Thursday 24 September 2009

My earliest memory of thinking is a story I convinced myself of as a kid. This was that there were little people living all over the house, so small that they were invisible. And that these little people were Evil.

Well, Evil is too strong a word. I called the microscopic world that these people lived in Bad Land, because it was a place where everything Good was bad and everything Bad was Good.

I remembered this the other day, when I heard a child being told off. Young childhood for me was a time of arbitrary moral distinctions. Why was it bad to stay up late? Why was it bad to shout and run around early in the morning? I had no concept of reasons yet, so it seemed reasonable that the opposite could be true.

This principle fed through to the rest of my life. As a teenager I of course knew everything and swore off morality. Ethics, to me was a set of restrictions based on arbitrary reasons. For instance abortion is unethical because foetuses are assumed to have souls. This was unacceptable. Better to judge ethical decisions on a case by case basis than on the basis of reasons that are always wrong in some circumstances.

But of course, to judge what is good for a certain situation you need to ask a few questions: What is goodness and is worth doing good for. These are basic but they have to be asked. We need a basic definition of goodness to understand that shooting my best friend is not good for him. And we need to decide that what is good for my friend is more important than doing what is good for increasing the murder rate in my area.

These are basic things. But they show that in order to work out what is good we have to appeal to some abstract universal quality that is not merely found situationally.

So for a while I became a Satanist. I think a lot of people go through that kind of stage. I accepted moral values, but inverted some of the major ones. For instance, goodness for self as a high value, willingness to accept a level of self-destructive behaviour as a means of self-expression, justifying kindness to others as activity that makes me feel good, etc. I guess I was basically a good kid, but I justified morality from an inverted perspective.

This leads on to my current moral basis. Satanism failed to invert morality entirely because moral assumptions remained the basis for everything.

Full moral inversion became possible with the acceptance of absolute morality as a guiding principle. In accepting morality as a principle to apply to all things I finally made reality fully subordinate to ethics.

By living as a being subordinate to ethics, I aim to destroy my nature, and destroy the nature of everything I do. The result is that adherence to absolute Good is also an expression of radical Evil.

What purpose did all this hold? Is it just an attempt to understand good through the mediating quality of evil?

I'll probably write more tomorrow (lucky you, you non-existent audience) but I am pretty tired now. Sleep is good.

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