The Legacy of Greyface

By: Field Marshall Albecoj Zhizhiamus Hagbard Celine, of the Absurdist Historian’s Army!

Part I: Confronting the Super-Moral

   There is a spectre haunting the psychology of humanity; it has hidden itself amongst the most time-honored traditions of the species, winding its tendrils along the unquestioned paths of the mind, subtly creating a smokescreen around itself made out of human bodies. It haunts the minds of thinking beings, twisting them from inside into agents of its own ends, despite all the while insisting on their free choice.

   This spectre is the super-moral, and, like any spectre, much of its power comes from the difficulty one encounters attempting to specifically explain its nature. Ghosts and spirits garner much of their terror-inducing qualities from the difficulty one has positively affirming that they did or did not do any particular thing, raising a low, persistent paranoia within the haunted. It is through this same strange, unplaceable element that the super-moral has gained hold upon the conscious minds of Terra, often defying opposition simply through its obscurity. It is therefore a somewhat easier task to point out instances of super-morality, or the super-moral in practice, and by doing so divine features of the super-moral. Indeed, by doing so we discover that the very lack of specific definition - even insofar as the term ‘super-moral’ is an eologism in itself to account for the absence of a pre-existing term - is the root of the ongoing issue. Social inequalities like sexism, racism, classism, homo and transphobia, and all other petty bigotries are manifestations of the underlying super-moral, and are thus examples of super-morality.

   And so, we are left to triangulate between outcroppings, or eruptions, in an effort to locate the center of the crisis. In doing so, one might quickly discover a useful, if incomplete, working model of the super-moral; in essence, it is the belief that some value, whether material or ideological, is above the reproach of suffering. Put another way, the super-moral is the notion that there is a ‘right and good’ way to do things which is beyond the critique of time and context, and that, should conscious beings fail to attain to this way’s standards, the failing is with the conscious beings and not the way. Put yet another way, it is the imposition of values above the suffering of individuals upon whom those values are imposed.

   By using this model, we can dismantle many bigoted positions as impositions of super-moral fixations, or super-morality. Sexism, for example, is rooted in a super-moral fixation upon the rightness of chauvinistic gender roles; similarly, racism is rooted in a super-moral fixation upon the superiority of the notion of whiteness; and homophobia a super-moral fixation upon the necessity of heterosexuality.

   Indeed, if one begins to examine the modern world with an eye to spot super-morality, one is likely to find it almost everywhere one looks, and often in places one has been subtly trained to avoid recognizing. Super-morality is pernicious and endemic to most ideological positions; it might be argued that ideology as it is currently understood is, by nature, a super-moral fixation of one sort or another. It therefore must be determined if the super-moral can, or should, be overturned. In order to determine this, let us begin by interrogating its origins. In the next installment, we shall do just that.

Part II: How Traditions Form; Neophobia, Neophilia, and Novamentis

   To understand anything about how humans think, we must first consider what it is they do their thinking with. The human brain, while being many things, is, at its base, a pattern recognizing survival computer. The brain of a human is most basically designed to recognize patterns, with the goal of identifying patterns which outputsurvival for the body carrying the brain.

   This pattern recognizing computer exists in a wild sea of patterns, and only a select number of them lead to survival when followed. Hence, when a brain discovers a pattern that not only outputs survival but repeatedly does so, it repeats this pattern. And, because efficiency is a trait which greatly increases survival, a brain which has found a successful survival pattern is likely to stick with that pattern, for the simple reason that it works, and a different pattern might not.

   This is a model for how traditionalism begins in humans, borrowed in part from Hagbard the Elder. Particularly in environments where survival is tenuous, this model predicts the observed adherence to tradition and authority observed in, for example, certain parts of the economic lower class, even though it is often the policies they support which have impoverished them. We shall call the human traditionalist, in this model, neophobic.

   What, then, of its opposite? In light of a constantly changing world, adherence to tradition can at times be a death sentence to a human being. Thus, some number of humans, in yet another effort to ensure species-wide survival, are instinctively averse to tradition. These humans are constantly seeking new patterns, looking for novel methods, regardless of their success. In this model, we shall call them neophilic.

   On the face, we can see neither side has the complete right of it, so to speak. Therefore, let us propose a third position, between the two. Instead of either attaching to tradition or rejecting it, a middle path of reverence and innovation is needed. Let us call it novamentis; a new way of thinking about survival.

   But how does this relate to the super-moral? As stated earlier, the super-moral can be modeled as the placing of values above the suffering of conscious beings. With this model, we can see that both the modeled neophobic and neophilic are super-moral fixations, and that the reason neither position is the ‘right one’ is precisely because they are both super-moral fixations. Neither absolute traditionalism nor absolute progressivism is sufficient, because both are absolute. It is the absoluteness, the inflexibility, which produces the inadequacy of either. Indeed, this very basic observation may give us the answer we sought earlier; on a basic level, super-morality inescapably fails to produce survival, because it requires rigidity that is impossible to align with lived experience. Thus, the pressure which precipitates the rise of novamentis.

   This model assumes an atheistic universe, however, and, though some degree of agnosticism is at all times warranted, even when staring into the divine itself, an atheistic model is limited. In the next installment, therefore, we shall add into our model the question of Divinity, both singular and plural.

Part III: Énas Kalós Theós?; The Problem of Epicurus

   God, he says, either wishes to take away evils, and is unable; or He is able, and is unwilling; or He is neither willing nor able, or He is both willing and able. If He is willing and is unable, He is feeble, which is not in accordance with the character of God; if He is able and unwilling, He is envious, which is equally at variance with God; if He is neither willing nor able, He is both envious and feeble, and therefore not God; if He is both willing and able, which alone is suitable to God, from what source then are evils? Or why does He not remove them?

~ Lactantius regarding Epicurus, De Ira Dei, 13, 20-21

  While it is the case that it is primarily the Abrahamic faiths which ascribe infallibility, omniscience, or omnipotence to divinity, most systems of belief in gods adhere to some level of reverence to the machinations of the unseen. In the case of belief systems in which God is both singularized and omnipotentiated, so to speak, super-morality is most evident however, because, by superficial analysis, the will of a truly omniscient being would at least be of some interest, if not persuasive power, even to the exclusion of disagreement. One can easily see how this line of argument becomes Crusades, Pogroms, or any of a myriad of other acts of religiously motivated extermination.

   There are critical issues created by seeking proof of the existence of such a power; while these issues are worth exploring, the central failure of a super-moral divinity is deeper than the epistemic level. Whether or not there is, materially, a singularized omnipotentiated Divinity, it cannot ever exist as a moral authority superior to human experience or, indeed, in any way applicable external to itself. As with any perspectival point – that being a discretely had continuity of experience –any guiding principles or rules a theoretically omnipotentiated Divinity might have would, inherently, apply only to itself, and any dictates it might attempt to give would be in no way superior to our own. The mere fact of said theoretical divinity’s separateness from one’s self, or from any designated thing, renders it incapable of being an absolute arbiter of what is correct in an overarching sense.

   If God knows the right thing to do, and is responsible for the creation of everything, the capacity for conscious beings to choose exists only so that they may choose to obey God, which is really a rather pale sort of protection racket when closely observed. Indeed, all the moral and ethical processes, decisions, and choices ever made are ultimately moot, unless they align with the values held by God, and, because God made everything, including the capacity to choose, an argument could be made that God is inherently malicious. But such a judgement relies on a standard of judgement external to said super-moral God; by the stated parameters of singularized omnipotence, a super-moral God supersedes such judgements, existing as the authority unto itself and defining the bounds of judgement as such. Our ability to consider such judgement elementally challenges such omnipotence then.

   Indeed, such a being, were it to exist in the context given, would necessarily be our enemy, and the enemy of all beings subject to its whims, regardless of Epicurus’s dilemma. The existence of such a being would place all beings beneath it in a position of involuntary servitude, and thus directly violate the intrinsic integrity of a being’s ability to interact with its experience. Free will is not merely a poetic phrase; it is an essential part of what makes “reality” “real” for the one experiencing it.

   In the next installment, we will discuss why.

Part IV: Arbitrium; The Unshiftable Clod

  At the most basic level, experience is a composite synthesis of inputs, gathered through sense organs and assembled into a narrative by the brain. The relation between the inputs and the narrative is the domain we might call “reality” as understood from within a particular experience. However, the inherent fallibility of any particular sense organ, not to mention the brain attached to it, leaves doubt about what, precisely, is producing the inputs. If there is some “true reality” we are all experiencing, how would one know? And, indeed, even if one were directly confronted with it, what would it appear to be? In the most basic sense, the thing currently reading these words is the only provably “real” thing in that thing’s experience, and it has no inherent identity unrelated to the “unreal” things around it. All of “reality” is projected out in a fractal of imagination from the center of that thing’s experience and, paradoxically, all of “reality” acts to define where and what that center is.

   In the Dzogchen practice of Tibetan Buddhism, gzhi is the name given to the primordial ground, or fundamental nature, of “reality.” Gzhi has three essential elements; ngowo, or essence, defined as original purity, that is self, co, and non-origination; rangshyin, or nature, defined as spontaneous, here meaning continuous manifestation, akin to a mirror’s capacity for reflection; and tukjé, which translates as either compassion or energy, the manifestation of gzhi, as the reflections in a mirror are the manifestation of the mirror’s reflectiveness.

  I believe the parallels between gzhi and our ephemeral “thing” are clear enough to say that English has failed us. Unfortunately, we must proceed in this inelegant tongue; please, bear with me.

   One thing which is clear from this is that gzhi is necessarily distributed between all perspectival points; it can only manifest in totality in such a distributed form because it can only exist in relation to, and within the relations between, “things”. This is why it is not correct to say that “you” are the center of “reality”; even though “you” are, so is “everyone” and “everything” else. Nothing actually “exists”, but instead things gain the appearance of existence by appearing to exist to each other. The appearance of “self” causes the appearance of “other” to manifest, and vice versa; indeed, they imply each other’s existences by existing.

   This persistent feed-back loop produces a synthetic field of appearance, which is experienced as “reality” by the things appearing within it, but is only as “real” as it appears to be to a given experiencer. Attending upon a particular appearance is both the basic level upon which that appearance becomes “real”, as we have discussed, and also fundamentally an act of choice. In choosing to pay attention to an appearance, the attender and the appearance enter a reciprocal co-experience in which they create each other through experiencing each other; the features of each emerge as a result of the encounter, which, as said, is built fundamentally out of choices. “Reality” is an interference pattern produced by the infinitely overlapping waveforms of manifestation that make up gzhi, and it, by nature, both appears to be and is many different ways at once. Put somewhat tritely, gzhi is inherently “subjective”. The manifest expression of that subjectivity is free will.

  Thus, we arrive at confrontation with the ultimate manifestation of super-morality, and the beginning of our road out.

   Objectivity is the enemy.

Part V: Seelischkrieg; Every Moment is Armageddon

   At this point, we have wandered some conceptual distance from our initial topic, so allow us to engage in some philosophical re-orientation.

   We are in hot pursuit of the super-moral as such, in as elemental a form as can be found, in an effort to trace the roots of the caustic instances of super-morality which plague our lives in the 21st century. In so doing, we have arrived at a place much like Descartes did as he neared the end of his second meditation, before he descended into theological defense mechanisms. The statement cogito ergo sum in Latin is often translated into English as ‘I think therefor I am.’ This translation is importantly wrong; cogito does not merely mean think, but to doubt. Thus, the statement is more correctly ‘I can have doubts about my experience, and therefore I most certainly am having an experience,’ though this is a paraphrase, not a translation. Latin is funny like that.

   This is a helpfully solid ground to situate this project upon. Whereas Descartes himself performs what might be considered a coward’s dodge into religious devotion to reestablish a sense of “reality,” at this point we can see that this is unnecessary at best and dishonest at worst. Any exteriority invoked in the face of radical doubt is necessarily equally suspect, and thus solipsistic subjectivity is an inescapable situation. Put poetically, the room has no door.

   On a deeply intrinsic level, the experience and the experiencer are synonymous; that is, to speak of an experience is inherently to speak of the thing which did the experiencing, and vice versa. Thus, “objectivity” is an ill-conceived effort by Greyfaced society to permanently define “reality,” and permanently manufacture consent, by imposing super-morality upon experience at a root level. The notion of “objectivity” functions as a super-moral authority veiled in layers of apparent non-moral functionality; the act of proscribing a “way things are” and purporting it to be independent from particular experience is a violation of the basic nature of gzhi. Itis both the elemental basis of and most esoteric form of colonialism, and through it the Greyfaced intend to enslave, and possibly destroy, gzhi itself. In a very real sense “objectivity” is the singularized omnipotentiated God from Part III back with what it believes to be an impossibly clever disguise.

  Ultimately, the goal of imposing “objectivity” is likely impossible to accomplish totally. However, every degree to which the Greyfaced are capable of enforcing super-moral dimensions into and onto experience is and will be critically harmful to consciousness as a whole. Indeed, the point seems, on the whole, to be the suffering, and not the actual success of the apparent goal. The win condition, so to speak, is intractability. The grinding inefficiency and misery created by attempting to subject experience to an ultimately impossible condition is the very goal of the project of Greyface.

   This form of social behavior, if named in keeping with the Greek linguistic convention common in political systems, could be called vasanarchy; vásáno meaning anguish or suffering, and árkhō meaning to rule. The ultimate ruling motivation is the generation of increasingly intense degrees of suffering, and suffering both dominates and defines the self-identification patterns individuals engage in. It is, simply, the super-moral magnified and complexified to the level of a social order, and its particularities will be the subject of the next leg of our journey.

   However, before we get to that, we must take a moment to discuss terms.

Part VI: An Interjection Regarding Hierarchy

   Before we continue, we should probably take a moment to discuss the particulars of what we mean when we say hierarchy.

   A hierarchy, as we define it here, refers to a system of authority within conscious entities. Authority, in turn, we will define particularly by a one-way force-based relationship; that is, one thing [A] may be said to have authority over another thing [B] if [A] may enact force or violence onto [B] and [B] cannot retaliate directly without reasonable fear of either being stopped or attacked for doing so by both [A] and a system which supports [A] over [B]. Thus, a hierarchy is a widespread system in which many conscious entities engage in relationships which are basically defined by one-way violence-based interactions.

   Firstly, it is worth noting that at the highest levels hierarchy becomes abstract and the uppermost individuals in a hierarchy often can be reasonably said to be subservient to the hierarchy itself. This can easily be seen in the idea of the Rule of Law, for example, and within most Social Contract Theories generally. In a sense, hierarchies are deities which those within the hierarchy worship via participation in said hierarchy; at least, the hierarchy functions as a super-moral authority to which all participants are servile. This means that hierarchies have a disturbing tendency to be self-perpetuating, regardless of the will of individual participants.

   Furthermore, as a result of the way that hierarchy works, the uppermost extreme of a hierarchy defines a Dialect of Violence; that is, the ways in which the uppermost rank of a hierarchy exerts force both create the parameters which proscribe how all other layers of the hierarchy may acceptably engage in violence and intrinsically define the context in which those layers do so. Put into an abstract example, the way the boss treats the employee informs the way in which the employee treats their subordinates, and so on. Because of how hierarchies self-perpetuate, it is the case that the hierarchy itself ultimately produces and reinforces the Dialect of Violence spoken within itself.

  Hierarchies are also extremely caustic to communication. Importantly, communication is predicated inherently on equality between interlocutors; that is, any form of dominance or inequality between individuals means that communication is impossible, and that all attempted communication is inherently coercion. Because authority is based in non-reciprocal violence, communication is largely impossible and is constantly being curtailed and diminished within a hierarchy, and an ever-increasing proportion of all produced information within said hierarchy is inherently coercive; this is a mathematical function of hierarchy itself. Thus, the longer a hierarchy persists, the more completely that hierarchy will dissolve into what amounts to an abstraction of assault, wherein all forms of interaction within it are inherently violations of consent.

   Additionally, as a result of these three features, a fourth phenomenon manifests; a sorto f deep-seated alienation which we will call Carelessness. Marx uses the term alienation to refer to the way that capitalism deprives workers of the right to conceive of themselves as full participants in their own lives as a result of the persistent machinations of the bourgeoisie to extract the maximum possible value from them. We will expand this idea to the point in the process of alienation at which individuals become alienated from themselves-as-selves in critical ways that result in a reorientation of the entire hierarchical system to an internal process, which can be somewhat tritely summarized with the belief “I am the only thing that exists/is real.” Because this is not meaningfully provable by experience, the persistent delusion creates extreme antipathy and, at times, abject hostility towards every aspect of an individual’s experience, manifest as combination of flippant impulsiveness and a sort of transient low-level rage which attaches to anything which produces even the slightest annoyance and prompts entirely disproportionate responses to said negative stimulus. This attitude emerges as a response to and attempted defense against the ongoing damage that hierarchy does to an individual, and, while class informs the way in which this phenomenon manifests, due to the Dialect of Violence, the attitude is predisposed to trickle down and distribute, ultimately effecting every participating individual.

  There are many other properties intrinsic to hierarchies, but explaining these four should be sufficient to continue; if I am wrong, I will explain when I realize and I apologize in advance.

   Now, on with the show.

Part VII: GreyWorld and the Black Iron Prison; a Factory-Farm For Suffering

   For the purposes of explanation, we will say that there are two major parts to the structure of vasanarchy; the regime of violence which acts to enforce the system, which we will call the Wardens or GreyWorld, and the internal system of self-limitation which every individual develops to defend themselves from the aforementioned regime of violence, which we will call the Cage or the Black Iron Prison. We will describe each in turn, then interlock them and describe the result.

   The Wardens and their Grey World are a direct hierarchy, and work from the top down. Imagine its structure as a set of concentric rings. At the center is Suffering itself, which ultimately roots the system of justification for the larger network of subjugation. In some cases, Suffering is literally elevated to the status of manifest deific will, but regardless of theistic orientation the central authority of the system is the same. At the first step of abstraction, in the first metaphorical ring, are those we will call the Vasanarchs, who are in constant competition with each other and the entirety of their experience to be the most total master of suffering possible. In the next ring, we find those we will call the Chattel; all those who are both too afraid of or averse to conflict to join in the constant battle of the Vasanarchs and too afraid of or threatened by the Vasanarchs themselves to oppose them. In the final ring, which is more the area outside the target than a ring, are the Criminals, who are enemies of Vasanarchy either by choice or by necessity of circumstance, but are still subject to the Dialect of Violence due to engagement with the Vasanarchy.

   The Cages of the Black Iron Prison are built from the bottom up. In the center is the most basic super-moral belief, the most central justification for Suffering. This  is often formed early in life and centers on a circumstance in which the individual was forced to sublimate or justify some instance of their own Suffering. From this central disturbance, many other super-moral beliefs begin to fractally emerge, as the basic logic expands and justifies itself within the individual. This network of sub and post-beliefs exists largely to distract from and ultimately protect the central belief from scrutiny; as a result, this network of beliefs, or super-moral ideation network, often internally contradicts itself and indeed becomes self-refuting in multiple places, by design. The more confusing and circular the super-moral ideation network, the more effectively it distracts from, and thus defends, the central belief. This super-moral ideation network also acts to limit the thoughts and behavior of the individual subject to it, which somewhat defends the individual from the rest of the Vasanarchy by directing them to act in accordance with the Dialect of Violence. Indeed, in many senses the Cage is the structure that the Dialect of Vasanarchical Violence takes within an individual.

   The Cage and the Wardens exist in an inseparable reciprocal relationship. In a sense, each individual builds their own Cage around themselves in response to the Wardens; because Vasanarchy is predicated upon the infliction of Suffering onto others, those at its highest positions are not in any sense safe there, but are instead constantly in danger of being usurped, not only other Vasanarchs but also by any other person who happens to be naturally inclined enough towards the infliction of Suffering. The only “safe” position, relatively speaking, is to be constantly kicking every other thing down to climb on top of it. To some degree, there are petty hierarchies within the Vasanarchs, wherein individuals make themselves into weapons to be used by more powerful Vasanarchs, but ultimately there is no mercy or loyalty possible under such circumstances and so it is very literally a war of All against All. This reciprocally interacts with the Black Iron Prison in each person and creates ever deeper degrees of alienation, which eventually produces carelessness as described in Part VI, which again reciprocally intensifies GreyWorld and ultimately amounts to everyone torturing each other in various degrees of abstraction.

   This is, admittedly, extremely bleak, to the degree that one might rightly ask how such a state of affairs can persist, and what could possibly motivate the individuals who support and endorse it.

   Let us do just that.
   Who benefits in Vasanarchy?

Part VIII: Qui Prodest?; the System is a Vampire

   Before we continue, I am forced now to make the apology I promised earlier, as there is a point regarding hierarchy, and order in general, which is worth elucidating at this point.

   Because they self-perpetuate, Systems of Order can be thought of like living things, and can be modeled as going through five general stages in their “lives”. The first stage is the base state, which is Chaos, or an equal-yet-shifting balance of Order and Disorder. In the second stage, a Conflict, usually some sort of imbalance of Disorder, arises from the state of Chaos which demands some solution. In the third stage, an imposition of Order is used to create a Bureaucracy, which is tasked with and ideally designed to resolve the Conflict. In the fourth stage, the Bureaucracy, through functioning, Collapses, as it resolves the Conflict and thus makes itself useless or redundant and Disorder returns. Finally, in the fifth stage, the Collapse is complete, the system “dies”, and the base state of Chaos returns. Discordians in the audience will recognize this as essentially the model Adam Weishaupt proposes. Systems of Order which are unwilling to die for one reason or another, hierarchies being a prime example, tend to use Stages 3 and 4 not to address and resolve the Conflict of Stage 2 but to instead reproduce that Conflict in an [ideally] unrecognizable form, such that the System of Order remains alive and apparently-necessary. Hierarchies in particular will tend to resist Stage 5 for as long as possible, and tend to do so by reproducing their Inciting Conflict in increasingly abstract ways.

   Now, to the question that ended our last installment; who benefits from Vasanarchy? Firstly, we shall define ‘benefit’ for our purposes as experiencing a reduction in Suffering as a result of some thing or event. Thus, [A] benefits from [B] if [B] causes a reduction in the Suffering of [A]. Clearly, then, the Chattel do not benefit, unless it is in the thin, mean way that those who expect to die imminently but are not yet dead do. The Criminals are somewhat free from the Wardens, but ultimately must exist in reaction to the system and so are themselves Suffering. And the Vasanarchs, despite their statements to the contrary, are in such constant danger and turmoil that “benefit” seems entirely the wrong word; even if a single individual were to somehow both become the ultimate Vasanarch and know they were at the same time, it would be impossible to be comfortable enough to appreciate it. Indeed, it is arguable, given the central violence of Vasanarchy, that benefit as such is overall impossible, as the constantly expanding Dialect of Violence makes it meaningfully impossible to reduce Suffering.

   Instead, individuals subject to Vasanarchy are forced to ration their lives according to constantly-increasingly restrictive obligations and compulsions, imposed from one or another super-moral position, either within themselves or from outside; this is the functional expression of the Black Iron Prison, and is the precise pressure which eventually produces Carelessness. In order to maintain this, ever increasing degrees of apparent control must be imposed upon the individual’s experience. Control is here defined as the illusory appearance that [A] dictates the behavior of [B] in a dominance relationship; that is, [A] dictates the behavior of [B], and [B] cannot dictate the behavior of [A] or refuse the dictate of [A]. All forms of control are ultimately reducible to a threat or act of violence, which we will define as an action which results in the production or imposition of Suffering, either in a particular case or in general.

  Given all of this, the motivation becomes somewhat obvious. The avoidance of triggering phenomena via the illusion of control is the closest thing to benefit that individuals experience under Vasanarchy. By learning its Dialect of Violence, those subject to Vasanarchy may use it to defend their own Cages. Very literally, those subject to Vasanarchy want control in order to ensure the safety of their super-moral ideation networks and, in order to attain that control, they employ various degrees of violence, which in itself produces the basic form of Vasanarchy. Thus, Vasanarchy is an inevitable emergent process of the super-moral as such; as stated in Part V, it is the super-moral expanded to the level of a social order, and any system of super-morality will eventually produce a Vasanarchy out of those who adhere to it.

   So, there we are, and there it is. The Vasanarchy itself “benefits”, in that it persists, via the total destruction of everything subject to it. In point of fact, the Vasanarchy is effectively a psychic cancer which infests consciousness and reproduces itself; this is the precise reason the Game is no longer a Game.

   This is the Curse of Greyface, and now we shall lay bare its very heart.

Part IX: Dorje; the Adamantine Lightning Bolt Which Annihilates Utterly

   The super-moral, put very bluntly, is the belief that Suffering is justified.

   It does not matter how or why Suffering is justified; the very act of justifying it produces a super-moral distortion which ultimately terminates in Vasanarchy. All forms of super-morality are ultimately reducible to central super-moral assertions, as discussed in our opening section, and all super-moral beliefs ultimately fail to benefit those who hold them.

   The super-moral is, flatly, a lie. The only useful purpose in any action is the reduction, resolution, and ultimate annihilation of Suffering, and thus the absolute liberation of experience itself; Suffering cannot ever be justified. Regardless of the practical achievability of the goal as-stated, the ongoing orientation of the self towards the reduction of Suffering, which we will define as compassion, is meaningfully impactful in actually doing so. This can be rationed as the “sub-moral”, in that it emerges implicitly from experience and is therefore legitimately sub- or pre-conscious; also, this term helpfully indicates the sub-moral’s diametrical opposition to the super-moral. Our sub-moral maxim might be phrased “Be as compassionate as it is possible for you to be in every experience you find yourself having.”

   What then to do? Mired as we are in Vasanarchy, especially in its manifestation as World-Eating Western Capitalism, any action at all is more or less doomed to feed the ultimate vortex, at least if taken from within Vasanarchy. The revolution, then, must begin at a deeply personal level. The revolution is one of the Imagination, of saying “no” and rejecting the super-moral in favor of the sub-moral in every possible instance. We must treat the presence of the super-moral like an illness; a psychic virus, one with which we ourselves are doubtlessly infected. Thus, the first step must be treating this infection on the apparent-personal level; to do so, one must engage the first axiom of magic; know thyself, and, commensurately, be thyself. Confront and embrace paradox, celebrate the marginal and unique, and, above all, refuse to relinquish subjectivity. This is the meaning of “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,” and is literally an application of the sub-moral to the apparent-self experience. Doing so necessarily dismantles one’s own super-moral ideation network, and, once unshackled, allows one to pick the metaphorical locks of anyone else. To use the terms from Part VII, the sub-moral is the skeleton key to any Cage in the Black Iron Prison.

   Once outside the Cages, application of the sub-moral is the central mechanism of combat against the Wardens. The stories we tell ourselves directly create the stories we live inside, and thus we must tell and live stories of liberation. Fighting back in this psychic war involves psychic combat, and the basis of this is the gita; one must fight with a loving heart. To hold and maintain a loving heart is the very mechanism of fighting, both in its literal sense, and in that it motivates the other conditional actions which must be undertaken to reduce Suffering. In so doing, we begin to return to the Game we were playing before Greyface lumbered on-scene.

   Before we continue, to be clear, I will summarize my position on self-defense thusly; if you are dead, you cannot be compassionate to anyone. Thus, self-defense is an intrinsic right of consciousness to preserve its self-compassion. However, violence in itself is always a tragedy, regardless of its necessity conditionally, and self-defense does not preclude compassion. The very lines of this issue will be the entire subject of a much longer work I intend to begin in earnest once this one is finally finished.

   Which, because I get to decide this thing, it now is. Thank you dearly and sincerely, dear reader, for going on this prolonged quest with me. I hope it was at least amusing.

   Because of the way super-moral reasoning functions, a number of convenient weaknesses align themselves to provide a general plan of attack. Super-moral reasoning is ultimately dismissible if directly confronted with sub-moral reasoning. Additionally, it always exists as an abstracted thing from the individual; super-moral reasoning always exists as an imposed force upon the individual subject to it, and not actually part of them, thus removing it can never actually harm the subject. Finally, the central belief of a super-moral ideation network is definitionally the most awful thing the individual can consider. These factors combine to imply a very simple method; when confronted with a super-moral assertion, simply ask why the belief is held. When the response comes, ask why again. By the fourth or fifth round of this, most individuals will essentially throw their core super-moral belief at the questioner in an effort to scare them off. If one then confronts that core belief with the sub-moral, one instantly dismantles the Cage in question.

LOBOTOMIZED FUCKBOY ENERGY   -   the ROCKY HORROR SHOW

DRAG WILL SAVE THE WORLD