Evil In Guise Of Good

Evil In Guise Of Good Hiding In Plain Sight, All Over… And Evil Masquerading As Good Can Collapse Civilization:

I have never been to the famous Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse, and never will be, although I passed by it thousands of times. Chez Panisse embodied, in the USA, for decades the principle of Political Correctness… And Political Correctness contravenes my personal Philosophical Correctness! (Ever since Socrates we know that political, let alone judicial, correctness can be at odds with philosophical correctness!)

I didn’t go to this fake French restaurant because it would have violated many of my deep principles, from the political to the culinary, including the principle of being a professional party pooper, much unappreciated, as deserved… Besides, I probably cook better and healthier…

Chez Panisse looked to me as a tasteless example of evil in the guise of good.

Friend John Michael Gartland agreed:

I have been there. It is nice in theory but it is self congratulatory, over political, over sanctimonious, just too woke. Dining should be a respite from politics. Diners are treated as lucky and blessed to snag a table at this sacred temple of food. A warm sincere welcome would have been nice. At the same time, there is integrity to the mission/vision of Alice Waters. She didn’t invent the farm to table movement but she sure knew how to promote and monetize it. If even half of what the praise she gets is true she is quite accomplished. As a diner in her food factory of a restaurant I just didn’t get a sense of what all the hype was all about.

Yes. I have never been to Chez Panisse, but I have interviewed and grilled individuals who did, and went there more than once, and even before the restaurant became famous because Clinton, while president, ate there.

At least one person who ate at Chez Panisse also ate regularly at Chez Patrice… And found the food better and more correct with the latter. So here is the slogan for the day: Chez Patrice, not Chez Panisse!

Just an example of what’s wrong with glorifying in Chez Panisse: How can it be philosophically correct, knowing all we learened in the last 50 years to serve expensive wines? Wine is a luxury the planet doesn’t need and a healthy brain can’t risk. Right, the ancient Greeks celebrated Dionysos, god of wine among other things. But clouded thinking brought them under the Roman boot!

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Meanwhile Elon Musk has to walk around the worst part of downtown San Francisco, where Twitter is located. He wrote: “You could literally film a Walking Dead episode unedited in downtown SF. This is where San Francisco politics leads and Twitter was exporting this self-destructive mind virus to the world. With some exceptions, other tech companies are still doing so.

Evil in guise of good.”

[There is an elite Franco-American school nearby where my daughter could have gone; but my spouse who for business used to go there all the time, vetoed it, for safety concerns caused by the walking dead Musk talks about.]

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WOKE INSTEAD OF WORK:

Mitterand, who got the highest fascist medal in WW2, from the hands of the fascist leader himself (later condemned to death), lowered the French retirement age from 65 to 60. This lowering of work, is, fundamentally, the same idea as Roman emperors creating unemployment (and then rescuing the unemployed with gold distribution, turning them into crumb hungry pigeons…)

All of this under the cover of woke and inverted logic, not to say values…

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Woke Is The Product Of A Way Back Machine: Not Just From Marx, Or Saint Just, But Theodosius I!

How did evil in guise of good start? Much of PC is not Politically Correct but Perfectly Cretinous. Woke, in its most recent version, in my opinion was invented in France, especially in the power circles and areas in a one mile distance from Saint Germain (tellingly, the most expensive part of Paris). See the picture!

We have to go back to the “socialism” of the 1920s and 1930s. And even earlier, the rise of Marx against Lasalle (founder of German SPD, co-founder of German universal healthcare) and Marx against Proudhon (French constitutional MP, anarchist). Marx loved the idea of evil in the guise of good. Marx loved the idea of dictatorship. His mental following, to this day, is immense (includes Putin and Xi).

By the 1930s, most European intellectuals were either pro-Nazi or pro-Stalin. Relatively decent people like Rosa Luxembourg had been eliminated. For example Albert Camus was in the Algerian Communist Party when he was as young as 22.

Maybe that self-destructive mentality emanated from the butchery of World War One where French and British nationalism got immolated in the trenches. So, instead of embracing the democratic ideal of meritocracy and progress, the “positivism” of Auguste Comte, instead then of embracing what made Europe good, steering away from dictatorship, all too many European intellectuals embraced the idea inherited from resentful a failed Bourgeois Allemand, Marx: evil in guise of good became  the new European ideology. It spilled in the US as “woke”.

Evil in guise of good was the seduction of propaganda blatant with Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Japanese fascism (bellicose Hirohito), Hitler, Franco, etc.Even Hitler knew this, and explained it well in his writings. To seduce those who wanted to do good, the socialist minded, a liberal amount of red in the Nazi flag would help, so Hitler conceived it thus.

How woke became dominant in France and even malignant is a long story, including the defeat of 1940, and the rise of the fascist Mitterand, which started… in 1940 (and ended socialist president of France in 1981). Now the defeat of 1940 was an indirect consequence of the rise of the… USA: FDR refused to help France with Hitler, as early as 1933. That made French politicians incapable of doing what needed to be done, namely go to war with Nazi Germany early. That could have won the war, but the danger was that France would have been considered an aggressor nation victimizing Germans. 

Evil in the guise of good is an inversion of all values, and (much of) French intellectualism embraced that route after 1945. The end result is that even dactylographic pedophiles became honored guests at the presidential palace, received a state stipend, and even state provided lodging in the most expensive part of expensive Paris… Under several French presidents!

The dark logic of the establishment may escape the unsubtle: when values get inverted, the inversion of all values itself becomes a value, and celebrating the most outrageous outrages, such as literary pedophilia who would send anyone in prison, even in France, being a particularly outrageous outrage, had to be embraced, as an ultimate violation, and because so it was. 

Even the New York Times finally agitated its antennas on that revelation: 

A Pedophile Writer Is on Trial. So Are the French Elites.

For decades, Gabriel Matzneff wrote openly of his pedophilia, protected by powerful people in publishing, journalism, politics and business. Now cast out, he attacks their “cowardice” in a rare interview. [Norimitsu Onishi, Feb. 11, 2020.]

PARIS — Gabriel Matzneff, the French writer under investigation for his promotion of pedophilia, was holed up this month inside a luxury hotel room on the Italian Riviera, unable to relax, unable to sleep, unable to write.

He was alone and in hiding, abandoned by the same powerful people in publishing, journalism, politics and business who had protected him weeks earlier. He went outside only for solitary walks behind dark sunglasses, and was startled when I tracked him down in a cafe mentioned in his books…

Hiding is new for Mr. Matzneff. For decades, he was celebrated for writing and talking openly about stalking teenage girls outside schools in Paris and having sexual contact with 8-year-old boys in the Philippines.

He was invited to the Élysée Palace by President François Mitterrand and socialized with the far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. He benefited from the largess of the fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent and his partner, the business tycoon Pierre Bergé.

But Mr. Matzneff has been summoned to appear in a Paris court on Wednesday, accused of actively promoting pedophilia through his books. Mr. Matzneff could face up to five years in prison, yet the case is also an implicit indictment of an elite that furthered his career and swatted away isolated voices calling for his arrest.

In a widening investigation, prosecutors announced Tuesday morning that the police would start seeking witnesses to find other possible victims of Mr. Matzneff.

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Evil In Guise Of Good Can Run Amok:

Roman Civilization collapsed because evil disguised as good, the Roman Catholic imperial terror, was imposed over the entire Roman polity. Serious: between emperor Theodosius I terror edict of 381 CE and catastrophic religious war of 394 CE, only 13 years! (What the establishment doesn’t want you to know!)

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French intellectuals are often gifted and France, being at the core, if not the core, of Western civilization since the Fifth Century is still extremely influential. So it is important to prevent French thought from becoming gangrenous… as much of it has already become, generations ago. And the proof of this is the growth of “woke”… which is a monkey style parody of being awake and enlightened. Monkey style can go only that far because causing a backlash. (And a backlash is not the worse that can happen, as when the Christian apes took control, and destroyed Roman civilization…)

Woke? Hence the streets of San Francisco…

Which go hand in hand with hyper luxury a few miles away, where the world is decided by evil characters masquerading as good. because woke creates delapidation, itself a distraction, followed by condemnation and appreciation of plutocratization… All the more as the most evil characters behind all of this then advertized themselves as “lovers of man” (philanthropia)…. 

Patrice Ayme  

Pedophile Matzneff, right, in Paris in 1990 with the French business tycoon Pierre Bergé, center, and Harlem Désir, founder of SOS Racisme, Socialist Party leader, European MP, etc….As recently as 2013, Matzneff was feted by a wide cross-section of the French literary establishment. He won the prestigious Renaudot Prize for a collection of essays. Matzneff promoted sex with under-age teenagers, “Les Moins de Seize Ans” (“The Under-16s”), all over the TV, radio, all media… I am focusing on him but he is just one bacterium in a vast gangrene.

The preceding is not an attack against Bergé as an individual. Bergé had good controversial ideas (bit like Musk). In March 2016, at age 87, Bergé expressed his position on “modest fashion” saying, “I am scandalized. Creators should have nothing to do with Islamic fashion. Designers are there to make women more beautiful, to give them their freedom, not to collaborate with this dictatorship which imposes this abominable thing by which we hide women and make them live a hidden life... In one way they are complicit, and all this to make money. Principles should come before money.”

Evil & its Good God, Versus Wisdom, Crown of Creation

More theology? Enough with that!!!… Except that Judeo-Christian values are all around, ever since our cultural ancestors, the Greeks, not to say the Egyptians, and Phoenicians, came in contact with the Jews around 33 centuries ago (that probably started with the enormous turmoil known by Pharaoh Ramses III as the “Peoples of the Sea” invasion; all old states succumbed to it… but for Egypt, which survived in extremis).

Thereafter, a hierarchy of values was proposed, which became part of the philosophical problems which brought down the Roman Republic, and, centuries later, the Roman empire itself (it’s pudically refered as the seduction of Rome by “Oriental values”…). In Judeo-Christianism, the top notions, the top values, are omnipotence and goodness. Even after the Judeo-Christian was lethally wounded by the Enlightenment and toasted to a crisp at Auschwitz, the hierarchy of values it carries is still around, orienting the psyche of most people. And those values imparted by Judeo-Christianism, omnipotence and 100% goodness, are, contrary to repute, deeply inhuman.

There is a well-known trilemma, between “God”, omnipotence, and evil. The Cathars founded their religion on it. The fundamental idea of God, one and indivisible, is that He is omnipotent, like the savage of old, over his wife and children! Omnipotence is the definition of “God”: no omnipotence, no “God”.

However, if God is willing to prevent evil, but can’t do it, He is not omnipotent. Thus not God. Yet, if God is unwilling to prevent evil, “God” is evil, or, at least, no good. If God is both incapable of preventing evil, and unwilling to prevent evil, He is both incapable and evil, so why to call Him “God”, and debase oneself, kneeling to Him and his incapable, evil nature?

Of the Cathars, only castles are left. The obsession of Christians with “omnipotence” and “goodness” (of said omnipotence) brought this result. The Christians exterminated to the last, with an enthusiasm Hitler would try to direct toward the Jews, eight centuries later. Vatican, greed, and Paris (“French”) king Philip Augustus dispatched Catholic armies who killed most Cathars, at least 700,000, in France alone, and destroyed all their works (further eradication was pursued in Italy and the Balkans, killing hundreds of thousands more, if not millions). The Pope had decreed that Cathar properties and lands were there for the taking.

Confronted to the previous trilemma, the ancient Greco-Romans, Phoenicians, Hindus, Celts and Germans, who had plenty of half potent, half evil gods, would have scoffed: why should gods have to be good and omnipotent? Isn’t it enough to be gods? Can’t gods be free to do as they please, and be incapable and evil, as they pleased? As a Chinese emperor famously noticed, not taking action is itself an action.

The Judeo-Christians have a problem, though, because their “God” is omnipotent, omniscient, and supposedly “good”. The Islamists have less of a problem than their Judeo-Christian predecessors: God, in their Islamist version, although “merciful”, is horrendously cruel and torturous, to the point of sounding completely unhinged. However, Allah has lots of problems (as related by the Qur’an) with human contradictors, thus suggesting he is not omnipotent. To avoid this, the Qur’an claims that Allah laid traps to all these people He wants to “throw into the fire”. So people are not bad because Allah is weak, but bad because Allah is crafty, and misled them.

The Cathars read the Bible: clearly the Old Testament is a piece of evil trash (with God ordering holocausts, right and left, torturing David’s son, to death, over a week, just because David had refused to enact a gratuitous holocaust, etc. Thus the Cathars deduced that the Old Testament showed the Devil created the world (the Vatican was not amused, and fought the Cathars with Inquisition as early as 1022 CE; finally launching a crusade against them, in 1209 CE, two centuries later).

Christo-Islamism is the ideology of tyranny, made by dictators, for dictators. Thus it represents as ultimate goods the values which should be perceived as the characteristics of absolute dictatorship: omnipotence, and goodness as defined by said omnipotence

Why this obsession with power and goodness? Christo-Islamism was engineered mostly by Roman emperor Constantine and caravan raider Muhammad, both of whom were, if not the fiercest, bloodiest dictators ever, certainly the intellectual progenitors of many of the worst dictators. (Constantine assassinated wife, son and nephew.) So Christo-Islamism is the ideology of tyranny, made by dictators, for dictators. Thus it represents as ultimate goods the two values which should be perceived as the characteristics of absolute dictatorship: omnipotence, and goodness as defined by said omnipotence.   

Yet, pretend goodness and omnipotence are not the top values of the crown of creation, Homo Sapiens. Wisdom is more like it. Wisdom is the top value.

Wisdom is not indifferent to good and evil. Wisdom gives primacy to goodness over evil (as babies can’t do without goodness and altruism directed at them, thus wisdom couldn’t even exist without goodness!)

However wisdom. Once it exists, is first about growing ever more intelligence. Intelligence etymologically, that is, in the logic of its true sense, means: reading between the lines.

It doesn’t mean being good, 24/7. Fundamentally, goodness is needed, for babies, children and for fostering enough altruism for whatever society needs to function. Beyond that, in the realm of good and evil, anything goes.

In particular, hatred and fascism, both related to war making and keeping human numbers low enough to prevent mass extinction(s), have their uses.

We are not omnipotent, but ever more potent, because we can read ever more between the lines. That’s all the divine We The People need.

Omnipotent dictators playing pretend goodness are incompatible with advancing wisdom. How will we get rid of them? With good old, evolutionary honed anger, and combat. All these qualities Judeo-Christianism insist we shouldn’t have (they are reserved to the divinity). All these qualities the founders of Israel rejected… rightly so (the philosopher Isaiah Berlin complained that “they listened to Hitler, not us”).

A bit of hatred for evil makes a most worthy ethics good. This is the human way to go. Anything else invites collaboration with the enemy, the most despicable, and vicious ways (for a contemporary example, consider the situation in Burma, where an entire Muslim population is kicked out by otherwise resplendent, self-absorbed Buddhists…)

Patrice Aymé

Could Veganism Cause Extinctions?

For millions of years, hominids evolved as ever more efficient killer apes. This allowed entire human races or subspecies to live off meat. Such as the Homo Sapiens Sapiens variant Cro-Magnon, or Homo Sapiens Neanderthalis. Meat was a hyper concentrated energy source. just ask seals, dolphins, killer whales, humpback whales, polar bears and walruses.

East Africans, tall and lean, evolved to run down exhausted preys in the mid-day sun, they became ancestral to many people today (most of all of them, according to the “Out of Africa” theory). Cro-Magnon looked like ancestral Scandinavians, tall and strong, ready to fight the fiercest lions, wolves and bears. They are ancestral to many people today. They long lived in present day France, when France was landlocked by enormous glaciers on towering mountains, all around, or the giant ice sheets form the north, and the icy seas, west and south. Then non-glaciated Europe was a land of tundra, and enormous herds of often gigantic beasts.

Hunting is our past, how we evolve, and so was war. Vegans want to change all this. They claim that the future is not to touch adversely the smallest hair or feather. Thus they suggest to not use any animal product whatsoever. Instead, one should go fully agricultural. Agri-cultural means to cultivate the ager, the field. Hence the question: Vegans say they are friendly to beasts, they want to live off fields they cultivate, but are fields friendly to beasts?   

Pure Veganism Would Lead To The Extermination Of This Species

This is the paradox: is one friendly with others, when one exclude others? (The question is not just for Brexiters) When vegans exclude all animal species, are they friendly to animals?

Nature is good and evil. Gods stand above nature (supernatural), they don’t exclude it. Could it be that, when vegan want to exclude evil, they want to exclude nature?

How so? Very simple. Contemplate the world we have. Look at the Auroch. The last auroch died in a royal preserve in Poland in the Seventeenth Century. Europeans domesticated aurochs perhaps 25,000 years ago. Through a careful mix of natural and artificial selection, over 10,000 generations, Europeans created the European domestic cattle (meanwhile Indians and Africans were doing the same with their own breeds; the African zebu was probably evolved in India first; it resists well to African diseases such as sleeping sickness, malaria…)

Or consider sheep and goats: millions live today. They are descendants of their wild ancestors.

What do vegans want to do with all those animals? Through these millions of these domesticated animals survive the ancient species which graced the Earth for tens of millions of years.

This is not an idle question. Take chicken. The rooster was made by the Romans into the symbol of Celtic lands (which they called “Gallia”, the land of chicks…) In the wild, chickens, initially from South East Asia, are basically extinct. By refusing the presence of chicken inside plates, and in the fields, vegans condemn the species to terminal extinction.

Does hard core veganism allows to ride on horses and run dogs?

Conclusion: hard core veganism would lead to the terminal extinction of the most megafauna. They claim to be friendly to the individuals, but they will kill the species.

Solution: keep on using animal species, but do it in what is, ironically enough, called a “humane” way. If a rooster has a beautiful, easy, comfortable life, and then loses by surprise its head in a laser explosion, is it so bad? Would this sudden death be worse than enjoying life prior to this impromptu, sudden, unforeseen and painless demise?

Is veganism, pushed to extreme, the psychological equivalent of a brat who declares to his mom that he will refuse to breathe, rather than to eat its vegetables? Mummy here, being nature herself?

There is an extremely powerful metapsychological objection to veganism: we have seen that story, the story of renouncing life, many times before. Periodically, a slave religion arises, and recommends to us to lay prone, refuse life, reject even self-defense, accept to live small, barely eating, afraid to bother others in all and any way. This apparently bizarre cult is only natural, and is an evolutionary selected mode of operation: that of the prey which surrenders to those red in fang and claw.

When an animal of one of these species which get preyed upon, is surrounded, and death is unavoidable, it is often seen surrendering to its fate: this is part of the co-evolution of ecological systems (something not well-known, but still a fact). Not the evolution of the fittest individual as the naive evolutionists of the 19 C had it, but the evolution of entire ecological systems, as individuals made of multitudes. Is the vegan is a beast which wants to die and disguises this as a lofty language, while dragging hundreds of large species in its hateful discourse? Hateful of what? Hateful of life itself. Life is about living, thus suffering and dying. Not that the latter activities are necessarily something to look for, just the opposite. But mitigating and escaping them, is the spice of life.

Thus it is not excluded that the rise of veganism corresponds to surrender to mighty plutocrats: instead of tearing and shredding plutocratic substance, vegans decide that broccoli is all the protein they need. ‘They are starving? Let them eat grass!’ Say these new Marie-Antoinettes of the abysmal age.

Thus we have seen that story before. Whenever great plutocrats rise, We The People tends to roll on its back, presents its belly, and waits for horror, persuading themselves that horror is all what they ever wanted. Buddhism preaches that it is better to give up on life in full, rather than indulge into giving and receiving suffering. After its creation by a Princeling (not a coincidence), Buddhism took over most of India. But the predators laid in wait. They re-took all of India.

Vegans can preach. The only way what they preach can not lead to mass extinction, is by reserving around half of the land mass to total wilderness, in all and any ecological zone. That could, even should, be done. However, refusing the essence of life, preferring non-existence to death, is another matter entirely.

Patrice Ayme’

Good Is Absolute

Long Story short: Not everything is relative. Good, goodness are not relative, but absolute. Absolute thanks to what? Neurohormonal activity. The fact is, and it’s a truism, people are happy enough to keep on living.

The Gods are relative. Biology is absolute.

So how come much of human thinking and values became all too relative in the Twentieth Century?

In the early Twentieth Century, the genius mathematician, physicist and philosopher, Henri Poincaré, announced what he called the “Theory of Relativity” (1904). The theory achieved great fame. Especially as “Relativity” slowed down time (as observed since zillions of times). (Relativity was attributed to a German scientist, so it was viewed as very serious; never mind that Einstein had neither discovered, nor demonstrated ANY of the basic equations or ideas of said theory; it was the interesting case of a strictly non-German theory attributed to a German.)

In any case, it was thereupon decreed by the vastly mentally unprepared masses, and not quite a few intellectuals, that everything was relative, including good and evil. A relative mood set on the land. Einstein himself played it to the hilt:

Many Philosophies (Such As Buddhism), Adopt The Mood That Suffering Is More Important Than Happiness. Neurobiology Contradicts Them

Relativity of morality is not all wrong. My pet thinker, Nietzsche, contributed to exhibit moral relativity, by pointing out that aristocracy and the rabble it ruled over, had, thank to the “slave religion” of Christianism, completely different moralities. The mathematician, physicist and philosopher Pascal himself had pointed out that truth itself depended upon which side of a mountain range one considered (“Vérité en deçà des Pyrénées, erreur au delà. Ce qui est une vérité pour un peuple, une personne, peut être une erreur pour d’autres. Ce qui est valable pour l’un ne l’est pas forcément pour l’autre.”). In truth Pascal parroted Montaigne’s use of the mountains. More generally Montaigne said: is called barbaric what is not usual (“Quelle vérité que ces montagnes bornent, qui est mensonge au monde qui se tient au-delà…. Chacun appelle barbare ce qui n’est pas de son usage”.)

In truth, the “Theory of Relativity” is all about some types of space and time measurements being relative to some types of motion. It’s not about everything being relative. Modern logic admits that any logic is relative to the universe it lives in.

Does the latter mean all morality is relative? As the Nazis claimed? No. Morality, in the end, is a biological concept. But not an obvious one. Contrarily to the pathetic naivety of Nazi theories, biology can give us a ground to stand on, which is otherwise subtle than the “selection of the fittest“. We are biological systems, and much of us is inherited. Yes. However, what about good and evil? Is that inherited, and can we go beyond what’s inherited?

John Zande wrote a book “The Owner Of All Infernal Names”. I commented: Mr. Zande seems to embrace the ancient Cathar theory that the creator of the world is obviously evil. The problem with this, is that love is even more important to human beings than evil (that’s easy to demonstrate: babies would not exist, but for love). So, if one believes the occurrence of evil is absolute proof of an evil creator, the even more prominent occurrence of love is absolute proof of an even more prominent benevolent creator, by the same metalogic. (The Good Lord is good, because He makes more good than bad.)

Yet, there is no God but Evolution, and Evil is the Master’s stroke.

Mr. Zande kindly replied:

“Insightful comment, and the logic is sound. The thesis presented in TOOAIN addresses the so-named Problem of Good. To paraphrase, good is a necessity. It spurs on growth. Ultimately, though, there is no good. What appears good is in fact little more than the means to greater and more efficient suffering. Love is also encouraged. In the book I cite this poem by Naomi Shihad, Kindness:

>>Before you know what kindness really is

you must lose things,

feel the future dissolve in a moment

like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,

what you counted and carefully saved,

all this must go so you know

how desolate the landscape can be

between the regions of kindness<<

The premise is, love-lost is stronger and more potent than the fleeting curiosity of love-found. Complicated grief is a terrible ailment and serves to exemplify this. To love is to opening oneself up to tremendous physical and emotional pain, and to the Creator, this is pure cream.

I also present a number of examples to demonstrate this point that there is no true ‘good,” including medicine in general, writing:

Consider then the truth: More bodies doing more things over a longer time can only be scored as a breathtaking augmentation of resources.

A general population dying at 35 cannot, by and large, produce the same quantity or quality of suffering generated through the extended life of a general population dying at age 80 or 90. Here man has added 30 years—an entire generation—to the duration of his potential suffering, which in the eyes of a debased being is to be applauded as not only a marvel of market optimisation, but an almost miraculous, self-inflicted diversification in the greater portfolio of potential pain.

By permitting the development and maturation of innovative methods and practices which abet bodily longevity the Omnimalevolent Creator has positioned Himself to reap 20, 30, or even 40 years more pleasure from His game; drinking in the pang of creeping irrelevance, the pain of crippling arthritis, the emotional distress of immobility, mental degradation, senility, the anguish of seeing friends and loved ones die early, the anxiety of financial and perhaps political insecurity, and the hopelessness of a life bookmarked by death and conscious annihilation. In no uncertain terms, ruinous ageing is an abhorrent stain on even the most spectacular of lives lived, often robbing an individual of their most prized possession, their dignity, and this gradual drip of irreversible decay and the misery born of it can only be seen as a boon for a being who thrives on tapping into increasingly complex veins of suffering.

Now, let me just say, the book is a parody of 19th Century natural theology works… and it was, at times, desperately hard to write the words. I couldn’t bring myself, for example, to detail all but three examples of animal cruelty.”

The first step out of the dilemma of pain is to realize that it’s evolution which created us, not some moral person up there (the so-called “God”). So there is no game. Normal life is, most of the time pleasant enough to feel better than the alternative(s). This is what evolution expects. And has selected us for. Cocktails of neurohormones in our brains and gut make sure of that we experience enough good to keep on going. So, integrated all over, weighted with time, life is, overall, pleasant. Abject pain and unfathomable terror, occasionally, do not make much of a dent on this (although, as John Zande points out, the problem of ageing has become, viewed as a sum, much more considerable, since we have made enough progress to extend ageing rather than extending health, indeed).

However, when pain and suffering get to be too much, one can take action: euthanasia, revolution, and even war, are solutions.

You want peace and happiness? Then kill pain and suffering, in a timely manner. Otherwise, your brain will do it for you. And slavery may ensue.

Patrice Ayme’

WRATH OF GOOD: No Evil, No Good.

WHEN NICE DOES NOT CUT IT, NEITHER EMPATHY, NOR KNOWLEDGE ARE ENOUGH. ANGELS HAVE TO TURN INTO DEMONS.

No Wrath Of Good Means All Good For Evil.

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Abstract: Sheep are good, but, even when they bleat long and hard, they do not advance civilization, let alone goodness.  Sometimes goodness needs to use force, to enforce a higher good.

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Bob Herbert in the New York Times, following Elie Wiesel, courageously points out that: “The tendency to draw an impenetrable psychic curtain across the worst that the world has to offer is understandable. But it’s a tendency that must be fought.” (May 30, 2009).

“It is so much easier to look away from victims,” said Wiesel, an Auschwitz survivor, at the White House in 1999. “It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes…. But indifference to the suffering of others “is what makes the human being inhuman… The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees — not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity, we betray our own.”

All very true. Feeling the pain of others helps to get going.

Still, seeing the humanity of others is not enough to address horror in full. The torturers can easily pose as victims. They whine that they have to torture, or they will not be safe. They have to bomb the world, because there, somewhere, there is that man, those terrorists, the bad ones who did such and such… 

Hence, even if we see the victim, and feel the pain, we have to see the torturer, and the executioner, for what they are, and then find the courage to ask the torturer, and the executioner, and the bomber, and those serious ones who send the flying robots, to cease and desist. And then if the torturer and the executioner do not stop, then what?

Some bring on even more empathy, and end up helping the executioners, as Hannah Arendt showed (enraging masses of treacherous, uncomprehending sheep). The passivity of Jewish organizations faced with Nazism, was indeed amazing: it often turned to collaboration. Mercifully, the oldest and strongest democracies had a better wisdom of history.

On September 1, 1939, France and Britain, the democracies, sent an ultimatum to Adolf Hitler: cease and desist within 48 hours, or we declare war. On September 3, 1939, around 11 am, the democracies, France and Britain, declared war to the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler. Within a few days several nations of the British empire followed: Canada, Australia, India… Within days 45 divisions of the French army attacked, while the Poles were fighting for their lives.

What did the USA do in all this? Good question: an impenetrable psychic curtain had come down across the worst of the American soul. Indeed, American corporations went in overdrive in their collaboration with Hitler.

For example, the Ethyl Corporation of America rushed air fuel additive supplies to Hitler’s Air Force, which had run out of them, and would have stayed on the ground, if not replenished. That would have been disastrous for Hitler’s army, which depended upon air power (Hitler’s Air Force would lose about 5,000 planes in the next year of war against France and Britain!).

Soon, Hitler’s ally, Stalin, attacked Poland from the east, and invaded. Meanwhile the Nazis air bombed flour mills, so that the Poles would starve during winter, which is rough under those continental latitudes. Just to make sure, the Nazis opened a huge concentration camp in the most insalubrious part of Poland, a swamp at Auschwitz. They stuffed it with Poles, and made it so that they would die in great numbers. The Nazis would kill six million Poles in the next 6 years.

A few months later, full of American technology and direct investment, fueled by the Soviets, Hitler got lucky, and, after a battle that killed a few hundred thousands people, invaded France.

And the USA waited… It was not clear whether the USA was waiting for the success of murderous racism, or the fall of Great Britain. The suspense lasted more than 2 years. Finally, dictatorial Japan attacked and then declared war to the USA on December 7, 1941. And what did the USA do? The USA waited some more. On December 11, 1941, Hitler declared war to the USA.

But what if Hitler and the Japanese military leaders had not been so stupid? Well, the USA did not intent to go to war in 1942. It was firmly intent to wait some more. Good things happen to those who wait. Let’s not forget that Hitler’s regime was racist (among other things, it sterilized Germans of partial African descent), and the USA was racist too. No doubt millions in the USA would have preferred a world racial order, and an alliance with those that tried to make it so.

In the same vein, although the holocaust of the Jews (and others) was known since the French government denounced it in fall of 1940, the Western Allies did not bother to threaten the Nazis about it (although the Nazis had made a big noise about the massacre of 23,000 Polish officers by the Soviets).

Morality of all this history? Arendt pointed out that: “Death begins its reign of terror when life becomes the highest good.” That’s deep.

Conscience without the will to use force is only devastation of a beautiful soul. To fight Satan, cognition is not enough. To fight Satan, empathy is not enough. To fight Satan, demonic minds is what it takes. Otherwise it’s all just about the pathetic whining of the weasel in the night.

Such is the paradox of ultimate goodness. To be truly good, it’s not enough to be good. It is even counter-indicated to be good all the time.

The wrath of good cannot be foiled by death. Goodness is what gives meaning to death, and death is its ultimate instrument. The devil is in the details of the goodness,  and the goodness rests in detailing evil as needed. Too much whining about the victims is just self serving fluff, it is not what righteous warriors do. Right and might is what goodness makes.

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Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.com/

http://tyranosopher.blogspot.com/

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Note: The necessity of evil in the realm of goodness was long guessed by Judeo-Christo-Islamism. Still, it’s hard to explain: in the Qur’an God angrily warns the faithful to never dare ask him this sort of question, and of his relation with the Djinns (demons made of light). God says it’s nothing they can understand, but whatever is said about it, it’s false.