“I die the king’s good servant, but God’s first”

- Sir Thomas More upon the scaffold, mere minutes before his beheading on the 6^th of July 1535

It is a troublesome peril within ethical discussions that supererogation becomes a yawn on a night out. - as soon as it is present, people decide that the fun is done and the night shall end. For once the notion of going beyond the call of duty is introduced, people lay flat on their backs as if scared by the onslaught of a towering Moose in the woods of Alberta. As if going beyond the call of duty was apocalypse manifest for ethical discussion, because either going beyond the call of duty is pointless (since one should only do that which they are required), or that going beyond the call of duty is too tall a glass of water to drink. For it seems that peoples ethical discussions remain centred around what is required of them and what they are “truly” capable of doing.

But I tell you my dear reader, that you need not be scared of going beyond the supposed call of duty, for you need not give up all your savings or jump on top of a grenade or sacrifice your orifices by swapping places with a sex slave. Since supererogation is not a daunting task but can in fact, in many instances, be quite mundane and plain.

Take for example a scene from the film Novocaine (2025) starring Jack Quaid as Nathan, an awkward yet endearing man with CIPA. Now Nathan works in a Bank as the assistant manager and settles various claims pertaining to credits and payments. So he is a man who has a certain task to fulfil with rules and regulations surrounding it. He cannot rob and steal, nor can he simply not do his job – he must actually function as an assistant manager.

And in his role as assistant manager, he has to deal with a payment issue with an elderly client named Earl, who owns a hardware store. Earl has always been a reliable client, meeting his payments every month, on-time and in-full. Yet ever since his wife Beatty past away, and the recent economic downturn, Earl has been failing to meet his payments and thus gives cause to the Bank to foreclose on his business and house.

Nathan, as assistant manager, has every right to take that away from Earl. In fact, if he really wanted to fulfil his duty and role as assistant manager to its fullest potential, he would take no other measure than to immediately take away Earl’s lifelong business.

But here is what Nathan does instead.

He tells Earl, that he will wait to file the paperwork till the official deadline, which will give Earl enough time to gain more earnings from his business and for his deceased wife Beatty’s social security and retirement to clear probate. What this will do therefore, is ensure that some payment is available which at the very least would permit Earl to keep his home.

Now before I give my whole spiel on duty and morals and all that pertaining to Nathan’s action, keep in mind these three questions.

• What actually is your duty?

• What do you lose by fulfilling said duty?

• And how hard is it to forego something when fulfilling one’s duty?

Because bringing it back to the example at hand, Nathan is his doing his job as an assistant manager. He is not failing to complete his tasks, he is not breaking any company rules. His only possible wrongdoing in relation to his job, is that he is not acting as a perfect profit maximising assistant manager.

But this is where the first question may come in, for what actually is Nathan’s duty? Does he truly have this strongly binding duty to the bank to profit-maximise as if it were a moral imperative? Or is his only true duty to the bank itself one of doing the tasks actually mandated towards him?

And unless one were to either skip a few steps and/or be a spawn of Lloyd Christmas himself, then the answer is clearly the latter. Because unless we specify a separate moral duty to the bank that is imposed upon Nathan, then his only real duty is to simply do the tasks he is instructed to do.

For when considering Nathan’s general moral duties, separate from his duty to the bank, then in the most simple sense possible, Nathan has a duty to do good and engage with the ethical (whatever that may mean). And for many of us that involves being charitable, kind, forgiving, loving etc.

Thus the subsequent question is, when being an assistant manager on company time, does Nathan’s moral duty somehow vanish just because he has another set of obligations to the Bank? And the answer is no, of course not. Such duties exist together – sometimes in conflict or harmony or indifference, but existing together at the same time nonetheless.

So when Nathan is confronted with the face of the Other in the form of Earl, and the dilemma surrounding his humanity, he is not having an issue with supererogation but an issue with one singular duty - for his duty to the bank does not interfere with his fundamental moral duties. And in that sense, with so many of us in real life, when we are out for a walk, or at work or exercising, the moral dilemmas that face us are invalidly reconstrued as questions of supererogation when in fact there exist no conflict of duties and only a conflict between the will and the ethical.

So to keep this motif of the general everyday going, even when one forgoes maximising a certain goal or role (as a worker, or walker, or lifter etc) in order to fulfil their duty to the Other, what is one actually losing? Because all Nathan loses, is an opportunity cost rather than an actual loss – as he only loses the opportunity to show off to his superiors his short term success in squashing the soul of an innocent man. Thus in our day-to-day life, what is lost when we decide to help someone with their bags or help someone pay for their groceries? Since if there is no conflicting duty, what loss is actually incurred that is not minor when faced with the Other in whom there exists an infinitude?

And the answer is, excuse my language, Jack-Shit.

Thus if the cost is Jack-Shit, how hard is it really for someone like Nathan to simply wait a little longer before filing his paperwork? Because by now, you must know the answer to be “it’s not that hard to do some good”.

Since these supposed acts of supererogation people employ when they throw their hands in the air and say “Well I’m sorry, there’s nothing more I can do, I’m just doing my job” are often but a complete and utter fabrication of the state of affairs before them. For in our day-to-day lives, we rarely encounter some grand dilemma in which morality demands that we sacrifice everything. More often, the choice is much more mundane: wait an extra week, help with the bags, pay for someone’s groceries, or simply do not make another person’s life needlessly worse. So do not see the plague of society and carry on business as usual, for the moral act is never that unusual or disruptive.

“This whole thing is not about heroism. It is about decency. It may seem a ridiculous idea, but perhaps the way to fight the plague is with decency.”

“What is decency?” Rambert asked.

“In general, I can’t say,” Rieux replied. “But in my case I know that it consists in doing my job.”

- An excerpt from The Plague by Camus

And perhaps Rieux is right. Perhaps the great mistake is imagining that morality begins where duty ends and heroism begins. Sometimes doing the right thing does not mean going beyond the call of duty. Sometimes it simply means understanding what the call of duty was in the first place.

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This was no small matter. For besides the present day Trumpian invocation of this law, the responses to said legislation reveal a deeper issue at the heart of politics itself. Since it is the case that we all have commitments and ideological arguments. The conservative may oppose gay marriage due to its supposed effects on tradition, the liberal may promote it on the grounds of liberty, and the Catholic may oppose it due to the nature of Christian marriage. Everyone has something they oppose or promote due to a certain set of reasons. But what if those reasons are not actually the real reasons, and the foundations of our political commitments are simultaneously far simpler and yet exceedingly more complex than the arguments we present?

This is something I will make clear in the contemporary reaction towards the KKK Act of 1871. Grant’s moderate contemporaries of a liberal flavour found it horrifying that he would suspend habeas corpus. Such moderate Republicans, who disavowed slavery and remained committed to Reconstruction and equality before the law, did not disagree that something had to be done to curb the violent degeneracy of the South. But they did not accept that one ought to cross the sacred lines of the Constitution in order to achieve an end, however noble it may be. Such a sentiment is presented no better than within the figure of Lyman Trumbull, an ardent abolitionist who became one of Grant’s greatest opponents manifested greatly through his decision to join the opposing Liberal Republican Party.

Trumbull argued that the Klan could indeed be prosecuted through the ordinary judicial process, and that the difficulty of prosecution did not meet the standard required for an extraordinary wartime measure such as the suspension of habeas corpus. To him, the issue was not whether the Klan was an evil organisation, for it undoubtedly was, but whether the government could abandon constitutional safeguards whenever ordinary law proved inconvenient or ineffective. The argument goes that if the Constitution could be set aside for a noble cause, then it could one day be set aside for a wicked one. Thus the true test of constitutional government was not whether it restrained power in times of civility, but whether it restrained power precisely when the temptation to exceed it was greatest.

Furthermore, he believed it sacrosanct that lawmakers and servants of the public follow the law as it is, and not as they wish it to be. Since any violation of the Constitution was, to him, a violation of the spirit of the nation itself, and must therefore be opposed regardless of the consequences. It is precisely this reason that he not only opposed Grant’s suspension of habeas corpus, but had earlier opposed Lincoln’s suspension during the Civil War. That same constitutional conviction later led him to campaign for an end to Reconstruction, support the restoration of Southern self-government, back Tilden for the presidency, and ultimately indirectly aid in the cowardly compromise of 1877.

Many would argue that Trumbull’s commitment to the Constitution appears to represent his political beliefs, the product of an axiomatic progression into actionable ideological dictates. Yet one must ask whether this is really the case. For the picture Trumbull paints of the Klan is not that of an insurrectionary force beyond the reach of ordinary government, but of a violent and dangerous criminal organisation whose members could nevertheless be prosecuted through the ordinary judicial process. The machinery of law in his view remained intact, with functioning courts capable of prosecuting the Klan. And however difficult prosecution may have been, difficulty alone could not justify setting aside the Constitution.

This is the world as Trumbull saw it. But why did he see constitutional government as sufficiently robust that extraordinary powers seemed not only unnecessary but fundamentally illegitimate? What merited Trumbull to paint such a picture despite the mounting evidence to the contrary?

For across much of the South, the ordinary machinery of justice had ceased to function as it ought. The murder of Judge Thomas J. B. Patterson in Alabama provides one of the clearest illustrations of this collapse. Patterson, a Republican judge and former Unionist, had attempted to uphold the law against those who sought to violently resist Reconstruction. In response, Klansmen abducted and murdered him, confident that the very institutions he represented would be unable or unwilling to punish them – a confidence that held true. For such Klansmen were never held accountable because the local justice system itself was compromised by the KKK’s influence. Thus by ordinary legal means, many Klansmen had rendered themselves effectively untouchable, not only in their crusade against Black Americans, but against teachers, Republicans, officeholders, clergymen, and anyone who sought to advance civil rights or liberal ideals.

With this in mind, was it really the case then that Trumbull was merely defending the Constitution? Or did the Constitution itself remain a more salient object within his cognitive economy than the collapse of constitutional government taking place in the South? For it seems the prospect of constitutional overreach appeared so vivid to him, whilst the practical impossibility of administering justice under ordinary law remained a shadowy possibility.

For it is not the case that Trumbull was a hypocrite, a racist, or someone who did not care for the civil rights of Black people. His earlier legal abolitionist record demonstrates a sustained commitment to dismantling the structures of slavery and racial oppression. This is a man who gave great will to the cause of liberating Black people from oppression. To say he is a hypocrite is to engage in an elaborate scheme to explain away his abolitionist efforts and severe opposition to the Confederate South. Rather, what is at play here is not ideological commitments and the charge of hypocrisy. No. Rather, what is at play is the fact that Trumbull’s political commitments do not represent an axiomatic progression of ideological dictates, but a post hoc linguistic manifestation of an underlying experience.

Since it is the case with all of us, that we encounter objects of perception (sensory or conceptual) that elicit a feeling, an emotive response of sorts. For example, when one hears of the Holocaust, what occurs is not a value-free affectively cold calculation of political and moral ideas, but a gut feeling. I hear of the events taken place and immediately, without any linguistic manifestations, I know it to be wrong. Such a feeling may be structured by political and moral ideas deeply ingrained in people, yes, but it is a feeling nonetheless.

These emotions are not merely secondary reactions that follow after an intellectual judgement has been made. Rather, they are part of the very process through which objects of thought become meaningful to us. The Holocaust for example, is not encountered as a collection of abstract propositions about historical events, but as something that is immediately presented with an affective weight. It appears to us as something horrifying or perhaps in the case of those who possess deeply distorted conceptual frameworks as something admirable or an object of distrust. Now this is not to mean that emotion determines judgement entirely, but that judgement never occurs in the absence of affective orientation. Our conceptual understanding of the world is always situated within a prior landscape of feeling, where objects are not simply represented but valued via affectivity.

This is why political and moral commitments cannot be understood merely as detached ideological systems that individuals rationally adopt and then apply to the world. Rather ideological commitments are built upon and sustained by affective relationships with objects of perception. The concepts we use to describe the world are, in part, attempts to articulate and organise these prior affective experiences. Thus, when Trumbull encounters political events, he does not first encounter neutral facts and subsequently derive a moral judgement. Rather, those facts are encountered through a pre-existing affective orientation that gives them significance, which is later expressed through the language of political ideology.

Thus, what the case of Trumbull reveals is that there is something about the sight of constitutional overreach that creates a more salient feeling than the systematised violence of the South spearheaded by the Klan. For he could vividly imagine and conceptualise the dangers of constitutional overreach, but could not fathom that the dangers within the South were equally, or (in my opinion) more threatening.

One might respond by stating that Trumbull did have genuine commitments, and that these commitments guided his actions and politics. And you who responds with this is stating something true as gold. For Trumbull’s constitutionalism was genuine. He applied it universally, even when politically damaging. However, it remains in question why the constitutional order occupied such overwhelming moral salience that the systematic failure of Southern legal institutions did not persuade him that extraordinary measures were necessary.

For it is not the case that other Republicans simply disregarded the Constitution whilst Trumball stood as the Sicarii did against the Romans. They too were concerned with the expansion of presidential power and the extraordinary provisions of the KKK Act. Yet when confronted with the violence of the South, they perceived this violence as precisely the kind of circumstance that justified such measures.

Trumbull however, appears to find every possible avenue through which the situation can be understood as manageable within constitutional boundaries. Like a mother who says there is food at home when there is nothing but a cucumber in the fridge, Trumbull sees every event that might require superseding the Constitution as something that can ultimately be resolved through constitutional means. Because, the Constitution stands for Trumbull as a salient object of reverence, where the sight of its violation becomes an emotionally negative experience. Whereas for others, the prospect of confronting the Klan’s violence becomes the salient object - something which feels morally necessary and more important than the constitution.

This issue of emotional asymmetry is a tale that has lasted for many a time. Human beings have long presented themselves as creatures governed by consistent principles, as if political and moral commitments exist as fixed ideological structures that are applied neutrally to the world. Yet when confronted with events that carry significant affective weight, the apparent stability of these commitments almost always begins to fracture. Consider responses to COVID or Trump’s executive actions. In both cases, individuals who had previously positioned themselves as defenders of particular constitutional principles found themselves interpreting those principles through the lens of a new perceived threat.

Take for example, responses to COVID. Liberals who had traditionally remained tethered to the Constitution in discussions of liberty, appeared less tethered to these commitments when faced with the prospect of a public health crisis. The possibility of an economically damaging pandemic became an object of immense affective salience. Thus the threat was no longer merely an abstract political concern but something experienced as genuinely concerning. This new emotional state of affairs allowed for the reorganising of the relative importance of competing values. So it became that the preservation of life, economic prosperity and collective security appeared more urgent than the protection of certain forms of individual liberty.

Conversely, consider responses to Trump’s executive actions, particularly those concerning immigration. For many on the political right, concerns surrounding illegal immigration were not encountered as detached questions of policy, but as objects imbued with fear, distrust, and perceived existential threat to their view of life. The abstract principles of constitutional restraint or institutional norms could therefore become secondary when placed against the perceived danger represented by immigration. Thus in both cases, individuals did not necessarily abandon their ideological commitments; rather those commitments were interpreted through an affective orientation that determined which aspects became most salient in a given moment.

So what appears from the outside as hypocrisy is therefore better understood as the consequence of the fact that political judgement is not formed through the mechanical application of principles. Rather said principles are brought into contact with a world of emotionally charged objects, and the affective significance of those objects shapes how those principles are understood and deployed.

Thus, the progressive does not hate Trump merely for suspending legal norms in the abstract. No. They hate it because of who is doing it and because of the content of what is being done. For the progressive would permit an FDR or a Grant to engage in constitutionally dubious executive activities in the name of socially progressive values. Similarly, many on the right did not oppose COVID regulations solely because of concerns surrounding legal authority; rather their opposition was shaped by who was exercising that authority and what was being imposed. Since if Trump led the way on certain COVID regulations, perhaps it would’ve been less of a gut-felt blow than when the alleged Lizard King of the Jewry Anthony Fauci was spearheading the COVID response. Thus the issue is not simply the existence of extraordinary power, but the affective meaning attached to its use.

With what has been said, I hope now it is made clearer that political commitments are therefore linguistic revelations and not necessarily direct manifestations of our experiences. For language does not simply provide a transparent window into the affective structures that underlie our political judgements. Instead, it often serves as a means through which those experiences are organised, justified, and made intelligible to ourselves and others. Since one may experience something that could be described externally as distrust or fear, yet the language through which that experience is expressed may conceal, transform, or reframe its underlying character to produce a representation of self that is more amenable to the listener. Such a process may not necessarily be conscious, yet it is a process that we all engage in. Political language can therefore operate not merely as a representation of belief, but as an extension of the cognitive and affective processes that produce those beliefs.

This is why Trumbull’s position cannot be understood as the axiomatic progression of constitutional principles, as if he simply possessed a set of abstract commitments that logically determined his political actions. Rather, such commitments represent a post hoc linguistic explanation of an underlying experience. It is essentially a way of articulating why he felt compelled to protect the Constitution, even when doing so brought him into conflict with the very people and causes he had previously fought to defend. His constitutionalism was not the origin of his judgement, but the language through which that judgement was rendered coherent.

And so modern democracy, for all its virtues, creates a peculiar tension between experience and expression. We are required to present ourselves through the language of not only public reason, but through the logic of the spectacle. Our feelings towards things may remain, but the words we use to express ourselves no longer seems to express our sentiments but the sentiments of another. Because the experiences that give rise to our preferred political commitments are rarely so clinically clean for the political domain. We are forced to translate the affective realities through which we encounter the world into a language that can be justified before others. And in doing so, there is always the possibility that the language we adopt no longer fully corresponds to the experience from which it emerged.

Trumbull in this respect occupies a peculiar position. He could stand tall in his defence of the Constitution because his constitutional commitments and his underlying experience were not in contradiction. He did not need to alter, conceal, or reformulate his language in order to make his position appear coherent. His commitment to constitutional order provided a vocabulary that genuinely expressed the way he encountered political reality. He revered the constitution, his words expressed it, and his actions manifested it. Yet the modern political subject is rarely afforded such simplicity. We are constantly required to negotiate between what we experience and what can be publicly expressed. Our language must be adjusted in order to align with the moral and political expectations of the society in which we exist.

This creates a peculiar condition in which individuals may possess experiences that they cannot easily acknowledge, not necessarily because they are consciously deceptive, but because the available language through which those experiences can be articulated has already been morally structured. The consequence is a separation between the affective foundations of political judgement and the linguistic commitments through which those judgements are expressed. Which means our own opinions or voting habits are no longer truly functioning as democracy intended. For if you do not want migrants, or do not want Fascist parties to exist, then you need not tip-toe with the expression, but must express it! Otherwise ones malcontent can never be brought to light and remedied.

“We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.” 

- Slavoj Žižek

Modern politics therefore is not simply concerned with what individuals believe, but is now tainted with the difficult process of translating experience into a language that can survive public scrutiny. For whilst the abolitionist liberal Trumball could be respected for sticking to his guns, who on the left of the political sphere can ever afford to express an emotion different to the crowd?

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“Quod scripsi, scripsi.” 

     – Pontius Pilate, John 19:22

Roger Taney was, by all accounts, a good judge.

Appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 1836, Taney seemed to grow in stature as his tenure endured. His writings were dense, caparisoned in a deep constitutional imagination. His Jacksonian populism was tempered with a genuine practicality and by the 1850s, as every branch of government seemed to convulse under the dissonance of two free and captive peoples, Taney was wading through the field of antebellum politics with a deft hand that brought the admiration of abolitionists and Southerners alike.

In Strader v Graham (1851) the Taney court was asked to settle the question of whether a sojourn in a free state or territory positioned the slave under the jurisdiction of free law. The buried contradictions in a bifurcated nation were starting to show. Christopher Graham had repeatedly permitted his three slaves, George, Henry, and Reuben, to travel to Ohio and Indiana for musical performances. Art finds a way, I suppose. Ohio and Indiana were, unfortunately for Graham, within the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which prohibited slavery in any of the territories within its ordinance. Enervated by the inconsistencies of their status, George, Henry, and Reuben got on a steamboat owned by one Jacob Strader and escaped to Canada. Graham sought damages from Strader under a Kentucky statute that made anyone who assisted in the escape of enslaved peoples liable to their owners. Strader argued that these men were free under Ohio law and accordingly, that Graham had no property to recoup. Following a rubber stamp from the Kentucky Court of Appeals, Strader appealed to the Supreme Court.

The Taney court was being asked to address the substantive question, whether free territories had a transformative effect on any slaves in their jurisdiction. Taney himself understood that a decision either way would ignite the incipient Compromise of 1850. In an exquisitely milquetoast opinion, Taney dismissed the case on jurisdictional grounds. The constitution, placing all states on equal footing, precludes the Court from deciding between Strader and Graham. It is emphatically not the Supreme Court’s business what Kentucky law is concerning Kentucky domiciles. Everyone was slightly unhappy, but everyone got something, the basis for any enduring compromise. Roger Taney had threaded the needle.

Taney was born on March 17, 1777 to a prominent, and prominently Catholic, slave-holding family. After being sent to Dickinson College at aged fifteen, Taney’s developed moral faculties led him to despise the institution of slavery. He emancipated the slaves that he inherited from his father and provided lifetime monthly pensions to those that were unable to work. In one particular instance, Taney defended Jacob Gruber, an abolitionist arrested for his criticisms of slavery, and during defense, described slavery as “a blot on our national character”. Gruber was acquitted on all charges. If, for Kant, the truly righteous man is not the one that stumbles into the moral choice, but overcomes all temptations to the contrary in achieving their duty to the moral law, then Taney is our moral exemplar. A man who in achieving moral clarity was forced to reject the very grounds of his creation.

This Roger Taney, the sagacious compromise maker with an apt eye for justice and liberation, is a creature that exists purely in historical memory. Today, Roger Taney the man does not exist, he has been unmade. Taney lives and breathes only through his decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857).

The “Strader” Taney, the reserved, politically minded judge is nowhere to be seen in the pages of his majority opinion in Dred Scott. The case centred around whether Scott, a slave who had built a life for himself in the free territory of Wisconsin, could sue his slave-master for his freedom. After all, how could a man be free in Illinois but not in Missouri, the basic ontology of a man’s soul is surely consistent across state boundaries. The jurisdictional escape hatch Taney had used in Strader was still entirely at his disposal for this case. And sure, on a different day Taney may have disposed of the case in the same manner as before. But Roger Taney wanted to fix the gaping wound in his country, and he was determined to settle the question of slavery.

In the fifty-five pages of his majority opinion, Taney rejects seemingly every half measure available to him. At each point he expands, and expands again the province of his decision. Simultaneously Taney held that people of African descent are not and can never be citizens under the constitution, that Scott will always be a slave, and that the Missouri Compomise, which prohibited slavery in northern territories, was unconstitutional because it interfered with slaveholders’ property rights under the Fifth Amendment. In a single decision Taney eviscerated the legislative compromises that had tried to quell a civil war over the question of slavery.

Pedagogy advises that we now forget about Taney. Textbooks quickly turn to the Civil War and remember Taney only as a political arsonist, the death knell for any attempt toward a legislative, a British, resolution to the question of slavery. This move is both morally and intellectually barren. For the most uncomfortable part of reading Taney’s opinion is that Taney was, constitutionally, absolutely and uncomfortably correct.

The Constitution was a compromise. A compromise that aimed to provide a modus vivendi between irreconcilable differences on the question of slavery. The three-fifths clause, the fugitive slave clause, the protection of the slave trade and even equal representation of states regardless of population are all an outgrowth of a vision for political life that treats slavery as a kind of basic right of difference that domineering legislative enactments should not touch. Every liberal system throughout time has found for itself its own set of untouchable issues that must be politely, and universally, ignored for the survival of the polity. For the American system, the basic elements of constitutional design ensured that free and slave states alike both had an effective veto on national policy.

Any faithful interpretation of the constitution prior to the adoption of the 14th amendment has to acknowledge that nowhere in the text, history or tradition of the founding documents is there citizenship for black slaves. As Graber writes, “If the persons responsible for the Constitution intended that Congress have the power to ban slavery in every territory, then this was the best kept secret in American politics during the late 1780s.” Taney’s findings in Dred Scott are then less the ramblings of a bigot bending the constitution to his will, than a faithful reading of the text’s intentions and infrastructure for political engagement.

With this understanding, the Missouri Compromise, deft as it may have been, becomes clearly unconstitutional and Taney’s conclusions in Dred Scott come cascading down. Slaves are clearly property, and the Fifth Amendment prohibits the deprivation of property. The last thread holding together the unconstitutional exercises of legislative rapproachment was, of course, stare decisis. A respect for precedent on the grounds that an existing consensus, however constitutionally questionable, is integral to an existing order. But by the 1850s, the rolling series of legislative compromises had brought only chaos and political dysfunction. The Missouri Compromise had given way to the Compromise of 1850 and later the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The principle of popular sovereignty enshrined in the Kansas-Nebraska Act, that settlers should decide for themselves the status of new states, brought only a small premonition of the fight to come. Roving bands of southern and free settlers flooded into the new territory and in 1855, John Brown arrived in Kansas with a divine call to arms. He and his followers kidnapped five pro-slavery settlers and hacked them to death. Things were no better in the Congress. Less than nine months before Dred Scott, Charles Sumner delivered a five hour speech on the floor of the Senate denouncing popular sovereignty and attacking Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina by name. Two days later Butler’s cousin walked onto the senate floor after adjournment, approached Sumner and beat him repeatedly over the head with a heavy metal-tipped gutta-percha cane.

Three congressional settlements in thirty-seven years had achieved only a bludgeoned Senator, an entire state reduced to a disordered jungle, and a President, Buchanan, who explicitly told the nation in his inaugural address that he hoped the Court would “speedily and finally” settle the question of slavery. Hardly the grounds for a patrician respect for stare decisis. Something, anything, needed to be done.

With precedents failing, and a country begging him to decide, Taney read the constitution as he found it, and he made his choice. The Civil War was always inevitable. For a country that embeds slavery in its founding compact to abolish it, it first has to itself die. The countries of post and antebellum America are not the same and the country that Roger Taney served had to pass.

Taney knew slavery was wrong, but it has always been the effect of a liberal proceduralism to condemn a man’s soul to irrelevance. Taney was not rioting against liberal values, he was their faithful servant. He did what all great liberals are meant to do, to ignore the petty passions of the soul in service of faithfully adjudicating on the basis of law, constitution and country. How devastating it must be for one’s soul to be cast aside by the necessities of a political order.

Of course, history has another judge similarly condemned by his order.

In Anatole France’s short story “The Procurator of Judea”, first published in 1892, an exiled Roman patrician encounters Pontius Pilate in the twilight hours of his life. At the end of the page, the patrician brings up “a young Galilean miracle worker”.

“Do you remember that man, Pontius? Pontius Pilate frowned, bringing his hand to his forehead like someone who is trying to remember. Then after a few moments of silence, he murmured:

Jesus. Jesus. From Nazareth? No. I can’t bring him to mind.”

France gives us by far the most haunting version of post-Gospel Pilate present in the literature. A man defined by a fundamental indifference to the moral qualities of his actions. A man so enthralled in the vicissitudes of governance and legal niceties that he cannot for the life of him remember the death of God.

France’s Pilate is the perfect judge.

Of course, this Pilate is not a popular one within the Christian imagination. There is a long tradition of extending to Pilate precisely what we deny to Taney, a soul beneath the verdict, a man trapped by the system. In the Divine Comedy he is found languishing in the Vestibule of Hell whilst Judas suffers at the very centre of damnation. In the Ethiopian Orthodox church Pilate is a saint, having found salvation following the Gospels narratives. And of course, the historical doctrine of Jewish Deicide within the Catholic Church has always posited Pilate as a victim of the barbarous mob.

Why do we seem so incapable of condemning Pilate but so eager to cast aside Roger Taney. Why do context, manipulation and post-lapsarian sympathies enter into one but not the other? The obvious answer is that Pilate exists in a pedagogy built on ideas of soulcraft. A tradition that emphasises the ways in structures of government and law inevitably ask us to un-become people, to give up that which makes us whole, to at every turn ignore our soul. For Christian thought, those who fall victim to the system, those hollow husks of men, deserve not absolution but sympathy. And even where that sympathy is hard to find, in the case of Pilate, they find something, anything to contextualise the fall of the liberal man. Taney exists in a different pedagogy. One that judges a public man not on soul but purely on output. One that has no moral architecture to understand the manumitter and the Chief Justice as one and the same.

In failing to teach Taney properly, we fail to protect against the instinct to un-become. To believe Taney was acting from bigotry, from poor legal acumen, from sheer stupidity, is to purposefully ignore the sweet temptation of constitutional evil. It is a heartening thing to find your actions necessitated by the systems of today. To remove your moral agency from the calculation. To become the perfect judge. But as France shows, the most desolate life is not the painful one, but the numb one. The one where you give yourself so fully to a system that it swallows you whole.

Roger Taney was swallowed whole. But he didn’t have a Christian pedagogy to dig him out. So we will continue to forgive the Lord’s executioner, but condemn and condemn again Roger Taney.

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The performative male, at his core, is not unique in his performativity, but rather in the mode of his performance. For the issue is not his spectacle upon the stage, nor the recital of a song for us all, but that he plays the progressive who subverts the status quo; he sings not the Nessun Dorma, but the cries of the proletariat as he garments himself in the blood-soaked fauxletarian costume.

Within the white bourgeois safe havens of Bushwick or Dalston, the precarious semiotic status of the performative male appears almost self-evident. Yet such familiarity obscures the issue at hand, for we see no further than the performativity of the white man listening to Sade, reading The Second Sex, or romanticising the working class over oat-milk matcha. We mistake the symptom for the disease.

Just as a doctor may treat a succession of infections believing the malaise solved, all the while ignorant to the patient’s underlying HIV, so too do we identify the countless manifestations of the performative male whilst overlooking the collective neurosis from which they arise. It is precisely this failure to perceive the underlying pathology that prevents us from recognising Tupac Shakur as a pre-contemporary instantiation of the performative male. For although his image appears worlds apart from the Bushwick aesthete, both remain indexed by the same symbolic economy of coolness; one in its contemporary form, the other at a stage in which the ethical had only just begun its conversion into the aesthetic. Since Tupac marks the point at which progressive moral representation became culturally valuable independently of ethical embodiment.

To reiterate, the performative male is ultimately one indexed by a neurotic desire to be cool, and thus contemporaneously subversive of the status quo in a progressive manner. Regardless of his actual politics or surface-level ideology, he is compelled not merely to align himself with progressivism, but to embody a uniquely progressive disposition as a form of aesthetic-based morality. His concern is less with ethical coherence than with occupying the semiotic position of the morally progressive.

It is this fundamental neurosis, produced by the simulacrum of coolness, that restructures the symbolic economy of contemporary society. Progressive representations no longer merely signify moral qualities; they increasingly come to constitute morality itself. The ethical is displaced by its own representation, until progressive symbology is experienced not as the image of virtue, but as virtue in and of itself.

Such is manifest nowhere more clearly than in the propagandised and immortalised figure of Tupac Shakur. To many, he was the man from the streets who knew the hard life, who knew how to get down and dirty. A relatable figure in this regard, yet one rendered culturally exceptional through his supposed feminism, intelligence, social consciousness, and apparent ability to elevate the masses to a better place: the tough guy with the heart of gold.

He thus came to occupy a uniquely symbolic position within the cultural psyche. A messianic figure, if you will; born of the land and its people, sharing their blood, customs, and traditions, yet seemingly capable of transcending them whilst simultaneously remaining indexed by them. He stood both within and above the culture, both defender and breaker of the law, revolutionary and outlaw, poet and gangster. It is precisely these contradictions that granted the image of Tupac its extraordinary symbolic power, allowing increasingly disparate moral qualities to accumulate around his public image.

Yet whilst the cultural imagination attempts to elevate Tupac into something approaching the Christ-like figure of 1990s hip-hop, the historical Tupac Shakur was nothing of the sort. For this idealised image reveals far more about the symbolic demands of coolness than it does about the man himself. As I shall argue, Tupac was not the moral archetype he has retrospectively become, but rather one of the earliest and most complete manifestations of the performative male.

Consider first his supposed feminism and extraordinary respect for women. Were these a genuine and actionable set of ethical convictions, or rather a performance of progressivism whereby Tupac subverts the overt misogyny of hip-hop culture through an aestheticism dressed in ethics? The distinction is crucial. For I do not ask whether Tupac cared about women in some ordinary human sense, but whether his relation to women was fundamentally ethical, or whether it occupied the symbolic position of ethicality within the simulacrum of coolness. Or in other words, was this a true and actionable set of beliefs for Tupac, or a performance of progressivism as he subverts the status quo of misogynistic hip-hop culture in an act of aestheticism dressed in ethics?

Let us first consider the evidence in favour of Tupac as an icon of the masculine proletarian apologising to the feminine. One might immediately point to Brenda’s Got a Baby, wherein Tupac recounts the tragedy of a twelve-year-old girl, impregnated by her cousin, who abandons her newborn in the garbage. Or perhaps more explicitly, Keep Ya Head Up, in which he professes sentiments recognisably aligned with feminism, from respect for women to support for reproductive choice. One could equally invoke the countless testimonies of women who remembered Tupac as thoughtful, compassionate, charismatic, and deeply enjoyable to be around.

Or shall we just give up and play this video:

Since these examples are precisely what transformed the image of Tupac into something greater than that of the archetypal gangsta rapper. They furnished his public image with progressive signifiers that, within the symbolic economy of coolness, became increasingly inseparable from moral worth itself. Yet this alone tells us remarkably little about the ethical structure of the man. It tells us, first and foremost, about the symbolic structure of the image.

But what actual weight does any of this hold? At most, it demonstrates that there exists evidence of a man who cared about such issues, who sought to be kind and understanding towards women, and who, by many accounts, enjoyed genuinely positive relationships with them. Yet is this evidence of an extraordinary respect for women, or even of feminism properly understood? Or is it merely evidence that Tupac possessed a personality attractive to women, coupled with a rhetorical fluency that expressed itself through progressively persuasive language?

For I do not wish to negate the personhood of Mr. Shakur, nor deny the possibility that he possessed a sincere ethical concern for women. Rather, I wish to show that regardless of his care, personality, or even the existence of some underlying ethical code, his progressive attitudes towards women functioned primarily as an aesthetic within the hyperreal structure of the simulacrum of coolness. They possessed not merely ethical content, but sign-value.

For it is cool when Tupac goes against the grain, much to everyone’s chagrin, by appearing unusually receptive to women within a hip-hop culture otherwise saturated by overt misogyny. Such receptivity therefore acquires a symbolic force beyond its ethical content. It ceases to function merely as a moral disposition and instead becomes part of the aesthetic architecture of coolness itself, whereby progressive representation carries a cultural weight disproportionate to its practical embodiment.

Yet despite this carefully cultivated image, Tupac’s romantic life reveals a striking discontinuity between representation and embodiment. More often than not, women appear less as objects of enduring love than as transient companions within an intensely aestheticised mode of living. His own words perhaps reveal this most clearly:

“Even though they end bitter... this person was supposed to just come, be with you, do this, and leave.”1

The sentiment is a quintessentially Bushwickian justification for the absence of romantic permanence. Women enter, women leave, and what remains is not the ethical relation but the experience itself. Constantly was Tupac simply a charming, kind, and enduring personality -perhaps nothing more than a personality - whose charisma repeatedly attracted women before those relationships dissolved into another fleeting encounter.

Khephra Burns reaches a similarly uncomfortable conclusion2:

“There’s no love there… It’s totally selfish sex in which the women are simply props to massage his dick and ego”

This is not, however, evidence that Tupac secretly despised women, nor even that his concern for them was wholly insincere. Rather, it reveals a profound asymmetry between symbolic representation and lived embodiment. The progressive image remains intact, even whilst intimate relations continually fail to instantiate the ethical substance that image appears to promise. The representation therefore acquires a life independent of the referent, preserving the aesthetic of moral progressivism even where its practical expression remains fragmented and inconsistent.

Yet to recognise this asymmetry is not to deny the possibility that Tupac possessed genuine ethical convictions regarding women. Indeed, there is little difficulty in accepting that he may have sincerely admired women, wished to protect them, and at times acted in ways entirely congruent with those convictions. Such an acknowledgement, however, leaves the present argument wholly intact. For ethical sincerity and aesthetic function are by no means mutually exclusive. A disposition may originate in genuine concern whilst simultaneously becoming absorbed into a symbolic economy that prizes it not primarily for its ethical content, but for its representational value. Thus, even if Tupac’s concern for women were entirely authentic, what rendered it culturally exceptional was not simply the concern itself, but the symbolic position it occupied within the emerging simulacrum of coolness. His ethical disposition became inseparable from its aesthetic appearance, until the image of progressive concern increasingly eclipsed the ethical relation from which it ostensibly arose.

For such is the logic of the spectacle of coolness: that one must engage in a progressive subversion of the status quo. Tupac is therefore not merely a man who possessed an ethos he drastically failed to live up to, but one who suffers from the same collective neurosis that structures the performative male. Within this symbolic economy, certain progressive acts acquire an immense sign-value, signifying moral quality without necessarily constituting morality itself. The ethical relation is progressively displaced by its own representation.

Thus Tupac speaks in progressive tongues, yet does not necessarily apprehend them as progressive in any consciously ideological sense. Rather, he experiences them as cool. Their ethical force is mediated through the aesthetic logic of coolness, such that progressive signification becomes desirable not simply because it is morally good, but because it occupies the privileged symbolic position within the contemporary order.

Hence the striking disconnect between representation and embodiment, a discontinuity equally visible within the contemporary Bushwickian man-whore. He may read feminist literature, but does he embody its ethical demands, or merely reproduce its symbolic vocabulary? He may fluently speak of patriarchy, consent, and liberation, yet does such language structure his intimate relations, or simply furnish his public image with the correct progressive signifiers? Likewise, Tupac may rap about a woman’s right to choose, but will he accept her choice in a New York hotel room in 1993?

For Tupac Shakur provides remarkably little evidence of a sustained embodiment of the progressive image he came to represent. This is not because his views were necessarily insincere, nor because he consciously sought to deceive, but because those views had already become part and parcel of the pursuit of coolness through progressive subversion. Within the simulacrum of coolness, the image of ethicality accumulates symbolic value independently of ethical practice, until representation itself becomes sufficient – devoid of its original referent.

Of course, it must be stated that his upbringing under a Black Panther mother undoubtedly exerted a profound influence upon Tupac’s political sensibilities. There can be little doubt that many of his convictions possessed genuine historical and personal origins. Yet not all politics is performative, and not all politics remains what it once was. The origin of a belief and the symbolic function it comes to perform are not necessarily one and the same.

For Tupac’s progressive attitudes towards women need not have been fabricated to become aestheticized. Within the simulacrum of coolness, they become perfectly pleasing to the Big Other and the collective gaze of coolness, irrespective of the sincerity with which they were originally held. Their sign-value begins to eclipse their ethical function, until the representation of progressive morality assumes greater cultural weight than its practical embodiment. Since it is with this point we can make clear that which has been alluded to throughout this essay – that being how within the simulacrum of coolness we find the ethical being consumed by the aesthetic. And therefore, we see the performative males embodied progressivism qua coolness as a fundamentally aesthetic act garmed by the ethical.

Since within a Kierkegaardian framework, for a relation to be ethical is not merely for it to be concerned with the good, for such a claim invites a semantic discussion which, whilst worthwhile, fails to capture the psycho-social dynamics with which we are presently concerned. Rather, the ethical is fundamentally relational, and therefore concerned with the Other. This, however, does not entail that one’s relation to the Other must be sympathetic, benevolent, or loving. It means only that the category of the ethical is constituted by its concern with the Other as such. For example, the act of killing another remains situated within the ethical category regardless of whether it is ultimately judged to be good or bad. Whilst the semantics of goodness and badness are themselves historically contingent and philosophically contested, ethical discourse remains irreducibly concerned with one’s relation to the Other. By contrast, the caffeine content of a cup of coffee is not, in itself, an ethical concern, unless it becomes constitutively related to the Other. Consequently, our engagement with an object becomes ethical only insofar as that object either enters into, or itself constitutes, a relation to the Other.

Conversely, the aesthetic, whilst not necessarily immoral or practically self-centred, is a domain fundamentally concerned with the I. It is concerned with the passions, sentiments, affects, and sensibilities of the individual, alongside their lived and affective experience of the world. This characterisation is fundamental and therefore equally applicable to both aesthetic consumption and aesthetic production.

In aesthetic consumption, we speak of aesthetics in relation to the dispositions, passions, and experiences of the I, irrespective of the historical origins or intended function of the object itself. The aesthetic object is apprehended through the individual’s own affective relation to it. Similarly, aesthetic production rests upon the externalisation of an internal sentimental state, whereby the individual seeks to embody, extend, or otherwise express themselves through a creative medium. Hence, when one wears the colours of one’s football club, such an act is not exhausted by its social function. It is equally an aesthetic act, insofar as an internal attachment, affection, or devotion is externalised through symbolic and creative representation. In a similar, and more paradigmatic, fashion, the artist painting upon a canvas externalises an internal affective state whose expression extends beyond the merely social function of painting itself.

With these dichotomous domains established, we can now consider how such seemingly opposed categories may nevertheless be indexed by one another3. It is indeed possible to find the ethical situated within the aesthetic, as exemplified by the performative male, just as it is possible to find the aesthetic situated within the ethical, as exemplified by architecture that is at once functionally necessary and aesthetically beautiful.

For an object to be indexed by something is for its ontology to be determined by the indexing category, even where its phenomenal appearance suggests otherwise. Consequently, whilst an object may phenomenologically appear to belong to one category, the constitutive principle of its being may instead reside within another. The phenomenal categorisation of an object is therefore not fundamental to its ontology, but merely to the manner in which that ontology is disclosed.

Thus, for the ethical to be indexed by the aesthetic is, in layman’s terms, to say that what appears ethical by virtue of ethical language and ostensibly relational action is, in fact, fundamentally determined, though not necessarily exhausted, by the aesthetic. That is, it is constituted not by a primary relation to the Other, but by an internally organised sentimental relation to the world.

This does not mean that the aesthetic is reducible to pleasure, happiness, or feeling good. Rather, it returns us to the original distinction concerning relationality. The aesthetic is fundamentally constituted by the I, whereas the ethical is fundamentally constituted by the Other. Consequently, the aesthetic begins with an internal organisation of passions, sentiments, and affects before extending outward into the world, whilst the ethical begins with the Other before reflexively returning to the self. The distinction, therefore, concerns not emotional valence but the ontological direction of the relation itself.

Accordingly, to say that the ethical is indexed by the aesthetic is not to discuss pleasure, but to identify the constitutive starting point of a relation. Consider the wearing of a badge as an expression of solidarity. Such an act appears prima facie ethical, insofar as it symbolises one’s relation to others. Yet it may nevertheless be indexed by the aesthetic when the badge is worn because it satisfies an internally constituted sentimental attachment to the representation itself, rather than because the wearer is primarily moved by the Other for the sake of the Other. In both cases, the individual may experience pride, fulfilment, or even happiness. The distinction lies not in the emotional outcome, but in the ontological ground from which the action proceeds.

The performative male, however, through a state of cultural neurosis, no longer encounters the ethical as ethical, but as something indexed by the aesthetic. Consequently, the good act, the sentiments it evokes, and even the consequences it may produce become phenomenologically indistinguishable from an act whose ontology is fundamentally aesthetic. Under the conditions of this neurosis, he is unable to trace the genealogy of the ethical representation back to its constitutively ethical category, and instead remains captivated by aesthetic representations of the good and their faux-referential claims to ethical significance.

For such a spell is conjured within a sea of representations untethered from their original referents, wherein aesthetic simulacra come to occupy the place once held by genuine objects of ethical concern. The ethical is not abolished, but spectralised. Its whispers continue to haunt the symbolic capital attached to aesthetic representation, leaving behind only the phantasm of ethical life whilst its constitutive relation to the Other quietly recedes from view.

And when surpassing the rose-tinted lens upon the image of Tupac, and staring at the man himself, we see the fundamental aestheticism in his supposed feminist attitudes. Furthermore it is not merely the existence of progressive views towards women that contributes to Tupac’s idolised image, but the symbolic economy in which those views circulate.

They function less as the ethical axioms from which his conduct consistently proceeds than as privileged signifiers within the spectacle of coolness. It is precisely this displacement that reveals Tupac not simply as a politically progressive man, but as one of the earliest manifestations of the performative male - a subject who, like so many after him, becomes caught within the collective neurosis of the simulacrum of coolness.

Thus Tupac therefore ought not to be understood as a contradiction to be resolved, but as a historical symptom to be interpreted. His simultaneous advocacy of women and participation within hip-hop’s misogynistic culture reveal neither simple hypocrisy nor moral incoherence, but the gradual emergence of a cultural condition wherein ethical life itself became increasingly mediated through aesthetic representation. His concern for women may well have been sincere, his tenderness genuine, and his desire to protect them entirely authentic. Yet sincerity neither escapes nor dissolves the simulacrum. Rather, ethical conviction itself becomes absorbed into an aesthetic economy that prizes not simply goodness, but the appearance of goodness; not merely progressive conviction, but the image of progressivism. It is precisely here that Tupac’s historical significance resides. He stands not merely as one of hip-hop’s defining artists, but as one of the earliest figures through whom the progressive aesthetic became inseparable from moral legitimacy itself.

And originally, the ethical produced the aesthetic. For the orirginal references of the cool (which was not cool) emerged as the aesthetic consequence of genuine ethical courage, of contemporaneous subversion enacted through lived existence rather than symbolic display. Yet within the simulacrum of coolness this relation became quietly inverted. The aesthetic no longer followed from the ethical, but increasingly produced what came to be experienced as the ethical. Ethical concern no longer generated the progressive image; the progressive image increasingly generated the experience of ethical concern. Thus the good act, the feeling it generated, and the moral worth attributed to it, became indexed not by the ethical relation from which they arose, but by the aesthetic representations through which they were apprehended. Ethics gradually ceased to determine the aesthetic and the aesthetic increasingly came to determine ethics.

And perhaps this is Tupac’s greatest legacy. Not gangsta rap. Not Death Row. Not even his enduring cultural mythology. Rather, that he stood unknowingly at the precipice of a civilisation in which the performance of ethicality would increasingly eclipse ethical life itself. Today, one need not merely be progressive, but appear progressively. One need not simply possess conviction, but signify conviction. One need not embody virtue, but aesthetically communicate it. The authenticity of one’s concern is almost beside the point, for the image itself has become morally efficacious. Such is the triumph of the simulacrum of coolness. Such is the cultural neurosis of modernity.

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To begin, ontological inquiry often focuses upon the dialectic of Self and Other, yet there is a fundamental lack within such a dialectical position. Self and Other are not negations of each other but complementary. Self cannot be defined without Other, and Other without Self – hence the common discussion surrounding such ontological dialectics.

Both Self and Other exist as particular identities, Self being a singular particular whilst Other is encountered through a plurality of particulars. However, to grasp the particular one must also grasp the universal – das Man.

Dasein, through verstand initially focuses upon Self and Other as particular modes of encounter when considering its being. However, with the universal, Dasein is forced to situate its being within the horizon of das Man. A dilemma unfolds whereby Dasein must exist as itself, exist with others, and exist within the shared horizon of das Man.

For Dasein is not simply a human being, but the mode of being characteristic of that being for whom Being itself is a question. It exists not as a static substance possessing a fixed essence, but as an ongoing project continually disclosed through its relation to itself, to others, and to the world. Consequently, Dasein cannot be understood independently of the horizon of intelligibility within which it finds itself situated, for its understanding of itself is always mediated through the structures of meaning that constitute its world. It is precisely because Dasein is both finite and self-interpreting that it must continually negotiate the tension between its own particular existence and the universal horizon of das Man, within which the significance of its being is disclosed.

Confined by its finite and embodied condition (Körperlichkeit), the possibility of existing within the horizon of das Man becomes difficult for Dasein to understand. In what way is its being meant to be situated within the universal horizon of das Man when it is but one particular being?

In a Hegelian fashion we can consider Absolute Spirit as the unity of Self, Other, and the Universal. Thus Dasein, whilst constrained by its finite and embodied condition, can realise itself through Absolute Spirit. Yet what is this entity, and how is Dasein supposed to realise itself through it?

Let us take a Christian reading of Absolute Spirit, whereby we view it analogically as the Holy Spirit. Absolute Spirit is the totality of reason and thus encompasses everything within the intelligible realm – no matter how apparently unintelligible. The constant dynamic sublation of all that ever is, ever was, and ever will be is akin to God’s spiritual manifestation within the intelligible realm.

For Dasein to realise itself through Absolute Spirit is not to attempt to dispel its embodied condition and ascend to an ethereal essence by becoming Absolute Spirit, but rather to act in accordance with the will of Absolute Spirit. This may not necessarily be a conscious endeavour of rational Aufhebung, but a matter of one’s relation to the Symbolic Order and the Imaginary being conformed to the symbolic manifestation of Absolute Spirit. The unconscious representational state of affairs that constitutes ontological accordance with Absolute Spirit can only occur through an internal state, free from systematic tendencies toward antagonistic reverberations.

Such antagonistic reverberations arise when the symbolic structures through which Dasein understands itself and the world fail to cohere with one another. Rather than disclosing reality as an intelligible unity, competing structures of signification generate contradictory modes of understanding that continually distort one’s orientation towards Being. The Symbolic Order thereby ceases to function as a transparent medium through which Absolute Spirit may be apprehended, instead becoming fragmented through competing differentiations that obscure the intelligible order of reality. Consequently, Dasein is no longer disposed towards authentic disclosedness, but becomes absorbed within the continual negotiation of incompatible symbolic possibilities. Only where these antagonistic reverberations are absent can the Symbolic and Imaginary exist in sufficient accordance that the symbolic manifestation of Absolute Spirit is disclosed without systematic distortion. It is through this representational accordance, rather than through rational contemplation alone, that Dasein becomes disposed towards affirming the will of Absolute Spirit.

For Dasein to be capable of accepting the symbolic manifestation of Absolute Spirit, it must therefore be phenomenologically disclosed in such a manner that enables it to understand and accept the symbolic manifestation of Absolute Spirit.

Under ordinary circumstances, Dasein is rarely able to achieve such a state of affairs and instead remains absorbed in the ongoing projection of possibilities that characterises existence. For most, Dasein is primarily a matter of becoming rather than authentic disclosedness. This may in essence be in accordance with Absolute Spirit, yet Dasein is seldom able to understand and accept this. The existential uncertainty of existence continually returns Dasein to the process of Aufhebung through which it must continually reorient itself towards its possibilities.

Dasein, whilst commonly associated with temporality, projection, and becoming, can be reinterpreted in a manner that allows for an unusual constancy of disclosedness in extraordinary circumstances when one is not constrained by embodied finitude, psychological instability, and dispositions antagonistic to Absolute Spirit.

Yet extraordinary circumstances arise when discussing Mary and her relation to her own being. She possessed direct knowledge of the symbolic manifestation of Absolute Spirit, in the form of the Holy Spirit announcing that she would conceive and bear the Son of God. In light of such knowledge, she understood what was required of her within the broader horizon of interconnected intelligible relations, and accepted the burden of grace. These extraordinary circumstances allow us to interpret Mary as exemplifying an unusual constancy of disclosedness within Dasein.

Her mode of being is predicated upon her existence as herself, her existence with others, and her participation within the shared horizon of das Man. Yet she is able to situate herself successfully within these ordinarily irreconcilable demands and dwell in an unusual constancy of disclosedness rather than continual existential reorientation. For she accepted the will of the Holy Spirit in light of knowledge of that will.

But her acceptance should not be understood merely as an act of submission, but as the affirmation of a mode of Being already phenomenologically disclosed before her. Ordinarily, Dasein must continually project itself towards possibilities whose authenticity cannot be known with certainty, thereby requiring an ongoing process of existential reorientation. Mary’s circumstances differ precisely because the symbolic manifestation of Absolute Spirit discloses, with unprecedented clarity, the authentic possibility towards which her existence is ordered. The ambiguity ordinarily constitutive of Dasein’s projection is therefore not abolished, but resolved through an explicit disclosure of the intelligible order itself. Her constancy of disclosedness thus arises not from the absence of temporality or projection, but from the absence of uncertainty concerning the authentic possibility that she is called to affirm.

Yet her acceptance of the will is merely one part of the story, for the precursor to her acceptance is vital in understanding it. To truly accept the will, rather than merely submit to the will of the Holy Spirit, is to understand and affirm the will of the Holy Spirit. Dasein is not merely subject to the contingencies of existence; it projects itself towards possibilities and seeks an authentic orientation amongst the many possibilities disclosed before it.

Mary is only able to truly accept the will of the Holy Spirit because she was already oriented towards an authentic mode of being. Her phenomenological horizon, underpinned by the symbolic structures constitutive of the Symbolic Order, is fashioned in such a manner that disposes her towards the authentic possibility whilst preventing her from mistaking inauthentic possibilities for authentic ones, even though she remains free to pursue them.

In that sense, she is not subject to antagonistic reverberations within her symbolic structures, nor are her Symbolic and Imaginary registers out of accord with the will of the Holy Spirit. In essence, she is only able to truly accept bearing Christ due to an unfettered expression of natural law.

Natural law, in this sense, should not be understood merely as an external moral prescription, but as the intelligible order towards which Dasein is already disposed by virtue of its being. Where symbolic structures become fragmented through antagonistic reverberations, this natural orientation is obscured by competing possibilities that appear authentic despite their incompatibility with Absolute Spirit. Mary’s mode of being, however, remains free from such distortions. Consequently, her affirmation of the will of the Holy Spirit is neither arbitrary nor externally imposed, but arises as the fullest expression of the intelligible order already constitutive of her being. Her acceptance therefore represents not the suppression of freedom, but its highest realisation, for genuine freedom consists not in the arbitrary selection between possibilities, but in the authentic affirmation of that possibility towards which Dasein is most fundamentally ordered.

Furthermore, this means that her exemplary mode of Dasein did not arise upon accepting the explicit will of the Holy Spirit, but rather characterises her mode of being as a whole. Prior to accepting the will of the Holy Spirit, she exists in the ordinary process of temporal becoming that characterises Dasein. Yet at the moment of acceptance, her mode of being achieves an unusual constancy of disclosedness. From that point onward, her orientation towards Being remains fulfilled, even though her temporal existence continues to unfold dynamically. By this we mean that her mode of being is fulfilled, whilst her concrete existence continues in time.

Therefore, Mary was always Dasein, even though this becomes most intelligible to us at the moment she becomes Theotokos.

Yet this is not to suggest that Theotokos constitutes Mary’s Dasein, but rather that it discloses the exemplary character of her mode of being. As with all human beings, Mary exists as Dasein prior to the Annunciation, projecting herself towards possibilities within the horizon of existence. Yet the symbolic manifestation of Absolute Spirit reveals that her existence has always been oriented towards the authentic possibility disclosed in becoming Theotokos. Consequently, the Annunciation does not create a new mode of being, but renders explicit the intelligible orientation that had always constituted her phenomenological horizon. Theotokos therefore functions not as the origin of her Dasein, but as the fullest disclosure of the authentic mode in which her Dasein had always existed.

And as argued previously, Mary was in essence always ordered towards Theotokos, and it is this orientation that most clearly reveals the distinctive character of her Dasein. Mary therefore should not be honoured solely on account of her status as Theotokos. Her carrying and caring for Christ was an action that, in principle, another could have performed. Rather, it is the exemplary character of her Dasein as revealed through her acceptance of the vocation of Theotokos that makes her worthy of honour. It represents the highest form of authentic disclosedness through which we come to understand Being. Being is disclosed through the understanding and affirmation, rather than the mere submission to, the symbolic manifestation of Absolute Spirit qua Holy Spirit.

And within the broader horizon of interconnected representations, symbolic differentiations continually reverberate throughout the totality of meaning, generating competing structures of signification that obscure the authentic identity of Dasein. The task of authentic disclosedness is therefore not the construction of a new identity, but the phenomenological disclosure of the intelligible identity already implicit within Absolute Spirit. Thus, identity becomes obscured through competing structures of signification within the totality of meaning. Yet to discover one’s authentic identity through the resolution of these differentiations is to situate oneself closer to the symbolic manifestation of Absolute Spirit.

This resolution should not be understood as the elimination of difference itself, but as the reconciliation of symbolic differentiations within an intelligible unity. As competing structures of signification cease to generate antagonistic reverberations, Dasein is no longer compelled towards conflicting modes of disclosedness, but instead apprehends itself and the world through a representational horizon ordered towards Absolute Spirit. The symbolic manifestation of Absolute Spirit is thereby not rendered more present, but less obscured, allowing Dasein to affirm its authentic mode of being in accordance with the intelligible order that has always constituted reality.

Thus, the Theotokos may be understood as a paradigmatic instance of authentic disclosedness amidst existential flux, for she possessed both the capacity and the opportunity to affirm the intelligible order of reality without succumbing to the distortions produced by competing differentiations.

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“LAUDATO SI’, mi’ Signore” – “Praise be to you, my Lord”. In the words of this beautiful canticle, Saint Francis of Assisi reminds us that our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us. “Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with coloured flowers and herbs”.

- Pope Francis in his encyclical letter, LAUDATO SI’

mother! (2017) is one of Darren Aronofsky’s most infamous and innovative works in his stellar filmography. In this film, he builds upon his previous motif of environmental concern in Noah (2014), whilst similarly maintaining a biblical theme, albeit an allegorical one. All of this, however, has been discussed and analysed to death - something I have little interest in repeating.

Rather, what I wish to discuss is how the synthesis of environmental concern and theology in mother! is not merely a fantastic depiction of art, man-made environmental disaster, and Christianity, but of something far more philosophically interesting: an implicitly anti-Gnostic vision of reality. Beneath the film’s familiar biblical symbolism lies a profound affirmation of the material world and humanity’s obligation towards it - an affirmation that stands in direct opposition to the metaphysical pessimism of the Gnostic tradition.

Aronofsky wants us to focus on how we - as sinful, impure beings - destroy and corrupt the very world upon which our existence is predicated. Herein lies one of the film’s most compelling insights: that our relationship with creation is neither incidental nor merely practical, but fundamental to our moral existence. This seemingly simple point possesses remarkable layers of theological and philosophical complexity, revealing itself in almost every scene and line of dialogue throughout the film. However, the Gnostic implicitly rejects such a conception, for the material world that surrounds us is itself inherently evil, fashioned not by the supreme God but by the malevolent Demiurge, or Yaldabaoth. We are, as the joke goes, merely minds encased within an armour of bone, flesh and muscle - a prison rather than a home for the pessimistic Gnostic.

Our existence is therefore not predicated upon our bodies, nor upon anything materially relevant to them, but upon the pursuit of gnosis and the eventual reunion of the divine spark with the Monad in the Pleroma. From the Gnostic point of view, why should one care if this Cartesian material reality is squandered or wasted away? It is, after all, merely the defective product of an inferior creator. The goal is not to preserve the world but to escape it. Consumption, sex and worldly desire are therefore rejected, not because they frustrate harmonious human flourishing, but because they further entangle the soul within the corruptions of material existence. Asceticism thus becomes a fundamentally negative philosophy. It is not principally concerned with aiding one’s fellow man, cultivating virtue, pleasing God or living harmoniously within creation, but with rejecting reality itself in pursuit of transcendence.

Since for the Gnostic, this rejection of the material world is not merely an ethical or ascetic preference but a metaphysical necessity. Reality itself is fundamentally disordered because the cosmos is not the work of the supreme God, but of the Demiurge - an ignorant or malevolent creator often identified with Yaldabaoth. The visible universe is therefore a prison rather than a gift, and the human body a cage that obscures the divine spark within. Salvation comes not through redemption of creation but through gnosis: an esoteric knowledge that allows the soul to awaken to its true origin and ultimately escape material existence altogether. Consequently, environmental stewardship possesses little intrinsic theological significance within the Gnostic worldview. If creation is itself the product of a cosmic mistake, then preserving it cannot be a moral end in itself. The ultimate objective is liberation from matter, not reconciliation with it.

Yet contrary to the opinion of New Atheist’s and other such benighted critics, Christianity (among many other world religions) do not think that the perfection of the afterlife makes our physical existence in the now, meaningless. For Christianity presents almost the exact opposite metaphysical picture. From Genesis onwards, creation is repeatedly affirmed as good, not despite its materiality but through it. The physical world is neither an illusion nor a prison, but an intentional act of divine love. Humanity’s fall introduces disorder into creation, yet creation itself remains worthy of preservation and ultimately redemption. This affirmation reaches its fullest expression in the Incarnation. Christianity uniquely proclaims that God becomes flesh rather than merely appearing to do so. Likewise, Christian hope is centred not upon abandoning the body but upon its resurrection. Matter is therefore not something from which humanity must escape, but something through which divine grace is capable of acting. The created world is consequently deserving of stewardship rather than contempt.

And as Pope Francis discusses in Laudato Si’, Saint Francis of Assisi was an ascetic due to a positive philosophy of love, sacrifice and harmony.

“The poverty and austerity of Saint Francis were no mere veneer of asceticism, but something much more radical: a refusal to turn reality into an object simply to be used and controlled.”

Our existence is a gift that is filled with beauty, love, and cherishment. Regardless of religious sentiment, experience as it exists materially, truly means something to the individual. And whilst there may be ugliness, hatred and sadness, it is not the case that what is “good” is ultimately negated.

Thus, with the multitudes of people, items and concepts that we truly care for, we ought to find a harmonious state of affairs in which our love is rightly ordered (i.e. loving thy neighbour more than a random daffodil). Such was the goal of Saint Francis who thought harmonious love is found through giving up worldly desires and directing such attention to the world around and beyond one’s senses. What follows from this view of creation is not merely an environmental ethic, but a philosophy of love. If the world is a gift rather than a prison, then our relationship to creation cannot simply be one of utility or domination. Rather, our love must be rightly ordered so that we acknowledge the value of creation without confusing it with God Himself.

And whilst it remains unconscious, our love for the planet exists and must be factored into the harmonious state of affairs. Such love exists implicitly through transitivity, and such a mode of love is a justified way of describing love. For love rarely exists in isolation. Genuine love for one thing often generates obligations toward the things that sustain, protect, or are loved by that object. In this sense, love possesses a transitive quality: whilst not identical in degree, our affection for one object naturally extends to those upon which it depends.

Consider a simple example. I love my mother. My mother cherishes her garden. Whilst I do not love the garden as I love her, my love for my mother gives me reason to treat the garden with care and respect. Were I to deliberately destroy it, I would simultaneously fail in my love for her. The object of my concern has expanded not because the garden possesses equal worth, but because my primary love has generated secondary obligations.

So it is not the case that I should love the garden like I love my mother, but rather there is a relationship between me and the garden that should be acknowledged as a love of sorts if my love for my mother remains constant. Such transitivity exists on two accounts for “loving” the planet we occupy.

The first is a materialist conception in which I love my physical existence, and the material objects and people around me. Such objects are predicated upon the existence of a healthy, functioning planet. I should therefore care for and acknowledge the implicit love (that exists within my soul rather than in my mind) with the planet.

The second is a godly or immaterial conception, in which I love God. God loves me and all his creations – this love is displayed through granting us a material existence. If God loves us via a material existence, then we ought to respect and acknowledge such materialness (i.e. don’t kill yourself and make the most of your life). Thus, the respect and love for our materialness is a matter of respecting it in its temporal entirety.

And what I have just spoken of is made abundantly clear throughout mother! (2017). As countless reviews and analyses have observed, the film and its characters are steeped in biblical allegory. Yet to leave the discussion there is to overlook something far more interesting. It is precisely this structure of transitive love that mother! visualises. Humanity does not merely exploit the Earth because it misunderstands ecology; it exploits the Earth because it has failed to reciprocate divine love. The house is not simply an ecosystem but a gift entrusted to humanity, and every act of violence inflicted upon the Mother is simultaneously an act of ingratitude towards the Father.

Jennifer Lawrence’s Mother is therefore far more than an environmental metaphor. She is the maintainer, restorer and life-blood of the newly renovated house, and consequently the conscious spirit of the Earth itself. From the opening moments of the film she labours tirelessly to preserve its beauty, carefully restoring the walls, polishing the floors and nurturing every room into a harmonious whole. Her intimate connection to the house is made visually explicit through Aronofsky’s repeated use of subjective shots, wherein Mother places her hands upon the walls and witnesses the beating heart of the house beneath its wooden frame. The distinction between person and place consequently dissolves: she is the house, and the house is her. As more guests enter, violating her privacy, staining the furniture, breaking treasured possessions and ultimately tearing apart the home brick by brick, Mother herself begins to physically and psychologically deteriorate. The destruction of the material world and the suffering of its spiritual custodian occur simultaneously, revealing that the two are inseparable rather than opposed. Such imagery stands in direct opposition to the Gnostic conception of matter as disposable or intrinsically corrupt. Aronofsky instead insists that violence against creation is violence against a living reality that possesses genuine moral significance.

This reaches one of its clearest expressions in the infamous sequence involving the broken sink. Mother’s repeated warnings that the pipe will burst are ignored as the guests continue to crowd upon it, until it finally collapses and floods the house. The scene is almost absurd in its simplicity, yet therein lies its force. Humanity is presented as possessing both knowledge of the consequences of its actions and the freedom to avoid them, yet continually choosing immediate gratification over stewardship. Ecological collapse is therefore not portrayed as an unavoidable tragedy, but as the predictable consequence of arrogance, entitlement and indifference.

Yet this house is not merely a house on its own, nor is Mother simply a mother a priori. She is paired with the Father, portrayed magnificently by Javier Bardem. He is a storyteller, creator and promulgator of life whose love knows no bounds. He is, in some sense, a Deleuzian wet-dream of infinite and ever-expanding creativity, endlessly generating new expressions of beauty whilst permitting each to exist with its own independence. His generosity, however, borders upon the tragic. Time and again he welcomes strangers into the home despite Mother’s objections, continually extending mercy where justice would demand restraint. Even after the crystal is shattered, after Cain murders Abel, after the house descends into chaos and ultimately after humanity consumes his own son in an unmistakably Eucharistic inversion, the Father continues to forgive. His love is inexhaustible, but humanity continually mistakes divine mercy for divine permission. In allowing humanity its freedom, he also permits the continual desecration of that which he loves most deeply.

It is here that Aronofsky’s theology departs most radically from a Gnostic worldview. The central tragedy of mother! is not that humanity finds itself trapped within an evil material order, but that it repeatedly profanes a creation that is fundamentally good. The horror emerges not from the existence of matter, but from humanity’s inability to recognise it as gift rather than possession. Creation is not a prison from which one ought to escape through hidden knowledge; it is an act of divine generosity that demands gratitude, stewardship and rightly ordered love.

But as discussed by Thérèse, whilst the Father may love all of creation equally, He does indeed have favourites.

And the Father’s favourite is us. He marries the Mother, a creation whom He loves, cherishes and continually restores, yet He ultimately grants humanity a uniquely privileged place within creation, for we are His ultimate creation. It is precisely because of this privileged position that He entrusts the house to us. Such a gift, however, is also a burden. In granting humanity freedom, the Father also permits us to ruin that which He Himself loves. We abuse, berate, neglect and exploit the Mother. We trample over her home, violate her hospitality and repay her care with indifference. But worst of all, we kill her child - the Father’s child - born within this very house.

And in the film’s ultimate act of theological perversion, after abusing the Mother time and time again and taking advantage of the Father’s inexhaustible love and mercy, humanity commits its greatest sin. Upon the birth of the Son, we seize the very gift the Father has entrusted to us, kill Him, and consume His body in an unmistakable inversion of the Eucharist. What should be the supreme expression of gratitude becomes the supreme expression of entitlement. Rather than receiving the Son as a gift, humanity devours Him as though even divine grace were another commodity to be consumed. We thus find ourselves indexed within a dialectical fluxion of joy and sorrow: rejoicing in the gift whilst simultaneously destroying its giver and engaging in act of both solemn remembrance and merrisome celebration. Tis both an event of grace dampened by our misdeeds and a funeral brightened by the love of God. Such tension is never alleviated, for it permeates existence in a physical realm, where we fail to position ourselves appropriately in the physico-spiritual plane whilst constantly consuming the infinite currency of God’s love.

What terrible acts we inflict upon the Mother. And what immeasurable grace the Father continually bestows upon us.

Thus, whilst the Father continues to love humanity, and whilst we shall forever occupy a privileged place within His creation, such love ought never to be mistaken for licence. A relationship is, after all, a two-way street. Love that is never reciprocated ceases to resemble communion and instead becomes exploitation. If we are indeed the beloved, then it is our duty to offer something in return - not because the Father requires our gifts, but because gratitude is the natural response to generosity.

To love the Father, therefore, is necessarily to love the Mother, or more specifically the planet that sustains our material existence. She is not God Himself, nor should she become an object of worship, but she is the living embodiment of His creative love and His providential plan for humanity. In caring for creation we neither worship nature nor diminish God; rather, we honour the One whose love is continually expressed through it. It is for this reason that we ought to love and preserve our planet through both the material and immaterial conceptions of transitive love outlined above. The Earth is not merely the place in which humanity happens to exist, but the first and greatest gift entrusted to us by the Father. To destroy it is therefore not simply an ecological failure, but a profound failure of gratitude.

The domination and exploitation of our planet is therefore not just due to a positive philosophy of capital but a negative gnostic philosophy where we do not regard our physical existence as divine and love-worthy but a mere means to an end of faux-spiritual gratification. So, it is not enough to reject the promotion of capital and consumption in order to achieve a rightly ordered state of love, for we must also reject the rejection of the saliency of matter and physical existence. Since your body does matter, and that lake, or tree, or mountain matters also.

Ultimately, mother! is far more than an environmental allegory or a retelling of biblical history. It presents, perhaps unconsciously, a profoundly anti-Gnostic vision of reality. Whilst the Gnostic seeks liberation from the material world through the acquisition of hidden knowledge, Aronofsky instead presents creation as something intrinsically meaningful and worthy of love. The horror of the film does not stem from humanity’s imprisonment within matter, but from its continual desecration of a world that was freely given as an act of divine generosity.

In this sense, mother! is not ultimately about climate change, nor is it simply a Christian allegory. It is about gratitude. Aronofsky presents creation as an act of love, and humanity’s greatest sin is not merely that it destroys the Earth, but that it destroys a gift it neither earned nor fully understands. Such destruction is therefore more than ecological collapse; it is a theological failure - a refusal to reciprocate the love that first brought creation into being. The film thus rejects the Gnostic impulse to despise matter, instead affirming the material world as something sacred precisely because it is loved into existence by God.

This is, in many respects, one of Christianity’s most distinctive theological claims. God does not merely create the material world and abandon it, nor does He call humanity to escape from it. Rather, He enters into it through the Incarnation, sanctifying matter by assuming it Himself, and promises not the abandonment of the body but its resurrection. Creation is therefore not an obstacle to salvation, but the very theatre through which divine grace, sacrifice and redemption are made manifest. To reject the material world is, in this sense, to reject one of God’s greatest gifts.

To love the Father, therefore, is necessarily to love the Mother - not as an object of worship, but as the living expression of His creative will and divine generosity. If, as I have argued, love possesses a transitive quality, then our love for God necessarily extends to His creation, just as our love for one another extends to the conditions that sustain human flourishing. The question posed by mother! is therefore not whether God continues to love humanity (for throughout the film, the Father repeatedly demonstrates that He does indeed love humanity) but whether humanity is capable of returning that love through gratitude, stewardship and reverence for the world entrusted to it. In the end, Aronofsky’s masterpiece is not a warning that we are trapped within a fallen material existence, but a lament that we have forgotten how to love the one we were first commanded to tend.

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So spoke the Teacher on the eve of his execution.

In my last essay, I detailed my precise, albeit obvious, understanding of the nature of truth, the core of it as it pertains to living, breathing people who are themselves concerned with living and breathing.

I concluded that in the majority of cases, what is ‘true’ is readily within the scope of our knowledge and power. Uncertainty calls us often to remember, and what we remember is a universal certainty that shows that our particularity, our individual natures and individual troubles, are not ultimately unique to us, but instead occur within the scope of the universal – what is true for all is true for one, after all. This is the foundation of truth for the living. And now that we have worked out the least of these, the lowest, let us turn our heads upwards to the highest.

If the basest truth is grounded in the idea that we as individuals dissolve into the universal and redeemed, the most refined, complex and ornate truth will reveal that the individual is separate from the universal and cut out from it. The basic truth will help you survive. It is a tool. The highest truth will help you to truly live. It will shape the facets of your being and guide your head, heart, hands. Perhaps it has begun to already, for this truth is largely manifest in reality now, but its true essence is forgotten. So Nietzsche was correct when he said that Jerusalem had long outlived Rome, but it is just as true that Christendom’s earliest, strongest memories are fading, while fresh Romans are born every day. In my last essay, I told a story of two truths, which illustrates what I am attempting to get at, which I will reiterate here and then expand upon:

When humanity awoke to itself for the first time, it made two fundamentally opposing realisations. The first, that in the tundra, the desert, the jungle, the world was a dangerous place, sparse and frightful. Tooth and claw hid in thick darkness and the skies were full with terrible lights and cold water. The second, that all of this rotated around them, that wherever they chose to sit, there too the universe itself chose to pivot.

The God was with them.

And because of this, they endured these threats. Because of this they controlled them, shaped them, bent them to their will. From the skies they brought rain, from the beasts they cut meat, and little by little, they found their place. As time wore on, the world grew larger and darker. It was not only nature that they suffered but each other. Opposing peoples pillaged and murdered. And within their own ranks was theft, deceit, violence. But nonetheless the stars drew their patterns and the rivers whispered their secrets.

The God was with them.

Larger, darker still became the world, as these people were enslaved, foreigners in a land that despised them, and made to build great monoliths dedicated to the glory of their own subjugation. But nonetheless, the God was with them. And when even a small portion of them escaped, and walked and died and walked to find new lands to call their home, a greater empire claimed them, and then another, with technology capable of stirring the bowels of the Earth, capable of bringing the very land itself to the mountain top. These people looked around and saw what had succeeded, what felt the best and was most easy: to exploit, destroy, indulge, violate, and oppress. And in this darkness, under the sprawling knife, these people reached their greatest understanding, the greatest certainty of their eternal reward.

A man was born, and The God was with them.

Not around them or beyond them. No, he walked amongst them, talked and broke bread with them, looked like them and suffered like them. In the most absolute sense, the God was with them. And with His time upon the Earth, the God imparted the culmination of their history, the imprint of Himself upon each of them. He said that his kingdom was not of this world, that there, the strong were weak and the weak were strong, the rich poor and the poor rich, that the first would be last and the last would be first. He showed them the truth of their belief, that the God had indeed been with them since their foundation, for He would suffer as they had in the greatest, die as they had in the most treacherous, and rise again as they surely would in the highest. And he did. Thus there was a split in truth, in existence, a choice. The World or The God.

There is a distance between these truths, and they do not overlap. Yet humanity stands between them, occupying both. They are the object of the world and the subject of God. It is therefore humanity’s freedom to embrace one or the other, to choose either to revel in the straightest paths of the World and prosper of their nature, or deny the world and turn away from it completely. But this story does not reflect upon whether the truths are to be judged equally, simply that they are to be judged. As shall be seen they are not created equal, for what does it mean to be against the world? What does the God-man mean when He says that His kingdom is ‘not of this world’?

The world is a dangerous place. The more we learn about its breadths and depths, it is this truth that becomes apparent to us. Even when we ourselves are not directly affected, we cannot deny the larger structures and mechanisms that unfold, by our own designs or otherwise, against the interests of the human race. Indeed, it is agreed that the universe itself is destined to descend into entropy, expand perhaps indefinitely into a dark and sterile silence, while we, within it, are driven by vices that seem baked into our own biology to cheat and deceive and sabotage each other and ourselves.

Without employing terms such as good or evil, let us simply say that it is easier, less resistant, more available to sink than it is to rise, to rest than it is to move. Our infinite ambitions are paired with a finite existence. We unite to divide, forming larger and larger groups to distinguish ourselves from other growing bodies, all to generate difference, hierarchy. This is natural to us. It is natural to nature too, red in tooth and claw. But we are not so natural. Since the beginning, we have cut ourselves apart from the world. We alone walk proud and upright, not level or leaning toward the earth. And we observe this world and believe ourselves to have a place in it, a purpose, unfounded and unsubstantiated by the evidence of our own existence. But we are born with it, into it. So we say from the beginning, The God is with us.

But if God is not of the World, in that He does not reside within it, or is a product of it, what is He? He has told us already. He truly is ‘not of this World’. He is a denial of it, of its nature and its being. He is, as Pseudo-Dionysius asserts, apophatic to our worldly knowledge. The world expects a God of hierarchy, of brazen power, destruction and punishment. It expects a God of riches, pleasure, and cruelty. For these are indeed the forces that govern the world, and which we might call idols.

But God is not of the world. He appears as a man, truly a man, capable and destined of fear and trembling. He does not fight or conquer or dominate. His company is the weak. His reward is death. If the world is universal, he is individual. If the world is violent, he is peaceful. And furthermore, here is the clearest opposition. The world divides itself against itself. It is mired in hatred and conflict. Thus, God’s character can only be the truest embodiment of love. It is this fact which grants God all power, all strength, and all wisdom. For hatred can only repel itself, dividing and dividing until there is nothing left. But love embraces otherness and takes it into itself.

So the Teacher went gladly, fearfully to the Cross, as the hatred of the world sought to destroy Him. And by all worldly understanding it did, for the crucifixion is the greatest failure, the greatest suffering, the greatest fall. But it had to be this way, for God is not of this world. Thus it becomes the greatest triumph, for where hatred destroys, it is exactly there where love builds up. Hence the Teacher says, ‘It is finished.’ For the highest truth has been made self-evident. That the finite culmination of the lowest, most futile suffering might be the beginning of an eternal, ever-expanding, glorious revolution. That in spite of the world’s hatred, and indeed because of it, love shall overcome it in its entirety. To be against the world then is to embrace it; to be against hatred is to be for love, which has no enemies. So Paul, struck blind to the world and given sight by the heavens, says, ‘If God is with us, who can be against us?’

Do you understand me, of the nature of this truth and the measure of its greatness?

Perhaps this all seems obvious. But I do not think people truly comprehend it, what it means to be against the world. Some shut themselves away. Others conflate God’s truth with the truth of the world and believe their wills to be the same. And some simply choose the truth of the world to be their truth and are happy to be measured by its rules and lifted by its currents. They cast off their foreign mantle and say ‘I am of the world. I am with the world. There is nothing more than the world.’ However, I implore you never to do this, for it is again in the nature of the world that nothing may be greater than it. But turn against the world, and in doing so hold it all in the palm of your hand as though it were no bigger than a walnut, and love it for its infinite imperfection, and you will know the God of love and peace in eternity. For he is with you then, beside you then, the young, hopeful, strange one, saying ‘Go, and do likewise.’

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For many, when understanding someone has gender-based issues of self-perception leading to mental health problems we may seek to aid their troubles in some-way-shape-or-form. Yet this simplistic understanding (yet not necessarily incorrect) outlook of Gender Dysphoria may apply to the looksmaxxing community and thus the question arises whether gender affirming care should be given to such a demographic.

This question was not thought of by me, but was the joking/not-joking product of far-right Tik-Tok provocateur Neo-Coom who put this question forward. Whilst I do not share his attitudes, views or outlook on anything – it was a good and interesting question to put forward.

Yet the question of gender affirming care is rather less pertinent due to the underlying question of whether looksmaxxers suffer from Gender Dysphoria. The title of this essay may lead you to believe that I would like to focus on the political and financial questions of gender affirming care. However, I will leave this highly politicised concept up to you. Rather the more interesting question to put our attention to, is as to whether looksmaxxers suffer from Gender Dysphoria.

To maintain a motif, Google AI overview defined Gender Dysphoria as “the significant distress from a mismatch between one’s gender identity (internal sense of self) and their sex assigned at birth, often causing anxiety, depression, and discomfort with one’s body or social role”.

This is of course not the same thing as gender non-conformity since one can have dysphoria without wanting to stop conforming to their societal gender norm. Similarly, it is possible (yet not probable) that someone would want to change gender for reasons other than Gender Dysphoria. Thus Gender Dysphoria need not be about being Transgender, but is simply about the mental distress of gender-based ideals not corresponding to one’s physical state.

Now let us dive into the looksmaxxing community which prima facie has an obsessive need to fix flaws in their appearance, or in other words looks-max. This may seem to simply be a case of collective Body Dysmorphia, yet if we clarify the complexities of gender and the deep-seated ideology of the looksmaxxing community, we may come to find that it is also Gender Dysphoric rather than simply Body Dysmorphic.

Let’s start by looking at the ideology of the looksmaxxing community. It believes first and foremost in “objective standards of beauty”. Yet as we know, whilst some objective measures of beauty exist i.e. clear skin, facial symmetry and harmony, the totality of the pure notion of beauty is extremely theory-laden. Looksmaxxers are blind to this, and from their alt-right, incel, black-pill and red-pill origins base their so-called “objective beauty standards” in highly patriarchal contemporary western standards of beauty.

Objective beauty standards do exist and have been empirically shown to cross race and culture due to how Homo Sapiens implicitly select for evolutionary advantageous features in people. The looksmaxxer accepts this and is oddly in a more informed and educated mind-set than most of the population. They know the objective benefits of height, strong bone structure, good smiles, clear skin and good hair. Such aspects are undeniable and should be uncontroversial to accept, hence why most of the population implicitly accepts this.

Yet the looksmaxxer goes beyond mere implicit acceptance for the salience of this information is far too great. Detached from the real, they live in a simulation of romance where clicks replace conversation and phantasies of attraction subsume basic biological attraction (which involves much more than mere looks). This simulatory existence where phantasy permeates their experience results in a normativity of disappointment.

Disappointment not in their looks, but disappointment in themselves as men. This phantasy of attraction, is predicated upon such assumptions:

• One can only be a real, whole person as a man iff one is a “real man”

• One is a real man iff “women want to date” said man

• It is jointly necessary and sufficient for a woman to date a man iff the man is greater than or equal to their level of attractiveness.

• The jointly necessary and sufficient conditions for a man to be attractive, are universal factors + androgenic factors of physical attractiveness.

And herein lies the main issue at hand, that the looksmaxxers sense of self is not predicated upon a need to look “better” (like those who work-out or try to cut down on sugar) but a need to become a “man” via looking more “like a man”.

Because consider the four different categories of sex – chromosomal, gonadal, hormonal and phenotypical. The looksmaxxer, assuming they were born a conventional cisgender male, is well aware that they are a man in the normal sense of the word, and thus biologically is a man in all four categories - XY Chromosomes, penis and testes (which does not necessarily have to be visible or functioning), male-patterns of hormonal development (i.e. estrogen for androgenic brain development and testosterone for bodily development) and looking “like a man”.

Yet we ought to give greater credence to the concept of looking “like a man” since such a category can, as we know, be delineated further. And it is in this further delineation in which we find the conceptual backbone for the structure of Gender Dysphoria. This is due to the phantastical notion that looking “like a man” is equivalent to “being a man”.

For the looksmaxxer, amongst many other terms, they have categories of manhood due to the perverted synthesis of patriarchal values, attractability and gender identity. These categories are present implicitly through the PSL scale which “objectively” measures attractiveness via analysing Facial Harmony, Balance, Symmetry, Sexual Dimorphism. Here are the perverted categories below:

• 2 PSL - Subhuman

• 3 PSL – Low Tier Normie (LTN)1

• 4 PSL – Mid Tier Normie (MTN)

• 5 PSL – High Tier Normie (HTN)

• 5.5 PSL - Chadlite

• 6 PSL - Chad

• 6.5 PSL - Giga Chad

• 7 PSL - Adamlite

• 7.5 PSL - Near perfection/Nearly a True Adam

As one can discern through the nomenclature of the categories, such ranking is not merely based on attractiveness, but also on a sense of fundamental dignity which exists in a depraved persephonic matrimony with androgyny.

Evidently, the simple sense of human self-worth for the looksmaxxer is unfortunately tied to this scale, and is based upon a deeper, yet not necessarily valid, understanding of the male gender. Thus their dysphoria is not merely based upon superficial looks, but in the sub-genders of ‘man’.

Through the simulacrum of attractiveness embedded within the hyperreal simulation - paired with deep ideological thought – the looksmaxxer sees ‘man’ not as a basic ostensive signifier but an identity that holds deeper complexity with greater meaning than it should merit. He sees ‘man’ as being predicated mostly upon looks, which creates sub-genders of ‘man’ that each hold “objective” worth based upon attractiveness. When his sub-gender does not match with the sub-gender of desired “objective” worth, he is not merely upset but dysphoric.

To alleviate this dysphoria, the looksmaxxer engages in a variety of remedies that focus not only on the phenotype, but the underlying hormonal factors that aid in determining the phenotype of the sub-gender. He will bone-smash, work out, mew, get surgery, take peptides, inject steroids, get leg-extension surgery – all in the name of alleviating his dysphoria. Such alleviation can only really be considered as gender affirming care.

It seems odd and counterintuitive to think of such a thing, yet to all those who do not experience gender dysphoria the underlying notion of gender dysphoria is a concept that is utterly foreign and counterintuitive to us. Whilst I am aware of what is culturally “manly” and what features (physical or personality-wise) are attractive, I have never thought of or considered my status as ‘man’ in a perilous state. And it is this experience, or lack thereof, that puts such a line of discussion in the realm of queerity2. So now I leave it up to you the readers to determine whether or not gender-affirming care should be given to looksmaxxers, for I remain agnostic on such a point due to my uncertainty and unfamiliarity with the looksmaxxing state of mind.

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Recently, whilst listening to the song I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool by Kate Fagan, I thought it interesting to extend and complicate these earlier claims. Although ostensibly simple, the fetishisation of class becomes a particularly revealing object of desire when examined through the lens of its imitatory subcultures. Fagan’s song thus compelled me to articulate this phenomenon more fully.

Because in the song, Kate explicitly refuses coolness on the grounds of its “chemical” and financialised character. And in this evaluation, her intuition is fundamentally correct.

If dyed hair is “in,” so to speak - as it was during the 1980s - then the object of coolness, whose mimetic force is commanded by the Big Other, comes to be experienced as an authentic mode of being. It is due to self-identifying libidinal forces that such a state of being acts as an object of desire. The self chases endlessly after the carrot on the stick in order to attain the unattainable wholeness. Such a state of affairs is thus dysphoric in nature, since unity is present through the object of desire that is the cool image. The resulting dysphoria of individuality is unsettling precisely because the Symbolic Order is structured such that the Imaginary apprehends semiotic wholeness only through a matrimonial fusion of subject and object - here, the person and their dyed hair. To exist without this representation of being is to experience a divorce from reality itself: an ontology perpetually in flux and devoid of anchoring signifiers.

Once widespread, this perspective crystallises into the cultural psyche, such that the collective Imaginary becomes capable of creating the experience of dyed hair as authentic. Yet such a state of affairs only arises due to a significant restructuring of the Symbolic Order through the continuous proliferation of fetishised representations of dyed hair. And herein lies the essence of coolness – a collective state of neurosis resulting from a reconfiguration of the semiotic nature of objects and their associations steeped in the progressive heart of modernity.

Through a satisfactory double entendre, Fagan sees beyond the ostensibly “chemical” nature of cool dyed hair. One’s hair never naturally has a dyed look (in most cases of course), and so one must rely upon unnatural “chemical” methods to bring about a prima facie inauthentic mode of being. Yet in the oddest fashion, this very performance of authenticity comes to constitute authenticity in and of itself. It is as stated before, a matrimony between the partial self and the object on the path toward becoming. Thus, although the subject unconsciously apprehends dyed hair as “chemical,” it is nevertheless loved and admired as natural and authentic, precisely because coolness, as a simulacrum, relies upon a condition of collective neurosis.

Kate subverts this logic by bringing to light what remains submerged within the depths of the collective Super-Ego. She reveals not only that the hair of her cool contemporaries is literally “chemical,” but that their hair in and of itself - alongside the person, their clothes, their breath, their body, and even their status as cool - is chemical in kind. The so-called matrimony between self and fetishised object of consumption to alleviate dysphoria is “chemical” in nature. It is not “chemical” merely because becoming necessitates relation to an external object, but because the subject fails to comprehend the complex and constitutive relation between self and object.

If Dasein requires dyed hair, then such a requirement may indeed exist; yet Dasein, properly understood, knows why this desire arises and recognises it as a condition of its own being. Forgetful fetishisers of phantasy in object form never truly become, for their relation to objects of consumption remains irreducibly “chemical.”

The “chemicality” of coolness, in its inherently fetishised mode of mimicry, demands further examination when the object of imitation is structured by the semiotics of class.

This is something also present in Kate’s analysis of coolness.

I don’t wanna be too cool
I don’t wear the hip clothes
I just shop at AMVETS

The wearing of “hip” clothes is and has always been based on the image of something progressively subversive. Often, this subversion is anchored in class signification rather than in other objects of leftist admiration.

What Kate is unaware of, due to the state of collective cultural neurosis, is that the “hip” clothes she denigrates as symbols of hegemonic taste in a Bourdieusian manner were, in fact, historically the garments of the financially constrained and culturally marginalised. The sailor, the miner, the farmer, the peasant – demographics of individuals whose identities were authentically expressed through food, clothing, and tradition - were once objects of cultural distaste.

Bell-Bottom trousers, “Bob Dylan Caps”, Blue Jeans and the so-called “peasant” blouse (items based off the previous demographics stated) all became staples of fashion in the 1970s, and thus objects of coolness1. Yet coolness as we know is a mere simulacrum of progressive subversion, and in this case, a subversion of class. And until its point of neutralisation, the object of coolness possess a detached perverted reference to a class-based subversion. Thus consumers of these garments exist in a state of simultaneous awareness and unawareness regarding the class implications embedded in their acquisition and display. By the 70s, these fashionable items became cool precisely because their images had already been widely proliferated and fetishisation had become endemic.

That image is one of struggle, resilience, and fortitude forged through poverty2. This is precisely why modernity, in its abstraction from embodied ethical life, remains profoundly Christian in form. No longer is the image of moral brilliance present through exemplifying royal values but the values of the deprived and marginalised. Meagreness has sublimated strength, and struggle supplants success. One need no longer to read the script of Caesar, for his throne has been usurped by the lowly Nazarene. Sandals in lieu of red boots, thorns instead of laurels, and admonition over applause. This ethos of slavish humility so ingrained in the graceful nature of Christianity finds itself within an ethical simulacrum which in turn acts as the meta-structure, in which class-fetishisation occurs.

For true humility require not that one struggle as Christ did – not only because His struggle saved us from such a need, but because we must be humble in our hearts and minds. Our very essence of being constituted within our souls must be humble, graceful and lowly.

However, this key Christian notion became a salient point of reference and thus an integral representational ideal in the collective system of semiotic objects. Thus, it became both structurally foundational, and representationally popular within the zeitgeist. Yet such factors are what allowed for the image of the Christian ethic to strain so far from its original referent, till it became a simulacrum where it is now detached from the referent of Holy Ethics. All that remains is the empty, self-referential husk of worldly ethical performativity.

“Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven” - Matthew 6:1

And this performativity requires not good works, nor a path towards internal virtue, but a display of “Christly” impoverishment, humility and relatability in regards to the poor and marginalised. Working at a soup bank at Christmas is not possible, but purchasing a trade workers trousers and Carhartt jackets is necessary. As the Christian ethic becomes a simulacrum in the form of empty class fetishisation, so too does the concept of good works itself become simulatory. At the unconscious level, the Symbolic dictates the ethico-aesthetic taste of the modern subject and thus the Big Other demands that style, vocabulary, accents and consumption triumph over love, care, and The Sacred. Even if the subject is consciously aware of Godly ethics and the “right thing” (i.e. volunteering at a soup kitchen) it is the logic of the spectacle that the performance of fauxletarianism is required to signify moral worth.

It is this logic that dictates that one’s ontology - tainted by wealth and privilege - can attain wholeness under the gaze of the Big Other only through detachment from the undesirable and attachment to the desirable.

“The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist, and its power is employed above all to enforce this claim.” - Guy Debord

Thus, the modern subject who does not suffer in accordance with the collective phantasy of noble proletarian struggle is rendered morally deficient. Such individuals are compelled to lose themselves, only to reconstitute their identities within the phantasy of noble proletarian struggle. This ego-ideal of spiritual authenticity in light of aestheticized ideal-ego is a demand from the Big Other that endlessly produces tension. We see such tension most pronounced in the extremities of phantasy present within radical leftism.

Here the phantasy of struggle, when sufficiently phantastical, ceases to function as mere ideological narrative and instead precipitates jouissance as surplus-enjoyment through the castration of prima facie capitalistic desires. For most subjects, the Ego metabolises class fetishisation through the register of aesthetic pleasure alone. This configuration constitutes the neurotic subject of progressivism; one that, crucially, also encompasses conservatism, insofar as no subject escapes the all-encompassing gaze. Yet when the Symbolic is more rigidly ordered by fauxletarian signification, the saliency of phantasy forecloses the Ego’s ability to remain within a purely aesthetic neurosis i.e. the tension of ego-ideal and ideal-ego forces a sublation into a new dialectic of ethico-aestheticism.

Here, the class fetishiser is no longer forgetful but fully cognisant of their aesthetic choices; nevertheless, this awareness displaces neurosis from the aesthetic register into a moralistic one. Consider for a second the bourgeois Marxists who “fight for liberation, revolution and seek to engage in praxis”. Such subjects are well aware that they dress down, refuse so-called “capitalist clothing,” and reject bourgeois standards of dress which involve mimetically appropriating the aesthetic codes of the poorest strata of contemporary society. Yet they remain unaware that the so-called “ethic of revolution” is saturated with a false morality based on aestheticism. One that arises not from the primal impulse of agape, but from performative submission to the Marxian Big Other.

This ethical neurosis arises from the same structural conditions that generate the aesthetic fetishisation of class in which we are all, to varying degrees, implicated. The self is unable to apprehend itself as whole through its constitutive parts and is thus compelled to undergo an ontological surgery, wherein a class transplant is violently imposed. This class transplant, however, is not a transplantation of ontology proper, but of the ethos of the zeitgeist as it is mediated through the empty self-referential signifier of coolness. To then perform the phantasical struggle of the noble proletariat in an aesthetic is thus an attempt to escape one’s own cultural code in order to secure a more favourable state of affairs within the desire of the Big Other.

“[The Narcissistic] identity is framed through the luxury of a consolatory mirror image afforded by the ubiquitous presence of the media in our lives” - Christopher Lasch

Such a situation is uniquely characteristic of modernity due to the dissemination of a detached Christian Ethos. A fifteenth-century nobleman adorned in extravagant colours would have been culturally lauded for the overt display of stature and status. By contrast, the wearing of white tie and tails in the twenty-first century invites cultural admonition precisely because of its association with stature and status. Such cultural admonition does not exist independently, but is inscribed within the psyche through the structuring operations of the Symbolic Order itself.

The Big Other thus issues an injunction: that wealth and its associations be rendered as objects of distaste whilst poverty and its associations are fetishised. Therefore, in the terminal diffusion of “slave morality” into the depths of the psyche, the subject who does not materially inhabit poverty seeks to negate their socially dictated ontology by garnishing themselves with the trappings of poverty as an act of penance through the stigmata of workwear. Yet this is not penance proper, for penance and the absolution of sin require a conscious and intentional orientation toward mercy.

The phantastical idealisation of poverty is phantastical in nature, and is thus not predicated upon rationalistic deciphering of intuitions but submission to the ingrained logic of the spectacle. The Christian ethic, when detached from itself and proliferated in its liberalised form, functions as a dominant semiotic meta-structure within which idealised forms of poverty become an object of desire. In this corrupted spirit of Christ, we no longer tremble before Capitalism’s sacrificial lamb; instead, we revel in its slaughter. Their blood is a new colour of paint for a modernist exhibition, whilst their cries are spliced and remixed into a beat for Taylor Swift’s innovatively offensive upcoming Hip-Hop Album.

Exploited figures of capitalisms wrath are psychologically crucified not in the name of salvation, but for the purposes of aesthetic consumption. In the real, such figures endure forms of suffering and horror scarcely imaginable, yet are created by thine own hand. Yet we do not deal or engage with the real state of affairs, for our experience remains confined to the phantasy that occludes it.

Within post-colonial studies, the “Myth of the Noble Savage” remains a salient object of critique; yet we must also attend to the parallel construction of the “Myth of the Noble Proletariat.” This myth is deeply embedded within the zeitgeist and attains immanence through the apparatus of coolness itself.

The peasant blouse, for example, in its modern short sleeve form is not merely chic; it is a cultural perversion of pain and poverty that has become detached from its originating referent. What now appears as a neutralised garment - stripped of struggle in the 21^st century - once functioned as a subversion of wealth in the mid-to-late 20^th century.

Now I beg of you to think, how many women’s blood, sweat and tears are sutured into the embroidery we have so effortlessly co-opted? How many farmers’ and miners’ lives were sacrificed upon the altar of market forces so that thine denim might come to life?

We wear neutered struggle and speak in oppressed tongues all due to the phantastical notions of class-based struggle as an object of desire. Yet struggle is not a noble aesthetic, but the symptomatic product of Man’s fallen nature and his inhabitation of a corrupted kingdom. And our kingdom of aestheticness is built not upon innovation, allyship, or camaraderie, but upon blood, struggle, and pain.

Yet we cannot help ourselves, for the fetishisation of class persists wherever progressive imagery has been severed from its moral spirit. Echoes of this morality linger until the point of neutralisation; yet any echo, as such, constitutes a diabolical failure. The echo is merely the image of the original voice, and it is the original voice itself that must be encountered.

In hearing the songs of the cotton picker, modern musical revisions state its great beauty. However, aesthetic restructuring of misery into unsublime beauty allows the subjugated worker’s voice to be encountered only as echo. To encounter these sorrowful songs directly is to be subsumed within the real rather than displaced into the hyperreal.

Yet an escape to the real is not merely a matter of leaving for the woods or turning off your mobile phone. Structure upon Structure upon Structure, constructs a labyrinth of unconscious semiotics from which escape becomes an ordeal of profound difficulty. And regardless of the progress made within this labyrinth, the subject remains enclosed within the supra-structure of class fetishisation. Any escape door we believe ourselves to glimpse proves to be a mirage in the desert of authenticity.

I could ramble on, I could discuss more culturally relevant items such as the syndrome of those who buy vintage but not second-hand, and purchase from thrift stores but not charity shops. However, I think the essence of my point at hand is dispelled. Our idea of coolness is, in part, predicated upon class fetishisation which we possess due to a morality of aestheticness.

In terms of what this means for our actions and future outlook of aesthetics and morality, I am not sure. I can only hope that we do our best to bring the latent morality of care that underlies class fetishisation into the light of day, where “true” action may replace fauxletarian performativity.

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There are various counter-points and counter-counter-points to what I have just said. I am not pretending to have solved anything, nor do I think what I have written is new/ has not been addressed before.

Rather, I write what I have written as a way to elucidate the muddied water of non-academic ethics. I find that many would-be-philosophers ascribe to ethical non-cognitivism due to the argument that ethics is nothing more than “Boo – Hurrah”. And this is a troubling sight to see, since non-cognitivism is not about “Boo - Hurrah” but about the sensicality and truthiness of ethical terminology.

So to all the non-cognitivists out there, I implore you to truly think about whether ethical terms can be sensical, semantically-adequate referents to reality. It may be the case that ethical non-cognitivism is true. Yet until such pondering of epistemological proofs occur, the position you hold is confused and untenable!

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Christians of the non-liberal non-theologically-loose variety are often divided into two camps of argument when it comes to discussing topics like deceased unbaptised infants.1 One camp would argue that such infants are damned due to their lack of a Baptism. The other, would argue that Baptism is not just the visible worldly practice of water and ritual – henceforth whilst the deceased infant did not partake in a worldly ritual, they may have been metaphysically and spiritually baptised through other methods and thus may be saved.

Whilst the latter is much more nuanced and attractive, it still holds onto the notion that Baptism is necessary for Salvation - a notion I dispute.

Such a Christian may reply and state that scripture clearly shows that Baptism is necessary for Salvation. Yet the only part of scripture that makes an explicit connection between Baptism and Salvation is in Mark 16:16 which (as I will come to show very soon) does not show that Baptism is necessary for Salvation.

The argument against the necessary condition of Baptism for Salvation

Mark 16:16 - He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.2

To make my point clear, let us do two things. Let us split the verse into its two main statements

Statement 1: “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved”

Statement 2: “He that believeth not shall be damned”

Definitional addition – to be damned = to be not saved3

Therefore, we can restate Statement 2 as “He that believeth not shall be saved not”

So our two main statements are as follows:

Statement 1: “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved”

Statement 2: “He that believeth not shall be saved not”

Next let us reformulate the statements into second-order logic.

To begin such a formulation, we must define our predicates over the domains considering souls/persons.

Believes(x): person x Believes

Baptized(x): person x is Baptized

Saved(x): person x is Saved

Statement 1: ∀x((Believes(x)∧Baptized(x))→Saved(x))

Statement 2: ∀x(¬Believes(x)→¬Saved(x))

Statement 1 reads as - for all instances of person x, if they believe and are baptised then they are saved. Or in other words, for all who believe and are baptised, they suffice in guaranteeing their salvation.

Statement 2 reads as - for all instances of person x, if they do not believe then they are not saved. Or in other words, for all who do not believe they will suffice in guaranteeing their non-salvation.

Now let us take the contrapositive of both statements to make a more explicit point on the relation between Baptism and Salvation.

Contrapositive of Statement 1: ∀x(¬Saved(x)→¬Believes(x)∨¬Baptized(x))

Contrapositive of Statement 2: ∀x(Saved(x)→Believes(x))

The contrapositive of Statement 1 reads as - for all instances of person x, if they are not saved, then they do not believe or they are not baptised. Or in other words, whoever is not saved is necessarily either a non-believer or unbaptised.

The contrapositive of Statement 2 reads as – for all instances of person x, if they are saved then they believe. Or in other words, whoever is saved is necessarily a believer.

From what I have stated so far, I can safely and reputably state the following statements:

• Baptism and Belief are jointly sufficient conditions for Salvation

• Belief is the only stated necessary condition for Salvation

• The contrapositive of Statement 2 allows for the possibility that for all who are not Saved, are not Saved solely on the basis of their lack of belief.

• If Baptism was necessary for Salvation, then it would follow that ∀x(¬Saved(x)→ ¬Baptized(x)) or ∀x(Saved(x)→ Baptized(x)). And yet such is not the case. Therefore, Baptism is not shown to be necessary for Salvation.

Throughout the New Testament, Christ preaches the importance of Baptism, and its spiritual powers are clear to us through His own Baptism from John. It is also scripturally clear that Baptism is a key part of Christianity i.e.

Matthew 28:19 - Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost

And so it seems that upon Christ’s command, we not only should Baptize, but upon a divinely-based moral imperative must Baptize! But this necessity for Baptism does not necessitate that one affirm the false statement “Baptism is necessary for Salvation”.

Such a line of argument is in line with the notion that whilst it is necessary for one to do good works or go to Church, it does not follow that good works or going to Church is necessary for Salvation.

However, one may bring up John 3:5, which states “Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.”

One may argue that this explicitly shows how Baptism is necessary for salvation. Yet such is not the case, for there are three issues at hand. One issue is the question of there being an explicit relation whereby Baptism is necessary for Salvation. The second being whether any necessitating relation (implicit or explicit) exists. And the third issue being one of textual interpretation.

Let us begin with the third issue- textual interpretation. Prima Facie it seems that Christ is referring to a Baptism ceremony where one is spiritually cleansed via the physical water. Yet the story is more complicated than just that.

The context behind the text is as such:

¹There was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews:

² The same came to Jesus by night, and said unto him, Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God: for no man can do these miracles that thou doest, except God be with him.

³ Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

⁴ Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born?

⁵ Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.

⁶ That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.

Here we can see the possibility of ‘born of water’ being a reference to amniotic fluid within the womb - a physical birth - due to Nicodemus’s questions on how someone can be born again if they’ve already left the womb. Such a physical birth is ‘That which is born of the flesh is flesh’. Yet I admit, my attempts to negate the water reference seem quite a stretch.

But Christ Himself makes the distinction between being born of flesh and spirit in John 3:6. And the question arises as to whether being ‘born of the spirit’ simply refers to (in John 3:5) being ‘born of spirit’ or ‘born of water and of the spirit’. If being ‘born of water’ is simply a reference to the physical birth, then being born again is simply a matter of being ‘born of the spirit’.

Now if the notion of being ‘born again’ perfectly corresponds to Baptism, and if we take the standpoint from above, then we may argue that whilst a Baptism may be necessary for Salvation it seems that such a Baptism is not a ceremony of water. (Assuming an explicit relation whereby Baptism is necessary for Salvation)

However let us be more lax with our analysis and assume that being ‘born again’ is a matter of Baptism, and that a Baptism involves being ‘born of water and of the spirit’. So let us move onto the second issue, of whether a Baptism is necessary for Salvation, which I will do so by second-order logic.

Baptism = Being born of water and of the (Holy) spirit

BWater(x): person x is born of water

BSpirit(x): person x is born of the spirit

Saved(x): person x is Saved

Statement 3: “Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God”

And into a more standardised form of English suitable for our discussion.

Statement 3: “One cannot be saved unless they are born of water and born of the spirit”

To turn this into formal logic will be quite tricky due to the conjunction ‘unless’. In my opinion, the best way to formalise ‘unless’ in this case is to use it as an implication whereby the post-conjunctual clause is the antecedent and the pre-conjunctual clause is a negated consequent. It is similar to attempting to formulate ‘I’m hungry unless I eat’. The outcome is ‘If eating happens then hunger does not happen’.

And so we can reformulate the statement further.

Statement 3: “If one is born of water and born of the spirit then one will be saved”.4

Now into formal logic we get.

Statement 3: ∀x((BWater(x)∧BSpirit(x))→Saved(x))

This reads as for all instances of person x, if they are born of water and born of the spirit, then they will be saved. And so being born of water and the spirit are jointly sufficient conditions of Salvation.

Contrapositive of Statement 3: ∀x(¬Saved(x)→¬BWater(x)∨¬BSpirit(x))

This reads as for all instances of person x, if they are not saved, then they are either not born of water or born of the spirit. And so non-salvation necessitates that one did not engage in at least one of the ways of ‘birth’. It is not clear as to which condition of Baptism - being born of water or of the spirit - is the necessary one for Salvation if we assume that Baptism is necessary for Salvation.

Yet it seems very much plausible to state that it is the spiritual rebirth and not the water-based ritual, that is the necessary condition for Baptism and Salvation. And so it seems very probable to state that the worldly ritual of Baptism and acceptance into a visible church is not shown to be necessary for Salvation (as a universal imperative rather than a local one).

One may dislike my logical approach to the scripture at hand, and argue that I may take Christ’s purported words far too literally. Yet such a line of argument can be applied to anything else within the Bible. If we are simply taking loose ideas of words, grammar, meaning, and intention then my literal interpretation is just as valid as the metaphorical one.

Furthermore, if Baptism was necessary for Salvation, why did Christ not make this explicit? Christ constantly makes statements that clearly show a necessary relation between Belief and Salvation but never Baptism. Christ consistently focuses on how we should know Him and have faith in Him in order to be Saved, but it is only in the analysed Mark 16:16 that we see an explicit relation made between Salvation and Baptism.

Explicit instances of Christ showing the necessary condition of Faith/Belief for Salvation.

Matthew 7:21-23 - Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.

John 14:16 - Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.

John 10:9 - I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. They will come in and go out, and find pasture.

The various arguments for what constitutes Belief and Baptism is not something I wish to discuss. The discussions on what the consequences for Church teachings and its status as a gateway to Salvation is also something I do not wish to discuss today. But I hope I have made my argument clear to you all. Whilst the title of this essay is quite inflationary, it remains true that there is little-to-no strong evidence in favour of dogmatically affirming that a wordly Baptism of water is necessary for Salvation. The mystery of this sacrament remains mysterious, and it’s spiritual power is very much real, yet that does necessitate that the unbaptised are damned.

Pilate asked him, ‘So you are a king?’

             Jesus answered, ‘You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.’

Pilate asked, ‘What is truth?’

John 18:37-38

AN ELITE IS INEVITABLE 

BAD INTENTIONS CAN YIELD GOOD RESULTS 

EATING TOO MUCH IS CRIMINAL 

CHILDREN ARE THE CRUELEST OF ALL 

              Jenny Holzer, Truisms, 1982

It is a strange scene to imagine: The Son of God judged by Pontius Pilate, the local height of Roman authority who, try as he might, cannot find an offence against which to sentence the innocent, albeit eccentric young man. He speaks obliquely, saying ‘My kingdom is not of this world’, and finally, ‘I came into the world, to testify to the truth’. And in the midst of all of this trial – indeed this odd man’s life hangs in the very balance – Pilate takes pause. He asks a question that is given no answer (at least by the Evangelist); But he asks it nonetheless: ‘What is truth?’

Does such a question arise for the average individual as they muddle through the motions of their daily life? Or is it reserved for the ignorant one, the powerful one, who stood before the very incarnation of truth, the Word of God made flesh, and could not understand the content of what he was hearing. It is perfectly plausible for that question to never arise, for indeed one could live one’s whole life – and truly live it and suffer and win and fall and be lost and raised up again – atop the foundation of truly fundamental misunderstandings.

Ancient man did not know his place in the universe, believed wrongly that he lay at its apex, and that there, around his meagre, pelted living, the chariots of the infernal cosmos galloped eternally. And modern man may be equally as mistaken, caught in the infinite collisions of particles, sub-particles, quantum possibilities that define in its totality, his thought, deed, future, past, and present. He believes wrongly that he is free, that his decisions – his capacity to decide – is his own, rather than the temporal unfolding of eternal certainty. And yet, we do not think our ancestors lived half-lives; we do not consider their errant wanderings to have been in vain. Indeed, there is sometimes more life in the philosopher’s stone than in the atomic truths of lead and gold.

But what then must we do? Are we never to ask that baffling question – What is truth? On certain rainy days I must agree. There is no future in it. Just as worrying will not add another minute to your life, neither will that foolish pursuit. There is no truth in work or in play, in production or sloth, pleasure or pain. And Kant was right. We can never know things as they are in themselves. Ask what and who and where and how, but never, never ask why. But then the weather clears and I walk beside the river and there is some secret joy to that question – What is truth? I reflect upon my friends and the love that I have shared and the adversity I have shouldered and I am touched by a perfect clarity. ‘Yes! Yes!’ I cry out in my soul, ‘Yes! This is it, and I have known it my whole life. Truth is the kiss that endures after death. It is the kiss I share with the whole world at once. Yes!’ And then I walk on, and write my silly essays and drink my sugary drinks.

How do I parse these worlds, where crossing that street can destroy and create me? Indeed, what truth is there within these truths that can preserve me safely along this passage? It is not truth I need in that transition, but certainty. Is truth always certainty? No, of course not, but not all truths are created equal. While it may now be true that the days are short and cold, later they will be long and warm and my initial truth will be wrong. But if I say that the world revolves in cycles, and that change is not irreversible but regular, we can build something upon this truth. We can persist when the days are cold and short for we know that one day, they will be long and warm. This is truth. It is ancient truth and it is modern truth. It is living truth – in that it is the truth of a life that does not fear and tremble unless it is truly called to. Is this the species of truth that we are seeking? It is simple. It does not change. It is obvious. It lay beside the axe and bow of primordial hunters as another tool to survive, and it has not left our brains, although today we have perhaps forgotten it, along with our axes and bows. But there is someone who has not forgotten it in our strange era, and in her expression of it, this bold and self-apparent truth, she herself appears strange, perhaps even offensive.

Without further introduction, I present Jenny Holzer and her Truisms. There are many ways to interpret her long lists of bold, assertive phrases, but in them I believe she has condensed the very essence which we have been here discussing. Let us inspect one which I have quoted at the top of this essay: BAD INTENTIONS CAN YIELD GOOD RESULTS. It requires little qualification. Of course not ALL bad intentions yield good results but that is not what the sentence is claiming. Its claim is true in an eternal sense and thus we are inclined to disregard it. It speaks nothing specifically to our particular situation, nor does it provide us insight into the nature either of bad intentions or good results, and yet…

It is true.

And you must remember it, and never forget it. And never find yourself thinking that ‘Because the results were good, the intentions must also be good’ or its opposite, ‘I suspect this person had bad intentions and thus the result of their actions must always have a hidden flaw’. With Holzer’s truisms there is very little for one to doubt or indeed scrutinise. They are engineered this way. And perhaps part of her intention is to lampoon these very truths, parcel them into great, expansive boards that overwhelm people with their obviousness and lack of utility, but it is another self-apparent truth that all negations contain their objects, and while perhaps she pokes fun at the self-righteous, aggrandising book of Proverbs, the lady of Wisdom herself nonetheless speaks through, in italicised, blocky words.

I call these truths, these truisms, tools that rightfully go alongside axes and bows because they are instruments of survival. They are the hard bricks in the foundation of life that, if neglected, cause otherwise intelligent, strong-minded people to topple. They are the cornerstones that even shrewd builders may reject. Therefore I invite you to peruse (Jenny Holzer’s List of Truisms - Words of Women) but before you do, I cannot overstate how truly useful this kind of truth is and how truly difficult it is to reorient your brain to consciously consider them. After all, they are obvious. You ostensibly already know them, but they are so obvious and so known that when they are needed most, they are taken for granted and forgotten. We are those fresh faced soldiers who, when the horns of battle commence, become sudden amnesiacs who cannot hold or load their rifles. But the horns will blow again and again and we will learn not to freeze.

You can even create your own truisms as I have below (but store-bought is fine):

OVERTHINKING HAPPENS AT NIGHT

SELF-DOUBT IS OFTEN TOO EXTREME

GOOD THINGS WILL ONE DAY HAPPEN

INSPIRATION TAKES PRACTICE

NECESSITY IS NOT ALWAYS A VIRTUE

Often these very phrases appear at our lips when we see another in crisis. Someone denegreates their own efforts or is lost in their sorrows and we leap to these truisms without a second thought. But if we cannot apply them to ourselves, if we cannot deny the higher thinking that says ‘Ah, but these do not fit my particular situation’, then there is no truth in them at all. But of course, there is. It is we who lack truth then.

But have I not entirely missed the wood for the trees in Pilate’s speech? If my answer to his question is, ‘Truth is the state of the world as we understand it, but all that we live in misunderstanding is lived in contrast to the truth, those truths of which we are already aware,’ then I ignore the genesis of the question, of the man who claims to be a witness to the Truth. Of course, I am offering a secular vision; where people find their spiritual kicks is not of my concern. Faith’s passion after all is the height of the heart, and is invoked only in the greatest of crises. God may be able to solve all things, but you too, you who are weak and foolish and unremarkable, you too can solve some, many things within yourself. All you must do is remember.

But a word for the man who testifies to the Truth, a word to Him. Those ancient ones who believed themselves to be the center of the universe were not so wrong, for it gave them power and wisdom and dominance above the elements. The God was with them, even when rain wrecked them and earthquakes plundered them. And as time continued, and the world grew larger and darker, they did not forget the God that rode ahead of them in battle, even as they lost again and again. And in that vast darkness of the world, there was an inward shift. For all that triumphed before them was evil and wretched and gave sick pleasure and dealt mindless pain, but still the God was with them. He was with them against the World.

Thus arose a Man. This Man was the God and he spoke the Truth that they had known since the beginning, that there was strength in weakness and weakness in strength; that love, poor, defenceless love, would overcome the world in eternity; that they were, all of them, gods, and that God suffered and died. And that ignorant one, Pontius Pilate, could not understand, for he had built his truth upon the world and thought himself just and righteous as he sent the God-Man to his death.

This evaluation is the product of my passion and you need not follow it. Perhaps there is Truth toward the world rather than against it. If there is, I have not found it. But do not forget Truth’s purpose, which is to allow you to live, to save you from the world, as at one time your axes and your bows saved you. Do not forget them. Do not forget those Truths Of Which You Are Already Aware.

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And, of course, many of you will cry out:
“This is inegalitarian!”
“A flagrant violation of human rights!”
“How dare you relegate people to the bottom of a social ladder!”
“Society cannot survive without equality!”

                                                                      -

Yet before you carelessly hurl the rehearsed soundbites of modernity, allow me the courtesy of presenting my case.

Look around you: problems proliferate, solutions are proposed, action is forgotten, and people are resigning to apathy - a terrible state of affairs indeed.

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And yet Liberal Democracy has promised us that such a state of affairs would never occur – that a sensible and enlightened populace would wield its power for the betterment of society. However, the populace proper is neither sensible nor enlightened (this indictment extends to myself). As the fruits of our democratic system attest, our power has been ignorantly exercised not for the betterment of society, but for the betterment of certain personal phantasies detached from the real.

This is not to deny the historic triumphs of Liberal Democracy, but rather to observe that its once-ripe fruits have begun to rot. Its revolutionary vitality, born from the sublation of aristocratic and feudal society, has itself ossified into a new orthodoxy. Tis now the stagnant status quo that subjugates us all.

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Many populists however, would argue that the onus of our political stagnation is not on the populace but on a particular class of elites.

The Leftists blame the wealthy capitalists who lobby legislatures to advance policies that go against public approval.

The New-Right focus on the Woke Establishment composed of detached University Educated moralists who would rather focus on the condition of the Black Hijabi Polycule Amputee over infrastructure issues.

And a certain segment of the New-Right look toward the Jewish population. (I have nothing more to say on this falsehood).

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Besides the last perspective, the populist view is correct in many regards, and the essence of their proposals hold much weight. Yet the populist imagination habitually exaggerates the role of the mysterious “elite” in creating our present state of affairs. For whilst “the elite” hold power (by virtue of being the elite) Liberal Democracy has awarded an unimaginable amount of power to the populace proper.

Yet the populist may strike back, and retort that “the elite” have removed a great deal of the people’s power. But the populist is confused when considering how “the elite” have stripped the people’s power. There is indeed truth in understanding that the actions of “the elite” may be antithetical and antagonistic to the people, but this by no means confirms the proposition that “the elite have stripped away the people’s power”.

For each individual remains powerful in their ability to campaign, debate, protest and vote. This capacity is not ornamental nor vestigial, like the forgotten headphone jack on a backpack; it is genuine and functional. The powers conferred by Liberal Democracy are formidable, and many of the transformative reforms of modernity could scarcely have emerged under the decrepitly insulated hierarchies of pre-modernity.

The aristocracy of old neglected vast swathes of humanity - women, the poor, the queer, the disabled, the irreligious, and many others.

But your vote, your campaigns, and your voice changed all that. Because the power each citizen has under Liberal Democracy is truly powerful.

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Yet herein lies the very problem of Liberal Democracy. You and I are far too powerful.

The grotesque image of our political affairs is merely a reflection of our collective soul. Our post-lapsarian ontology necessitates that we act as both sovereign and saboteur over this Earthly Kingdom we rule.

Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.

- T.S Elliot, The Wasteland

When that highly educated politician appears to speak like a fool on live television, it is not out of ignorance but fear - fear of uttering the wrong phrase before a pack of moral hounds eager to devour any misstep.

When that lawmaker - seasoned by years of study and service - proposes a tepid, uninspired policy, it is because a herd of uneducated and uninterested citizens would recoil at the sight of genuine reform. For a phantasy of change is but a phantasy.

When a party leader pledges sweeping transformation yet delivers only modest, incremental reforms, it is not deceit but necessity. Subtle, systemic change - though vital - is impossible to communicate to a populace that demands only what can be seen and felt within the confines of their own immediate reality.

                                                                      -

If the world of Liberal Democracy sucks, it is because we have made it as such.

Like a child that is awarded a responsibility, we have carelessly misused our powers as trinkets of play, rather than as vital tools to aid thy neighbour and self. Thus, tis high time we remove some of those powers.

For citizenry is not a right; it is a privilege. It is a privilege to have certain powers in civil society. As human beings we are endowed certain God given rights, and it is the responsibility of each human being to respect these rights. For as Kant puts it,

“Any respect for a person is properly only respect for the law”

And to respect the law, is to act in accordance with God’s will.

                                                                      -

Yet whilst the polity may strive to enshrine the various human rights, dominion over one’s neighbour is not among them. Your vote is not just determining the outcome of your life, but the lives of all your fellow citizens.

Moreover, the goal of the polity is not necessarily co-current with God’s will and thus with human rights. The goals of the polity are, and always have been, the success and flourishing of the polity – by whatever metric that may be.

Thus, our political power is nothing less than the power to determine the fate of the polity itself.

                                                                      -

Now I implore you to take a dosage of humility.

No matter how bitter or distasteful, please swallow your medicine.

Now gaze into the mirror of your own conscience and ask yourself “Am I even suited to decide who should be deciding the course of action needed for the success and flourishing of the polity?”

The sweet bitterness of humility forces you to affirm the question, because no one is well-suited for the task of electing representatives let alone being one.1

                                                                      -

But is politics over? Have we solved it? Is the answer that politics is unsolvable and that we should just give up?

No!2

The answer is that we must minimise how much we fuck up the world around us. For though we are fallen, we need not languish in the craters we have made upon impact.

                                                                      -

And to minimise our tendency to fuck things up, we must recalibrate the distribution of power. Not all citizens should wield equal influence in democratic processes.

This distinction I draw is not between liberty and tyranny, but between liberal rights and democratic powers. Every citizen should enjoy equal freedom to speak, to assemble, and to advocate - but not all should command equal weight at the ballot.

Those better suited to steward society ought to possess proportionally greater influence in its governance.

For example:

• The seasoned leader of a major trade union should possess greater electoral weight than the inexperienced nineteen-year-old recruit who demands higher wages without comprehending the repercussions of such a demand.

• Likewise, an economics professor at a reputable university should have a more substantial voice in economic policy than that random bloke in the pub who doesn’t know how tariffs work.

• And The Good Samaritan who lives in service to others should hold more sway than the habitual offender who has repeatedly violated the moral fabric of the community.

In light of this, it becomes clear that my argument is not for the resurrection of second-class citizens but for the creation of multiple strata of citizenry - a third, a fourth, a fifth, and beyond. These dynamic tiers of citizenry would evolve and be periodically reassessed in accordance with individual merit and civic contribution.

One may find myself and my basic argument detestable. Yet I assure you that I am neither evil nor authoritarian.3 For my thoughts are but the natural extension of what many people already think:

That everyone, by virtue of being a citizen, should have the right to vote. Yet those who are more educated, more accomplished, more experienced, and more morally upright should exercise proportionally greater influence.

To make such thoughts normative, we ought to conclude that each measurable attribute of civic worth - education, service, integrity, contribution - could be rationally assessed to determine one’s degree of electoral authority.

Such a hierarchy of political power is neither inherently nefarious nor detrimental to the common good. It is, rather, a more judicious method of allocating power. For whilst God has awarded us certain inalienable rights, equality of votes is not among them.

                                                                      -

What I have said in this essay is neither ingenious nor novel. Discussion of this sort has been around since Socrates was annoying the citizens of Athens. But the story remains the same. We are not all equally deserving of power.

So let’s bring back second-class citizens!

But “sueño” also means “dream”. The startling and confronting thing about this alternative translation is in how it reinterprets the relationship between reason and its devils. An excess of rational inquiry, not a deficit, becomes the cauldron from which demons spew. It has always been the dreams of rationality that produce monsters.

To express a belief in demons, more broadly a belief in “enchantment” as a metaphysical reality, has become a shibboleth by which the liberal magisterium has discounted the status of its members. It is a distinguishing belief; even those who hold it are meant to express some internal dismay or disgust at their rational inadequacies. However, even the most spiritually bare must recognise that demons used to exist. Or at the very least people just as intelligent, and just as scientific, as ourselves, were utterly convinced they existed.

“The past was enchanted. It was a world in which the supernatural was natural, where heaven and earth intermingled constantly, where angels and demons were as real as birds and beasts.”

– Carlos Eire

It is difficult, from our vantage, to grasp how ordinary the supernatural was for those early modern scientists. The most peculiar aspect of the documentation of supernatural events in the West is that it peaks only after the birth of skepticism and empirical science. The age of Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz was coterminous with the flying witch, the levitating saint, and the devil in corporeal form. In early modernity we see a moment in time in which the seeking rational mind, the scientific mind, found its objects of observation in the impossible and demonic. In an unadulterated seeking of truth, we found monsters.

Of course, the ardent materialist can try to wash their hands of it. Without even parsing the literature, they can insist that these events did not happen, that people did not see what they claimed to see. That these events are impossible.

And of course, they are impossible. No one knew that better than the witnesses themselves. These were not instances of private hallucination, where the mind develops a coherent, fantastical picture for itself. These were public impossibilities, seen against the weight of everyday reality. The observers of supernatural phenomena were perfectly cognisant of the disparity between reality and the flying witch. And yet, they were damn sure that witch was flying.1

But what then are we to make of all this? Did Arthur Conan Doyle, Pierre and Marie Curie, Mary Todd Lincoln, Alfred Russel Wallace, truly encounter spirits at their seances.

I don’t know.

What I do know is this: had you or I lived in early modernity we too would have lived in enchanted times. We too would have known, just as surely as I know the grass under my feet, that demons were real.

But of course, we live now in “disenchanted” times.

Something happened in the transition between early modernity and our own spiritually pallid era. The rational mind, once fascinated with the inexplicable, has turned against it. Here are two stories of how that unfriendly divorce took place.

People used to see demons. Now they don’t. Science sets the rules for what counts as evidence. Studies have to be repeatable, and there are no videos of Saint Gabriel flying through the halls of Yale. It isn’t, then, that science ignored the inexplicable, it explained it.

Here’s another story.

People used to see demons. When science was young and hungry for truth, the inexplicable drew its gaze. The unexplained wasn’t dismissed, it was investigated. Then something changed.

The experiences themselves never disappeared. Step outside the halls of Oxford, Harvard, and The New York Times (or even within them after a few drinks) and you will hear the same parochial tales. Of dead people talking through the firmament of the iPhone. Of UFO abductions qualitatively identical to the visions of Catholic mystics. Of encounters with Mexican demi-demons in a psychedelic haze. Nothing, in the end, that William James or Saint Francis of Assisi would not have recognised.

But science grew tired.

It bristled at questions it couldn’t answer, at mysteries it couldn’t master. Instead of inspecting the intricacies of life it cornered them off. Consciousness? An illusion. The universe’s beginning? Not a real question. Free will, the most obvious fact of human life? A childish fantasy. And spiritual experience? The delusions of an animal mind.

This hermetic seal around questions of life and death produced no answers, but it gave scientific careerists the comfort of certainty. If a real challenge were to emerge, it could be brushed under the rug with the rest of them. The slumber of reason in the modern West didn’t banish monsters, it merely deferred their categorisation.

I tend to think the second story is closer to the truth.

But for the obdurate materialist, I have one more plea. Everything above describes only those forms of enchantment with clear analogues in the early modern past. I myself have never seen a demon. I have not spoken to the dead. I have yet to encounter the mystical phenomena that seemed to pervade my ancestors’ lives. And yet I still feel surrounded by enchantment.

For demons in late modernity live with us in the digital plane, and they speak through living wires. What is the digital plane if not a purely metaphysical beast? A realm without bodies, where unencumbered minds can collide and merge. A strange kind of heaven on earth.

We speak to avatars we can never understand, and yet there is nothing we understand more. Content is conjured up in an ecosystem that no one controls, and yet all must inhabit. And we live at the whim of algorithms that whisper in ancient tongues, shaping our desires and moulding our fears.

And sometimes, in this mesh of living wires, the whispers turn dark. Men sit alone in their rooms and, by some mystical possession, are seized with the spirit of violence. In the place of Mammon and Lucifer, digital demons compel murder through the circuitry of a living god.

We live in enchanted times.

And we should be afraid of the demons that live with us.

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Give me your hand, I’ll give you my mind,

It’s a fair exchange if you’re deaf, dumb and blind,

And we’re sold out,

Well that’s what it’s all about.

             - ‘Cannock Chase’, Labi Siffre

There is a horror to being.

Not in being one thing or another, but being in and of itself – to be. I am not the first one to make this observation, nor will I be the last, for it is one which every young man going through the stages of his age and youth will make before he quickly forgets it. But let us serve our memories. Let us undergo what the Ancients called anamnesis, and recollect those things we buried in our journey to be human.

Indeed, there is a horror to being, an awful, clawing silence to it that cannot depart for all the days of your life. See, you were born a stranger – you did not speak the language, nor see clearly the faces that danced before your blurry eyes. You did not understand anything but hunger and fear and warmth. And when you grew, still you did not know the causes or effects, how one man may leave and another may return hours later, changed in a way you could not identify. And when you spoke, then and now and now, you could not ensure the meanings; you could never explain it to them as you understood it in yourself. And when you wrote and the pen would not smudge, somehow the weight in every word buckled the lines and where you went with them, no one could follow. And of course, you fancied yourself a lover – but who would love this silent thing? And who could love its myriad reflections, navigate its labyrinth, glimpse perhaps the heart of it. And how could you do the same?

Forgive my angst. I am going somewhere with it, and my perspective is not so severe. I believe even the happiest of us could look inside themselves and find a little terror at their life, at the very occasion of it. Indeed, no one is ever completely understood, and at our worst we understand almost nothing of each other beyond the coincidence of texture and shadow. But please, please, do not confuse me for a solipsist (although by all definitions of the word I suppose I am one), for I concur with the One Who Shall Live Forever, who said “It is not good for man to be alone”. To perpetually doubt the humanity of others does one no good, no matter how cripplingly unfalsifiable the claim of humanity truly is. We must trust that those around us feel and love and bleed just as we do. At the very least, we must identify within ourselves the whole scope of all human things, that is if we believe ourselves to be human.

But this, like everything else, is easier said than done. In the mundanity of the everyday, we are confronted by the inexplicable. Someone who looks just like you, with eyes like you and hair like you and fingers like you, will act in such a way, in movements so slight you might never have noticed them in the first place, that you find yourself in that abyss again asking, ‘Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?’ Etiquette, compassion, forgiveness, these things will save you, no doubt, and you will not murder every philistine on an electric scooter who turns without indicating. But the fact remains: Even without the conscious context of the silence, we will find ourselves at odds with our fellow humans, and in such discovery discover that there is no rational explanation for their actions. Or we will find an answer that explains away in omni-understanding terms the root of all evil, as a careless, universal wind of which we are at the eternal mercy of…but I have preambled long enough, too long in fact. Here is the point.

I do not understand the ways of some men. I do understand the ways of some fish. I have agreed more with a crow’s decision to annoy a farmer’s dog than I have with the voting patterns of millions. And death is a fearful thing. It is often said that we cannot ascribe our human motivations upon the actions of animals and to a certain extent I agree, but I deny the idea that all that they are is lost to us, we who share half our DNA with the birds of the air and the lilies of the field. And who can deny that pain is our great equaliser, that if I kick you and a dog in the same spot, you’ll both keel over and be just as baffled as to why I did it. On the opposite end, If I gave a toddler a football and a bumblebee a proportionally smaller football, the two fools would look the same. They would play. Now, I could list discrete examples until the cows made the rational decision to come home, but I will settle for generality. Despite the infinite divide of being that separates us from our fellow human, we strive to seize fellowship and develop it almost instinctively. But we do not extend this trust to the other creatures that roam the Earth, despite our similarities. We refuse to see from their eyes, and invent myriad ways to ‘humanely’ close them. But do not mistake me. I am not advocating for a kind of panpsychism that suggests we offend the pavement by walking on it. I am simply stating that living things, especially those which we eat on a mass scale, have experiences which are comparable to ours, which we must implicitly admit if we consider that those humans around us are similarly comparable. And not only this, but the fact that we have the capacity to misunderstand the human proves that we have the capacity to understand the inhuman. I shall rephrase and elaborate for clarity.

It is a fact that in spite of existing in separate consciousnesses, which permits the possibility and inevitability of irreconcilable differences in perception, understanding, and ‘rational’ thought, we as humans are nonetheless capable of relating, caring, and empathising with one another in a matter that transcends the rules of society (in that we do not act toward each other out of pure obligation). Given that this is the case, we must therefore recognise that in spite of existing in separate consciousnesses, we have the real capacity to empathise, which is the movement of placing oneself in the position of another, with that which is inhuman, at the very least through the avenues of pain and pleasure. More specifically we are capable of understanding the suffering of the inhuman. And it is this particular point which is most critical to convey. You may contest me on all other aspects of my assertion, but you cannot disagree with me on this.

And I doubt that you will, for it would be foolish to suggest that the act of boiling a lobster while it is still alive is not a truly medieval kind of torture. But you might dispute the idea that you should not kill it in the first place. After all, we do not chastise the lion for hunting its prey, nor mourn the antelope for losing its race. But we are neither the lion nor the antelope. If the lion does not hunt, it will starve. If the antelope runs free, it will breed itself into starvation. But if you do not eat meat, as millions of humans already do not, you will not starve. You will not die. And you are far further from the antelope than the lion is. In fact, you have never even seen the antelope. The meat you buy has no face, no hair; it is plucked of feathers and chlorinated to remove odor. You did not kill it and thus you think yourself not culpable. You have washed your hands before the crowd and said “I am innocent of this blood. The responsibility is yours.” But you are complicit. It is a narrow mind that suggests that to be an actor, you must physically act. Indeed, your money funds a punishment too cruel and unusual to be expounded here. If we agree upon pain, we agree upon this. You can plunder the depths of another man’s soul and still be a foreigner to his madness, but break your arm or pass a kidney stone and you are in the wretched company of the least of these.

I am not a preacher, and I do not mean to preach. But examine the words I have used. Examine the truths of which you are aware. I have not exaggerated. I have not misrepresented. The unity of pain and the pain of industry are facts beyond dispute. And if you do wish to dispute them, dispute them first with yourself, then imagine what I would say, then listen to it, and then shut up. There is no good argument against Veganism. On an environmental level, the meat industry is catastrophic. On a nutritional level, we are capable of surviving on a vegetarian or vegan diet and we have for centuries, and that is not to mention the laughable idea that one’s diminished ability to grow big and strong justifies torture and death on a mass scale. This also applies for those who complain about taste – grow up and learn to eat your vegetables. One semi-salient argument would suggest that if the animals to be consumed lived full lives in conditions comparable to that of the wild and then one killed them in a painless manner, one could be justified in eating it. But of course not. We do not kill people simply because we stand to profit from their deaths, or at least we don’t do it very often and it’s quite frowned upon when we do. And if you were to say I was drawing a false equivalence between animals and people, then I would draw your attention to my previous statements regarding empathy towards animals. You would really allow your own life to be ended at some arbitrary point for the gain of some transcendent being – there are people who won’t even consider donating their organs after they die of natural causes! But even if that final argument did require a little legwork, on a practical level it is meaningless, since the likelihood of you, my reader, actually doing that is almost zero.

Therefore I assert my original position. There is no good argument against Veganism. It is an impenetrable truth that to consume meat in any form requires the murder of an animal that was alive, the same kind of alive that you trust I am. And at the very least, consider it a kind of Pascal’s Wager, more effective than even the original wager itself: In the unlikely event that I am completely wrong, then you are innocent. But if I am right, even by a fraction, then the weight of suffering you bear is vast and uncountable.

One more thing, just one more thing. It might surprise you to know that I eat meat. I am a meat-eater. Friends have commented when they have visited my family home that the quantity of meat that we, an average family of four, consume borders on the bizarre. But I love the taste of it, the texture, the ritual of preparing it. I resent the fact that I will never have the opportunity to taste Dodo or Galapagos Tortoise. So why do I say there is no good argument against Veganism? Because there isn’t one. I am wrong. I am wrong to do these things. I am empirically more wrong than most and my knowledge of this does not acquit me. But perhaps one day I will change. I will stare long enough into the barrel of truth and overcome my weakness and be converted. And if more people truly reckoned with themselves and untied their most natural of desires from their most lofty of reasoning, they too might convert. Or, at the very, very least, be as I am and not talk with their mouths full.

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I also do understand that my style of writing and thought is odd. For this I apologise, but at the same time, I do not apologise.

Enjoy.

Philosophers have long contested what constitutes the first philosophy. Husserl privileged ontology, Wittgenstein language, Descartes epistemology, and Levinas ethics. But really well and truly, The Family is the first philosophy. It is the first touchpoint for every human being who enters the world, our grand initiation into the strange and uncanny fact of existence. This entrance leaves us in the hands of adults, to whom we can only express our most primal reflexes. From a Hegelian perspective, our neotenic selves lack true consciousness, for we have not yet attained self-consciousness. We are but, in a Kantian sense, Sachen, and exist as bundles of uncontrollable flesh and nerves in need of constant care and attention. Our very existence rests precariously in the palms of random adults who copulated nine months prior. They assume the role of the Lacanian Big Other within our undeveloped psyche, and therefore the construct of our Symbolic Order. They are our everything and constitute the first Authoritative Other, the primordial governing presence of our psyche’s Super-Ego. A psyche which, in turn, confers upon us the very condition of existence. Existence itself begins within The Family, and our collective existence is what constitutes our civilisation. The Family is the key unit, and first philosophy of civilisation.

And this concept is focused upon heavily within the history of civilization, for as The Family changes, so too will civilization. Thus, there is something quite pertinent in discussing the contemporary state of The Family, for in just a few generations it has been reshaped by radical, accelerated changes so profound as to render it almost unrecognisable. Amidst such transformations, it is vital to ask the question, What will become of Civilisation? And to have an idea of what will become of civilisation, we must investigate The New Families Of Modernity.1

The present state of affairs is such: If we are looking at the dwindling number of stable families, then we witness a large and worrying level of atomistic families marked by diminished interaction and heightened permissiveness in this post-modern age of parenting. Yet this is a simple stating of our current situation; to truly understand our present state of affairs, we must understand The Family itself.

And we must begin to understand The Family in its earliest iterations, where its tether to the real remained strong. This tether is one that keeps us grounded to our evolutionary programming. Thus to understand The Family as a tether to the real, we must come to know of our evolutionary programming.

Now, unlike other mammals, human infants are exceptionally vulnerable, requiring prolonged and intensive care. For millennia, mothers have nurtured and sustained their offspring well into adolescence - a feature absent among all other non-human primates. Our biological constitution, and the primitive sociological structures that flow from it, are markedly distinct from those of our evolutionary kin. Human males, for instance, exhibit comparatively peaceful and cooperative intra-group bonds, often forming enduring kin-based coalitions. Put differently, Human Males as a group get along well with each other and occupy a more central and constructive role within The Family than do our hominoid cousins2.

Our difference with other primates continues, as we are predisposed toward monogamous pair-bonding, though with a marked disposition for promiscuity. This stands in stark contrast to our promiscuous cousins, the bonobos and chimpanzees, as well as to the silverback gorillas, whose social order follows a dominant-male, winner-takes-all, polygynous system.

It is our instinct for monogamous pair-bonding, that helps to explain why humans, unlike other hominoids, form such deep emotional attachments to their mates. We lack fixed mating seasons, and women do not exhibit overt signs of estrus. Thus, Human mating is not merely the opportunistic pursuit of reproductive availability, but a more intricate system of enduring pair-bonding - one that depends on subtle indicators of reproductive fitness, such as physical vitality, attractiveness, intelligence and prosocial behaviour.

For the goal of evolution is not the survival of the individual, but the proliferation of genetic material. And our genes may only survive and thrive under the biologically self-imposed system of pro-social behaviour. Tis in our very nature to love, care, dispute, and commune.

Through an understanding of our evolutionary and archaeological history, we come to see - without the heavy influence of complex modern social systems - that humans have a more intimate and compact mode of mating and child rearing. These two components - monogamous parents and children closely bound to their biological progenitors - form the primordial essence of The Family3. In this sense, The Family may be understood as a uniquely nested structure, binding generations together in a manner unparalleled among our evolutionary kin.

And from this biological foundation, we can trace the emergence of more complex forms of The Family with the rise of early hunter-gatherer communities - societies composed of interwoven multi-family units. Here we can understand how social and cultural factors can impinge upon the biological norm of our species. Unlike other animals, humans possess the singular capacity to learn and to alter behaviour beyond instinct. Through language, and its doomsday departure from the Lacanian Real, we acquire the ability to transcend our evolutionary script. Yet in the relative simplicity of early hunter-gatherer life, where language had not yet attained modern sophistication and thus its reality altering Armageddon capabilities, communities remained more firmly tethered to the Lacanian Real, thereby retaining much of the primordial familial pattern4.

Yet civilisation progress, and with the advent of the first agricultural revolution in 10,000 BC, we are able to see complex levels of civilization and culture develop from the 4^th Millennium BC onwards. It is in this Agricultural Age that we can more fully grasp The Family, as it advances through the dialectic of history in its pursuit of the Absolute Family. In this stage, the Family sublates its earlier, survival-oriented form and is reconstituted as the trustee family: defined not merely by subsistence, but by its role as a fundamental economic unit. We no longer struggled to endure in our environment, for we sculpted the environment in our image. No longer was The Family hunting to survive, but rather, producing in order to consume.

In this era, The Family functioned chiefly as a unit of production, for most families resided within a lower portion of society. Among the elites, variations in familial form began to appear, marking the first stirrings of future differentiation within The Family. Yet the economic realities of pre-modern agricultural life enforced a relatively homogenous form of The Family. The Rich were few, conspicuous, and segregated in every aspect of culture and society – and thus did not represent The Family. Until the rise of the bourgeoisie in the early modern period, such wealthy families remain peripheral to our analysis.

The Family had to farm and produce, and contrary to common assumption, agricultural life was far more arduous than hunting and gathering. Contemporary hunter-gatherer societies reveal that subsistence often required only modest caloric intake, with foraging groups typically covering no more than 4-5 kilometres per day - largely in the form of walking, punctuated by occasional bursts of pursuit. This minimally intensive and basic society permitted a relatively egalitarian division of labour, in which women could and did readily participate.

By contrast, farming demanded long hours of relentless toil and the maintenance of increasingly complex architectural structures, thereby necessitating a more efficient division of labour. Pair this with a more socially advanced - and thus reality shattering - society, patriarchal norms could be more effectively enforced by extending biological differences into comprehensive social hierarchies. Thus, women became increasingly confined to domestic responsibilities. Yet these tasks were by no means negligible; the comforts of modern society did not exist, and thus child rearing was coupled with demanding physical labour in the production and upkeep of household goods. Similarly, for non-farm work, women frequently contributed to artisanal or domestic production, though generally under the direction of the male head of household.

In this context, children functioned as indispensable labourers within the productive unit that is The Family. The relationship, whilst still one of parent-child, had a striking resemblance of apprentices under a master. Parents were compelled to balance their natural affection with authority, for obedience was not a mere virtue but a condition of survival: without the disciplined labour of children, The Family’s economic viability was imperilled. On the other hand, infants remained infants, for their tether to biological reality has remained forever complete. Yet children were not like children in our modern sense, for they were not primarily regarded as wards to be nurtured, but as essential contributors to The Family’s economic output.

This state of affairs is what rendered birth rates an imperative subject that required cold calculations. If children are long term investments in the form of productive workers, then one would hope that enough would survive the trials of existence, in order to contribute productively. And within such economic calculations, one would see quite quickly that if too many die, the workforce of the production unit would be below sufficiency. With the ability to “produce” more workers ending at menopause, one may no longer be able to “produce” any more workers for production, and thus The Family fails in its mode as a production unit. Similarly, if too many survive, then there is a surplus of workers with high maintenance costs (food, clothing, time).

This notion of “children as key-workers” leads to two minor explanations for the belief systems and traditions of certain pre-modern cultures. The first being the social pressures involving high birth rates, which helps to ensure sufficient worker levels are reached. The second tradition being infanticide, where one would kill off “weak/unsuitable children”, since potentially unproductive workers may as well be removed from the workforce before mass costs were accumulated5.

For reasons both complex and contested, reasons which need not detain us here, society in the Agricultural Age was overwhelmingly patriarchal. For in the economic unit of The Family, one must focus upon Capital and Property. Children were conceived as property, while women, as the bearers of children and commodities of pleasure, were construed as a form of physical capital requiring investment.

And as Westermarck showed as early as 1891, marriage in its earliest forms often originated as a transaction of property, involving contracts and the expropriation of fund and assets. Within this quasi-social system of sexual property, the contractual status of women acquired overwhelming salience. This logic also explains agricultural man’s anxiety over paternity: to invest one’s property in a child who was not truly one’s own was to divert resources outside the clan. Hence why many cultures have long standing traditions of treating female adultery with greater severity than rape, for it threatened the integrity of property and lineage.

And in the trustee families of pre-modernity, rooted firmly in property, dominance was paramount. Just as one may protect their house, would the head of the family protect their clan. Here the powers of manus, potestas, and genus are maximised, thus rendering the Family extended, powerful, and insular.6 It is in this sense that The Family encompassed every sphere of life - marriage, children, labour, speech, dress, and custom. With our present state of being this may seem foreign, but traces of this comprehensive authority endure in many collectivist cultures today; in South Asian contexts, for instance, arranged marriage remains widespread, and the authority of extended elders continues to exert formidable influence.

In the families of pre-modernity, there was a straightforward directed system of mating habits dictated by hierarchical power structures within The Family. One married whom one was commanded to marry, for The Family’s private law was law sacrosanct in pre-modernity. Typically, such marriages were sculpted in a fashion that would boost The Family’s economic standing and social prestige. Qualities such as beauty, intelligence, or character lost much of their evolutionary significance, for they were subordinated to the imperatives provided by social pressure and economic necessity.

Due to the small rural nature of The Family in pre-modernity, geographic constraints confined most families to a narrow pool of potential mates. The very wealthy however could surpass this, and in the case of royalty, could access an international circle of dynastic partners. Yet even with this international mating pool, royal mating preferences were extremely constrained due to the small number of individuals with comparable social statuses. Thus, everyone had their marital options tightly bound to local geography and enforced social preferences.

For example, a poor villager within a small community and family of low stature, likely had no social connections to facilitate a marriage from beyond the village. They are told by their family to marry someone hailing from a local family with whom The Family trades and does significant business with. To resist such arrangements was to face the wrath of The Family and the brutal justice of private law. Thus, with low geographical mobility, high social pressures, and restrictive criteria for mating, there was a strong tendency to inbreed and have low genetic diversity: unless countered by deliberate intervention e.g. there are some instances of lawmaking within the Middle Ages, with the task of prohibiting certain forms of consanguineous marriage.

In the trustee family of pre-modernity, clanship and in-group bias were heightened to the extreme, with a constant need for violence and authoritarian behaviour. Hence why blood feuds and draconian punishments were employed to preserve the purity and authority of The Family. In this sense, the Family of pre-modernity may have remained close to the tether of our evolutionary backstory and thus acted within our inherent teleology as social creatures. To: live as community; engage in violence for irrational reasons with poor illogical ad hoc justification; love intensely and simply exist as defined by the collective rather than by the I.

Yet, The Family existed within the contorted reality structured by language, culture and mythos. Their violence, dominance, strongly nested nature and destruction of heterogeneous souls could only reap the end of The Family. Such a state of affairs was a poor one, and with developments in the economic structure, The Family sublated its previous form as it entered modernity. Here in this new age - industrialisation, urbanisation, and the bourgeois gaze would dismantle the old structures of kinship and inaugurate new forms of domestic life.

With the onset of modernity, The Family underwent rapid transformation and diversification. As the state consolidated its authority and the economic structure shifted toward a proto-capitalist system, an emerging bourgeois class fostered the beginnings of a consumer base. As opposed to the early medieval period for example, the rich are not few, nor easily conspicuous, nor culturally and geographically segregated. The advent of modernity meant the slow yet rapid collapse of the traditional structure of society. The leisurely life of the rich, and thus leisurely familial style, began to diffuse among the broader population through the nascent bourgeoisie. Yet prior to the full frontal attack of industrialisation, the pervasiveness of such a class was limited, leaving The Family suspended in a transitional flux between its agrarian and industrial forms.

But it is with industrialisation, that we can definitively discuss how the bourgeoisification of The Family fully takes shape. In the industrial age, the trustee family is no longer and is supplanted by the domestic family as the dominant form of The Family. With such a mode in place, the genus, or clan power, is subordinated to the authority of church and state, with the private law of clans yielding to public law due to the expanding apparatus of modern institutions. Henceforth, the activities of The Family were protected by law from intrusion by the clan. Relatives might still gossip, exert pressure, or attempt to dictate conduct, but their authority was curtailed and confined within the boundaries of public behaviour as dictated by the all-encompassing state.

This transformation coincided with profound shifts in the economic structure of society, which in turn moulded The Family into new shapes. The Family was no longer an insular unit of production; it became a domestic nucleus of producers and consumers within an ever-expanding capitalist system. Where once extended kin groups dwelt together in rurality, families now relocated to urban centres, forming nuclear households among strangers rather than clansmen. It is in this context of capitalistic liberal Urbania that every aspect of The Family will shift. Marriage, child rearing, rules, and duties are all subject to profound reconfiguration, as society moves ever further from its tether to the evolutionarily dictated real.

With separation from the land and blood from whence one came, individuals now had the opportunity to marry partners with whom they shared no historical or social ties. With the erosion of genus, public law sanctioned such unions without interference from the clan. Legal and logistical barriers prevented clans from enforcing traditional marital arrangements, as families now resided apart in the anonymity of urban life.

And it is here within the urban areas that we see how The Family assumes its role as a domestic unit of producers and consumers. In pre-modernity, work was conducted within the home. But modernity demands a mass segregation – Labour from purpose, white from black, mind from soul, work from play, self from Other. And so, workplaces separate from home and family, thus becoming a new inescapable feature of life.

For example, “in 1800 only 5% of workers in New York City operated outside the household, but by 1840 the figure was 70%”. For the first time, work no longer meant work at home. And within the nuclear communities of Urbania, it meant the unprecedented possibility of children being left entirely alone. Thus, difficult decisions confronted the Family e.g. how could parents ensure adequate care for their children whilst working away from home?

For some, assistance came from the community or nearby extended kin. For others, the only option was for one parent - most often the mother - to remain at home. Shaped both by crude social compromises and the lingering influence of pre-modern patriarchy, women were largely confined to the home. Here the domestic sphere was a far-cry from the domestic sphere that women were confined to in pre-modernity. Cooking, cleaning and child-care are notable instances of dedication and labour, yet it was not comparable to the production of goods and arduous physical labour that women of pre-modernity conducted alongside the tasks of cooking, cleaning and child-care.

But on the point that I have just made; tis a blunt point, and does not reflect the rapidly changing state of The Family in modernity. Many working-class women, often as many as 40%, laboured outside the home whilst simultaneously managing child-rearing responsibilities. Yet such working-class labour did not change the overwhelming reality of women confined to the domestic, for economic demographies shift and modern patriarchal norms become solidified. And this confinement to the domestic sphere epitomised the bourgeoisification of The Family.

Life came to be conceived as a presupposed order, in which leisure, love, family, and work were treated as distinct ,compartmentalised domains for the individual consumer. In such spirit, the most bourgeois statement is “don’t shit where you eat”. And yet life is all about shitting where you eat, tis inevitable7. All aspects of existence remain inextricably interwoven, not by individuals alone, but by the very fabric of existence under the gaze of the Big Other.

The domestic family of Urbania marked the beginning of this dissolution of communal bonds, replacing them with the salience of the individual. In the case of the centuries prior to the 20^th, it meant saliency for men, whose leisure was institutionalised in work sponsored holidays, pubs, sporting pursuits, and other activities designed for the individual male consumer - often at the expense of broader communal life. Children, though still bound to The Family, became increasingly independent, were treated with greater leniency and subjected to less direct authority.

What authority remained was often delegated externally: to schools, or in the Victorian working-class context, to the workplace itself. As the Family underwent bourgeoisification, so too were children reconstituted as consumers, and thus recognised by both state and market as independent rational agents. Though still nominally subject to parental authority, this authority steadily eroded as the state, rather than the clan, intervened more directly in the affairs of The Family.

Beyond the actual state of The Family, we witness a mass proliferation of The Family due to a mass increase in population, mainly in part to the second agricultural revolution. Furthermore, the makeup of The Family itself becomes more diverse, due to the national diversity (e.g. the various people that moved from rural areas into cities) represented within Urbania. And with a diverse community, free choice of marriage, and a domestic style of family, do we see new mating habits. For the pool of mates now expands greatly, which gives greater opportunity for new mating habits to form. And whilst one may capitulate to the Big Other within their mating practices, they no longer reside under the thumb of the trustee family, and thus their control over mating practices was no longer greatly constrained.

The individual of modernity is now free to determine what qualities within a mate is socially and economically advantageous, rather than those qualities dictated by The Family. In this liberal environment, individuals are now able to wilfully capitulate to the whims of their evolutionary senses and engaging in “like for like” mating preferences. Whereby one is finally able to marry someone who is of comparable attractiveness, intelligence, and personality – rather than merely marrying to the rigid economic and social criteria imposed by The Family. Within the larger mating pool of Urbania, paired with looser mating preferences, The Family becomes more culturally, and genetically diverse in its sublated domestic form.

In Victorian London for instance, twas now increasingly possible for an individual, who has no land, blood, or social connections, to marry beyond their socio-economic status by nature of finding and wanting a reciprocating mate with comparable levels of attractiveness, intellect and character, rather than by nature of pure economic and social criteria imposed upon by The Family. Tis self-evident that economic and social considerations did not vanish, but were in fact under the same primal reciprocal process between two consenting individuals, rather than a non-consenting process from one’s authoritarian kin.

It is in this sense that The Family becomes thoroughly bourgeois, by the fact it becomes domestically Liberal within an individualistic landscape of city living, where social value was not rested entirely upon the traditional values of trustee families, such as those stemming from Organised Religion, but upon new capitalist modes of value - such as the sign-value produced through consumption of certain capitalist items.

It is a family whose mentality, as espoused by Walter Benjamin, is manifested through the window shop display and sitting room. Entire modes of existence and consumption enacted by the Flâneur, who reside in the perpetual state of collective neurosis surrounding the Urform of modern capitalism. Thus in any state of neurosis, where one’s syntactical system resides in flux, do we see a paradoxical state of being produced due to a shattering of appropriate transitivity surrounding symbolic relations.

Hence why an odd eclectic mix of Philitsinnic Libertinism is present within the bourgeois culture that comes to encapsulates The Family. In this paradoxical state, consumption envelopes The Family, but such consumption is hollow due to the pursuit of sign-value whilst simultaneously depreciating the object of consumption. The Family will buy the finest fashions and artworks without any genuine appreciation, for they merely consume to alert the watchguard tower of their faux escape attempt from the prison of animalism.

And within the domestic structure of urban capitalist society, The Family’s values drifted ever further away from their evolutionary essence. In societal form, it has sublated its previous inadequate form of the violent authoritarian trustee family. Yet society itself has drifted ever further from its biological origins. The ordering of The Family’s values gives less salience to the biological necessity of pro-social engagement, privileging instead production, consumption, and the relentless pursuit of sign-value. And as The Family evolved alongside society, the Collective Symbolic Order reconfigures. With such a gestalt shift, the Big Other seeks not participation in communal life nor devotion to kin. No, tis not the case. The Big Other demands that one work all day and spend all night.

Thomas Mann’s 1901 novel Buddenbrooks vividly portrays this danger of decadence within the bourgeois family. Spanning four generations of a northern German mercantile dynasty, the novel illustrates the paradoxical blend of Philistinnic Libertinism that characterised bourgeois society with its dominance over the juxtaposing domains of industry and art.

Thomas Buddenbrook, the novel’s central figure, emerges as emblematic of the Family’s trajectory in its modern domestic form, foreshadowing our own contemporary condition. As the eldest son and future patriarch, we understand him to be the archetype of the protestant work ethic, with his diligent and industrious attitude towards serious business in a serious life.8 Although Thomas appears devoted to The Family’s economic interests, these concerns are but a façade. Such interests only exist as a pursual of sign-value, for The Family’s economic situation is more than sufficient. What Thomas truly cares about is his family’s prestige and social success. All of his life-force is dedicated to this goal, and his rigid perfectionism sets him apart from his bohemian brother Christian and ditsy sister Tony. Both of the less industrious siblings are representative of The Family in modernity, but Thomas stands as the archetype of its pre-contemporary form.

Stretched thinly between the juxtaposing ethos of bourgeois society, he strives at once to be industrious whilst also attempting to display The Family’s contemporaneity, prestige and cultural refinement. His life, spiritually vacant, is consumed by the hollow pursuit of capital and prestige. And at the young age of 48 he dies due to dental complications, for the sweet decadence of modernity left his soul as hollow and rotten as the tooth that killed him.

Like Thomas himself, The Family lives in a constant state of faux fulfilment with outwardly dedications as flaccid as Bill Maher after five whiskeys9. The Family does not lose its spiritual essence by placating within society, no. But it does lose its essence by virtue of giving such frivolities increasing salience. And within the simulation of modernity, The Family becomes hollow like Thomas.

And whilst we assume leisure to be the motif of modernity, and by extension of The Family, it is paradoxically both leisure and stress that characterise this era. The Industrial Age, and the capitalist modes of production it introduced, generated something unprecedented in human history: long-term stress. One may retort that pre-modern societies - devoid of modern technology and healthcare - must have been extremely stressful, but ‘stressful’ is not the precise designator, for ‘traumatic’ is far more apt.

Agricultural society was punctuated by acute episodes of trauma - war, famine, and disease. Life was hardly leisurely, yet it was not relentlessly industrious and productive either. Those who survived these often fatal disruptions could expect a rhythm of work that, while arduous, rarely carried the persistent burden of long-term stress. One can very easily find isolated moments where portions of society had lifespans filled with seemingly long-term stress, but by no means was this characteristic of the broader zeitgeist.

In modernity however, The Family is compelled to endure such stress, with the relentless pressures of unique working habits and the eradication via segregation of humanity’s natural need for pro-social engagement. The Family is now confronted with anxieties unknown to its predecessors: they must work arduously in a fashion antithetical to the human life-cycle in order to unsuccessfully relieve their worries over bills, labour, and money for childcare. Long term stress is a killer. Tis already recognised by biological research as profoundly detrimental to both physical and mental health, and this is readily seen as a health crisis for humanity in modernity.

The passage from the traumatic societies of the agrarian age to the stress-ridden societies of industrial modernity is reflected in the disintegration of familial authority. Metaphorically speaking, stress is killing the authorities that head The Family. With authority taking a perpetual nap from the long hours of modernity - paired with the rise of radical expressive individualism - the moral structure of The Family begins to erode.

Having traced the consolidation of the domestic family in industrial modernity, we now arrive at the contemporary era, where The Family sublates into its highest possible form, at the cost of its general existence deteriorating into the nothingness of the aether. In a Hegelian sense, it is here at the present pinnacle of society that we can witness the current apex of humanity, and with it the greatest form of The Family. But whilst the greatest form of The Family may exist, its general sublation into the atomistic family with post-modern teachings has separated The Family from its original evolutionary essence.

The Simulation supplants the real, and the all-seeing eye of the perfect consumer watches us from Barad-dûr. The Family cannot escape their gaze, and under its scrutiny it fragments, disintegrating into the atomistic family. Its previous domestic form was simply not suitable for the individualistic consumer-based precariat society that was emerging; consequently, The Family was compelled to sublate into a more flexible and accepting form10. But with such attempts of flexibility, however understandable, is fundamentally antithetical to the rigidity of The Family. The tension between the juxtaposing state of affairs curates a growing latent force within The Family - a force that ruptures from the inside-out.

Writing in 1947, Carle C. Zimmerman foresaw the emergence of precisely this style of contemporary family, even as society stood only at the threshold of the transition from the domestic to the atomistic form. He predicted that The Family would ultimately collapse with the ascendancy of expressive individualism and the erosion of its traditional communal functions. His seminal work, Family and Civilization (1947), describes the rise and fall of Greek, Roman and now contemporary civilisation through its cyclical progression through trustee, domestic and atomistic family structures. Whilst I do not subscribe to his conservative thought, his ascription of the factors which cause The Family and thus civilisation to collapse was apt. Such factors are:

Increased and rapid early “causeless” divorce

Decreased number of children

Elimination of the real meaning of the marriage ceremony

The spread of the antifamilism of the urbane and psuedointellectual classes

Breaking down of most inhibitions against adultery

Revolts of youth against parents so that parenthood becomes more and more difficult

Common acceptance of all forms of sex perversions11

And collapse it has. Yet this collapse is neither simple nor singular. A host of further details and forces must be accounted for in order to grasp the full scope of this transformation.

For in this moment, the individual whose essence was defined by The Family, is now defined by themselves as an independent and rational consumer. Their autonomy is now sacrosanct, and The Family is reduced to merely an auxiliary attachment - for nothing can impede upon the phantastical dreams of the consumer. The very concept of sacrifice erodes, without sacrifice, community cannot endure. Thus, The Family, as the original and eternal community, disappears. Partners, children, parents and siblings are amortized into mere auxiliary attachments, for the I has been reconfigured into the 1 - the most salient number of all.12 The consumer wants to have their cake and eat it, and the simulation assures them that if they keep chasing their phantasies then the unattainable objects of desire will be attainted.

It is in this sense that Harry Hendrick’s ascription of narcistic parenting comes true. The culmination of his life’s work is presented in his book Narcissistic Parenting in an Insecure World (2016). In this, he presents the show Super Nanny (2004) as something representative of the prevailing post-modern attitudes towards child-rearing and parenting. He rightly says:

‘Want your life back? You need Supernanny!’ The message being that prior to having children, you had a ‘life’, which you have since lost; only through having control over your children can you get ‘it’ back. This enticement to egotistical possession of the self at the expense of a child, implicitly conforms the neoliberal notion of ownership and the mainly feminist view of the child as in effect a robber who burgles the mother’s identity and, therefore, must be marginalised so as not to deny the female ‘me’.

Children, whom we bring into the world, are increasingly perceived as burdens and auxiliary impediments to the sovereign self. This paradoxical state of being, where one despises the fruits of their own labour is emblematic of the simulations propagandising of individualistic dreams. For one cannot have their cake and eat it. Life is not equivalent to pure autonomy, and one’s life is not eradicated through the most basic notions of sacrifice. Yet the simulation dictates that the cake must be free of sacrifice, for one may suffer an allergy attack.13

But sacrifice permeates all of existence, and even the very act of not having a child is indicative of true sacrifice for many people. It involves the recognition that whilst a child may be one’s object of desire, it would be irresponsible to give ground to such desire without the capacity to provide the requisite attention and love14. Yet this notion is seldom found within the zeitgeist, as evidenced by the prevalence of children born outside stable familial structures.

Yet with this point of stable familial structures, I seek not to give unworthy credence to present idealisations of the semi-fictious institution of marriage. For the sanctity of marriage is not a concern of mine. Instead its function as an indicator of a stable union between willing partners is something of great importance. And much to the dismay of the anxiety-riddled right, marriage has not disappeared, but rather it has transformed into a symbol of love instead of a rigid institution of society.

People are marrying less, that is correct. But younger generations are proven to marry later in life and see it not as a necessary rite of passage, but rather a union between two loving partners. And love as a prevailing concept is quite unique to modernity, by virtue of people seeking images of an ideal notion of eros propagated by the simulation. Whilst I seem contrary to the notion of love, I do not deny its existence. Yet such a disposition toward eros is muddled within the simulacrum of love. For the individual is no longer urged to act upon the immediacy of passion, but rather to wait, cohabitate and learn, until they discover the complementary Other capable of fulfilling the constructed ideal of love.

“In love, the one consciousness recognizes itself in the other, and the other in itself, that is, they are one consciousness” - Hegel

Yet the search for the Other is a difficult one, and in that endless transitionary period, individuals often cohabit and form short-term relationships. And such a state of affairs has proven to be a poor one for The Family and thus the individual. It has been shown that cohabitating partners are less likely to pool their money for the sake of parenting, for the money of the I belongs to the I. This dynamic helps explain, in-part, why cohabiting partners tend to be less effective parents, in economic terms, than their married counterparts15. Furthermore, such cohabiting relationships also tend to last much shorter, with around 1/10 surviving after 5 years in the US, and rarely ever converging into marriage – for one chases neither a life-partner nor the whims of their loins, but rather the fetishised phantasy of love.

But beyond the philosophical notion of searching for a lover and conforming to the gaze of the Big Other, distinct new mating habits are forming. With social pressures decreasing, and increasing separation of the individual from the community – the mating pool expands dramatically. Furthermore, with the advent of the digital age and the accessibility of global travel, relationships can form across borders. And whilst it may be a semi-common phenomenon in the west, cross-border marriages are an extremely prevalent and interesting phenomenon in the Far East. For example, of the individuals who immigrate to Taiwan and gain citizenship, “97% of them do so through having married a Taiwanese; and of this 97%, 99% are women”. The contemporary mating pool is unprecedented in its scope, expanding both domestically and internationally, thereby increasing opportunities for genetic diversity and fitness.

And this contemporary mating pool is truly unprecedented. Owing to low-geographical mobility, our pre-civilisation hunter-gathering ancestors could only engage in genetic mixing to a modest degree. Over the course of hundreds of generations, mass genetic mixing did occur across continents; but, in terms of a palaeolithic individual for example, the reality was far narrower, with mating typically occurring only between neighbouring and geographically proximate communities. With the advent of civilisation, and the consolidation of radically nested communities, mating habits became more constrained, and genetic mixing occurred largely through the expansive networks of empire.

In our present age, however, cross-continental mating is rapidly increasing, and its results can be observed within only a few generations. Thus, the present genetic admixture, which would once have required hundreds of generations of mating and migration, is now unfolding within the span of mere decades. The evolutionary fitness produced by this development is extraordinary. The Family itself is transforming at a genetic level, advancing in a positively evolutionary direction at unprecedented speeds.

On a similar note, due to general immigration increasing across our hyper-globalised world, the number of children with mixed heritage is steadily increasing. In many developed nations, where immigration is high and mate selection is no longer rigidly bound to pre-determined categories of wealth, class, or race, the demographic category of ‘mixed-race’ has become one of the fastest-growing social groups, driven by inter-racial copulation. Thus we are witnessing not only unprecedented genetic admixture, but also profound cultural intermixing for The Family.

The discussion on this new state of affairs for The Family, and thus civilisation, has been ceded almost entirely to the hard right. Tis far too complex a situation for me to give a mere dose of micro-analysis - as I have done throughout the essay. Yet much to the chagrin of Liberals and Leftists, tis a situation that requires analysis and cannot be ignored. Perhaps one may ultimately conclude that the cultural diversification of The Family bears no significant negative effects upon civilisation or upon The Family itself. Yet the myopia of Liberals and Leftists towards this ensures that no conclusion is ever seriously reached.

Yet to continue upon the interesting new mating habits that form The Family, we see an intriguing phenomenon arising from the discussions surrounding the incel population. As stated before, due to the de facto and de jure pressures of The Family, individuals mating preferences were heavily constraint along the lines of pre-determined categories of wealth/class/race. In this state of affairs, women had to marry, for both social and economic reasons, men who could fulfil such criteria. In the economically precarious and subjected state of being for pre-contemporary women, character-based mating habits were nearly non-existent. One must marry a man who is both a provider and acceptable to the preferences of The Family. And with a fundamental shift in society, mating habits are no longer fundamentally based upon socio-economic factors but the primal dispositions of attraction and love.

With mating habits constructed upon these primal dispositions, relationships now operate on a consensual, peer-to-peer equilibrium of preferences. Thus, as women attain parity with men within the economy and society, character-based criteria in mate selection becomes extremely salient. This is a key point. For in a colloquial sense, countless attractive and engaging women found themselves bound in matrimony to ‘men who aint shit’.

Yet the genre of man who may have found success in the patriarchal marriage based societies of the past, may no longer find similar success in the primal love/attraction based relationship societies of the present. Meanwhile, as the ever-expanding simulation spawns countless subcultures, the incel emerges as one of its most striking products: a pure digitised unit, segregated from the real. These men who, no longer “touch grass” or participate in the pro-social psychological development that occurs when tethered to the real, come to perceive the opposite sex as a mere simulacrum conjured by digitally mass proliferated fetishised imagery. Yet the radical socio-political views of incels are not to be focused here, for the gist of the incel movement is key to the discussion of family formation in our present era.

It is a well-established fact - attested by empirical studies, evolutionary theory, and general wisdom - that female sexual access is far more restrictive than male sexual access. Hence the colloquial expression ‘to put out’ is most often applied to women, for men, in a sense, have nothing to ‘put out’ per se, as their sexual access is already “out”. Thus, there is a sexual asymmetry between the sexes. And within the consensual, character-based mating systems of our present era, men whose traits - both internal and external - are deemed unattractive by the collective Big Other will lose out in the race for love.

Tis true that younger generations engage in less sex and form fewer romantic relationships than their predecessors. Yet this phenomenon is driven primarily by romantically unsuccessful men due to the inherent sexual asymmetry between the sexes. And such men suffer from the same social virus that infects incels, albeit a smaller viral load.

Within the simulation produced by the black box of the digital age, one loses their tether to the real, and thus their essence as a human being. The essence being a pro-social creature fit for community and its demands. And this erosion of pro-social character among young men in particular, has led women across the developed world to withdraw increasingly from men who embody certain social or political traits.16 As a result, fewer effective long-term partnerships emerge, for the consensual reciprocity of mate selection has become a zero-sum game within the digital age. Thus the Family begins to dwindle, as its very foundation - a stable relationship between two adults - struggles to take root.

And to continue with the effects of character-based mate selection in modernity, we come to a fascinating development along class, intelligence and wealth. To surmise previous criteria for mate selection: In the agricultural age under the trustee family, one’s mating pool was severely restricted, leaving little room for genuine choice in partners. For choices were not constrained by the auxiliary attachments of love – intelligence, character, attractiveness, swagger etc. – but rather by the rigid social and economic standards pre-determined by The Family. In the industrial age, the domestic family emerged in Urbania, where individuals enjoyed greater choice, yet remained constrained by the limited reach of communication and by powerful societal pressures. One was able to choose partners based upon notions of love, whilst still remaining subordinate to The Family and the gaze of the Big Other. In this era of The Family, mate selection was still constraint for love had to be translated into marriage for life.

With a fundamental shift in society and economy, contemporary mating habits have given rise to a peculiar and unprecedented situation – and that situation is cross-class/racial/cultural mating, with a specific peculiarity surrounding cross-class mating. What one may notice from my previous description of The Family in pre-modernity and pre-contemporarity is a lack of discussion surrounding class and wealth, for social mobility was low, and the geographical as well as social segregation of classes was strong and defined.

To marry across significant class or wealth boundaries prior to contemporary history was exceedingly rare, for one could ascend only so far within the rigid social hierarchy. Thus, there were no Mr. Ripley’s commonplace to medieval society. Tis in the developed western world, where social mobility is comparatively high and the economy has transitioned from industry to information and service, do we see the peculiarities of love focused mating habits.

And we can understand the deeper peculiarities of new mating habits through understanding the dynamics of social mobility, which today is mediated primarily by education. Tis in the pathway of education, leading to higher education institutions, where various cultural and geographic backgrounds are brought together within a single institution. And with the institutional barrier to success being higher education, we see that those who do not reach higher education, have much lower levels of such social mobility and do not tend to leave their originating area and/or cultural bubble in a significant manner. Thus, society divides into two broad groups.

Group 1 – Higher Education

Group 2 – Basic Education

Group 1 is more socially, culturally, racially, politically and economically diverse than Group 2

Group 1 as a collective has higher IQs and SQs than Group 2

Group 1 tends to get married more than Group 2, who tend to cohabitate more than Group 1

Group 1 is less likely to divorce than Group 2

Group 1 has less kids than Group 2

Group 1 has a higher proportion of women than Group 2

Group 1 lives in more expensive cosmopolitan areas than Group 2

Group 1 make more money, and is wealthier than Group 2

Group 1 is more Liberal than Group 2

Why do I state these statistical facts? For it is in higher education, that people tend to find their partners and mates. And thus from this standpoint, can we observe how mating habits have evolved in a strikingly unique way. In Group 1, the boundaries of geography, class, and race have made an unprecedented dissolution in mating preferences, thus allowing love itself to emerge as the primary guide in mate selection. Such saliency and possibility for love not a commonality in human history. But with this new social cleavage of education, new mating boundaries have inadvertently been developed.

For in these groups, differences in IQ, SQ and overall aptitude for academic success is increasingly shaping mating choices. In pre-contemporary society, such mating boundaries were negligible, for higher education was reserved for the upper classes - a small minority17. Prior to our current paradigm of oddities, one would mate with people within their geographical and social periphery, with IQ and SQ playing little no role in the process of choosing a mate.

Today, however, it has become commonplace for university-educated individuals to marry one another, thereby constructing a new mating boundary, one defined by higher IQs and SQs, that transcends traditional class distinctions. With such a notion of IQ+SQ cleavages among mates, we can come to understand the work undertaken by Simon Baron Cohen – who investigated how such traits might manifest in the offspring of university-educated couples. He found that among Ivy League originating parents, there was a disproportionately high incidence of autistic children, which he attributed to the likelihood of such pairings producing children with highly systematising cognitive profiles.

This extremely interesting phenomenon is further accentuated when contrasted with the dynamics of Group 2. Group 2 - by virtue of being: more conservative; more likely to have kids; more likely to have lower IQs and SQs - may be copulating in a way that, ceteris paribus, could generate a significant demographic shift when contrasted with the reproductive habits of Group 1. Furthermore, with the Brahmin class of educated elites being more likely to produce children with hyper-systemising brains and thus children who fall under the social category of autism, there may be unprecedented results in the behaviour and dynamics across demographics. I cannot stipulate what the future may bring, for I view these points in isolation, away from the deeper social and economic nuances of the body politic. But such points are interesting nonetheless and deserve further attention.

Furthermore, if we look further into the new generations produced by The Family, we find that - beyond the graduate vs non-graduate example - personality types are radically shifting. Research shows a continuing trend amongst young adults whereby conscientiousness, agreeableness, and extraversion are declining, whilst neuroticism skyrockets. In other words, the populace is gradually becoming less kind, less helpful, less socially hospitable, less diligent, less composed, and less disciplined.

Bogus analysis would argue that this trend is unique to the present young generation e.g. Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Yet if we follow both the data and analysis of The Family over time, do we understand that such a trend has been present throughout our contemporary era and thus includes older generations like the Baby Boomers, themselves emblematic of the pits of modernity.

What these personality types convey is the saliency of the individual, and the zeitgeist of radical expressive individualism, where kindness is commoditised, and pro-social behaviour may only be conducted for financial or narcissistic reasoning. The Gemeinschaft functions upon such pro-social behaviours being internalised and done without logical deliberation. Thus, the antithesis of the community, provided by modernity, is proving its ruin with the eradication of the benefits of the community e.g. happiness and meaning. And the dissolution of the community, via the rise of radical expressive individualism, can be seen through the lens of The Family’s permissiveness.

Such permissiveness is not a propagandising term used to denigrate parents who acknowledge the rights of children and/or accept their child’s non-conforming state of being. Tis fairly obvious under both the legal system and common sense that children have rights and deserve respect. But contemporary thought increasingly seeks to erase the very ‘otherness of age’ inherent in the parent-child relation, by insisting that children ought to be treated in a similar fashion to adults. With an eradication of the necessary otherness, that constitutes the moralising effects of the Big Other as represented partially within the parent, does permissiveness constitute allowing children to act in a manner antithetical to their ontology.

“This is why permissive parents, who foster friendship with their children, are frowned upon by the purveyors of the authoritative approach: they blur the boundary on which the ‘otherness’ of age relations depends” – Harry Hendricks

Deprived of adequate, non-abusive forms of societal pressure, and shaped by The Family’s present permissive state, present and future generations are being conditioned in a manner antithetical to human flourishing and ever more submissive to the gaze of capital. Such a state of affairs is greatly presented by Leonard Sax in his book The Collapse of Parenting (2015). Sax has rightly espoused that peer culture has overtaken the parent culture, with parents no longer setting and enforcing the appropriate standards. It can be said the collective Symbolic Order of the youth has recalibrated in such a way, that the Big Other is no longer embodied in parents, but rather in a commodified society of peers.

When the authority of the moralising parents dissipates and is supplanted by the gaze of the consumer, the child of modernity is inadvertently sacrificed to Jeff Bezos, High Priest of Moloch. Thus, the child becomes subsumed within the simulation, bereft of guiding values. Like The Master staring into the untempered schism of reality, the self-regulatory neuro-endocrinological system of an individual is blown to smithereens, and they capitulate to the gaze of the consumer. If the cycle of permissiveness continues, present and future generations will produce ever more vulnerable, neurotic, introverted, low self-esteemed children, capable only of consumption, and incapable of entering the ethical realm. For the individual enthroned as the supreme I can engage only in the aesthetic.

It is the logic of consumerism that undermines the values of loyalty and permanence and promotes a different set of values that is destructive of family life - Christopher Lasch

It is in this sense that the novel and hit film series Diary of a Wimpy Kid, acts as a perfect example of my point at hand. The Heffley family that we are presented to in this fictional world, is a fantastic representation of the atomistic family in modernity. The Heffley family exists not as a collective whole, but as a series of individuals with “self-determined” interests. Each of them is subsumed within phantasies produced by an individualistic Imaginary Order.

Susan, the mother, intellectualises her state of being and is seemingly aiming to create a loving family. Yet this family she wishes to construct is a mere phantasy, for she mimics fetishised images of The Family in order to appease her psyche. This is evident in the column she writes, where she conjures her legendary battle against the forces of insolent children in producing the ‘perfect loving family’. But her actions are for the most part, de facto, pro-family. Even though it is clear to all the viewers of such films that she seems to chase an image of the family as an object of desire. Such manifestations of the chase do indeed provide pro-family outcomes. Yet her actions provide no help shifting the paradigm of modernity that encapsulates herself and her family.

The father, Frank, is simply not there. He exists physically within the real, this is correct, but he seems a tad lost. He has lost himself to the absurdities of modernity, working a job of non-existent value and allowing everyday to pass by18. He loves his family yes, but he finds true solace in the spiritual desert of Suburbia through civil war mini-figurine re-enactment. He has neither the time nor energy to be the moralising authority - authority that was present within the parents of pre-contemporary society. He is but an individual with a family, job and hobbies and rarely ever a Father.

The three children in the Heffley Family – Rodrick, Greg and Manny – are all emblematic of the onslaught of modernity and tired permissive parents. The essence of their being is found within the simulation and thus the saliency of life is geared toward fetishised objects of consumption. Through the faux authority presented by their parents, each child exists upon their most primal dispositions and have a weak grasp upon their unique pro-social faculties. They become mere surviving, maximising individuals with few easy-to-spot imperatives.

Their purview of reality becomes limited, for immanence is only achieved via objects of consumption. Rodrick and Greg understand their social worth in the simulacrum of coolness by mimicking past progressive subversions through their fetishisation of certain concepts. Rodrick sees only the possibility of becoming a rock star and attaining the admiration of ‘hot chicks’, whereas Greg wishes to garner great popularity by simply wearing a backpack with one strap. These idealisations go beyond mere teenage lust, for it is a phantasy that bleeds into every aspect of the real. None of them exist as a collective for they are each subsumed into individual phantasies produced by the simulation. Like many other families in contemporary society, the atomistic Heffley family is seemingly non-existent, devoid of authority and harmony.

The state offers little help in this regard, as it has taken on the role of parent in the limpest of manners. Hannah Arendt was correct in her assessment of modern bureaucracies: they are devoid of genuine responsibility, accountability, and thus virtue. Although such systems can be effective in practical matters, such as infrastructure and sanitation, they remain soulless, personless shadows of authority. They do not nurture the child but instead contribute to the dismantling of The Family via their action in upholding the simulation and inaction in regards to dismantling it.

The state acts not as an aid for The Family, but rather as a competing source of dominance. It does not exist as a true authority for the child, for that power exists only in the real with parents, teachers, and community members. But the state attempts to dominate nonetheless, seeking to mould better children amidst the chaos of modernity. Tis a valiant effort and should not be misconstrued as evil, yet it ultimately disrupts and corrodes the ordering of values that ought to be set by The Family. However as evidenced by any form of The Family, the values set by The Family may not be aligned with the values of the body politic.

In a Foucauldian sense, the state as it developed in modernity uses its power within the technologies of institutions to create a disciplinary society for certain strata’s to be fit for adequate production and consumption. And as society has steadily progressed the Deleuzean case of control societies becomes more recognisable. Here the individual is focused on as a data point rather than a member of a group, and their subjection by the state is via surveillance, tracking and modulation within an open interconnected system of individuals. In the case of children, the analyses of Foucault and Deleuze remain relevant, for the state wishes to have new generations subservient to the values of the body politic and not The Family. It wishes to accomplish this feat via employing its technologies to physically enclose and discipline children in order to prepare them as fresh meat for the control societies of technofeudalism19.

And such a concept was noticed by Hendricks and other critics of neoliberalism. In the technocratic neoliberal era that was consolidated by the 90s, children were rebranded as ‘the future’. This propagandising term, used notably by Tony Blair when high off his ‘Education, Education, Education’ acid trip, is not to confer the primordial concept of the young replacing the old. No. It was a term used to convey the economic and technological future of state-controlled, aged under-25, individual economic units within a globalised, information based technologically advanced global economy.

The state, with its faux moralising position, gives the child an ordering of values with the goal of producing university educated professionals. Hence why mass funding and political importance was given to unnecessary higher education institutions and the propagandising of the STEM field. For the prevailing neoliberal outlook upon children enforces the ‘Supernanny perspective’ whereby, outside of their economic potential for the state, they exist as nuisances20. And contemporary youth policy reflects this, with policy mandates with the direct goal of doling out adult style punishment on young Nare-do-wells. Yet the state is responsible for only so much. And whilst they ensure the collective Imaginary order is in line with the ethos of the simulation, The Family is nonetheless the touchpoint for the child, regardless of partial state intrusion.

Yet it would be foolish to blame such a state of affairs solely upon parents, for The Family is only that which is suitable for its contemporaneous situation. Studies consistently show that many people want to have stable families, homes and jobs. That they want to marry, to spend more time with their children, and to effectively provide them with the necessary moral faculties. Yet it is not the case that parents cannot control their children due to an inherent inadequacy within themselves. Rather, parents cannot control the onslaught of modernity. And thus the idiom that was once ‘it takes a village to raise a child’, becomes ‘it takes a mass bureaucratised tax gobbling machine of unspoken and unparalleled power to unsuccessfully prevent a child from being subsumed by Baal the CEO of Consumer Corp’.

And in looking toward both present and future, The Family may face new transformations wrought by reproductive controls e.g. abortion, genetic testing, and genetic modification. This topic has gained much salience in contemporary discussion, so I care not to state what has already been stated. But with individualistic preferences dominating reproductive choices, it is entirely plausible that future generations will be desirably sculpted via genetic modification, whilst so-called “undesirables” are selectively aborted.

Hence The Family, should it survive the unknowable perils of genetic modification, will no longer exist as a family, but rather a personalised collection of fetishised objects in human form as an object of consumption for the individual. Spouses and children, in this schema of extreme jouissance, are reduced to mere images awaiting fulfilment21. And with the world expanding beyond the real, of which our psyche is anchored to, the phantasies of perfect spouses and ideal children can be realised through technologically advanced reproductive control. This is the crux of contemporary society: phantasies bleeding into the real. And such phantasies conjured by the collective Big Other infects us all.

This state of affairs is antithetical to The Family. And whilst radical expressive individualism may have eroded certain values needed for The Family, one cannot simply escape the matrix, and segregate from society. The gaze of the Other encompasses all, leaving The Family unable either to resist or to capitulate, trapped instead within the very dialectic that breaks it. The future is unbeknownst to us all, and the present is never as bad as it seems. But if we continue upon our loose path of absolute liberty, it seems that The Family may lose itself within Modernity.

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‘You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?' You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you. – Kamala Harris

The existence of I as Ego can only be manifested through Others, but there is a specific genre of gaze that confers true existence for the subject. And this is the gaze of the lover.

Whilst one may be seen through a dialectic of anger, oppression, disgust, lust, fraternity, tis only through a dialectic of love that one is ever truly seen.

To understand my thesis, throw upon yourselves the anxiety riddled poncho of scepticism. Become ingratiated in its freezingly hot cloth. Allow yourself to be enveloped in everything and nothing. Find yourself both alone and surrounded in this new state of being, where nothing makes sense anymore.

The world is real, and you see it to be real however your psyche knows this to not be true. That unique feeling of terror overwhelms you, since the world exists in a state of flux between reality and non-reality. Tis something that lies within the Lacanian Real, and thus its queerness is understood only by those who have faced it. True scepticism is a paradoxical incomprehensible state of being, and its terrors are incomparable. For example, knowing that one is in a virtual world does not confer this type of terror, for in such a scenario one exists and truly knows that phenomena is mere phenomena. True scepticism is but a state of flux between reality and non-reality, which results in non-existence - a most terrible and incomprehensible state of being.

For one may only come into being as that which is. For even in the negation of such a state of affairs, one may even come into being as that which is not. The sensical tracking of this to reality is worthless, for individual ontology requires emotional validity, not logical. One cannot come into being as that which may-be, for to be is to be. And a sceptic is always residing in that which may-be, or in other words in emotional flux, for they can neither accept or reject a state of affairs. Tis a terrible state, and so one must sublate this by attempting to decipher reality from first principles.

One may look to the world as Descartes did and come to confidently state, “cogito ergo sum”. But whilst one knows that they exist in some capacity, the terrors of scepticism continue to haunt the psyche, for to exist as pure Ego is a terrifying thought. Hence emotionally, one does not truly feel as they exist, thus the emoto-informative matrix of the mind rejects the proposition that one exists. So, even though one knows that they exist, they still know that they do not exist. Thus the state of flux, unique to scepticism, continues to haunt the subject. And to be a sceptic in a state of flux, is to lack existence.

To resolve this issue of being, one emotionally wishes to be within that phenomenon that confuses them so. Tis not a philosophical issue of knowledge but a psychological issue of accepting phenomena. Existing as pure Ego is terrifying, for it is a hellscape in comparison to the world which the subject puzzlingly views behind a sceptical glass. A sceptic is not a confused person, for their logical faculties remain intact. A sceptic is but a child locked out the playpen, wishing to no longer exist as a confused voyeur but as the object of voyeurism within the playpen. They do not want to observe, for such absurd observation is non-existence. To exist is to feel, and one cannot feel without another.

As Hegel rightly introduces to philosophy, one requires the gaze of the Other in order to be. But from our experience, with or without the cloud of scepticism above our heads, are there not times that we feel non-existence even with the gaze of the Other? One may be subsumed within a troublesome dialectic of Boss-Employee and perpetually feel the gaze of the Boss and yet feel empty. Feel as if nothing is there. Feel as if you’re not really there and not really doing anything. You know that you exist and yet your existence feels wrong, it doesn’t actually feel like you exist as other workers do.

No longer do you wake up every day with routine, tasks, hopes, dreams and tribulations. You just sort of exist as an employee, and every day, every task, every emotion, every bit of sense-data bleeds into each other. You simply watch your life go as an observer within flesh armour. Emotionally, your existence feels wrong and thus the emoto-informative matrix of the mind rejects the proposition that you truly exist. And even with the gaze of the Boss conferred upon you, you remain a sceptic to existence as life becomes that which may-be and never is. Other employees seem to be, whilst you may-be. Some quality seems to be missing. And that quality is love.

“To be valued in this way, to be installed at the center of the lover’s universe, is to have one’s reality and individuality truly and fully acknowledged. Only the lover, after all, looks closely, carefully, and generously enough to truly recognize the beloved in all her individuality.” - Troy Jollimore

Love is the most positive configuration of the emoto-informative matrix and becomes the schema of ultimate idealisation. It can reconfigure a crooked smile into a work of art. It can reconceptualise the undesirable into the desirable and sublimate the imperfect into the perfect.

To be emotionally cognisant of the gaze of the lover is to eliminate all scepticism that terrifies the subject. One no longer cares of such valid scepticism, for there is no fear, no terror, no sadness with their current mode of existence. Existence remains painful, tiresome and horrifying, but it is devoid of the true terrors of scepticism. All pain and suffering in this mode of being is that which establishes a tether to the real. It is the connection that exists only past the glass of the voyeur. Love, without fault, places all individuals into the playpen and whatever is, truly is. No state of flux exists, and all joy or pain is that which is - a concept unbeknownst to the sceptic.

Emotionally, one feels that their existence is right. That this loved existence is meant to be, for this is how one is meant to be. For as James Baldwin so eloquently puts it, Love is “not merely the key to my life, but to life itself”. And no other state of being can compare, for the terrors of scepticism may pounce upon a single ounce of fluxion within one’s loveless mind. But the dialectic of love leaves one free of all fluxion and thus free from the terrors of scepticism. And to be within the gaze of the lover, is to reconfigure the Symbolic Order in such a manner that one finds the Big Other smiling upon them.

There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love. - John 4:18

And it is in this sense that the notion of a loving God becomes a crucial point for a more concrete existence. For the world is complicated and messy, and one may never feel the gaze of a lover. One may be loved in the real, this is true, but one may not be situated within a true dialectic of love. And if the world seems forever loveless, existence becomes impossible. There is no Tv show, no whorehouse or restaurant where one will discover the gaze of the lover through dopaminergic maximisation. If all of existence seems devoid of colour and life, then it is not within relations of the real that will result in a loved existence.

Instead, one must see that which is unseeable. Discover that which is undiscoverable. And reach to beyond the limits of one’s reach. One must find a non-contingent perfect lover who exists solely within the mind and solely beyond it. In other words, one must love the perfect lover in order to be situated within its gaze.

“Loving is giving something you don't have to someone who doesn't want it” – Jacques Lacan

As an eternal universal affirmation of being, God as a metaphysical concept is the ultimate object of love. Perfect in that He does not require Love, and yet as the perfect lover requires our Love for us to be truly situated within his Gaze. And this Love we must offer is impossible, yet it is de facto achievable. With that which is real, our love becomes muddled with the imperfectabilities of reality and loses its metaphysical strength. Thus worldly love, no matter how transcendent, cannot be placed as the purest confirmatory device of existence. Love in its purest form is that which we can never achieve and never give. And yet we never achieve it, but are given it, for we have no control over who can love us. And God as a perfect lover, confirms our existence through his love, for without our consent he loves us all.

A down-on-their-luck individual might respond to this by saying, “How can God love me? There is no love in this world, so why should I believe some imaginary figure loves me? Everyone else despises me, and rightfully so. They couldn’t possibly love me. After everything I’ve done, after all my pain, I can’t love anyone, and no one can love me back. I’m just a speck of a human, and I, like everyone else, can’t wait till I’m cleansed from this Earth”.

But to echo the wisdom of James Baldwin and Kevin Conroy, We’re all broken. And we all feel as if we aren’t deserving of that which we are given and not taken. And the pain one feels is pain absolute. But through coming to know ones fellow man through art, and stories, one comes to see that everyone has shared ones pain. And this pain, this guilt is not a stain of imperfection but a mark of reality. In that sense, whatever pain or anger one has, is never something that is unloveable. It is the mark of a real person, a person who can be loved.

Any of this guilt can be washed away within the dialectic of love. And to think that ones guilt is far too great for any redeemability, is the height of arrogance. How is it ever possible that your guilt outweighs His mercy? By mere virtue of existence, you can be situated within the dialectic of love that confirms such existence.

However, one may retort that a perfect lover is incapable of loving everyone, for love at such magnitude can only be given to a singular object of love. Yet He who exists as a perfect lover, is the most paradoxical entity in our finite understanding. God as a concept does not merely violate laws of physics and metaphysics. He is not simply the negation of logic. He is not of the same criteria as a “flying man” or “a light-speed travelling sloth”. The essence of God is paradox. And such paradox both puzzled and enlightened St. Augustine when he stated:

“O omnipotent Good, you who care for each one of us as though he was your only care and who cares for all of us as though we were all just one person”

And this paradoxical love confers the vitality of ones ontology in a non-contingent manner. Thus to accept such a point, is to enter the perfect dialectic of love with God. Such a dialectic, by virtue of emotional capitulation, forces us to sacrifice and give what we cannot give in the name of love.

But does this mean that one must give oneself to God and separate from the real? To segregate oneself not only physically, but mentally and spiritually - as some sort of spiritual self-flagellation? No. Tis true that love as an emotional byproduct demands sacrifice. Yet such demands are not demands proper, for that would be coercion via guilt. Such demands are produced by the subject for the subject, as a realisation of the dialectic they find themselves in. For those that truly love us do not wish for us to lose ourselves, for they love us as we are.

Their love confirms our being as an object in-itself and as an object in-other. Thus we must exist as such dialectically opposed objects in the puzzlingly absurd real. And if we must love, hate, progress or regress as a state of being, then we must do so situated within the gaze of the perfect lover. Without the gaze of a lover, human or divine, we find that any such qualities give us not the existence fit for reality. And so to exist, we must find Love.

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It all seemed like a dream to her now, that dark, stale place and the constant drip-dripping of the water clock. In where else but dreams could she, a queen, be led in oily chains to the black bowels of her castle and ordered in bristling tones to bow and extend. Down there it had felt like a nightmare. The last, pale lights of day that had scarcely descended the winding stairs were shut out with clicking locks, replaced by candles. Their pale lengths were crooked and curled and knotted like the fingernails of a witch. By their light alone she could piece together what surrounded her, the strings and valves of that awful, ticking thing. And then she knelt beside the prophet, the dirty, pock-marked prophet whose twisted, waxy hair was tied around his neck. And as her guide commanded, so she placed her hand within the groaning metal, and did not recognise the flickering of the candle or the crumbling bones in the bowl.

…with this hand of flesh and blood, reach out and grab the hand of God. With this divine technology, grant now the gift of prophecy...

The royal bed felt like a sheet of marble that night. How could she ever sleep or dream again? That vision, borne like a spark from the dullness of the prophet’s chamber, burst again like a thousand more sparks in her mind. It was the future, just a slice of it, snipped haphazardly out of Time and just as clumsily reinserted into the synapses of her skull.

She was going to die. That was what the gift of prophecy had given her. Queen Jane, the Southern Huntress, the bold usurper of the Crown, was going to be murdered in the dark. No, not entirely in the dark; there would be a sliver of moonlight to her left which would solemnly illuminate the shining armour of her murderer. And her head, secure one moment and the next expertly cleaved from her shoulders, would recall one final sight as it spun into oblivion: the very colours of her royal guard, peeking out between the armour chinks. And of course her advisors could not advise, nor the mentalists calculate, and even the magicians could not chain her soul to earth, for this was the nature of Fate. She was smart enough to know that.

But though the Queen could neither sleep nor dream, she could remember. The battle had seemed inevitable, its odds insurmountable. The air was cold and hard, and the sky was unseasonably cloudy. And she and her entourage cut a small figure of lunacy against the King’s army. It was just another rebellion after all, and she, just another rebel. And the grey, rolling sky didn’t care, nor did the cows that grazed in the field over. By all accounts the very occasion of her being seemed that day pre-arranged to have all the consequence of rain, the collection of her thought and deed drizzled quietly down upon the King’s men. In minutes it would dry and be gone. Yet now she sat up in her glacial bed and looked out into the night. There she watched the view that had greeted that foolish king for all the days of his life. Looking out, a thought consumed the prophet’s vision and the darkness.

Perhaps certainty was for fools. And perhaps it was the very essence of life to fight.

~

The Queen’s sickness was a secret thing; it was disclosed with secrecy and secretly it unfolded, but it unfolded nonetheless. By the time the official announcement, sealed ornately with black wax, had arrived at Giltyre’s estate detailing that a curse-affliction had taken the Queen, Giltyre himself had already been informed of the news by his groundskeeper, his spit-turner and the peasant boy who swept the haydust from the stables. Nonetheless, he cracked the condolent seal to confirm it and to collapse the wandering rumour into truth. The Queen was sick. So sick was the Queen that only a myth could save her. In a far-off land, in the mountains of that land, at the highest peak of that mountain, was hidden an elixir that could cure her. As a member of the royal guard, Giltyre was obligated to heed the call as he was obligated in all other things. So by the light of early morning, he donned his armour, mounted his horse and released slowly the tender hand of his wife. The road stretched before him like a bitter scar upon the earth; Giltyre pondered his obligations.

The memory of his last call-heeding was not so faded. That final order echoed through the gales: ‘FALL BACK! FALL BACK!’, as the King, his uncle’s cousin, fell like overripe fruit to the muddy ground. Remembrance chilled him. He never could abide like the House of Summanus, who weathered each changing of the guard as though they were simply trying on new coats. But neither could he abide with the noble chivalry of his forefathers and die a true loyalist. Not only did he fall back that day, but in as well, kneeling to the new Queen Jane. His wife was pregnant. He wished to see her, and the sun. Still, he couldn’t help but think whether the problem of the Queen’s sickness was self-fulfilling. Still, he heeded the call.

In the antique chambers the royal knights mulled restlessly with one another, remarking on their blades and harvests. Giltyre stood silently among them, pinching the fragile neck of a crystal glass without drinking. Slowly, the room’s murmur dimmed. They would not see the Queen today but her rather underwhelming herald who, with the ringing of a handheld bell, announced himself.

“By the almighty power of the Crown, woven down from the almighty power of the God, I now announce the knights of the Royal Guard who are petitioned to seek the cure for Her Majesty’s affliction. After much deliberation, they are as follows: Sir Abraham of House Pascarion, Sir Stefanus of House Summanus, and Sir Cherub of House Giltyre.”

Instantly, the room was set with chattering. Why had Giltyre been chosen? Abraham and Stefanus were as loyal as old dogs but Giltyre, somewhat of an old dog himself, seemed a baffling choice. He struggled to contain his own confusion. As Abraham and Stefanus celebrated in their corners, a gallery of silent eyes watched Giltyre as he marched toward the herald.

‘May I have counsel with Her Majesty?’ He asked with a stern awkwardness behind his helm. ‘I wish to thank her for the honour of her choice and I wonder if I may inquire as to what qualities she believes make me suited–’

‘You are the man for the job.’ The herald whispered harshly. Although Giltyre towered over the balding sycophant, he was little phased. His beady eyes did not even turn up to face him. ‘Those were Her Majesty’s exact words: “the man for the job.” Do you not think yourself the man? Do you doubt your Queen’s judgement?’

The sheer bluntness of the herald took Giltyre aback more than a mace. Suddenly he had no more words to say.

Later, he convened with his new fellows in some pampered corner of the castle. As the sun descended their small room and all its faded furnishings were bathed in a golden hue. Giltyre rested on a stool while Stefanus stretched out across the window seat. Abraham stood solemnly by the door. Of them, only Giltyre had removed his helmet and let his long, silver hair fall over his face.

‘What shall we do?’ Abraham asked pensively.

‘What shall we ever do?’ Stefanus said snidely. ‘Our duty is absolute. All excitement sets, just as the sun inevitably. If the Queen is as poor as they say, we must leave tonight and no later. My home is the Capital; I have nothing to miss. And you have no wife, Abraham, no one to write to. Giltyre?’

He wrung his gauntlets together and did not look at Stefanus. ‘I can send an emissary home.’ Giltyre said finally. ‘My son will be proud no doubt, and my wife, she knows it is not the duty of a knight to sit idly in his estate. Let us go tonight.’ Then, with not another word spoken between them and the sun’s last light illuminating the mountain tops, the three slipped away.

By and by the moon lit their path down, winking dimly between the branches that stretched high above them. Abraham, the youngest of them, gasped with every snapping twig or hidden rustle and Stefanus lunged his lantern into the night, but Giltyre was not concerned. He saw the hare’s eye in the undergrowth, the gaggle of asps within the trunk. A blind witch had told his mother before he was born that he, her bright son, would never know peace. And lo, Giltyre came out with charcoal eyes that saw no shadow. In the silence of his tent – for even the moon had descended now and Abraham would move not a foot further in the darkness – Giltyre closed his eyes. He saw vividly the rivers of blood pulsing behind his vision. Indeed, not even the darkness of his eyelids were safe from his enchanted sight; he would not know peace. The question stung him again. Why had he been chosen, sent for above all others? Why did fate cut short the lives of some and tie others in long and convoluted knots? And why, as he opened his eyes a fraction, was Stefanus Summanus parting the thin entrance of his dark tent as if to whisper something in his ear? Yet nothing escaped Stefanus’s lips.

Giltrye, still, troubled, watched as thin blades sprung out from his visitor’s plated wrists. And there, with all the practiced precision of a fishmonger, Stefanus poised to gut his catch. He pounced. But like the silver fish, Giltyre glided smoothly from Stefanus’s pointed grasp and took up his sword from beside him. In a single motion he cut himself from the tent. Stefanus continued to fumble inside.

‘I will evade death.’ Giltyre told himself reflexively. ‘I will bend as the reed, and plant as the reed, and the wind will not break me, and the flood will not drown me.’

He saw Stefanus’s covered form clearly, wrapped in the thick fabric like a childish ghost. And, approximating the location of his head, he delivered a hefty kick. With a satisfying clang, Stefanus slumped out of the tent like a newborn animal, lost in his bearings.

‘It’s a sin to kill a sleeping man.’ Giltyre said mildly.

‘Ah, but you were not sleeping.’ Stefanus grumbled, taking to his feet and readjusting his twisted-around helmet. ‘And now that I know this, I need not worry about the etiquette of it all. I would have hated finding a Pater to bless your burial.’

Stefanus had always been an arrogant one, even as a boy, and upon reflection, Giltyre’s surprise at his attempted murder dulled almost to nothing. The potential motives were myriad and all equally meaningless. Stefanus had found one and that was all that mattered.

Giltyre sheathed his sword. ‘I am neither in the mood to die or kill,’ he said. ‘Why should we wake Abraham with this mess? That is, if you have not already slit his throat in his sleep. I will leave, take a different road and return to my home, if it is the sole glory of saving the Queen that you want. And you should not fear my retribution. My deserting alone will make my testimony moot before the courts should I for some reason wish to seek revenge – it is all a young man’s game and I have no real interest in playing.’

‘You will not walk away from me, Giltyre. We were brought here for a purpose. We were sent for with reason. Why would you, an old fool, be questing with us? You are too weak to climb, too fragile for fighting. But you are of the blackened guard, the last one left, the only one to bend to Queen Jane. So she cannot trust you and she cannot use you. In my wisdom, I understand this to be a mercy killing. I am certain that she wishes for you to fall into a ravine, but no. You shall fall to me.’

Giltyre chuckled. ‘Well, it’s a good thing I never travel alone.’

Suddenly there was a rustle from behind Stefanus. He whipped around in the dark and saw nothing but the glassy eyes of a curious deer. He turned again. Giltyre had bolted. He’d sprung as far and as fast as his old knees could take him and vaulted onto his saddled horse with all the practice of a dancer. He couldn’t believe the trick had worked. But Stefanus was a wild one. He howled with frustration into the night and began to sprint after Giltyre’s fleeting gallop.

‘My valour will be multiplied in this!’ Stefanus cried. Turning back, Gilrytre watched the manic knight blindly slice his way through the undergrowth. By the tarnish of his armour, he resembled a panther, leaping, bounding forward, his long claws bared. ‘You will not escape this, Giltyre,’ he continued, ‘Queen Jane has found you out. You are a stranger, a ghost, a decimal to be rounded!’

But then, gradually, the forest fell silent besides the crunch of the horse’s hooves upon the soil. Giltyre dropped to a canter. He removed his helmet and let the night air dry his sweat. He did not understand it, still did not truly reckon with the cause and its effects. He wondered if a clairvoyant of the court had read his barely dissenting mind in that royal chamber, whether a captive hell-hound had smelled out some doubt in his heart. He clenched his reins desperately. If that were true, if his thoughts had been plundered covertly, then Queen Jane would know the truth; she would know the depth of his cowardice, his love of living and his hatred of pain. His wife’s face floated before his mind’s eye then, her and their modest estate and their foolish, grinning, freckled son. If only the Queen understood how truly inconsequential she was to him and how quickly he would forget her sharp command.

Stefanus drew near again. He had lit a torch and was stabbing it into the darkness, sending a shower of sparks before him. The sight almost amused Giltyre, of that lost, frantic man-child. With a sigh, he donned his helmet, spurred his horse again and dove deeper. But Stefanus did not follow the noise or fly into a rampage.

Almost swallowed by the wind and the trees again, Giltyre heard Stefanus at last cry out a single phrase: ‘Vos baptizabit in Spiritu Sancto et igni!’

‘Surely not…’ whispered Giltyre, as a terrible whistling filled the air. It was as if the forest itself was screaming from its roots. And though Giltyre saw the night as clear as the day, this he could see clearer. It was a fireball. ‘Which imbecile taught this reprobate magic?’ Giltyre thought in a sudden panic. He pushed his steed further, faster, but it was no use. An orange glow like a new horizon painted the trees and the black soil around him, and the horse and his hands and indeed when he turned to face it, his charcoal eyes were tattooed with heat and light. He braced, saw nothing, heard nothing, and felt as though his bones were smithing ingots and his teeth, a row of little drops of volcanic glass.

But then thought returned to him, ebbing, seeping. It was cold and hard but smooth and gentle as well, as though he was laying in the palm of an angel. He opened his eyes and saw the stars above him and heard the sound of flowing water. He strained to orient himself before relaxing fully.

‘I’m not dead.’ He thought, a wide smile creeping across his face. ‘I’m not dead.’

At length, the good spirit of the river carried him, keeping his face above the waters, washing the soot from his armour, whispering peace into his ears. Until at last it bent upon a long bank, and there it left Giltyre, like the rest of its temporary belongings. And there he lay, nestled among polished stones, his head upon a pillow of moss. After the sun had risen before him, and his eyes had grown tired from watching the river softly gurgle, Giltyre arose and looked around. The dawn was crisp and clear. In the distance, the white walls and towers of the capital unfolded, and in front of him stood a shack, half-tarred and ramshackle.

‘Perhaps I might be offered a meal before I am pointed in the way of my estate.’ Giltyre thought as he achingly approached. ‘A knight of the realm can expect such hospitality, and I will offer the coins in my purse as thanks, and they will nobly refuse to accept them.’

But as he drew forward his gauntlet to rap upon the door, it swung open violently. The smell of matted soil, of rendered fat and peat smoke struck him along with an overwhelming sense of recognition. This man who had opened to him, fresh-faced, stocky with a keen glint in his gaze, this man was an heir. A true heir, unlike the bastard claims of Queen Jane. A true descendant, and his name was Bann. Giltyre had not seen the boy in years and here in this strange squalor, it seemed impossible that his father had once been king. The shock stunned him and he did not speak the pleasantries he had prepared. But it did not matter.

‘Giltyre, you old dog,’ began the unwashed prince, ‘We’ve been expecting you…or someone shaped like you. I’ll explain in a moment, just come inside before you wither from consumption.’

For his age, Giltyre knew when to speak and when to be silent. And so he abided quietly, advanced into the fire-lit room and observed the faces of the others who sat or crouched around a cloth-covered box in the centre. They returned his stare widely and, like him, did not speak.

‘My retinue,’ Bann said, gesturing before him with a chuckle. ‘A far cry from my father’s armies, but as the Southern Huntress proved, one does not truly need the power of men. Regardless…tell me Giltyre, has anything strange happened to you recently?’

‘Yes, I suppose. Certainly. I shan’t recount it, but yes, it is an oddity that I stand here at all. What is going on, Bann? Something is happening and I am remarkably blind to it. Why are you here, in this country hut? Is your half-brother dead?’

Bann shook his head and stoked the fire. ‘As far as I know, my brother is collecting his own army in some far corner. But he is not my concern, so long as he does not interfere. And as for me, I am here to retake my father’s kingdom, so it is. And why I am here in this hovel? I shall show you now.’

He strode over to the circle of his comrades, to the center, and beckoned Giltyre to approach. With great reverence, Bann peeled back the veil from the box, revealing its oily, crenelated faces. Interlocking teeth chattered and whirred there, and when Bann picked it up, it seemed to hiss at his touch.

‘A hypothesis and two centuries of wasted labour, and this is the product – the product of that product I should say.’ Bann began, turning the cube in his hands. ‘My father’s palace has many rooms, many forgotten places that our forefathers made and discarded: Buried beneath the foundations, my great-great-grandfather met with a prophet and an architect who proposed to build a theoretical machine. They observed the complexity of nature and all its purposes and wondered whether such complexity could be replicated for its own sake, and what purpose that might serve. And they built it, for years and years they built it. The men that died inside it, their bones were whittled into needles and their skins were stretched into membranes. And after all of that work, it never turned on; it was a failure, and the project ended. I was given this piece of it as a birthday gift by my father, just a peculiar novelty and nothing more. And yet, now that he is buried and that treacherous bitch wears the crown, it has awoken. Somehow, she completed it. And now, we know what it does.’

Suddenly, Bann handed the box to Giltyre. In an instant, it opened at the corners like a flower and swallowed his gauntlet. His hand felt cool and numb within it, as though plunged into the vacuum of a portal. Bann gripped his shoulder with sudden fervour.

‘It’s a kind of organ, like an eye or an ear. But it belongs to the universe, knows the natural paths of all things. I touched it and I saw – no, I didn’t see – I knew the Queen was going to die. I knew that a silver-haired man with eyes like coal would knock upon my door. What do you now see, Giltyre? What do you know?’

His sword in his hand, shaking. The cold stillness of death. Execution.

But how? He had no desire to kill the Queen; he alone had knelt before her sword. And yet it was his fate. And now the prince’s eager glare had recognised it.

‘It’s you, isn’t it?’ He said with a dark laugh. ‘You’re the one who’s going to do it. And we’re going to help you.’

Bann’s retinue took to their feet and gathered around him. They took in his stature, the antique curves of his armour, all of it, as though he was the beautiful child of promise, born with golden hair and blue eyes. But he was wrinkled. His hair was grey, and his eyes were black. And though his mind cried out against these ends, the breath in his lungs, shaped by the shifting of his lips, whispered absolutely: ‘Yes. I am the man for the job.’

~

The shutters wouldn’t shut. She tried to close it but after a moment it would swing open again in defiance of her, her power, her rule. Night was coming. The moon, that callous, blinded eye, began to climb the distant mountains.

‘Is this the night?’ She thought. The fear of death clung to her like a foul odor which she could not expel; she had sent her suspects away and yet it brought her no solace. The shutters just wouldn’t shut. That beam of light, that betraying beam, still it shone through the unfettered window like a shroud. Who would stand in that light and cut her down? When would they do it? Would they be quiet or loud, bellowing or silent? Would she plead or cry, or defend and attack? Or before the blackening hour would she take her own life, in offense of all holiness. She returned to the belligerent window and peered down, saw the squires fighting with sticks, the peasants rolling their hay by moonlight. She tried to open it. The latch didn’t budge. Tonight was the night.

‘Oh God, oh Gods,’ she thought, turning away with shame. ‘I must escape, arm myself somehow. I am Queen Jane, the Southern Huntress, my rule was ordained by the stars; I will not die this night!’

Throwing open her private chests, she withdrew her dagger, a long crude thing that her father had forged for her. She prayed for its sting to protect her, as it had at her bloody crowning, as it had when she sliced the king’s throat. It burned away in her bodice, itching to be used. But she could not stay here, and as she threw open the door and descended the stairs, she heard the window’s shutters finally slam shut. But where would she go? At every turn she feared the worst, that in those candle-lit halls, the stoney walls themselves would crumble and the moonlight would bathe her killer. It struck her. A place without moonlight. If she was to die by the light, she would live in the dark. Down the steps she flew, deeper, deeper into the forgotten bowels of the palace. Somewhere in the dungeons; somewhere deeper than the dungeons. Finally she stopped and caught her breath. The air was thick and stale and safe. She cast her view up the stairs, saw only a sliver of that awful pale glow. But her ears filled with whispers then, the clicking, sliding whispers of a vibrant machine. She stood before the iron door. She had only thought to descend, and her feet had brought her here, back to this terrible place. But only she could open this door. Only she could pass through its enchantments and take for herself the curse of prophecy. And so she did. The door allowed her into the darkness. In the candle’s fire she saw the prophet and his bowl. She saw the door close and lock behind her. All was still. Even the machine that surrounded her, that had rattled and rang only moments before, now fell silent.

…in our Father’s house, the rodents dig their holes to steal our daily bread. The traps are laid against each plan made, to find and crush them dead…

She turned to the prophet. ‘What did you just say?’

But the prophet repeated nothing and rattled the bones in his bowl. With each shake, the room seemed to come alive with more vigour than before. The floor hummed and shook. Dust rained from above. It was if the Earth itself was in the midst of a stomach ache, or choking on something lodged in its throat. The metal groans grew louder, louder, until above it all the distinct unclicking of locks rang about, freezing the Queen completely. Something wasn’t right. Of course none of it was right but this impossibility was too great to bear. Only she could open the door; it was bound to the very instruments of her soul. There was no earthly power that could untangle it and yet, and yet, now it swung open. And there he stood, on the threshold, bathed in moonlight.

Without hesitation, she withdrew her dagger and bore it before her. She would not let fear destroy her. She would not let it corrupt her expression.

‘Reveal yourself.’ She said sternly. ‘You are in the presence of a queen. If you do not bow, I will consider it a mortal offense.’

‘Your Majesty,’ the shadowed knight answered, ‘Lay down that candlestick.’

She didn’t understand but she did as she was commanded, and the candlestick clattered to the floor. She had sworn it was a dagger, she had held it, felt its weight and edge. And now it was a candlestick. She felt her knees weaken as the incredible weight of something fell around her. It was as though she was standing at the end of the world, staring into a void.

‘I don’t understand.’ She said finally. Tears pooled at the corners of her eyes and her voice wavered. ‘I don’t understand at all.’

‘Neither do I, your Majesty,’ said the knight, with strange difficulty. ‘Something has brought me here, opened each door in my way and knocked sleeping all the guards in my path. I do not know the walls of this palace well, in fact I have never visited this prophet’s room. And yet every turn I took, every step I made, it all brought me to here. And my sword, even my sword; Observe it, your Majesty.’ The knight drew his blade and balanced it along the tip of his finger. Like the hand of a compass its point swung until it was in line with the queen. It was almost looking at her. ‘And I cannot let it go. On my journey here, I threw it down a well, but when I turned my back, it had returned to my scabbard, and now it will not even leave my hand.’

‘What is your name, Sir?’ she asked.

‘You know it already, your Majesty. It is Sir Cherub of House Giltyre. You sent me away but I have returned. But I am no traitor,’ He said, advancing one careful, trudging step at a time. ‘I never had, nor have any intention of acting against your rule.’ His blade glinted in the light. ‘I submitted to you in full grace. I have a wife. A child.’ She began to back away but her feet were like anchors in a mire. ‘I live for them, and for myself. I am sorry for what I am about to do.’ He raised his sword. This was the very moment. Memory and reality intersected. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. Certainty was for fools. Still she shifted back. Her ears filled with the cacophony of the machine and the rattle of the bones. The sword fell. She fell with it with all her might. Her head struck the floor.

…then they said, Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves…

These words, the prophet’s head whispered in his bowl. The rest of him lay beside the queen as she panted. Each new intake of breath was like fire within her. She was alive, somehow, and the prophet was dead. But Giltyre wasn’t finished. He raised his sword again and thrust it into the ground. It sank to the hilt with a head-splitting wail, as though it had been thrust into the heart of a beast. The chorus of pistons and valves and drums winded down, and for the second and final time, the great machine fell silent.

‘It is an abomination.’ Giltyre said, after a long time. ‘To try and control the future. It has yet to be moulded by God, and given to us as the present. You tried to open it early. It’s not polite.’

Queen Jane nodded thoughtfully. ‘I believe you now, that you are not a traitor. Let me thank you, Giltyre. That at least is in my power. What do you desire?’

The knight stood up fully, and set his face to the door. ‘I desire to live and die of old age, surrounded by my family. I wish to be forgotten by your plans. I wish to walk away, your Majesty.’

‘So be it.’

Paradoxes are paradoxical. Paradoxes are breaks in reality and logic. They cannot truly occur, and thus to “embrace” one is an impossibility. Were paradoxes to be accepted, the very foundations of life and society would collapse. One cannot simultaneously affirm “I love you” and “I do not love you” without falling into paradox. How confused our lovers would be if we were to stay in a paradoxical flux.

Even the mere utterance of the term “paradox” evokes unease, as though the concept itself were intrinsically erroneous. But such uneasiness arises precisely because paradoxes embody what is inherently incoherent. They cannot occur, for they are the logical residue of invalid reasoning. Truth is esteemed as Good, Falsity condemned as Bad; why, then, should anyone adhere to the false fruits of invalid reasoning?

To embrace such contradictions is not merely nonsensical - its delusional. The only defensible sense in which one might “embrace a paradox” is by provisionally accepting absurdity as a heuristic device, in order to enable the refinement of a theory into something no longer self-contradictory. Beyond this, one cannot simply embrace a paradox.

EMBRACE A PARADOX

REALITY IS AN ILLUSION

It is a well-established and extensively substantiated position in both philosophy and cognitive science, that what we call “reality” is but a product of our illusory senses. All consciousness is inherently a hallucination, for we mistake our internal mental representation as genuine perceptions of an external world “as it is”. In this sense, consciousness functions as a sublimation of phenomena into the guise of noumena.

In principle, there is no categorical difference between the “ordinary” subject of consciousness and an individual experiencing the “altered state” induced by psychedelic substances such as LSD. Both states are of conscious experience; although distinct neural regions may be activated, each nonetheless constitutes a conscious experience. The neural pathways through which we apprehend the world are, in their fundamental structure, shared by us all.

We possess no objective control over perception itself; we simply perceive what we perceive. We remain perpetually vulnerable to the perils of scepticism, and advancements in neural imaging only compounds the evidence for the illusory subjectivism that plagues us all.

Reality is nothing more than what each of us sees and experiences. There is no objective reality, for reality is an illusion.

REALITY IS NOT AN ILLUSION

WE ARE NOT FREE

Upon what grounds can one reasonably believe in freedom of choice? The concepts of free will and determinism are fundamentally irreconcilable. Philosophical gerrymandering of terms does little to reconcile these notions, thus compatibilism is an untenable position. The choice is clear, free will or determinism. And the answer is clear, for there is no choice. Determinism is true.

The entire enterprise of the social sciences is one that tacitly presupposes determinism, insofar as it seeks to identify the causal mechanisms by which individuals and societies develop. The fruits of such deterministic studies reveal, for instance, that poverty correlates with a higher likelihood of criminal behaviour, whereas affluence often correlates with diminished empathy. Beyond these two minor examples, every single facet of our environment is dissected and deconstructed, and the realization emerges that much of human behaviour can be reliably predicted by social circumstance.

Furthermore, advances in evolutionary psychology and neuroscience reveal that human behaviour is not only socially conditioned but also biologically predictable. For instance, women’s frontal lobes develop earlier than men’s, and male hormonal composition is associated with heightened risk-taking tendencies; a biological factor that helps explain why, in colloquial terms, girls are significantly more responsible than boys during adolescence. Likewise, studies indicate that conservatives tend to possess larger and more active amygdalae than liberals; the very brain region implicated in fear responses, a motif deeply interwoven within right-wing thought.

To reject the philosophical and scientific evidence for determinism, is to reject knowledge itself. In light of the overwhelming evidence, we must tell ourselves that we are not free.

WE ARE FREE

MORALITY DOES NOT EXIST

To declare that something is “good” represents a profound detachment from logical reasoning. There is no objective good, thus morality and all discourse surrounding it are a complete and utter farce. One must first assume that ethical statements are, in fact, propositions capable of possessing truth value. Yet this very starting assumption is already a matter of considerable contention. For many, the statement “X is good” is completely non-sensical, since there exists no objective referent for “good” in reality, unlike, for example, the measurable mass of an object. The non-sensicality of such a claim renders it incapable of bearing truth value, precisely because it lacks intrinsic coherence.

Yet if one grants that such statements are propositions with truth value, one must then grapple with the fundamental tension between objectivism and subjectivism in ethics. For the ethical objectivist, the only ostensibly tenable positions are either Moore’s non-naturalism or the appeal to God as moral arbiter. Yet both positions ultimately appear intellectually lazy. Each relies upon an unprovable and undecipherable concept, leading inevitably to theoretical impasse. One may believe in either non-naturalism or divine command, but one can never truly know or deduce their truth. Therefore, such arguments remain forever confined to the realm of theoretical speculation.

If cognitivism is assumed, the most coherent position available is ethical subjectivism. A concept that gains increasing support from moral psychology and from research into the ways evolution, neural processes, and social environments shape our moral faculties. Thus, the only two tenable positions in ethics are subjectivism or non-cognitivism. And with either position, all discussion surrounding morality becomes inherently worthless, for it is not an area of life worth considering with its lack of objectivity and relation to reality.

If one were to seriously engage with the subject of ethics without the lazy usage of faith, or a grand scheme of gerrymandering terms to fit an argument, then morality reveals itself to be little more than a farce.

MORALITY EXISTS

LOVE IS A LIE

How on earth can humanity persist in clinging to the flimsy and soppy notion of “love”? We all know that love doesn’t exist. What we call “love” is merely an illusory manifestation of our biological software, which was programmed by the processes of evolution.

Human beings are Homo sapiens - an officially classified species, no different in kind from any other within the animal kingdom. And all animals, ourselves included, are governed by a single primordial imperative – reproduction - the root from which all other imperatives emerge.

The entire process of evolution is not oriented toward the survival of individuals, but toward the survival of genes through their proliferation. Individual survival is merely a secondary concern, valuable only insofar as it enables successful reproduction. Our capacity for survival exists only to extend life long enough to ensure the successful proliferation of genes.

People are often confused by the Male tendency to “die for nyash”, but the Animal Kingdom is filled by the bushelful with examples of creatures engaging in life-endangering antics for the sake of reproduction. Gorillas, stags, and bison, for instance, engage in violent battles over mating rights; conflicts that frequently prove fatal. Certain species of manakin perform elaborate mating dances in which the male beats his wings with such intensity that, if prolonged, the exertion threatens to exhaust his cardiovascular system to perilous levels. And the praying mantis engages in sexual cannibalism, wherein the female decapitates and consumes the male during copulation. The male praying mantis, like us all, exists solely to reproduce.

Whatever “love” we claim to feel, for anyone or anything, is but a rendition of our folly nature. Our love is just a certain configuration of our emotional matrix sculpted by evolution in order to facilitate pro-social behaviour. Homo sapiens are promiscuous pair-bonders, producing fragile offspring that demand intensive parental care. And what we call love is simply an evolutionary mechanism ensuring reproductively successful pairings.

Even the scent of an infant’s head exemplifies the subtle ways in which evolution programs us for pro-reproductive behaviour. The most prevalent volatile organic compound emitted from an infant’s scalp is hexadecenal. A substance that functions as a chemosignal: which heightens aggressiveness in women while inhibiting aggression in men, thereby aiding in the calibration of maternal protectiveness and paternal restraint at reproductively optimal levels.

All that we feel, and all that we have been taught about our emotions, is ultimately false. And nowhere is this falsity more pervasive than in the discourse of love, which saturates and dominates nearly every corner of human existence. You don’t love anyone. No one loves anyone. Love is a lie.

LOVE IS REAL

THE FUTURE IS BLEAK

Global Population continues to rise. Pollution and Waste escalate without restraint. Climate Change continues to threaten the very conditions that sustain life on this planet. Governments have devolved into bloated bureaucratic machines, that pander to the wants of the few over the needs of the many. Mass consumerism dominates the world and expands relentlessly, with no sign of abatement. The internet and the broader digital age have inflicted irrevocable damage upon the minds of the generations destined to inherit leadership. Depression is up. Anxiety is up. Social Disorders are up. Neuroticism is up. Attention Spans are down. Social Skills are down. Agreeableness is down. Conscientiousness is down. Introversion is up. Political Discord is up. The very qualities thought to undergird a flourishing and stable society are steadily vanishing. No stable jobs, no access to good homes, and the only food you can afford is Ultra Processed Slop.

Tis a terrible state of affairs that shows every sign of deteriorating further. Oh how the future is forsaken.

THE FUTURE IS BRIGHT

CHRIST DID NOT RISE FROM THE DEAD

People are very much pickers and choosers with their miracles. To believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead is, from a rational standpoint, both illogical and nonsensical. Is it not remarkably convenient that those who believe in Christ’s resurrection, and in similar miraculous claims, are invariably situated within the very religious and cultural contexts that promote such beliefs? Wow, what a crazy coincidence.

It is almost as though faith itself is confined to those beliefs already culturally implanted within our minds, that are primed with the correct informational and emotional matrix. Yet when confronted with equally absurd claims from outside our cultural framework, for instance, a report of some anonymous individual resurrected in Peru, we magically decide to employ our rational faculties to dismiss them as implausible.

When human beings die, they remain dead. Why, then, should we make an exception for a semi-mythic figure deified by the dogmatic followers of a book written by desert people from over 2000 years ago? Paradoxically, it would be more coherent to believe in all miracles than to selectively endorse only those that align seamlessly with one’s pre-existing worldview.

The religious dogmatism surrounding miracles is an untenable position. Likewise, to pass historical judgment on the basis of mythic religious claims is intellectually indefensible. Thus, the case is very simple; Christ was not resurrected.

CHRIST ROSE FROM THE DEAD

GOD IS NOT REAL

The greatest representation of belief, is belief in God. God is posited as an entity beyond human comprehension, and yet countless claims are confidently made about Him as though they were fact. “God wants you to do this”, “God wants you to do that”. But how can anyone truly know such things? How can one claim knowledge of God if, by definition, He is unknowable. Religious texts do not aid in this matter either, for if we cannot know Him by nature, then an illusive text will not aid in this matter.

Is not “God” merely a construct of language, one that structures reality in a manner presupposing a singular creator? Other cultures conceive of the divine in radically different ways, precisely because the categories of their languages shape distinct metaphysical horizons. God may be understood as Gods; and He may not even be conceived as an entity at all, but rather as a metaphysical principle, like a mystical energy permeating all existence and governing its order. God could as easily be conceived as female; it is only the patriarchal bias of our language that compels us to speak of Him in the masculine.

It is epistemically impossible to establish, as fact, that God is real. One can, by contrast, verify empirically that water boils at 100 degrees Celsius. Moreover, the rational arguments for God are all obscenely ridiculous, as their gaps arise largely from the social and linguistic biases embedded in our very conception of the divine.

In nearly every other case of inherited cultural hangovers from a time gone by, we have shed the delusions of antiquity. No longer do we continue to accept the beliefs of uneducated people from ancient times who think that an epileptic is under demonic possession, whereby the demon can be warded away with prayer and ritual. Belief in God persists as perhaps the most enduring of cultural hangovers, sustained by the profound grip that religious dogma has exerted upon the cultural zeitgeist for millennia.

There is, little distinction between belief in God and belief in the curative power of prayer for cancer patients. Both are equally delusional. And so it is clear to all those in possession of their senses, that God is simply not real.

GOD IS REAL

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“To shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time”

– Jean-Paul Sartre

The fact demands explanation. The unreality of watching a bullet tear a man’s throat open beneath the sun’s theatrical glare is too potent to ignore. In the face of such vital force, the retreat into political discourse may seem cowardly, an abdication of a more moral reckoning. Yet it is necessary.

After all, there is substance to a political death. Attempts to fold Kirk’s death into the broad category of gun violence miss the point. All deaths command moral indignation, but they do not all speak with the same voice.

Amid the sound of gunfire and the cries of widowed mothers, political murders whisper unsettling truths. They are a grim form of cultural communication. Man is a political animal, and so it is that political murder is an attempt to change the nature of man.

We must then face the question. What, in the end, does Kirk’s death mean?

JD Vance has an answer.

Kirk’s death, Vance insists, is the culmination of a sickness in the left. A sickness lodged deep in its cultural institutions and elites, in the very people who raise your children and shape your daily life. Violence, he claims, is woven into their expectations.

Vance, as always, overstates. Yet he is not entirely wrong. There is something going deeply wrong inside the left.

But how can that be? After all, the plurality of political violence is carried out by the right, not the left.

However, the force of violence in civil society is never captured by quantitative metrics. In the contemporary West, violence is a rarity, whatever polemics may suggest. The salience, then, is always in how that violence reverberates around the culture. We call something a political murder only because it metastasises into political reaction. The significance of political violence will always be in how each side responds when blood is spilled.

Still, even if we move beyond a bare actuarial, it seems the right continues to have the more depraved relationship to violence. Elon Musk, and Kirk himself before his death, joked about the attack on Paul Pelosi. After Sandy Hook, Alex Jones conjured up conspiracy theories to deny the massacre had ever occurred.

But notice, both of these responses amount to moral deflection. Joking about violence lifts it out of the moral sphere, if only for a moment. Conspiracy theories go further, denying that the act of would-be moral condemnation even exists. The deflection here is itself a tacit admission of the act’s own moral aetiology. Impulses to humour or denial are no doubt cowardly, but at least in their cowardice they concede the immorality of the act at hand.

The left’s relationship to its own violence is of a fundamentally different sort.

Unlike the right, the left does not deflect from its violence. It courageously faces it down. In doing so, it has incorporated political violence as a necessary and basically moral feature of its ideological substrate.

To understand this disposition, we must recognise the enduring legacy of postcolonial thought in the modern left’s intellectual inheritance. This is not to say that every liberal is reading Fanon or Sartre. But the tone of 21st-century progressivism has been unmistakably anticolonial. It has at the very least, proven a persistently stubborn mode of analysis.

Much of the early-2020s discourse on a “progressivism out of control” was, in fact, a battle to mainstream and sanitise the anticolonial rhetoric of violent revolutionaries. Land acknowledgements, theories of systemic oppression, even notions of therapeutic violence are all hangovers of a postcolonial movement long left wanting for a colonist to resist.

“At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect”

– Frantz Fanon

Fanon’s therapeutic vision creates a deterministic relationship between hierarchy and political violence. Violence is not, as it turns out, a choice made by individuals. It is a kind of impersonal antibody, eliminating pathogens of oppression and healing broken psyches. Of course, Fanon confronted a real colonial administration. Yet his formula, that systemic oppression necessarily produces violent uprisings, has shaped the left’s reaction to its violence well into the contemporary era.

Understandably one might be confused. Charlie Kirk was not running a colonial administration that imprisoned people and stripped them of their rights.

Charlie Kirk was speaking.

Here is a second realization about modern progressivism. It is fundamentally terrified of politics. Its fiat victories in the late 20th century on a range of social issues created within it a culture that assumed the nature of the polity itself was fundamentally liberal. Illiberal, or even non-liberal, views became not mere opinion, but attacks on the very character of civil society.

It is not that you just believe abortion is wrong, you are systemically oppressing women. It is not that you believe in colourblind admission, you are systemically racist. It is not that you oppose transition for minors, you are complicit in trans genocide. As Kirk’s shooter wrote to his partner hours after the assassination: “some hate can’t be negotiated out”.

Politics, the expression and contestation of different ideas, becomes impossible if the ideas held by your political opponents are considered not opinions, but armaments in the systems of oppression that besiege your life.

When every position is filtered through the lens of structural oppression and joined to deterministic equations of violence and hierarchy, the result is an impenetrable logic. Violence, for some on the left, is not really the act of a person. Rather it is a spirit of righteous emancipation that descends on chosen revolutionaries and compels them to shoot.

In less than a year:

Brian Thompson, a father of two, was shot in the back of the head in the street by Luigi Mangione. The subsequent commentary reminded us, however, that America’s discord lies in its higher healthcare premiums compared to Europe.

Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim were gunned down by Elias Rodriguez as they were leaving an event in support of Gazans caught in the war. The murders were quickly reframed as reminders that the US continues to block UN resolutions on Palestine.

Charlie Kirk was shot in the neck as he was trying to persuade people that disagreed with him. Yet for much of the intelligentsia, what mattered most was his opposition to transitioning minors.

This toxic dialectic cannot continue. As Ezra Klein observed, “the bullet that tore into him was an act of violence against us all”. Political disagreement cannot be endlessly subsumed into theories of systemic oppression. Violence against the innocent is not therapy. It is not destiny. It is a choice. Riots and murders are not the language of the unheard. They are the language of rioters and murderers.

We should hear them clearly, and condemn them.

May Charlie Kirk rest in peace.