all the while putting real heroes to shame. Let idealism and courage be practiced by the others—everyone is contending for dominance in those attributes, and they only end up badly. Nor should you languish or actively practice evil: even if you are one of the few capable of becoming competent in evil, it is just too much work to stay on the bottom. As an embodiment of amoral sense, you will practice the evil of just letting things happen, saving a few good effects of bad outcomes for yourself and letting the bad effects fall upon whom they may. Most are only indifferent to great evil; but you must be indifferent, too, to everyday goodness. Let no act of kindness go noticed.
Ignorance is the origin of everything that is thought great. Aim your wit below the belt: if it is too keen it will strike heads, and people will look up to see what flew over them.
Enflame hearts on an open grill, and their owners will invite you to dine on their compassion. Don’t reveal your lack of interest until after you eat their heart.
Having good taste means scorning the popular and the avant-garde alike. Praise what has been previously praised but is now obscure to all but the learned. Instead of Shakespeare or Baudelaire, claim Ronsard as the poet laureate of your gray soul. Be a member of the savant-garde.
Make the best out of what is worst, then yawn as you say of the best: “It is only the best,” or of the worst: “It is just worst.”
Always remember: no matter how much of a scoundrel you are, a well-written book will secure your good reputation.
Life Bonds
Plastic surgery—a beauty more natural than natural, a hyper-natural beauty; the perfection of nature, its correction where mutation and adaptation went wrong. Cosmetic reconstruction makes an aesthetics possible that not only enhances our form but reshapes our function as well. When the human look becomes passé, we can xenograft behavioral templates from those species closest to us: baboon facelifts to turn every smile into an act of aggression, bonobo sex-drive surgery to redirect our warmongering.
Like bodies, society too may be reshaped internally to prevent the failure of its parts. In annexing the dogmas of religion, kosher prohibitions are sidestepped with pig organs; pork no longer passes through us but is made part of us: larynx implants that will make rabbis and imams oink their sermons, bovine breast augmentations in Hindu women to prevent dairy shortages and encourage grazing past toddlerhood.
In preventing crime, primate liver transplants for alcoholics may decrease the longevity of drunk driving.
When these alterations go out of style, more distant species can be turned to: rhinoceros rhinoplasty, giraffe neck lifts; for amputees, praying mantis limb-reattachment.
Republicans versus democrats: elephant trunks versus donkey ears—incompatible sense organs would impede bipartisan agreement no less.
Business models: pack rat trading, gross margin wolfing, financial foxing. One does not graft parts here so much as substitute higher mammals for purer ones.
The rejuvenation of family values: filling children full of cotton to make them as charming as their stuffed animals. “Life” becomes a criterion of cuteness and obedience.
After assimilating every animal species into us, organisms from the Jurassic period are reconstructed to satisfy our need for anatomical novelty: pterodactyl wings, tyrannosaurus jaws, hair plugs taken from the Cladophlebis fern. We regress back through geological history to satisfy our craving for trendy new forms and reverse evolutionary functions. Eliminating back pain with trilobite exoskeletons; taking spoonfuls of primordial soup to treat chickenpox. In the act of absorbing Earth’s biological saga, future peoples will read its diary from our fossil remains.
Usurping Half of Zoroastrianism
Ahriman: evil spirit flowing through all other gods, god beyond gods, driving their ambition to create and rule. He is the Loneliness before the creation of the world, the egomania that craves something small to stroke it. The cruelty of Greek anthropomorphism, the better half of Ahuramazda. Yahweh’s irrational vengeance: going beyond repaying kind for kind to surpass the original affront; the original golden rule—the leaden rule. Backbone of Hammurabi’s code, founding concept of the social contract, guarantor of justice, precursor of lawsuits. And the god of the New Testament? Ahriman is in him too, killing with kindness.
What is Aristotle’s god but a cacodaemon? The unmoved mover—modern man’s goal, his ideal, a misplaced value resulting from insufficient contemplation. Aristotle’s god cannot make anything. He knows but cannot do, the possessor of a worthless knowledge. Longing to be a god of action, he envies the hands of man. Spending all his time contemplating us, he wants more than the same in return. That he does not receive more than this, that we merely contemplate him as he does us, signals the unwitting blasphemy of imitation. A life devoted to the worship of god—this is what he desires, our celebration. He is as jealous of Yahweh as Yahweh is jealous of him.
The life of creativity and the worship of a god—things on which Aristotle is silent but Ahriman embodies. The enjoyment of music requires a total lack of concern with the world, and Ahriman is always listening to nature for any out of tune notes, conducting his symphony of indifference. Capable of all the same feelings as Ahuramazda, he simply experiences them more intensely, in the extreme—but in regard only to himself, without sympathy. Wouldn’t flattery of this god be enough to ensure his favors? Not bound by moral imperatives, he is free to bestow his services lavishly on whom he likes.
Why did not Darius and Xerxes invoke Ahriman before their invasions? Would he not have helped them more than Ahuramazda, who could see their ill-will and punished them for bad judgment? Would he not have overrun the more limited allegorical qualities of the Greek gods with his all-encompassing one? If it had been a battle of deities rather than men, the advantage was with the Persians.
Why does Ahriman need Ahuramazda? If only he could have remained in his original condition—but then he would not have the opportunity to vent bad will. His weakness is that he, like us, needs first to Be so he can revel in negation, to suckle the supreme deity and throw a temper tantrum at the same time. So, for the sake of entertainment, he relegated himself to second-rate status.
Evil’s virtue: its prevention of the surfeit of “the good,” the banality of comfort, happiness, freedom—those highest incompatible ideals. The achievement of any one crowding out the attainment of the others, there arises disappointment and regret in not pursuing an alternative. To gain happiness without freedom is the complacency of the thoughtless and the misery of the conscientious. We feel we were meant for a wholesome existence, that the world was made for our advantage; instead we are constantly at tension with it, misaligned with its indifference to our hopes, attaining only pieces of our goal. Man is a bag of whims corked by the limits of his paycheck and the fruitlessness of his prayers; only in wine, in the ablution of the liver and fogging of the brain, can he exaggerate his powers and dream everything is within his reach—awakening unto a headache that fills him with a regret for dreaming. The grasper at ideals is a weaver of patchwork absences he never intended or desired. Embracing his disappointments, he casts off any expectation of self-betterment. Confronted by the absence of eudaemonia, he experiences the side effects of the moral lifeworld; twitching and nauseous, he regurgitates his former longings and bloats himself on air. Flatulating the heavens and belching greenhouse gases, the fantasies and opportunism of the sky become a matter of abdominal distension.
The Means Justify No End
Like drunken archers, people always find ways to keep the bulls-eye intact by making a potential target of everything else in sight. There are certain means which determine their distinctive character by frustrating their goals. The sheer pleasure of loosing arrows, making archery an activity-for-itself that
