Honor
85th installment to my philosophical system.
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.