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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.

Weird Heterogeneity

I had a dream last night, which I don't remember. But I woke up thinking: "Any useless action which is not prohibited is outside of the social narrative."

This has to do with something I've been wandering about recently. The social/historical narrative of production is, in my opinion not wholley determinate for society. Other narratives disrupt or determine it. At the same time, however, the base/superstructure model of culture is not entirely wrong. To a high degree the economic base of a society does determine the cultural superstructure.

So what is wholley beyond the economic and social narrative? I would argue that heterogeneous activity is brought into the mainstream of society precisely thorough being made criminal.

Heterogeneous activity is activity that is not commensurable with the mainstream of homogeneous society. However, by being understood as a crime heterogeneous activity is made into something that can be understood, measured and even treated. There are even situations where limited transgression of a law upholds the law in principle. For instance, almost all teenagers in Britain who are not mentally unwell commit one crime or another. And through this limited transgression they "get it out of their system" and go on to be law-abiding citizens.

Certain societies see all non-commensurable activity as in some way suspect because it presents the possibility of non-state dominated discourse. For instance an Iranian friend recently told me that Ayatollah Khomeini went so far as to write a book describing what Qu'ran verses to read on the toilet. In this way, almost every part of our society is understood through the dominant social discourse.

But there is always that which is non-commensurable, that which is too Weird to be understood. It is small and insignificant. It cannot afford to be condemned as criminal or upheld as moral. It cannot be uplifting, or profitable, or respectable. It can't even afford to go for shock value by breaking taboos. But maybe it is where we can get a true alternative view. Maybe there's value there.