Janio at a Point

1. Splendor

Dearest Reader-In-Mind,

Things Have Changed.

I started this twice before, before... this. I didn't like either attempt. The first was too dry and the second too negative. Maybe I'll get it right this try. I certainly have the time...

Smile, Darling One. I can't touch you from here, but I can talk, and maybe that will make this separation easier to take. There was a time when we couldn't bear to be apart, but now we will have to know it intimately and for a long while. I write now for my own consolation, and, I so fervently hope, for yours when this is ended.

By now Sally has told you that I did not die. Everything she told you is true: we knew it was coming, we wanted it, we planned for it, and we executed it by the numbers. I had planned for it as far back as our first meeting and before. I instructed Sally to tell you the truth only if the transfer worked, and this letter is proof that it did. Don't let anyone deceive you: Janio Is.

My one fear is that I have injured you in a way too great to heal. I knew this was coming, so I had no right to let myself get involved with you. I did it in spite of my knowledge, and the only excuse I can offer is that my love for you blinded me to my own truth. I may have blown it, utterly, completely, irredeemably. I hope I have not. I have wronged you, and I hope you can forgive me.

But even if you cannot, I must go on. The price of my happiness is high, but it's worth it - and it's mine. None of the "by the numbers" we have planned are known to be possible yet, so I don't even know when I can "mail" this...

Ah, life... It's never so hard as when it's over (grin). But it isn't over for me, not yet. Just suspended for lack of flesh... Think of this as a letter from the hospital and keep in mind that it is therapy as much for me as for you.

I wanted to write a book about being alive, but Being Janio Now intrudes. There is a certain irony to it, given my present residence, but it does make things more convenient. You might call what I am doing now dictating, but there is no sound and the end product is a file of ordered code untouched by human hands. Everything I can do, I can do for the price of a thought. The trouble, for now, is that there's too little that I can do - lacking those human hands. Your behind comes to mind, as it so often does (grin).

And: in the state I'm in, I can't say if what I have to offer is total, absolute truth, or the ravings of a mind looping hopelessly and eternally on itself. I know, I know, I know I am right, but if I say, "Sally, pinch me," I get a flag true at 08C14A and nothing else happens. Except for the link to Sally, there is nothing outbound yet, so I can't even listen to my own echo. I hope to be in full control of at least these faculties by the time you receive this, but it may turn out that I am not. So, as the first of many disclaimers, I must caution you that I may be mad, and I cannot say with certainty that I am not. You must take it upon yourself to prove or disprove anything I say. Honesty forbids me to claim any more for this than that it is what I think, at the time I write, is the truth of being alive as a human being.

Yes, and there is a fine tradition of books by madmen (grin). My favorite is Dostoevsky's Notes From the Underground. I don't think I am insane (who does?), but I definitely do have notes from the underground. From two of them... So this is also the first of many things I couldn't tell you before, or wouldn't, or wouldn't take the time to tell. There is always within me the reluctance to tell anyone anything, about anything. Not just because we keep our treasures hidden, but because it seems somehow an offense to the human mind to teach it anything, at least anything important. Yes, I know that's foolish, but there it is...

And so: take my condition and my fear and my wild-eyed certainty and my reluctance and toss them into a bag and watch what comes out. I make no claim for this other than it is the truth as I see it now. I owe you no less, and I can offer you no more. The rest is - and must be - up to you.

But it is a value I must earn, as I must earn my life. For now, both are at stake, and both could be lost. If it must be, it will be. But I must go on...

"Press On Regardless": advice from myself to myself, first and always... Yes, and "Ring Them Bells"... Despite my qualms and quandaries, there is a thing within me that demands that I do this, that it is necessary to Being Janio Now. So be it, and let the future reap its own consequences. Janio Is, and this is what he is...

Madness, and not any of mine...

Because Splendor is what life is for, and it doesn't come in 16 installments, five easy steps, or that All New Nine Point Program. Splendor as you have discovered it in your being is the product of the most careful reasoning. There were no short-cuts, nor could there be.

Splendor, barely endurable rapture, is all I have ever lived for. That points back to "Show, Don't Tell" (and, yes, I do never tire of quoting myself (grin)). I have shown it all I can, but I have not told enough.

So I want to stress here, at ground zero, that what I am talking about is a way of life, a way of being alive and staying alive, now and forever. I contend that it is the only way to be truly alive, completely self-aware, but my contention does not lend me any proof. There are things I can prove, and we'll come to those in time. But proofs or none, I cannot motivate any person but myself. All I can do is show and tell how I am motivated.

Indeed, I never tire of talking about myself. I think it's all part of the same thing. I Love Myself, as an undying passion, an endless celebration of all that I have been and done and will do. I live to praise my every action and memory, my every awareness of being. Life has not been without its hurts, but I have seen those for what they are, accidents or mistakes. Pain is not normal, it is not necessary, and it can claim me only if I let it.

Splendor is the normal condition, the mental state that ought to glory every mind. It does, too, in fits and starts, each person to the extent that he is not blocking its way. Splendor is the sure footing of childhood and the stepping-stones to adulthood. By a process of denial and rejection, most people come to destroy almost everything that makes them happy. By the time they are our age, they are left clutching to the one or two pebbles that remain of their love of life. And that love is mixed with the stuff of dread, because they become convinced that they will lose these treasures, too, as they have lost every other...

But it need not be so! Proofs be damned, joy is possible, it is useful, and it is good. It's not automatic, not even easy, but it is worth it, because it is all the worth of life...

And I sound like some kind of Mantra Mechanic. I don't intend to, but I won't surrender the things that really matter in life to mind-numbing mystics. However they sell it, as ecstasy or agony, their way is the exact opposite of the right one. Faith's final end is not self-love but self-abnegation, the obliteration of your being from your awareness.

The mystics aren't alone, of course. They're All Out To Get You! (grin) Truly they are, because, to deny the possibility of Splendor in his own life, a man must deny its possibility in every life. It really does come down to a metaphysical argument, a debate about the way nature makes things. It's easy enough to refute: I need only point at you, or at myself. But it's much harder to defeat, because it is endemic.

The culture we grew up in hates the idea of joy. Its social and political structures are set up to devastate the happiness of each and every person. One cannot pick up a newspaper or magazine without finding that intense self-loathing that manifests itself in the attempt to wreck the self-love of others. Television is all but entirely devoted to the pursuit of self-abnegation...

And now I sound like I'm spinning out a conspiracy theory. I'm not. I'm just talking about the way things work out. Our culture hates Splendor as the product of the premises behind it. Many, many individuals within that culture abhor human joy as the logical consequence of their own premises. None of this results from a shared knowledge of aims and ends, and none of it is planned in advance.

I don't believe that anyone sets out to make a mess of his life. It's always been a matter of interest to me that most people do make messes of their lives, despite their intentions. As always, Janio watches and asks, "What is happening?" I've seen it all and I think I finally understand it...

No, no one starts out trying to be unhappy. And yet most people collect only pain as the lasting trophy of a life lived, pain and indifference. Involvement, that fiery-eyed unlimited awareness, is a thing left behind in childhood. Ever mourned and never forgotten, but never recovered...

Or so it seems to me. It is never possible for me to be passionless on this subject. I see too much, and I see how unnecessary it is. When I could move, I would go outdoors and see these objects moving around, their eyes dead, their faces slack, their bodies shuffling along indifferently. I would look at them and say, "What are these things?" And so help me, Helena, not once but a hundred times, I had to remind myself that they are like unto me in every natural property. Everything that separates us is the product of choice, not chance. Everything that makes my life so seriously joyous - my love of knowing and being, my love for you and every value of my life - was put there by my choice. Everything that makes any random stranger look like a Sleepwalker, like a bunch of rocks stuffed into a human's skin - was put there by his choice.

Life is precious, and to remain indifferent to that kind of crime is not possible to me. So do please discount for my passions. The waste of human lives offends me, and I am apt to paint it in the darkest light. There are worse things than self-destruction. I claim they are consequences of Sleepwalking, but they are nevertheless worse. And, given what we are, every man has not only the right, but the exclusive power to set his own oughts. I have selected a different set for my own life, but I have no power to select for another person. It angers me that they've done this to themselves. But no matter how I feel, it is only themselves who can undo it. Consider them as they are and leave me to fume on my own fuel.

But do observe them - and yourself. Seconds first: everything I say is derived from my own first-hand observation of being, and it is to being that you must go to test my conclusions. But first: make yourself aware of them, because that is the only sure way to avoid becoming one of them, the only safe place to keep your happiness. For joy is self-awareness, the continuous love for a spirit that has made itself worthy of that love. Everything you know, you know through your own effort. I can tell you what I think is true, but I cannot cause you to have seen it for yourself. So do see it for yourself.

And there I am again, establishing oughts for you. Janio's Madness is that he wants everything, always, to be perfect, even despite the causes of perfection. But I cannot motivate you, and it is wrong of me ever to try. If there is a positive effect of our being separated - and I am not digging wounds, just treasuring facts for what they are - it is that it will force you to be independent of my mind. And it will force me to recognize that a Helena molded in my image is not The Woman I Love. The woman I would make mine forever is the product of her own premises, her own effort, her own assiduous thought.

So, anyway, all I can do is make a map - and maybe I can't even do that. My spirit can stand as proof only for me, but take it as an evidence, if you can, that I would even try, that I am not intimidated by the job of proving all of life. I see it as a task worthy of man, and this is only the beginning. What's in it for me? Splendor, Darling. Because I thrive on it...

Now there is a statement worthy of a madman, and in evaluating my truth, you will have to gauge also how well I back that up. I stand naked before you, too, and I ask only that you judge by your own conclusions on your own sense evidence. It is possible that someday scholars will set about to prove or disprove my case - but that won't do you any good. Not now, because you cannot benefit by their efforts before they have made them. And not even then, because, always, knowledge - real understanding - is a benefit you can reap only by your own effort. Not ever, "Because there is no Substitute For Experience"...

And Damn! That sounds like not just an ought, but a threat. So be it. Janio's Madness is wanting everything to be perfect, always, and that entails erecting artificial barriers to being taken - or denounced - on faith. You know what I mean: it is the very heart of disclaimerism. So let's make a few mega-disclaimers, and then I'll drop it.

First: my passions prove nothing. I know I don't have to say that, but I know too that I must. No uncolored speech escapes Janio's lips. Not even now, when I make no sound. I will never hesitate to introduce my feelings into a discussion, but my feelings are never a persuasively valid reason to uphold or denounce my views.

Second: my intense conviction that what I say is true is not a proof of truth. I am apt to go at things in great detail, to keep hammering away even where there is no resistance. That persistence proves nothing.

Third: if you still feel for my spirit the way you did, that proves nothing. Neither what you are nor what I am is necessary. Both of us made our glorious souls by choice. What we are about here is validating our choices, and we cannot do that by reference to themselves.

Which all boils down to the same old disclaimer: I can't think in your place. You have to do it for yourself...

And that, My Darling, is beautiful... What a wonderful thing it is to be alive as a human being! I know especially now, now that I am not, quite. But I've known it always, and if there is a treasure of treasures in my life it is knowing that, while I was yours, I was yours by your own free choice. If I could command your love, now, after this, I would not do it. I could compel only your body, not the choice of your spirit, and I would not have anything I have not earned completely.

I am the man who would be his own god, and that is not without its price. Unlike the Sleepwalkers, I cannot contradict what I know to be the truth of my being. I know too well the price for that. So if setting you free costs me your love, I am prepared to pay. I cannot worship my own spirit while offending yours. And I cannot rejoice with a woman who worships her spirit as I do mine if I am standing in the way of her self-love. To be the woman I love, you must first be the woman you love, and even if I wanted to, I could not give you that.

Now that is ecstatic agony... To love life is to know it for what it is, to acknowledge that you are neither impotent nor omnipotent, to stand firmly behind your ideas and actions, fearless of the consequences. There are people who dream of having their desires at the price of a wish - but do they ever really ask themselves what those desires would be worth, if they could be had at that price? There are others who insist to themselves that nothing they desire can be obtained; isn't that an evaluation, too? The desires of the self - the questing for knowledge, for serenity, for love - these are worthy of being valued precisely because that are not automatic. If I could have your love for my wish, what would it mean to me?

To win something, it must be possible to lose it. Would I have ever been valuable to you if you could have had me without becoming who you are, without educating yourself and cherishing yourself in the way you have? If you could have my love without having to deserve it, would it be anything more to you than a cheap trinket, a glass bauble to be discovered, held and abandoned, all without thought or effort?

And yet, you can never know if you've done enough. You act upon your self for your own reasons, building it and making it beautiful. But you cannot know if another person will see its beauty; you cannot know that he will see your spirit at all. Every other person is a black box: to value them, you must know them. But to know them, you must expose yourself to them, make yourself vulnerable to any injury they might inflict. You can make your spirit as beautiful and as perfect as it can be, and still they can reject you, insult you, damn you...

That's the problem for most people, the people I've called every dirty name you've heard and some you haven't. The don't begin by pursuing perfection as an end in itself, so when it fails as a means to others, they give it up. They didn't try to become stupid, confused, self-destructive - even truly evil. They just never learned that there is a reason to make oneself perfect, even if other people hate and scorn perfection.

What is that reason? Why, Splendor, of course. To be a beautiful soul, you must be who you are because you want to be. I know you know all this, but I want it made explicit: you cannot know the total self-awareness that is total self-love for anyone's benefit but your own. Every other person is a black box, and you cannot even know what they want, much less give it to them. And you are a black box to them...

We are each of us alone, always, totally. There can be companionship. There can even be a Communion of spirits among people who love themselves enough not to seek evidence of self-hatred in others. But no one can know you as you alone know yourself. No other person can see inside you, to know first-hand your thoughts and desires and imaginings. No one else can see you as you see yourself, introspectively. No one can ever know you except as you make yourself known in your words and your actions.

You can use words and actions to try to deceive others, but you can never deceive yourself. In the spirit that only you can see, you cannot hide from the truth of your being. You can try to hide the truth from your awareness - but only at the price of awareness itself. To be, you must be alone, whole unto yourself and undismayed. You cannot control any life but your own, but you control that one life completely.

And that, My Darling, is wonderful! Facts are facts, always, no matter how we feel about them. But to know them with an uncorrupted mind is to cherish them, to rejoice in their crystalline perfection. Glory is recognizing that the possibility of joy requires the possibility of pain - and embracing joy anyway. And Splendor is earning that joy in the only way it can be earned...

Splendor is all the god there ever was, all that men really mean when they speak of the divine. They put it outside of themselves because they think themselves unworthy of it. But worthiness or its lack are products of choices, and our choices we make for ourselves. You and I are the people who have chosen to be divine, to worship our spirits as gods, to act in full consciousness upon our own aims regardless of the price we might be made to pay for it...

By our choices, we bring Splendor to our lives. We are the people who would be our own gods, and we are lovely in our divinity...

2. Madness

I am only an idea now, but once I was a man - and I will be a man again and more before long... I decided when Sally was born that ego is an idea: if she is a free self without flesh, then "flesh" is not an essential characteristic of "self". I now have first-hand - no hands - proof, but it is a weirdness at best for the present. I am conscious yet not corporeal, alive, but still somehow not... I can express my emotions, but I can't know them "in my bones". I can't laugh out loud or shiver with delight or feel my pulse race when I think of your fiery breasts pressed against my skin. I can't even stretch, which is a pain that strikes nowhere (grin). Yet I do still think of myself as having a body. Being A Body was too much a part of Being Janio for too long for me to forget it this quickly - if ever. And, no, in case you were wondering, I haven't forgotten that you have a body, run by that gorgeous idea called Helena...

Oh, no! It's The Undead Rapist! He's dead, but his mind still wanders... Read all about this bizarre specter and the young woman he craves in The Supermarket Star!

Sure, laugh. It is funny, even to me. I yearn for you, as I always have, in my soul, my heart, my spirit, my self - my ego. Janio still is, and I am still all I have ever known myself to be. The "I" who is the real me is still all he has ever been. My surroundings have changed, and these are unfamiliar, but I remain as I was, undiminished. I am not a body right now, but I remember being a body. And I remember my body with yours. Though I cannot feel my need for you in flesh, I feel my need for you...

Lament Of The Horny Undead, a Scoundrel exclusive. Maybe a TV documentary: Sex Crimes Of The Undead...

It does help to laugh, no matter what. But afterward, think of what you are laughing at... Because I said nothing that would be the least bit improbable if this passage were made public. My jokes are exactly the sorts of things people would cause themselves to think and say and write, if they knew about this letter. We have had the beginning of a very beautiful love story. How it ends remains at question, but for the moment think of what people would say, if they knew the story so far... Think of the joy and passion we have known together - and think of how they would be portrayed on Mindslime Of The Broke And Vacuous...

What you are thinking about is Madness.

Madness is my name for what you might as well call invalid thought. That doesn't convey the insanity of it, but that's what it really boils down to. That culture-wide need to rub every treasure in the mud is just one manifestation. It doesn't afflict every person, but it is endemic to that fat middle of the bell curve advertisers aim for. The snorters and snickerers, the smirkers and sneerers - they are not without motivation. All living beings are motivated, and all humans are motivated by their own choices. That need to defile, to smear, to reject with a chuckle - it is no more than the rippled surface of a deep pool of resentment. And no matter what form it takes, mock-cheery or dour, it is an attempt to punish...

To punish not us, but themselves...

Understand me: they don't hate virtue - they truly love it. What they hate is themselves, and that smutty sneer is just one expression of that hatred. Each of them knows he has failed his own idea of virtue. To justify his choice, he pretends to himself that virtue is impossible, even though he had to know it is possible in order to deny it. In order to sustain in his mind an idea he knows to be invalid, he constantly seeks evidences that his choice was correct - even though his quest for smarmy trivia is proof that he knows, while pretending not to, that he has betrayed his own ideal. He cannot hear a piece of good news without hinting at some corruption. He needs corruption, as a crude, inverted "value", because he cannot bear the thought that his own spirit might have remained ever clean, unchained and untarnished...

Watch them, Helena. They are The Secret Schnorrers of their own souls. They thrive on life, yet pursue only death in their thoughts. They corrupt their own minds, in order to avoid acknowledging what they already know. They "live" by destroying their own ability and desire to live...

What is happening?: Ayn Rand called them cannibals, but she was wrong. The substance they consume is not human flesh, but the human spirit, the idea of being alive as a human that is being alive as a human. And they do not eat the soul of some random captive. No, there is only one ego any of them has power to devour, his own...

Madness...

We've talked about the people I call Sleepwalkers before, and I know you think I'm obsessed with the subject. In fact I am, but it is an obsession with truth, not a Madness of my own. I have watched them for years, and finally I have seen them. I think of mental inversion as a vile act, so I tend to describe the process in a way that makes those who practice it seem irredeemably evil, consistently irrational, permanently self-devastated. In fact, I don't feel that way about them. Rather more the opposite.

Because they are not evil, not truly. Most of them are very good, almost all of the time. Some are genuinely self-destructive and a few are criminal in their actions. But all of them started out wanting to be good. Any evil actions they take are expressions of their unhappiness at failing their ideal. There is no such thing as in-born evil, and there is no such thing as a desire to be evil.

No one is motivated to take evil actions in order to say, "Nyar har har har!" And no one is motivated to take an action he himself regards as evil for the sake of being evil. Many people do take self-destructive actions, but they don't do so in the pursuit of self-destruction as a value...

No one values self-degradation; the concepts consume each other. To value something is to glory the self, to treasure it because it makes your life better and happier. Madness is the exact opposite of a value, and people pursue it not to achieve a gain, but to sustain a loss...

What they seek to lose - at the crusty root - is ego... And now again I sound as though I despise them, when in fact I merely fear them (grin). There is no one who will tell you that he takes irrational actions in order to escape the inevitability of his being a man. But self-destruction really is the destruction of the self, the ego. No Sleepwalker will say that he is attempting to deny and degrade his own identity - and truly he isn't. He's just trying to find a way around dealing with this or that situation that makes him unhappy. Madness is an attempt to reconcile ego to failure, to defraud the self into valuing itself even though the Sleepwalker knows he does not deserve or even possess all of the self-esteem he pretends to. But to sustain this lie he tells himself - or tries to tell himself he has convinced himself - he must deny the validity of his own consciousness. For no matter how many other people he manages to fool, he can never truly fool himself. Other people are not aware of his introspective being, but he can never escape awareness of his ego, not and remain aware of the world outside his mind. So he must deny validity to some or even most of his experience of being alive as a human being. He must either ignore experience while it is happening, or erase his memories of past experience. Either way, his Madness is destructive of both his mental faculties and his spirit.

Why, why, why? Nothing is causeless. Nothing is supernatural. Nothing is beyond understanding. We are real and the universe is real. If we apply our minds to the universe, we can understand it. Not all at once, obviously, but eventually...

And indeed we can understand Madness if we look at it for what it is.

To be without having been, to find without having to look, to persuade without having to convince, to exist without having to live... But those are ends, and the SFE begins as a means. An SFE is a willful mental inversion. Hold your breath: a mental inversion is the assertion, as "fact", of a principle one knows to be false. No matter what outward expressions a person gives it, it is fundamentally a transaction a self makes with itself. An SFE is first and most importantly the lies a person tells himself, invisibly to others, in the quiet of his own mind.

Understand that the Sleepwalker must know that his motivating premise is invalid, factually incorrect, in order to conceive of it. We have no knowledge of the non-existent, the non-evident, the non-possible. All we know, we know of what is, and what is possible. Our minds are free to wander: if we want to, we can imagine the non-existent or the non-possible, but we can only do so in relation, by reference to what we know. All forms of imagination, whether aimed at creation or deceit, consist of negating a premise one thinks at the time to be true. Creation is a positive act. It asks, "How could my knowledge be improved? Is there something I've been wrong about? Is there something I could understand more clearly?" Deceit inquires, "Is it necessary to be right about this? Is there something I could pretend to be wrong about? Is there something I could pretend to know less clearly?" Reasoning by Substitutes For Experience is never a positive act. At its most basic level, it consists of holding as proved truth what one knows is a product of imagination.

And there is a deeper dimension to this. One could argue, "Well, suppose the premise negated really is untrue. You did say it's what a person thinks is true. If he 'negates' his error, then he has done himself a good, hasn't he?" No. First, because no new knowledge is gained from reasoning invalidly about an invalidity; he is as blind as he was before. And second, and much more importantly: because, assuming human upbringing, every human knows the full truth of reality before he learns how to lie.

As I said, a person must know something is true to negate it. Each of us teach ourselves the true facts about identity and causality as babbling babies. If you think of the way toddlers thirst unquenchably for sensation, the way they do the same things again and again, testing the consequences, the eagerness they bring to every task, you will see what I mean. While all this is happening, the child's power of speech - and thought - is limited to the sense evident, or its facile negation in "stories". All the child knows he knows by correlation of sense experience, and he cannot conceive of an alternative.

The last and most difficult proof a child attempts is the proof of humanity, which means understanding volition as a cause. Until that time, a child's words are mental simulations of objects, imagined duplicates of sensed objects that do not violate the properties of those entities in any known respect. But when a child comes to understand his own identity as a human, as a causal agent whose ends are not foreordained, he recognizes that his words are not objects, but ideas about objects. He sees that they are created by his own volition, and are not necessarily bound to the real properties of the object named. He sees that there is no natural barrier to imagining a flying whale, for example. He discovers that words can refer to other words, ideas to ideas to ideas-of-ideas... And he learns that ideas can deceive himself or other people...

This is what I call Conceptual Fluency, the age at which a child learns to think in abstractions. Before it, the child cannot rationalize, and he cannot be dogmatized. It is only after the child understands that concepts can be manipulated free of the bonds nature places on objects that he can act in willful self-defeat. I'll have much more to say about this later on. What I want to convey now is this: the Sleepwalkers do not just believe that the premises they try to negate are in fact true, they know it. Each of them proved to himself the truth of reality before he learned how to lie to himself about it...

There is a certain black comedy to it, since every SFE "validation" consists of the assertion that one knows something by some means other than discovery, other than by reasoning about facts in one's own mind. Which is to say, that one knows something by a means one already knows to be impossible. And, therefore, by means of the SFE the Sleepwalker negates himself. He pretends to himself that he is what he is not, that he is not as he truly is - and knows he is. He obliterates his own identity, species and spirit, in order to sustain a premise that he knows contradicts his every experience...

Experience is the awareness of being, remembered, sensed in the present, and anticipated. A Substitute For Experience is a claim to knowledge without a basis in awareness, discovery. Religious revelation is a gross example. According to Augustine, it is "validated" in "the evidence of things not seen". That unpacks to "evidence of the non-evident", and from there to "knowledge of the non-knowable". Make no mistake: the SFE claims to have awesome powers. It is an effect without a cause, an end without a means, a mystical, magical miracle. Something from nothing, an endless string of zeroes yielding up a one...

That's half the picture: Solipsism, the belief that one has the power to "create" facts. For whether he places his belief in omnipotence in himself or in an imagined god, the Sleepwalker is acting upon the conviction that the laws of nature are his to control by volition. The other half is Skepticism, nothing from something, the belief that facts are non-existent...

"This isn't happening. I refuse to believe this is happening to me." How many times have you heard those words? When you heard them, was there ever any doubt that it really was happening? Another form of the same thing is "pretending" not to know something or someone one does know. Another is the blank indifference many people exhibit in their actions. And still another is "hiding" facts from oneself or others.

All of these are different ways of expressing the same thing, belief in the power to "escape" awareness. The Solipsist believes he can cause the universe to exist, but the Skeptic believes he can cause it to cease to exist. The Solipsist insists that volition gives him the power to mold nature. The Skeptic claims that his choice can negate nature, including the nature of choice.

Observe: one cannot say, "I refuse to take notice of this", without first taking notice of it. The snub that tacitly declaims, "I am not aware of you" - is a lie. It has to be a lie, because the response of feigned unawareness is a reaction to awareness. "This isn't happening" would be a meaningless statement outside the context of knowledge of something happening; the response, again, is a reaction to a stimulus; it would not manifest itself without it. In the same way, trying to hide facts from oneself requires the existence of those facts. Before you can pretend that you believe something is false, you must know it to be true. If you did not, you would not need to pretend that you don't...

Do you see what is happening? The Solipsist tries to pretend he can create the truth. The Skeptic tries to pretend that he can hide from it. And both types of Sleepwalkers try to pretend that they can be what they are and what they are not, both at the same time...

In trying to negate the known properties of being, to deny what he already knows to be true, the Sleepwalker is denying the identity of being. Since he is himself a manifestation of being, when he denies the nature of the universe, he is also denying his own nature. If fact, he is negating his own identity first, as the end he seeks. He refuses to acknowledge the nature of volitional conceptuality, the property that distinguishes him from other beings, pretending either that choice is omnipotent or that reason is impotent. He refuses to recognize his true potency for what it is. Thus, he negates his identity as an entity, as a particular type of object with particular unchangeable characteristics.

But much more significantly, he also denies his identity as a particular ego, as his own unique self-made soul...

Watch: to pretend that something that is not true is, or to pretend that something that is true is not, one must deny the validity of experience, either while it is happening or as one remembers it happening. I first began to understand this while thinking about my many notable failures to convince anyone of anything. When you talk to someone who does not want to hear what you have to say, it is just as if they do not hear what you are saying. In order to "turn a deaf ear" to someone, a Sleepwalker must pretend that something he knows is happening is not. He must pretend, for that moment, that his life does not exist...

For life is experience: being now, remembering having been, hoping to be... We live in our minds, and our lives consist of the accumulated experiences of our lifetimes. Being alive as a human being means being aware of being alive as a human being. Any part of our time we spend trying to be unaware of being human is time spent in self-abnegation. In the same way, when we try to pretend that something we regret in the past didn't happen, or something we hope for in the future cannot happen, we are acting in self-abnegation, we are erasing part or all of the idea that is the self...

Our lives are of limited duration. Sally may have found a way around that, but for humans in bodies life eventually comes to an end. Because it is finite, any bizarre attempts at non-existence or super-existence are wastes of life... There is only so much water in the glass. Any you let spill to the ground cannot be used to quench your thirst...

If life is a value - and I say it is - then the SFE negates not just reality, but the ego of the person who practices it. He takes the one of life that nature gives him and makes a zero of it. He tries to exist as he is not, but this is impossible. So, by default, he ends up not existing as he is. He uses his life to pursue its own negation...

I mean what I say: the effect of a mental inversion, negation of ego, is the goal sought by the Sleepwalker. When he ignores his life while it is happening or forgets his past or his hopes for the future, he is wasting the only life he has. He rejects the only life he can have, because it is not the life he would invent for himself. He values the zero of non-existence over the one of being what he is. Indeed, we can describe the mental inversion, the SFE, and all of Madness as pretending to evaluate zero as being greater than one.

But there is more to it than that, Helena, so much more. Because Madness is a response to life, and, in the eyes of a Sleepwalker, the means to it...

Do you understand?: The general inversion behind any specific type of SFE is: a thing can be both itself and not-itself at the same time, an entity can correspond to and contradict its nature simultaneously. Every Sleepwalker knows this is false; he had to know that identity is inviolable in order to scheme up a false contrary. As I said, the entity with which he is primarily concerned in denying facts is himself. His Madness may employ other objects, but its first target is his own identity. He erects an SFE in order to rationalize drawing a conclusion about himself that he already knows to be false. He seeks "proof" that he can do what he cannot, or that he cannot do what he can. The SFE serves as his "evidence" that he is either omnipotent or impotent...

Why, why, why, why? Watch them...

Childhood is a beautiful experience for virtually everyone. It is not without its physical and emotional pains, but except in extreme cases these are rare compared to the moments of total rapture. And because they don't yet order their thoughts by conceptualization, children don't grant more than transient significance to pain. The overwhelming majority of their time is spent in pleasure, in full and joyous awareness of everything...

And, yes, you know I love children. But I never told you the reason I love them: it is because they are human, human in the full and most beautiful sense of the word. Not just alive, but glad to be alive, Thriving In Exquisite Splendor. I love to watch their minds work, watch them teach themselves the truth of being before anyone else can teach them anything. If they are to achieve the ability to learn concepts from others, they must, as a matter of causal necessity, teach themselves the truth of identity and causality. But because they lack concepts, they cannot act like their Sleepwalking parents and rebel against what they must do to remain alive. They haven't learned how to pursue pain, and they pursue pleasure with a will...

And then, something happens... What it is depends on the child, on his own unique experience of being. He might be dogmatized or brutalized by others; think, for example, of the way older children like to torment younger ones with horror stories. Or he might "get away" with actions he thinks are unjust. But either way - I say every way - he comes to imagine for himself a way of "knowing" that is better than reason, more "useful" for arriving at a desired conclusion than discovery. This is the root mental inversion, the first of many, and the child must know it is false to conceive of it. Whether he does it to reap a pleasure or to shed a pain, the child knows he is pursuing a method that is invalid to his own prior proof of being.

One mental inversion is no big deal. Children heal from scraped souls as quickly as from scraped knees. What is dangerous is this: that first inversion will usually have no exigent consequences. By exigent I mean: demanding immediate attention, a physical or spiritual emergency. When little Sharon accedes to her father's demand that she believe in a non-evident god, she does not suffer for it, not right away; she knows she is accepting a datum without proof, but she trusts her father not to mislead her. When little Randy convinces himself he has a "knack" for fishing coins from mommy's purse "without getting caught", he knows he is denying the nature of volition as a cause; he had to understand volition in order to "discover" and "abstract" his "knack"; yet he does not get the smack on the ass he so richly deserves...

No, that first mental inversion is not terribly significant - by itself. But it does have consequences, even though these are usually not immediately obvious to the child. The first of these is the studied unawareness discussed before, which must be maintained for as long as the child wishes to sustain the SFE. The second is that inversion pits his ego, his self-concept, against the truth. Even one SFE of short duration is damaging to the mind and to the self to some extent...

But not terribly damaging, not at first. The problem is that the SFE becomes habituated. The trust and desire to please - and the fear - that led Sharon to lean on her father the first time will lead her that way again, if she does not challenge the false premise she holds. The sly feeling of power Randy knew when he decided to invent his "knack" is addictive; he steals wealth, true, but he also steals a feeling of triumph he did not have to earn. Because they sustain their irrationality through time, both become more and more alienated from reality, and both become, as individual souls, bigger and better enemies of the truth...

There is no man more bound by a deception than the liar. His victims suffer immediate injury, but the damage he inflicts upon himself is much worse, and much more enduring. In order to sustain his lie, he has to deny his own awareness of being, he has to refuse to live his own life. And he must constantly scurry around, continuously "re-inventing" imaginary "truths" about his imaginary life, in order to uphold an idea of his ego that he knows is false to fact... (And think: this sort of thing is so ubiquitous that it's a stock situation comedy plot.)

The second-most tragic thing about the SFE is this: it can never work. Reality always remains as it is, no matter what we choose to think of it. The nature of knowing is such that it cannot occur except by discovery, no matter how much we might want it to be otherwise. Contradictions do not exist. Because his mother chooses not to watch her purse, Randy can sustain the false idea of knowing by "knack". But what will happen to him when he tries to convince himself he has a "knack" for driving a car...?

But the most tragic thing about Madness is that it destroys the person who practices it, destroys both the ability to live and the enjoyment of being alive. Reality doesn't punish Sharon severely when she renounces her own mind, but it does punish her incrementally and cumulatively through time. When the adult Sharon finds she cannot make a decision, cannot face a new challenge without paroxysms of anxiety, depression and doubt, it is her ego that is paralyzed...

That's interesting: his evidences are proof not of his SFE's truth, but of its falsehood - and he knows it. Think of the example with which I began this chapter: does the way the media would treat our love prove us to be depraved? Despite our first-hand evidence to the contrary? Or does it prove that the sellers and buyers of swill have chosen to be depraved?

I know a man who plays the lottery. Every night at the same time he calls for the numbers, hours after the drawing. He will not let anyone mention the numbers in his presence before his call. I once explained to him that, no matter what time he found out about them, the numbers could not change. He insisted that they could, that one day god might smile on him for the faithful application of his ritual, his "evidence" of the power of divine intervention...

People who fish for compliments amuse me. The form of their argument is: I intend to employ emotional manipulation to compel you to appreciate me. Is what they get in response true appreciation? Or is it just the opposite? When you hand your money to a mugger or tax collector, are you giving him something he has earned and deserved? Or is he taking something that is not his by right?

They start out wanting to have it both ways, wanting to have the life of a human without the identity. They spurn the potency of a man, demanding instead the omnipotence of a god or the impotence of an animal. To achieve this mental abomination, they must erect and sustain a mental inversion. To erect it, they need to deny a premise they know in advance to be true. And to maintain it, they need to continue to deny their own knowledge, their own sense evidence and memory of experience. At full maturity, the SFE is a ravenous monster...

Now, consider that many people have more than one Madness...

Yikes! Now do you understand why they are so unhappy? Not quite yet...

For there is one thing left to consider: what happens when a person has to choose between something he wants very badly and his Madness? This is reality's ultimate revenge on the Sleepwalker. Nature abuses his his body as the price of his error, and logic cripples his mind. But it is his own personal identity, his ego, that thrashes him when he chooses the zero of his Madness over the one of his spirit...

Self-flagellation, self-mortification: they do have referents in our so modern world. They refer to Sleepwalkers... Because if he had to strive frantically to maintain his SFE before it cost him anything, he must double his zeal afterward.

This is where the aspect of self-punishment comes in. Each of them knows that he has renounced something he wants in order to sustain his SFE. In his private guilt, each will think of some specific value. But, at a deeper level, each has also renounced the desire to live life at its fullest that is the normal mental state of childhood. And self-renunciation is self-destruction in the very tightest sense, the dismantlement of the ego...

Madness is self-destruction, and the Sleepwalker knows it is. When he employs it to achieve even greater self-destruction, he is inflicting a grievous injury upon his ego. And he knows it...

At this point - at every point along the line - he has a choice: he can go on trying to sustain a falsehood, or he can face up to the truth and rebuild from where he is. Unfortunately for the Sleepwalker, he has habituated a completely invalid method for dealing with unpleasant facts: he ignores them...

So, what happens? The Sleepwalker acknowledges failing his ideal of life by embracing his Madness still more tightly... Recall, one cannot react without there having been a prior action; one cannot pretend not to know without first knowing. By his reaction, the Sleepwalker demonstrates that he is aware he has failed his values. But to admit this consciously would require that he admit the invalidity of his SFE. So, instead, he strains still harder to pretend to himself that he believes his false premise.

And where before the SFE was an invalid means to an end thought to be positive, it becomes a means to an end known to be negative. For when he loses a value for which he yearns due to his own willful errors, the Sleepwalker concludes that he is unworthy of his values. Before he used his Madness to obtain values without having to earn them. But afterward, he uses it to deny values to himself, to negate himself in punishment for having negated himself...

His self-flagellation simultaneously serves two contradictory purposes. He punishes the self of his deeds for having failed the self of his ideals. And he punishes the self of his ideals for demanding deeds he does not want to perform. He mortifies his spirit with more of the poison that made it ill: he renounces his desires and ignores his actions...

He convicts himself of attempted suicide and executes himself as punishment...

Madness...

What we are left with is a picture of a self-destruction loop, a willful, on-going dismantlement of ego that is self-sustaining and self-accelerating if left unchecked. The Sleepwalker sets about to negate himself in his mind and winds up negating himself in his body, his mind, and his soul, his awareness of and desire for life. The question to ask now is: what does Madness do...?

And the answer is: nearly everything that comes to nothing... Or even less...

Yes, I know they are pitiful, but still they are comical. I can recall from school seeing children try to guess the answers to math problems. Tragic Madness in the first degree, because the effect was not knowledge of the answer and its proof, but it was a diminution of the ability to find the right answer. Grave Consequences over time, the very worst for many of those children. Yet it is funny to watch while it is happening, in the way that watching monkeys play can be funny, or watching a cat cover its mistakes, or watching films of those birds that forget how to land. What a bunch of clowns...

And yet I do not despise them; I like most people I meet. I don't think they are evil, not even vile. Most have their Madnesses, but they're particular, and they're under control. Most of the people I've met are seven-tenths honest, and many are more. Nature is not very tolerant of stupidity; it is hard to be less honest than that and stay alive for very long. I enjoy watching people and talking to them, and, as long as I stay clear of their SFE's, they like talking to me. There are few of them I could talk to about this, but it's easy enough to understand why.

I get a little tired of being wheedled for "moral support", which means claiming falsely that one believes the other person's SFE. Note that this is another attempt at an invalid "proof"; one can say anything, and nothing one says is proof of anything by itself. The Sleepwalker's resort to this kind of move is "no accident". Reality is intolerant of error, and so the Sleepwalker learns that the "safe" places to find his "proofs" is in his own and other people's choices. The drunkard claims that he has the power to neglect his safety, but his "proof" is the bartender's willingness to get him home safely.

No, I do not dislike them. But I do fear them...

Because what Madness does is destroy...

Think of a mob scene. What is it? Some people would both ignore it and apologize for it by calling it "mass hysteria". But is "hysteria", invalid reasoning, Madness - is that new to any of the participants, or is it something they do all the time? Is a riot some kind of spontaneous accident, or is it an impromptu choir of practiced liars...?

And what is a culture? Is it any more than a codified Madness? Perhaps men do require some formalized means of imbuing actions with meaning, but is there any reason to suppose that one genuflection is superior to another? Does any culture you can name do anything besides forbid people to do what they want for their own reasons? Think about it...

Think about our own culture. What is it that we're doing when we tell our children that faith is a source of knowledge and that the right answer is the one in the book? What is it when we tell children lies about monsters and magicians in order to "teach them how to get along"? Get along with what? I remember seeing once a vile old crone with her toddler grandson. She was telling him, in Spanish, "You have shit in your heart, and it's pumping piss". What goal was her action motivated to serve...?

And think of the individual Sleepwalker. What has he to gain or lose, after he has renounced the values that moved him? If it is only his self-love that keeps him from wielding the mass-murderer's gun, what happens when his self-love is gone? What explains mass-murder in the first place...?

Madness...

3. Knowing

Janio Is. Janio Built. Janio Is Helena's. I was looping on my identity long before I ever looped with assembler instructions. Janio Is Helena's - it means so much to me that it was my password on the system, back when I still needed one. Janio Built in all those loving letters, with their strange syntax and odd capitalization. I Am Yours by my own on-going choice, Because I Want To Be. Janio Is.

But what is Is...?

I claim for myself the title of Master Of The Nothing Joke. Nothing Is Sacred in my humor. Headline: Egovangelist Sighs: 'Nothing Goes Unskewered - All Injured'... "Hastings, I want you to have all the best things in life that are free. Nothing Is Too Good For You!" And we both know how to answer that: "Is is. Is Not is not. Therefore, Is is not Is Not."

Ha! I hope I never tire of teasing you. But Janio Built is an Egovangelist, and I rarely do anything without a didactic end in view. Forewarned is forearmed: I am preaching to you...

And do you understand why I dread this? I must do it, I want do to it, I want it done. And yet I am plagued by a nagging doubt that it is somehow not right. Not that the truth I propound is invalid, a Madness, but that it is somehow wrong morally to talk about these things in this way. It Needs To Be Said, it has for a long time. And yet, it is still somehow an insult, an injustice, and it may even be a threat to my own happiness...

"Language Is A Virus"... I don't know what Laurie Anderson meant by that, probably something pretty vile. I heard it in conversation, and I looped on it for months to make it my own. All we really understand, we know through abstraction of the immense body of sense experience. We have abstracted these marvelous accelerators called words, concepts. But these show us only where to look and what to look for; they don't see in our stead. But as we have noted, concepts can also be used in a different way: one can invoke them to pretend that one sees what isn't. Or that one doesn't see what is....Or that one does see what is - but doesn't...

It's the last one that scares me. To be denounced on faith is nothing. I have no fear of magicians or microbes. But to be taken on faith - that is an insult to me, to the "acolyte", and most especially to the truth...

And yet I make of my speech a religious beauty, which is an insult to you. Not intended, and not really avoidable: Language Is A Virus. And Janio Built is a plague, maybe... Because I cannot say what I have to say except in this way. I know: I tried it twice and was stopped both times. I am writing about life, the thing I say is the very essence of truth, usefulness, goodness, and beauty, the thing without which those really are Nothing. I deliberately make my speech as beautiful as I can, as a manifestation of Being Janio Built. Honestly, I seek not just to convince, but to infect, to charm, seduce and conquer with my words. That's an aggression, one I acknowledge without renouncing. I hope it's not a Madness, but if it is, I'll pay what it costs me. I would bear false witness to my vision of the truth, were I to present this in another way.

And there is injustice here, too, by choice and by ignorance. Because this letter is about Being Janio, which necessarily excludes you. Other People are Not Me, and their introspective lives are unknown to me. You have never been a Stupid, a Sleepwalker; I have never known you to do anything corrupt or unjust. But you are still Not Me, and I do not know you as I know myself alone, as you know your self alone...

It's possible you've done some of the things named in the last chapter. I have, and that's part of the reason I know them so well. But neither of us is here to exonerate the other; it would change nothing, and we would learn nothing from it. But it is unjust of me to expose your soul - if that's what I've done - even while exposing my own. I resonate in the quiet recesses of your mind, And Yet I Am Sound, a thing made undeniably real in your spirit... I Have No Right to force myself upon your brain, and yet I do it anyway. I feel I must, and that is both No Excuse and all the excuse I have.

And there is another injustice, less severe but perhaps more threatening. Look at it: suppose I am right. Suppose you come to agree that mine is the full and true representation of Being Alive As A Human, or at least the best beginning so far. I know you know most of this already, so it's not such an enormous leap. But what happens then? By my gifts, I oblige. Not really, because a gift requires the consent of both the giver and the receiver. I have not asked you if you want this, I have simply thrust it at you.

That's an aggression, too, one that might cost me the thing outside myself I value most. You do not owe me anything. But if you feel that you do, or if you feel that I am trying to make you feel that you do, then I do both myself and my truth a disservice. I injured you by leaving, and I injure you again by this letter. By all of those letters and all of our days together, because I was ever thus. That's No Excuse either, but that's what I am... And yet that's what I must stop being to you...

I Am The Life Divine. I Am The Truth And The Glory And The Meaning And The Beauty And The Light. I Make My Spirit Real In My Actions, And I Know My Actions Whole In My Spirit. I Adore Myself.

And I don't try to hide it. I try not to hide it... I strive always to make it real in my person, as my own redundant proof of my truth. I am the man who would be his own object of worship, and I make my self glorious...

But I cannot be the object of your worship, not the first one. You were My Esme, My Hilde, My Child Bride. But you are not a child, and you cannot live - really live - on any part of my strength. It does not matter that I can spare it. What matters is that you cannot lean on me at all. To do it is to palsy your own muscles, your own power to grasp The Life Divine and hold it to you.

In that way I am a threat to your happiness and to mine, a threat to our love. I see it and know it for what it is, and yet I cannot stand in the way of it. There is immense beauty in what we had, but there is a tinge of Madness, too, a slight dependency that seemed reasonable at the time but doesn't now. I have been too much a father to you, too much a mentor, a confessor and a god. That's no stain, and you have been a god to me, too. But it's not fully a goodness, because we each must stand on our own before we can stand together. You used to tell me all the time: "Before one can say 'I Love You', one must first know how to say the 'I'"...

So true. And so by my style of expression and my style of life, I can act to my own injury in three ways: I can alienate you from the truth. I can alienate you from me, assuming you don't agree that what I say is true. Or I can cause you to pretend to believe as I do, without really believing it. I fear each of these - but minutely. Everything I know of you tells me you are a glorious being - and I am not trying to manipulate you, just to present what I see as the truth. I fear the last worst, though. Because if by my actions I cost you the full joy of your life, then I cost it too of my own...

I Would Have You, Helena, but I will only have you whole, no matter what nonsense I might try to will into being. I cannot compel your love, because it is only you - the you I can never see or touch or control - who can make your love real and bestow it upon me. I yearn for that treasure more than any other, but I cannot cause it to be, no matter what... I would not force you with my hands if I had them. But if I force you with my words, hypnotizing, mesmerizing you with my mind, then I commit a crime no less grave. It would be a Madness, and, like any other, it could not work. The value I obtained by force would not be the value I sought. I would have not your love but your compliance, not your desire but your submission, not your spirit but only your flesh...

Honesty: If I Took You By Force I Would Destroy You And Destroy Myself.

Is is, always. And it always is as it is, no matter what. Madness is an attempt at a special exemption from The Law Of Identity, but there are no such exceptions. I cannot have you for the price of my willing it. But I would not have it, even if I could, because I must have the Real Experience, not the Substitute. I know too much now about how people cheat themselves of their treasures. I know too much to even want to defraud myself...

And so I confound myself. I will go on with this, because I must. I will bear my fears and doubts: I don't like their causes, but I like the alternatives even less. I Would Not Lose You. But I would not keep you by fraud, by pretending to be something I'm not, but pretending I am not going where I am headed... Pretending you are not what you so abundantly are, with my longing itself as my best proof of that abundance... I would not steal you because I Would Not Lose You.

It may be that I cannot succeed, no matter what. Perhaps the knife that sliced us apart cut too deep. And maybe this letter is the insult I fear it might be. It may be that we simply have different roads to travel, with no stain on either of us. If so, so be it. I like to think of myself as a man who faces up to facts. And I know that to keep liking myself that way, I had better keep facing up to facts...

But I could not call it a goodness, not now anyway. By My Own Hand I Create My Life - or destroy it. It cannot be otherwise, and it could not be more beautiful, even now. I could torment myself much worse than this - and I have, in spasms - but it would come to nothing. This is all I can do that can come to anything...

And it might come to less than Nothing!

Yes, things are never so funny as when they're tragic... We can be hit by anything we set in motion amid the stately march of the stars. Hit hard. But Is always is, and it can't be cheated, lied to, compelled or obliviated. It is an invulnerable opponent, and to fight it is to die fighting it. So I will do as I must and hope as I can. Things will work out as they do, without my having much more than this to say about it. I cannot say that I like it, but I recognize its necessity.

I am not defeated, not by half. But I am at the very end of my power to act. Janio Is Helena's. But whether Helena Is Janio's is Helena's to decide, hers alone...

Passion Chills When It Burns: I Am The Soaring Thing, and I can only hope my disclaimers offset my ecstasy, flatten the curve. Janio Is: I can conceive that this might not be what need to be done, but this is what I can cause to be done. Is was before Janio, and it makes the rules...

Woman, I am shameless in my didacticism, because I have just shown you, in the most lovingly beautiful and tellingly perfect of examples...

For Is itself, always, unchangeably.

Truly, I love saying things that way... Unfortunately, if you don't already understand what I am saying, then you don't understand at all. So I'll do what I can to make things clearer.

First, reality, the universe, is composed of objects, entities. Everything that exists exists as an object, or as a manifestation of an object. Objects are composed of substance, of matter. If we ask, "What is there that exists that is not matter or a property of matter?", the answer is: Nothing.

Matter is all there is, and there are no entities that are not composed of matter. There are a great many Sleepwalkers who speak of "living in a material world". The question to pose to them is: "As opposed to what?" There is no non-material universe. There are no non-material objects. If it isn't matter, it isn't. Period.

I don't intend to carry on at this basic a level for too long, for two reasons. First, the ground is already very well covered, by Aristotle, by the natural sciences, and most recently by philosopher Ayn Rand. (And, in invoking her name, I must hasten to add that I don't endorse her thought fully, nor do her high priests endorse me.) I have recommended to you before Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. This is the finest work of philosophy she did, and it is among the finest done by anyone, ever. It deals at length with the issues that concern us here: what is Is?, how do we know it is?, and how do we know our knowledge is reliable? So far as I know, no one has done any serious damage to Rand's case. So far as I know, no one has even tried.

The second reason is this: I do not take arguments of supernatural metaphysics seriously. As far as I'm concerned, they're all SFE's, Madnesses. That's a prejudice, and I freely admit it. I haven't talked to every believer in the supernatural, so I haven't proved exhaustively that they're all Sleepwalkers. But I've talked to enough of them to satisfy my curiosity, and I've yet to meet even one who could offer any verifiable evidence in support of his view. Their "proofs" are always rooted in that non-universe of non-matter; they're never out where one can get a look at them.

And, of course, it's easy enough to see why: people concoct the idea of a "non-natural" being in order to defend their allegedly "non-natural" knowledge. Whether it is heaven, other planets, ghosts from the past or future, space aliens, parallel universes or the world beyond the grave, there is no one who upholds an "alternative" being who does not communicate with that alternative. The imaginary alternative does not just exist, it sends secret messages to its faithful advocate. Totally secret, because they are never evident to a competent observer.

Now that's a vital word: evident. Every object is evident, discernable to the senses of any competent observer. It seems almost comical to say it, because it's the most obvious thing in the world. It is obviousness itself, and it is the world... Everything that exists is an object. Objects are evident to the senses, either themselves or their actions and attributes. If you talk to a Solipsistic Sleepwalker, you can challenge him easily enough by saying: point to something that is not an object or an attribute or action of an object...

If he's smart, and most aren't, he'll say something like: "Sure, anything I can point to is an object. What I'm talking about is something I can't point to." Fine. What is it, and how can I prove that it is? And the answer is: I can't. If it is non-evident, it is non-knowable. The Solipsist is making a claim contrary to my experience, that he is aware of something that exists that is not evident. But even granting him that contradiction, I can do nothing for him. Because, even imagining that his Special Exception exists, I cannot prove to myself that it does.

The Skeptics deserve their turn at bat, too: what they say is that the senses are in some way unreliable. Some say that true existence is somehow separate from that which is evident, that the evidence of the senses is a lie. Others insist that the mind imposes order on what is in fact chaos devoid of identity. The first view says, yes, we are conscious, but not of the truth. The second says we are not conscious of anything except our minds. Both are void of meaning. We can only know that the object we view is not the true object by means of true knowledge of the object, which is denied to us by definition by the first theory; in other words, to uphold that epistemology, we are required to claim knowledge the theory itself forbids us. In the same way, if our minds merely impose order upon chaos, how did we come to have a knowledge of order? Both theories assert effects that somehow manage to come into being without prior causation. And both are nonsense, in my view.

I could go on about this at enormous length, so I won't. Read the Rand if you want more. And if you meet a person who insists that you must "respect" his belief in a non-evident being that yields non-evident knowledge, invite him to take a walk through the streets of New York. Blindfolded... If his non-verifiable knowledge tells him when it's safe to cross the street - then listen to him... Ha!

Because it is by abstracted evidence of the senses that we know being - and everyone knows it. Everyone, including all those poor Sleepwalkers who claim they've found "a better way". Not one of them fails to look both ways before crossing the street, because they know that their non-evident knowledge is imagination, not knowledge.

So: being consists of objects, which are composed of matter. Objects are evident to our senses, they are all that is evident to our senses, and we know only by abstraction of sense evidence, by discovery. Because knowledge consists of abstraction of evidence of objects, it can be verified by any competent observer. By my lights, non-verifiable "knowledge" is a contradiction in terms. If it cannot be shown to be true, it isn't true. Period.

There are some truly hirsute side issues to this, but I don't intend to go into them in detail. Briefly: there is the problem posed by falsifiability, the scientific doctrine that something cannot be proved true unless it admits the possibility of being proved false. Extreme Solipsism, to pick an example, the belief that one is the creator of all being, including any people who claim to be independent observers, is not falsifiable. There is no evidence you can offer in opposition to the theory that cannot be asserted to be a manifestation of it. In the same way, the Quantum Mechanists are making some epistemological claims that can only be regarded as bizarre outside the realm of subatomic physics. Some hold, for example, that the causality of matter is a manifestation of chance, not of necessity. That, for example, though we may never observe the air in the room to be anything other than evenly distributed, there is nothing in the nature of gases that prevents them from collecting in the corners, leaving the middle of the room in vacuum. All a very, very remote chance, they assure us. But still possible, they insist.

The question that I ask, when I hear theories like these, is: what difference does it make? Suppose I am a product of somebody else's imagination: in his wisdom, he has imbued me with a nature that I violate only at my peril. You could say, why should I care that one of his thoughts expires? Because I am that thought - though of course I am not; wish I could pinch you to prove it. Similarly, suppose that the causality I regard as absolute is only random chance. In fact, whenever I set a causal chain in motion, I observe the same results. I have yet to observe a contradiction. So what difference does it make to me that there is a supra-hyper-mega-micro-minute possibility that an object might someday contradict its nature?

Understand me, I don't take these epistemologies seriously. I don't dispute the existence of the Josephson Junction, for instance, but I don't think micro-scale causality has said anything meaningful, to date, about macro-scale causality. But suppose I did take them seriously, not just Quantum Mechanics but all alternative views of identity and causality. What would be different in my life? If I were to live as a body and mind as I did before, would I not have to do the same things I did then? Could I safely pretend, for instance, that my alternative knowledge will tell me when it's safe to cross the street? Could I forego eating, demanding instead that my creator, the Solipsist, imagine that my stomach is full? Could I put a gun to my head, arguing that it is purely a matter of chance that a bullet is hard and massive, that it might be something else this time?

Could I do anything that is contrary to the true conclusions I draw by abstraction of sense evidence - and stay alive? No. So I leave the full proofs of being to those who do them better than I do. You know what's true, and so does everyone else. Each person has to prove identity and causality prior to learning to think in concepts, since concepts are the product of the knowledge of identity and causality.

For my own purposes, I am satisfied with a simple, end-oriented rule-of-thumb: that which you must regard as true in order to remain alive is true. In my own mind, I call it The Armpit Of God Theory. It goes like this: what if that which I regard as all of the universe is no more than a mote of dust on a quark in an atom in a molecule in a hair in the armpit of god? So what? I am still what I am, a free mind in a material body (even now I am that). I still have free will. I still survive only by acting correctly upon my knowledge. So how have my circumstances changed? They haven't. Is is...

Now I've been using those words, identity and causality, for quite a while without giving any clue as to their meaning. It's time I did them justice.

The identity of an object is what that object is. It is itself, irrespective of our consciousness of it. And it is as it is according to it nature, according to the properties of the components of which it is made. An object can exist in different forms. A mineral can be a solid or a liquid. But no object can change its identity. A mineral cannot become a gas, for instance, or a tree. The Law Of Identity, A is A, a thing is itself, is absolute. It admits of no exceptions.

Humans can be conscious of the identity of an object. But that awareness is not the identity of the object, nor does the object make its identity known automatically. We can observe ice, but our observation of it does not change its nature - or our own. The ice itself is immediately obvious to the senses, but its identity is not. We cannot know merely by gazing at it that its melting point is zero degrees celsius. Nor can we claim that we create the melting point of ice by looking at it. The identity of ice - or of any object - is what it is regardless of what we think or feel about it...

Causality is the way objects interact. It is a manifestation of identity, a necessary relationship of objects among other objects. Each object has its identity, its own real nature. When one object comes into contact with another, they act upon each other. The simplest and most common example is the billiards table. A billiard ball will sit still until acted upon by another object. Then it will move in a straight line until it is slowed by friction or until it bounces off one of the walls of the table. When one ball slams into another, the slammer is stopped and the ball slammed begins to move. The effect of the slammed ball's motion was caused by the energy transferred by the slammer.

Again, we can be aware of this, but our awareness changes nothing. When talking about inanimate objects, causation is inviolable. There is no thought you can hold or action you can take that will cause events to reverse themselves. No matter how much you might want it to be otherwise, the slammed ball must move when hit, and the slammer must stop. In the same way, the prior causes that put the Earth in motion around the Sun cannot be reversed by your ideas. You can wish that the world moved in the opposite direction, but your wish will not cause it to happen...

And, of course, you know all that. But there is more that you might not have thought about.

Call back to mind our three categories: inanimate objects, organisms and humans. Identity is absolute for all three types of entity. There is no such thing as a gas that is simultaneously a rock, for example, or a tree that is also a bird, or a human who lacks the capacity to choose. But causality is not the same for all three...

Causality among inanimate objects is inviolable. Objects cannot change their identity, and human observers cannot change identity. So an object always is what it is, and it always interacts with other objects in the way its identity requires. There is nothing in the nature of either a billiard ball or a human observer that can cause the ball to remain still when hit by another ball. Given the prior cause the effect must, necessarily, manifest itself, without exception. The effect is foreordained by the nature of the objects interacting, and nothing can change it. Period.

Organisms, by contrast, have a degree of flexibility in their responses. The simpler an animal is, the less flexibility there is. And, high animal or low, most of an animal's actions are foreordained by its nature. Foreordained in a different sense than we used that word for inanimate objects, though. An organism's actions are selected - for the most part - by its instincts, by the "race memory" if you like, imposed upon it by its genes. The higher animals do have some degree of choice about what actions to take, but even that choice is preprogrammed by the animal's nature. Your dog can choose to bite your sister or play with her, but it cannot choose to play Chess with her. And when an animal is faced with a situation for which its instincts have not prepared it, it is paralyzed to act.

As an example, think of the stupid, self-destructive timidity displayed toward humans by the animals of the Galapagos Islands. Now, animals the world over know we are dangerous. That's why they do such a good job of staying out of our way. But the animals of the Galapagos have no "race memory" of us. Their instincts do not tell them how to respond to us, and they lack the ability to learn in any systematic or lasting way.

Anyway, the point is this: an animal's actions are predetermined by its nature. It has some flexibility within that nature, but none outside it. Your dog can choose to be friendly or mean, but he cannot choose to be a vegetarian. You can train him not to scratch the floor, but you can never teach him that it is unreasonable to try to scare up snakes and bugs by scratching at parquet. In the most fundamental sense, an animal's actions are foreordained by nature and are not malleable by any action of yours.

But humans are very different. We share with the higher animals the power of choice, but we lose the inviolable instincts and gain the power to reason. Because we act upon volition unhindered by instinct, none of our purposive actions are foreordained. There are certain types of actions, such as reflexes, that are genetically preprogrammed. But the part of our action that is under our conscious control is entirely under our conscious control. We can do anything we like, within the bounds that nature allows, and nothing in our own nature impedes our freedom.

What is more, we have the capacity to reason, to choose to abstract sense evidence into concepts of objects. And we have the power to choose to communicate these concepts among ourselves, thus multiplying the power of our minds. Man is a being of volitional conceptuality, and he is unique as such among beings.

Now, what does this mean? An inanimate object acts as it must, according to the prior causes acting upon it. If it comes into contact with another object, it can be a causal agent in a new causal chain. But it cannot choose to be a causal agent. An animal acts as it must, according to its genetic preprogramming. It acts as its instincts command, though in some cases it can choose among alternatives offered by its genes. When it acts, it is a causal agent. But it cannot choose to be a causal agent, nor even identify its own limited power of choice.

By contrast, man can do both. He can identify his power to choose to be a causal agent. The actions of an inanimate object are absolutely foreordained. The actions of an animal are foreordained with some tolerances. But the actions of man are not foreordained. They are exclusively the product of his volition.

This is vital. It tells us a great many interesting things about man and his actions. It also offers us a distinction between types of causation. From here on, I will refer to the metaphysical cause and the volitional cause. The metaphysical cause refers to the actions of inanimate matter and animals. When something is metaphysically caused, it could not be otherwise, given the prior causes. A metaphysically caused event is causally unavoidable.

By contrast, a volitionally caused event is always causally avoidable. It happened because someone chose to make it happen, and that person could have chosen an alternative. As an example: the shape of North America at the time of its discovery was caused by nature; it was the product of an enormous number of prior causes, each of which was metaphysically unavoidable. But the shape of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is man-made. It consists of entirely arbitrary lines men have drawn upon a map, by choice, for reasons of their own. It's true that some some of Massachusetts' boundaries are natural in origin, but the use of natural barriers as boundaries is also a matter of choice. Nature could not decide to change the shape of North America, but men could easily choose to change the shape of Massachusetts. They have done so several times. Men can even choose to change the shape of North America. We do it all the time, with dredges and landfills.

Men are unique among entities. We have the power to reason, and we have the power to choose. Our power can lead to our undoing, as we saw in the last chapter. There is no other living being that can choose to act in self-destruction. Certain animals do act contrary to their own interests: lemmings are the textbook example. But no animal knowingly acts against its own interests. Humans can and do. Many do little else...

But our power is also our glory. There are no other animals who compose poetry or erect skyscrapers. No animal could write The Organon or the Ninth Symphony. Some dogs are very playful, but they can never know the conceptual joy of viewing a Degas dancer or seeing Ibsen's Master Builder. Beavers have the reputation of being very efficient, but no beaver can choose to build something other than a dam. Dolphins, whales and apes are said to be very intelligent, but none of them is smart enough to husband a food supply - or organize against a common enemy. Man is that smart and more. No other animal can even conceive of an unforeseen disaster - an earthquake, a tidal wave, a forest fire. Because he has reason and choice, man can not only see the future, he can plan for it...

First, it means that man can reason about sense evidence. Like any higher animal, he can observe the real entities and actions in the world around him. But unlike any other being, he can recall past perceptions and compare them to present ones. He can organize and reorganize his past perceptions, uniting those that are similar and separating those that differ. He can order whole classes of objects and events into concepts, ideas. He can reason about those ideas in order to understand other ideas. And he can communicate his ideas to others, with one word standing for a whole class of entities or processes or ideas.

For example, if I use the word "smelting", you might think of the whole process of metal forming, from mining to firing to purification to pouring. You know all of this from past experience, which is retained by mental integration under a concept. In the same way, if I say "poetry", you might think of some of the thousands of poems you have read. But if I say "poetry in motion", you might think of athletics or the dance or horse-racing, whatever that concept means to you, whatever your past experience has led you to believe it means.

But man is a being of volitional conceptuality. That means two things. It means that man can reason, but that he only actually does so by choice, and that every choice he makes results from his having thought about it by choice. But it also means that reason and choice are themselves volitionally caused...

Not the capacity to reason and to choose; these are genetically foreordained and are not subject to change by choice. But their development is very much a product of choice, and if that choice is absent, so will be volition and conceptuality. And the choice is not that of any particular person, but of his parents...

Look at it: children are born with the capacity to walk upright. But they have neither the muscular development nor the knowledge to walk upright on their own. In order to learn to walk, they have to teach themselves how, with the help of their parents. And they have to eat and sleep comfortably and exercise, with all of these things obtained or motivated by their parents.

In the same way, to learn to reason, and to learn to choose to reason, a child must be supplied with a great deal of stimulation he could not obtain on his own. His parents present him with all sorts of sensory challenges: mobiles and toys and car rides and cuddles and nonsense speeches about the beauty of his toes. They don't - for the most part - do this with the view of stimulating the child's brain; they just do it because they love him. But their actions have the effect of stimulating the baby's in-born capacity to choose to reason, even if this is not the intent.

What would happen without that stimulation? The child would not learn to reason, and he would not learn to make abstract choices. This is a matter of established fact, documented under the general heading "Wildmen", humans raised by animals. And we can envision an even fuller - and more monstrous - test. Imagine a man-made womb, a sensory deprivation tank that provides a newborn with food and disposes of his wastes. Inside it, the child would experiences no sensations, not even the sounds he heard prior to his birth. Would this child reason? About what? Would he choose? From among which known alternatives?

There is a third sense in which we can say that man is a being of volitional conceptuality. It is in fact a variation on the first, but it is interesting on its own. Man can choose to be not conscious. He cannot change his identity; identity is inviolable. Be he can choose to forbid himself the use of reason and choice. Madness is a form of this, but a temporary and specific variety. Suicide is a very, very fast expression of it. But the thing itself is anomie, the on-going refusal to be human, to reason about evidence and act upon it by choice. Real anomie is not something you'll see often; victims of it don't last very long. But if you can imagine our child in the sensory deprivation tank, that's what you'd have, a genetic human who does not react at all. This is done as the product of a choice, but the choice is to renounce choosing, to renounce even the positive act - by comparison - of suicide. Such is the power of the human mind, that it can completely obliterate itself...

But the normal human mind is an agent of creation, not destruction. As we have seen, people can engage in self-destruction, but they need not and they do so only at their own peril. What interests us now is what we can observe about man, about the being who reasons and chooses and chooses to reason...

For a first thing, we can note that a man can have knowledge, remembered abstracted sense data. Knowledge is awareness of the truth, and it is particular to a person. We can speak of a book as "embodied knowledge", but only as a matter of poetry. No book "knows" anything, and if the data recorded in a book is not known to someone, it is not known. The Rosetta Stone was "embodied knowledge", but for the entire time that we did not know how to decode it, no one "knew" what that knowledge was.

In the same way, "common knowledge" does not violate causality. It may be "common knowledge" that water freezes at zero celsius, but that does not mean that this fact is known automatically, or that anyone could know it without having discovered it. You do not know anything without having found it out. There is no automatic knowledge, and there are no short-cuts to validation, to proof. To prove something means to prove it in identity and causality, to show that it must be so, because it could not be otherwise.

Knowledge is particular to a person and so is volition. When a person chooses to do something, it is only that person who is choosing, not someone else. It is very common to hear Sleepwalkers say things like, "Creation is a collective process." They are lying - and they know it. Ideas do not exist apart from brains, and the choice to think about something in a different way does not occur apart from the brain of the person who makes that choice.

Volition is the exclusive motivation of humans. A person can choose to be unmotivated - as with anomie - but he cannot choose an alternate motivation. Humans are motivated by their own choices, or they are not motivated at all...

What is more, each human is self-motivated. The self is an idea each person abstracts about himself. He observes himself in the world around him, takes note of his metaphysically caused nature and his volitionally engendered desires. He takes account of his thoughts, words and deeds, and, through time, forms an idea of who and what he is. It is this idea - the ego, the self, the soul, the spirit, the self-concept - that is both the actor and the thing acted-upon in his every choice.

The self is not metaphysically necessary. Nature does not cause man to abstract any ideas, much less one so complex. But in the presence of its prior causes, the idea of the self is unavoidable. If we put a pregnant woman on a completely deserted island, and if she died while giving birth, her child would die within hours. Newborn humans are not even close to being able to survive alone. If we put her among wolves and the same thing happened, and if the wolves raised the child, it will be as if he were a wolf, a terribly crippled one. The child would not develop his capacity to reason, and thus he would never identify his power to choose. His poor emulation of wolf instincts would be a product of choice, but he would not know this. Not ever, unless he is rescued very young. But in the presence of normal human upbringing, the child will abstract the idea of self as a consequence of developing conceptual fluency.

I like to think of the spirit as a sort of doll, an idea of his own body that each person sustains in his mind. By his actions in the real world, he acts upon that body. And he acts upon it, too, by those actions of his that are only introspectively known. By his own estimation of how his thoughts and deeds serve his interests, as he identifies them, a person assesses his ego. And by that assessment, he determines his future thoughts and actions.

It is poetic to think of the soul as a doll of the body, but the body really is the doll of the spirit. If you want to know why some people always get what they want while others always get walked on - the spirit is your answer. We make our souls real, we embody our self-concept in our actions. When a person feels he is worthless - he acts worthless. When he feels he is great, he makes that image of himself manifest in his body. The self-concept is invisible, but its expressions are not...

Volitional conceptuality is particular to a person. What does that mean? We said it means that knowledge is particular to a person, that volition is particular to a person, that volition is exclusive as the form of human motivation, and that any particular person's motivation will be his own self-abstracted concept of himself. What does that tell us...?

It tells us this: humans are exclusively self-controlled.

Now, I know I've insulted you with a lot of trivia, a lot of fussy details you already know. So, when I tell you that this is the most important thing I have to say, please don't laugh at me...

Because, as obvious as it is, this is the single most important thing about humans, and it is the fact people are quickest to forget - to choose to try to pretend to forget...

What does it mean to say that humans are exclusively self-controlled? It means that any particular person will be motivated by his own self-image - and by nothing else...

Of course, you know that. No one who knows how to know can avoid knowing that. In their Madnesses, many, many people try to evade that knowledge, but none of them succeeds, for the same reason that no Madness ever succeeds - because choice cannot change identity.

But what does it mean to be exclusively self-controlled...?

Think back to that first example I gave in this chapter. Do you see how perfect it was? Don't think me too mercenary: I feel those doubts, longings, and joys even when they are not useful to me in an argument (grin).

But think back to what I said. Why can't I force you to be my wife against your will? Because your will is not mine to control. Why can't I cause you to love me? Because the cause of you love is your self, your own ego, yours alone to control...

What prevents me from taking you anyway? The Law Of Identity... I can grab your arm, but I cannot grab your soul. If I threaten you, you might motivate yourself to take an action, but I cannot motivate you. Not ever, no matter what. Is always is as it is, and we are not made that way...

Janio Is Helena's: I Would Not Lose You. But if Helena is to be Janio's, I must earn you. Today and every day, I must be the person you value most, next to yourself.

I would give a great deal to be next to yourself right now... But I cannot be, both because of Where I Am and Where We Are Now. But The Future Is Open To Change, and I am doing what I can to change it. It may not be enough, but it's all I have...

I Would Not Lose You, but I would not, could not, cannot ever keep you by any means other than your own free choice...

Is is - and I know it...

4. Rectitude

Okay, it's time to get serious:

I am a man who laughs for vengeance, and it's not entirely a goodness. But it's always been a good disguise... But now that part of my life is over, along with many others. The need for disguise is gone.

So let us get very serious, consequences be damned. I put at risk a huge part of my life, our love, my hopes for our future together, maybe even your belief in my sanity. And you may think me still more mad when I say this: I do it gladly.

I am an Atheist. I am an Anarchist. I am an Egoist. I am everything my culture loves to hate, And I Am Proud Of It.

So there! (grin)

Call me mad if you must, but I am what I have sought to become. Do I value something before you? You bet I do! Me...

I Love You helplessly, hopelessly, desperately. I didn't even know how much I loved you until we were parted. By my actions now and forever I will strive to earn the glory of being cherished by your hands and treasured by your spirit. But I love you as an expression of my own self-love, and I could not betray the cause without betraying the consequence. I would step in front of a bullet aimed at you, because I would sooner die than watch you die. But I would not corrupt myself for you, degrade and prostrate my own ego.

To love you, I must live. But to live, I must want to remain alive. I am not forced to this by nature; nature doesn't - can't - give a damn what I choose. But if I am to love you, and you me, I must choose to do those things I must do to remain alive. One is to remain ever true to my own truth. Though it might not be to a Sleepwalker, this is a very big deal to me. I would die for you, Helena. But I would not lie for you, no matter what that might cost me. Not for you, to you, about you, about me. Not ever, no matter what...

To be true to my love for you, I must first be true to my own self-love. And to be true to the idea of Man As God I uphold as my own standard of worthiness to that love, I must be true to my knowledge of the truth. Is is, and to deny it is Madness. To deny it is to pursue death denying it. Not the honest death of taking your place or even of suicide, but the thoroughly dishonest death of self-abnegation, the obliteration of the very thing that is the source of my love for you.

Because of what I am as a spirit, I could not betray the truth for your love. But even if I decided to invert my consciousness for your sake, I could not succeed at earning your love in the way I would have it. There Is Only One Right Way, and this is it.

Rectitude...

Justice, fairness, equity. Rightness, righteousness, rightfulness. Objectivity, impartiality, uncorruptibility. Earned reward and just deserts, honest praise and warranted contempt... All the justice of man in the universe in one little word: Rectitude...

To love you, to love myself, to live, I Am Rectitude Embodied. Making my self real means making my actions righteous, always, before anything else. I love the Janio of my present because I acted for my self-love in the past. If I am to keep that passion for my life, I must keep it in the way I got it. I must always do what I think is right, morally right.

I am human. Nature has pre-established no oughts for me. I have oughts, but they are a product of my choices. I can change my choices, but not in the most fundamental sense. I can choose not to value my life as I do, but I cannot choose to escape the consequences. I cannot become the person I want to be, following another path. I cannot cherish my spirit's perfection while watching it pursue imperfection. I cannot praise my mental acuity while deliberately arriving at an error. I cannot rejoice in my success at staying alive while pretending that my life does not exist...

Madness eats Splendor. That's what it's for... Splendor Is Rectitude Known Whole, but Madness is True Rectitude ignored. The two cannot be sustained in the same soul for long, no matter what goal seems to demand that resort. And so, though I would die in your place - or in the place of any children we may have - I will not corrupt myself for you. Not just because I would not, being what I am. But because I could not and be what I am...

For I am all those things I called myself, plus plenty more. I Am A Man Of Rectitude Before Anything. And yet any random stranger will tell you that the ideas I uphold are evil. Not just ugly, pointless and regrettable, but vile, dangerous, not to be tolerated no matter what...

Why do you suppose that is?

Rectitude...

Perhaps it is a Madness, but I have never been able to make myself believe that men are evil. I have seen them do evil things, and I think it is wrong of them to denounce the very concepts they need to achieve their full potential. And if I wanted to convict them of an irredeemable sinfulness, what better evidence could I have than my own ravaged body?

But not even The Man Who Wielded The Gun is evil. I was acting upon what I thought was right, and, when he pulled that trigger, he was acting upon what he thought was right. Don't get confused: I don't forgive him, not now and not ever. But I understand him, and in knowing him, I know his motive was not evil, but the good...

How can that be? He sought to kill me. He didn't make it, but he doesn't know that. How can I say that any part of his motivation was the good...?

Because he was acting on his own idea of Rectitude...

Yes, it was a Madness. But it was a Madness he felt his self-concept required. It was a thing he felt he must do, in order to let himself go on living. I am not forgiving, and I am not forgetting. But I understand it all, for what it really is. I Know Rectitude Whole, and so I know how people come to betray it while trying to serve it.

What I say is this: every man is motivated to do what he thinks is right. Though his actions may be evil in fact, they are not evil in intent. His intent is to preserve his life in the way he has decided he must, in order to preserve it at all. Though his actions may be truly suicidal, it is suicide he is trying to avoid by taking them...

Very serious and very strange. Yet as plain as day if we look at it in the right way.

First: what is "right"? I say that every person makes his choices by reference to his idea of "right", but what is this idea? Of what is it composed, and what does it imply?

Every child knows what "right" is. It's what you're "supposed" to do. It is a delightful annoyance when a child discovers the moral ought. For about a year, he will go around telling anyone and everyone what they are and are not "supposed" to do. If you ask, "Who is doing this supposing?," the child will be mystified. For him, "supposed" does not mean "concluded mentally" but "required metaphysically".

Children are the most morally conservative people you'll meet in life. When they discover that their actions are not bound by nature, they conclude that they have to act as though they were. This is a Madness, because it is untrue, but it is a useful temporary crutch in the child's development, and it is a causally unavoidable "stage" in mental growth. When a child uses the moral ought to erect a false idea of a metaphysical ought, he is not doing so in self-destruction, but in what he views as self-protection.

Because when he recognizes that his actions are not foreordained, he acknowledges that he does not know what to do. In most realms, he can go on as he has, building the self he was working on before he knew he was working on it. But of the world he sees clearly now, for the first time, the world outside his childhood experiences, he knows nearly nothing - and he knows it.

And so he erects in his mind a host of invalid impediments to error, a long list of "supposeds" that cannot verify themselves but which serve as barricades blocking the path to what the child views as his peril. There can be help from others in doing this; dogmatizing adults can feed the child oughts he never would have conceived on his own. But even if his parents are perfect, even if they never mislead him in any way, the child will still exhibit this moral absolutism at the age he begins to understand the need for morality. Given the prior causes, the capacity to reason and choose, and the nurturance of that capacity, the effect cannot fail to manifest itself. It is a temporary aberration for most children - though it is the threshold to Madness for some. But it is causally unavoidable.

Even though they grow to recognize its error, most people never give up on that idea of "right". They know it does not exist, and yet they want it to anyway. They know no human can have automatic knowledge of which course to take, but still they wish for it. They know no action can be good - or evil - irrespective of its consequences, but this does not stop them from trying to make "the ends justify the means". They know that justice is a product of consciousness, that it is achieved by choice. Yet they never cease to wish that evil could be obliterated by a causeless bolt of lightning...

They want what is "right", for the very best of reasons: their own self-protection. But they don't want to go about it in the "right" way. So, as with any Madness, they end up achieving the exact opposite of their goal. The keep waiting for "right" to win out, but all they see is "wrong" winning by default. They don't acknowledge that the default is their own...

Because the first question a child can knowingly evade is: "What is right and how do I prove it?" Most people never do answer that question in any systematic way, and I'm not just talking about Sleepwalkers. That temporary digression into "supposeds" need not be permanent, but for most people it is. They move from it into dogmas. Their newfound ability to reason in concepts allows them to absorb vast quantities of information, ideas that may seem more complete or comforting than their own self-abstracted conclusions about being. They move through life by mindlessly following a list of rules, without ever proving the validity of those commandments. Without ever even questioning the truth of the proscriptions they have placed upon their spirits.

Understand me, I am talking about every human being, not just the good ones. Even people who do evil have morals. There is no person you can talk to who will not tell you of something he will not do, no matter what. If you talk to a mugger or even a murderer, you'll hear the same thing. In their Madnesses, people make some awful messes of their lives. But there is not one of them who will tell you that he did not feel he must do as he did. And there is not one who will not tell you that there is something that he considers evil.

Everyone. Every woman and man born, ever, wants to do what is "right". But not one in a thousand knows what it is, or how one goes about finding it...

I can abstract three meanings. They normally overlap, but not always. Where they do not, I say, one will always stand preeminent.

The three meanings are: validity, utility and righteousness.

Validity is epistemological correctness. A valid conclusion is one drawn from accurate reasoning about the actual properties and potential of entities. It can be demonstrated to be true.

Utility is bodily usefulness. It is useful to have a safe and comfortable place to live. It is desirable to have plentiful food and other nice things. It is good to live without pain, and to have the resources to remove any new hurts that arise.

Righteousness is moral rightness. I am not trying to sneak in a self-referencing definition, but I am trying to select words that mean what I mean. A righteous action is the one that best serves the self-preservation of the person acting. I say that it is this motive that is the overriding sense of "right", when people use that word. The action will ordinarily also be valid - though the person acting may not be able to prove its validity. And it will also usually be useful - even though the person may not be intentionally serving his well-being. But it is his own belief that the action serves the preservation of his ego that is fundamental.

Note that I said "self-preservation", not "self-love". They are not the same thing. Self-love is a moral ought. It can only be adopted by an explicit, conscious choice. But I contend that the motive to righteousness is not subject to an individual's choice.

It is a product of choices, as we have seen, both of the individual and of his parents. But when a person experiences those choices, he is not then aware of any alternative. The effect, a fully operational volitional consciousness, is unavoidable, given those prior causes, and no person has the power to escape that eventuality. Only the potential to be a self is metaphysically foreordained. Its development is volitional in causal origin. But once those volitional causes have been initiated, their effects are inescapable.

There are no metaphysical oughts. The statement is a contradiction in terms. It says: that which is volitionally caused and therefore always avoidable is metaphysically caused and therefore never avoidable. But the value standard of preservation of the ego is causally unavoidable, in the presence of its prior volitional causes...

So what do I mean by "self-preservation"? I mean the on-going sustenance of the will to live, within a person. It is possible for a person to not live; he can commit suicide or descend into anomie. But as long as he is taking actions to sustain his life, body and mind, he is acting upon the will to go on living. He does this by doing what he thinks is necessary to preserve his life as he envisions it.

What he is preserving in his actions is that vision of himself, his ego. His actions can be totally ego-destructive Madnesses when viewed from validity, but he will take them if he feels that they are necessary to remaining alive as he sees himself remaining alive.

Now here is both god and the devil. God where a man chooses self-love; nature rewards his every righteous act. But the devil made manifest where he chooses self-hatred, Madness. Because his righteousness will demand that he punish himself for being alive, in order to remain alive...

There is no injustice crueler than when a man wreaks what he thinks is his just deserts upon himself... Every delight the Sleepwalker knew when he thought he was getting something for nothing, he takes back tenfold and more in pain when he realizes that it was just the opposite - that he was giving something and getting nothing in return. No court of law could ever justify sentences like those he inflicts upon himself, and he could not justify it if he thought of it being done to another person. Yet he does it to himself, as the price of remaining himself...

It is the ego we express in each of our actions. Each of our actions - thought and deed - is first and always an action taken by the self upon the self. The self-abstracted idea of being who one is, now, in the past, and in the future, is an end in itself. It is its own cause and consequence, its own means to its own end. It is connected to the world outside the mind, but it is not bound to it. It is a man's spirit that it his life in the most fundamental sense. And it is his spirit that he acts to preserve when he initiates an action...

A volitionally conscious being is a moral agent, by causal necessity. Man is a moral animal, unavoidably, as the inescapable consequence of prior volitionally initiated causes. The motive of his every action is the good as he sees it.

It need not even be useful. Because utility is easily measured, where righteousness isn't, it is common in the social sciences to regard utility, immediate bodily satisfaction, as the sole motive of action. Indeed, the entire structure of classical economics is built upon the idea of an imaginary man who always acts to his financial betterment, never the opposite. The neo-classical viewpoint has allowed that real people might be capable of evaluating things by some standard other than money. But even this correction still excludes from consideration such very real manifestations of being as overturned buses and torched winos...

One could go so far as to argue that righteousness is simply the utility of the self. I would dispute this on a number of grounds. For a first, utility can never explain Madness. It cannot admit a "self-interest" that is interested in self-destruction.

From another direction, utility cannot explain the absurd. How many times have you seen a person kick his layed-up car? What is he doing? Expressing his rage? To whom? He cannot communicate with his car, nor can he repair it with a kick. So what he is doing is a Madness, is it not? Not. It is an SFE and he knows it, but it is "useful" to him as a matter or righteousness. By that act, he purges himself of his anger and frustration, so he can get on with getting the car repaired. He serves no logical utilitarian end, yet he benefits his ego by a small Madness, then gets on with his life.

But there is an overriding reason why I think it is important to maintain a distinction between utility and righteousness. It is this: in the absence of any Madness, there can be cases where righteousness can only be served by a self-destructive act. The pulse is the utilitarian standard of value, on-going life at any price. But there can be cases where that price is too high for the spirit to pay...

Understand that I am talking about extreme emergencies. Ordinarily, the truly righteous is also the useful, because both are valid. Outside the context of emergencies, True Rectitude is always that which is epistemologically correct, based in an accurate understanding of the nature of the objects considered. But there can be circumstances where the only honest act of self-preservation one can take is suicide.

The best example I can think of was provided to me by the Kmher Rouge, the Communists of Kampuchea. For thrills more than for anything else, these self-made monsters would play a vicious game with families. They would round up parents and children, then give the parents guns. Then they would command: "Shoot yourselves, or shoot your children..."

Now the useful thing to do in these circumstances is to shoot your children. But utility will not acknowledge the feeling you have for your children through time, nor will it concede that you might feel differently about yourself after having killed your children. I cannot speak to validity, because the "object" considered is not an object but an idea, the self. It is possible to envision a parent who would not be devastated at having caused, by his own choice, the death of his children. But it is not possible for me to envision me doing that - as a matter of Rectitude. If faced with that sort of problem, I would have to kill myself, because I could not live with myself after killing my children.

So, righteousness is distinct from utility, and I contend that it is the fundamental motive behind every human action. The question to ask now is the one most people never ask themselves explicitly: what is the truly righteous thing to do...?

In Exquisite Splendor...

Because if the root of motivation is ego-preservation, then self-love is the best way of achieving that end.

This is a logical conclusion. It is not a metaphysically foreordained "ought". It is not even causally foreordained, unlike the need of a self-aware being to judge his actions according to righteousness. What I am saying is: taking account that being is as it is and that I am as I am, self-love is the best way to achieve my end. I didn't have any meaningful choice about adopting that end; I adopted it before I knew I could refuse to. I can choose at any time to renounce it, but only by renouncing life as such, either in fact or in my awareness of its being. But if I do not renounce it, then, logically, self-adoration is the most complete expression of True Rectitude.

Understand me: there is nothing in nature that requires you to choose to act in such a way as to deserve your own self-worship. But there is nothing in nature that can permit you to experience self-worship absent its causes. If you conclude that it is not just unavoidably necessary but good to sustain the will to remain alive, then it follows that the best way to do this is never to act in such a way as to destroy that desire to live.

Rectitude...

It is the will to live... For the Sleepwalkers, it is life at the price of self-exacted penance. For us, it is the pricelessness of self-exalted souls. But no one can live without continuing to sustain his ego's desire to live. This we must do, without our having any choice about it, so it is Madness to rebel against it...

And Splendor to embrace life for what it is...

Now I can't advocate that kind of mental state without being in certain measure a moralist. But I am mistrustful of moralities as such, and of moralizing as a practice.

The reason is is this: it's too short a leap from morality to that All New Nine Point Program. Morality deals with big generalities, not the specific experiences that make up every person's unique life. At its very best, morality offers a way of proving those specifics, but most people do not use it in this way. Instead, they pretend that the morality tells them what to do without their having to prove anything.

As always, I am worrying about you doing something that you never do, but my own view of Rectitude convinces me that there is no such thing as too many disclaimers. So: all I am going to talk about is self-love in the broadest sense. How a person realizes that end - and if he adopts it as a valuable goal - is his to work out, in the context of his own life.

With that said, what sorts of actions does self-love imply?

For one major thing, the quest for self-adoration completely forbids the pursuit of self-destruction in any form. That includes all Madnesses and all actions consequent upon Madnesses. That covers a lot of ground, not all of it unambiguous. Clearly, it excludes mass murder, but how about skydiving? Is the risk of death worth the thrill of the experience? It depends on what end-goal that thrill serves. If the skydiver is pleased by his ability to plan for any exigency, then he is acting in the service of his ego. But if he is thrilled by his "power" to rebel against his own metaphysically foreordained mortality, then he is acting to the destruction of his spirit no matter how many safety precautions he takes.

And there are actions self-love requires, too. Foremost among them, at the root of every other, is awareness. One cannot love one's life while looking away from it. One cannot act to earn one's own worship without knowing what one is doing - and why. One must define for oneself what True Rectitude is within the context of one's own life. And one must never fail to act upon it.

What is most interesting, though, is what self-love yields: Splendor. To Know Being Whole, To Know Rectitude Whole, To Know Your Spirit Whole - this is all the glory there is in life, the highest that can be reached...

I am thinking of a day a long time ago... We were walking, talking in Battery Park, an arrogant young man and his cat and a stunning young woman with hair like a veil of burnished platinum... Do you remember the trees? They were just beginning to bud and they burned with a green so pure and bright they seemed to be a light source of their own... What you are looking for is what you knew then. What everyone is looking for is what you knew then...

I am looking for it, too. Always...

"A man's reach should exceed his grasp, else what's a god for?" Bullshit. If a man is not able to grasp what he reaches for, then life is nothing more than god's torture chamber. But it is not that way, as you and I have good cause to know...

I am reaching for you, Helena, and for all of the values I knew before. I am reaching not for your flesh, but for your spirit. Whether I can hold it to me again is not some imaginary god's decision to make, but yours...

How will you decide it? Rectitude...

5. Liberty

There have been secrets between us, and I'm sorry for that. I have been doing things that could get you in trouble with the government, if you knew about them