in the realm of the real, which is to say, only to what is really possible given the circumstances and conditions.

Monarchy is order established dictatorially. Though the opinions of men often divide on historical questions, it can be said with consistency among all that throughout time those who have seen the opportunity to take power have often taken it. History belongs to the bold. Those who do not seek power remain subject to it, and Lord knows how servile and quick to acquiesce people are so long as they’re promised continual order—even if that order comes at the expense of their general well-being. Whole ages are born on the prejudices of a single person. Monarchy is sovereign so long as the populace capitulates. The instant legitimation is questioned, all power is suspect, and the ruler begins to feel uneasy for that very reason—for when the supposedly divine mandate is questioned, all things become defiled and turn human, all too human.

We human beings are wickedly inept and have always thought the act of thinking painful; and so, we’ve always been led astray by those who claim to do the thinking for us and who solved every issue already in their heads—only to reveal their incompetence by getting nothing done and struggling mightily to even make a slight change. Change is a hard thing, which is why many like powerful figureheads who speak to their issues but who never deliver on them. The world will always be tossed about, too, by those who only seek positions of power for themselves rather than power for the people. Man is more microbe than monkey where his intellect is concerned; for, indeed, most human labor goes towards everything but thinking, everyone resembling the paramecium more than anything else—lazily moving about the environment, striving to find a means of subsistence and nothing more.

Nobody aspires to anything great today, unlike in ages where monarchs ruled, because order and stability have been chained to rationality and calculation. Everything done today is through committee—boring meetings and pointless briefings—nothing more than fuel for the bureaucratic industrial complex, propped up by inflated asset values and maintained through decadent cultural values. No meaning in anything. Lifeless in all things. In short, the death of the individual human; the whole of humanity turned into a giant cog for the sake of producing things nobody really needs—industries failing by the day, subsidized by the people, all while most are living on subsistence wages, unable to afford anything beyond what is necessary for them. Is this any different from slavery?

Monarchy for whom should really be the question. Every ruler claims to do what they do for the good of their nation, but their actions always portray the opposite, for in the end, they’re merely human too, and think very selfishly the instant they feel themselves under fire. It takes a certain kind of psychology, or perhaps a disturbed genealogy, to consider yourself the ruler of mankind and yet not have them in your heart whenever you make any decision. I would argue few rulers in history have ever been mentally stable; for their decisions always portray a kind of maliciousness embarrassing even to a psychopath—indeed, that’s where the stereotype comes from: these people act like devils, and, worse still, they get enjoyment out of dominating people through their use of power—watching people suffer while they prosper is the point. After all, isn’t it good to be the king or queen? On account of their reckless use of power, they destroy whole cultures, commit genocide, pillage and plunder whole continents, and delight in the suffering they bring so long as they’re ignorant of it. How anyone can live with themselves for leading such degeneracy I can only account for by factoring in their psychology.

There’s no such thing as a person without a psychology. So long as subjectivity persists through consciousness, there will always be a sense of the ego, the “I” which performs the action. What accounts for the action, however, belongs solely to the field of psychoanalysis: a scientific approach to analyzing thoughts—a method for finding the implicit values hidden under our decisions and behind our self-justifications. In psychoanalysis we objectify our subjectivity, and in doing so hope to find the cause behind our every individual effect. But how does this apply to monarchs? It applies to them by revealing their underlying values. That’s the whole point of this kind of analysis. It is Nietzsche’s autobiographical method (genealogy) applied to actions, and in their application hoping to discover the underlying values.

Everything in life is a value. Power itself is a value, and that’s why ages where monarchs have ruled have always been very turbulent and fast-changing: because the psychology of a monarch is such that their will is to be obeyed in the moment of its expression; and so, very many fall in line and do what they’re told instantly as a result of the implicit authority found in their power relation; it is essentially the power derived from a perceived position of authority that corrupts their mind. Such is why most leaders throughout history have surrounded themselves with flatterers and people whose whole point of being in court was to please the monarch. When this kind of power is yielded, it becomes apparent very quickly how quickly they’re able to do things. Action is made swiftly, and as a result change is brought about quickly.

The values of a monarch are powerful in the sense that they’re instinctual. Actions done from will alone are the strongest, and so, naturally, monarchs have an intuitive capacity to act without hesitation, and their psychologies reflect this by how little thought is given to the consequences of their actions. Their wills epitomize what they want, and every action they perform is on account of that will. I say again, history belongs to the bold: to those willing to make an impact through a force of will alone, power enacted on behalf of their will, power for power’s sake, for our sake, for history’s sake. Change is a byproduct of what is done on behalf of our values, nothing more.

The long position of esteem and grandeur which history has afforded monarchies rests precisely on their ability to do things no one else was able to. When your power is not constrained by a parliament, bicameral legislature, or conglomerate, only your will is what determines what happens—your own innate sense of morality is judge, and every value becomes your own. This is where all greatness originates: in figures who utilize their power for the sake of establishing their morality as the morality of the nation as a whole.

When one sacrifices themselves to their own ideals, they identify with the ideal itself, and so are driven to action solely on the ideal’s continuous belief; they become perpetual motion machines, for the impetus needed to continue the motion is derived from within themselves, and thus only limited to their own self-belief—either out of foolishness or pure self-deceit, it works either way. Power works according to its own laws of motion and can hardly be said to have an equation which describes it completely; indeed, the only law that may be said to apply to it is the law of subjugation to the will, meaning that it only operates psychologically, according to the implicit values and nothing more.

All this begs the question, though: where do values arise? They’re partially genotypic and partially phenotypic; but overall values are made in reality, forged in life, discovered on their own by accident (most of the time), and always change according to past experiences and present circumstances. The initial values we hold are our predispositions, but they can change provided we have a strong enough will to satisfy the drive to change. Monarchs are unique in that their will is made that of the nation, and so they have the whole productive capacity of the land at their disposal for the sake of working on behalf of their will. Again, this is why monarchs have such powerful instincts: they’re not hesitant about anything except when their own well-being is considered, and so they act with impunity, thus making all values powerful so long as they adhere to the drive which moved them in the first place.

With all this said, one would think change is merely a matter of power relations, and they would be right. The weakening of our values today has made change seem impossible, but in truth, we’re simply in an era where nobody truly acts for their own good—people only act when they feel themselves able to succeed, forgetting that failure is a necessary part of growth. It should be mentioned here, though, that failure when tethered with delusion is always a setup for disaster. People often use their failure as a show of strength, but in truth they’re merely in denial about lacking the power to succeed; this is a reversal of the strong impulse for the weak one, making it decadent and impossible to endure for anyone honest. Oh, how I despise these weaklings who tout their degeneracy as liberation, as expression, as art, as part of the “culture,” always said not knowing the true meaning of that term.

People who want monarchy today are merely projecting their own weakness out into the world. Like I said earlier, when weak values come to dominate the populace, the people will forget their own individuality and place their hopes and dreams in a savior figure, rather than saving themselves. This was, in my opinion, what was so revolutionary and history-altering about Marx: he was the first philosopher in modern history to boldly claim that the future is ours to make after our own image; that reality remains at our feet, and it’s up to us to pick it up and use it for our liberation—to free us from the tyranny of all monarchical dispositions, life-denying impulses that toss our troubles onto figures who don’t know us and who don’t care about us.

Our values need to correspond with what is powerful for us. Until all of mankind is able to affirm their own will, I scarce think it appropriate to call anybody on Earth today free. A better world is possible, and our individual wills must be the things responsible for bringing that about. Suffering must be encouraged, evil must be expanded, and hatred for all that is anti-life must become universal if we’re to move beyond what was in former ages the highest form of spirit conceivable.

Freedom has always been relative. Everything we cherish today had to be fought for, for the powerful have always been willing to make their values dominate but never allow us our own. They claim to produce commodities they never sunk their labor into. What kind of nonsense is that? Under what Reich is that fair? It isn’t, and they would argue that it shouldn’t be. Well, of course they would argue that, considering they have all the power with respect to it and would do all they can to maintain it.

Hard times do not always produce strong men. In fact, long before the bold ones come, there’s always a clear descent into decadence even worse than before the initial collapse. It always gets worse before it gets better. Mankind has always had to suffer from tyrants who thought the whole point of the world was to dominate those weaker than themselves, and that intuition has become so ingrained we still think in terms of it—but we moderns must move beyond what has for so long prevented us from seeing brighter pastures. Encounter something enough times and you’ll start to question it. The moment this occurs, it’s only a matter of time before you start considering things for yourself, from your own perspective, and start acting slowly against the pervading values of the times—in doing so rising above them, and becoming your own monarch: a monarch in control of yourself—the strongest ruler there is, in fact, that has ever lived!

Aristocracy

Aristocracy would be the rule of the best if there were any men actually worthy of that title. No man is ever worthy of any title he gives to himself, for, in my experience, very few truly deserve them.

The natural course of our days rolls on like a stone that’s been kicked down a hill, and—to use that analogy from Spinoza—would think itself moving of its own accord were it actually conscious. Most of our lives are lived subconsciously, without our awareness. More often than not, we have very little to say about life, and yet, we live it every second, experiencing at all moments something profound—existence itself. Those who cannot speak on life are either dead or dull. Anyone with an eye for the casual and normal, should they wish to be a writer, must find the perplexing and stupefying within it. A person who cannot look on life and find in it a depth of unimaginable proportions can never hope to live happily within it.

Experience has taught me many good things, but the most important of all is making our thoughts so interesting to ourselves that we cannot help but find charm in them. Our own thoughts should distract us—not in the vain sense of being caught in our own delusions of grandeur or devising schemes for how to achieve some impossible dream life, but rather we should find our life in them. The most extraordinary aspect of life which most people miss as they live it is that life itself is enough for our contentment, so long as it’s tethered with health, a good spirit, and an open mind ready to derive enjoyment from our everyday experience.

We, more often than not, always think of something to say regarding life but find not the courage to write it down. One who is able to express life is able to, in that sense, make it immortal. Man can never say exactly what he thinks at all times, but it is enough for him to have made the attempt anyway—to have tried to set to paper, for all the world to see, just what he thinks on a thing. I’ve often found that my thoughts betray me, for when I go to set them down on paper, they never come out as I think them, making it seem as if my ideas are better than my executions of them: this is true.

It is worse, however, for one to have many great ideas that never see the light of day, usually because they thought they could perfect the idea before writing it down. It should here be remembered that a man can never find himself eternally satisfied with whatever he says honestly (greatly) alone; for, in truth, what is considered great changes by the day, at the turn of our temperaments, and so, what is considered beyond human one day may be considered human, all too human, the next. Speaking for myself here, it has often occurred to me while thinking that I’ve just thought something which may, perhaps, never occur in history again—and yet, having thought it, I considered it too imperfect to be set down for posterity, as if that great thought were nothing at all, always soothing myself with the false consolation that another one like it can be thought at a later date. I am a vain man, a ridiculous man, a complete lunatic.

Why must I always fail to see within myself the truth and omnipotence of my ideas? I always write too late, it seems, for all my “truths”—which are really my extemporal thoughts beautified by my diction and dressed prettily by my style—never seem to last forever. I can always say a thing presently which I know I will contradict tomorrow, and yet, in the moment of writing it, find complete certainty in it. This is the painful battle I carry on with myself every single day; it is a battle so deadly I can’t seem to fight any other, and so, I find myself in the end waving a white flag which no one can see. I find it even interferes with my living in the real world—that is, in the world outside my own ideas.

The real world is hell, and yet, I could not have my ideas were it not for my self-imposed tolerance of it. All things are really vain in the end anyway, and so, it would seem being slothful is the only honest vice there is—all things being set down only reveal how little we actually have to say. The less one writes about life, the better. But, for a writer, his life is to write, and so, he lives off the continuously compounded interest of this contradiction. It is a vicious circle which none can really find the edge of, for every time they increase their distance from the center, the radius of their ambition increases, and so too does the area of their ignorance.

Very few can actually express what they mean; for, not giving any thought to the infinity that is contained in every casual gesture, they categorize all experience as either mundane or exciting, and so lose the ability to sense the nuance in everything life offers. This makes them unable to describe the world as they truly see it in the moment, in turn relegating it all to boring, worn-out phrases that stultify and drive the life completely out of all that is wonderful in the experience itself. Again, it often happens that what we see in our experience makes us want to say either everything or nothing at all.

The worst feeling in the world for a writer is being inspired yet having no one to relate it to, or having nothing around by which to inscribe it. Just imagine: you look out onto a sunset by yourself but have no paper around by which to scribble out what it is that you feel in the moment of such an experience. It is dreadful! You would forgo seeing everything altogether if it could not be recorded. I know for my sake I would, for the thought of losing a thought is terrible to me. Either everything or nothing. That is the only dichotomy which I want to maintain in my life—indeed, even become dogmatic about. I’m passionate about life, yet, from my habits of living, you would think I despise it.

In truth, I feel both, and that is why I’m such a great writer: because I contain the soul of one who is yet to feel content in anything, yet who possesses an intellect great enough to know exactly what would make him feel content from everything (even the smallest things). My life is dreadful, but also the most magnificent that has ever been. That will certainly be the thing most people remember me for: that I’m a man always searching for the meaning of life as life itself is presented to him each day. In fact, that is why there can be no true “meaning to life,” for what we understand to be meaningful changes as often as the ocean tides.

Each day we awake, we, in a sense, discover for the first time what it means to be again, and in being, uncover what we feel is lacking in the present moment here and now. What was is no more but shall be again, or so we think; for in admitting this aspect of “again,” we consign ourselves to the bottomless pit of doubt—doubt about when that “again” shall be—and in doing so despair at the thought of living at all. You see how circular it all is now? I hope you do.

To return to our topic, however, aristocracy holds a natural place in every man’s heart, for it’s born out of egoism and maintained on appearances. It would be very strange if men only submitted to others on rational grounds alone. There are certain qualities which belong to man which all others would value to some degree, and in this question of valuing is found the origin of master morality, for what is considered strong is associated with those who are the best. Indeed, the first civilizations were all aristocracies that were legitimated by the priestly class. Rulers were subject to humiliation rituals in order to show the populace where they failed as a leader, and in doing so also showed how pious they were towards the gods—for it was the gods, after all, that endowed the ruler with the qualities that made them ruler in the first place.

It’s always funny to look back at how aristocracies were described and fawned over by all the “learned” men of the past. Seemingly everyone, prior to the American Revolution, was in agreement with Aristotle that aristocracy was the best form of government by which to run a state. Of course, the whole library of justifications for it—for the total subjugation of the underclasses to this one supposedly “superior” group of leaders, that is—was blown up the moment the naturalistic fallacies propping it up were no longer agreed to a priori. The hubris of mankind has always allowed the worst to lead the majority, and in doing so has led to more tragedy and death than a poet could make verses out of.

We’re still living with the consequences, by the way: millennia after millennia of rule imposed top-down rather than built bottom-up, suppression of any opposition, and the death of anyone who actually posed a threat. The kind of psychology that would allow one to think themselves natural rulers because of their inherent qualities of “superiority” still persists, and always will as long as man is foolish enough and ambitious enough to treat the world as a playground rather than a shaky construct that requires the cooperation of everyone.

Everyone’s psychology is really an embodiment of every value they hold, and every action is an expression of which value is the strongest in the moment of a desire asserting itself upon the psyche. An individual is only as stable as they are capable of enduring their own thoughts positively. Values, like laws, must always be considered in the negative but lived in the positive; that is, the nature of them is described apophatically (negatively) but expressed in the affirmative (positively) through action. A man can only hold himself to what it is he values, and if he values nothing, then he lives for nothing and is not worth consulting on anything existential. The more one endears themselves to life, the more they’ll be able to act positively in it.

Life, in all its colors and hues, is a thing to be considered great when looked at through a lens that makes all things appear in their honesty. The goal of a writer, in that sense, is really to present the reader a world already filtered and shown in all its honesty, without having to do the hard work of making it so. Values are always in an uproar, fighting and vying for domination within the breast of all, and yet, most consider them as accidents rather than things with lives of their own. Anyone who does not see the subjective quality in all values is really blind to their nature.

There has never been a true aristocracy, for superiority is of a moral (subjective) category and can never be made objective merely because people wish it were so—nay, even think it is so. So long as the prejudice of objectivity persists, however, there will always be those who are quick to affirm the notion of there being truly superior people. Like with all assertions of this kind, they fall flat the moment they’re scrutinized, for only a person steeped in rationality would convince themselves of a criteria that suddenly makes all things of a moral complexion objective.

It’s always post hoc rationalization with these supposedly reasonable people—they see the flaws in every argument except their own, and on that account come out the bigger fools; for the more they poke holes in others, the bigger theirs become. They fail to see the necessity of subjectivity, treating it as a bad thing for no other reason than indoctrination. Never having an original idea of their own, the best they can do is become stupendously learned in the paradigms and conceptions of another, and on that basis construct their own nonsense architectonic system—a babel of stupidity they build to the clouds with the hopes of reaching their god: truth.

Aristocracy as an idea is something that can only sound reasonable to a child, for it takes a child-like mentality to be impressed by power that is used in no other way but self-servingly. As I said earlier, there may be natural differences between people, and we may find in others certain strengths of character that are far more impressive than our own, but that alone does not constitute actual superiority. For again, the whole idea of superiority is based on prejudice—an assumption—it’s a value we hold to and which we see another hold to, but in a degree far more perfected than our own. In a sense, like with monarchy, aristocracy is merely a projection of what the majority as a whole value and like to see in others. We see this today nowhere better than in America, where our presidential elections are essentially a new type of entertainment—politics made humorous—only it’s entertainment with massive implications, which everyone forgets when dazed by all the idiotic statements and impossible-to-keep campaign promises.

To anyone who actually holds to aristocracy as a good form of political organization—I only ask you look at the last thousand years of history to see if that was a good idea overall. Then again, asking for these types to look at evidence is like trying to stop a train mid-track. They’re crafty, too, for they know all the arguments inside and out, how to argue for them and how to defend them, as well as how to spot the internal contradictions in your own system. But no matter how smart you are, you can never make nonsense seem probable if the idea you’re arguing for has already been debunked. Aristocracy in political philosophy is no different from the flat earth in Geology: so thoroughly disproven and overthrown as a principle of useful social organization that anyone who actually argues for its return is either insane or doesn’t believe what they say in the slightest—it’s almost always the latter case today.

I should say, by the way, that as an American, I have a virulent contempt for aristocracy—for our history is born in rebellion against monarchy and aristocracy of any kind. The American Revolution was done for the sake of removing one yoke (hereditary monarchy) for the sake of another—a homegrown one that was more familiar to everyone already living here (aristocracy in the form of a landed gentry). I’d take homemade aristocracy over distant rule by monarchy any day of the week, for at least with home aristocracy things can be done to reduce their excesses, and if not, they can always be overthrown.

Aristocracy should only be looked on as a curiosity, examined by those interested in politics, and ignored totally by those who are ignorant of all things historical. It isn’t worth anyone’s time debating the merits of a defunct idea. The debate was waged centuries ago when all the “learned” men of Europe felt the need to have an opinion on the French Revolution—the first, and so far last, true proletariat revolution in history. The two most famous figures in this debate were Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, in which Burke was against the revolution while Paine was for it. And in the end, Paine won the argument—not because his reasoning was better (in fact, you could argue Burke argued his position more thoroughly than Paine) but because the zeitgeist had determined for itself that the monarchical and aristocratic principle was finished, over, debunked, never returning—and good riddance to it!

It was, after all, this revolution of thought—this complete transformation in the way man viewed his relationship to the world—that established the idea of individuality, and from that, identity, subjectivity, and the human spirit as a whole: a subjective spirit which is inebriated with the contemporary and dances to the music of trends and artificiality. That is our modernity anyway: an epoch in which everyone is trying to become their own aristocrat. Asinine but understandable. In an age as devoid of learning and culture as our own, it only makes sense that there would be those who proclaim with all their heart the desire to bring back a long-dead idea. They’re so ensconced in their own stupidity, and have such a thorough lack of originality, they think a return to old ideas will save us in our current times. Leave it to the supposedly erudite to offer up solutions which are themselves in need of solutions.

Oligarchy

People today hear the term “oligarchy” thrown around a lot, but I suspect very few have any idea what it really means. I suppose the best approach to it is to confront it as directly and honestly as possible.

All nations are oligarchies. If by oligarchy we here mean what it has always meant—rule by the few—then by definition there has never not been an oligarchy throughout history. Even before the formation of civilizations, there were hierarchies of power: tribal leaders and bands of men who convinced whole tribes to go along with them—either through force, cunning, or brilliance. We see in nature, too, the natural tendency for things to become oligarchic: wolf packs, ant and bee colonies, hyena clans, etc. Everywhere we look in the world, we see undeniable evidence of things being ruled by a smaller and smaller number.

In the context of a nation, it only makes sense that there would be such a vast amount of power held in only the hands of a few. The more complex an institution is, the more it needs to be bureaucratized in order to become manageable at all. Administrative bloat is a necessary byproduct of increasing complexity—complexity, that is, within a system that becomes more and more ambitious with respect to how much power it wants to command. This is the system which all developed (First World) nations have mastered, and as a result, have completely controlled and spread throughout the world—spreading the virtues of top-down authority and increasing misery piled atop the people underneath.

America is the zenith of this, though its progress has been furthered along in Japan and South Korea far more than anywhere else; as a result, it has given those countries the reputation of being intolerably competitive and extremely nepotistic—which always carries with it its two inevitable companions: ignorance and hivemindedness. The stereotype regarding Asians in this respect, I’m sorry to say, is absolutely true: they’re the most conforming, agreeable, nonargumentative, unimaginative, sterile, boring, stiff-toed, uptight, narrow-minded people in human history; and this stems from their general conservatism. For this reason, capitalism functions very well in Asia, and the people—more willing to make the best out of a bad situation than actually change the system overall—will forever be subject to it until they collectively change their attitudes in accordance with their material conditions.

Capitalist nations are where oligarchy tends to flourish the most, not in the least because life under capitalism is controlled largely by asset managers—people whose entire lives revolve around accruing more wealth for themselves while leaving the rest behind, staring at a stock ticker hoping for it to increase indefinitely. It’s revolting when you think about it: whole fortunes which dominate entire governmental apparatuses. Their wealth isn’t even in real assets; it’s situated entirely in speculative bubbles which only perpetuate financialization, driven solely by greed, and made the highest value because wealth is seen as the only form of power worth fawning over today.

What kind of world is it where the most “powerful” (wealthy) are actually the weakest where morals are concerned? The wealthy today are, without question, the most herd-like and life-denying people in all of human history. And I’m not just talking about degenerates like Epstein; I mean the entire 1% as a whole. The whole lot of them are corrupt to the core and have become inhuman for the sake of making themselves feel more than human—in truth, to call them “human, all too human” would really be an insult to the miserable wretch that man is, for at least the average man has desires outside of world domination and total depravity. The rich have the morals of Macbeth: ambitious, power-hungry, scheming, domineering, spiteful, lustful, etc. And like Macbeth, too, after obtaining power they’re constantly in fear, always worried, never sure of anything, and dread most of all a loss in their power—all this accumulates into a desire to make power the only moral, where morals revert to what they were before civilization: strictly instinctual and primitive.

What does all this indicate? Only their truest intentions. To become so powerful they can impose their morality on the world so domineeringly that their will becomes the new overriding drive that all follow on account of its force, and force alone. In a sense, they want to do what Jesus did, but instead of through a gradual spread and adoption by the people, they want to impose it from the top, just like the oligarchs they are. And to think, these people are praised by the herd on account of their wealth alone. The power they wield stems from that moral evaluation—a sickly, weak, life-denying evaluation that stems from projection on account of the herd’s weakness. The herd is impressed by the wealthy because they would like to be wealthy themselves. Every value held by the majority today is really a desire to support ideals which they themselves would like to obtain and break at will, just like the powerful do.

Power for the wealthy today is really an abstraction, for their goals are not actionable; they do not want to act, but rather want to amass so much wealth, so much power, that they retroactively create the world after their own image. What they really want is to become like a god—but not in the ancient sense like Alexander the Great or an Egyptian pharaoh; rather, they want the herd to subconsciously adopt their values instead of developing their own, in that sense gaining complete control over how reality is considered. What they’re after is a reevaluation of all values—but not for powerful values, rather, only their values, for in their minds their values are the powerful ones. In making this a goal for themselves, they become a slave to their own vision of the world, and in doing so become herd-like themselves; they deny life by making their goal in life to live it out exactly as they envision it.

You see, the instant you make something the point of life, it instantly loses all value; for the drive which compelled it in the first place, now being worked towards and fulfilled in some sense, weakens and desires a new goal as a result. To make power its own end is nothing but vain ambition, and it stupidly follows that line of reasoning straight off a cliff, only to fall right into a sea of troubles—nihilism being the most damning, followed by despair and pointless suffering.

Power is the drive of all values, and so it follows that anyone who is perceived as having a lot of it would necessarily be admired by the stupid, who only know how to follow their immediate instinct when thinking is involved but are more than ready to actually capitulate when reality is concerned. This is what I hate most about modernity: its stupidity. It isn’t the artificiality of it, or the obvious obsession with frivolous and idiotic things like money that annoys me, but it’s the lack of power—the complete and utter capitulation on behalf of everyone to conform and endure and tolerate things that should really bring about revolution that drives me insane. So many people want power but are so lazy and too stupid to actually achieve it that they prefer to admire those who have what they want already.

It’s why Trump was elected. Nobody in their right mind would vote for an overweight moron with no political experience if politics were a rational enterprise. People voted for Trump because Trump represents to them what they themselves wish they were—wealthy, powerful, brash, confident, etc. It’s all vibes-based, irrational, uncritical, illogical, totally moronic, unreasonable, and everything else. Trump was an outsider, and that’s precisely what gave him the edge. Americans know a fake from a phony, and everything after Obama just seemed like a whole lot of nothing—so they went with the candidate that was so out of left field that maybe something positive could be brought about from this new firebrand. Of course, nothing really happened, and, in fact, things have gone from bad to worse since 2016. We’re all now paying for the sins of our ignorance, and, quite frankly, I hope Trump finishes this country off for good already.

America has been a scourge to humanity since World War II, and I think all the devastation we’ve unleashed worldwide with our stupid foreign policy—imperialism, containment, forever wars, globalization, etc.—combined with our disastrous domestic policy—wage stagnation, homelessness, the war on drugs, austerity measures, financialization, unemployment, economic crises, an abysmal education system, etc.—indicates that, in short, we’re the bad guys and have been since 1945. As an American, I have to say there are many things to love about this country—primarily found in our history and in our collective unity around the ideals of freedom and the constitution—but at present, this place offers me very little hope for the future. I don’t like to see a nation as wealthy as ours plagued with all the moral and societal problems that we have. It’s unconscionable, and change is possible, but so long as the oligarchs run things, we will find ourselves forever in this plight.

Returning to oligarchy, though: one of its central principles is that of consolidating power into the hands of a few. Generally, the larger a population, the more top-down rule is needed to ensure everything functions as intended; and so, we have the beginnings of a management apparatus that oversees complex regulatory functions. All of this is assumed outright, and very little is questioned—if any of it is.

In modernity, little is questioned for the sake of conformity. All that is considered is personal: how it could affect the individual personally. It’s a subconscious egoism that’s apparent in nearly everyone living today, and yet very few actually notice it. Naturally, this leads to a populace where the dominating values are those that only feign affability rather than increase power. As I said earlier, nobody really knows how to acquire power today, for their minds are so narrow and unconsciously influenced—either by their material conditions or media consumption—that they seek it in money, or start a family, or resign from the world entirely. And so, with the information landscape being so vast and so accessible, combined with a decrepit, life-denying lens through which everything is viewed and interpreted, of course nobody would be able to create enduring narratives that actually influence people in a positive way.

I never would have thought it possible in the history of the world that there would be such a dearth of meaning—combined with a nearly universal nihilism, tethered to a morose skepticism alongside a vast stupidity—that everyone would default to making their values only those which gratify their selfish impulses. I suppose it could’ve gone no other way, for the most immediate is the easiest to latch onto when nothing else can be used to serve as the foundation for your life; but this, of course, leads them nowhere. For when one acts like this, everywhere they turn they’re met with the same undeniable reality: that the things which are immediate fade away as soon as they’re acquired, and no amount of cycling through desires and passions would ever make them endeared to life on account of them alone.

Kierkegaard spoke of this in his book Either/Or and described it as “crop rotation”—the aesthete’s ultimate method for enjoying life having already experienced what they presumed to be the highest pleasure; they seek life in novelty, and so are in a perpetual rotation of one enjoyment after another, but being fulfilled by nothing permanently. People think the meaning of life is a static thing that, once obtained, they can rest easy on for the rest of their lives, but experience proves to everyone sooner or later that a life lived for the sake of one goal never does anything for them. And so, the goal of life is really made subordinate to whatever it is we feel the goal is in the moment and should be followed in that manner, deliberately.

People today feel the need to subjugate themselves to whatever it is they’re in passion for, and it doesn’t help that these passions are, more often than not, totally foreign to them, and not really desired by them—or, if they are desired, not done with any conviction and certainly not hopped into with ready alacrity. For example, people today start relationships merely for the appearance of being in one, because they feel like it’s a duty. This is merely a societal pressure unconsciously acquired and not given a second thought. Doubt scares fools, and that’s why I can confidently label nine-tenths of the human race as total buffoons in literally everything that doesn’t concern their narrow interests—interests obtained not from any intellectual ratiocination or genuine passion, but from a necessity born out of their material circumstances. This is a type of degrading pragmatism that strips life of everything it’s worth and leaves behind only a crusty shell not even worth glancing at.

This is to say nothing of marriage, which is also mostly done out of compulsion rather than true love; there is no “true love” in reality—anybody who says otherwise is kidding themselves and should stop immediately. Divorce is more common than every couple wants to admit, and the vast majority of couples, having no understanding of how to cooperate with each other that doesn’t become a one-sided affair, always end up in quarrels and petty arguments that neither of them really want to engage in—again, because they haven’t the least clue what the other wants, and less any ability to come to an agreement between their differing values in the moment. Such is why the most successful relationships are those that aren’t founded on love but on friendship and mutual necessity—the sense of not wanting to leave the other because of how well they make you feel in even the smallest and most common gestures. That’s true love.

A large number of people do not forge their own journeys but forgo them for the sake of fitting in; very rarely do people even think for themselves anymore, for anything that is counter to the environment they’re in always exposes them as the odd ones out, and so they suppress their truth in order to come off as more agreeable—stupidity in the highest regard! Oligarchy makes this a necessity in all environments, however, because it feels the need to simplify and reduce all things to their constituent parts in order to make them easier to manage and control. Oligarchy is fundamentally about control, and that’s why every institution falls prey to it eventually—for so long as there’s a need for order and stability, it will be achieved through reduction and simplification—through the method of analysis and exhaustion—minimizing all things to the point of reducing them to atoms, only for them to be recomposited afterwards in a multitude of different branches. It was dubbed the “Iron Law of Oligarchy” for a reason after all. So much for freedom.

Tyranny

Man constantly finds himself faced against a tyranny, both from within and from without. What a man’s life consists of in the main is discovering for himself just how impregnable his own reality is, how indescribably complicated his existence is, and how incapable he is of making clarity within it.

All our days are spent in sleep, labor, and sloth—and this is very telling, for what it shows is that if we look at life in its threefold aspect, we will find that man is in one of three situations: unaware of life (sleeping)—cosplaying death, if you will—, working for life—laboring for his basic necessities—, or distracted by life—using his leisure time in the most unproductive manner possible.

Whichever poison a man picks, he will regret it: for in sleep you do not live, and thus miss out on the opportunity of experience itself; if you work you are not free to pursue your real interests—those activities which are more morally and spiritually uplifting—and thus atrophy your mind deliberately for the sake of conforming more readily to your work environment; and in your free time—where your time is actually yours—you have no real idea of what you want, because you’ve never asked yourself that thanks to the constant responsibilities life places on you for the sake of your survival, and so you resort to what is easiest to enjoy and hardest to overcome with diligence, and thus remain forever fastened to that slothful, ignorant, barbaric, unhelpful, totally useless line of pleasure which is called entertainment—as if anything shown on television or our phones were as compelling, interesting, or important as the activity that goes on inside our own minds.

I could never understand the impulse to endure what is intolerable. What habits of mind must one adopt for the sake of making injustice seem like a reasonable thing? As far as I see it, the sickening moral injunction of doing to others what you would like done to yourself only applies to those who know their power is great enough to not have to suffer on behalf of another’s insincerity. It has always been the case with man that the strong do what they wish and the weak suffer what they must; nobody in history has ever been able to transcend that maxim of Thucydides, for so long as man performs his life through action and force, he will forever be subject to power as the fundamental lynchpin which holds together his whole humanity as such.

Man is a moral creature first and foremost, and so the drives which he adopts are always with respect to his dominating passions, and hence subject to power. Power rules all, and those who do not wish to be subject to it ought to either place a yoke on their own desires or become master of their own drives to such an extent that no power can sway what their main impulse is. The powerful man doesn’t fear the power of another, and indeed thinks less of those who feel the need to constrain their power out of their own life-denying impulse—those who humble themselves before the world as if it were a living being. The forces of nature only matter to the extent that they influence our impulses, but like with everything else, the power of man is such that he can emancipate himself from all forms of tyranny.

Tyranny is, after all, nothing but the external and internal restraints which are placed upon our power. Power is the prime mover of all things, and so what is willed by man is commanded by the impulses, motivated by the drives, and performed through our will—a powerful will which transmutes abstractions into actions. The goal of life is the fulfilling of a goal which is forever needing to be accomplished again and again. Our passion is like a bucket with a small hole at the bottom which, so long as we fill it, will hold all the passion we put in it; but the longer we wait, the more passion we lose, and thus the death of all drive and ambition, the weakening of our power, and the eventual death of our very souls. This is the very tyranny we place upon ourselves so long as we live: endlessly striving, forever fulfilling and replacing passions with newer and newer drives of ambition, accomplished through power and made subject to the laws of motivation and inspiration. Power plays its own games with us, and we merely come out the end of it wondering if the present we suffer now can be made more glorious in the future.

Man tyrannizes himself with his own life. On account of all he wishes to do and achieve, he makes passion the sole drive of all things, gives in to his powerful impulses, overcomes his drives, and ends up burning himself out on his own successes. Even power cannot overcome itself, for the second it does it has a new impulse which it feels the need to overcome, that overcoming being itself; power wishes to overcome itself, and so life is caught in the crossfire of every ambition and every passion, and is made hostage to its own ability to exercise itself.

The restraints which man places on himself are more deleterious to him than the ones from outside him. Anything that limits a man’s capacity to act is, in effect, attempting to limit his expression of power, and in doing this preventing his action of any kind. This is harmful to him in the long run, for if he cannot act he cannot live, and so consigns himself to a wretched stasis, a motionless activity of pure contemplation—contemplation for its own sake, which only reveals his inner depths, if that, but never reveals the world as he sees it overall. Every man takes the limit of his sight to be the end of the world, and as such comes away from life with a very narrow view of it. Only those who have ventured out and seen the character of man as it is truly born in the world can claim to have seen it.

The person easiest to fool regarding existence is the self, and as a result it is necessary to always have a cautious aspect whenever viewing anything, for so long as man believes himself to be in control he will forever fall prey to false assumptions and vain conjectures that get him nowhere in the actual analysis of his soul. It can never be forgotten that man tyrannizes himself just as much as the world does.

A perspectival eye—a vision for beholding many lives—is necessary if you wish to move through the world with any semblance of consistency; for the constant interactions which life makes demand of you to fulfill will never become any easier the longer you put off seeing the world through eyes not your own. The most harrowing aspect of life is that it cannot be lived singularly in any true fashion, not anymore anyway; there’s too much dependency upon all that have come before—that endless chain of causation and contingency—to make any Thoreauvian life actually plausible. While self-reliance is a great ideal to live up to, and a great philosophical outlook for those who either despise the world or do not find themselves in it, it’s simply too difficult to live genuinely without falling into a kind of deliberate degeneracy of the human spirit.

The world is too much with man, and while it’s possible to live frugally and contentedly with only the necessities, it cannot be done without great personal sacrifice, not to mention the supreme loneliness that comes with living such a life—a life most are simply too far gone to truly understand. So much, in fact, has the world capitulated itself to capital that people cannot separate their identities from their productivity or material status. It’s the greatest tyranny which capitalism has pulled over the eyes of the majority—to make life resemble a busy airport terminal, constantly buzzing with life, movement, and lethargic eyes, annoyed faces, and tired expressions. My contempt for every value held in high esteem today knows no bounds. My anger towards everything is truly frightening, actually. I cannot help but make use of it, however, for I always find a way to add my subjectivity into whatever I see, and in such a fashion that leaves most awestruck by the honesty of it all.

Tyranny knows how to bend every value to its whim, and in doing this is really the most dominant form of manipulation mankind has ever devised. In its substance, tyranny makes all other values subordinate to a single value: order. Order has been seen as an implicit good in all forms of government, but none have ever been able to make it a consistent aspect without extreme authoritarian measures. Whether anyone can claim to have order in their own life, let alone in the government, is a stretch, for even the most consistent people have lapses in judgment or unexpected events come up which totally change how they are to approach life.

Tyranny is a violence to man insofar as it limits what is possible within his range of actions. If a man cannot act as he wishes, he does so either out of deference to the mores of his times, or rejects his own strong impulses for the sake of appearing like everyone else—a nonsensical love of inaction justified out of fear and reproduced via sloth. Man’s own tyranny is the one loved most by him, and for that reason is the most dangerous to him, for it’s very easy to justify old habits by making them appear moral. That labeling of morality, which is ascribed for appearances, eases the mind’s inability to grasp the unknowability of a habit by making it seem as if it were simply always done that way.

In that sense, the greatest tyranny of man is his moral impulses; though he would like to will them into action through an exertion of his power, he lacks the mental fortitude to withstand the power of his own impulses. Thus, he does everything he can to weaken himself, and in that way limits what he can do to only that which is not too straining on him. The tyranny of impulses shall always make itself felt in man so long as he feels disconnected from his power. If in any way he is unable to perform an action, it is always the result of a cowardice of some kind, or from the action itself being far beyond his powers to perform.

Ambition too has a role to play here, for often when a man attempts something beyond what he is capable of, it is solely from ambition that he overestimates his power in the first place. A man with too much power almost never acts with any consistency, for he sees too many things which he’s capable of doing, and thus divides his power across many ambitions, accomplishing none of them as a result. I tend to remember a few presidents who have felt the same, and as a result ended their terms doing nothing at all.

Charismatic leaders, in the context of government, are often responsible for rubber-stamping policies that can be seen as tyrannous. But it should be noted here: of all governments, tyranny is the shortest-lived, for tyrannical power wielded uncouthly often proves detrimental to all subjects. As a result, discontent and disaffection swell, and the leader, seeing this among his subjects, only furthers his megalomania, almost always ending with him overthrown or killed. The fate of all ambitious men is one of eventual collapse and failure, for they attempt what is beyond their power. The disavowal of their own tyranny (a restraining of their impulses) is actually what causes their downfall.

Tyranny must be seen from both directions at the same time, which is what makes it so hard to comprehend properly: you have to simultaneously limit yourself and overcome yourself—you must know when to act and when not to. Whichever action you choose is selected for you by your drives, but those same drives must be overridden when the action proves too much for your power. A wise man very rarely finds himself under the spell of his own tyranny, and this is because he knows his own drives intimately and has a strong enough command of his environment to know which impulses will arise within them in order not to fear them.

Often it is under the tyranny of another that a man finds himself subjected, but God forbid this same man places a yoke on himself—what then will he do? It is an unequivocal fact that most men do not know what they’ll do, and this is because they have never considered themselves worthy enough to think for themselves on any matter touching on life. As a result, they have a mind so constituted as to allow the “necessities” of modernity to take hold of them and never allow them the clarity of mind or the integrity of spirit to truly determine for themselves what is important. This is a modern practicality which for the individual is existentially suicidal; it’s nothing more than a type of pragmatism for the modern world, which deep down is a self-justifying tyranny which weakens the individual impulse and thus cuts short all potentially powerful drives and actions.

Man is not himself so long as he cannot act as he will, which is to say, act for the good of himself and those around him—all this stemming from his self-imposed repression, a vexing restraint which turns his every drive against himself. There is nothing noble in any of it, and yet man finds it easier to obey than to act on his own will—not like any of his drives were powerful enough to bring about something miraculous anyway, but the point still remains: man tyrannizes himself with his own life-denying impulse, the repression of his own feelings on matters concerning him and him alone for the sake of some drab consistency, a boring regularity, a totally worthless morality that values that which is weak specifically because it is weak.

When will the age come when man is not only himself but also a gentleman of the world? I suspect that day shall never come so long as man is made subject to repetition and rotation after rotation of the same sickening drives—the same morality, the same impulse to be nothing but what the world around him molds him to be.

Has there ever been a prodigy of benevolence for humanity? Perhaps Jesus Christ. But when will we all move past our Lord and Savior? When will we accept the fact that he died and is never returning? I suspect that will never come so long as we consider it a duty to accept him into our hearts rather than accepting ourselves into our own hearts.

The long tyranny of Christian morality has hung over us for over two thousand years, and this sickly recluse of a moral system has infected every facet of our thinking regarding the impulses, regarding power, regarding the things necessary to live. A man cannot free himself from the oppressive tyranny of a “popular” (herd-like) morality when everything that is powerful for him is viewed negatively against him and turned violently against him by the benign influence of social pressure—conformity made mandatory, designed to be virulently anti-life, and yet presented to him as a form of liberation.

It is coaxed in kindness in order to avoid seeing how violent it truly is against the self. Christianity has always been against the self, for it’s a fundamentally ascetic religion. As a result, it has some good precepts—though in no way unique—regarding how to treat others, but some of the most revolting suggestions about how to live personally in this world.

Jesus won by accident. In truth, if it wasn’t for Rome adopting it as the official religion in 380 CE—along with the message of Christianity being very accommodating and inspiring for the weak and downtrodden (which has always been the majority of mankind)—Christianity would be just another sect of Judaism, probably no bigger than what Zoroastrianism is today.

So long as man views himself as weak and in need of saving, Christianity will never die—for, in all honesty, its message is so seductive and so universal in its outlook, combined with being an extremely easy religion to adopt, that it will always serve as a moral rock by which the herd attach their chains. It is, in that sense, the greatest tyranny of all time, for it transcends the typical tyranny of a king or despot over his people by making the people tyrannize themselves.

It lures them in with the words of Jesus and the glorious life to come hereafter, but it never mentions all the talk of humility and denying this world for the sake of the one after. Every moral feeling today is almost always a reaction against or an affirmation of Christianity, making it, again, the most successful reevaluation of values in history.

But I feel it has run its course, and it’s time for humanity to embrace a new ethos, a new moral tyranny—a tyranny even greater than Christianity, for this new tyranny will be life-affirming and more honest than Jesus ever was.

Democracy

Democracy supposedly places the power in the people, and as a result makes a mockery of what power truly is. Power is not simply will. Power is only the ability to make things happen. And as it turns out, nothing ever happens in democracies, because they don’t do anything at all. To rely on the whims of the people is only good to make changes in the present, but if one wishes to build a stable state long into the future, there must be a correspondingly progressive set of representatives that actually follow through with the wishes of the people.

Democracy is dead, and we have killed it. Not from our own desires to see it before us lifeless, but from the ignorance which pervades every aspect of our thinking regarding the nation as a whole. It was always assumed by the Founding Fathers that the democracy we now cherish would sustain itself through even the worst crises so long as the populace was educated, well-informed, and had an actual stake in the affairs of the nation overall. What we now have, however, is nothing of the sort. Our democracy is really a racket for the rich to pick and choose which representatives they want, rather than the people. The people are so disconnected from their own political spirit that they haven’t the slightest clue which issues affect them beyond the financial; and while this has always been a major issue throughout all capitalist nations, it shouldn’t be the only one—there’s a future beyond capital, and yet everyone feels the need to view their entire life through that one barbarous lens.

I’ve found that the more present a problem is within the lives of everyday people, the more they see all things in their life through the lens of that one issue. People today make their every problem a material one, never a spiritual or moral one—forgetting completely that all problems are moral in their essence, for all evaluations are subjective, and thus necessarily personal. There’s no capacity within the minds of most today to see themselves—internally recognizing themselves, that is—as free enough to enjoy any liberal understanding; what strikes them as revelatory is nothing aside from that which immediately improves their circumstances. What man has a mind for politically is only that which shortens his commute to work, which alleviates some of his debts, which reduces the burden of keeping himself fed, which supplies a strong enough foundation for his future success; and so, as long as democracy offers a man none of these things he will not love his freedom, for he will feel himself imprisoned inside his supposedly democratic system.

That’s why I said at the start that democracy “supposedly” places the power in the hands of the people, but every American living today already knows how untrue that is—for our votes count for very little, and change stemming from them is nonexistent. Like I said, our representatives are captured and controlled by special interest groups and other companies that want the free rein to do whatever they will, and as a result their objectives are always at odds with the people who elected them in the first place. It is a vexing contradiction that, so long as elected officials do the opposite of what their constituents want, will forever remain—and so too shall the animosity which is constantly flung towards the government as a whole. A government is only as good as the people who run it, and so, even if the demands by the people are very obvious and achievable, they will never be worked towards so long as they interfere with the interests of the wealthy.

If a person cannot view their lives outside of a debasing adherence to the system already in place, then they cannot live their lives freely. People today attempt to overcome their condition by working within those conditions, not realizing that those same conditions are what repress them and enslave them in the first place. The morals of America have always been those of industry, self-sacrifice, piety, and individualism; and while arguably good values on their own in the abstract, when it comes to the concrete (the lived realities of most people) these morals do nothing but subjugate the human spirit and hasten man to an untimely death—a death caused by overwork, burdened by the material privations which are foisted onto him by the system overall.

So long as man finds it within his power to overcome through work—a false evaluation he holds onto on account of his belief in the sickly, decaying, life-denying American morality of conscientiousness—he will continuously be made the fool in life by simply having more work handed to him, for indeed the ready workhorse is tired first. Everything in America is geared towards burnout, suppression, disempowerment, subjugation, and capitulation to the most malevolent forces in history—and no amount of democracy or appreciation for Enlightenment values will ever change those material conditions unless the populace as a whole recalls that famous suggestion by Thomas Jefferson: “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and is as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” Freedom lives inside America so long as the populace remembers what it was we were striving to accomplish with our revolution—the complete rejection of the monarchical principle, and the empowerment of the people through the election of representatives on behalf of our collective interest. Should these two things be abolished, let the whole union dissolve with it, and allow anarchy to run rampant in the streets.

I was always under the impression that the point of the United States was to allow the citizens as much freedom as possible without making the cost of drawing breath in a free atmosphere too expensive or harmful to the political body as a whole. The initial conception of government, as the Founding Fathers understood it, was very limited; and we still pay dearly for this conservatism today, for being considered strictly in a moral sense, and with emphasis being placed on freedom above well-being, we have people today actively defending austerity measures even if those same measures cause objective harms in the body politic as a whole.

It’s a vicious death spiral, in which the power to immiserate is placed above that of reducing it—so long as the government has a hand in doing it, that is. So long as people are skeptical of the government, they will see any positive action done by it as an affront to their liberty, and as a result will feel the need to reject it—although I would suggest not telling these same people where Medicare and Social Security come from. There’s been a long indoctrination campaign underway in America to make people hate the government for no other reason than that it’s the government—playing on old tropes and outdated fears going all the way back to the nation’s founding—and all this is done for the sake of limiting the power which the people actually hold, should we be bold enough to admit again that this nation is a democracy.

Having said all I have thus far, let me finally come clean and say it: America at present is not a democracy, but a type of quasi-mixed government (usually labeled a republic) with a bicameral legislature, along with a system of checks and balances established between three branches—the legislative, executive, and judicial. And to think, this system of government—without doubt the greatest ever devised in history—has been made the personal henchman of globalized capital.

There can be no democracy so long as the people are made to see themselves only as cogs within the machine of capital. This fact has other implications which I don’t think even the genius of Alexander Hamilton saw—it took Karl Marx really to see it—and it is this: the subject becomes alienated from all things that pertain to their welfare inside a state so long as their relation to the state is one of master and slave, without recognition or fair compensation for what the subject actually brings to the state on account of their labor and effort.

This is especially bad for a democracy because a democracy can only be legitimated through the people—and so, if the people feel they don’t matter and suffer on account of the policies made by their representatives, then what’s the point of government in the first place? Democracy, as Aristotle noted so long ago, almost always falls into either oligarchy or tyranny, and neither can last long when people feel the organization of the state as such does not supply the necessities. Again, this is an internal contradiction unique to America: we hate the government, and yet the government as an institution is so massive and powerful we can’t see ourselves freed from its influence. I say again, what is the point of government then? I do not know, but I have some ideas—not unique to me, but certainly prescient with respect to the times.

I think it’s important to first acknowledge what it is we’re really dealing with here. America has prided itself on being the freest nation in the world, and yet there is nothing free in America—everything requires money here, and that single constraint alone constitutes the whole political problem under capitalism, as far as I see it. People want the government out of their hair, and yet the policies that are enacted by Congress in conjunction with the president always serve to go against the people, and rather only wish to serve their capitalist overlords.

How do we square this? How is it that a man can live freely if at every turn he must sell himself for the sake of enjoying his liberty? Shouldn’t the government allow freedom to prosper in this instance by reducing how much labor is necessary for the sake of the subject’s freedom? What does history say on this point?

It’s been said that the point of government is not to provide people material comfort but rather the freedom to pursue it, and I would consider this a very noble, very Protestant moral injunction, which typically goes as follows: “you must work hard and sacrifice all things for the sake of your bread.” This was justified through its asceticism, for the laboring man thinks of only one thing, the labor before him, and as a result does not allow the mind to see any perspective outside of the one born in labor.

But if labor is made on behalf of life, and more often than not takes up too much of life, how can anyone participate in the government effectively? They can’t, and this I call the American freedom paradox. Freedom is a nice idea in theory, but is not true in practice—and will never be true in practice so long as only a third of a man’s day belongs to him (the other two-thirds comprised of sleep and work).

The goal of the government, in my American-centric view, is this: to make the pursuit of happiness easier by eliminating outright the financial barriers that are constantly put up as a bulwark against what a man can freely do. There is no freedom so long as a man must work to live. The Protestant work ethic was a moral for its time—and was a good one at that—but what was once seen as strong and unifying is now sickly, life-denying, and anti-human in the extreme.

People forget how much history has to be repeated due to our ignorance with respect to all our mistakes that led to change in the first place. Like morals, the events which lead to historical change are almost always gradual, and the result of a large buildup of resentment over decades—centuries in some cases. The ethos which America comes out of was one of deliberate austerity, frugality, limited tolerance, and immense bigotry and arrogance; unsurprisingly, this motley of stern and ignorant precepts eventually gave rise to the morals of hard work, determination, perseverance, and self-reliance.

What was once seen as a necessity became a value judgment so prevalent we still think in Protestant terms today with respect to labor. In fact, we can’t think out of it, and that’s America’s biggest problem today: its false individualism, which I prefer to call by its true name—egoism.

A man who doesn’t concern himself with his fellow man but only himself is a man who deserves to fail in all his vain, individualistic ambitions. Should an entire nation adopt this man’s attitude, it will surely fall into a barbaric state of competition and needless immiseration on behalf of the majority; and this is exactly what we see today in America, and the government only perpetuates this decadent Protestant ethic of individualism by making it more and more difficult to live at all.

A corrupting moral has commanded the entire American psyche for centuries at this point. The more ingrained a moral evaluation is, the more it will be taken as self-evident by the populace, and the more it will perpetuate throughout history; only a reevaluation of values can change anything at this point.

Look around you in America and tell me what you honestly see. I know what I see. I see the consequences of a long, overplayed collection of values that are beginning to collapse in on themselves. I see nothing but a history of replacement—a systematic overthrowing of all decent, strong, powerful, life-affirming values, and as a result it has given us a characteristic selfishness unmatched in all the world, and an individualism that is anything but singular—rather, it is egoistic, entirely beholden to material interest, and narrowly obsessed with financial gain at the expense of all those less fortunate.

This is the kind of morality which America has: the morals of capitalism, a jungle in a box, a nation full of knaves, fools, ignorant bigots, and moronic moralists. There is no morality outside of labor and self-improvement, and that’s why America has never been able to develop a lasting cultural identity aside from economic materialism, justified (in a very Anglophonic way) on behalf of a pseudoscientific biological determinism.

Every intellectual today feels the need to have scientific evidence behind every claim they make, as if that somehow made their subjective interpretation of the data any more plausible. I hate with a passion any man who justifies his bigotry on behalf of “the data,” as if a few cherry-picked statistics justified the ultimate implications of all their nonsensical beliefs.

Be strong. Become HARD! Impenetrably so. And affirm what is true today and false tomorrow. Let us battle it out in the moral realm, where all propositions really belong, rather than in this sterilized, false Hinterwelt of abstraction—this decadent, liberal, all too accommodating atmosphere of fakery and trickery. Your values against mine. Let’s go, coward!

You see now how sickening, selfish, false, life-denying everything we call a value in America really is. It’s all subterfuge, deliberately laid down for the sake of obfuscation. God, everyone in this wicked country is so fake, so against themselves by buying into this false narrative of individualism: in trying to become individualistic they only enslave themselves to their own egoism, and as a result lose all honest moral intention behind all their actions, and subjugate all their life’s meaning for foolish ends that offer them no happiness and advance them not a step anywhere but in the land of ignorance.

I think it’s very clear from the morals we’ve adopted collectively as a country that we Americans don’t want assistance from the government, and would rather die in miserable poverty so long as we get to keep our pride in rejecting their helping hand.

If the nation were actually rational and wanted to improve overall, we would begin by organizing the powers invested in the government to not only check all negative powers within the union as a whole—those powers which go against the interest of the people, that is—but increase the capacity to support and increase the prosperity for every state in the union.

This will remain impossible, however, so long as the dominating values are still Protestant, life-denying, laborious, useless, and degrading to the spirit of everyone living today. We remain at present captured by values which don’t help anyone but those already at the top; we remain tepid and slow in all our political transactions, and revere stupid abstractions and political ideologies that aren’t worth the paper they’re written on—to say nothing of the actual nature of our “democracy,” hierarchical and uncaring, made deliberately complex to discourage you from questioning it.

Like I said, everything in this country is about as exciting as a book of statutes; no inquisitiveness in anyone, totally captured by capital, and obsessed only with pleasure and temporary escape from the actual misery that is people’s livelihoods.

Take it from Henry David Thoreau:

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things. —Walden.

Indeed, it was noted by Menander long ago that it is better to be the slave of a good master than to live miserably as a freeman; and this is the conception which most today view their plight through: capital has become such a domineering orienting force, such a powerful narrative by which to understand your life, that any abstraction that doesn’t touch on the material is ultimately derided even if it’s a good notion in theory.

Nothing is sacred anymore because it has all been defamed in the eyes of the populace, and, sadly, the herd can no longer see things that aren’t dangled directly in front of their face. The thing they look for is an abstraction which they have chained themselves to, and yet they still feel it as something tangible, and in the struggle against the invisible they tangle themselves up in their own chains and die from exhaustion.

To see the world as it truly is requires you to look past the mere sustaining of it, but this is impossible for the moral powers of most; already trained to see things in that stupid, materialistic way, their minds are sharpened to a fine point but are only able to cut into a single idea—namely their livelihoods, their material interests, and nothing besides.

People analyze and take apart fact by fact their whole life, and yet are unable to see that it is the way in which they live that is killing them. Their capitulation to the system of decadent morals is precisely the thing stripping them of life, but they will cling to it heartily so long as it continues to provide them a narrative which makes sense of everything for them without much effort on their part.

And so it is with the origins of democracy—the most perfect system of government for capitalism ever devised.

Gentlemen, this is democracy manifest!

Revolution

It cannot be argued from too far out of left field that revolution is, in fact, a glorious thing. The integrity of revolution itself speaks volumes merely in its embodiment by the people. There is no greater truth than one collective action taken on behalf of a populace for the sake of their own emancipation. Every revolution in history has been a reaction against oppression in one form or another. The human spirit does not go quietly into that good night of bondage unless it is coerced into believing that its subjugation is really a type of liberation from the oppressive fetters of everyday life.

Existence presents us with a task to perform—gagner sa vie—and after that, nothing worth considering, for most people do not know anything outside of earning their living. As I’ve already said before, modernity is captured by a type of moral evaluation that makes everything the reverse of what it truly is: oppression is liberation, work is freedom, labor is fun, good is evil, etc.—as far as I’m concerned, it could be argued we’re living as much in the shadow of George Orwell as we are of Friedrich Nietzsche.

We’re at a moment in our species’ history that yearns for the end of history altogether. Tired and repressed, slothful and unable to see beyond next week, we men of today do not wish to see tomorrow, for if it’s as bad as the present is, there’s no imperative in any of our decisions. Where Immanuel Kant once laid down the rules for all morality, we now seek to build our own out of whatever rubble remains from this falling metropolis around us—just as the Romans did to the Forum Romanum long after the golden age of Augustus, when the former glory of the republic was only a distant echo.

What concerns us today is anti-moral; it is, in its truest sense, a return to the spiritual out of necessity—a requiem for a narrative, a set of ideas and values by which to adopt in order to make sense of everything today. I say it is explicitly anti-moral because the values and ideas are not arrived at on their own but are rather culled from ages past, and as a result bear no resemblance to our present circumstances now.

Wisdom for life can never be arrived at through any other way but life. The man who spends all his days hunched over a book hoping to discover in it something of existential importance is doomed to fail; for the self-knowledge that is a necessary component of wisdom is lost if it is not embodied in action. Only when one grows tired from seeking wisdom in books can they develop for themselves a narrative by which to live—again, only after seeing the futility of manufacturing meaning for themselves out of erudition alone. I’ve seen many men led to ruin by their strict adherence to a conformity of study that turns into a vexing habit—a habit of taking from other men what they should really be searching for in themselves, always firmly believing from the start that their searches will not be in vain; and from that conviction lay the foundation for many false errors within themselves, never to be overcome, for they still hold truth to be a static thing.

Again, wisdom is not something which one can discover in a dusty tome but rather something which must be arrived at only after one grows tired from searching for it. In that sense I’m very much like Hegel, anti-wisdom, for wisdom actually implies a type of knowledge that is rigid, unchanging, and totally counter to contradiction as such. This cannot do in a world where all is flux and revolution is upon us every second. Wisdom is really a type of movement within spirit as such, an overcoming of what is on the surface settled and unchanging, which in its true depths lies the moral impulse to express what the zeitgeist truly is.

Most of life is the forgoing of one action for another in the face of what is an assumed necessity on behalf of a demand which our power was inclined to perform over any other demand in that exact moment. That which makes an individual grow is also that which, more often than not, the individual seeks to avoid at all costs, for there is no wisdom by which to fall back on in that instant. Life, when seen from its true revolutionary perspective, is that which transcends the state—yea, a thing which even words fail to convey truthfully, for every thought is really an impulse that possesses the writer enough to actually be expressed in reality, while all the other thoughts fall back down into oblivion, though each of them may have been just as insightful.

It is always necessary to see the spirit of man as that which strives and seeks but which never obtains anything but a simulacrum of what was truly thought. That which makes necessary demands on the individual to grow is always that which is difficult, hard to obtain, perhaps even impossible given the scope of the ideal and the power of the individual to advance towards it. There’s an almost indescribable aspect of action which nobody can really explain other than to say that was what they felt like doing in the moment. Notice here how we always return to the instincts or nature when we’re confronted with something which our reason cannot categorize and box in—where labels fail, that is where true insight lies.

Only when one is tired from the search for meaning can they take in the full implications of their actions; normally distracted by the labor of daily life and concerned with the most immediate and trivial things with respect to maintenance, it always happens that those who are bright-eyed and hopeful for the future come out the worse for it by taking their own hope too far, and thus souring it in their eyes: become too ambitious and the practical starts to appear boring to you.

Mundanity is viewed with suspicion today, but the herd have never been able to properly calibrate their desires with what is present in their reality; even their own narratives provide them false consolation in this regard, for it’s still human, all too human—viewed through their hopeful lens, making everything a positive which is really a negative, all in order that they may come out thinking for the best when all is really for the worse. So long as hope lives, men will continuously dance right into the arms of despair.

Look at the lives everyone lives today, and you tell me if there’s anything revolutionary in their spirit—anything that seriously moves them that isn’t connected with the drab normality of their own wretched existence. I find in man an endless singularity which is overlaid with the mortar of morality: everything that is herd-like triumphs in the end today, for modernity doesn’t reward those who move against it. Seekers of the zeitgeist will forever be right about everything, but also be recognized as such too late—look towards Nietzsche as perhaps the best example of this.

The psyche of modern man is fundamentally scared, broken, unable to cope with all the advancement—the endless seeking for some regularity amidst all this movement all at once would seem to suggest that the best thing to do is perhaps to get lost in place, to search for lost time, if you will, all while on your own way towards the end of your very life—a blank entry being the final chapter of every great existential diary after all.

It cannot be said with enough contempt how sickening and corrupt everything today is: egoism—a perpetual sense of self-importance which has gotten out of hand—rules all, even the Earth itself, and all for what? What good does all this searching do for us whilst we constantly find ourselves facing an uphill battle, hands tied, eyes blinded, ankles shackled, and spirits demoralized, all stemming from our occupation—even the word gets struck in our throats as we say it. And to think, people still affirm evidence and truth as if they still held any power, as if they were still in the conversation at all. To look for “facts” to “support” what you say is useless insofar as life is concerned. Leave that to the literature teachers, who think it’s their job to teach critical thinking in a class that is subjective by its very nature. Buffoons!

Christ help me. I can’t with mankind anymore: the falsity, the fakery, the cunning of reason for the sake of their own justification. Truth as power, truth as that which sustains our life. I’d rather kill myself than talk to a dogmatist with respect to their values. When a person says “truth,” they really say “value,” but should they say “perhaps,” I instantly know I’m dealing with either a skeptic or an agnostic who’s confused as to what their values are; I like those people much more! I love, in fact, the one who does not know yet strives to know nonetheless; the seeker after their own truth is the greatest lover of truth mankind has ever seen.

To be called irrational today is really a backhanded compliment. When people say it, they think they’re insulting you by speaking the truth; and that just shows you how much they actually value the principle of truth in the first place: to think it a problem to be irrational when existential aspects of life are concerned. It also reveals their narrow-mindedness, for they view all propositions the same, thinking everything reducible to logical absolutes and nothing besides. My patience for these cretins died a long time ago, and with that death came my own death, from which I resurrected a totally new person, in love with life again and enflamed with a revolutionary passion to finish what Nietzsche started—to bring about the true reevaluation of all values.

I even surpassed Nietzsche in this instant, in the same way I did Pyrrho, Schopenhauer, and Cioran—for unlike all of them I affirmed life irrationally but still held to the empirical aspects of it. (Nietzsche became dogmatic when he asserted the apparent world as the only world—a deeply metaphysical claim.) In that sense, the people I find myself closest to intellectually are, in fact, Pascal, Emerson, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, and William James.

While I still cling to the perspectivism and method of genealogy from Nietzsche, I find I could not follow him in his outright rejection of metaphysics; for me, he was still too wedded to the idea of truth to ever truly overcome it. He, like me, wanted final answers, but finding reason insufficient to provide any, he affirmed it was nonsense altogether rather than remaining agnostic with respect to that proposition. You can still affirm life without having to reject everything to do with the truth of it. I feel if Nietzsche never went mad, he would have come to the same conclusions Dostoevsky did regarding life, whom he read very closely.

What is a psychologist to do today—in an era of upheaval and social unrest, paranoia, and complete nihilism? I feel the best decision one could make presently is to view the world as nothing more than a sideshow filled with actors who are trying their hardest to make you laugh. Anyone who takes life seriously when everything around them is completely unserious should be looked at with suspicion, for they’re either crazy or putting on a convincing act; an act so convincing you would think they actually have something to look forward to besides death—that is, you would think they’ve found a meaning of sorts.

It doesn’t take a lot to see that any real talk of revolution is only just that: talk, and will not advance far beyond talk. Everyone has become so atomized, estranged, disaffected, and discouraged from doing anything today that revolution is only considered seriously in the minds of the Marxist enthusiast and the insane. As I said at the start, revolutions only form in moments that are ripe for them—when oppression has become too much to bear (as we saw with Spartacus), or the necessities of life are lacking (as we saw in the French Revolution).

Spontaneous revolutions almost never happen, and very few are charismatic enough to influence an entire populace to fight for a cause they’re willing to die for. Revolutions are those moments in history when years occur in only a few weeks. Change, which is the basis of all revolutions starting in the first place, must be fought for tooth and claw, for those with power want nothing more than to maintain it, and if that means suppressing millions of people they won’t give it a second thought.

The conditions for revolution have never been more ready than now, especially in America. Worldwide, we’re seeing a constant move towards the authoritarian, and this is a sign that the old political values which upheld the status quo are coming apart at the seams. When a value becomes ascendant in the populace, that is an indication of the times, a sign of things to come in the future—a forecast, if you will—that reveals all the prejudices presently active within the minds of everyone, though they all be ignorant of it.

The value set which the world is subject to at present is neoliberalism, though everyone alive currently knows it’s on its way out and cannot be brought about faster. Established in the wake of World War II, it grew to such dominance that nearly everyone born after 1945 has been trapped in a single overarching perspective which they cannot break loose from—they can’t even think outside of its frameworks, for they lack the intellectual maturity to make sense of it all, and even if they can they still have to subjugate themselves to it in order to survive, which only further perpetuates and legitimizes it.

Everything within the power structure is deliberately designed to be as impenetrable as possible, and, of course, it monitors everything, making any true revolutionary organizing nigh impossible. The current dominating values are the ones it imposes, and so, on a societal level, the public is inundated with them so subliminally they can’t value anything without its corrupting influence—in fact, most only value things through its influence, and nothing more; all this being justified, by the way, on behalf of order—and why would it be anything else, for of course it would be order that they hide behind to justify all their depravity: a term vague enough and generally agreed upon by most as something that is good. You see the false equivalence combined with the equivocation they’re using, all in the hopes of selling you their nonsense? It would be pitiable if it wasn’t so destructive.

The spirit of revolution is such that in every age it presents itself as a reaction against something that troubles the human heart so much that death is preferable to its continued endurance. Those who reject revolution do so only on account of its seeming impracticality, and they would be right, especially today, where the average person willingly submits to whatever they are confronted with rather than overcoming it through struggle.

Conditions are so designed at present to keep the entire world pacified and occupied with this or that immediate circumstance, and as a result the thought of real struggle is laughed at, ridiculed, argued against even by those who know things are not as they should be but see no other way of life to hope for. Whence comes all this nihilism? It is, in fact, a metaphysical reevaluation which has overtaken the minds of entire civilizations and has been at work for nearly six hundred years at this point.

One can argue the whole reevaluation began in the Italian Renaissance. The revival of classical Greek culture, which later saw its zenith in Weimar Classicism and English Romanticism, revealed to the entire world that a new dawn of metaphysics was upon enlightened peoples. I think, however, it can all be summarized quite simply in the following manner: the day faith no longer became a matter of life and death is the day true belief in values died. What effectively happened was that the values which once made faith and the hereafter the dominating concern for most people no longer held water, and so were replaced by a new faith, a new kind of mysticism in all honesty, which we still deal with today. Values in the spiritual and ethical were replaced with the immediate and material; people organized their lives around how to advance in this world rather than in the next, and so their concerns shifted to ways of achieving material prosperity at the expense of all else.

Modern man in the age of revolutionary readiness no longer feels ready to fight on behalf of his beliefs, and this is because he no longer holds those beliefs in high regard—no longer valuing them to the point of dying for them. We see this problem today most clearly, in fact, in politics—where both parties no longer hold to any value beyond that of power for its own sake. Values at present are such that change is less important than stagnation, and so nothing ever happens.

Revolution is something that can only occur in a people of imagination, a people who value things beyond what presently concerns them, a people capable of seeing and building for the sake of the future—to plant a tree in whose shade they will not sit. It really is a mockery at this point in time to consider things from that perspective, however, for so few are actually capable of going along with it. Revolution cannot occur unless a large enough percentage of the populace agree on the state of things, or change their values enough to actually bring it about. All else is folly.

Nothing short of revolution can save humanity at this point, but I don’t believe it can occur unless we first have a reevaluation of our present values, for it is our values that led us to where we are today. Only a culture obsessed with material possessions and comfort can let decadence reign supreme in our age. Just as the monarchs of the eighteenth century suffered for the sins of their ancestors (the monarchical principle), we of today must now suffer for the debauchery which our ancestors were so fond of. It’s a sad but true fact: we have to reject and start over with respect to all our values, and only from there can we seriously talk about revolution. Until then, all is talk and theory, but never action—no praxis.

War and Peace

War is the natural state of things, and peace very much the byproduct of reason. Nature insists that all things be in flux and, leaving no stability within itself, exhausts itself in continuous fighting and clamoring within the environment. It should go without saying that were there no life on Earth there would be no war, and the only peace would be like that found on Antarctica today—a rather drab and mundane quiet, peacefully persisting through time and having no action whatsoever to speak of.

Life for man necessarily implies that death must occur, for man is a heterotroph, making the consumption of other organisms a prerequisite if he is to live. In this very fact is found the earliest source of conflict and the beginning of all war. Organism against organism in the fight for survival has to be one of the oldest states of nature, for whatever does not survive off the sun alone must obtain nutrition from somewhere. Thus, the first conflict between organisms was that for nutrients.

As the earliest forms of life evolved and expanded, adapting to the ever-changing environment all the while, man was eventually spawned from that long chain of chance, and so too was war in the sense we typically understand it: a conflict between man and man. Philosophically, it may be argued that man is constantly at war with all things around him, but more on that later.

Finding himself cast into the world as if through some miracle, man lived according to the precepts of his time, and this typically meant nothing more than following the traditions laid down. Early life for man was difficult. It was one of foraging and collecting. Uncertainty at every step, constantly hungry, and having a deep sense of urgency with each approaching cloud. Nothing came easy to prehistoric man as it does for us today—with our air-conditioned rooms and well-stocked grocery aisles.

In that era of history in which man was not sure when his next meal would come, there was a constant source of anxiety and struggle which he had to overcome through no other means but forward; the sheer resilience found in our ancestors is something to admire, for their lives were tough beyond all measure—and I don’t think many today could reject the modern world even if they tried, for we’ve all become too attached to our comforts and as a result know not how to live frugally, let alone dangerously.

Mankind as a whole, it should not be forgotten, has existed as a species for only a very short amount of time, at least in comparison to the Earth, and so, in all honesty, we’re still in our mewling phase as a species—not yet out of our baby shoes, if you know what I mean. Within this time, however, we’ve matured quite rapidly—at least in comparison with all the other species—and have literally come to subjugate the entire planet to our will. In doing this we’ve developed ways of bypassing outright the original difficulty of life—scarcity—and yet, despite this, have still managed to fracture peace with incessant war.

How could this be, considering the only war within the state of nature is one fought over scarce resources necessary for our survival? Well, as time would play out, after man became master of nature—and could readily supply all his needs for himself—he took to his innate ambition and desired things beyond what was necessary, and so brought upon himself needless strife and conflict. For man’s innate ambition, if not set on nature, is set upon himself, and thus makes his own ideals things to be actualized in the world; what this has often implied, and inevitably led to, is armed conflict between, at first, groups of hunter-gatherers—and later, as civilizations formed, whole armies. But before we speak on war proper and man’s role in it we ought first to discuss this societal development in the first place.

Every war prior to the formation of agriculture was fought between tribes over some territory or some abstraction which both held in mutual esteem but which only one could possess for some reason. With agriculture came the formation of settlements, which allowed the tribe not only to expand but also to be more productive, and from this came the earliest cities, which in turn expanded into states, states to societies, and societies to culture and civilization as a whole. From here, man no longer saw himself as part of a tribe alone, but as part of a new collective identity which focused on family and his relations in society as a whole.

There have always been leaders of tribes—those in whom the majority placed their confidence, initially through a show of strength—and so the same naturally followed when civilizations formed. With man’s place in nature at this point no longer subject to the tyranny of chance (not entirely at least), it would happen that those who were the strongest would command the whole society after the manner they saw fit, not unlike the manner Gilgamesh ruled Uruk, I would suspect. With a single man now in control of an entire nation, and with his every desire made open to him—no longer having to hunt for his food or worry about predators—he was now free to use his power in whichever way he wanted to. Coming to his position thanks to his power—his competence in using his strength, that is—he naturally took that attitude into all things, in the same way a man with a hammer views all his problems like a nail.

Indeed, history tells us that most leaders and founders of nations were warlords by today’s standards—military leaders who were able to conquer others through their power alone. A powerful man thinks all things solvable through power and power alone, and so the earliest leaders were such men: capable strategists and commanders of men to do as they wished. And so we have it. When war is no longer fought between man and nature, it is fought between man and man—usually between a man with more resources against one with less.

The cruelty of war is found in that fact: that it is undertaken out of vain ambition and always at the expense of the weaker for the sake of increasing the vanity of the stronger. The stronger decides, in this sense, who lives and who dies, and such power is corrupting to the morals of that man—though it can never be argued that that is an error, for in such an era power was the only true moral, and that which weakened the instincts spelled defeat for the aggressor. The rest, I think we can say confidently, is history—for Voltaire rightly noted that the aim of all war is robbery, and Jean‑Jacques Rousseau, in perusing Hugo Grotius, came to the conclusion that history is but a litany of tragedy and misfortune.

As civilizations advanced, so too did the stakes and the losses suffered on behalf of ambitious rulers; the greater the number, the greater the bloodbath, and man has played through this exact thing more times than any man would like to recount. It can be said that half, maybe two-thirds, of history is war, and the remaining percentage is found in eating, sleeping, and doing nothing. Every war is a tragedy and in truth unnecessary, for no man in command of his heart would willingly tear another’s out for the sake of his own gratification or empowerment. Here I depart from Friedrich Nietzsche and do not say that everything a powerful man does is good merely because he is powerful—rather, I think the most powerful man is one who thinks war beneath him, a man who uses his reason pragmatically but never existentially: that’s my Übermensch anyway—an individual in command of their power, who uses it in ennobling ways but never at the expense of another.

With all that said, we can say now that war is merely ambition taken too far—hubris in the highest regard. It’s funny too, because as I write this, the U.S. has gotten itself into another war, fought on behalf of our “ally,” Israel, for no desirable reason whatsoever. I have a hunch that the military-industrial complex is involved; and I would also suspect this kind of attack has been on the minds of many hawks for decades—I mean, Benjamin Netanyahu literally said a war with Iran was something he’s “longed to do for 40 years,” so I guess it wasn’t really subtle; it was only a matter of time. And to think, none of these leaders know the true cost of war, none of them understand how terrible it truly is. War is hell. War is what occurs when reasonable men leave the room and allow the world to be run by vainglorious men—men with a vision for the world; only it is one that is necessarily self-centered and egocentric.

It seems Heraclitus was right: “War is the father of all things.” All things against war are weak and fundamentally anti-human, or so the warmongers would like us to believe. War in the days of Alexander the Great was rather simple to understand. All leaders acted on behalf of their ambition to conquer, to subjugate, to inflict pain and suffering for the sake of their drive—all that which satiated their hunger for conflict and increased their feeling of power was good, and everything the opposite of that was rejected outright. War today, however, speaks the language of political jargon: foreign policy, self-defense, overseas interests, protecting our allies, spreading freedom, stopping evil. War has adapted itself to a post–World War II lingo, in which any mention of it is an immediate cause for concern—for the last thing mankind ever wants to repeat is that. War today must be presented piecemeal, obfuscatorily, unintelligibly, etc. Everyone knows it’s an unpopular thing, and very few actually have the guts to commit to it, for the simple fact that the stakes are much higher than they ever were before. But more on this later.

You would think history has seen enough of war and that men would like to usher in an age of peace, but so long as powerful men assume leadership positions and suddenly find themselves in the upper echelons of power, there is always a slight probability that power will corrupt, and as such would lead to war. It was said by Will Durant in The Lessons of History that “in the last 3,421 years of recorded history only 268 have seen no war.” What are we to extract from this stupendously tragic fact? That war is, perhaps, ineradicable from man—maybe even a necessary part of his soul, for all wars, again, are born in ambition when nature is no longer a concern.

I’ve spoken before about man being in a long war against himself, but never about war proper: war that views men as disposable, nothing more than a unit in a battalion—treating them inhumanly, forgetting that the person there is a child to someone and that they have dreams beyond national defense. Violence knows no bounds and will forever be a cause of dispute and conflict so long as the feeling of revenge lives within the hearts of men. War will surely be the death of us all too, should we feel the need to globalize it.

At such a moment in history the air hangs heavy with tension; there is always conflict to get up in arms about, and there’s a seemingly endless supply of men willing to risk their lives for the sake of some perceived glory found in battle. Many men have died in war, all in vain as far as I see it. No one should have to be convinced that what they do is righteous if the act in and of itself is virtuous. Since men are made for war, it is an easy thing to convince many of them that what they fight for is for the good, but the end result is always the same—massacre after massacre, death and destruction, plunder and pillage, genocide even; are all these not the ripest fruits of war, and the “noble” productions of our power on behalf of an idea? My stance on war is very much like that of Desiderius Erasmus. In fact, I would go so far as to say that we share the same position, though arrived at from opposite directions.

Now, I’ve spoken at length about war, but what about its counterpart, peace? Peace is the negation of everything which war brings about. Peace is established in harmony. Like war, it is born in nature and is as much a part of our spirit as the ambition which leads us to war is. I love peace and would prefer it over war at all times. I love peace because it generally means happiness—happiness that is not to be broken by the ambitions of man. A world in which all see each other as brothers and sisters is a world that promotes understanding, tolerance, and love; a world in which ambition is impossible to conceive of, for everything a person can want is already provided to them. That, in my thinking, is the greatest of all possible worlds.

I hate war because it leads to suffering, and I despise seeing people killed, displaced, and saddened by the lack of hope which their present circumstances put them in. If my death meant the end of all human suffering for the rest of time, I would gladly sacrifice myself like Jesus Christ for that end. A world as beautiful and abundant as ours deserves to be organized in such a way that allows all of mankind to rest assured, to take it easy, to enjoy life in all its beauty simply in living it.

Right now, evil is in the ascendant, and many misfortunes are taking place which, were the world perfect, would never occur at all; but since our world is not perfect, it is in my view the end goal of our lives to leave the world in a better state than it was when we came into it. Mankind has always loved pointing out the differences between people rather than loving the differences as something unique—an aspect of culture, say, or a new language or tradition by which to become smitten. In diversity comes unity, for all multitudes have their origin in a single, all-encompassing spirit which represents humanity as a whole. That, as I understand it, is what peace is: a total confluence of all things tied together in love.

Our responsibility at this point in time, it has to be said, is quite unlike what it was at any other point in history—for our actions have greater implications today than they’ve had at any other point in history, due in part to how fast we’re advancing technologically. Modernity is unique in that the problems we face are existential on a global scale. It’s no longer true that what happens to someone across the world is of no concern to me. Being as interconnected as we are as a species, thanks to technology, has shown me one thing—that if I do not have love for my fellow man across the world, then I do not have love for my neighbor either; rather, all I show in such an action is a wicked egoism beneath contempt, a kind of selective love in which I place my own judgment above the principle of love itself, which is really to degrade love and render it meaningless.

War dissolves all ties of love, for war is the opposite of love—it only occurs when the opposing sides are no longer willing to listen to each other, no longer able to see each other as fellow men, no longer able to love each other as friends love each other. It is the duty of all future people to make love a necessary aspect of their lives. Mankind should really turn all ambition inwards, toward the heart that is, and make love—and love alone—the only thing worth being ambitious about. Until hate has been torn out of our hearts and ambition no longer serves our egoistic ends, we can never rest comfortably in life, for war always remains open, and with that, suffering. Let us move past this evolutionary accident—this wicked moral evaluation of hate, revenge, ambition, war, etc.—and become caretakers for all mankind collectively.

Let us end war. Let us promote peace. And let us love all as we love ourselves. Nothing more, nothing less.

Slavery

I think that nothing will ever give permanent peace and security to this continent but the extirpation of Slavery therefrom, and that the occasion is nigh; but I would do nothing hastily or vindictively, nor presume to jog the elbow of Providence. —James Russell Lowell, A Message of Jeff Davis in Secret Session.

Slavery was once an institution for only a select few unfortunate races, but now has become open to anyone, so long as they wish to enslave themselves for the sake of their lives. It is a fact not to be lauded, for what it implies is nothing more than a continuance of human misery that has no place in a world meant for happiness and flourishing. Given our liberal, enlightened, freedom-obsessed world, you would have assumed that man would have already destroyed the chains which bind him to a life of misery and toil—but nothing remains as ingrained in the minds of fools as that which touches upon their existence, and so long as man must work to live, he will perpetually maintain the continuance of his own subjugation.

In a very real sense, the greatest crisis which confronts man at present is his inability to rid himself of the notion that his time is to serve others for the sake of sustaining his own. Man is always willing to obey others but never willing to obey himself. What is taken as the norm today is a long tradition of increasing servitude for all those unable to make something of themselves through their diligence alone. Man is incapable of living today without selling himself out in one form or another; even those who live off the grid must still bow down to nature and hope their power is capable of gathering enough sustenance for their hungry bellies.

All this and then some is the modern condition of man, but it is never questioned by him; he makes do with what he has as best he can, but never talks about it out loud to himself—let alone in his head, which, in truth, is barren and empty most of the time. If man had half as much intelligence as he does industry, he would have withdrawn from the world long ago; for he would have discovered there is nothing here for him that does not inevitably lead to his destruction. The very emptiness prevalent in the hearts of all moderns is on account of a tradition long gone and forgotten, buried under the constant rubble of experience which so animates the continued forward movement of all things in the world at present.

Our times are comprised of only a single unity: one uniform motion forward—even if that forward movement really constitutes a backward motion, a motion of stagnation and eventual decline, a ceasing, in fact, of motion altogether. Modernity is upheld by a dream of progress that has never really manifested itself in any positive way. What people live through today is one tragedy after another, hardly any progressive movement anywhere, long bouts of economic difficulty, and tremendous periods of hopelessness. People today go as far as to make their despair a thing of joy. The reversion at this point is almost complete.

The day men call good evil is the day Friedrich Nietzsche’s reevaluation of all values would have officially commenced; and after that it is only a matter of time before this age falls into oblivion, only to be revived and regaled with the most splendid display of life-affirming values not seen since the Renaissance. Things as they are now cannot persist, and will not persist so long as the human heart finds within itself the strength to overcome it. The soul can only endure and embody so much corruption before it sickens itself to death, and must then adopt a new physics of morality if it is to continue on. What this soul sickness indicates is the beginning of an age of decline, in no way new but in many ways finally coming to roost.

It was already noted around this time a century ago by men like Oswald Spengler and René Guénon. The Decline of the West and The Crisis of the Modern World may rightly be viewed as prophetic books rather than mere history or philosophy books, respectively. Even before them, Nietzsche, in his Beyond Good and Evil, already sounded the alarm: the decline and decay of all things spiritual, the total debasement of all formerly held values, the rejection, even, of strong values for the sake of personal ones—which were themselves a mere reaction against what was already dead and rotting.

It cannot be argued for strongly enough that what we face today is really the playing out of a foregone conclusion, the origins of which trace back to the French Revolution. Man, having finished with the rule of kings, decided to place himself under the rule of an even greater despot: himself! It was only a matter of time, then, for things to get as out of hand as they have. The average person lives as if they were more fit for slavery than freedom, for the simple fact that they have not yet matured intellectually to the point of understanding the implications and significance of their own freedom. The values which must exist in tandem with freedom have often been overlooked by pretty much everyone.

Everyone says “freedom,” “liberty,” and “justice,” but never lives in accordance with them. No one today follows through with these moral injunctions themselves. Everyone is a hypocrite when it comes to their life, and this is because their life is sustained by their enslavement to work, and as a result, they consider things only after the exhaustion of labor has so confounded their mind that they cannot think straight with respect to their own values. The values they cling to out of familiarity are precisely what keeps them shackled to life—I say again, they do not live life but are shackled to it on account of debt and misery. This is the reality for most people, and because of it they devalue life in the face of its continuation.

Slavery has, in fact, never ended, only changed form. A man who lives by his wages alone today is no different from the slaves who were under the command of Xerxes. We like to think our freedom is our own, and that we carve out our own paths in life and build for ourselves our true destinies—but no one can honestly entertain these inspiring liberal assumptions when their very survival is dependent on their employment; indeed, four-fifths, perhaps even seven-eighths, of the whole world is dependent on another for their own subsistence. The master-slave dialectic is maintained, order is upheld, and the general misery dished out on the populace is ever increasing.

For those with power, nothing more could be asked for; for those with no power, the question of how much must be suffered in order to live is in demand. To live today is to pay dearly the cost of drawing breath. All toil is equal in the suffering it deals, but some are better than others at maintaining the strain of it. Some, usually of weak mental constitution, go crazy at the thought of life and fall into a crippling anxiety which they cannot break free from.

Anxiety is perhaps the greatest product of the modern world, for it can only exist in a time of stress that is itself non-existential—that is to say, non-life-threatening; it can only be born in the minds of those who think their life is their own to command and improve upon, when in truth they are subject to material forces which they had no say in, and yet which they must live according to so long as they value their life.

A true slave never worried about their life, and therefore could never have anxiety in the modern sense, for as far as they were concerned, they had no life outside of service to their masters; any thought of life outside of bondage was merely wishful thinking, for indeed their whole life was at the behest of their masters; and as a result, slaves all throughout history internalized their own subjugation as a necessary component of who they were, thus making their enslavement quasi-permanent—just like how the serfs in Russia continued to work the same fields they were formerly bound to for no other reason than that that is all they knew how to do.

All this to say the hard truth: the values of men today are so materialistic that they cannot be overcome until this obsession with quantity, order, calculation, categorization, systematization, and credentialization is abolished from our minds completely. All things today have to be systematized, simplified, rigidified, and stultified if they are to be accepted by the public at large. In general, everything is reduced to numbers on a screen, and anyone who wants to get ahead in life must always do so at the expense of their own liberty. Slavery shall always be permanent so long as men consider it a duty to uphold it.

The social relations of the past which led to the present have always considered as an implicit value the sense of order and regularity in life that dominate the modern world today. Things are considered more by the calendar than anything else.

And whoever is bold enough to see the world as it truly is, and as a result rejects it on that basis, is labeled a misanthrope, an oddball, a weirdo, a bizarre man, a strange individual, a totally confused person—and, with relish, always ending these insulting and vain tirades by saying such a person is impractical, living in the clouds, high off their own ideas, etc.; and yet, these same people live the same day on repeat and are too stupid to go insane from the repetition—indeed, these are the people to whom the expression “ignorance is bliss” applies perfectly, for they are monstrously ignorant, and yet seemingly not all that blissful—I would suspect because their values also encourage them to be fruitful and abundant and well-off, and yet their own empty lives are anything but.

Ah yes, this is the modern age as such: one of slavery which is argued as freedom—for the simple fact that the person enslaved makes themselves so of their own accord. It is, in my view, the most decadent moral evaluation possible to conceive, for it turns literal enslavement into a form of empowerment, made upbeat and optimistic with platitudes that hold for no one actually conscious of their reality. It is for this reason that realism in an existential sense is often considered pessimistic today, when in truth the exact opposite is the case; but alas, one can expect nothing less than a complete and total misevaluation in an age such as ours.

Anyone who denies the conditions of the modern world should be beaten and burned until they admit that the opposite of such a scenario is preferable to the reality which they live through now. I see nothing in the present worth writing home about, for all things become commodified the instant they become popular, and so just as quickly die the moment the fun surrounding them disappears. The world has a deeply pacifying and patronizing element to it. All things seem to be the same, and whatever is innovated upon gets quickly adopted and accepted as the norm. The time between when a thing occurs and when it is adopted is so short that there is very little time to deeply reflect on anything.

The implications of a thing are lost in a sea of other sensations, and so all that remains of it is but a distant echo, a vague sense of nostalgia which you cannot explain but feel all the same. Without reflection, there is little to no understanding that occurs in the mind, and so there is almost no possibility of a thing’s significance being ingrained in the soul. Hence why all things ring hollow, and why so many today mindlessly follow whatever they’re told, rather than coming to their own conclusions on a thing which they have experienced.

Any reflection that could possibly occur today is always done after having been passed through a sieve of associated ideas that are vaguely connected, and which relate to you personally in some way, but which are always arrived at first through association, and not existential reflection; in that sense, reflection is very rarely personal, and this is because it is never done genuinely from the heart first. Things not done from the heart are always dishonest in some way, and though some are very good at passing someone else’s thoughts as their own, there always comes a moment in which the person knows what they’re doing is not them, and so they collapse into contradiction and absurdity soon afterwards.

Whatever is false is to be shunned, but few today have the gall and personality to actually do so; I suspect because our age is much more accommodating to the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, the wicked and the bad, so long as all of it is prefaced with an ode to its honesty and originality. It is all over with us anyway. This age shall pass, and what follows it is an abyss so deep even those free spirits who gaze boldly into it cannot break from it, and so slowly turn insane, until they suffer a complete breakdown themselves.

To be more specific, the self-willed form of identity today, which is constantly being praised by those who have not the slightest idea what that really entails, is only an indication of the barbarism yet to rain down upon us—a barbarism of ignorance that is incorrigible and irreconcilable with all the modern values which we hold dear, and which we would rather die than be without. Of all value judgments, the most monstrous is the one that leads to an implicit contradiction that cannot be rectified through explicit action. In other words, it is a value judgment that is sustained in contradiction, but which cannot be subject to change when reality proves it to be a contradiction.

That which necessarily precedes reason, and precludes it, in fact, is what all value judgments today have more or less become. It is no longer subjectivism with an existential bent, but rather subjectivism with a social bent, a political bent—a desire to see others follow along with the same freedom of thought which is, in truth, a monstrous falsity. This is, again, the modern form of slavery: not arrived at by choice but through socialization—the adoption of values not your own merely for the sake of finding yourself more at ease with the world around you.

If the world were not as interconnected as it is, it would be easy to remain ignorant of all things not essential for life, and to continue living as you have before without much consideration for other values which are not worth considering; but because this age is one of dynamism and technics, of capital capture and cybernetic socio-political entrapment, all values are defiled, and truth is made subject to the market itself. At this point, we all ought to agree with the great Henry Adams—and start praying to our dynamos. Slavery by choice is often said to be better than by force, and yet force is what initially established it as an institution, and choice is what presently sustains it.

The illusion, I should say, of free choice, which comes from that monstrous error of free will—which in truth is compatibilism made digestible and regurgitated into the mouths of those who find truth too jagged to swallow.

The Ethical Response

Virtue and Vice

Though men should at all times strive for virtue, it happens more often that their vices get the best of them, and on that account are they ruined by what they seek.

By becoming absorbed in virtue, one often falls prey to many vices which lie behind every action. A man must guard himself at all times against that which is bad, for there is more bad than good in the world, and from that fact stems every difficulty in life.

If virtue were an easy thing to acquire, every man would possess it without difficulty. With more men made victims of vice, however, it shows you that virtue is not only hard to obtain but that most cannot obtain it at all. What a man falls for is often more informative than what he hopes for; and in every instance of failure, we see the true character of a man—for man is crafty, and would play the whole world some slick trick if it meant he could keep appearances in the face of his own failures.

Life feels at all times like an alternative scenario which we would rather not think about. Even the simplest things require contingencies, and wherever man goes, suffering follows right behind like a shadow. If all things could be known, there would be no ominous shadow which follows man; but alas, so long as man stands out of the reach of the light of honesty, he will forever be near his own vices, and will be brought to ruin and shame by them as a result. It cannot be forgotten that a great part of a shadow’s darkness is the result of man’s obstinance with respect to his own heart; the longer one rejects what they feel internally, the further they stray from honesty, and as a result never see the light of truth.

So long as man doubts himself, he will never trust himself, and if he cannot trust himself, he cannot know himself. What would become of that great Delphic maxim if a man could not comprehend the suggestion given him by it? It would fall into oblivion, an eternal darkness shrouded in ignorance, and maintained by the black veil placed over it—yea, even obstructed by dark branches that cover everything in that forest of night, where not even the moonlight shines through to illuminate anything.

So long as man doubts, man suffers. Doubt is the greatest cause of suffering, but only for those men who think it the objective of thought to actually arrive at a final truth with respect to everything. It has always been the case that those who are the greatest critics of truth were once the strongest and most ardent seekers of truth—not unlike how the most staunch atheists today were once the most faithful servants of God.

As an aside, but slightly related to the concept of doubt, the arguments on behalf of objective truth made by René Guénon in his The Crisis of the Modern World are perhaps the most poignant, and typify that which I speak of. This genius of a man was very right to criticize the shortcomings of pragmatism and vitalism as philosophical movements, and was, in my opinion, even greater than Friedrich Nietzsche in explaining how the mechanistic turn which constituted modern philosophy—starting with René Descartes—led to the moral evaluations which we hold in high regard today, and which, without doubt, indicate a great decline and, in fact, a coming age of decadence, the likes of which have not been seen since the Romans. However, despite Guénon’s unimpeachable brilliance as a linguist and metaphysician, all his arguments for truth as being metaphysically real are nothing more than a litany of argumentum ad consequentiam (appeal to consequences). He takes the decline of the modern world as the ultimate proof of his ideas, and on that account becomes nothing more than a cultural critic, not much different from myself or someone like William Hazlitt—but the pretense of any “real” philosophy is driven out with a sturdy stick, for like all defenders of “the truth,” they always fall back on values and subjectivity: on this point, so long as mankind does philosophy, the perspectivism of Nietzsche will always have to be tripped on and faced with total despair by all genuine seekers and philosophasters alike.

Even geniuses doubt. Though Guénon thought himself above doubt by viewing everything through the lens of objectivity, it really only revealed one thing—he too was but a man, a genius, but still a man; and in showing himself to the world all too humanly when he spoke of things profane, that is, of this world, he made himself a passionate defender of “the truth” in order to ease the doubt which had come to ravish the entire world—and look no further than our own times to see what doubt has done to the human race.

What is really needed today is a way of doubting without having that doubt interfere with the existential. Again, man must trust himself, and must not lie to himself—as Guénon did—with the belief that truth is something out there. Every defender of truth is really the defender of a prejudice. Those who think truth beyond man, who think it something eternal and mind-independent, must have their heads examined—for I don’t believe much activity is going on up there if they truly believe that. Truth is a value seldom worked up to the point of objectivity; few men have the luxury of convincing themselves of such claptrap.

Truth has gone so far, in fact, as to be considered a virtue by most. Now this is an idea I cannot possibly fathom. A virtue—which is really a value in the guise of objectivity—when taken to the extreme becomes a vice. And in that we have the clearest evaluation possible. Values are a fluid thing, and change as often as the ocean tides; so long as man is in the world, he must constantly find himself thinking differently than what he initially thought. The facts of life, which are born in our experience and exist only for us as individuals, change each passing second; every thought constitutes a new one, and they constitute many more to come. The future, though appearing near to us, is as obscure and uncertain as our very present—for, and this I must ask, who has ever been certain of a single moment in their whole life? Surely no one honest with themselves. I don’t even feel honest with myself right now, and yet I write all this as if I knew with certainty the contents of my heart. That is the honesty I spoke of earlier: an honesty which allows one to leap into the unknown of life and not be undone by it.

A man can no more predict what he’s to say next than he can predict what he’s to say in the future. The judgments we make, and the values we hold to, may as well be represented by the clouds—for I know no thing in nature that so perfectly captures what a value is than a cloud: slowly moving, peacefully, almost deliberately, changing size, shape, and color, but always remaining itself, as it were. Values are such things as dreams are made of, rounded off with a sleep when we die, but carried on in life as we live. Though we cannot be masters of them, we are, in fact, influenced by them, and in that we have the power to obtain virtue from them. This idea was first propounded by Aristotle, and from him came every variation by every virtue ethicist imaginable; now, having been the most dominant theory of ethics for most of history, combined with its recent revival, I feel we ought to discuss it, and in doing so reveal the hidden prejudices and assumptions that lie behind it.

Of all the ancient philosophers, Aristotle was, without question, the most thorough—it was this thoroughness, in fact, that led Hegel to call him the “teacher of the human race”; and for good reason, for it could be argued that Aristotle was the first polymath in history, and the first man to have a truly comprehensive (encyclopedic) knowledge of all things. Aristotle always started his philosophical investigations from first principles, which is to say he always started out with what appeared most obvious to his reason; and from this single intuition about what was right, he deduced a whole system of seemingly reasonable conclusions—giving justification after justification for all his ideas, and in this lies his entire reputation. There is almost no subject which Aristotle did not think about at length, but as great as he is, he never questioned the value of truth itself, and so, like everyone after him, made the conclusion final, fearing doubt more than anything else, and assumed without ground his entire system. Pull that one intuition out, and his entire system collapses.

It has always been assumed that if anyone seeks to refute Aristotle, they must begin by refuting his reasons; but the second they admit to this, they are already fighting an uphill battle, for they all assume the problem lies in his reasoning rather than in his presuppositions. Every problem in philosophy is really a problem of presupposition; in that sense, there are no real problems in philosophy, but rather disagreements about how the propositions are argued for or against, or about how the conclusions are arrived at through reason itself. As a result, philosophy has been stripped of its existential character completely, and has rather become the concubine of reason, satisfying conditions that lead to “objectivity”, but totally ignoring the obvious subjectivity that lies at the heart of every investigation. As a result, we ought to always investigate the claims of a philosopher on our terms, not on theirs, for theirs are just as much unfounded as ours. That is what existential analysis is, after all. So let us approach Aristotle in this way.

Aristotle believed that in the careful weighing and measuring of our proclivities, we could arrive at a golden mean, as it were, and from there know the best value to adopt with respect to our situation. This was arrived at by Aristotle teleologically, which means that the goal itself was the impetus for the initial action; there was a purpose or intent behind the action, and the action was carried out in order to further the goal in mind. Now, up until this point, Aristotle is strictly in the subjective domain, and is to be praised for organizing such a coherent thought in regard to action; but where he goes wrong is when he tries to turn the subjective, personal, context-dependent aspect of action into an objectivity. Right off the bat, we are already betraying the essence of the notion itself. If a virtue is relative to us—which is to say it is dependent on the intentions of what we ultimately want to achieve—how could we ever say that it is mind-independent, eternal, in a word, objective? Aristotle tries to argue, I think unsuccessfully, that teleology is objective because it relates to a desire born out of reason; and for Aristotle, it is reason which guides all things. Reason cannot be subjective because the contents of an idea relate to objective reality as such. Disagreeing with his teacher Plato, Aristotle considered reality not as a reflection of some perfect realm, but rather as an object which contains perfection already in it; the perfectible aspect of nature gave rise to virtue in man, for virtue is nothing but man’s ideal reality made manifest in the world as such.

To reiterate this point, for it is quite a perplexing one, Aristotle believed reason was objective because it was rooted in the nature of being rather than the whims of the individual. But what is this nature of being, and why assume it to be? Aristotle used all his genius to answer this exact question in his Metaphysics, but all we received from him in that tome was the same groundless assumption that all philosophers still cling to to this very day. Aristotle never doubted reality itself; he was merely the best at providing reasons for why things were as they were without making them seem like subjective evaluations with respect to them. And this has more or less been Western philosophy ever since; our intellectual tradition was born in sin, born in objectivity, born in the affirmation of reason—but literally no one before Nietzsche actually doubted the values behind all our affirmations: the Sophists, Eleatics, Pyrrhonians, and Stoics—not even they truly doubted, for they all held doubt to be epistemological rather than axiological (value-based), and as a result held to a foolish agnosticism rather than an affirmative philosophy of becoming.

Virtue has always been born in reason, for man has always assumed virtue to be a reasonable thing to pursue in the face of a world which has so many vices in it—a false world which distracts and obfuscates from our honesty. But while all this is well and good pragmatically speaking, philosophically it is without reason, for it is without ground, and thus must either be continuously despaired over dialectically or accepted existentially. Reason is itself a value. It has nothing to ground it to outside of the subjective preference of the individual who holds to it. Men for all time have made virtue subject to the objective, but never subjective for the individual self—never making it existential, only rational, weak, life-denying, decadent. This is the vice of all vices, for it seeps into every aspect of our evaluations and turns all our powerful instincts against themselves—thus making us forever interpreting, never to act, never to be.

Temperance

Temperance:
Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.
—The 1st of Benjamin Franklin’s 13 Virtues.

It behooves a man to find temperance. Without it there is no constancy of mind—and without that, within the multitudinous affairs of life, a man is more often than not swept up into the most trifling nonsenses conceivable, of no benefit to his life; and on that account does he waste his time, and thus send to oblivion all that which is necessary for his well-being and happiness.

My love for literature was actually spurred on by my recognition of the very sad fact that, in the modern world, most people do not have temperance; and I found that on this account most are made to live very wretched lives. Lacking the constitution of mind necessary to withstand the blows which life dishes out on them, and having no clear understanding of the importance of consistency or promptitude, a man today more often forgoes all these existential considerations by relying on his conscientiousness alone—believing, like an ox, that the world will unfold before him so long as he is steadfast in his labors towards it.

It has to be remembered, however, that a man may have much conscientiousness but no proper outlet for it, and as a result, he leaps into the abyss of life not understanding what is and is not for him—that is, not understanding those things which are conducive to his happiness, like, in this context, acquiring temperance.

Seeing all this, I took it upon myself to become the first true moralist of the 21st century. I wanted to provide a new path to an old destination which most today have totally forgotten about—a path of serenity to a destination worthy of all our attention and effort: peace and contentment in life.

And so my writing objective was formed, forged in the flames of my desire to provide the modern world a set of old values with a new moral substantiation for them—to provide an outlook perfectly corresponding with our own times so as to make everyone today more life-affirming; only to be achieved by those free spirits who were fortunate enough to stumble across my writings, and through my words come to slowly agree with all I said, not on account of its veracity, but on the honesty of its delivery and the prescience of its existential outlook.

And so I found myself at the very beginning of my writing career, very much in demand by no one but, for myself, wanting to supply the world with what I wished was actually in demand by everyone—writings of the highest existential content. I wanted to create in the minds of my readers a new awakening. I wanted to rouse them from their slothful, life-denying slumbers—caught in the grips of a vicious morality not their own—and provide them a new way of thinking, a new method for evaluating life, so as to only affirm those things which are important to them and them alone.

Personally, if a writing is not uplifting for the spirit or upbuilding for the soul, then it can hardly be called a writing at all; for writing, as I understand it, is meant to promote only that which is good for man, and done for his benefit alone.

Writers love to write things that are only of interest to them, and so they capture niche audiences but gain no wide recognition—and as a result are stuck writing only to that one audience; whereas, as I see it, a writer must be encyclopedic, and must strive to be life-affirming in all they say, for without that there is no true communication between the author and the reader.

Indeed, if the ideas are well written but do not connect with the hearts of the readers, then the writing will fail in its intentions—again, there is no true writing unless it is done from the heart, and so the best prose falls flat if it only talks of things factually; I would take Paul Valéry over Henri Bergson any day of the week, in the same way I would take Schopenhauer and Nietzsche over Spinoza and Descartes. If there is no musicality in the prose, no spirit implicit in any syllable, then that writing as a whole deserves to be lost to time, just like all those ancient declamatory exercises from the Greek and Roman orators.

I do not lose an ounce of sleep wondering what the lost speeches of Demosthenes or Cato the Elder might have read like, in the same way I do not busy myself with the scribblers of today—for writers are vain and ambitious, as they have always been, but unlike in the past, we of today lack the skill or tact to actually say anything worth remembering into tomorrow; rather, most today write as if they were speaking of yesterday, as if their ideas were already dead and fossilized. Do these people not know that time destroys all things, and no matter how exalted and genius a man may be considered today, he will find himself mixed with the soil soon enough?

And to think, most actually fear death; when, as I see it, that is the greatest aspect of life—to no longer be is such a blessing when you consider how temporary our consciousness really is. We take ourselves into the market of the world and strive to collect as many commodities as we can in the short amount of time we have; and in doing this we lose sight of what is important in life—that we will ultimately die—and that all our ambitions only serve to aid us in forgetting what life truly is. This I despise, and is precisely what I am at war against in all my writings. A human being must be in the now, and act according to their own understanding. All else is folly. Live, damn it. Live your life. Become what you were meant to be.

Take hold of yourself. Understand where you come from spiritually and intellectually, and in doing this you will have gone through all your moral assumptions, and have rooted out every bad, life-denying one; and in the process of doing this, you will have reconstituted yourself, fashioned after your own image, and will have thus become who you were meant to be.

But all this is very difficult for a person to conceive of today, for, again, most have no temperance, and have minds too occupied with the “real” affairs of the world to be able to see beyond it. It is a sad but true fact that most cannot think outside of their decadent material frameworks; and as a result, they construct whole castles of insanity in order to live in—all in an attempt to silence the constant clamoring of worldly affairs which they cannot detach themselves from. I have made this point before, but it has to be made again.

Everyone identifies with their material conditions, and as a result they make themselves a ready slave on the market of an occupation, destroying their souls in the process, and acquiring a peculiar hate for life which they can never seem to find the origin of—not realizing it all stems from their own life-denying morality, their evaluations of what “the life” should be, which is always some crude, picturesque vision of material luxury and moral debauchery, which serves only to drive them into deeper despair and misery regarding life. This is the present age, and this is what I fight against every time I sit at my desk to write.

I am in a constant war against the whole contemporary morality, and I seek to lay waste to every false value in existence, in order that the only values that remain for mankind to believe in are to their benefit and profit, and nothing besides.

This age is anything but moral. I look around me and see people confused, stumbling through life, knowing in their hearts what they want but finding no way to acquire it. This disconnect is the result of our evaluations. A man who lives falsely in the world lives falsely to himself; he represses his true inner shadow, and as a result gets lost in a sea of identities which he cannot reconcile or play the part to perfectly at all times. This is the schismatic aspect of inner life for man today: a beast on the one end and a god on the other, but unable to affirm either representation with serious moral confidence.

In such an instance, a man either conforms to the world, as most do, or he rejects the world and struggles as he must for the sake of saving himself from life. In my view, I find the second option infinitely more rewarding, more life-affirming, more important spiritually and existentially. In short, I view the latter choice as the only one a reasonable person can make, if they have the right set of moral (existential) intuitions, that is.

Everyone says my goal is noble, my intentions correct, my heart in the right place, and my mind capable of achieving it, but at the end of all this warm praise, they ultimately turn a cold eye to my endeavors; and this is because they know deep down themselves that I am right, but do not want to admit to it, for to do so would mean validating my criticisms of their barren, boring, empty, lifeless, life-denying values with respect to their own life. They do not want to admit that they live not for themselves but for another. This deeply hurts them, but that is not my fault. Life is too great to not live it dangerously.

That is the essence of my philosophy: amor fati, Selbstüberwindung, the infinitude of the private man made manifest in words. You must live life, and in doing so find what you want out of it. In my case, I found my calling in writing—for I found no other human activity which perfectly encapsulates the implicitly dialectical nature of it all; the sheer immensity of life is enough to make a contemplator like myself dizzy at the thought of it, and, in fact, enough to scare me from ever wanting to live it.

I had to overcome this fear, however, by giving myself a duty: a duty of doing what no man before me has ever been able to properly achieve—a truly genuine life, lived after my own understanding, in which every action I take is the result of my own will, and not compelled by circumstance or material necessity. That is, as I understand it, the truest life a human being can possibly accomplish.

My truth does violence to the moral assumptions of most people, and as a result my fate is already sealed—always to be writing, never to be read, in my own lifetime at least, just as it was for Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. A man who strives to improve the morality of a people by writing is like a man who strives to see the moon through a microscope; nay worse, like a man who talks to the furniture because he believes they are listening to him. Honesty has never been a popular policy, not really—for so long as narratives have been around, people have always preferred the pleasing lie over the hard truth.

The truth hurts, and this is because most people are unable to stand hearing that which differs from their own thinking, not in the least because, chances are high, their thoughts are not their own, but rather someone else’s which they have clung to out of tradition, and maintain on dogma.

If only I could change the moral precepts and evaluations of people without having to write; then again, if everyone in the world suddenly became life-affirmers, affirming only the strongest morality, living after the manner they best see fit, that would leave me without a reason to live anymore—I would find myself like Proust after finishing In Search of Lost Time, feeling as if I accomplished what I was put on Earth to do. But perhaps I would not mind that, for that would mean the world is living honestly, as it should be, thus making all moralists and legislators of values totally redundant.

Now that I’m thinking about it, I suppose I could write anyway, but only on different themes: I might write about how good the world is, as some foolishly optimistic people do today; yes, that would suit me, I think. I am a natural optimist after all. If I were not, I would see no point in writing, for again, writing not done for the improvement of the reader is vain verbosity, mere scribbles on a page without a larger conception of what is important in life: totally worthless!

The most popular books have always been moral in some sense, at least in the English tradition. Not counting the Bible, the letters of Saint Augustine, along with the philosophical tracts of Thomas Aquinas, were among the most popular books for centuries. This is to say nothing of Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ, or the essays of Francis Bacon, or the sermons of John Bunyan. When the general public started to become literate around the 17th century, the most popular writings were periodicals.

Newspapers like The Tatler and The Spectator were extremely popular, and had many monthly subscriptions; and though the articles themselves covered things we would consider mundane and boring today, I would consider them among the most important in all the world—for they touched on nothing short of morality, the most important of all subjects in my understanding.

Men like Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Samuel Johnson, and Benjamin Franklin all wrote with the intention of improving the morals of their readers, and nothing less; and it was from these essayists that I took my own inspiration in order to begin writing in the first place, and to make my own foray into the world of letters; and I think at this point I have earned myself the title of Dictator litterarum (dictator of letters), for I am the most prolific writer who has ever lived, and will continue to be so long as I live in a world as corrupted and in need of saving as this one. That is the truth.

As I said at the start, the utter dearth of existential material, which was once the norm in the world, has led many to go astray in their morals, and has made many the worse for not having a clear path to temperance; and so, most strut about ignorant of the whole world which moves beneath them, and, to add insult to injury, find it all quite easy, and think their ignorance the clearest sign of their humility and piety. If their doubt were as strong as their faith, they may actually live lives worth emulating, but so long as they continue on in the world ignorant of everything, they merely persist and nothing more.

It is an insult to mankind to merely work but not to uplift. Those who do not uplift others existentially are mere machines—existing for the sake of keeping the whole cog in motion, but never willing to reflect on the movement of the cog itself; and because man is incapable of taking things from the existential perspective, that motion is forever blind to him, just like how the shape of the planets’ orbits was obscure to the ancient Greeks.

Temperance—in all its glory—is a virtue open only to those who are capable of taking things by the day, as they come, very slowly, only fit, really, for those unwilling to jump into the flux of life—that constant commotion which so often confronts us and drains us of all our vital powers. Self-restraint, which comprises the whole of temperance, is itself in large part self-reliance, and in that sense is one of the most crucial aspects of existentialism. A person who cannot find within themselves the power to resist the temptations and vices of this world is unwilling to make themselves orderly, refined, delicate, gentle, and simple.

A simple life always corresponds with a temperate life, and so the two are seldom seen apart from each other. A man in anger is no clever dissembler; and neither is the man who is without temperance, for they live their whole lives as if headless, and always adopt the most degrading and life-denying values possible. Let a man start with temperance, and the rest of his values will likely change therefrom.

Prudence

Prudence is a lost art. The loss is great but not greatly felt by most today, on account of many never having prudence in the first place. Though most would like to claim prudence as a virtue for themselves, their actions often tell a different story. That’s how it is for most people: always affirming that which is right, and doing the exact opposite of what they said they would do the moment the opportunity arises.

Man betrays his own values more than he thinks. Now this could be a cause for rejoicing if the values which he goes against are weak and detrimental to his own prosperity, but most today are brought up and weaned, as it were, on the breast of modern culture, and as a result adopt a set of values already dead, and in desperate need of reevaluation if they’re to ever come into themselves as persons of true culture and attainment. I do not expect, however, that many today would actually strive to attain culture of any kind, for to expect a dirty filter to pass through clean water is completely ludicrous.

Most have a set of values which they hold to on account of their familiarity with them, and as a result stay stuck in the past, as if still a child, and never grow up intellectually, never desiring things beyond what their parents wanted for them.

It always struck me as the greatest misfortune for a free spirit to be raised in a well-off family, in which the parents’ authority and decision already rest on a “strong” foundation—their material (financial) success.

The material success of the parents is proof enough for the child that what they say is wise and should be followed; and so the child adopts a very conservative outlook with respect to life, and never exits the shadow of their parents until they themselves are adults—and even then, some still fear their parents, for the ingrained sense of authority was thoroughly beaten into them as children; an authority which they never questioned, and a set of values which they always assumed to be correct from the outset, merely because that’s the same set of values their parents held to.

In that sense it’s really no different from religious indoctrination, only in this context it has existential implications which can either lead the child to success or ruin; and for that reason it is extremely important to consider, for I hate the thought of an artistic genius being made to follow the career path of a banker or lawyer or engineer merely because that’s what their parents wanted them to become. A stupid, vicious, perfidious, malignant set of values which corrupt the artistic bent of a child; making them live out a life not of their own choosing but of their parents’ choosing, all done in order to please the people who were supposed to raise them, rather than groom them into becoming “successful” people.

It’s cruel and unusual in the highest regard. How could one willingly do that to someone they’re supposed to love? In the parents’ “love” for the child they embitter the child against them, and for good reason; for the parents prevent the free expression of the child, and as a result stultify whatever natural impulse to self-examination and decision-making arises in the child—leaving everything to the parent, and as a result making the child completely dependent on them even late into life.

Such a person must then rediscover themselves when they’re freed from the watchful eye of their parents, and as a result, the most common thing they do is go against their parents, which they once held in high regard, but do so in a very stupid and lazy way—as such, nobody is really benefited, and the child is left wondering to themselves whether their whole life up until then was a lie or not. It’s tragic, and yet, it happens more often than people would think. I speak purely from experience on all this.

Also speaking from experience here, I’ve found that working-class children have more leeway with respect to what path they’re to take in life, for their parents are in no position themselves (at least financially) to have any real influence on the decisions of their kids. Again, it is the material success of the parents which is proof enough for the child, and as a result they go in lockstep with the wishes of their presumably well-meaning parents. And so the cycle of false evaluations and life-denying values reasserts itself, continuously, time after time, never to be superseded until a break in tradition is made, usually by a bold child who is persistent in their own self-belief.

It usually takes a child not cut from the same cloth, so to say, to be rebellious and free-spirited enough to actively reject whatever it is their parents are trying to force upon them. I should also mention that I’m speaking here personally (existentially), not occupationally—for it is, sadly, a true fact that most children in working-class households do something similar to their parents, though not from the influence of their parents directly, but rather from the material circumstance they’re brought up in—another evil the world must combat and defeat outright if the triumph of love and peace is to reign supreme in this beautiful world of ours.

Returning to the point of childhood success one last time, it is my view that nobody—no matter how successful they are—should determine for another what they’re to do in life. That most important of all existential decisions must be arrived at holistically from the child’s own experience and interests. Anything even remotely counter to this is nothing but sabotage to the well-being and future happiness of the child. Whenever a child is brought into the world, the parent must raise them, of course; but they must also strive to allow their child to raise themselves in some sense. Every parent must have as much faith in their child as they do love for them.

Life is complicated, and so the child must discover that for themselves, but in a manner that is monitored and carefully watched by the parents. As I see it, the best strategy for raising children overall is partly hands-off and partly interactive. Of course, in the infant phase of a child’s life, much doting, care, affection, attention, and communication must occur, otherwise the child will develop very clear antisocial proclivities—the result of their ignorance with respect to acceptable conduct in social interactions, which does nothing but ostracize them from everyone else, leading to further isolation and negative mental developments.

Once a child matures and reaches their adolescence stage, a more free approach can be taken by the parents. At this stage in their life, the child is experimenting with themselves, putting on new identities and getting interested in things outside of what they may be used to normally. Around this stage of development, it is incumbent on the parent to do nothing more than allow the child free rein to discover themselves and experience life on their own; but, of course, to always step in when the child seems to be taking things too far—which is a constant worry for the parents, and understandably so, but this is where faith in the child must step in.

In sum, a parent must do their best to lead their child down the path that they have chosen for themselves, but at the same time must ensure that in the child’s journey of becoming who they were meant to be they do not destroy themselves in the process. This is the most difficult job of a parent, in fact, for it often leads to decisions which were initially left to the child to make, but as a result of their inexperience and incompetence must now be made by the parents—as if the adolescent, striving to figure out who they are amidst the bustle of life, was still an infant.

It is an almost impossible circle to square on the parents’ behalf, for to make a decision on behalf of the child would seem like a rejection of the initial principle which led to the child’s miserable state in the first place—and maybe in some instances it is, but as I see it the blame cannot be put on one or the other, but rather must be made on life itself, for the world is unfair, and often deceives us and leads us astray from the original path we had hoped to be on.

Life is a tough gig, and nobody said parenting would be easy, but as I see the world, it is best if it is lived in faith and understood in reason, only after the effects of our decisions have been manifest in our life, from which we can learn and strive to avoid in the future, in order that our present may be lived with more assurance.

An individual who tries to understand their position in the world must begin in prudence, for prudence represents nothing but cautiousness with respect to life. A cautious man seldom makes mistakes, and if he be wise he’ll learn from the incautious mistakes of others. Every life is really a bundle of mistakes, and those who go through life quite at ease with every mistake have the good fortune of doing so either on account of their ignorance or on account of their pragmatic erudition.

The intelligence of a man is a very hard thing to measure, but his ignorance, one of the easiest ever. All one has to do is take account of everything which has occurred to them in life like an accountant, and employ a kind of decisional balance sheet to see how many pros and cons they have incurred in life; if the pros side is greater than the cons side, then we can be sure that their life was lived more intelligently. A good life often corresponds with a good intelligence, and what men do intelligently we can be sure, to some degree, was considered by them as prudent to themselves, and beneficial to the goals they had in mind.

Prudence is a very powerful value, for with it you can stop vices, uproot sloth, and dispel all negative cogitations with respect to life. So long as a man lives, he should always keep prudence near and dear to his heart, for without it he can have no confidence in any of his actions. Often when a man acts in life, he considers only the short-term (immediate) consequences, and as a result suffers the effects of many unforeseen consequences, which he could have avoided had he actually taken a broader perspective.

It always happens that the most commonplace advice for life is often the most listened to, and also the most discarded, precisely on account of its familiarity to everyone; it seems true even with respect to existential advice: familiarity breeds contempt. A proverb is only as good as the ears which hear it. If a man is not ready for a piece of advice in their life, it will pass through one ear and exit the other; just like thoughts arising to the surface of the mind only to be clawed back down to the infinite depths of the mind by other attention-seeking thoughts.

An individual well-endowed with intellectual precocity and an artistic passion is often capable of expressing something so universal and true that one is left awestruck by their encounter with it. For example, speaking for myself here, one would wish Beethoven didn’t torture us so with the genius he displays in the third movement of his 15th string quartet—he literally makes the strings cry, not softly, but violently, sniveling and all, with slight pauses between each teardrop to introduce the recapitulation. It is a staggering genius. Another example I’m reminded of is Michelangelo, and his terribilità—the sense of awe which one feels when looking at any of his creations; I certainly feel this way when I look at the Sistine Chapel ceiling, or the statue of David. One can make the same arguments for the music of Bach and Mozart, or the art of Da Vinci and Titian.

All things become philosophy when our thoughts become incapable of representing what it is we’re trying to describe. It is hard being truthful in a world that disavows so many integral aspects of humanity; what a man finds is often not what he initially sought, and yet, in the search, he discovered a part of himself nonetheless, as if the goal itself were not the important thing, but the seeking for one. A man must have a goal, otherwise he acts without purpose, and this is very imprudent—especially when you consider how meaningless it is.

Philosophy is not just the love of wisdom, but it is the search for wisdom, and in that search you reveal more about yourself with respect to the world than you actually uncover about the world. The world to me is too complex to ever fully uncover, in the same way the contents of a man’s heart can never truly be exhausted. We live a long mystery and then we die, hoping by the end of it to have discovered what it was all for. I do not proclaim to reveal all things in my philosophy, but I certainly hope all I say will be of some use to those who want to discover for themselves what this all is.

No man can know all things, but a smart man can certainly make it look as if he does, and that is what the greatest philosophers do after all: they give the world an epitome of their life through their ideas, and in doing so make it seem as if they’ve truly got to the ground of all being, and have at last uncovered the last mystery of the universe. This is all moonshine as far as I’m concerned, but I cannot help but make life a concern of mine, for I’ve spent most of my life living in confusion with respect to what I was supposed to do in it—as if that was a sensible question in the first place.

We’re all dead in the end, and nothing really makes sense to a dead man, but life has its own reasons, just like love; and so there will be men in every age who utilize their prudence for the sake of doing very imprudent things—like existential philosophy (which is what I’m doing now).

Often do men make jokes at the expense of others for the sake of lifting their own life above the common stock, but in doing this all they reveal is their own insecurities. They evaluate the whole world from their own perspective, and label anything counter to it as false. They’re confused with respect to their own goals, and so must saddle others with their own confusion by affirming that which they themselves are unsure of. They take a single objective as the whole narrative of life, and provide themselves an exquisite passion for no reason other than humiliation, I would assume anyway. These people are like Nasreddin, riding a donkey backwards but claiming it is the donkey that is facing the wrong way. Silly little fools.

Modernity is anything but prudent. Ceaseless motion is the modus operandi of most people today. Everyone lives like a runner moving downhill; they must stay on their feet, running quickly, lest their momentum overpower them and they fall to the ground. Look at how busy everyone is trying to make themselves, striving after this or that goal, trying their hardest to live in the moment, and as a result getting caught in the materiality of it all, and forgetting themselves completely.

This is where philosophy, as I practice it (existentially), would have incredible benefits for most people, but I suspect most today are ill-equipped to actually deal with the contents of their own experience, their own inner life that is, and so, distractions and work are all they have to live for, to fall back on, and to fall into oblivion over, for that is the direction which their values have pushed them towards: they’re being placed in a coffin as they live without even recognizing it; and you know what, it’s sad, but necessary I feel—people must know pain, and must suffer greatly if they’re to say along with Tennyson: “And tho’ we are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are.”

A requiem for values proper to our lives existentially: that is true philosophy.

Courage

All throughout my life, my father gave me two pieces of advice which I think about every day, and which I don’t think I could ever forget even if I wanted to. The first was “to watch everything.” The second was “to face your fears.” It is this second piece of advice that pertains to the subject of this essay.

A man is everything with courage, nothing without it—for without it a man would be unable to face his fears. In the context that my father said it, he meant with respect to the “real world”—the external world “out there,” as if the inner life of an individual were abstracted from reality as it were; when in truth most view themselves, and identify who they are, through the opinion the world has of them, rather than how they view themselves.

This constant sense of judgment is common in our age, for this is the materialist age par excellence after all. When you take the spiritual out of life, you’re left with nothing but the surrounding material to fill it with, and so you act and gather as much as you can, but never find satisfaction in anything which you manage to get your greedy hands on. There is a hole at the bottom of our spirits which is constantly leaking vital power, without which we would want for nothing, but would also die of despair induced by demotivation. A man must live for something, and if he lacks that which gives him a purpose he will surely perish in the most inconsequential manner possible.

There has never been a time in history as superficial, banal, and decadent as now. I see everyone striving to acquire many things, wanting to achieve many goals, trying to do what they most want to—but they fail to see all the implications of their thoughtless actions. Always acting on impulse, wanting to appear busy in order to be in good favor with those around them; it is all the same with these people—their evaluations are anything but meaningful, far from powerful, weak and life-denying, in fact. Their impulse is an impulse to decay and death; they care not for themselves, and as a result deserve to die for themselves.

“To perish in the pursuit of something great,” they say—while at the same time affirming the most nihilistic ambition conceivable. They’re so devoid of any coherent narrative with respect to life, they make the rejection of all narratives for life the only thing they stand for, and on that account do nothing with themselves aside from wallowing in their own self-made despair. I have no love in my heart for such bad faith actors. These people literally say life is an evil, and live their life as if that were true; I suppose no one told them a thing may be philosophically true without having to be existentially true. We today already know the fate of the Earth, but does that then imply that we should cut it short?

Only a person who has made the meaning of their life the complete denial of it could affirm something so treacherous. It should be said, however, that no one is really a nihilist, for most find a reason to live even when they feel their life has no meaning whatsoever. True nihilists allow for time to fossilize them while they live; they let themselves be overtaken by life through their stagnation, and wish themselves to dissolve into a million fine particles, indistinguishable from dust or sand—their only objective in life being to become a corpse.

It would do these nihilists some good to consider their lives in the light of courage, however. It is a moral suggestion, I do admit it, but I don’t know what else to say to such a person other than to suggest what I myself would do in their situation. I hate this dilemma with a passion, however, for I know firsthand how futile suggestions are to a person unwilling to listen to them; to the hopeless one, words are but air, and it’s doubly sad if you genuinely mean well with what you say, but know deep down, in some sense, that their demons are theirs to face alone, and nothing you say to them will aid in their battle.

Most advice fails precisely because the person it’s given to cannot recognize it within themselves; they may understand perfectly the meaning of your words but are unable to internalize them, unable to make them personal, that is—and this is exacerbated by the compounding troubles which afflict them externally as well. You see, a mental battle is not just mental, it’s also material. Again, if a thing isn’t internalized, or made subjective to their own spirits as they exist in the moment of their suffering, then it will never have meaning for them. Advice must not be mere platitudes, but must actually correspond with the present conditions of the heart to whom it is meant for. But this is easier said than done, and more often than not advice fails completely, not because it was bad necessarily, but because the battle the person was fighting was too much for them.

The mere struggle for existence, the lack of hope, the difficulty found at every turn—everywhere revealing evil, seeing all evil, hearing all evil, speaking all evil; all of this and then some comes together to make our life what it is, a temporary struggle of epic proportions, made small and repressed by the utter banality and artificiality of our age: the very material essence which lies at the heart of every moral evaluation, every value, every action, every decision, every impulse, every drive—the whole lot of it meant only for corrupting the youth, poisoning the well, and weakening the resolve of mankind; wishing actively, in fact, to crush the will to live, to repress all spirit in man in order to keep him in check and complicit, following the system as instructed.

Oh, how much misery I’ve seen, so many noble faces soured with the regrets of life, as if plagued by life itself, where pain is the only stimulus. If only my words could serve as complete consolation; then that misery would be easier for them to bear, but alas, life serves to instruct us through suffering primarily, and on the basis of that fact do we regret having life in the first place. To think, this temporary moment which we live is, for most, spent doing things we really shouldn’t have to. When one puts life into perspective, and sees everything from the proper view, they’re almost always shocked by the ephemeral nature of their very existence.

The shortness of time, and the rapidity of death, always jolts them awake to their own consciousness; they suddenly become much more aware of the small things in life, the things which they once passed over without real reflection. They see for the first time the grandeur of their own lives; they see significance within themselves, and on that account do they suddenly find courage to live, and say to themselves, “I matter!”

Multa modica faciunt unum satis (Many small things make one “enough”) goes the Latin proverb. And I would have to agree, at least existentially. The continuous gathering of many pleasant things throughout life, though small in size, does serve to make existence a lot more tolerable. And in this tolerable condition, one can actively cultivate courage within themselves.

But how does one cultivate courage exactly? By doing what my father said, “face your fears.” Watch everything around you. Think before you do things. Think of the consequences of your actions. Always be ready to defend yourself and what is right. Use intellect over emotion. These are all my father’s sayings. He’s more of a sage than I think he realizes, though he would consider all of it common sense, born from his own experience. Since all that he knows is born in experience, he knows perfectly well the truth of everything he says, and on account of that he can easily pass for a proverbist. Every idea comes naturally to my father because he relies more on his instincts rather than his reason, and so has perfect command of all facts that pertain to him, and on that account becomes a trustworthy guide in life, though he should be listened to with caution whenever he speaks on things out of his wheelhouse.

My father’s a great man. He raised me stoically, but also showed me the perfect amount of care and affection necessary for me to feel loved. I matured quite quickly growing up, and had a precocious intellect with respect to worldly affairs which I rarely showed to anyone—and so, on that account, I was seen by most as shy, reserved, modest, diligent, conscientious, nonchalant, and even distant; but this was only because I saw the world for what it really was at such a young age. And so I adopted an adult-like attitude as a child; an attitude necessary to be responsible in the world, which I still maintain to this very day, and will continue to maintain so long as I live.

It was in those young days that I first understood what my father truly meant. To face your fears means nothing more than showing courage in the face of the unknown. Courage is the capacity to endure life when life itself seems like a nightmare. The more a man experiences life, the less he has to fear, for he’s already acquired courage with respect to many things through living; over time, this courage becomes second nature to him, and all things suddenly become more possible, more entertainable; what was at first scary is now easy, and what is difficult is endured with a firmer spirit. And with this strong spirit obtained, a man can do just about whatever he sets his mind to.

A free spirit cannot abide by the dictates of the world, for that would be to kowtow to a force not born from their own heart, and thus would be false with respect to who they are. For this reason, the world must be looked at by all those who wish to be themselves within it as a sort of battleground on which to use all our genius in overcoming it—overcoming all the damnable social pressures, that wicked social conformity, all false values not our own. Only from our own values can we create the world after our own image; a world resplendent with beauty, filled to the brim with real art, genuine art, art for ourselves, in order that it may become art for the world. As artists, if we’re to live for mankind we must first live for ourselves.

Nothing true can arise from a heart oppressed by daily labor, for by the end of it all mental powers have been exhausted, and can only be called forth in short bursts, but not sustained long periods of time afterwards, thus making honest thought necessary for innovation nigh impossible.

The free spirit must always have within them a sense of courage. Courage is necessary in any great undertaking, especially one of great artistic merit. It happens more often, however, that a man is undone by excess courage than by his lack of it; for the man without it fails at nothing but also accomplishes nothing, while a man with plenty of it often becomes overly ambitious and attempts what is far beyond his powers. It would be enough for a man to temper his courage with prudence, but this is exceedingly difficult, for the more experienced a person becomes, the easier it is for them to overestimate themselves.

Courage is like wine: in small amounts the truth always comes out, but in large quantities, it’s no different from alcohol—a disgusting revelry always ensues when drunk off it, and every utterance sounds confused and corybantic. If men could only hear with what asininity they speak when drunk off lies rather than truth, drunk off anything, for that matter, that is unbecoming to them.

Courage, like all great virtues, must be pursued with temperance, moderation, and consistency. There seems to be a hint of truth in Aristotle’s notion of the golden mean: when a virtue is taken too far in one direction it becomes a vice; and so, it becomes necessary for all men to use their reason to restrain and reel back from whatever excess exists in their hearts at the moment of undertaking any action. Courage is born in action, but is sustained in itself. In the same way a wheel is turned so long as a force is applied to it, courage will maintain itself, for its very nature is to be persistent incessantly until the battle with life is lost.

Every fear is overcome with courage, and through courage does one obtain what they seek, so long as they’re persistent in the desire to obtain it. Men achieve things but rarely without trepidation at first. The world is so vast and confusing it’s surprising to me anyone has the courage to face it at all; but I suspect it can be argued that man is simply that kind of creature: a never satisfied beast who has courage already within him, and who uses that courage to achieve anything he sets his mind to. The capacity to act courageously is already in us all. It’s simply a matter of circumstance and opportunity that determines if we’re to unleash it or not, and in such moments discover what we’re truly made of.

Honor

Incipio honoris causa. (I begin for the sake of honor.)

Honor sustains a man in times of trouble, endears him to life in times of mirth, and empowers him in times of decadence. In such times as now, a man is lost without honor. Nay, let us generalize the notion and say that without virtues or principles of any kind, a man today is tossed overboard and left to stay afloat in the vast expanse of the sea, with no land nearby to wash upon. Virtues are to a man what a life raft is to a person stranded out at sea; without them, he will surely perish in the endless torrent of nonsense and vanity which the world so consistently showers us with at all moments.

It’s difficult to even imagine what life would be like without constantly having to readjust oneself to its present conditions—these wretched conditions which make us question the worth of life entirely.

What a strange historical moment this world is going through at present—where honor is considered pompous, and degeneracy is considered liberating. I know this world all too clearly already, and I find in it very few things worth regarding highly, and, in fact, think most things are worth ignoring, to be honest—for the more one tries to engage with the world, the more one is forced to kill one’s own soul, to sacrifice one’s own humanity, placing a mask before one’s face constantly in order to move through it with less headache, thus turning that mask into a substitute for one’s own face.

Everything at present is a false evaluation which gets misconstrued as correct, and on that basis does it take hold within the morals of the populace, left to its own devices from that point forward, forever perpetuating life-denying values. How cruel it all seems were it all to be taken seriously. The fact that people take life seriously at all at this point in history is baffling to me. Don’t they know it all ends in vanity and disappointment, and that no trace of humanity will exist 100,000 years after our extinction? No. Clearly not. But even still, it doesn’t matter. The human race will continue on so long as there is a larger quantity of stupid people than there are genuine thinkers.

In my opinion, the entire human race would end in a century if everyone thought exactly like me; but then again, that final century would be, if I may hazard a guess, the greatest Belle Époque in history; for the dominating values would be my own, and I am nothing but powerful in my values, wise in my undertakings, and strong in my drives.

Honor, for my sake, has always been a value to which I have given little thought. Being very insecure for most of my life, and never thinking highly of myself—due to the humility my father raised me with—honor struck me as something worthy only for those who have done honorable things. I still believe this, and as a result find it difficult to recall any moment in my life in which I have done something honorable. Then again, it could also be argued, on account of my age—not yet past my 23rd year—that I have so little to speak of with respect to honor; if I may, however, allow me to make vain gestures in the direction of honor, and in doing so strive to recall some memories which may hint at it.

For as long as I can remember, I have always tried to live a moderate life. To the best of my recollection, I never acted once in my life with the explicit hope of gaining attention or popularity. I was raised as a child to value two things above everything else: kindness and honesty; and to stay away from two vices in particular: lying and meanness. I was very impressionable as a child, and could have easily been molded into a monster, for I had the psychology of one who didn’t wish to think for himself, but rather to be master of another’s way of thinking. Luckily, I was spared that misery by having good influences around me, and having parents who allowed me to raise myself more or less—the best way a child can be raised, after the manner the child sees fit, made in the image of his interests and nothing besides.

Temperamentally, I am anything but argumentative, and on account of that have always gotten along well with all fashions and manners, cultures and languages, peoples and stereotypes; it didn’t matter to me who you were—I would treat you with the same respect I would treat my own family. It was a duty, I always thought, to be kind to all, mean to none, and uplifting to those who were down. I despise seeing sad people, in the same way I despise all shows of affectation and superfluity in pompous people.

There was no hint of ambition in me all throughout my childhood and adolescence. Even now I am still called lazy for not having a job; imagine that—a person barely out of his teens being asked to decide what he is to do with the rest of his life—as if such a question could be answered within a lifetime, let alone a few weeks, if that. It cannot be helped, however, for this is the materialist age which we have all created for ourselves; an age in which the heart of a man and the contents of his character pale in comparison to the value given to money by most today.

With the world being in such an obvious state of decline, it is perhaps better to look upon the whole of it as a sort of desengaño, and to not put up too serious a fight against those whose minds have been stretched out on the rack of materialism from the beginning—they cannot help believing the things they do, for they were raised to be certain of their values’ inherent goodness; and so they cling tightly to their wicked, false, infamous values, and in that regard are to be pitied, and hopefully open enough to change in attitude when confronted by a free spirit who lives completely opposite to their false presuppositions regarding how a life should be lived—a life sustained on false hopes and wicked illusions propped up by industry and sacrifice that amount to very little in the end.

In general, I pity those who are rude towards me in such open displays of cruelty, for I know deep down their lives are just as empty as the words they regale me with. Fools! Speaking with less sense than a child by projecting their own standards of success onto me, as if their standards—their idiotic, anti-life values—were somehow applicable to me: me! Of all people. A person with more self-awareness and existential knowledge than perhaps anyone alive presently. The whole situation would be a comedy if these people didn’t take themselves so seriously; if they weren’t so sure that their values were the correct ones.

If only these people had the courage to doubt what they hold to be true—true not on account of their own reasoning about it, but true merely because that is what they were raised to believe as true, indoctrinated from the very beginning to never question their values: always working, always a slave, desiring to be free, but never finding the path which leads them to liberation.

It’s as if the whole of modernity lay under a curse, forever saddled with values that only perpetuate this obsession with material things, this frenzy to become financially successful, this total lack of any spiritual or ethical commitments by anybody; the whole world today is selfish in a very real sense, because everyone is taught to believe that crude competition is the natural state of things, and is to remain so for the rest of time. Everyone has it exactly backwards from my own perspective, but that, unfortunately, means nothing in the eyes of what the cultural zeitgeist really is.

Decadence and life-denial are the dominant values today which everyone has already bought into, and so, as long as people hold to them, they will always be correct with respect to what society (the zeitgeist) as a whole values, but never correct with respect to their own values—for again, they have no values of their own, only what they have adopted from society out of custom, habit, and socialization. I hate to bring up this quote by Marx and Engels as often as I do, but it will forever ring true to me so long as people today live lives totally at odds with their own character:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. —The German Ideology.

And in connection with this, who could forget that famous quote by Emerson:

Great men are they who see that the spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world. —Progress of Culture. Phi Beta Kappa Address, July 18, 1867.

Now isn’t this the most shocking juxtaposition ever? Only great men—free spirits, as I call them—are capable of moving beyond the values captured by the material interest of the age, for their ideas are the result of their values; but the stupid multitude has the monopoly on values, because they can always assert their values as correct merely on account of their near-universal acceptance. Granted, it’s an argumentum ad populum if we are to be technical, but when have the masses ever listened to logic? Indeed, if they were actually logical, they would have brought about the reevaluation of all values already, for their material conditions certainly constitute such a drastic change, in my opinion.

It isn’t that they’re stupid that’s the problem, but rather that they glorify their stupidity for the sake of coming off as genuine, upright, honest folk—it’s honestly degrading to hear an utter moron babble on about who knows what to people equally stupid.

A value is nothing more than an impulse, or drive, which guides an individual’s power—imposed on him by instinct—and on that account makes him act in the world in order to bring about the satisfaction of that drive. So long as a man desires, he will always have the need to exercise his power toward a goal. If he has no goal, he has no life, and thus is less than human.

What we have today, however, is the deliberate sabotage of a person’s instincts by the ruling class for the sake of making them value things they would have previously never considered. In controlling a man’s values, you control his very mind, and in turn control his actions. This kind of system is organized so carefully by the elite that it makes the majority actually believe they are free in their actions, when in truth they are pulled by strings they cannot even see with their own eyes. Again, this is nothing short of the complete control of a person’s mind, which is the best thing to control, for by controlling the mind you, in potentia, control the direction of a person’s power.

By making someone value a thing artificially—that is, not from their own accord—you make them act superficially, and such is why everyone today is superficial, stupid, vain, arrogant, and totally oblivious to the forces which own them.

What is a man to do, however? The situation is literally hopeless if we look at it objectively, which is why I suggest looking at it differently—that is, outside of the narrative bubble which the ruling class wants us to see the issue from. Here’s my assessment and my proposed solution. Things are currently organized materially so as to maintain the current value structure in place—unfortunately, the decadent, life-denying values are going nowhere anytime soon. So what is to be done? We have to change one individual at a time; we must all do our part to change existentially, and hold to a new, strong, life-affirming set of values which are completely at odds with the current ones.

This is slow and will take decades, if we are being honest, but that is what happens when a population allows itself to be so utterly captured and subjugated to capital—so much so that the only real concerns for most people are material ones, which is why everyone’s values reflect their present material conditions: an abomination when we consider how abundant this world of ours truly is.

Once enough people understand the direction the country is going in, the rest will follow suit—just as everyone today follows suit with the status quo, even though it is the exact thing which keeps them down and disempowered. What I am effectively advocating for is a worldwide awakening of consciousness: to open people’s eyes to the reality of their situation, and from that give them the courage necessary to start affirming their own values, to start making demands on those already with the power. Community is becoming increasingly important in our age, and so we must find common causes by which to organize if we are to make actual change.

A single genius, even an Übermensch, would be incapable of rallying the entire working class around them in order to overthrow the present power structure. It has to be a group effort formed by millions who actually share the same goal at the end of the day. Without community, we will continuously be atomized, and as a result always subject to the values of the powerful, rather than our own. If true change is to actually occur, it has to be built from the bottom up, from small communities to an eventual political party if need be.

The problem was never with the individuals themselves (though I still think I’m justified in calling the lot of them stupid), but rather with the system they live under that makes them the way they are. We see this kind of disconnect today in the political sphere. If you receive your information from social media only, you would think the entire world is composed of lunatics and sycophants—but in real-life interactions, you would find most people are exactly like yourself: confused, upset, and simply wanting the best for themselves.

Politics has always been a battle of means rather than causes; that is to say, for the majority of history, people have understood perfectly well what the problems were (the causes), they only differed in the means by which those problems could be solved—and in that value difference came every political conflict ever. As far as I see it, what the world is undergoing currently is just another period of decadence and collapse; and, while it does suck to live through, we are not entirely helpless—for while things seem all for naught, people today have more tools at their disposal than ever before to avoid some of the worst side effects of collapse.

Let me repeat the point again: community is king. We need to all be of like mind when the powers that be strive with all their might to keep us isolated and angry at one another. This reality is already captured by capital and made the tool of it, but that is a social relation which we all actively maintain, and which can just as easily be overturned—just as a person’s life-denying values can be overturned the moment they understand the origin of their values. The unifying force is already at hand; we merely need to seize the moment through our collective will, formed by our new, proper, life-affirming values, and actually change the world for the betterment of all.

That, as far as I see it, is honorable: to perform an action that is out of your character on the spur of the moment because the situation called for you to act. An honor is only lavished on those who are worthy of it; and so we must all strive to be honored in the world through our actions, simple though they may be, and appear exalted on account of our integrity to our principles. Though the present age seems totally dishonorable and not worth saving, I say to you it is; this age is worth saving, for our lives matter, and our relations with others matter, and our capacity to love matters. Love is the glue which holds together the whole world, without which mankind would not be what it is.

So long as love is honored, love will prevail and triumph over all.

Justice

Injustice reigns, but justice sustains. Were all men natural angels, there would be no need for justice. Law would suffice, and all would follow. But times now, like times past, have never been entirely commodious to our spirits.

A man must make his way in the world plainly, after the manner he sees fit. None are ever truly prepared for the task before them, but life presents itself as something beyond mere living. We love, too. We eat and sleep. We cherish the good and weep at the bad. We cry when things are sad and laugh when things are funny.

A man must move with his spirit as it presents itself to him in that day. Every day is different, and so too are the attitudes of men. We are not the same as we were yesterday. What men are in the present is what they resembled in the past, but it cannot be said truthfully that they are precisely as they were. Time plays its part, as we ourselves do in our own lives: getting and spending, moving and providing, all across this globe, filled with many hopeful souls, sustained on bread and a desire to succeed.

I admire the man who seeks justice in a world constantly attacking and antagonizing him. The injustices of the world are born in spirit and manifest in action. Though the values we hold are scarcely our own, we still own up to them proudly as if they were ours, and are thus destroyed by them. A man who clutches his own fate too tightly will undoubtedly lose it. Like sand, if squeezed, it is sure to leak.

It is enough for a man to seek justice for himself. A man can never rely on the law completely, for it is enforced by men, and on that account always open to corruption and abuse. The government is nothing but a hodgepodge of men, women, and statutes anyway—developed legislatively, enforced executively, and maintained judicially. Without the norms which we constantly uphold on account of the everyday actions we perform, there would be very little foundation upon which to argue for the justness of a thing.

Man makes society, not laws. Though laws are necessary for the enforcement of contemporary values, they are, aside from that social feature, but words in digests and compendia alike.

Hold nothing to be sacred beyond your own soul. The heart of a man is what makes him, and his principles are what uphold and sustain him. Though few are able to reconcile themselves to life when so much injustice is presented to them as they live, there is always hope and love enough at the bottom of our sturdy spirits to which we may hitch ourselves. I cannot help but be sentimental on this point, for I feel in the moment of writing it that I have yet to follow it myself. This very clear piece of advice, meant for all alike, is a plain suggestion—powerful in its implications, but unlikely to move the hearts of those who are not ready to dance to its tune.

Like I said, every thought has its moment, in the same way every instance of justice has its time and place to be delivered. Judges may be great people—more learned than the average, for sure—but I do not suspect them to be any more moral by the study of it alone. I suspect the moral rectitude of a man comes only from his appreciation of what is intrinsically right according to his own heart, not subject to a rigid examination of common law traditions and precedents set in a time far removed from now. It is only in our daily correspondences with life that we find opportunities to exercise our moral powers.

If I find myself far from the world, I may have a tranquil state of mind for the time being, but the isolation from others would only serve to endear me to solitude more. While this may have been possible for a Robinson Crusoe or a Henry David Thoreau, I am no such man by constitution. Though I love my solitude almost as much as I love my dearest—my immortal beloved, my mystery, and favorite friend—I cannot find myself too far removed from the world for long periods of time without turning against it—all its common, ignorant ways, which strain my powers of patience.

For me, there is enough justice in the world so long as those who do bad are punished and those who do good are valued. In times such as now, very unusual and hectic, it behooves a man to retreat into himself and to find where in his heart his most important things lie. The greatest assurance of justice can only arrive when a man has formed a pact with himself: to do no evil, praise all good, and leave undisturbed those who do not conflict with his peace.

My morals are simple, but my spirit is great. The same is true for all men, I feel. When passion is drained from life, all one has the power left to do is deliver invective after invective on the very sanctity of it, and as a result fall deeper into the hole he dug for himself, and which he now seeks to bury himself in. Every action which constitutes our happiness is one that cannot be considered too bad; for though it often happens that people take the joys of life too far—and seek to make themselves enslaved to them—the temperate man who seeks only justice for himself will do nothing against his principles, and in that he will become a full human being.

Though men make more wrongs upon themselves than they intend, it cannot be helped. The temptations of life are tempting precisely because of the joy they bring. If there were no sense of enjoyment in life, I would hardly think crime possible—except for injuries to persons accidentally—for there would be no intent to harm, and therefore no pretense for action. For one must never forget that action is merely the recognition of some desire that seeks to be fulfilled through the use of power.

Power rules all. But it does not have to be the sole arbitrator when it comes to our decisions. If a man were forced to go his whole life surviving solely on instinct, he would find himself in ten crimes before the end of the day. Only in restraint, through deliberation and reason, does a man come to inhabit those qualities which distinguish him from the beast of burden.

Though most men are very bovine in intellect, they contain enough reason to heed the words of plain language: a simple, unadorned style, capable of rousing the spirits not on account of its elegance, or in its manner of delivery, but in the sheer simplicity of it—brevity is king, after all, but even in our conciseness must we strive to restrict as much as possible the overuse of our syllables.

Man does justice to himself when he is faithful to his heart. I feel, unfortunately, that many times throughout this tome I have been dishonest with myself; not to say the style was bad—for I was merely following the passions of my spirit as they presented themselves to me in that moment—but to say my style was not simple enough, not chaste enough, not of an elegance that even an illiterate person could appreciate. And though lamenting that which is already done is folly, it cannot be helped. I wish I had restrained my powers of diction much more, used fewer semicolons, and shortened the whole by about a tenth of what it is presently.

I wish I had written only in plain sentences, so simple even a fifth grader could read them with great delight. Alas, our faults cannot be criticized too harshly, for the better angels of our nature rarely present themselves to us consciously; and so we are seemingly divided eternally within ourselves. Such is the nature of man: always wanting justice, never receiving it unless it be through his own initiative.

The common life is that which is lived eternally regretting, always hoping, and never finding satiety in anything which is at once achieved. The life of a writer is doubly hard, for he makes his way in the world on account of his present inspiration, which never lives up to his visions. The ideas a writer has are always superior to what he puts to paper. And sadly, a writer can only work with what his soul presents him in that moment. This is to say nothing of the sheer difficulty that comes with actually writing something that will last more than a few years. The time too, dear God—how long it takes to perfect a sentence. And how many times must we writers say the same thing over and over again, ad nauseam et ad infinitum.

Writing can be summarized as nothing more than sentiments put to paper and placed in print, in which the writer hopes his reader will enjoy what is found in those words.

Words, like justice, endure so long as they are understood and upheld. The best writings are written on account of their universal quality; that is, the honesty contained in them. It is an injustice for a writer to write when not inspired, and worse still to write while inspired on uninspiring themes.

I often say the best thing for a writer to do is to follow his heart rather than the advice of some scribbler. Read the best. Love that which is great. Decide for yourself what life is, and on that basis construct a whole chrestomathy of inspiration. You cannot go too far astray if you write as it comes and edit as it grows. Just as in the spoken word, that which is unsaid is often best. The same holds true in writing—that which is not written is perhaps best. Plain language is simple to follow but hard to imitate, let alone to do well.

That is often why the writings of a kindergartner, though often riddled with spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, are very charming, and are perhaps the best models for honest writing imaginable. Having little experience, they draw from their imaginations, and in doing so fill the page with a wealth of creativity spread out over only two lines. It is brevity met with creativity. It is the best writing ever. And to think, it comes from children. In this sense, I believe we adults have much to learn from how our children approach the world.

Some days seem more just than others. This is not because they actually are, but because we see the world in a lighter hue; things appear happier to us when we ourselves are well-rested, well-fed, strong, capable, and in command of all our powers. Though we wish this to be constant, perfection is found in nothing—only in our ideals. That is why we must strive to have a realistic vision of the world. Seeing the world honestly reduces our expectations. As such, we guard our tranquility and happiness by not finding much in the world to bother ourselves with. The only thing I concern myself with is how I can spend my time. I want to spend it loving only that which is lovable, and to increase my empathy for those with whom I may differ. Everything else is vain.

Some days, too, seem more productive. This is for the same reasons given above. We are made either victims of circumstance or beneficiaries of circumstance. Though the former is often desired, I find it easier to write an encomium on the latter—on suffering rather than on joy—not because joy is weaker (the opposite is true), but because suffering is more prevalent, and thus a larger source of inspiration. Creativity comes and goes in waves, and how a person writes today will almost certainly not be how he writes tomorrow. Consistency with respect to who we are, in that sense, is a mirage which we can never unsee once it has been revealed to us. Such is why I strive to harmonize myself with my soul, rather than contradict what it is my soul tells me.

It is often the case that a writer can write only as much as their mind will allow them. And yet, sadly, the instant they step away from their pen, the best thoughts finally strike them. It was this fact that led me to master the aphorism. I cannot bear the thought of losing an idea, even a meretricious one. All my ideas are my children, as far as I see it, and I want to produce as many as possible, in order that they may go out into the world to be fruitful and multiply.

In my writings, I bear the stamp of every impression. Every period ends a single idea which will give birth to a thousand new ones. I know I have been unjust to myself for many years, and also know how much labor I have put into correcting that wrong; but the time is finally upon me to fling off all these old prejudices which strive only to keep me down. I have withstood all blows of fortune, and on that account have made myself glorious in the eyes of time—and in my own eyes as well. I have great self-confidence now, and feel capable of whatever my mind sets itself to.

The greatest justice is that which is recognized in yourself. The justness of your own character—that is the only thing worth remembering long after you are gone. We today may hold the just in high regard, but show me a person as he is typically, and I will show you an ordinary man worthy of no praise but from himself. Modernity is difficult, life treacherous, and time all too short for what we would like to achieve. Though a man comes into this world hopeful, he leaves it happily behind him, glad to be done with this whole tragicomedy called life. I do not disdain life, but only wish it were more just. Since it is not, I must act according to what I feel is best within it.

A man should not need contingencies in life, for if he acted truthfully on principle and instinct, there would be nothing wrong in the action as a result (assuming the action not to be unjust). But because everything human is doomed to death and decay, we often strive to have our names perpetuated throughout time. In wanting this, we reveal our vanity: to be admired in name only, never to be understood or cared about beyond the deeds that made us famous in the first place. The only justice we can do to the legacy of a dead man is to hope to be inspired by his character, his moral aspect; his deeds, in and of themselves, are worthless if they do not also inspire us to act in a similar way.

Napoleon thought Jesus a better conqueror than himself, not because Jesus commanded men to act on his behalf as Napoleon did, but because Jesus’s deeds were enough to make other men want to act like him. It is not through force but through love that a man becomes immortal, for love is the most powerful force of all.

Justice has the benefit of being a value that begets other values. In the same way a ready mind makes a quicker apprehension of things, a firm sense of justice makes one quick in evaluating things, and on that account encounters more in life from which to learn and grow.

We are what we value. The source of every impulse is unknown to us, but the sense which each drive gives us is proof enough. We suddenly feel the urge to act, and must expend our power in some way in order not to go mad from inaction. The whole of our lives is contained in what we do. Again, our values have a word or two to say to us about what we are to do. It is in the legislating of our values that every great personal difficulty arises. A man can no more explain why he acts the way he does than a writer can explain why he wrote that sentence and not another.

There are more factors at play in the development of our character than a person would care to admit. The sheer number of accidents alone is nigh impossible to keep track of completely. With that being the case, we may rightly say who we are today is a happy accident; and, further still, we may say who we will be tomorrow is known by none but God. Values more often serve to constrain us than we would like. The opinions of others take precedence in our hearts so long as they are echoed by a million others and resound throughout the whole world, as every decadent evaluation does today. No one can find true comfort if he relies on the world to provide it to him.

Values are unjust so long as they prevent a man from living his life as he sees fit. Even justice has the opportunity to become unjust if it is led by those who see no value in it inherently. These people are to be avoided at all costs, for they will try with all their might to distract you from what is right with the force of their “convincing” arguments—mere claptrap not worth a bother.

It is well enough if we get on in the world after a manner we deem justifiable to none but ourselves. Values always have the tendency to corrupt if they are taken from others; and worse still, if they are made into dogmas by us. It is always difficult to live after your own designs so long as you are at the behest of another’s will. Such is why true freedom can only ever rest in a person who is solitary, on his own, and in full command of his own mind. I shall go so far as to say that it is the greatest injustice to consider just that which is not born from your own soul. Everything false is a lie, and the accidental correctness of an assertion does not justify or excuse the ignorance with which it was initially made.

People always claim to know things they do not, and so the same follows with respect to our values: what we assume to be correct is more often than not incorrect, but the fact of its incorrectness does not dissuade us from affirming it nonetheless.

Let justice be simple. Let it be arrived at holistically from experience and nothing besides. Often people overcomplicate the simple by trying to extract from its simplicity an eternal truth which holds for all times—as if a virtue as noble as justice could do that. Let only good values triumph. The weak ones will fade on their own, the result of their own decadence.

Duty

Duty confronts man at all times. Life itself can be considered a duty: a duty to love, to cherish, to protect, to raise, to care for, to provide for, etc. All our duties are but the expression of what we value. A duty can’t stand on its own. It has to be backed up by action, and that action has to arise from within man’s own nature.

The instincts themselves determine for us what we’re duty-bound to pursue—if we wish to survive, that is. In that sense, the bare necessities for life become the starting point of all duties. And from there, as time progresses, and innovations move likewise, we human beings adopt a new set of duties to be faithful toward. In that comes how we organize our lives, and thus how we live in the world—either in reaction against it or in subservience to it. Though for myself, the situation was never black or white. I neither conform to nor outright reject the times. I live through the times but do not make myself subject to them. The times are generally considered good insofar as they correspond to the passions of the individual experiencing them. On that basis, the whole of it is subjective, but that is how it should be.

To adapt to the times is a necessary exercise if you wish to live comfortably. Some are braver than others in this respect. Comfort has never been a duty of mine. I live dangerously. And actively hope, in fact, that the world becomes more uncertain and frightful by the day—for in that comes the true character of a man. In this panoply of misfortune, I seek to pitch my tent of life up in order that the winds of adversity will not knock it down. I am steadfast in my resolve to remain a part of the world and yet separate from it. I have no enemy but myself and the world at large. Do not misunderstand me, though. I do not mean here that the world itself is my enemy, but rather that aspects of the world become my enemy as I live in it. The world is at all times willing to play you a nasty trick should you open yourself up to it too loosely.

I’ve never been one to make myself subject to the craftiness of another. Why then should I attempt to make myself subject to the world as a whole? No. That’s pure nonsense to me. I know well what lies in my lane and what does not. And in that recognition comes all my peace of mind. I concern myself not with the times but with the eternities. My goal with respect to life has always been to maintain the essence of my person amidst the progress of time. I see no fault in being at odds with every trend and popular notion of the day for the sake of preserving myself from such confusion and decadence. The moral considerations of today have no bearing on my life, for I don’t see my life in any of it. A man lives best if he looks upon this world as a sort of sideshow, something to be gazed at but nothing more.

The duties of life are such that a man must always be at odds with the world if he’s to live honestly in it. Whence comes all this trouble? It is not that this age is itself cursed—though many mistakes were made in the past that led us to where we are now—but rather that most today adapt themselves too readily to the world; affirming values they never had before, and which they don’t really need, but by the grace of social pressure must acquire for the sake of not feeling ostracized by everyone else. Now, this in and of itself wouldn’t be a bad thing if everyone were affirming a set of powerful, creative, life-affirming values.

But when one looks at the state of the world presently, and sees the things people concern themselves with and waste their time on, it only serves to strengthen your desire to be anything but modern—or at least, to not fall into whatever decadent set of moral values everyone is caught up in. It’s as if everyone is under a materialist spell which they can’t break free from. At all times wanting to have something new in their hands, wanting a bigger this or a nicer that. It’s all so tiresome, and I can’t wait, personally, until everyone wakes up from this mass hysteria.

Every duty has its own reason, and reason itself is a kind of duty. If a man wishes to be rational, he must consider his situation as it confronts him, and in doing so make whatever decision is necessary for him to overcome it. Reason will always be a tool used by man for the sake of his duty, even if his duty may not at all times be noble.

Man looks for a reason in everything he does, though he may not be satisfied with the conclusion his reason leads him to. You can guide a logical man through a syllogism, but you can’t make him believe. In truth, what men really want out of reason is the ability to convince others. On the basis of their assumed-to-be-correct conclusions, arrived at through reason, men wish to make others see the truth of their conclusions. And so our logical men hop about, crisscrossing themselves all over the place for the sake of showing to another the veracity of their reason. In trying to map their own thinking onto the mind of another, they string together entire sophistries in order to appear convincing. And by the end of it, everything is so confused, and the strings are so thoroughly tied together, they can no longer distinguish all the interconnecting lemmas, and so fail to prove what they initially set out to prove. But it doesn’t matter, for the person they’re trying to convince is just as ignorant as they are; and on account of presenting everything in that rushed and confused manner, they’re likely to agree with our logical men anyway, perhaps more out of pity than anything else.

And to think, by the end of it our logical men claim this display of ignorance as their justification. Justification for what, and for whom? Who are you trying to convince, and why are you going about it using so obviously flawed a method as reason? Don’t these people know reason only works on the reasonable? A man who already agrees with you doesn’t need your justifications. He’s already developed his own. And good on him for that, for that’s the true spirit of reason as I see it: a tool not to convince others, but to assure yourself. And when this fails, you have the most vexing of all intellectual dilemmas: doubt!

Again, a man is scarcely satisfied with whatever justification he comes up with. Doubt ensues, and our logical fellow quickly turns spiritual. It’s not that reason itself is bad, but rather that it doesn’t provide most with what they actually want: certainty. All rationality is without ground, and so must always be circular in some way—but this circularity is precisely the thing they want to avoid. They can’t, however, for logic proves nothing that isn’t already known to be the case; it dresses up propositions in regal garb, and encircles itself endlessly to the point of actually appearing convincing to those less inclined, but anyone actually privy to the trick being played is not impressed.

Logic reveals nothing but the inner workings of our own prejudices. It’s easy to be fooled by it, too, for it presents everything very orderly and simply; but question the reasons behind the assumptions made, and you quickly find yourself in a circle from which you cannot escape, and must remain in so long as you seek to objectify and categorize reality into discrete, self-consistent boxes—as if that alone were what comprised reality. Logic is a system with its own rules, but the fact that people treat it as something objective and not to be questioned shows you the extent to which our intellectual horizons have diminished.

A justification is useful only for those who don’t already think the same. It is a way of providing someone an intuition, or, at least, that’s what it’s intended to do. As already explained, however, logic in the hands of most becomes eristics—debate with the aim of being right rather than finding truth; in other words, deliberate obfuscation for the sake of appearing smart, nothing more. As beautifully explained by Arthur Schopenhauer in his satirical work The Art of Being Right, it often happens that a man takes his own conclusion to be the final one, and on that account defends to the death that which he “knows” to be the case.

Man, in reality, knows nothing, and only believes himself to be right insofar as he is in line with the consensus sapientium (agreement of the wise). You can do your best to convince yourself of your own genius, but if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll quickly find that all you hold to is really without ground, and affirmed for no other reason than that it corresponds with your prejudices—that is, what you already assume to be correct.

Intuition is implicit within man (born in the instincts), but it only adopts the false label of truth when it is confirmed by experience, and hardened through years of reinforcement—exposure to the same false lines of reasoning again and again. That’s the true historical background to man which the lovers of reason ignore completely. They still believe in a perfect world—where truth is objective, and all subjective experiences overlap perfectly with reality. I honestly admire these fighters for the truth: those who proclaim that the truth is out there, and is real, and does exist, and can be known—it almost sounds religious at times. I regret to inform these stalwart warriors, however, that their intellectual games are at an end.

Truth is dead, and philosophers have killed it. I do not say “we” but “philosophers,” because the average person considers truth pragmatically, not objectively, as so many sham philosophers do today. This is a case where the ignorant are actually right, and the supposed lovers of wisdom completely wrong. Let us bury truth already, and overcome doubt through action, not reason. So long as we cling to reason, we’ll always feel the need to justify our instincts to ourselves, rather than acting on them and letting the consequences of our actions determine their appropriateness.

If there were no sense of duty, there would be no responsibility. We would act without punctuality, and so would fail at fulfilling any of our proposed plans. A man without duty is like a ship without a rudder, left adrift, subject to the chance and occasion of nature. Some adopt this kind of attitude with respect to life in order to avoid the trouble of thinking about it deliberately, but I am not such a person. My duties are my own to fulfill. I make them, and I can either fulfill them or fail them. Either way, I’m in control, and I do what I see fit with respect to my situation.

The more pragmatic men become with respect to life, the less their troubles suddenly feel. There’s nothing to trouble you in your life if you know how to manage it. That is, after all, one of the main duties of life: the management and regulation of it.

Duty is a value which we hold to in order that we may fulfill it. It is, in short, a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is the one thing which comes from without and yet develops from within. Only from within can a man find that which is valuable to him. Indeed, it may be argued that the greatest duty a man has is to himself—to be himself, to live after his own fashion, in a manner that he sees fit. It is the task of life to live it in such a manner that you can leave it at any moment without regret. Regrets are formed when we fulfill a duty that is not to ourselves. This must be avoided at all costs. The end of life is death, and so we ought to live it in a way that allows us to stare at the end of it without the slightest hint of fear.

We must only seek to become ourselves. That is the duty of life.

Law

Laws are, properly speaking, only the conditions of civil association. The people, being subject to the laws, ought to be their author: the conditions of the society ought to be regulated solely by those who come together to form it. —Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, Book II, Chapter VI.

Man is the law. Man makes the law and so must always be at war with himself. The constraints of life are not merely personal but are also institutional. At every corner of life, one is met with decisions that make demands on a man’s moral faculties. We are constantly living according to some implicit rule. Nowhere is man free but at the altar of his own mind. Where the crowd goes, there go the rabble and the rude, the vicious and the evil, the stupid and the vain. One can never exhaust the supply of insults that deserve, at all times, to be tossed at the herd.

Humanity is a band of savages, and in that humanness came the need to establish law. Law and order—always in unison. There was, implicit from the start, the connection of rules with order. The “rules-based order”? Perhaps, but not as we understand it today.

If Giambattista Vico is to be trusted, the first lawmakers were the poets. The honor of engraving on tablets the customary habits of a society was given to those who were best able to place in words the real-life images found in the actions of man. Long before Vico, in his Poetics, Aristotle was the first to express in prose what the skill of a poet was: one who imitates nature in words—words given life by the meter and rhythm of the thing described. Skilled in the craft of wordsmithing, and with their words influencing the minds and attitudes of the people, it was almost a given that those who would come to regulate society were those who were most influential. As it also happened, the poets were the first of the priestly class—but more on this later.

When societies organized and grew to a certain level of sophistication, more laws were necessary, and so, more people who specialized in the crafting of laws. Laws by the time of the Roman Republic were no longer crafted by poets but by actual lawyers. Poets, having their sympathies more with the suffering than the powerful, were seen as a threat to the social order, and so were turned into playwrights, scribes, or priests—entertainers and propagandists—and so they have remained, more or less. A doubtful eye is always cast on poets for that very reason; a constant association with the powerful has led to them being tarnished in the eyes of the public, and I would say for good reason.

Poets have a duty to not only be truthful to themselves but to the morals which move them to write in the first place. A person who writes at the request of another is no true writer, and certainly not a poet. A poet must be the freest of all writers, for their subject matter requires one to look at reality as it really is, rather than as it ought to be. To say it another way: in the use of verbs, an image must be painted, and that image must correspond to reality rather than an ideal.

What makes a law authoritative isn’t the fact that it’s written down, but that people follow it instinctually. Laws are values codified, nothing more. If a society suddenly valued a thing and wanted protection against the abuse of it, it would be made into a law shortly thereafter in order to avoid conflict. In the very beginning, before man even developed poetic capacity, there was no law to speak of, but rather habits of character that were adaptive to the environment. When man moved beyond his primitive privation and found the “light of Prometheus,” so to speak, persuasion became an option rather than force to get another to do what you wanted. In that sense—and this is Nietzsche’s argument, though not given justice by me here—reason was an alternative kind of power: a power of intellect rather than physical strength, which still allowed for a drive to be accomplished, or at least advanced, in some way.

The legitimizing force of the law was no longer force alone, but rather socialization maintained through taboo and memory. The intellect was now “turned on” for man, and the poet suddenly found himself flush with power, using the elegance of his verse to convince or dissuade the actions of a whole tribe. With this came a new kind of power never before extant: social power. If a single man could command an entire society, that society effectively becomes an extension of his will. And with this extension of will came the vice of dominion: a sudden desire to conquer other people for no other reason than the leader can, now that they have their whole society at their behest. Though it should be said here that poets themselves were rarely of the bent to gain power through traditional (military) means; they preferred, rather, to gain influence amongst the populace through their poems, plays, hymns, maxims, and adages.

With reason came arguments rather than violence, and so it suddenly became a lot safer to express yourself—so long as what you said was generally agreed upon. And what was agreed upon by most was already considered the case in the eyes of the ruler. Even in the earliest forms of society, the values the populace generally adopted were of such a kind that they always agreed implicitly with the ruler. Mankind has seemingly never gone beyond the impulse to obey another rather than to obey the self. When reason was in the ascendant for man—which it has yet to free itself from—the organization of society suddenly became a lot easier.

Instead of tribes of no more than a hundred people constantly fighting out of instinct from the implicit differences in the drives of everyone, reason was handed over to the mind in order to make all of common understanding. All the power was still vested in a leader figure, but disputes were no longer handled—by man, that is—in the manner they still are in the African savanna today: through force. A tribe of chimpanzees today resembles primitive man closer than we moderns do, in all honesty.

The original tribal leaders were made so on account of their force and ability to command others. When man civilized a bit, however, reason was more often employed, and values (law) became legislated—that is, set down in writing and established by punishing those who went against the prescriptions. That’s the origin of memory, by the way: torture and misery inflicted upon those who went against the prescribed values, which over time fossilized into self-evident habits—wretched customs which would go on to influence culture and morality alike.

All early lawmakers were poets, but not all poets were lawmakers. For example, neither Homer nor Hesiod was a founder of an empire—one was a blind bard and the other was a simple farmer with a knack for verse. Another example that comes to mind is Aesop, a hunchback slave who still teaches children morality today through fables. Those who were lawmakers, however, were (almost always) simultaneously military commanders. Think of men like Solon or Lycurgus. And if not poets, ancient military commanders were still very much influenced by poets, priests, sibyls, soothsayers, and fortune tellers alike. Men back then may have had reason, but not entirely in the way we mean it today.

What legitimized a lawmaker, should they not be a poet (but military commanders), was their connection to the Gods. A genealogy, on that basis, was always constructed by priests or state-sponsored poets, who were always subordinate to the ruler for the sake of giving the populace a reason to affirm the laws laid down by the ruler. In this, we have reason being used as an alternative to draconian measures, which has always proved more successful all throughout history, as both Aristotle and Machiavelli show. There must always be a factor of legitimation in all forms of government; otherwise, an arbitrary ruler is seen, rightly, as a tyrant and is therefore quickly dethroned in either a revolution by the populace or in a military coup. As an example, it’s often said today that Virgil wrote The Aeneid as a way to legitimize the reign of Augustus by showing his lineage traces all the way back to Romulus, who himself is a descendant of Aeneas, who married Lavinia.

Once a ruler is established, has the laws behind him, and a populace that recognizes his authority, he’s more or less free to take his society wherever he wants—and this is the precise impulse which leads not only to culture but to war, and in some cases (like with Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan), both. By commanding the people and disciplining the army, both done through the use of persuasion, a ruler can endear the public to his ambitions and can make the army loyal to him.

For the public, the persuasion is couched in the language of protection, security, and defense; while for the army, they’re persuaded through the glory of victory, the allure of battle, the attainment of spoils, and the ability to defeat and subjugate another society at their whim. One need only read Grotius, specifically his On the Law of War and Peace, to see the veracity of all that has been said thus far.

And so you have it. Law, in its original conception, is established on consensus and maintained over time through the populace shaping their values around the laws themselves. As said earlier, laws are nothing more than values codified; and so, whatever is written down reveals more the spirit of the age rather than a universal truth of any kind. For example, and this may shock many, the first canon in the First Council of Nicaea was on the prohibition of castration—which really shows you how common it was during the early 4th century. Laws only ever reveal what a population values in that moment of time rather than anything else. This has always been the case.

Nietzsche was really the first person to make the connection between reason, values, and societal organization. The ultimate takeaway from Nietzsche’s genealogical method is that reason itself, as an activity, is the beginning of all modern values, going all the way back to Athens; and from that travesty was born modernity as we know it: the love child of decadent values, bad ideals, and sickening moral evaluations. After enough time of this degeneracy, laws themselves lose all meaning. By this point, the end of all law is no longer the prevention of crime—which was maintained through guilt and the threat of punishment—for a reevaluation of values has taken place that has rendered all former laws null and void. This marks the restart of moral evaluations and thus ushers in a new age for lawgivers to provide the people a new set of values to adopt—hopefully not in the same manner history has shown us they’re usually adopted.

Hence why Nietzsche called his Zarathustra the “fifth gospel.” Nietzsche knew before anyone else that things were going only in one direction—down!—and that when the collapse finally does come, it’s up to those future visionaries—those readers of Nietzsche, those free-spirits—to remake the world after the manner of Zarathustra: to give everyone life-affirming values; to make everyone cognizant of their own powers; to usher in an age of splendor, beauty, culture, strength, and lawfulness never before seen in history; and, finally, to make way for the Übermensch. That is the end of all law: the overthrow of it completely as a concept by men who no longer need laws, for they are the law—they are the representative men: they are the Übermensch!

Laws, the moment they became detached from the poet, became standardized in the form of codes and tables. We see this perhaps most famously in the Roman Lex Duodecim Tabularum (Twelve Tables). Though men like Moses and Muhammad claimed to receive commandments not to be broken from on high, we today can safely consider them nothing more than prophets who were really convincing to a foolish audience. History is not exactly short of charismatic men who’ve managed to build entire cult followings around them. In some cases, some of those men go on to also influence the course of history, and in turn get to turn their values into law, and thus make it a part of the culture itself, which is what makes those values life-denying in the first place—for they don’t allow the average folk, the non-intellectuals and anti-free-spirits, to think outside of that moral evaluation.

One cannot relegate themselves to this or that value unless the value itself is in accordance with themselves. Protagoras was ahead of his time when he said, “Man is the measure of all things.” It may have been better put, however, if he said man is the evaluator of all things. I know no more self-evident truth than that. That man evaluates.

That man is subjective in himself but objective to all those who are not himself is, to me, as foundational as the law of identity. A human being can never look past themselves. Man can only experience himself in the present as the present presents itself to them. There is no reason behind what we are, only that we are; and that we must make use of this consciousness—this glorious life, this powerful experience—in some way that is profitable to ourselves and, if we’re lucky, to another that we love.

I find in law nothing more than the insecurities of men. I find in every self-imposed rule only the prejudices of one who has only ever been a life-denier. Anyone who actually proclaims a law proclaims a hidden malcontent that they’re trying to cauterize before it turns into a pathology. These sickly people cannot deal with the fact of others acting contrary to what they value. They cannot withstand an encounter with weaker values; and so, instead of trying to overcome what is troubling to them, they want to ban it outright and wish all would act as they do. This is surely the weakest mentality possible for a person to hold. I am only strengthened in this opinion when I look at the example of Friedrich Nietzsche: the sickly man who overcame his sickness through force of will alone. Nietzsche said:

For what purpose humanity is there should not even concern us: why you are there, that you should ask yourself: and if you have no ready answer, then set for yourself goals, high and noble goals, and perish in pursuit of them! I know of no better life purpose than to perish in attempting the great and the impossible. —Unpublished Note.

And in this, I too find my purpose in life: to make strong and noble goals for myself, and in making them, find myself willing to die pursuing them; to set for myself that which is great and impossible, made by me and attempted by me, and in attempting it, thinking it possible.

My goal ultimately? To love her to whom I would give life itself to have! Oh, my dearest, dearest R—, how much you mean to me, how much you are to me, to me—my everything! My truest love. My immortal beloved.

Let passion of this kind reign for all time! All I know, I know because I have loved. My values are strong precisely because I based them all on love and nothing less. The strongest values are those made only in love. Love, dammit. Love, and you shall have no need for law at all—for your values will become the law; a thing impossible so long as you’re false to yourself. Let that be the only law: honesty. All else is vain commentary.

The Path of Becoming

Religion

I sing my own religion. All my writings and feelings are nothing short of my own faith. My faith in life is my religion, and my religion is the world bound in the ideas and morals etched into the canvas of my spirit.

In the air, I find total serenity. Out in the sun, near the trees, within a stone’s skip of a stream, I am one with myself. My thoughts are my own and concern only that which is important to me. What is important? The Earth beneath me and the clouds above me. The horizon far from me and the palm near me. My palms, my horizon, my clouds, my Earth—all this I find to be the same with me, for I see and feel them through me.

Religion is the most personal source of joy. All comfort abounds in those ideas which a man can feel on his own, and which he can find within his own heart. Every day, I pray to nature, bow before it, raise my hands to it, and smile in joy at the thought of it. The closer one feels to the source of their happiness, the more human they become. Existence itself is an infinite fount which constantly spouts the fluid of life. Ah life—gracious thing, dynamic like liquid, ever-moving like the ocean, imperceptibly and yet immensely; like water, it reflects whatever it comes in contact with, and alas, reveals to ourselves what it was we were trying to find within it.

Life has within itself an inexhaustible character and unmovable aspect. Whoever looks truthfully upon life cannot consider it anything less than the whole of our being. It may be intrinsically good. It may be intrinsically bad. No matter—I will move according to myself and coexist with the good and the bad alike. I move to the sound of my own music and love to feel the breeze of life from all directions. I care little whether the winds be fair or contrary to myself. With respect to life, I am like the tumbleweed, moving whichever way the winds of life blow me. I am the four winds and perhaps a few other directions. Again, wherever I’m blown is a matter of indifference to me. I make what I can out of what I have before me.

Life is my canvas, and my spirit is the artist whose goal is to represent to myself what is important to me. In that, all of life lies. In every sling and arrow of outrageous fortune, I still find hope and love enough to endure and live. I am not discouraged by misery. I welcome misfortune just as much as a married couple welcomes consummation. No circumstance can ever render me hopeless. While I live, there is love enough in me to attempt the great and impossible; to live for myself in order that I may live for others.

My greatest contribution to the world will be these very words I pen now. It matters not to me presently whether, in a thousand years, people will be unable to read me—in much the same way we English speakers of today cannot read Chaucer in the original without difficulty. My goal is to impart sentiments and universal feelings, not the current humdrum of everyday occurrences. If a historian should like to read me a millennium hence in order to gain insight into the current times, I wish him many thanks and good travels through my prose; I hope it is enjoyable and useful to him—though I should confess now, I speak only of myself in all my pages, and in them give only the shadow of my mind, and scarcely sketch the true spirit of myself.

Whatever wind I am blown by in life presents itself to me so continuously that I am constantly having to fight against the prevalence of it. Though I care little for where I end up, for all our journeys end the same, I do care for how I make the most of that little journey in time. I am born in such a time that I can reap the benefits of all past ages comfortably whilst having to exert little effort on my part. I have before me the whole history of progress; every era compounded into a few indexes and reference books, dictionaries and encyclopedias, manuals and archive listings. I have the fortune of knowing not only Shakespeare but Walt Whitman, too.

Every century is profited by the one that came before it; and in that sense, future authors will know of me, but I will sadly not know of them, though their greatness may rival that of the old masters—which will perhaps be better known in their age, in fact.

Knowledge advances one thought at a time, and everything which we know today was once a mere speculation. Let your own speculations be the whole of your thinking, and you shall find yourself by the end of your life with a whole treasure trove of insights—observations and experiences which may serve to aid future generations. If a person lives their life not in any way serviceable to another, then that person can hardly be said to be living at all. As a writer, my goal is to awaken the reader to themselves—to uplift and encourage them, to make them live honestly, to live profitably; in short, to become the genius of themselves; to cultivate all that is in them and to make them a marvel unto themselves.

There is astonishing power in faith. Through it, a man can achieve all things, and without it, a man can hardly get out of bed, lest he subject all his experience to a rigid set of circular principles he upholds for the sake of comfort, and which he overcomes with the phrase, “pragmatism.” I know that man, for I am that man! Do not speak to me about philosophy for the sake of life (existentialism). I’ve ignored and accepted it simultaneously in the past. I came back to it faithfully and then rejected all its doctrines the very next day. That, to me, is the whole succession of life made tangible to man: a process eternal, ever-changing, and unepitomizable; man, the endless wanderer, a solitary figure who discovers himself when he moves past himself and enters into the world of another.

In the love of another do I find the most firm foundation for happiness—the source of a joy almost indescribable, and which is overpowering should you try to feel it in its entirety. A man can never finalize his thoughts on life, for a man’s ideal of what the last words on life should be changes each day he lives; that’s why the advice of Samuel Beckett is perhaps best on this point: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” At the end of my large oeuvre, the dominating themes will be confusion and indecision; and I believe the final word on the last page I ever write will be: “Perhaps.”

In the end, I will find all of this time wasted in thinking the greatest folly ever, but which I pursued anyway for the joy it gave me while thinking it through and writing it out. I may, in fact, go as far as to say that it was for the best that I wrote out as much nonsense as I did. I could have left nothing behind in terms of what I thought of the world, but I feel I have too much awareness to know how poor the memories of people are, and how quickly I, of all people, would have been forgotten in this world after I die. If I write, however, a part of me lives on in my works, and in that sense, I become like Homer, and Shakespeare, and Emerson. I see it already.

When one enters my bedchamber and finds me in my eternal sleep, they will cross themselves and perhaps shed a tear, but just as quickly will they be happy at the sight of all my manuscripts, for which I’ve already done the hard work of organizing and editing. I am my own literary executor and editor, my own nonprofit society for promoting my works.

I know my fate. I will be considered the Emerson and Whitman of the 21st century. I was 200 years after them but shall persist in the memories of those that come 200 years after me. Of this, I am as certain as a man can be. A reader cannot deny it. My message is great, and my prose perhaps the freest in history. I am all my literary idols rolled up in one. I have done the work and have done it so well I was able to see the futility of it, and in that became my own person, and shall always remain my own person so long as I have a mind to think and a place for my thoughts.

Maybe—now that I think about it—making my entire work only a blank page would have been best, but where’s the fun in that? No. I have to live. I’ve spent most of my life not living; and everything I write is really a direct response to that inactivity; I’m writing as much as I am to wash my hands of years of sloth. This is me, Joseph Diaz: confused, contradictory, but human above all else—happy, sad, strong, weak, shy, bold, hateful, forgiving, and above all, loving and sympathetic. Loving of the good, loving of the bad, too—turning the cheek but unsheathing the sword whenever the things I love are attacked. I am a powerful lover and a great despiser. I am the yin and the yang. I am the Dao and the Wu Wei. I am every atom and every star, every microbe and every man, every tree and every house: in short, I am all that is man, huzzah!

Tell me to look left, I shall look right. Nothing to be done and everything to be seen. We make contradictions with every blink. Time itself becomes that which we are: ever-present, forever, perhaps always to become, never fully to be. To not read the authors you love is perhaps the truest type of reading one can do. In not reading their words, you acquire a sense of their style through their influence, but not directly in their works. That is the truest form of literary art. Feel yourself in the desires of your favorite authors, but not in their works directly. What they are is more important than what they really said.

Every person we look up to is representative to us in that they have something which we want but which we do not want to work for. Alas, in yearning, we eventually reach what we want, so long as we continue to want it; and though it never arrives in the form we initially thought, it arrives, and it is enough for us in that moment.

Blank pages reveal more wisdom than all the holy books on Earth. The whole of intellectual history pales in comparison to a single man able to think for himself on all matters. An active mind goes a long way for those who know how to use it. The whole of life is really a canvas of static, waiting for an interpretable signal to be made within it. All the Fourier analysis in the world, however, would have difficulty deciphering the being that is myself. My essence is so human and honest I scare myself with what I’m capable of. I’m thoroughly frightened at the heights of my own power. I shudder at the thought of my own capacity for love—the depths to which I have gone in this life, all the sufferings and tribulations which I have endured and overcome for the sake of writing all this now. It is truly stupendous.

It is all the same in life, however. The liar and the truth-teller really mean the same thing; one only does so in a negative fashion. If one is scared of contradiction, one is scared of life. If one is incapable of looking past themselves, they cannot be said to be free—to be “in-themselves,” as it were, to be who they truly are. Most people think of who they are as who they project themselves to be; their whole identity is either a pure affirmation or a pure negation, never being true to themselves by rejecting contradiction as the central aspect of their being—the forever-changing aspect of themselves, the confused and inexpressible aspect; that aspect which they feel but which they shudder at the thought of wrestling with.

I have always striven to wrestle honestly with life. Most people, however, do not have this luxury, for their minds are preoccupied with the zeitgeist rather than remaining a happy spectator to it. In that sense, I’m very much like Democritus Junior (Robert Burton):

I have no wife nor children, good or bad, to provide for. A mere spectator of other men’s fortunes and adventures, and how they play their parts; which, methinks, are diversely presented unto me, as from a common theatre or scene.

Je suis Monsieur Flâneur. I am a first-rate loafer. A true prodigy time-waster—a jolly scribbler, who scribbles and drivels reflections that don’t amount to much in the end but words on paper. I love my words, though. I love what I have to say about things. I love how freely I’m able to move between graveness and frivolity. I truly do dance with my pen, and I’m unmatched at this skill, this craft. I am an essayist and aphorist wrapped into one. I confuse my whole subject topic and, like Emerson and Montaigne, wander in an abstract labyrinth of my own abstractions. I take myself where my fancy goes.

That is my world, my religion, and I would have it no other way. I prefer to love that which is distant, but in doing so desire to be closer to that which is lovely. I love from afar, and yet love the fact that the object of my life is far from me. I suppose it was only natural for me to fall in love with a woman in Asia; nay, she is no mere woman—in truth, she is an angel and unmatched in her sex—the most passionate person I’ve ever met and someone I would do anything to have. Ah, my dearest, my dearest, how much you shine through in my works at such a time. I hope years from now, should we never meet, I will read these very words and shed a few tears at the thought of you, for you taught me what it means to be human again. You taught me how to love! I love you, R—.

God, am I not the most contradictory man who has ever lived? I’m so contradictory—but I am a man, too. Let me contradict myself. I am human. I am a man, damnit! My religion is humanity itself. Like Feuerbach before me, I believe the next stage of Christianity is humanism. That is what I lay my true faith in: humanity, and nothing less. The world has always been run by bad men, but the majority of mankind as a whole, I would have to say, has been relatively indifferent to me and, in fact, something to be investigated with thorough interest, for in them rests another culture unknown to me. That is the greatest aspect of culture after all: that which is familiar to me and yet is couched in a totally different aesthetic.

Every age reveals its own mysteries, and they are really only comprehensible to those who live through them. Forever after must that age appear numinous and transcendental to those who live after it. The Romantic geniuses of the late 18th and early 19th centuries seem to us today like the paragons of culture, just like how to them, the Renaissance was seen as the greatest era in human history—the age of Donatello and Giotto, of Dante and Petrarca, of Da Vinci and Michelangelo.

History takes to its grave most of its secrets, but those that are revealed are often the most compelling and intriguing ever crafted. Forever is history silent towards us, but forever is it within the nature of man to extend his hand out towards it and attempt to grasp a bit of it. Man’s strivings for greatness are eternal and live in him as long as he does. Forever ambitious, forever yearning for the supreme encapsulation of all that is a part of him. All things in life seem integral to us, and that is why we do all we can to live in a manner we think deliberate and self-made. Most men are weak on this point, however, and remain more a part of their times than separate and detached from them, as every truthful man really ought to be.

Every man ought really to be his own chronicler, his own encyclopedist, his own navigator; in short—every man ought to become a polymath of himself; a polymath for the sake of discovering who they really are. If a man is to claim that he’s truly himself, it is incumbent on him to find that aspect of his character which is truly his own. All attributes must correspond to the object they describe; that is, of course, if we’re to give any validity to Leibniz’s Identity of Indiscernibles—a rather self-evident and tautological law if one already has familiarity with the logical absolutes. I, for one, don’t bother myself all that much with metaphysics. A man learns nothing about his being if he studies being in the abstract alone. A man must be all things which his heart demands of him. Nothing more, nothing less.

Whatever we feel in the present is our life. That should be the only commandment which we reverently recall and remain faithful to. We should treat every day like a new opportunity to discover something interesting about ourselves. Speaking from my own experience here, I feel I’ve managed to comprehend the entire world better from my armchair than I ever have by actually being out in the world and conversing with others. Shakespeare and Goethe are greater teachers than any shopkeeper—but, at the same time, the shopkeeper is more real than any of those authors can ever be, at least for me, for they’re dead; sure, their words live and their stories contain all of life, but a man can acquire more from experience than he can from books. On this point, Schopenhauer is unmatched:

Men of learning are those who have read the contents of books. Thinkers, geniuses, and those who have enlightened the world and furthered the race of men, are those who have made direct use of the book of the world. —On Thinking for Oneself.

In that sense, the shopkeeper is superior, but only in a relative sense; and at once do you notice the staggering complexity that is contained in a simple admittance so long as it refers to life. Shakespeare is better than any shopkeeper, but the shopkeeper, in being real to me, has greater potential. At such a juncture, one can only admit the obvious and say that it depends on the individual, and that at once silences all future debates. It’s kind of a cheap tactic when you think about it, but that is the last line of defense in our very accepting, tolerant, liberal atmosphere. It cannot be helped, though, I suppose. Lots of men died for the freedoms we have today, and so long as I live, I will try and uphold the integrity of their steadfastness and fortitude.

I’ve said a great many things thus far on life, but allow me one final rally with respect to it. Life is like a compass which shows all the cardinal directions, but whose holder knows not where his journey takes him. The glory of the compass is that it points to true north at all moments, but it does not reveal all the oceans, swamps, deserts, and grasslands which one will have to encounter as they endure their travels through life itself. Few men find their true north, their north star, their Archimedean point by which their whole life moves. And those that do find that each day they’re constantly at war with themselves, for they’re in an eternal battle with rediscovering it.

The spirit and soul of men alike move to their own eternal rhythms. I can no more explain why I write the things I do than I can explain why I love the way I do. I discover something new about myself each day I think about myself. At all times do I seem to be singing a Song of Myself, the lyrics of which are: “What I assume, I will obey!” That is my paradox, my Zen koan, my prophecy yet to come true. Those things which I value I try to do, and yet, in attempting them, I fail and do not do; and in not doing, I am cruel to myself, and thus am put off from action for a while until my soul recomposes itself and I can enter the fray again.

I am reminded of Romans 7:15, where Paul says, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” My own sense of the religious is epitomized in that single quote: to forever hate what I do, but to love the plans of goodness which I strive to enact in the world. I always come up short, but that is the nature of man—to fall short of perfection.

To speak personally for a moment: I was raised a thorough Catholic, did communion, loved God, praised Jesus as the Lord and savior, followed his word closely, read the whole New Testament by the time I was ten, and prayed whenever things in my life were difficult. I received the greatest moral education a child could want from Sunday school. I loved Jesus with all my heart because I thought him the greatest moral exemplar ever: he healed the sick, aided the poor, prayed for those who hated him, and did not attack those who attacked him. I myself wanted to be like Jesus, for I wanted to love people as he loved people.

Unfortunately for me, however, in my teenage years—ignorant of all things spiritual and finding no comfort for the problems in my life in the words of Christ alone—I went astray and denounced religion altogether. For many years, faith was my enemy, and I deliberately went out of my way to humor, but not to take seriously, the words of religious people. It wasn’t until my second semester in college—taking an Intro to Humanities class—that I reconnected with my faith. I was assigned the Book of Job to read, and in reading it, I found a connection between myself and Job. I also found that my rejection of God all those years ago was the result of my own repressed anger against Him—against what I presumed to be attacks imposed by Him on me capriciously.

However, in Job, there I was: weak, wretched, impoverished man as I was, suffering everything, but not yet finding the strength, or courage rather, to love God anyway. Job is, like Abraham, a light which all believers must look upon if they’re to receive spiritual enlightenment. I understood what faith was through Job. I understood that the ways of the world are mysterious to us, but that they become clear the more we give in to faith. Faith can move mountains! It is, in my opinion, the central idea to existentialism. In fact, I would go as far to say a human being cannot live without faith. Faith is the rock upon which we build our temple. Faith is what we cling to when reason can offer us no answers. Faith is the ground of all things; it’s what allows us to live in spite of faulty rationality.

A man who tries to live on reason alone will fail because he must either reject the spiritual or must assert without reason that it doesn’t exist, or that it’s merely subjective—as if that were an argument against the phenomenology of it. The varieties of religious experiences are such that we always find faith at the bottom of all our conclusions, but we fail to account for it in our reasoning. This is only a problem, however, for those who say, as Kant famously did, that a thing cannot be known unless it can be categorized and related in some way to its own category. This is the greatest circular argument ever offered in history, and yet it still carries weight today.

I myself was swept up in that violent torrent of atheist materialism for a number of years. In entering into that crucible of reason, I learned much about analytical philosophy, how to spot logical fallacies, and how to win in debates; but I learned very little about myself, which is what I was ultimately after. How was I to learn about myself, though? I found no answers—at the time, at least—in any holy book, nor in literature, nor in philosophy, nor in science, nor in art, nor even in mysticism. What was I, hopeless wretch that I was, to do? I found that the problem stemmed not from my readings themselves, but rather the way in which I was approaching them. I could not enter the kingdom of God because I was still trying to bash through the pearly gates with my battering ram of reason, rather than approaching things from a spiritual, faith-like perspective. My approach was entirely missing the mark of the text itself. I was still reading things literally, and so, of course, I was blind to the existential significance which every word actually contained.

The moment I changed my approach to reading and entered everything with a more open heart, I found what I was looking for. I was suddenly able to find great meaning in the words I once read with stupidly logical eyes. Rationality had turned me against all that was subjective, and on account of that, left me unable to find the existential in everything. Without question, this overcoming of my prejudice against the subjective was the greatest intellectual transformation of my life and will remain so until I die, no doubt. At once did the concept of faith make sense to me, and I have, since then, never looked back. I was finally able to interpret everything in my own way. I could, at last, make sense of nonsense by seeing beyond the surface-level contradictions. I gained an evaluative eye, an interpretive eye, a perspectival eye. I was a “transparent eyeball” to all things and could see into the inner moral depths of every utterance a person made.

In a word, I found what I was looking for: faith. Faith today is often derided as being irrational, but that’s only because the discourse around faith is epistemological rather than spiritual or existential. Every so-called rationalist today still continues to dichotomize all cognition into two boxes—rational and irrational—and anything that falls in the irrational (contradictory) box is to be shunned and ignored in its entirety. But this I cannot abide by, because I am not so constituted to adhere to rigorous reasoning alone: reasoning that does not connect with me personally; cold, hard, degrading reasoning that plucks the art out of every cogitation and makes everything decadent and egoistic—utterly useless, in short.

A man can never find himself if he searches only within the domain of what is consistent. Mankind has never been consistent and has at all times yearned for narratives over facts. This is not to say reason is all bad—in fact, I praise reason quite consistently—but it is to say that, existentially, reason is of little use. That’s why my entire philosophy can be considered broadly as anti-Enlightenment—after the manner of, say, a Rousseau or Joseph de Maistre.

I hate all things which do not quicken my activity, which do not empower me for life, which do not endear me to life, which do not increase my love for people, and which do not allow me to consider the good at all times: in short, all things which disavow me of any happy notion and which turn me away from life; indeed, those things which make me hate life, which make me become anti-life, which make me adopt values not in accordance with my own soul. Never again! Never again! Never again will I return to that barbarous perspective—that view of life which made me a materialist and which robbed me of faith and existential realization.

But with all this said, the question still remains: what is my religion? My religion is nothing more than the gospel of life. As I said at the very start, “My faith in life is my religion, and my religion is the world bound in the ideas and morals etched into the canvas of my spirit.” I am that conscious spirit which recognizes itself in every era of history and which strives to take only the best values from every era. At once I see myself in Beckett, next in Kafka, next in Proust, next in Nietzsche, next in Schopenhauer, next in Emerson, next in Goethe, next in Jefferson, next in Franklin, next in Milton, next in Bacon, next in Shakespeare, and so on all the way to Caesar and Christ.

Now, who is bold enough to tell me I am not a part of all these men? Who is that one brave voice willing to speak out against an army of one million strong? I pity the fool who dares to say I am not a part of history. We are all history, and our lives unfold before us like an old book that’s dropped from its shelf; it opens to a random page, and on that page, we find exactly what we need for the sake of our lives. That is what life truly is: a random page which we turned to in a large book that just so happens to contain the material we need in order to continue living.

My religion is, in short, the religion of the self, the recognition of the self, the love of the self; and in that loving, a common bond shared between all men, for in that self-love, we learn to love others just as deeply and personally as we do ourselves—for we see in their desires our own desires. It is only in the mutual recognition of another’s humanity—their individuality, or subjectivity, rather—that we can learn to love them. It is, today, a common trope to say that no man can ever reveal their own heart to another, or that another’s suffering can never be understood by yourself, but I find these views too pessimistic. Faith tethered with a progressive, existential outlook can turn any man into a believer. We must become believers in ourselves if we’re to understand the religion that we are.

Prophecy

If a man could know what was to become of him in the future, I suspect that would greatly diminish his desire to act in the present. What we are as we exist currently is an organized collection of matter that, through accident or fortuitous chance, happens to have a mind capable of beholding itself. We come into this world at great cause to our mothers, and we are sustained from the very start on values that we come to see as natural and proper to the formation of our future success. Life always has a way of turning our decisions towards its own ends. It’s as if we do not live our lives, but rather live through ourselves.

Prophecy, in all of its substantiations, merely represents one of the oldest urges in man—to know. Man is never without some doubt. This doubt causes him more anguish than he would like to admit. Every decision, when taken from a broad enough perspective, becomes consequential. On account of this, man has done everything in his power to give his mind some ease. I’ve argued before, and will again here, that doubt is itself a byproduct of reason, which is born out of our consciousness. Were men akin to gorillas or orangutans, instincts would predominate the mind, and reflection on the order that we human beings are familiar with would never occur to us. Reason is reflection abstracted beyond experience. Given that we’re the kind of species that we are, we have many faculties born in us which allow us to carry on the necessary functions for our survival. To enumerate the list would be impossible, but first and foremost among those a priori qualities is reason.

It was doubt that legitimized the practice of prophesying in the first place. Reason turns all things on their head by making the implausible seem plausible. Ignorance arises out of reason poorly done. When a connection is drawn between two acausal events, you inevitably have a situation in which the offered justification in no way relates to the action in question. To remain oblivious to this fact is to be ignorant. Though most men fear this ignorance, they don’t know how to avoid it because they assume it can be overcome with superstition—i.e., with more ignorance. Ignorance is degrading to the soul so long as it’s tethered simultaneously with the desire to know.

So long as man thinks, he must always feel the sense of finality closing in around him; he wants final answers but can never have them, for the questions he seeks answers to have no final answer. In a very real sense, ongoing prophecies were the earliest forms of re-evaluation—at least where reason is concerned. One event would lead to the initial prophecy being changed in some way, and on account of that, a new one would have to be cast—whether it be from augurs, haruspices, or sibyls alike.

All throughout history, people have been said to be inspired by some divine force—an internal sense which we today would call an intuition. From Moses and the prophets of Israel (as attested by Ibn Ezra and Maimonides), to the daemon of Socrates (related by Plato and Xenophon), to the familiar spirit of Fazio Cardano (as his son Gerolamo noted in his autobiography), to the muse of Goethe (noted in his letters to Herder and in his Dichtung und Wahrheit). It is simply a prejudice of history that these men described the same feeling in different ways. It’s the result of poetical or allegorical language that gets taken literally.

Where ignorance reigns, a man must either make himself skeptical of all claims or adopt a habit of mind which allows him to make all claims equally plausible: that is, either turn agnostic or turn insane. To be exact, this kind of false dichotomy could only be seriously entertained by those who hold the powers of reason above and beyond what they can actually provide; those sickly scholastics, walking around as if on stilts, sullen and embittered that reason gives them all the answers they look for, and yet are still deep down dissatisfied.

It’s a kind of thinking that leads to either/or conclusions only, and on that basis, it is completely devoid of existentialism of any kind. In other words, it’s a conclusion one could only arrive at by having their minds endlessly addled with stupid hypothetical questions that remove nuance completely from the scenario and only seek to color everything in either black or white. This kind of thinking has become so prevalent that people still call themselves champions of reason, as if this were the 18th century. As far as I’m concerned, the only reason these people know is reason in the colloquial sense—a justification made on behalf of a prejudice, done with the intent of defending a value.

Such is why everything seems so predictable today, and why surprise is dead as a concept. Nothing shocks unless it is deliberately provocative, and even still—that is more often than not staged and calculated, too. People are fake, even to themselves. Nobody has any ambition beyond themselves; they don’t even believe in a higher realm anymore—that is, unless that higher realm pertains to their material ambitions. With that proviso stated, everyone suddenly speaks the same language and understands the same sermons of decadence. As Voltaire said, “When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.” And damn ignorance for that.

As long as man thinks, he suffers. There’s never any end to man’s troubles, and they only compound the more he reflects on them. Thinking rationally is only applicable to those problems which are themselves the result of reason. People are tied in knots of their own making when they question things like the state of the times, the debt crisis, the lack of housing, income inequality, etc. As far as I see it, these are institutional problems that are the direct result of the system’s own line of reasoning. In other words, these problems only serve as proof that the system is functioning as intended. It isn’t really a secret at this point that capital’s main goal is the perpetuation of itself, and it stops at nothing for this end. The world is controlled by capital, and it has been a disaster for the human race.

There are few, if any, avenues in life which a man can turn down and find secure happiness in. No matter what a man does, he will always be met with suffering and disappointment; and in moments where he does not feel one of these two constants, he’s made to feel the dread of their return. Even pleasure is made a source of torture when the world is looked at through an objective lens. Hence why we have art, so that we would not die from life.

Man finds the struggle with himself almost too much at times, and so he seeks to distract himself with this or that egoistic end—a goal which will never satisfy him, but which he does anyway to pass the time because he has nothing better to do and doesn’t wish to coast through the day on stormy shores but rather in calm currents.

The amount of effort which must go into sustaining oneself, when properly considered, boggles the mind; and though it doesn’t seem like much because we do so on instinct, when considered rationally, one cannot help but be shocked. Reason makes the simple complex and vice versa. That is why I love reflecting on the little things in life. They offer me more material than I initially bargain for, and through them, I come to consider many things I otherwise wouldn’t have. All my writings are really prolonged conversations with my own reason, prompted by the essay title, and reflected on over a three-hour period. Whatever I come up with is merely what my mind offered me on that day. I have no doubt that every essay I write, should I have written them on a different day, would have come out drastically different from what they ultimately became.

I’ve also noticed that what really determines the style and length of my essay isn’t necessarily what I wrote or read before writing, but rather what the general atmosphere is inside my head. Some of my writings are very constrained, very polished, very to the point, and very concise. Others are sprawling messes that can hardly be said to relate to the title of the essay itself; these are usually my best essays style-wise, but I don’t always want that, for I have concerns outside of purple prose. Some (as I feel this one is) are a mix of both: a clear brevity in style, but at the same time not exactly on the topic at hand. Naturally, my best essays are the ones that do both, but in a manner that is non-compromising to the integrity of my spirit—which I feel I’m constantly in a war against.

When you start the essay also matters a great deal. The more tired you are, the more likely you are to write boilerplate prose—worn-out, hackneyed phrases that you wouldn’t have even considered were your mind fresh. That’s usually why the essays you write after just waking often come out better than the ones you write after having settled into your routine for the day. The numerous things which strike us throughout the day often serve to paralyze our mind should it be late into our routine rather than when we begin it.

Another thing which has to be noted is the subject of the essay itself. Some topics simply afford the author more interesting speculations. It’s usually a topic they’re familiar with and which they’ve occupied themselves with for a good amount of time. Chance, too, plays a large factor. Some topics leave an author so completely bereft of ideas that in their extemporal thoughts they develop astonishing masterpieces, though, again, this is few and far between. A man can only get as far as his mind is willing to take him.

In the main, shorter essays are better than longer ones. A simple style is superior to an ornamental one. A topic which offers various interpretations is easier to write than a narrow one. The timing at which you begin your composition is perhaps the main factor in determining how it comes out overall. And lastly, writings approached with brevity and the reader in mind can never go wrong: let them be short, confused, and totally off the mark—they’ll still find a place in the reader’s heart, for the form alone will make up for the lack of matter.

Sometimes in writing, it feels like you can never say what you really mean. This is the result of a confusion between the intent of the sentence and the actual words written. Sometimes we leave a thought half-developed, or not developed at all, and so always feel incomplete in some sense. Those who are especially attuned to their sentiments will never find the time nor space to capture the infinity which they’re carrying around with them. An author is simply one who wrestles with thoughts and hopes by the end of their wrestling they write a few good sentences that get at the heart of what they meant. Is that a good sentence? No matter, it was honest.

In the back of every author’s mind is a visceral sense of their own confusion with respect to the composition. Ideas are treacherous things, and we’re never in command of our minds completely; if we were, we could write at will, but this is impossible, for thoughts arise slowly and are kindled like a fire, rather than appearing in consistent spontaneity—though on this point, in certain cases of flow state, a person can, in fact, call at will the right words for the idea they have in mind; whether this kind of thing can actually be learned, however, I scarcely think possible. Every method or technique for “writing well” is false in an absolute sense. The moment one tries to explain an intuition that has worked for them, they objectify it, and in doing so try to reduce its incomprehensibility down to a vague notion which may or may not click with the recipient.

It’s this reason, in fact, that separates great writers from immortal ones. A great writer (Walter Pater, for example) knows how to say exactly what they want using the exact words they had envisioned, and in such an elegant way that nobody can misunderstand them. An immortal writer (say, Leo Tolstoy), however, knows how to go beyond mere conventionality and can make even the common seem uncommon; their style is not one of mere brevity and refinement beautified with diction, but rather on an entirely different plane of existence.

Immortal writers transcend the normal boundaries of the written form itself; indeed, their prose borders on music, for the images which their words evoke are almost always played out in our minds in the moment of reading them. This is really what separates the wheat from the chaff in the world of literature. There are those writers who know how to say what they mean and do so in a very tidy and elegant manner; and then there are those who go beyond meaning itself and touch, as it were, the soul of the reader.

For myself, I certainly feel I touch immortality at times, but only when I write without constraint and when I have more vigor than I do now. Presently, I am merely a great writer, but this composition is really nothing to write home about. For my own standards, it can hardly be called good, but it’ll do, for it’s honest enough—and that, to me, is the most important of all.

Perfection can never be found in writing. If one tried to write a whole book in their head perfectly before putting it to paper, they would never start the book. Every idea we have is subject to evolution and can seemingly always be improved in some way. So long as man is honest with himself, he can never find perfection, for his honesty would prevent him from being vain enough to actually proclaim perfection. The closest a book has ever gotten to perfection was perhaps the King James Bible; no other book (of its length, anyway) even comes close to matching the sheer simplicity, elegance, and profundity of it.

There have been many shorter compositions that deserve their rightful immortality—The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, In Praise of Folly by Erasmus, The Book of My Life by Gerolamo Cardano, The Essays of Francis Bacon, Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, Schopenhauer’s The Wisdom of Life, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, etc.—but no book really matches the KJV even remotely; give me Don Quixote, Hamlet, and Faust wrapped in one, and I will show you a book that still doesn’t compare.

Again, perfection is a vain thing to strive for in composition. To fret over this or that incidental aspect of a work gets an author nowhere. The best rule, I’ve found, is to have no rule with regards to composition. Write as it comes, make it naïve, make it truthful, edit it assiduously, and make sure every word written has a purpose—that is, has a reason for being there.

A single thing must always be recognized before you write, and it is the fact that whatever you do write will never live up to what you had envisioned it to be. With this acknowledged, I believe anyone can start on any writing and not be too dismayed by what was written by the end of the day. We can rarely equal our dreams in reality, and so we should only ever strive to make reality as it is a kind of dream. La vida es sueño, says Calderón.

Will

Fresh and bathed in the light of youth, I steal fifteen minutes of productive time to read Emerson, and in that, I am reborn and find that which I seek in my every creative thought. At once do all things appear no more to me than their whole infinity. I am alive again at once; returned, as it were, from my stern palace of reason, and made to love that which is real in the world.

Though a man cannot always will what he wishes, he can follow habits which he has acquired throughout his life and can give himself some sense of serenity in his thoughts: for his thoughts are no longer concerned with this particular, but rather the whole of creation.

A man’s will is only as powerful as his nature is jubilant. The will of a man commands the whole of his being; and though man, more often than not, wishes to be the master, the world subjugates him. The world is the real ruler. Nature, the God of all, which we’re surrounded by on all sides and at all times, is what man is in spirit, and which he forgets in reason.

We today take the materiality of ourselves as the only abiding principle by which to affirm, forgetting that sense of the world which appears as both. Nature is both. We may be material, but we approach the infinity of nature when we reflect on it as it is. At all times does man will to know that which he is, but for which his mind finds not the words to describe. Always do we come up short of our ideals. The world, perhaps, is too vast for our idealizations to be realized. No matter—we have spirit enough to sense nature even though our eyes should be closed to it.

It is the desire to be one with what is above that causes us to sink below. Though we sense what it is we’re after every second, we can hardly work towards it willingly and at our own discretion. Every man is a genius, but few have the fortitude to endure their temporary ignorance. Often, when lamenting the seeming loss of our tremendous powers, we think back to the past and try to replicate what it was we felt that made us perform such a creative act; but anyone who tries to systematize an intuition will fail, for the intuition was not an act of will, but rather the cause of circumstances which were beyond our powers.

This is the hardest thing for an artist to endure: the gap between creating and ruminating. We wish to always have full control of our genius, but nobody can be the master of a force that is beyond them. To wish to have at a moment’s notice the full range of our spirit is like trying to control a thunderstorm. Man is but a petal upon the rushing river of life. Often, our petals go down with the waterfalls; but, should the moment be right—when our unconscious powers are at the behest of our conscious powers—we can ascend from the banks which we dwell upon and can be lifted up by a wind of inspiration which we acknowledge and wish were eternal, but alas, must come and go with the shiftings of our spirit and the atmosphere of our minds.

Man would not be man if all things came to him as easily as breathing. That would be something different entirely. Perhaps an angel, but certainly not human. It almost seems unfair to us that we cannot, with ease, call upon that spirit which animates us. Man must always be on the lookout for inspiration; it comes to him in a variety of ways, but never with a consistent enough pattern to form a general method for its acquisition. This is, again, because the nature of man is not constant; but rather, like the sources of his inspiration, fleeting and temporary. Anyone who tries to grasp inspiration by groping in its direction will only clench air. All artistic geniuses were in agreement on this.

A man does his best work when the work comes to him as he pleases, when it feels as easy as breathing. This can only be achieved, however, when the necessary conditions align in such a way so as to make the spirit of what we think correspond with the spirit of what we do.

There must be, at all times, a necessary correspondence between ourselves and the world if we’re to act truthfully within it. A man is only honest when he knows what parts of the world belong to him and which ones do not. I am reminded here of the Swedenborgian notion of correspondences: all things have their necessary connection to man through man, and in man, for man, and with man. There is a spiritual reality to all things. As we live, our subjectivity is constantly making the objective seem small as we reflect upon it. I behold, at once, what is of me and what is for me. I am one with all past history, and I see before me the whole future history.

Though the world appears before me objectively, I interpret it according to my own understanding, and in doing that make it an eternal part of me—not unchanging, but forever moving.

As I breathe the air and my lungs expand, so too do my considerations of the world. The world has never been a single object, a mere datum, a static rock; always has there been change and perpetual motion. There is a natural respiration which the whole of nature partakes in. Though we are but mere particles of that great inhalation, we encompass a whole world unto ourselves through our own acts of creation. Creation—that is the sole object of man: to always be striving towards that which our spirits call us towards. For most of history, people have assumed the world we see before us was an act of creation. I say we should not lose sight entirely of this magnificent insight. I no more affirm the natural sciences than I do my own fanciful speculations about the mysteriousness of existence. All of existence is really a mystery, and man is the greatest mystery of all.

What are we to ourselves? The question is almost too broad to be answered as it’s presented to us. We ought, rather, to seek it for ourselves in nature and will ourselves to be what we feel we were meant to be; to will ourselves to be what nature around us tells us to be. That is the greatest act of creation which one can perform, I feel: the creation of one’s individuality, identity, and very soul. That is what we must always strive to do, and nothing less.

Nature has a will of its own. We enter into her thinking ourselves mere passive observers of her beauty; but quickly we find that she enchants us and seduces us into believing in the goodness of ourselves. We become, at once, knowers of the pure and find immense satisfaction in having this occult knowledge revealed to us finally. Though once obscure and tucked far away somewhere in the recesses of our hearts, our encounter with nature has brought to the fore that which was always in us, but which had not the opportunity to reveal itself to us.

We are emboldened to act when we see with what vigor and audacity nature exists for us presently. In it, we not only return to ourselves but feel ourselves transformed by it; we reconsider those things which were once ignored by us—those things paved over by the affairs and noise of the world which, to ourselves, have no great significance. We are born again, as it were, and consider, within the bounds of nature alone, only those things which have a direct and immediate impact on our life. All stray considerations are purged from our minds, and the only thoughts we think worthwhile in the bosom of nature are those that relate to us existentially, subjectively, spiritually, personally—in short, those thoughts which exist for us because we feel they must be a part of us.

There is, in life, a constant source of anxiety contained within it. We must always move through the world feeling as if we haven’t yet said or done what we meant to. So be it. We must live through it anyway. It must be possible for us to reconnect with what was always in us from the start, but which we hadn’t paid mind to on account of other things which distract us from ourselves. The self of man is reformed whenever he dares to think for himself. A man who belongs to a party of one is the strongest and most capable in the entire intellectual pantheon. When a man says, “I will,” he speaks for the whole Earth. Who can do that? One capable of recognizing the significant in the small.

The trivial always contains the hidden thoughts of a thousand years. There are beneath our feet rocks billions of years old. Should this not cause us great astonishment and worship? Should we not wish to be like the rock and discover the secrets of its longevity, its steadfast desire to stick around and endure through the worst? The temporary aspect of life only discourages us if we see our death as the end, when in truth it is merely the playing out of nature, to which we return in the end. Our subjectivity is what colors our lives and which makes us become attached to ourselves. We only comprehend the world through our one experience of it.

It is sad to reflect on all the things which we love and which we will have to leave behind when we’re gone; but to be an aspect of nature is to be as transitory as she is. That is why, while we have ourselves presently, we must seek only the good, seek only to love, seek only to be ourselves, and find great repose in the stillness of life—breathing the air, hearing the birds, feeling the sun, and loving all that has come our way in the past and which will come our way in the future. We must will for ourselves the kind of life we wish to lead.

While man feels himself to be his will, his will is more subject to chance and accident than he would like to admit. Though we cannot always consciously will what it is we want to do, the experience of life informs me enough to take the will as free nonetheless. I believe I have no choice in this decision, but feel I am free to accept the offer anyway. This feeling of willing is what inspires us to act. My subjectivity tells me that I am the one who feels as I do about this or that thing in the world; and as I live and gather more experience, my feelings become more refined, more exact, more relatable and communicable. In this, I discover more about myself, and from there conjecture about how others may feel about the same thing.

There is always a mutual understanding and recognition of the other when we enter the real world. The same is true in nature. We correspond with and rediscover for ourselves all that which has been eternal and all-powerful, but which we neglected to recognize on account of our not taking nature seriously. When one reclines in the full bloom of heavenly beauty (nature) and looks upon a leaf as if for the first time, they enter a part of themselves that’s truthful and honest; they suddenly see themselves in the smallest characteristics of the natural world, and in that become their own characters on the grand stage of the world.

When a man discovers the power in nature, he cannot forget the sense it gave him: the freedom, the clarity of mind, the tranquility, the peace. All things after that appear small and can never shake him from his sturdy pillar of contentment.

The joy of simplicity is perhaps greater than anyone can truly understand. I believe, in fact, that it takes a certain kind of psychology to be truly changed by what is simple and common. Most people today don’t even have an intuition of what simplicity is; the notion is totally foreign to them, and so they fill their time with distractions, and their spirituality has been replaced with materiality. The motto of today is movement, and so people move—whereto, not even they know, but they move anyway, as if controlled by another rather than themselves. Because everyone is already moving, the cultural momentum is such that others must do the same if they’re not to be run over.

It is a vicious system, barbaric in the highest regard, but it is one which we are forever to be stuck in so long as we neglect what is truly important to us and conform to the state of our materiality rather than our spirituality. Forever hustling, never to be happy with anything. That is the sad truth for most people today. Stuck in their self-made torture chambers, concerned about this or that expense, wanting this or that trinket, never reflecting on anything truly lofty or existential. Cruel world, cruel fate, cruel everything. This is not how it’s supposed to be. But the fact that most people endure it anyway indicates to me that it seems tolerable enough—either that or the majority’s mind has become so corrupted they see no other conclusion but what the system already dictates to them. So long as this persists, a man can never truly be free in the world.

This is why a man must enter nature, in fact. Nature reveals all the hypocrisy of the world and shows a man how insignificant all his material problems truly are. At once does a man see what is, for him, the essence of existence. When things are no longer controlled by others for you to consume, you can finally start interpreting things for yourself as you consume them. When man comes into relation with what is natural, he rediscovers what his will was initially: a tool for the sake of his instincts—a powerful tool for the sake of directing his actions and achieving his desires. This too is another aspect of man’s character that is completely lost today.

Man really exists in a state of perpetual sedation, wanting nothing for himself, and doing everything he is told to by another. In nature, however, among the trees and sleepy forest, a man can find some sweet grotto by which to enter, illuminated by a crack from above, near which rest some mourning doves. Only in such a place, where nature all around exists without conceit and hides no hidden prejudice, can a man truly feel his freedom for the first time. That is where all must go, and where all must stay for a time, if they’re to understand what the point of the will is.

Man wills because man wishes to do. The will is that force which compels a man to act. And it is in that sensation of wanting to act—to will—that man walks out into nature and is restored by the sight of all that is truly good. That beautiful sight, all-powerful nature—all that which was willed but once, and which continues on its course from its initial impetus like the planets revolving around the sun. It is a beautiful thing to behold. The will of man knows when it has willed a right thing. There’s an overwhelming sense of not only satisfaction but peace when following the inner dictates of our will.

Schopenhauer viewed the will as an evil metaphysical entity, a thing which causes us to desire endlessly and to never find fulfillment or satiety in anything we do; but I feel his a priori pessimism was to blame for so crude a view. The will itself has no moral quality to it. The fact that Schopenhauer ascribed it one was nothing more than a blunder on his part, for it was the only thing that justified his pessimism in the first place, without which his entire system would not have been philosophy but introspective literature—not unlike Leopardi’s Zibaldone di pensieri.

All suffering loves justification. We like to think that, were we to discover the cause of our misery, that would suddenly make it disappear—but experience proves otherwise; even after knowing the cause, should we find it, we are not alleviated but, more often than not, angered and even embittered, in fact, because we think to ourselves in this newfound revelation how avoidable it actually was.

The will is not to be despised on that account. I think, rather, that the will is ours to command but the world’s to control. As I’ve already said, it makes no difference to me whether this will is free or not, only that I have the sense that it is. Freedom can only be had once our wills are freed from the bondage of prejudice, corrupting influence, and life-denying values. Anything that pertains to the will but does not include our subjectivity in it is to be ignored and forgotten by us, for it contains no content that is for our life—which, as far as I’m concerned, is the only thing that matters.

Were all things actually controlled fatalistically, all actions would lose their telos (purpose) and would consign the whole universe to a kind of Rube Goldberg machine on a scale unimaginable and quite preposterous. This is why the will must be affirmed either way; and must be understood by us as having the same significance that nature has on us. Anything short of this is bound to fail, for it does not include what we are in it.

Liberty

Every man is at liberty to become himself. The world generally talks of intrigues and distractions, but I try to focus on what it really means to live. All I have ever had the mind for, the patience for—perhaps the only genius for, in fact—is to consider those things of the world which truly signify to myself that I am at liberty to partake in and enjoy them as I see them. The “I” of myself is that whose purpose is to understand life. Whatever is not for life is not for me. Though my interests change like the seasons, I maintain the colors and humors of my month all the same.

The world does not distract me so often as when I’m actually in it. When I enter into conversation with men and women alike, my mind inevitably turns to myself—I think of the time lost, the things not done, the opportunities slipping through my fingers. Whatever benefits may be conferred on me from entering into discussion with others lose their positive effect when I remember it is my freedom which is being occupied by another. A man can never feel at liberty to be himself so long as he must conform to the customs and values of the times; and how wretched, debauched, untranquil, distracting, and pointless the values today truly are. I can never say enough about the topic.

Everything is inexhaustible that is either hated by man or loved by man. I prefer to love. I deride those who hate. In general, however, I sympathize with both—those who love to hate and those who hate to love. A writer, even of the highest genius, can never express all that is on their mind; if they were to try, they would write nothing but the occurrences of every second of their life. The seconds of their life would become the only material worth writing down, and they would finish with a tome larger than even the largest phone book.

That which harms a man is that which goes against his liberty. Has there ever been a genuinely honest man? A man who can say that he has the liberty to do that which is beneficial to him at his will? I believe that, perhaps, only one thousand people in a whole century can have the luxury of claiming total independence—total liberty, that is—from the affairs of the world, and can be said to genuinely live their own life on their own terms. To live life on your own terms is to suffer no external distraction from what is important to you. This is nearly impossible today, for the material conditions do not afford most the opportunity to make the most of their leisure. Leisure is taken as the chance to forget the problems of the world. I have always despised this attitude. The point of the world is to discover the reasons behind why you would like to forget it.

No man truly lives according to himself, but those who come closest are those who can forget, at the drop of a hat, the person they’ve just interacted with, and can return to themselves in the same manner they step into nature. When one enters into a world not for them but rather in them—their own world, that is—they feel equal to God; and, in truth, I would say they are like God, for one’s mind is the only place one can take their subjectivity and attempt to view it in an objective manner.

All the troubles of the world suddenly fade away when, in your mind, you make a positive dissection of them, revealing what you already knew about them: that they were negative in aspect, and that in their negativity lies the truest positivity, should you be willing to think of them dialectically.

Of my own liberty, I make use of it by striving to enlighten the world. I wish to awaken the whole of mankind to the facts of themselves: the fact that they are, and that in their being they have enough power to endure the horrors of modernity with fortitude and profit in the long run. One should not rush headlong into too many disparate things. Life is large enough to contain countless lifetimes, and yet we have but this one. Let not this one go to waste. Reader, take in those last three sentences particularly deeply. Drink deep of them, for they are the essence of my philosophy in perhaps the most succinct form they can be.

Liberty for me is merely freedom as it was intended by nature. I live according to my own nature, and in doing so find myself nearer than any other man to the essential qualities of life. I make no agreement I cannot keep. I strive to stay out of the hair of others. I love those who love me, and those whom I myself can’t help but love. My life is a trial in which I’m constantly overcoming those forces which make me untrue to myself, and which strive with all their might to make me hate my liberty. I shall never give in, however, for I have something which most in this world today have forgotten about completely—integrity. I am principled and break my rules for nobody. I carry on in this world loving my neighbors, worshipping nature, and hating no one. That is my deliberate life.

As the minutes pass in one’s life, they make themselves oblivious to how much they actually reflect upon in the world. These reflections are very crucial for personal insight, and yet how many consider them to be nothing in the eyes of the world? This is a grave mistake on their part, for in ignoring their own thoughts, they leave another’s to take root in their heads. In doing this, they make themselves subject to the values of another and take ideas not their own as truth, forgetting the real truths which they develop every second they think for themselves. A man without liberty of thought is a man capable of no honest reflection.

All thoughts have their proper place, and those who think for a living (poets and philosophers) are best able to capture the true spirit of the age. Merely by observing the world does one gain an acquaintance with the most objective facts of life; in doing so, one can move beyond their limited scope of perception and come into the light of true thought: by concluding for themselves what is important for them, while at the same time avoiding all the cant and nonsense that everyone else today seems to be concerned with.

It is best to look upon the world with a gloomy aspect, for in that, one shields themselves from disappointment, which all pleasure leads to—to say nothing of all the innate misery which is contained in life as such. All is certainly not for the best, and it never should have been thought as such. Only a genius like Leibniz (perhaps the greatest polymath in history) could have been smart enough and reasonable enough to convince himself that this world is the best of all possible ones. A Dr. Pangloss today would rightly be considered a fool, even by the foolish—whereas the optimism he represented was very much a reflection of what people generally thought during the 1700s. The contrast with today could not be more apparent. The overall temperament has changed to become more cynical and realistic today, and as a result, people are more convinced by overt displays of debauchery than by genuine acts of kindness.

The materialists have won, in a very real sense, the war of ideas that began back in the Enlightenment. Everyone today thinks in materialist terms, so much so that theologians try to make religious faith reasonable, and some scientists are so confused they say outright they have no faith whatsoever. This is a sign of things to come. I fear it will become worse from here. Nay, I think I can say I know it will become worse. It must always become worse before it becomes better. People love that stupid phrase today: “short-term pain, long-term gain.” I say there’s nothing stupider than this, for long-term gain does not occur in reality—gain is only ever temporary, and short-term pain is, in fact, constant and ever-present. Be of good cheer, the worst is yet to come! That should really be the motto of everyone today.

It’s been a long time since Schopenhauer inverted the optimistic maxim of Leibniz: “this is the worst of all possible worlds,” and I think it needs to make a serious comeback. I am no supporter of accelerationism, but I’m very sympathetic to their views; for I understand the world as they do and know all too well why they see the only solution to the present system as bringing it to its logical conclusion in the fastest way possible.

I know this world is already done for in the end—science has proven it! Even before the Sun expands into a Red Giant and strips the atmosphere off the planet—burning everything on the surface to a crisp—the increasing solar luminosity (over a period of roughly 1 to 2 billion years) will raise the temperature of the Earth to such a degree that it will evaporate the oceans, causing a runaway greenhouse effect and eliminating all life. The surface will become a molten, barren, and sterile rock—a mix of Mars and Mercury. And then people have the audacity to say, “Best of all possible worlds.” “Best of all possible worlds,” you say? If such is the case, I want none of it. I prefer to say, rather, that the life we experience now is only a prelude to destruction—an overture before the opera of oblivion, the final act of which will be titled “Heat Death.”

It is this fact, along with many others, that really puts into perspective how trivial life is when viewed from an objective stance. It is why I wish for subjectivity to win in the end, and for love to reign overall. While we have the Earth as we have it, and the life we currently embody, it is best to live in pursuit of only freedom and liberty within it. I see no other reason to live but in the pursuit of a noble goal, an objective by which to organize around and devote your energy entirely. Educate yourself, start a business, get an occupation, start a family, exercise, listen to music, write, read books, ride a bike, go on a road trip, travel the world, make art—in a word: live. Live. Live life. Make your life a work of art! Make your life worthy of liberty itself. Make yourself appreciate the freedom you have now. And love the good fortune you have to be born in such a time, in such a body, in such and such a family, under such and such conditions. This is all temporary anyway, so why not see to it that you make the most of it.

If one does not make use of their liberty, they open it up for exploitation by another. Life is only as good as the use we make of the time in it. We cannot be untruthful to ourselves. We must live in the same manner the trees do in nature. When I walk past the rank weeds of life and enter into the groves of divinity (the bosom of nature), I understand at once the true meaning of the Earth and become endeared to myself. I no longer take for granted my own breathing and find total contentment in the smallest things: from the highest clouds to the lowest blades of grass, from the various species of trees and moss to the finches, swallows, and wild warblers alike—I find all is one with me, and I grow ever closer to myself and the life of others.

I can only love those who love themselves. I cannot be around those who despair of life because they confuse the whole of it with labor for the sake of it. Let not those crude materialists anywhere near me; please, I beg of you. I’d rather suffer the poena cullei (penalty of the sack) than one of them. Those are people who make the purpose of life the sustaining of it and think the greatest life is one in which the maintenance and sustaining of it is easiest. Spiritless, envious, malicious, greedy, artless people; no sense of culture or profundity at all. I cannot live without music, without art, without culture—in short, without love.

Most of my life was spent ignoring love and adopting a stoic attitude with respect to everything, which made me very tough-minded and industrious but also very boring and unapproachable for most—and, in my case, very apathetic too. I cannot say that most of my life was happy, or even worth remembering, if I may be honest. I used to say to my friends (when I was twenty-two years old) that I spent the first four years of my life not knowing I was alive, the next fourteen not reflecting on the fact I was alive, and the last four trying to figure out why I was alive. I often think, even now, that had I had the foresight back then to seriously consider life, instead of coasting through most of it (especially in my teenage years) like a leaf upon a turbulent stream, I wouldn’t have needed to develop my own philosophy for the sake of coping with life; I would’ve already had most of it figured out, I like to think (for I always was a thorough and independent man), and could live a more “normal” life.

But at the same time, I’m very grateful for having taken the unorthodox path that I did. Had I not, I wouldn’t be as educated as I am, and would not have had such a strong desire to attempt everything which I formerly looked down upon and derided more out of ignorance than actual grievance. The world is so much more open to me now, and I have within me the power to actually do the things most necessary for me. I am, at this point, finished with my education, the fruit of which is this entire book—my glorious philosophy, the whole of my thoughts on nearly everything important under the sun. I am that man. I am the main character of my story, and so far, the development has been very intriguing—the most intriguing in history, perhaps! I’ve become more full as an individual, and with that have become more full as a man overall—a man capable of being something tremendous in the world, a true light, a great force for good, the one who, through his actions, raises all spirits equally high.

I love nature. I feel love towards myself and those things which uplift me, and which remind me of the importance that life carries within it. In love, I find everything in the world that is necessary for life. I am capable of loving that which is lovable, and capable of ignoring that which is not lovable. I have true liberty in that sense. That’s what liberty means to me: the full capacity to act without restraint. It is not to be abused as most people do—falling down paths of relativism or hedonism—but rather existential reflection, reminding yourself of what truly matters, and applying your will for the sake of accomplishing that which is important.

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity—that was what Thoreau recommended, and that is what I myself choose to live by. No man’s standards are higher than my own. The Sun that is above us, and the God that dwells within us; the nature that is around us, and the people that mean something to us in our lives: those are the things I choose to love totally and without fear. I only wish to live loving those things and nothing more.

Nothing strikes the heart more severely than dishonesty. I personally cannot endure the pangs of fortune if they are not the result of my own decisions. To be at the behest of another is no different from slavery. People think this is a thing to be compromised. In truth, it’s a capitulation to what is wicked; it is akin to looking the other way whilst injustice is occurring right before your eyes; it is appeasement for the sake of another’s demands, a deliberate restriction of your own character. The shadow which hangs over the modern world is one of subservience to another. Liberty is only a pretense for enslavement today. Indeed, it’s looked upon as an honorable thing—in fact, just the normal thing to do—that one sells their precious time for the sake of surviving in the world. Until the phrase “you must work for another in order to live yourself” is totally forgotten from the world, mankind will never have true liberty—only a few will be at liberty to do that which they wish, while the rest work for those who are already at liberty.

Liberty is what the American Revolution was fought for. And that revolution represented to the entire world a new order that was under way, and which has in our own time come to dominate the entire planet. Everyone today wishes they were truly self-reliant—self-reliant in the sense Emerson meant in his essay of the same title—but, in truth, most aren’t, because they haven’t the understanding nor the liberty of time to truly develop for themselves appropriate conceptions of the world. They take what they receive, for in this economy, a wage worker cannot be a chooser of their own destiny—which is a crime against humanity as far as I’m concerned.

The human spirit deserves better than to be repressed under labor, attacked on all sides by stupid narratives which in no way actually relate to their actual interests or habits of mind. Everything is moving in the direction of the commodity, so much so that eventually life itself will become a commodity; just like how everything which presently sustains life is privately controlled by asset managers—greedy psychopaths who would rather see the Earth in misery so long as it means they can make a little more next fiscal quarter. The point has already been made sufficiently well, however.

Freedom and liberty is the end of all human activity; and our collective telos should reflect that by striving to make life more livable, more prosperous, more joyous, more life-affirming, more beautiful, etc. The world needs a new art. Mankind cannot subsist for much longer the way it’s going now. Some new ideas are here needed for the entire world; and I have done all I can to lift the veil, so to say, from the eyes of the masses with my philosophy, and awaken in them a true love for self-reliance, independence, meaning, upbuilding, in a word: liberty!

Education

A small but thorough education far surpasses a large but shallow one. In much the same way, too, a man who acquires his knowledge through personal experience, rather than through books or second-hand accounts, has a more sure understanding of the material in question.

A man who relies only on books to guide him through the world will inevitably end up lost, for what he needs is not provided for in any book in all the world. When a man reads, he takes the understandings and experiences of another as his own, and in that sense has the simulacrum of real experience, but in truth is still devoid of any real knowledge. The world can be viewed as a sort of map whose directions are provided for only in real knowledge (personal experience), and whose destination is ever-shifting and unable to be seen by anyone.

The mere book scholar knows off the top of his head every opinion ever said on a particular topic by all learned men in history, but is unable to produce his own opinion on any topic; having his mind so overladen with the thoughts of others, he has made it nearly impossible for his own thoughts to arise naturally without associating them instantly with an ancient authority. These men are no different from encyclopedists, compiling and systematizing knowledge already laid out and established, but never being able to add a personal spin or interesting application to any of it. They become mere learned men and nothing more; very erudite and abounding in facts, but unable to use them for any existential purpose—only a scholarly one, which will have very limited interest, for it in no way connects with life more broadly.

Who today still reads Scaliger or Grotius? They wrote some great works for their time, but unlike their contemporary Montaigne—who is still read widely—are nowhere to be found on the shelves of anyone except scholars of intellectual history. It should also go without saying that a learned man who writes nothing down for posterity is a mere idler, a bookworm concerned only with acquiring facts for himself, never to apply them anywhere; he believes they will be useful to him in the future but never finds the chance to offload some of that erudition onto a page.

Marx famously suffered from this, planning Das Kapital to initially be six volumes, yet only managed to write one—leaving thousands of manuscript pages behind for future scholars to sort out and publish. A more dishonorable example is without doubt Antonio Magliabechi, a bibliomaniac so ensconced in books that he wrote nothing down at all—yet he was touted as the most learned man in Italy while he was alive. A similar fate befell William King (1663–1712), a man so obscure not even academics know his name, though he supposedly read 7,000 books during a residence of seven years at Oxford.

This is not to say that mere book learners are useless, but rather to criticize them for not using their knowledge in ways that may be of use to mankind. There are throughout history many voracious readers who were also tremendously productive writers, and whose works are still held up today. Pico della Mirandola comes to mind, as does Gerolamo Cardano, Francis Bacon, and Robert Burton. I call these men proactive scholars, for not only did they read a great deal, but they were able to make some good use of it in the works they wrote.

In times nearer our own, I hold up Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Emerson as paragons of this ideal book-learner; each one of their works shows a very obvious originality, and yet, each of them read thousands of books throughout their lifetimes. The key for them was to never let the wisdom of the ages overshadow their own wisdom; in that sense, not only were they well-read and cultured, but independent in their thinking overall—able to weave every thread of knowledge into their own, though some of it be received from others.

One must keep one’s independence of thought at all cost, for it is your own thoughts on a thing that matter most at the end of the day. You must tether your every experience properly to your own soul. Without that, nothing will have significance for you, and all your learning will become a mockery to you. Narrowness is a sign of too much thought in a particular direction. Those who think only upon the subject matter without finding ways to connect it to life overall are, in my view, merely providing commentary to what another has already discovered or said—much like Ibn Rushd or Roger Bacon on Aristotle, but neither man ever produced something like the Summa Theologica of Aquinas.

Mere book learners have their place, as all things do, but as I said, they will never find their way through the world if they rely on them alone; they must connect what they read with what they experience, and in that experience must eventually judge for themselves on the matter and come to their own conclusions about the world. A man can only cling to his authorities for so long until they eventually become degrading and harmful to him. Overcome your anxiety of influence and enter into the real world like those scholars and philosophers who read much but also lived much. One thing above all must not be forgotten: live! Remember to live, for you will surely die one day. Leave something behind that can be looked upon by your descendants as a worthy relic worth cherishing and praising; whether it be meretricious or meritorious, who cares—do it anyway.

A man who knows everything from out of his own mind, and who has searched beyond books, so to say, can find in his own experience the whole of what he is looking for in life. Only a man who takes his education into his own hands can find satisfactory results by the end of it. All knowledge that belongs to him is only the most essential, for it pertains to nothing less than his own life experience. Experience is the guiding light of all things. While all knowledge is but experience duly taken up, those experiences which were acquired first-hand stick more firmly in the mind, and as a result serve as a much stronger foundation by which to build more knowledge upon.

Encounters in the real world far surpass whatever description, however ornate, can be provided in a book, video, or Wikipedia page. To reiterate, those who strive to uncover the mystery of life in books will always be limited to what they’ve already encountered; in that sense being unable to extrapolate on any of it, not having any experience of their own to go off of, and lacking the imagination to develop interesting subtleties or novelties upon the material taken up. They become walking encyclopedias, unsightly beasts of erudition in need of a domesticator—a scholar or noble genius who can take whatever they need from the facts and just as quickly leave them behind when the facts interfere with their capacity to develop their own thoughts on the matter.

A man can only develop intellectual intuition the more he encounters life and fails at trying to comprehend it. Thinking and reasoning are really two forms of the same action: they both strive to put facts in accordance with experience but more often than not fail to do so, for their objective from the start is one to which no one has ever been able to apply a method. How can one evaluate experience in such a way as to make our judgment of the experience certain? I’ve argued somewhere earlier in this book that a final answer (an objective solution) to this question cannot be found so long as the grounds on which we pose the question are themselves uncertain.

Certainty is the nightmare of all epistemological systems; and it has been a fault since Plato to make that (the Truth) the end goal of all human thought: it’s an attempt to make all philosophy subordinate to epistemology—a life-denying value judgment that removes the subjectivity of man completely.

I’m an existentialist. What concerns me isn’t whether everything I believe could be wrong, but rather why I should value such a concern in the first place. My philosophy was forged in long walks and interesting talks with myself. Everything I really know (from experience, that is) was derived from my own self-confidence; my own innate capacity to silence all the doubts contained within me, and to speak with honesty on what I considered things to be—based on what I’ve managed to encounter in books, and what I managed to developed by accident during bike rides and long walks. My philosophy could really be called a philosophy of walking, breathing in the air, surrounded by trees, and listening to classical music.

All my best thoughts occur when I no longer feel the need to constrain myself with what the topic is. As far as I’m concerned, the whole world is my topic, and the only subject I wish to study is that of my own life.

In my own subjectivity do I make my own world, and from there do I start the basis of all my investigations. Everything after that is really a blur of what I feel and what my reason deems to be correct after short reflection. There’s really nothing more to it. Anyone who tries to overcomplicate knowledge makes themselves a slave to it, and in doing so can become nothing more than a pedant, a really learned nobody, who will just as quickly be forgotten as they’re capable of recalling some learned quotation from a book nobody’s ever heard of. This cannot, and should not, be considered education at all.

A man who can only interpret life in the same manner a student gets his lessons by heart—through drills, rote, repetition and what not—can hardly be considered a man, for he is unable to relate what he learns with his own values; as a result, he makes his only interest learning, and values education only insofar as it makes him smarter. In short, they become like me—like how I was as a child—told incessantly by my mother and father that the only purpose of learning is to become smart enough to acquire a high-paying career.

I’m far beyond that narrow-minded conception. My ideals are much higher, much loftier, and, in my opinion, more myself, more unique to me. I can just as easily earn my PhD staring at a tree than by going to Harvard and taking courses surrounded by rich kids—soulless wannabes. No thank you. Keep me far away from such people. I want nothing to do with them and their stupidly materialist ends. Give me freedom and the trees, a good book and the bees, my dearest love and a small lodging, and I will be the happiest man to have ever graced the Earth.

Now, I’ve given my interpretation of what I think knowledge should be generally, but I’ve yet to speak on education proper. What is education, and what value does it have? It was said by Antisthenes that, “The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.” And he elsewhere said, “Not to unlearn what you have learned is the most necessary kind of learning.” In these quotes, I find my own sentiments admirably reflected. Learning should only be for the sake of life. While we live, I feel we have a duty to not only educate ourselves but to educate those who wish to be educated.

We should strive to take up no falsehoods into our minds, and we should strive to take into our hearts all that is necessary for our own advancement. In not unlearning what we’ve learned, that implies that the thing learned was important for us. As such, all knowledge should follow such a path. The greatest mind is one that not only has a command of many facts but knows how those facts fit into their own life.

Education not for life is not education at all. That’s why education today can hardly be considered education; rather, what it is is a motley collection of subjects from various academic disciplines tossed at the child with no explanation other than the all-too-common, “That’s just the way things are.” I can’t tell you how many times I heard that as a kid and how greatly I despised it. What was the point of school if I didn’t understand why I was going; and similarly, if I had no understanding behind the purpose of education? For me, the intent was always what mattered, not the end result. I was always concerned with how I myself valued a thing, not what its potential “benefits” alone were. If I have no need for the “benefits,” it becomes a waste of time and nothing more. Nobody, all throughout my life, was ever able to make school matter for me. I had to arrive at that decision myself; and only then was I able to learn a thing or two from that backwards institution.

I wasn’t a particularly keen student starting off. I got through elementary and middle school fine enough, but nothing from those years really stuck with me. I learned all my lessons by rote and crammed endlessly for the exams. I found it all very tiring, uninteresting, and difficult—not in the least because I hadn’t yet developed a pedagogical method for myself. I was getting by through willpower and personal interest alone. My strongest subjects were history and literature, but I failed tremendously at math, and some of the subjects in science I found either boring or too mathematical. I was a solid C student until high school. It wasn’t until 10th grade that I really found my stride.

By this point, I was finally able to find ways to make all the subjects connect to me personally in some way; and that, I found, was really the key to all educational success. You must either have an innate interest in the subject, or you must find a way to make the subject’s material connect with things that you’re already interested in. That is true education. And yet, schools today do nothing of the sort, do not emphasize anything in such a way, and, in fact, are against mixing subjects—all because they foolishly believe that approach leads to more confusion. They haven’t the slightest idea what they’re talking about.

The primary emphasis of school today is poisoned and made materialistic, which I’ve argued is the exact antithesis of true learning. If the goal of learning was strictly to acquire a livelihood, then a man would need no further education beyond what career he wishes to take up; but alas, we today in all our wisdom push our kids through this barbaric, crude system and expect them to figure it out on their own. As a result, when college comes around and these kids begin looking for a major, more often than not the careers which pay the most are taken up by them. The zeitgeist, material conditions, and chance are more often than not responsible for what major a person chooses.

When interest is no longer the driving factor, it gets replaced with a “pragmatic,” materialist one: you major in what pays the best, and so most go their reckless way, very ignorant of their true passions and stuck with a degree they never really wanted in the first place.

The world today is a sickening influence on our children, for it consistently provides them a false narrative of what “success” is supposed to be—which most stupidly assume to be nothing more than the ability to live lavishly, decadently, with a high-salary job in a nice neighborhood. It’s all very superficial and is reinforced in order to keep that dream alive. Most people never achieve that, and those that do (assuming they’re not already starting well-off) do so at immense sacrifice. It is a wicked system whose logic is morally bankrupt to the core and which promotes those willing to do anything for the dream of appearing successful. This is America: a materialist utopia, the nightmare sold as a comforting dream.

It’s a dream pushed so far it has infected the minds of practically everyone living in the country today; and so much so that even our children are told to be innovators, and independent, and insistent on getting what’s theirs. It’s made the point of education mere credentialism. It’s nothing more than an extortion racket. You (the system) fleece some poor sap of all his money, and you do so only because you’ve influenced him enough to believe that it was a good investment. Despicable! And to think, the system does this deliberately—as if they want people to struggle and make it impossible to get ahead. I’ve said enough on this, though.

School is really a place to be disciplined, not taught. It’s a training ground done for a career, nothing more. It teaches kids how to be regimented, structured, ordered, deliberate, punctual, but never actually educated. School doesn’t teach freedom of thought; in fact, it teaches the exact opposite. It organizes kids around a schedule, and it makes their success dependent on how well they are able to perform on exams, in which every question has a correct answer—as if life in any way resembled a multiple-choice test.

There’s no ability to think freely inside the classroom, only the liberty to complain about how it’s structured, but nothing more. It’s very similar to an occupation in that sense; you’re free to leave anytime you want, but financially you can’t, and so you’re stuck enduring that which you hate in order to survive. This is the system our values have made. We brought this on ourselves. It is merely the logical conclusion of a long history of mistakes.

I’ve always thought the first rule of education should be first to live; and only afterwards should one go to books for the sake of discovering what they’ve already thought, but said better by another. It’s obvious, however, that the current system doesn’t allow for any of this; and as a result, we get the same general malaise worldwide by all students when their education is concerned: they hate it and consider it with deep contempt, and rightfully so. Shakespeare, on this point, is eternal:

… And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. … —As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII.

Our children today still creep off unwilling to school and always will so long as education is considered from the wrong perspective—looked on as a task to dread rather than an opportunity to learn things important for life. If it is not for life, it is not education, for education is lifelong and should only ever concern the existential—those aspects which touch life only.

Habit

We forge the chains we wear in life. Our habits are retrospective, but their consequences contemporary. Every second is holy. Though our present seems short-lived in the face of many years ahead, what we do in this very moment matters. The lives we are to lead are comprised of what we do in the now and how we interpret them in the future.

What we make of our time becomes our habit. Habits are an individual’s time dressed in colorful garb, gold-embroidered, painted as if by the Gods themselves. Time is master of all, and we are but foam upon the sea of it. I very much like that, however. I feel powerful in the fullness of life. Only when life is embraced fully, and can receive its whole inspection from every corner, can a man truly feel alive within it.

No amount of time will ever equal our desires. There are more things we would like to do than there are lifetimes in the world, I would suspect. Though I cannot live all lives, I can live the one I inhabit now, and in that, make for myself habits—great and noble habits of the highest regard—to feel alive, as it were, and actually be of use to the world as a whole.

I say we must be holy towards the Earth. We must love infinitely. We must make habits that only inhabit our higher selves. Though our capacities are limited, and our time stretched thin by the necessities of life, there is enough time to discover ourselves within the mess of affairs. Most let their lives drift by them, one innocuous event to the next, and so never find what is meaningful to them—that is, what compels them to live, makes them endeared to life, happy to be alive. A man must take inventory of all his experience and draw the accounts up like a sturdy bookkeeper if he’s to understand the war that is himself. Quiet desperation must not become the North Star which we look towards for guidance.

A bad influence is just as bad as a false value; maybe worse even, for values are easier to change—whereas influences, which provide values in the first place, are much harder to uproot and overcome.

Modern life has to be lived in a state of constant overcoming. The forces which allow us to thrive must overpower those which make us merely survive. Thriving: life-giving power, inspiration, beauty, art—these are the forces which make life a pleasant thing. Survival: labor, itemizing, economizing, arithmetic—these take their place foremost in our daily concerns, and on account of them do we find all our labor bitter and meaningless; we today seemingly live as if ruled by these sterile, life-denying forces. Our values today are oppressed with the commotions of daily life to such an extent that our habits take on their sickening aspect; merely being near them is enough for decay and sickness to spread and infect us.

We must live above all things first. The spirit must receive its due amount of mountain air before it can concern itself with the trees and rocks before it. The whole of nature sings as I enter into it, and at once do all my habits appear small. I no longer concern myself with what is to be done, but rather what is to be experienced. External concerns fall away, and I am baptized in the mist of Mother Nature. Though the air is cool, and the scent of pine enlivens me, it is not these alone that make it glorious. It is glorious because my soul is calmed by the confluence of all sensations. I do not see things in parts but wholes. I do not break apart but construct together.

In my mind, the most powerful interpretation is occurring whilst I look out over the lands and see the whole of glorious nature simply being. The simplicity of nature alone is enough to silence every spiritual doubter. Nowhere do I feel myself more at home, and one with who I am, than when I step out of society and enter the father of all societies.

I value only those things which make my habits life-affirming. The romantic nature of what I envision is so great my thoughts fail to do it justice. I wish I could give all my thoughts their due consideration and raise each and every one of them to the highest exultation possible. Alas, because I am doomed to only so limited a scope of existence, I must form habits less grand than what I intend for them to be. In fact, all habits are really compromises. If we were beings immortal, we would have no need for plans or routines; there would be enough time to do all we wish, and so we would find no sense of urgency in any of our actions.

Rushing and creating habits are responses to the very real limitations which life places upon us. We cannot know all things, nor can we discover everything which we may potentially love in life; and so, we carve out for ourselves habits and routines which confer on us the necessary leisure to pursue those things which we have managed to discover and love. The best life would be one in which the only concern for man is how to happily spend his time pursuing that which he loves. The hand of fate, however, has never been so doting upon mankind. Reality is a battle to be won, rather than a canvas to be painted upon. That is, to my knowledge, the saddest fact concerning human life: man must forgo, mostly anyway, that artistic spirit within him, and must primarily value those things which concern his practical necessities—the boring necessities that keep the body alive.

Surely the man who says the point of life is to eat, sleep, labor, repeat is mistaken. What values our bold fellow holds to; to reduce life so thoroughly that only through the momentum of its subsistence can one continue to live it. Such a person resembles the man running downhill who, lest he stop, would tumble forwards and injure himself; better yet like the planets which, should they stop hurrying onwards in the course of their revolution around the Sun, would be flung far from home, tangentially to the path they were initially going. That is what man’s life seems like today: one ceaseless movement which is maintained from its own impetus.

The force which compels a man to accept the values of society presently is so strong, there’s hardly any pretext anymore for one to become their own individual. This world abounds in fools and sheep, and all the shepherds have been eaten by greedy wolves. This must change. This will change. I know it will. For I have faith incomprehensible to me, but powerful enough to force me to believe it anyway.

My only habits are those which I perform daily. I cannot say I’ve always been consistent with myself in life—who can?—but I can say that I’ve made a really concerted effort to follow strong habits, life-affirming habits—self-made and deeply adhered to—these last five years. If I may, however, I wish to provide you, dear reader, a history of my habits—or rather, the ways in which I came to the habits I maintain today. I suppose I ought to start from the beginning.

My life, since earliest childhood, has been one strong passion after another. My parents, bless their hearts, allowed me to roam freely through life; they allowed me to pursue what I believed in all throughout my life and allowed me to stumble when they thought it would be beneficial to me. I did, all my life, only those things which I wanted to. I can say in retrospect now that my childhood and early adolescence were idyllic, my teenage years were tragic, and my early adulthood (up to the very present) has been extremely productive and beneficial. I’ve traversed the whole spectrum of life, so to say, and in that have been met with many challenges and many enjoyments, all of which I now look upon quite fondly.

Were I not introduced to the difficulties of life at so early an age, I would not have developed into the man I am now. I would’ve, perhaps, been a much later bloomer than I already was; and I, for sure, would not have developed my own philosophical system—nor would I have learned as much as I did in preparing for it. As I already alluded to, I have only ever lived truthfully to myself. The only thing I was ever forced to do in my life, and which was out of my powers to deny, was going through school; other than that, however, every day has truthfully been my own, and in that I’ve been able to wander and trip as I roam the groves of life—and how beautiful they all are. I’ve experienced euphoria, existential dread, and everything in between. My life has been as close to a blank canvas as is possible to keep it. And, thank God, I was shunned from any powerful influences until the age at which I was wise enough to consider them on their own merits with respect to my own goals.

The only strong influences I had until perhaps the age of sixteen were my parents. I wish all children could say the same. By the time I was forced to think about life seriously—being still a blank slate, mind you—I was capable of choosing what I thought to be very mature and academic influences. I didn’t really consider life existentially until I was eighteen. By that time, my parents’ influence had already left an indelible mark on me, but I now had to perform my own self-examination and judge for myself on matters concerning life. And so there I was, barely out of my teens, having to think of something to do with my time—having gone through the gauntlet of education (school) without feeling myself educated enough to really live.

Imagine that: a young kid with his life still ahead of him, scared to actually step out into the world because, prior to that, he only considered the world in the abstract—but now the concrete side of it appears, and it’s very imposing and menacing towards him. Living life without having thought about it before—this must surely be a recipe for disaster. Dear reader, you would be right; and, in fact, I’m still suffering the consequences of such indecision, but let me tell you how I tried to overcome this initially, and then what I ultimately decided on.

When I graduated high school in May of 2020, all my habits up until that point were what routine had given to me since childhood. I started elementary at the age of four, and so, that became my earliest routine; all my habits from that early point going forward revolved around how school influenced my formerly free schedule—that was all I had ever known up until that point. It was only after graduating, and no longer needing to leave my house to go to a place I never really cared for, that I suddenly became conscious of my freedom again. It felt as if I was a child again during spring break, only this time I was older, more mature, and in full command of my own faculties (my power).

What did freedom mean for me in general though? Unfortunately, freedom meant for me the opportunity to be slothful—as it does for most people today, sadly. The dominating passion of my life, from the ages of four to about seventeen, was video games; and so there was hardly a moment—whenever I had the leisure, that is—in which my hands weren’t clutched tightly around a controller. As a result, no serious consideration with respect to life was really had by me—me being too distracted with childish games to really consider life appropriately; all my leisure spent in that slothful occupation: what a waste! Life for me had yet to be taken seriously—considered with respect and resolve, that is.

With all this painfully coming to my realization not a week after graduating, I resolved to set a new schedule for myself—to make new habits to live by from thenceforth! How does one make new habits though? Ay, there’s the rub. I had no knowledge of what I really intended to do with all my free time. Previously, all my free time was spent playing video games, but I knew by this time I could no longer carry that into the future with much profit to myself. I had to find something I not only loved but which I felt would be useful for me to pursue. By the grace of God, I had just that. Around the same time I graduated, I was developing an insatiable appetite for knowledge, particularly in mathematics, and so, that’s what I pursued with my newfound free time. I wanted to study everything that I thought important for the world, in order that I may know everything necessary for it before entering into it.

And so I drew up many resolutions and plans of study, not unlike Franklin or Tolstoy in that regard, and threw myself completely at them. The finer details of this were discussed in my autobiography, but safe to say this was the beginning of the habits I would later develop more fully, and which would go on to become the habits I live by currently. I very much followed my own example with respect to habit building. All my habits, all throughout my life, were merely the expressions of what I most enjoyed pursuing in life at the time. To summarize: my first habits formed around school, punctuated with slothful leisure—playing video games—and matured into more productive occupations as I got older, as I had to consider life more seriously, more existentially. I fell in with knowledge instead of games, and the rest is history. Finding self-education to be my greatest passion presently, that is the fulcrum around which all my other passions and habits rotate.

One only builds strong habits when their passions are incorporated into them. A habit is nothing more than a passion that is pursued relentlessly, and which is organized in such a way that it becomes a staple of your life. I feign no passions. I make no leaps into what is debauched. I cannot live unless I love honestly. I cannot love unless I live genuinely.

A habit is only for those firm enough in their purposes. A man of inconstancy can never hit upon a habit, for all his life is spent in doubt and indecision. A man who contemplates life solely never lives it but through contemplation. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” said Socrates, and yet, I cannot help but wonder how a person could live through doubt alone. I’ve tried personally, and I’ve failed. It was not for me. I found it insufferable after a while—always having to flee to safety the moment an inconvenience came along that wasn’t itself rational or easily comprehensible, which is literally every inconvenience ever.

How does a true doubter live? I suspect not much different from Socrates—which is to say, like a bum, dressed in dirty rags, walking around the porticos questioning everyone but finding no answers. Who could be so foolish as to ask a stranger the meaning of life? Apparently, Socrates was. Ah Socrates, great noble Socrates! The professional rage-baiter. “If that is your power, what are you without it!” Socrates questioned everything but the value of questioning itself, for he believed faithfully until the end that someone would come along for him one day and truly enlighten him. That’s the faith of someone religious, nothing more.

That’s the religious practice of skeptics—the maieutic method applied to life, but finding nothing in it, for it gives no answers whatsoever! I suppose, in the end, that the best criticism ever levied against Socrates was by the man who claimed to be his exact antipode—Friedrich Nietzsche—who said of him in Twilight of the Idols:

Socrates belonged to the lowest of the low: Socrates was mob. You know, and you can still see it for yourself, how ugly he was.

And good on Nietzsche for that, for Socrates was indeed very ugly (do his statues not attest to that?); and to be ugly in Greece during the Golden Age of Pericles was itself a refutation of a person’s character. How low our own values have sunk when men today act like Socrates did so long ago—walking around, high-minded and conscious of their rational powers, but unable to affirm anything whatsoever. These men may be able to argue with Apollo but could never withstand the power of Zeus, the courage of Ares, or the simple wisdom of Athena. How does such a person find power enough to live day by day? How does such a person enjoy themselves? How do they enjoy anything for that matter—affirming nothing but life-denial and decadence?

They’re completely incapable of valuing anything that is truly for life, truly strong, powerful, ample, etc. They doubt because they value what Socrates represented, and that is why they’re eternally caught between wanting to be firm but restraining themselves—because to affirm is to open yourself up to contradiction. That is life, however, and the more they deny it, the less they live. That is why such people find habits completely foreign—abstract conceptions, unknown to them; they spend all their time doubting the merits of an action instead of acting, and so lose any chance of being actualized themselves.

All good ideas have their time and place. What seems at first novel and requires a good deal of explication, in due time is accepted as self-evident by all, and taken to be the norm, in fact. Such is why every idea has its own lifecycle, and why philosophers must eternally battle against each other, even though people before us have already gone to war over the same differences in values. Why not stop the cycle? I know why. Because without conflict there would be very little impulse to live. That is the zeitgeist of the present. War on a scale mankind has never seen before is in the works: and when it unleashes, beware! This is the sign of a culture in the throes of death. But from this will come something truly perfect. I feel it. A new age. A new culture. A new mankind, perhaps?

I feel very fortunate to say I’ve never done a thing in life which I truly never wanted to. That has been the only true guiding light in my entire life: my honesty and integrity to myself, my interests, and my loves. All my habits, whatever they may be good for, are only so on account of my genuineness. I try to live with as little pretension as possible. I hate above all things false people: people untrue to themselves and those around them.

I see not far from my home a pond. I go there every time I get the mail, and I look into it. What I see, aside from the reflection of the trees above it, is an infinite serenity, almost enviable—nay, it is enviable, because my life is not as still as the pond’s surface is. That is why I love throwing rocks into it, for its ripples remind me more of my own life. In those ripples, however, I find another thing within myself that is equally powerful: order. I live deliberately by chaos, but I never let it get the best of me. I’m one of those men fortunate enough to not only partake in the fun but to just as quickly turn from it. I live by that maxim of Alberti’s:

It’s good occasionally to turn the mind from work to harmless pleasures, which is what I am doing. When time and place permit, I act silly in everything, with all my energy and effort; because I consider it to be the duty of prudent men to be wise around philosophers and jolly around winecups; for whoever wants to be serious in all places and at all times, and to look grave, restrained, and gloomy, is always foolish, in my opinion. But because I know how to behave in both situations, no one rejects me in serious matters, and all admit me in amusing ones. —Philodoxus.

All my habits, in essence, have been formed for the sake of being agreeable to all and disingenuous to none. I want to live no other life but a happy one, occupied at all times with nothing but nature, my dearest love, and my books. Habits are, for that reason, necessary aspects of life—for without them, one cannot hope to build a consistent enough routine by which to do the works necessary for happiness. Build the kind of habits you want in your life, and the rest will come unto you as surely as breathing. That’s a fact.

Eternal Consequences

Progress

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it. —Karl Marx, Theses On Feuerbach, 11th thesis.

Many no longer doubt the possibility of a world crisis, taking the latter word in its most usual acceptation, and this in itself marks a very noticeable change of outlook: by sheer force of circumstance certain illusions are beginning to vanish, and we cannot but rejoice that this is so, for it is at any rate a favorable symptom and a sign that a readjustment of the contemporary mentality is still possible—a glimmer of light as it were—in the midst of the present chaos. For example, the belief in a never-ending ‘progress’, which until recently was held as a sort of inviolable and indisputable dogma, is no longer so widespread; there are those who perceive, though in a vague and confused manner, that the civilization of the West may not always go on developing in the same direction, but may some day reach a point where it will stop, or even be plunged in its entirety into some cataclysm. —René Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World, Preface.

I cannot say with confidence that progress is eternal. Unfortunately, I think I know too much history to find any consolation in the idea that things will all work out in the end. What is the end, though? Only the discovery of the hidden mystery within nature. Man is nature, yet in all his science, he hasn’t yet acquired the necessary art to look within himself. It takes more than a mirror to truly see who you are. A man has to seek eternally for the rock upon which to lay the rest of his foundation. But how can one find the courage to truly look at that which they actively seek to avoid? The answer can only lie in life itself.

Within our actions do we build courage, and from there do we venture out into the world with more confidence; from there, we live as if properly constituted for the affairs of the world—seemingly as if we were born for them. The exchange of smiles between those we see makes up the whole of our happiness while we’re in the public sphere. Our private life is the greatest thing to return to when daily life has soiled us with all its nonsense; but in those little moments, those temporary joys shared between others, do we feel rekindled, and reconnect with our morality—that part of us which we hear every second, but do not find the ambience of too distracting.

The morality of man is progress incarnate. Though every man has been a victim of his time, he has also been a great steward for all future times. Mankind only exists today because other members of mankind thought it important enough to love each other. There has never been a truly immoral man: such a man would have no drive by which to exercise power for the sake of its accomplishment.

Morals are values turned habitual, but what do they become in the face of a true immoralist? Nothing but a laughingstock. If a man cannot find within himself power enough to value, he has no drive, no ambition, no passion in even denying those who affirm wickedness—he is a man who, overall, cannot hope to save himself through action. This is a man who cannot even deny progress. Again I ask, what is a true immoralist? A shadow, a ghost, a phantom, a mirage, an apparition, an illusion—in short, a nonexistent human being.

All progress is predicated on the notion that certain values are taken up by the powerful and spread for the sake of making them universal. Those who have morality have judgments; ergo, those who act have values, for to evaluate a thing is to consider it morally in order to pass a judgment on it. The moral law within me informs me on things just as objective as the information the astronomer receives from his telescope when viewing the starry sky above. My subjectivity is made objective the moment I embody it in the world. I value, therefore I will in the name of power for the sake of a goal. Love that which is noble for you, and you shall have the secrets of morality whispered in your ear as you travel through life.

Those who seek to will nothing do nothing, and so are rightly cast off from the whole world. I want nothing to do with immoralists who affirm nothing—the so-called “true immoralist” who only sees life as a thing to ignore completely. I only want to encounter people in this world who are affirmers of themselves, not afraid of their actions, who listen to their hearts, who value their own thoughts above the opinions of others. The future does not rest in the weak or timid. The world is degrading by the second, and if mankind is to reverse the course it’s currently on, it must be empowered by those who are strong, those who value, those who affirm morals in an immoral sense—that is, in a sense counter to all that is weak and life-denying.

That is what Nietzsche meant by immoral: to go against all that currently exists, because what exists now is what is slowly killing the future. Many counterintuitive ideas must be presented to modern man in order for him to change. This must be a gradual process, and must come about through deliberate action, though on a scale that seems at first imperceptible. Rome was not built in a day, and the formation of mountains takes millions of years. Human morality has only existed for as long as man himself has. That puts man’s moral nature at only a quarter of a million years (roughly). If man is to live as long as mountains, his consistency with respect to his values must be as certain as the movement of tectonic plates—and just as powerful, I should add.

Progress is progressive only when it’s existential. The nature of what we are is formed in the heart and embodied in the movement of our passions born in the spirit. There is no life without action. Anyone who tries to deny action is therefore deeply immoral in the decadent sense. To be existential is to be concerned with only those things which promote a positive (life-affirming and powerful) morality. A great weakening of man’s moral faculties has been underway since Socrates and Christ but wasn’t really consecrated until the Enlightenment, when men tried to turn faith into reason.

This kind of thinking, in the Western tradition at least, goes back to men like William of Ockham and Thomas Aquinas—but was brought into modern form by religious apologists, first and foremost among them being Hugo Grotius; his book The Truth of the Christian Religion is nothing but a prosaic miscellany of nonsense—fallacy and absurdity stacked on top of each other in a tower of stupidity, specifically written for laymen not in the hopes of convincing them but rather reaffirming them in their faith. Nonsense!

Grotius’s irenicism, which is an early form of Locke’s concept of religious toleration, is the origin of all modern decadence with respect to values; everything it represents is abominable to the human spirit and counter to strong values in every way possible. There is no progress in it because it only seeks to reaffirm that which is already immoral. Progress is evaluative and progresses one powerful action at a time. I don’t think “rational” proofs for Christ’s resurrection, or justifications for the Trinity, do anything for those already in faith—and certainly don’t do anything for atheists.

I only mention Grotius because he was a sign of things to come—a coming age of decadence and a decline in progress unstoppable in the world; the last truly great Renaissance humanist who, of course, would go on to inspire many Enlightenment thinkers—though not with equal praise: he was liked by Leibniz, questioned by Pufendorf, ignored by Voltaire, and hated by Rousseau.

Speaking of the Enlightenment, there was a very concerted effort on behalf of all three major philosophical sects—rationalist, empiricist, and idealist—to make what they thought obey the rational and justifiable. This, of course, was doomed from the start, for they committed a category fallacy the moment they tried to reconcile them; it’s equivalent to trying to weigh yourself with a ruler—it’s simply the wrong tool. When a man feels the need to justify that which his heart tells him, this is a clear indication that the values which formerly dominated those golden ages which we look upon now with admiration are long gone. Where has that powerful morality gone?

To the backwoods, only for a select few wanderers and free spirits to actually discover it. Man once willed without rational reflection, doing so on the basis of his power alone—but where is this impulse to be found today? Nowhere, except, perhaps, in those who actively try to act truthfully with respect to themselves; those who wish their values to become a universal law, not for others (as Kant would have had it) but for themselves.

Again, all progress is existential. The emancipation of one man’s spirit means nothing if he cannot then go on to inspire others to do the same. Real progress can only be born in a collective consciousness, in which everybody is capable of recognizing themselves and embodying their own powerful values. The values of an age dominate the majority of people’s souls, and for that reason are they rightfully called the herd; but this can just as easily be overturned, so long as it be done intellectually. This is nothing new. This is merely Marx’s idea of class solidarity made Nietzschean—which is to say made moral, but instead of turning it aristocratic (as Nietzsche did) it is liberal and emancipatory.

There is no collective progress possible for mankind unless all working people unite and find it within themselves to value the liberty and freedom of all enough to fight and die for it. The Enlightenment tried too hard to categorize and reduce things to their simplest components in order to make the study of them easier; but in doing so it removed all nuance and developed a passionate hatred for contradiction, not realizing that real analysis can’t begin unless it’s started from the standpoint of all things progressing towards some higher unity—which really means to advance on account of their dialectic being made tangible first in abstraction and second in action.

Never forget the threefold logical structure of Hegel’s entire logic: abstract, negative, concrete; being = logic = metaphysics—and in this unity come the three emanations: Logic (thinking of thinking; essence = nature), Nature (science of matter; concept = spirit), and Spirit (science of the human; being = logic). All of this was later simplified into Engels’ three laws of dialectics: interpenetration of opposites, transformation of quantity into quality, and the negation of the negation. One is still a child in philosophy until they have wrestled with, and been totally destroyed by, Hegel. We start with the abstract; we then go towards the negative as we interpenetrate the concepts logically and then spiritually; and then we reach, finally, a concrete thing—where the spirit of man is engaged with the quantities of things and recognizes them in their being, connecting them to the logical spirit of man which is evaluating the content of reality as shown in nature itself, and at last does it become a quality in the mind (a concrete abstraction) which corresponds precisely with the thing viewed in nature as interpreted by the spirit. All this to say, progress is a deeper concept than most can comprehend; and it’s a shame, too, because it’s the most important concept in reality as far as I’m concerned—and yet, so dialectical and contradictory that nobody with today’s set of values has a chance in hell of interpenetrating it truthfully, subjectively, morally, and spiritually. But such is the way of the world in the end.

In the end, we’re all dead. Let that fact be enough to summarize the whole of mankind. I feel it is necessary we continue to live for the sake of those who come after us. The world is in great need of powerful spirits. The times are so hard most shrink from the task of being themselves, but those few who stand against the tides and prejudices of their age overcome the decadence of it, and as a result gain the times for themselves in the end. The prevalence of these immoral values—these uncultured, life-denying, wicked ideas—must be uprooted and driven out of the world, carted off and laid in a mass grave alongside the other historical intellectual blunders.

It doesn’t matter that life is doomed. I choose life anyway. I cannot find my spirit suppressed any longer with the convictions of mankind; even if the whole of humanity were to be against me on this—I would still choose to be myself and fight to defend those things which sustain my being and which give me hope. If these words were capable of engendering the same affection in the hearts of others, then I have been successful in my task of promoting hope and making progress seem possible. We are in a battle, both spiritually and physically. The order of everything is backwards and seeks only to promote doubt and weakness in the minds and bodies of the populace. It cannot succeed. It will not succeed.

The reign of quantity and the signs of the times may be discouraging, but I find within them proper material for reflection. The whole world is a dialectical symphony in which we intellectuals must listen to the music of progress, and in doing so strive to move our spirits in the direction of the absolute. There is a spirit within us, not because I say so, but because we know. We know! We know, damn it! Let our hearts at last be given the reins of our cognition, and in that let us overcome together—spiritually and dialectically. We can no longer find ourselves subject to the whims of the material world, and the same applies to the immaterial world (the world of ideas).

We must be free to accept, but must be willing to enslave ourselves for it. These beautiful contradictions must be made meaningful through our spiritual interpretation of them. The whole of man is embodied in subjectivity, and in the nature of our being is contained the desire for progress. Progress has only ever been made impossible by the values which dominated an age. Never has there been an age in which the morally powerful truly dominated since the crucifixion of Christ. And never have the intellectually powerful dominated since Socrates.

We’re still fighting the battle of all battles—a two-and-a-half millennia struggle: a requiem for a criterion by which to judge values according to their truth or falsity; a life-denying value judgment which has never been questioned, or even criticized, outside of its innate epistemic merit. It’s a stupid question that received a staggeringly brilliant answer by Nietzsche—an answer so staggering and so genius, in fact, that it literally paved the way (I believe) for the next two thousand years of philosophy.

Nietzsche simply asked what value the question itself had existentially; and at once did the whole tradition of Western philosophy tremble and crack open, unleashing the souls of the damned into the realm of the living, now free to entice those philosophers living today to become free spirits and life-affirmers for themselves. The whole debate instantly became null and void. It no longer mattered whether the question itself has an epistemic ground to stand on; for even if it did, all who come after Nietzsche will not evaluate the question in the same way we’ve been for the last 2,500 years. The values of everyone will be so different, it will no longer receive the same evaluative judgment.

That is the reevaluation of all values in action; that’s what it means to reevaluate, what it means to change history with a single idea, what it means to pave the way for all future philosophy. At this point, it can’t even be considered a prelude to a philosophy of the future—for the future Nietzsche spoke of in 1886 is here now; and though we may not yet be ready for the Übermensch, our minds are cocked and ready to adopt affirmative values at the drop of a hat. The conditions for revolution are already here, both materially and intellectually, spiritually and artistically—willing to be accepted with open arms too, passionately and lovingly.

It’s already a popular speculation among my coevals—my generation, I should say: Generation Z. The 20th century had no real Nietzscheans. There wasn’t even a pretense for any of that. The two world wars made Marx the dominant philosopher of that barbarous century. But the 21st century is perhaps the first century truly ready for the message of Nietzsche. Marx failed, and the modern/post-modern interpreters of Nietzsche (Lou Salomé, Kurt Eisner, Rudolf Steiner, Oscar Levy, H. L. Mencken, Anthony Ludovici, Spengler, Heidegger, Chesterton, Russell, Kaufmann, Klossowski, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, etc.) either made him an antisemite, a socialist, a self-help guru, or a philosopher of power.

All of these are wrong for the simple fact that they all had the wrong instincts with respect to Nietzsche—their evaluations of him were still too biased and personal, too autobiographical; the greatest sin in philosophical interpretation is to overshadow the thoughts of the philosopher with your own before you have fully understood the implications of their ideas. The truth is, the 20th century was still too close to Nietzsche to really understand him properly. Nietzsche died in the year 1900, the literal start of the 20th century. You can’t really expect 50 or 80 years to be a long enough lapse of time to see the underlying reasons behind the philosophy overall, according to me anyway. It takes, in my view, at least a century, if not a little more. We’re presently a quarter of the way through the 21st century, and we’re rapidly approaching Nietzsche’s bicentennial.

I guess I’ve been dragging this on long enough though, and I ought now to finally come clean. In the same way Schopenhauer viewed himself as the only true successor of Kant, I view myself as the first true successor of Nietzsche. And the reason is quite simple: unlike Kant—whose Copernican revolution was already well within the tradition of Western philosophy and was completed by Hegel not thirty years after his death—Nietzsche’s philosophy represented a complete overthrow of Western philosophy as it was traditionally understood; not merely a new innovation upon very old and very well-trodden ideas, but a total reevaluation of the entire system as such. This is why it took a century; others were simply unable to see what I see, or rather, unable to develop the instinct for Nietzsche, the right intuition for his ideas.

This is not to say that because I’m the first, I’m the only true successor—there will be many successors after me, of this I have no doubt—but rather only to say that because I’m the first in the 21st century, everyone after me will necessarily have to go through me before they get to Nietzsche, because my interpretation is imbued with the zeitgeist itself. My interpretation will necessarily have to be wrestled with, spat on, debunked to death, and buried before a new, greater, stronger interpretation comes after me (just like what happened with Schopenhauer’s philosophy between Hartmann, Mainländer, and Bahnsen); but until that day comes, I will forever remain the only true successor of Nietzsche. Nietzsche, oh Nietzsche—a man so genius and prophetic, I, (the first true disciple of Nietzsche), claim here now in the 21st century that two thousand years from now, Nietzsche will be viewed in the same light that Socrates is viewed today.

Nietzsche was considered by Rudolf Steiner as a Fighter for Freedom (ein Kämpfer gegen seine Zeit), and I think of all the interpreters listed, Steiner is perhaps the closest to my own, and without doubt the best; but I would like to make a small addendum to the phrase, however: it is not that Nietzsche is a fighter for freedom (primarily), but rather a wanderer (or free spirit) who inspires progress—a fighter for progress, or, maybe more appropriately, an artist of progress, or even a musician of emancipation. Whichever is fine for me.

All I know is one thing with respect to progress: our actions bend towards it, but the world more often than not has other plans with respect to how we would like to see it change. As a result, we must overcome the world itself if that means ushering in a new era of progress, prosperity, strong values, and positive evaluations. Progress is patient, but only so long as man is persistent for it. We must not give in. Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! That is the sound of progress as I hear it.

Happiness

I find happiness in myself only when I step outside myself. Rise above yourself and grasp the world. The wisdom of nature does not rest dormant while we live. It is at all times trying to break through the barrier that we erect before it. It demands to be made free. The human heart must sing, and the wisdom of life, by life, for life, must not perish from the Earth.

There is within us an innate power of overcoming. Man strives to survive, and while doing so, makes nature his midwife and servant rather than his true wife—his true love. Happiness is love made manifest in the heart, understood in the soul, and remembered in the brain. At all times, happiness seems distant from us. But she is more willing to come to us than we would expect.

Our minds are capable of extraordinary things. We can call before us the whole of our history and find in our memories the most pleasant experiences. I look at my past with happiness, not because it was good or happy necessarily, but because it made itself known in my heart. I retain the memory not because it was pleasant, but because it was meaningful. Happiness itself cannot be meaningful. Only in our subjectivity do we selectively value this or that thing about an experience in order to make it better or worse for us in the end. What we emphasize in happiness is more important than the feeling itself.

My heart races and I feel a sense of shame. My heart flutters and I feel a sense of love. Either one could be good or bad, depending on how it is viewed. There is an intersubjective relation between man and the world. The realm of the spirit touches on the ineffable in this world. The realm of the real touches on the material in this world. And yet, both cannot be without their purpose; in the same way, one is not necessarily above or better than the other; only after valuing particular aspects of them can we then say which one was better than the other: that infinitely subjective act—the most powerful act a man can perform.

There is no existential either-or in the realm of the spirit—that realm where ideas are placed above matter—for the simple fact that the spiritual realm does not discount matter, whereas the material realm does. This is because the material realm treats everything as a mere epiphenomenon of matter, rather than an interplay of abstract and concrete conceptions of experience—one interpreted by the spirit (heart) and the other by the mind (reason).

We mistakenly assume that all must be matter on account of everything we experience being composed of matter; and this seems to be further validated by our scientific experiments, in which all we ever see is matter interacting with matter. But this faulty assumption in no way invalidates the spiritual, and that’s because it cannot say anything about the spiritual. Science, when it’s done properly, merely explores what is extant and ventures no further than what experience and methodological naturalism reveal. Anything beyond this is out of its wheelhouse, and thus does it remain silent on such matters. And this is precisely why science is not existential—it has no interest in subjectivity.

Only in subjectivity does one find existentialism. The divide between matter and idea has always been a false one. This mistake has its origin in René Descartes’ mind-body dualism—in which Descartes presupposed that the mind and body are fundamentally distinct substances: the mind is an immaterial, non-extended “thinking thing” (res cogitans), while the body is a material, extended machine (res extensa). In truth, Descartes sets before us a false dichotomy. He differentiates the mind from the body (from matter) on account of the function it performs: the ability to make abstractions from experience that aren’t necessarily material—like in a dream, for example. In reality, both are necessary.

There is no matter without empirical experience, and there is no abstraction from experience without matter. Hence why Descartes’ initial separation of them was incorrect; and, unfortunately, it gave birth to the wars fought between the rationalist and empiricist afterwards. It wasn’t until Kant that true (transcendental) idealism emerged, which in itself gave rise to English Romanticism and American Transcendentalism. There never had to be the distinction between the two, and yet, because of it, it gave rise to all the false intellectual prejudices and presuppositions of the modern world—ideas that are wrong, yet so widespread and common they are taken as being correct on account of their popularity. The same thing occurred morally, giving rise to false, life-denying valuations all too common today—but we’ve already beaten that topic to death.

One thing above all has to be remembered here: life is not an either-or false dichotomy, but rather an interplay of existential and subjective forces—and in that comes the happy idealism of free spirits; those who see life not merely as cause and effect—a string of actions embodied materially—but rather as a constantly striving series of value judgments, all of which we desire in instinct and which we act upon using power. Every action we make in life is, in fact, a coalescence of the material and the spiritual—matter and mind coming together in one human being, and in that unity is found a deeper harmony not found in mere matter or mere mind alone.

In matter alone does one find science as it is understood today. But can these modern scientists really be the naturalists whom Emerson spoke of? Those who not only observe matter but see the inner spirit (the spiritual realm) within it? Surely not, for science today has no real connection with art or life, and thus it is far from existentialism proper. Science as practiced currently is stultified by a petulant reductionism, a life-denying rigidity which aims to make all things objective and out of themselves (objectified): a desire to formalize all things, make them standard, have them correspond, and organize them in rational formation. It is this intellectual dreg which deposits its sediments in all minds presently, and which has resulted in the age which we see before us—uncurious, uncultured, uninteresting, unalive in a very real sense. This is where the intellectual must step up and strive to rekindle the truth of the spiritual in the material.

An intellectual is one who reflects upon the spiritual problems of the world in order to find solutions for them. The solution always appeared obvious to me the moment I discovered how groundless and anti-life every value held today truly was. The anti-existential bent—the total rejection of subjectivity in favor of objectivity—which has existed since the Enlightenment has always made modern man subject to formality and tradition, rather than inspiring him to create his own tradition, his own system, his own life! There is very little in the way of honesty in anyone today, because at all times must they bow their heads in reverence to a false God, an idol which does nothing for them personally.

Material conditions, and everything under their dominion, comprise the sole concern for many today; and as such, even if they are natural free spirits, they must deform themselves mentally for the sake of fitting in with everyone around them. If the mind is lost, so too shall the actions which command the body. Naturally, from all this, the whole world presently resembles one giant catalogue of handicaps—everyone doing this or that which is against their own interest, but which they’re unable to overcome because they lack the material means and the mental fortitude to withstand the shocks of the world productively, amicably, or interestingly. No one is spared. Even art suffers, because those who make it are hungry most of the time.

Sans art, sans culture; sans culture, sans life: therefore (via the transitive property) sans art, sans life. Nothing more to it than that.

One must make way for the new as one lives in the present and must strive to take only what is great from the old so as to ensure the future. History will always repeat itself, even if everyone knew it, but it can be doomed to a happier fate should the lessons of it be remembered. No one remembers anything, however. We look upon the past as a dead thing, of no use to us now. But when I enter into the present truthfully, I find my mind swimming in thoughts that only pertain to what I once felt. The past is where I connect with myself in the now in order to go peacefully into the future. In my subjective experience, I find all that is necessary for my happiness. I obey myself and take with me the spirit that sustains me in all my things.

I carry in me the power to love all that which I come in contact with. My soul moves towards only those things which are happy. I seek the good and the virtuous, and when I’m met with them, my mind forgets all unhappiness, and I return to my spirit in full. I no longer look only upon the surface of the deep, but actively enter into it in hopes of reconnecting with the one who made me (nature).

All vain egoism loses its grip on me. I am released and am finally able to find happiness in the small things of life. Happiness no longer becomes a goal for me, but rather a consequence of my own honesty with respect to myself. I, as the master of my mind, hold the whole world in my hands. The world is mine to overcome, and I do it faithfully so long as I remember the spiritual side of my being. I do not get confused in the throngs of matter and people, but rather look upon the sky and instantly remember that which is above me, that which sustains me, that which empowers me and allows me to endure the less savory aspects of daily life. No misery is equal to the joy which I radiate outwards on account of my own honesty. I inhale. I exhale.

I see the trees and feel the grass. I become a poet in my heart of hearts, and I sing the “Song of Myself” loudly, extemporally, like some wild Ossian. The clouds no longer feel so far from me, and I believe I can feel the horizon beneath my feet. I interpret all the matter around me in such a way as to raise it beyond the level of the atom and place it at the right hand of power, where in that realm of ideas I find every conceivable happiness possible. Nothing is foreign to me, and my spirit accepts all the movements of the world equally. I hold nothing in contempt, and I find the procession of life rather pleasant, in fact.

When one looks beyond matter they only rediscover that which was always in them, but which they were unable to see because of all the matter that piled on top of the spiritual. A heart overladen with emotion cannot properly express what causes such fits of anxiety. Step into the world of nature, however, and at once everything seemingly melts before you. The grandeur of life is seen in full view now, and the simplicity of it is overwhelming. A mind too caught up in the material would be shattered by the spiritual depth which is contained in a single leaf. What is a pinecone but a temporary fifth gospel? There is a power above us, and to that, we owe all we are.

Happiness to me is merely the recognition of life in all its honesty. The good, the bad, and the ugly come together for me, and in them, I find precisely what it is I’m looking for out of life: truth. This is not the truth of the logicians or metaphysicians, but rather the truth of an existentialist—a seeker of the good life, who only finds happy that which is in accordance with their soul; that which is true for them, subjectively so, felt spiritually, understood materially—all intersect at a single point, and our understanding picks up on the meaning only after the fact of its experience. That is the greatest type of happiness: that which is felt and understood only when reason returns from the splendor which the experience brought it to.

Happiness is often made the end of life, and as a result, most people are made miserable by their endless pursuit of it. As I already said, happiness should never be the goal which one seeks, but rather the by-product of someone’s honest reflection towards the world. Man is a mirror whose spirit reflects the world as it comes into him. A man must always strengthen himself against the materialist (real world) assaults which are constantly flung his way. The world is a hell for those who feel it too deeply. Do not become too attached to anything but the spirit which channels all your energies. Burnout and exhaustion are the result of an overactive nervous system. A man must learn how to tread lightly on those things which are negative to his spirit, but must also learn how to overcome that which is negative through his power.

A man can only find happiness when all his actions are directed towards those things which are desired by him. There must always be a correspondence between our hearts and our decisions. We cannot let the brute facts of the world dominate those passions which inspire us to live in the first place. If the fire for life is extinguished, so too is a man’s life. There’s no difference between a dead man and an unhappy man, for both have forgotten the good, that source of light which endears us to life—the only difference, of course, is that for one of them it’s permanent, while for the other it is only temporary. Life is temporary, and on that basis alone should it inspire people to act gloriously within it. Life—while you persist, give me the fortitude to endure the world as it exists, very imperfectly; and make me see the spirit that moves me from within and which causes me to love unconditionally.

I am now light! I feel the breeze of the wind and see the leaf atop the tree blowing vigorously. My happiness is now all but certain. I see the world for what it is and love it anyway. The whole Earth conspires on my behalf. There is no longer any privation which could possibly distract me from the love I feel towards all things. Honesty is my abode, and I dwell in a world of my own. All material affairs are trivial so long as they’re viewed materially; and are made into an opportunity for growth so long as they’re viewed spiritually. Either way, I’m blessed. Even my failures turn into great triumphs. This is not mere positive thinking but that which lies beyond it: true thinking—subjective thinking—spiritual thinking. Happiness found in existence in and of its own experience. That is true happiness.

Immortality

Though all men aim for immortality, few actually hit it. It is a great sign, in fact, of the vanity of man to presume himself great enough to last forever. Immortality only has a meaning thanks to death. Were our life not limited, were our experience immortal, were our time infinite, were our being eternal—immortality would have no great effect upon us. Our lives would pass on ceaselessly, and the impact of our actions would mean very little in the end.

Immortality has a tendency to put things into perspective in such a way that what lies before us, in the aftermath of its contemplation, appears very insignificant. It would be nice if man was content with merely being mortal, but again, the fact of our death presses on us severely and only causes greater anxiety as we age.

Age is the common stamp of organic life. Our wrinkles reveal more about our resilience than our deeds. We shudder at the thought of growing old, pale, weak, stupid, and in constant need of assistance. And so while we’re young, when youth appears like the only thing we have to our name, we devise schemes and plans and goals, and organize our powers around the pursuit of those things. In doing so, we hope to forget the hard business of contemplating life and rather only hope to live it—as if life itself were its own good, and on that basis would allow us to thrive meaningfully.

In seeking fulfillment in action, we take up arms against the troubles with which time oppresses us. We live life to forget about it afterwards. We tire ourselves out on vain things we value not for their own sake, but for the sake of our scared natures. Man is willing to do anything to give his reason a sedative; without a sense of control in his life, all things will fly apart for him, and he would rather go mad than live without order, even if that order is next to death in terms of the effects it has on him.

Man fears death like a child fears the dark; but even before death does the darkness of ignorance appear like some Lovecraftian nightmare. We’re incapable of finding within ourselves any true sense of immortality. If we were, our deeds alone would speak volumes for posterity; but most leave this world not even knowing themselves—and so, what hope do our descendants have of remembering who we were, when we at present are as unknown to ourselves?

It is only in our ignorance and forgetfulness that immortality seems impossible. If everyone had hyperthymesia, and lived as long as Methuselah, life alone would seem immortal—and in that sense, we would have fulfilled the task of our immortality—living, in order to be remembered after death. Our memories are very limited, however, and our lifespans seem to go no further than a century. With this acknowledged by us, the thought of death once again presses on us unfairly, overbearingly, without remorse. We seek to find ways of bypassing our temporality, but in doing so, we hardly find enough time to even settle our affairs, let alone make good on all those youthful ambitions of becoming immortal or living beyond our allotted span of time.

There’s no antidote against time, which consumes all. We are quickly forgotten by our survivors, our gravestones outlasted by trees and our names reduced to cold curiosities for antiquaries. Seeking eternity through inscriptions or epitaphs offers no real consolation against the inevitable erasure of the self. Time makes a mockery of all our efforts to outlast it. As a topic, it’s interconnected with so many macabre themes that one could write endlessly about its connection to death, birth, finality, infinity, and a thousand other philosophical fancies that hold a place in every pessimist’s heart. None but the lonely heart can understand the depths of despair which the thought of life brings on us—on we who have no one, want no one, and find nothing in anyone.

If one were to look out onto the scenes of life in a serious manner, they would find themselves almost speechless at how little we actually concern ourselves with the immortal. We speak of our lovers as being immortal or eternal, but we dare not say the same about our life. There’s a very obvious contempt in us. We live in contempt of life. We feel like life is itself a sick joke, and that we play it only for the sake of finding amusement within it. And such is why so many people live meaningless lives, for they live only for distraction and amusement.

Such is also why so many people flee from friendship—the thought of becoming too well-known, too felt, too understood by another, is delightfully terrifying to us—to we who only seek to know ourselves, and nothing more. Though death has its entrances and exits, we seem to be met with few who actually rise in applause at the Grim Reaper’s performance. It watches our final breaths, and then steals our souls when we least expect. Clad in black rags and armed with a big scythe, I find the blade of it to resemble a crescent moon. The moon is older than man, and in its sight, I find that in nature which is nearest to immortality. We die, fade, pass away, and move on all the same, but the moon remains.

Though it goes through phases—it persists; and just as night is merely the shadow of the Earth cast upon us as we turn from the Sun—so too are we in life. Our life is like a shadow which we’re constantly casting in the light while we live, and which disappears just as quickly as we enter into the dark. Even in death does our analogy work, for shadows either disappear in the presence of light, or in the complete absence of light. Either way, we’re gone, not to return, and a good thing at that—for who would ever wish to remain here?

If one is honest with themselves, they would find existence to resemble more an errata list than a blank slate. We supposedly draw upon that slate ourselves, but I find the chalk too weak, or perhaps the slate too black, to make any serious impression upon it. Our impressions are caused by our depressions. What makes us suffer is what makes us feel closest to life. I never knew a man who didn’t feel himself at his most excited when he was at his lowest low. Those who suffer in silence often are the hardest to single out amongst the crowd. They look so demure, calm, nonchalant—like nothing is wrong with them. Deep down, though, there’s always a depth to man which even eludes himself.

I don’t believe there has ever been a man who has been a complete master of himself. Those who have either went insane or found in old age that they’ve made many mistakes along the way, and regret having lived as long as they have. Even those men who, from the start, act with purpose and meaning, find that life always tosses a barrier in their way and prevents them from ever feeling at home in their own hearts.

The greatest confusion of life is, first—that it is—and second—that it has to be us. “That it is” is simply what it is; nonexistence has no meaning to one who isn’t already. “That it has to be us” is, perhaps, the origin of all our confusion and despair; it certainly could have been the case that we never came to be, and yet, here we are upon this rock forced to live, and forced to deal with all the impulses of life that direct us unwillingly. We seem made to suffer, and yet all those immortal celestial objects persist without the slightest concern.

I’ve said it before, but I have to say it again: consciousness is nature’s nightmare to man. It is that aspect of our being—that “night of the world” as Hegel called it—where before we were, others were, and yet in their image we were made; hungry and oppressed by all things around us, we were made conscious in our sufferings and turned to reason to overcome our state of suffering. In our experience, we find anything but salvation. I don’t even have the vocabulary to describe it, but if I had to hazard a guess, or a phrase rather, at what I think immortality is: I would say it is the sense of longing which comes from our desire to be seen and felt by others after we wake from the nightmare which is life—the loss of our consciousness, which is equivalent to being freed from nature’s oppressive thumb.

At all times, we yearn to be released from the clutches of our vain ambitions—to be freed from life, as it were—but at the same time, we find ourselves lost without them; and so, we live on, only striving to achieve those ambitions which we already know are vain. In that sense, our life is vain, for its purpose is made its own continuation—thus is it circular, as are all man’s logical justifications for existence. At every moment, we find ourselves striving to put words to what we feel deep down. Our thoughts are always on the saddest material imaginable, and yet, when viewed objectively, are the most trivial in history.

All mankind may do as they wish and bow in obedience to a will that is capricious; but for myself, I will have none of it, not only because I have no time for nonsense, but because I have not the strength to obey myself, let alone another. My life is among the most extraordinary ever lived, but only when seen from my own perspective. Points of view, in that sense, always give the wrong impression of things. They substitute the self instead of the world at large, and so only provide a very limited scope of what is real. To ever say a thing is real is a bold pretension, but for pragmatism’s sake, I’ll go along with convention and tradition. It is tiring at times, though, always having to fit in when your real goal is to be remembered precisely because you were different—i.e., not fitting in. And how crude the concept of “fitting in” seems. I can no more “fit in” in the traditional sense than I can get to the bottom of what life is. People make the point of life to fit in, but that kind of thinking is only reserved for those either unoriginal or too scared to live for themselves; chances are their positions are already secured, and on account of not wanting to lose them, they live safely, decadently, boringly, unculturedly... whatever else.

Time always moves slowest for the person who wants nothing more than for it to speed up. Life becomes even more of a drag than it is when the pace by which it moves is seemingly made slow—either by perception, surrounding activity, or boredom. Boredom… what a concept. Could that be immortal too? I tend to think everything can be immortal so long as it’s valued by someone enough to keep it alive within their spirits. Things today which can be called immortal are, rightfully I suppose, those things which always touch on the universal aspects of our sentiments. A good book, movie, or video game are all immortal in the same way, but achieve that same status differently. That is the perplexing aspect of it all.

We move in mysteries to ourselves, and the more we consider where we’re going, the more it seems like the time to consider it gets smaller and smaller. Our time dilates in the face of what we love, and our lengths never contract unless we’re feeling greatly tired. Only for so long can one speak on the same thing before the thing in question becomes insufferable. I don’t feel myself, however, unless I’m writing on that which I’ve already talked about before, and must do again and again. Forget me, though. Seriously. Forget me. Don’t bother with what I say all that much. Focus on you, and you’ll be alright. Trust me. I’m not perfect. I’m not cured from life. I’m tired of life. And I hope all this is shown through my style as I write it out. No better way to do it as I see it.

Again, I’m not cured, I’m tired—I’m only waiting for the world to end so that I can finally get some reading done. I find no greater time to crack open a good book than when everything seems to be falling apart. At such a time, one needs, I believe, a necessary distraction in order to endure the world. Time moves too slowly for those who live without consideration of this or that essential aspect of life. Life is lived in time, and so is always what we’re fighting against as our consciousness persists. Ay, to die though, to no longer be, to not desire anything—not even immortality: that seems the greatest of all things personally.

Immortality rests on two things: memory and action. Memory was already discussed. Memory is what allows the images which pass before us to be remembered with any certainty. If there were no memory, life would seem to fade the second we blink—and would enter back into the world of light the moment we reopened our eyes. Let us discuss action now. What makes an action memorable, or, more to the topic, immortal? An action is simply the expression of a drive, manifest in action embodied in the world, enforced through power. We will, and therefore we act. We act, and therefore we do. We do, and therefore we suffer. We suffer, and therefore we think. We think, and therefore————we are?

This is preposterous. This implies that we think only because we suffer. But wait… is that not true? Is not the nature of nature to be naturally nature-like towards us? Which is to say, to be indifferent to our successes and even more indifferent to our failures? I think any thinking man has to agree with the simple argument I just put forth. Our actions always lead to a kind of indifference which we scarce find the words for, but which we often feel in the tones of others. For example, when I read my own journal entries, I hardly feel as if I’m reading myself; for, in truth, every entry feels as if I was trying too hard to be honest, too “me,” too personal: I should have, perhaps, given my own soul a bit more space—then maybe it would have come out better.

When I read the journals of Emerson, however—or better yet, the journals of Cioran—I find myself instantly. Only in the words of others do I feel a true connection with myself. It’s as if my own self isn’t worthy of my own consideration. Perhaps I think too highly of myself. That wouldn’t surprise me, to be honest. Often do I wonder how it was for Pascal—sickly recluse that he was—jotting down his extemporaneous thoughts, and in such an elegant style it almost boggles the mind that such a man could have written that in the first place—and so quickly too, God! Undoubtedly the most enviable thing about a writer to another writer is the speed at which they write.

Thoughts carry only as much power as they carry truth. Sometimes, writing while being tired makes you more truthful, and as such do you become a pleasure to read. This is, without question, the exact style I’m writing in now. My own self-awareness stuns even me. A genius alone is a formidable thing. But a genius that is self-conscious of their powers: that can hardly be called a man in my humble opinion. Do I call myself a God? No, for like Prometheus, I hate all Gods. My motto for philosophy is found in that fact: all Gods are dead, now we say Overman!

Anyone who studies philosophy would have to agree with me when I say that all things either go back to Plato, Hegel, or Nietzsche. Nietzsche is really the Plato of the 21st-century, if I may be blunt. His name will far outlive every other philosopher who came before him; and I think the new age which is coming—the meta-age, the new tradition for mankind, the tired eyes and the weary souls: the age for them, that age which I speak of, that age is the age of Nietzsche. Alas though, we are not now in such a time where this proclamation will gain wide acclaim. Indeed, the herd still does not read the words of Nietzsche, though they feel in every fiber of their being those words which he spoke of. “Nietzsche spoke of this,” did he not? Of course he did. Nietzsche spoke of everything. He is the patron saint of modernity. To him we read, not to follow, but to be inspired by.

Nietzsche would have been horrified at the thought of people following him as if he was a second Christ; and yet, something in The Antichrist tells me he really was crazy enough to believe in himself enough—and in that faith of his did he predict the future. Others have done the same—say Will Durant, Oswald Spengler, or René Guénon—but few were as insightful, impactful, bold, truthful, in short, deliberately immoral about it all, as Nietzsche.

This is why there can never be a true successor to Nietzsche, in the same way there can never be a true successor to Christ or Muhammad—because their revelation was for their time, and once it passed, it had to be dealt with as the zeitgeist sees fit, and as it progresses in the throngs of our collective spirit. The whole of immortality is really action made continuous. Things which do not persist cannot be said to have permanence; and if they lack this quality, they cannot be said to continue through time.

All matter decays in due time, and almost no trace of humanity will exist after 100,000 years of our extinction; and yet, despite knowing this, there is a purely intellectual intuition which we have with respect to this type of knowledge which gives it the air of objectivity. Our spirit seemingly knows what this thing is intuitively. On account of this intuitive knowledge, we make the world intelligible and through that come to advance it in the material realm. Though, I think Guénon’s criticism of this obsession with the material world is incomparable:

As for the traditional sciences of the Middle Ages, after a few final manifestations around this time, they disappeared as completely as those of distant civilizations long since destroyed by some cataclysm; and this time nothing was to arise in their place. Henceforth there was only ‘profane’ philosophy and ‘profane’ science, in other words, the negation of true intellectuality, the limitation of knowledge to its lowest order, namely, the empirical and analytical study of facts divorced from principles, a dispersion in an indefinite multitude of insignificant details, and the accumulation of unfounded and mutually destructive hypotheses and of fragmentary views leading to nothing other than those practical applications that constitute the sole real superiority of modern civilization—a scarcely enviable superiority, moreover, which, by stifling every other preoccupation, has given the present civilization the purely material character that makes of it a veritable monstrosity. —The Crisis of the Modern World, Chapter 1.

And also said:

Let there be no confusion on this point: if the general public accepts the pretext of ‘civilization’ in all good faith, there are those for whom it is no more than mere moralistic hypocrisy, serving as a mask for designs of conquest or economic ambitions. It is really an extraordinary epoch in which so many men can be made to believe that a people is being given happiness by being reduced to subjection, by being robbed of all that is most precious to it, that is to say of its own civilization, by being forced to adopt manners and institutions that were made for a different race, and by being constrained to the most distasteful kinds of work, in order to make it acquire things for which it has not the slightest use. For that is what is taking place: the modern West cannot tolerate that men should prefer to work less and be content to live on little; as it is only quantity that counts, and as everything that escapes the senses is held to be non-existent, it is taken for granted that anyone who is not in a state of agitation and who does not produce much in a material way must be ‘lazy’. —Ibid., Chapter 7.

In the sands of time are etched our depravities. This modern world is everything which we thought was right but which, in vain jest and confusion, has led to our ruin. The only immortality we leave behind is that which we feign to show while we live, but which comes out after we die—the only time we’re seriously remembered by those who supposedly care about us while we’re alive. Just as quickly as we come into life do we go out of it. There is scarce any reason for anything beyond those which we come up with for the sake of our life, which we always think of in the context of death—and in doing so reveal our vanity for all the world to see once again. It seems, however, a very natural thing for man to do.

Man wishes, above all things, to be remembered after his death. Only those who strove for greatness ended up approaching it. It may strike us as bizarre, and even a bit vain, to place so much emphasis on a thing which, in the oblivion of time, cast all things into eternal darkness—forever forgotten like a memory to the dead—alas though, life is short, and art incapable of extending it indefinitely. And so we sing our songs of memento mori—in order that we may simulate immortality whilst we live.

World

What is the world itself? thy world?—A grave.
—Edward Young, Night-Thoughts.

The world is my becoming and perception. This is a truth which holds good for all things, but which can only be understood by man.

What is the truth, though? The truth is seeing the world as it really is, hoping all the while that one day all mankind will see the same.

What is the world, then? An illusion to which most submit, but which some transcend.

What is it to transcend? To realize that nothing is true and everything is permitted—that laws arise not from divinity but reason.

I understand the creed of the world now. The world demands that we be wise in order that we may all become free.

Freedom is not a given but a blessing—the happiest accident in history, I think. In reason do we find our divinity. What man is in relation to the world is nothing, but to ourselves we seem like the whole universe. In this comes all our troubles, and all our pleasures too.

The world is born in us, and only persists through us. The moment we shut our eyes for good, there too goes the entire world. We live in an endless abyss of darkness and destruction, the point of which is to represent to ourselves the undeniable emptiness of it.

We are conceived in jest, developed in joy, born in pain, and exit life in the dark. Whilst we live, we suffer the pangs of fortune and put up with confusions and miseries intolerable to any happy spirit. Such is why those with large intellects and deep hearts are bound to find life unhappy in an absolute sense. The gloom of the world appears before us like a dark phantom—some king of tenebrosity—and in him do we see the end of our days, the end of all days, the end of the world, in short. I find the coming darkness of the world a trite nothing compared to what the master of darkness has shown me in my dreams.

History has already proven everything for us. There is no need to get passionate about anything anymore. The modern world has passed a point of no return. The Rubicon has been crossed, and all light beyond that point fades to darkness. Even our happy thoughts seem like little consolation to all that is presently occurring. To those who seek to remain grounded, in their lane, sitting on fences—see the picture and believe the truth: this world is our perception, and only in our becoming do we transcend the misery of it.

This, however, can only ever be temporary; for like the joys of life, our accomplishments amount to very little in the end—on them we build our narratives, and by them we fall into the depths of despair, thanks to their inadequacy at providing us perpetual peace. All that which we love in life fades like mist in the wind; and as we age we see the literal fulfillment of all our saddest thoughts.

This world cannot be real. It literally can’t be. I cannot conceive of life as being anything other than the twisted fantasy of some malevolent evil—a wicked force which drags out the eschaton, rather than immanentizing it. If life were beyond perception, it would be the epitome of evil—a chance accident which allowed man to comprehend his own end. Man is the universe recognizing itself. The only epiphany that had to happen. Everything after that is a wild absurdity. Not even nihilism can contend with this malignancy. The whole of man is found on Earth, and whilst he’s stuck on this rock with others, he’s forced to accept the fact that one day his nonexistence will be realized, and then—————nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing! Nothing!

In these laments, one is reminded of the vanity which Solomon spoke of. One finds the whole of our being nothing more than a brief moment in time, which, along with the rest of unconscious matter, shall be lost in the sea of it—all to return to its undeniable unity with all of reality. A blank monad. No telos but death and becoming. Even our becoming in death is really a mockery of the concept of life; for if life should be, why must it go out like a flame in the wind? What is the point of it all? Nothing.

Alone. Alone I am in all the world. I may have friends, and even those who love and understand me—but life is a lie in the end, for it is never good enough to ensure me that the omnipotence of my experience shall go on. I find my life meaningful only because I can experience it. It is not my temporary misery in this material realm that sickens me, but the fact that I must go out of it. I am, like Pascal, not scared of what lies beyond—for I believe there is something beyond this—but rather scared at my own doubt regarding that great beyond: that mystery of all mysteries, that deep confusion, that utter delirium, that incomparable ignorance. What would life be if the temporariness of it were only that—temporary? I do not know.

“But you must know,” my heart screams out.

“You must act anyway in spite of your ignorance, and become that which you feel is in yourself to be,” my brain reassures me.

“But I am a doubter at heart; and actions stand on nothing if they’re carried out without their own justifications for them,” I say to my heart and brain. I then say to them:

“I cannot be what I feel myself to be if what I feel within myself is constantly in flux, and always giving me different meanings to live by. The miseries of my life are found in my eternal sufferings, all with respect to the doubts I place as barriers to any real action. It is not that I do not believe in myself, but rather that I cannot do so honestly; and you guys (heart and brain) know I can be anything but dishonest with respect to myself. There lies the rub. I’m already done in this world. I live on borrowed time which I steal from myself. Do I not resemble Marcel Proust in this regard? Passionate towards life only so long as my purpose is yet to be fulfilled within it—and all too willing to drop dead the moment I do fulfill it? And yet, oh, how deep my suffering goes; for in not fulfilling my purpose, I am made miserable. Thus am I doomed to forever be miserable so long as I live: because what sustains my life is my misery; so long as what I make meaningful in the world is forever to be beyond my powers to accomplish. I cannot help but live hopelessly; and yet, in that hopelessness, I cannot be anything but passionate. I become inflamed at the thought of my suffering, actively call upon it, in fact. My suffering and I become like one—I court her, and she seduces me. And I love it so much. I love the way she lies. I love the way she comforts. I love the way she acts towards me—violently, and I take it all, too! I love the way she stares—God, those eyes—out of this world. I love those seductive eyes (I can never get enough of them), those delicate features, those curves, and figure, and nose. My misery is just the company for me. Never am I without her, and so long as I live, she and I will be eternal—star-crossed lovers, fated to love each other, fated to die alongside each other, never to be without each other. She is the dark, and I am the light—and together, we bring about all things, and in that is my world made.”

You see at once now what my world is. I am the eternal doubter. I make my world, and I break my brain trying to overcome it through concepts, mere concepts—as if those abstractions were ever enough to comprehend the whole of it. The more I reflect on the world, the more I see how vain all my attempts to encapsulate it have been. I’ve studied whatever I could—from all ages, across all cultures, in all branches of knowledge—but have never gotten to the roots, or fundaments, of life in any of them. No system—no matter how ancient, modern, syncretic, esoteric, erudite, eclectic, or encyclopedic—has ever provided me with anything more than suggestions, which themselves required deeper investigation.

When one reaches the end of human knowledge—as I have—you find that it collapses in on itself from the sheer mass and instability of it—like a black hole, and the gravitational pull of it becomes too strong to pull out of, while at the same time the event horizon is ever-expanding. The more one possesses knowledge, the more it possesses them; and the warning laid out in Ecclesiastes 1:18 remains true—and even becomes more understandable to those who have gained all the wisdom in the world, and in the end had to reject it, for it meant nothing with respect to life proper.

That is why all book wisdom is folly, for it means nothing if it is not applied; such is why the only true wisdom which every man must possess if they’re to live is that of action tethered with moderate contemplation. The truest wisdom is wisdom for life, acquired through life, and nothing besides. The end of all knowledge should be wisdom, for knowledge is only information that has narrow applications to the material world, whereas wisdom is knowledge that not only applies to the material world but touches the spiritual as well. Wisdom helps a man endure the intolerability of life—stemming from our ignorance—by revealing to us how unnecessary and foolish all our erudition is.

Before life, we are nothing; in life, we feel the need to be everything; after life, ——————on this we must remain silent. It matters not how wise we are, for all things which pertain to life show us how incapable we are at grasping any of it truthfully. It cannot be forgotten that all which we strive for in life is purely negative in a metaphysical sense. The only positive aspect to life is suffering. If we try to define the world in terms of what it is not, we are as lost in that exercise as if we were to describe it positively—through sophistries and uninteresting presuppositions. The world, according to me, must be dealt with speculatively—that is, both positively and negatively—dialectically, in a sense.

What we strive for ends in emptiness, but in the striving we find a positive reason to live. Therefore, just like with our individuality (comprised of a subjective and objective aspect), we are pulled from both sides in every action we make in life. Everything with respect to life is open to doubt. In our doubting, we make the world seem more complicated than it needs to be; and, in truth, I fear we do that to ourselves deliberately, for deep down, on an instinctual level, we feel there is a bottom to the well where truth resides. We believe we can actually meet truth and ask her to reveal her secrets to us, in order that we may no longer fear life itself; in this, however, we are forever doomed to come up short.

Life has no final answers, even if truth really existed “out there” in the world, and those who seek final answers for life are like those who try to grasp their own shadow. In the flux of time, and in the kinetic nature of our beings, we are forever getting older, forever getting weaker, forever appearing dimmer, and never gaining what was lost. Mankind is lost in place, and there aren’t enough lifetimes to truthfully search for all the lost time. We all resemble what it is we most abhor. Our actions are always bent towards those things which we feel impelled to do; and in doing so, we faithfully follow our drives, and on account of them are we actuated in the world.

In every action, however, there is a residue of our instincts—and from that seemingly insignificant amount lies a whole germ of existential interpretation; that is to say, what we are in this world is really a reflection of our subjectivity, made objective—and what mediates between the two opposing and unifying tensions is our reflections (subjectively) upon the actions which we do in the real world (objectively). Man’s life today can hardly be called speculative, or existential, or even philosophical; rather, it is stupidly pragmatic, practical only with respect to the material (financial) aspect of life—and no deeper consideration upon anything is made.

This is the modern narrative which the world has adopted, and as such, our world becomes more dreamlike by the second. It’s shocking to me how thoroughly captured the entire world has been made. They do so out of necessity, which they incorrectly label with the term “practicality,” but they never try to change it—that is, never try to make it actually practical, or pragmatic, in the philosophical sense of that term. Why this is—even when the truth is clearly before their eyes—one can only speculate in vain, though I would think it stems from a confusion with respect to their values.

In our perception, the nature of the subject (“I”) and the object (“other”) become one, and are, in fact, indistinguishable. Reality has a way of making our consciousness seem continuous, like a stream; and in the movement of our life do we find nothing ever repeats twice—but when drawn back more fully, one finds the whole stage by which life is played on to be upheld by a cloud, and once recognized, falls into the abyss of obscurity and confusion. In the end, all we’re met with is oblivion, and the more we try to distinguish ourselves from our reality, the more we fall into it. There seems no point in even trying to deny anything philosophical about life.

Even if one were to discover all the negativities that lie within life, that would give me no deeper insights regarding myself—it would only further support what I said earlier: answers cannot be found, and all that we come up with is but a narrative justified circularly. What does one find when they consider life in relation to the whole world? Only that we persist on a knife’s edge, in a very narrow corner of it, really only for ourselves, and never eternally. All this talk of objectivity with respect to life endeared me to death at one point—this was before I became a real wanderer, a true free-spirit, a life-affirmer, an existentialist, in short.

I was a follower of death and decay and rot, and only wished for the end, but I found that life had other aspects to explore—plus, my natural optimism made it very hard for me to stay angry; I could never bring myself to be truly mad about anything, ever—I was always positive, even in the face of the worst conceivable. Had I not had this stupid, childlike optimism, I probably would’ve taken my life long ago. I have never been truly happy in living in this world, but, as a child, I found ways to look past the bleakness of death and continue on living in spite of its inevitable end. I was always passionate in my loves, and on account of that passion did I find the end of life an existential threat.

The thought of death always brought tears to my eyes when I was a child. My father always thought me too sentimental. I suppose it was this natural inclination towards sympathy in the face of suffering that I learned how to be so compassionate and understanding. This carries its own burdens, however. It’s very easy to get lost in your own reflections, and they always have a melancholic aspect to them. The more a man loves, the deeper his passion feels towards everything. It is in this passion that we sentimentalists often make ourselves great artists and poets.

With everything said thus far, you would think the world was made to make everyone a pessimist; but if we look around, we clearly do not see this. Everyone living has a good enough reason to stick around. Their narratives, though mostly not their own, and in the main maladaptive, seem to withstand well enough in the face of all that is miserable. It’s as if most of mankind find reasons on the spot to live. Nobody willingly flies from life unless they’re made to consider the continuation of their consciousness as a negative.

Pascal thought suicide perfectly justifiable should God not exist; and Schopenhauer argued, unsuccessfully I think, that suicide is immoral on the account that it “… thwarts the attainment of the highest moral aim by the fact that, for a real release from this world of misery, it substitutes one that is merely apparent.“ Apparent only in an epistemic sense though, of course, because the cessation of our experience would leave us undecided whether the escape from this world truly ended our misery or not—for we do not know what lies beyond, though intuition tells me that there is something. While we’re on the topic of suicide, I cannot resist quoting Schopenhauer again, for he makes a great analogy:

Is Hamlet’s monologue the meditation of a criminal? He merely declares that if we had any certainty of being annihilated by it, death would be infinitely preferable to the world as it is. But there lies the rub! —On Suicide.

Our world is born in perception, understood in becoming, and is overall indifferent to the hopes and dreams of its self-conscious inhabitants. I’ve lived much, and in living have come to many differing opinions on the worth of life and found death, in the end, is preferable to everything else; but at the same time, the optimistic side of me rebels and wishes only that people affirm life in the face of oblivion anyway. And you see now, dear reader, how the tension between my heart and my reason come to attack me once again.

My mind tells me the world is an illusion and that death is the only true escape from it; but at the same time, my heart tells me this world must be saved at all costs, for it’s too beautiful to let languish—others must have the opportunity to experience the joys and loves of it. The infinitude of our subject is made most apparent in this reflection, I would assume.

The Fermi paradox perplexes me, and, in fact, frightens me; the universe is so vast that, statistically speaking, there must be intelligent life out there not too dissimilar to us, and yet, no sign of intelligent life anywhere except on Earth. Dear reader, were we to discover intelligent life elsewhere, do you think they would have the same values as we do? Would they love, you think? I honestly don’t know, but right now, my heart tells me to hope that love wins out in the end, for it truly does conquer all. I find the world, even if its main stimulus be suffering, to be too precious and interesting to consign it to doom and thus worth forgetting about. I cannot simply forget the world; my heart will not allow me. I cannot simply live on my own and hope it works out well for everyone else. I tried living like that for a short period of time and found it insufferable.

I thought to myself, “What good is my personal happiness in this world if a million others suffer without having even the hope of happiness?” It’s a contradiction I could not square rationally, and so I gave up rationality—though not entirely, for I still hold to empirical and logical principles when practical aspects of life are touched (though not existentially)—and had to start from scratch with respect to my entire system of values; my morality, intuitions, drives, and interests were all uprooted and replanted in a more rich soil—all of which were developed over time and which all came to sprout into the book you see before you.

My philosophical system is, in that sense, a personal account of all my reevaluations—all those values with respect to life I thought important enough to have an opinion on. And in that sense, do I not perfectly reflect what this world is? A constant flux in which we, as the conscious subjects that we are, have to constantly evaluate and reevaluate those values we once held to, all because the nature of the world demands we do. In a sentence, the whole of my philosophy may be summarized as such: a continuous becoming that is always changing on account of our perceptions. Unsurprisingly, that, to me, is also the world.

I very much like the picture of the world I have painted—in as honest a manner as I could manage. Should one have made it this far in my philosophy, they should have known all this was coming.

Here’s my passing judgment on the human race: most live miserably but find, in spite of their misery, enough to value in order to live. My only goal was to create a reevaluation of all values in the minds of the reader, in order that the world may seem less oppressive and thus, more life-affirming. A single changed man can change the entire world; and that matters in a world where ideas and narratives are superior to reason and evidence. It is ideas that rule the world, not facts. And I believe from that truth we must all live accordingly.

If a new era of mankind is to be brought about, it must begin with a new set of values. Let this book—my philosophy, which lays out those new values—be the start of that great movement.