Sutekh, The Hyksos and Isomorphism

Plato's Pharmacy -- 

"Pharmakos"

"Offscourings" ---  Pharmakos (n.), 

a human scapegoat.

During the Thargelia, but 

also during adverse periods 

such as plague and famine,

 Athenians and Ionians 

expelled scapegoat(s), who

 were called 'offscourings', 

in order 'to purify' the cities.

The Cat sat on The Ma'at.

The Witchcraft of Salem Village

"Now, Derrida -- Foucault was the teacher of Derrida at the E.N.S. --Foucault took Derrida with him to visit the inmates at the mental hospital of St. Annes.

Derrida has been somewhat less publicly flamboyant than Foucault but he is no less of an irrationalist he's probably a more effective one; 

He is the child of a Serpharic Jewish Family living in Algeria -- he was very young, when he had the experience of being buried alive --

He was locked in a coffin-shaped Cedar Chest by his sister; he later managed to escape alive, but he was traumatised by the belief that he had died and been brought back from The Dead....

From this grew his identification with The Isis-Osiris Myth in which Isis of course brings Osiris back from The Dead; but this also implied fora an obsession with castration, which he told his students had suggested to him the the title for one of his early books, "Disseminations".

Derrida's irrationalism was later fuelled by the mystical writings of the Kabbalah -- very important -- and by his devotion to the satanic degenerate Antonin Artaud, of The Theatre of Cruelty, some people may remember this, too.

He was somebody who had spent about a decade of his own life in a mental institution. Derrida was jailed in 1981 by the Czechoslovakian Communist Regime on on charges of drug trafficking, but these these charges were never proven --

Some of the best one-liners about Derrida come from Foucault, during the period when these two were quarreling -- During the 1970s Foucault said that Derrida was a terrorist and an obscurantist who deliberately wrote in such a way as to be impossible to understand, so he could then lash-out at his critics, as cretins who were incapable of understanding the profoundness of his Thought;

The best summary from Foucault : -- "Derrida is the kind of philosopher, who gives bullshit a bad name." 

Now we can we can turn the lights on we don't need this at the moment we have one more deid DA's opaque doctrines are a philosophy of anglo-american destabilization from the word go his big publishing breakthroughs came in 1967 and ke lectures were delivered at the height of the May 1968 riots that led to the overthrow of General Charles deal the best government that France had seen in many Ages 

Derrida was a Leading Light of the click around the magazine Tel Kel which was one of the theoretical mouthpieces of this Rebellion now deconstruction deconstruction is an attack on the judeo-christian Western European civilization it is an attack that is powered Above All by rage DEA hates and resents reason and creativity in these he identifies with the Epic of Christian creationism and infinitism when these appropriate the resources of Greek conceptuality that is from his book on grammatology in other words derida hates Plato he hates Apostolic Christianity as exemplified by St John St Paul St Augustine and other patristic writers he hates the entire edifice of Western Civilization based on Christian platonism and in this he follows mentors like n who claim to be Socrates in Reverse or diogenes who defined himself as Socrates gone mad 

Most of all Derrida hates The Logos -- this in the Greek means word or discussion, perhaps ordering, lawfulness but finally reason -- The Logos is reason. 

In Plato's Dialogues, The Spoken Word is The Path to refining and improving The Logos or Reason — later, Christ came into The World as The Word of God; and in another moment of The Christian Trinity, The Holy spirit is the logos which proceeds from The Son of God and which abides with human beings  — Derrida wishes to reject all of this, and all of the implications -- 

Derrida says that Western European culture is guilty of Logocentrism -- The Western cultural Paradigm has contained within it, the aspiration to be based on reason : this has to be rejected. 

The Western cultural-Paradigm also gives priority to speech and to The Spoken Word -- you can compare this to to other cultures around The World, but this is not the case; 

Most literature was originally designed to be read aloud or or even sung, from Plato's dialogues to Dante to Petrarch to Shakespeare to Schiller --- and this is the hated Phonocentrism, which Derrida also wants to get rid of ---

Derrida delves into Plato in an attempt to show that the overtones of The Platonic Logos are exclusively paternal and male-dominated -- this gives rise to the further charge of phalogocentrism, and of course soon enough that turns into phalocentrism in the writings of the Menads of Feminist literary Theory today --

Derrida follows his Nazi Guru Heidegger in concluding that the real problem in The West is that our culture is permeated by what he calls 'metaphysics' -- Heidegger had railed against the metaphysics of presence and against metaphysics in general.

For Derrida, 'metaphysics' evidently means anything that cannot be boiled-down to Sense-Certainty. 

Derrida seems sees 'metaphysics' as The Enemy that must be destroyed and under this heading he lumps God, The Self, The Soul, The Human Individual, Causality, Substance Essence, Idea, Action and virtually any concept of any importance turns out to be 'metaphysical' -- these have to go, of course for reasons that are never really uh explained --

And of course for Derrida,  Language is this self-contained formal system of signs with no connection to any reality, concept or thing -- 

Back during the Weimar Republic in the 20s and 30s in Germany the pro-Nazi Heidegger and others referred to their battle against 'metaphysics' with the name destrution or destruction -- and destruction was the first name that Derrida ever gave to his own method.... 

Parallels have been drawn from Deconstructionism to Zen and above all to The Sufism of Al-Gazali whose destruction is in effect a deconstruction of Al-Farrabi and Ibn Sinna attempting to play on their supposed self-contradictions and writers on postmodernism have called attention to this --

a dozen years ago larouche authored a new standard American English curriculum for Effective US public schools in which he outlined the requirements for illiterate language setting out to express the geometric complexity of reality according to larouche this would include seven grammatical cases nine tenses five moods an active and passive voice non-reflexive and self-reflexive features and a vocabulary of 50,000 to 100,000 words including a very well-developed verb system this would therefore mean the ability to express at least 1,260 degrees of geometric freedom 

But of course, for the radical nominalist, paranoid-schizophrenic Derrida, 

Language has nothing 

to DO with reality — 

Derrida sides above all with the Linguistics of Ferdinand of Geneva, which accomplished a massive deterioration in these Language Studies by abandoning all idea of Historical analysis —

For Derrida, The Word as A Sign does not lead to A Concept or An Object, but it only leads you to other signs  — take for example, the word “cat”. 

Okay,  “cat” is A Word that leads you to the furry feline, right?

Right, but no — according to Derrida, this word by itself means nothing,  it only means something because it's different from other words, like “bat” or “rat” or “hat”.

It’s therefore a Negative and Relational Axiom of Duesur;  

For Derrida The Word seems to promise Meaning, but its definition always sends us through an endless chain of other words when we look for the definitions, so the promise of Meaning is indefinitely postponed, delayed, deferred according to this nonsense — each word in a text points to a NeverEnding series of other, older texts — The Chamber of Texts of Derrida.

This is Derrida’s jargon word of “differance”;with a big “a” in the last syllable, which packs ‘difference’ and ‘delay’ into the same baggage —

Now, for Derrida, 

The Author is Dead, 

by definition, he never existed —

The Human Self and The Human Ego have collapsed into an ‘X’ marking the spot where they once were; 

This is the so-called “Subject Position” :

There is no perception, 

all that Derrida is willing 

to talk about, is A Text —

A written text of black on white, 

with punctuation, typefaces, paragraphs, margins, codons, copyrights, logoes — logoes, but No Logos — and so forth.

This is what he calls ‘writing’ or ‘L’ecriture’ and this writing is primary over Speech — primary with respect to The Spoken Word, which is another purely arbitrary and absolutely absurd assertion;

Everything is a written text, in the sense that every thought, utterance or discourse — watch out when you hear ‘discourse’, because That’s THEM — uh 

Anything, 

any Discourse 

is simply 

"A Story that 

We Tell each other 

about something that exists"

(uh well, something that that 

may or, may not exist)

— and best way for 

A Discourse to be there 

is, as a written text.

So as Derrida says, 

“There is NOTHING 

outside of The Text”;

everything is A Text — 

there are no more Works of Art;

ALL black writing on white paper is A Text, be it Shakespeare, the telephone book, Mickey Mouse, the racing form, The US Constitution, the Jupiter Symphony all of those are Texts, and every one of of them is exactly equivalent to any other —

As you can see, what Derrida tries to do, is to draw you into A Labyrinth of Jargon — he's always shifting The Jargon, allegedly to keep from falling back into the hated ways of 'Metaphysics' —

He uses words like “trace”, “sediment” and “iteration” to show that words evolve and change their meanings, as they are used again and again — it's like barnacles on a ship's Hull or the way a coin might be worn when it goes through circulation;

For example, if we hear the word “crook” — Who do we think of think of?”

So, the idea is that each one of these words becomes freighted with a trace, a sediment of something, because of the way that they've been used, and this is always there and may not be under control…

These are overtones, connotations, associations, you can think of them as etymologies if you want to -- 

They become the key to Derrida practice of what he calls 'dissemination' : -- the scattering of Meanings through Free Play; 

The Point is always to show that writing is the product of some kind of a compulsion, some kind of a determinism, it is not free -- one example is Derrida's deconstruction of his favourite target, Plato.

This is the deconstruction of the Phaedrus dialogue in the book "Disseminations", by Derrida --

Derrida attempts to show through a textual analysis of the of The Dialogue, words that Plato uses, one is Pharmaca;

This is a Proper Name; it is a Nymph who was present when one of her companions was blown off a cliff and died on the Rocks below; 

Then we have the word Pharmakon; this can mean either a Medicine which gives Life or a Poison which gives Death;

Then we have Pharmakos; Plato refers to Socrates as Pharmakos -- it has the overtone of A Sorcerer or A Medicine-Man, used ironically -- "Socrates, I do apprehend you to be A Wizard! --"

Derrida points out, that although Plato goes through this series Pharmacea, Pharmakon, Pharmakos --  he does not use a closely-related word which is a synonym of the last one, which is Pharmakos and Pharmakos is the sacrificial victim or scapegoat -- 

This is the person, for example who would be ceremonially killed in Athens, in the event of a plague or some other natural disaster, or some disaster of another type -- so, scapegoat is of course what Socrates later became; 

So Derrida goes through this, with the idea of showing you that Plato was also not free; he was compelled, he was controlled by some kinds of subconscious psychological factors, 

and THEREFORE :

The Text says, what 

Plato could not have meant; 

....and this is the obvious 

Deconstructionist conclusion :

All reading is misreading; 

the Phaedrus dialogue and 

any other piece of writing 

is hopelessly contradictory 

and completely indecipherable --"

"They had rocked The Boat; 

they had upset The State; 

they had failed to maintain Ma'at.

"The Temple walls 

[of The New Kingdom] 

will depict The King as 

going on military campaigns 

to increase Ma'at, Divine Order --

and the notion here is, 

Foreign Peoples and Places 

are a source of CHAOS : so, 

The King must bring 

ORDER to these people, 

and it's for their own Good.

So The King is functioning as 

an insurer of Ma'at and 

the temples themselves should 

be regarded as FACTORIES, 

if you will, of this Divine Order.

At the same time, another 

of the old gods of the 

Egyptian pantheon, Sutekh, 

the embodiment of confusion 

and disorder, had become 

incredibly connected with 

the gods of foreign lands.

Any remaining religions practices 

of The Hyksos had also been 

incorporated into this deity and 

would have remained A Problem 

for any King trying to maintain Ma'at.

Despite King Ahmoses' termination 

of The Hyksos' political rule 

around 1550 BCE, the deities 

of The Semites remained. 

Even Queen Hatshepsut, nearly 

a century later, commented that 

The Hyksos ruled without Ra -- 

Her claim to have restored Order 

might hint at the very reason for her 

non-attendance on The King's List. 

That, or the unorthodox 

nature of Her Rule....."

I Was Cured, All Right!

 

I danced in The Morning 

when The World was begun,

And I danced in The Moon 

and The Stars and The Sun,

And I came down from Heaven 

and I danced on The Earth:

At Bethlehem I had My Birth.

Dance, then, wherever you may be,

I am the Lord of The Dance, said He,

And I'll lead you all, wherever you may be,

And I'll lead you all in The Dance, said e.

I danced for The Scribes and The Pharisees,

But They would not dance, 

and They wouldn't follow me;

I danced for The Fishermen, 

for James and John;

They came with Me 

and The Dance went on:

Dance, then, wherever you may be,

I am the Lord of The Dance, said He,

And I'll lead you all, 

wherever you may be,

And I'll lead you all in The Dance, said he.

I danced on The Sabbath 

and I cured The Lame:

The 'Holy People'

said it was a shame.

They whipped and They stripped 

and they hung me on high,

And They left me there 

on A Cross to die :

Dance, then, wherever you may be,

I am the Lord of the dance, said he,

And I'll lead you all, wherever you may be,

And I'll lead you all in the dance, said He.

I danced on a Friday 

when The Sky turned black;

It's hard to dance with 

The Devil on your back --

They buried My Body 

and They thought I'd gone;

But I am The Dance, 

and I still go on :

Dance, then, wherever you may be,

I am The Lord of The Dance, said He,

And I'll lead you all, wherever you may be,

And I'll lead you all in The Dance, said He.

They cut Me down 

and I leapt up high;

I am The Life that'll 

never, never die.

I'll Live in You if 

You'll Live in Me :

I am The Lord of The Dance, said He.

Dance, then, wherever you may be,

I am The Lord of the dance, said He,

And I'll lead you all, 

wherever you may be,

And I'll lead you all in the dance, said he.

Nietzsche believed that the long tradition of “unfreedom” characterizing dogmatic Christianity—its insistence that everything be explained within the confines of a single, coherent metaphysical theory — was a necessary precondition for the emergence of the disciplined but free modern mind. As he stated in Beyond Good and Evil:

 

            "The long bondage of The Spirit … the persistent spiritual will to interpret everything that happened according to a Christian scheme, and in every occurrence to rediscover and justify the Christian God in every accident: — all this violence, arbitrariness, severity, dreadfulness, and unreasonableness, has proved itself the disciplinary means whereby the European spirit has attained its strength, its remorseless curiosity and subtle mobility; granted also that much irrecoverable strength and spirit had to be stifled, suffocated and spoiled in the process."

 

            For Nietzsche and Dostoevsky alike, Freedom — even the ability to act — requires constraint. For this reason, they both recognized the vital necessity of the dogma of the Church. The Individual must be constrained, moulded — even brought close to destruction — by a restrictive, coherent disciplinary structure, before he or she can act freely and competently. Dostoevsky, with his great generosity of spirit, granted to The Church, corrupt as it might be, a certain element of mercy, a certain pragmatism. He admitted that the spirit of Christ, the world-engendering Logos, had historically and might still find its resting place — even its sovereignty — within that dogmatic structure.

 

            If a Father disciplines His Son properly, he obviously interferes with his freedom, particularly in the here-and-now. He put limits on the voluntary expression of his son’s Being. forcing him to take his place as a socialized member of the world. Such a Father requires that all that childish potential be funneled down a singly pathway. In placing such limitations on his son, he might be considered a destructive force, acting as he does to replace the miraculous plurality of childhood with a single narrow actuality. But if The Father does not take such action, he merely lets his son remain Peter Pan, the eternal Boy, King of the Lost Boys, Ruler of the non-existent Neverland. That is not a morally acceptable alternative.

 

            The dogma of the Church was undermined by the spirit of truth strongly developed by the Church itself. That undermining culminated in the death of God. But the dogmatic structure of the Church was a necessary disciplinary structure. A long period of unfreedom—adherence to a singular interpretive structure—is necessary for the development of a free mind. Christian dogma provided that unfreedom. But the dogma is dead, at least to the modern Western mind. It perished along with God. What has emerged from behind its corpse, however—and this is an issue of central importance—is something even more dead; something that was never alive, even in the past: nihilism, as well as an equally dangerous susceptibility to new, totalizing, utopian ideas. It was in the aftermath of God’s death that the great collective horrors of Communism and Fascism sprang forth (as both Dostoevsky and Nietzsche predicted they would). Nietzsche, for his part, posited that individual human beings would have to invent their own values in the aftermath of God’s death. But this is the element of his thinking that appears weakest, psychologically: we cannot invent our own values, because we cannot merely impose what we believe on our souls. This was Carl Jung’s great discovery—made in no little part because of his intense study of the problems posed by Nietzsche.

 

            We rebel against our own totalitarianism, as much as that of others. I cannot merely order myself to action, and neither can you. “I will stop procrastinating,” I say, but I don’t. “I will eat properly,” I say, but I don’t. “I will end my drunken misbehavior,” I say, but I don’t. I cannot merely make myself over in the image constructed by my intellect (particularly if that intellect is possessed by an ideology). I have a nature, and so do you, and so do we all. We must discover that nature, and contend with it, before making peace with ourselves. What is it, that we most truly are? What is it that we could most truly become, knowing who we most truly are? We must get to the very bottom of things before such questions can be truly answered.

 

 Doubt, Past Mere Nihilism

 

 

            Three hundred years before Nietzsche, the great French philosopher René Descartes set out on an intellectual mission to take his doubt seriously, to break things apart, to get to what was essential—to see if he could establish, or discover, a single proposition impervious to his skepticism. He was searching for the foundation stone on which proper Being could be established. Descartes found it, as far as he was concerned, in the “I” who thinks—the “I” who was aware—as expressed in his famous dictum, cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). But that “I” had been conceptualized long before. Thousands of years ago, the aware “I” was the all-seeing eye of Horus, the great Egyptian son-and-sun-god, who renewed the state by attending to and then confronting its inevitable corruption. Before that, it was the creator-God Marduk of the Mesopotamians, whose eyes encircled his head and who spoke forth words of world-engendering magic. During the Christian epoch, the “I” transformed into the Logos, the Word that speaks order into Being at the beginning of time. It might be said that Descartes merely secularized the Logos, turning it, more explicitly, into “that which is aware and thinks.” That’s the modern self, simply put. But what exactly is that self?

 

            We can understand, to some degree, its horrors, if we wish to, but its goodness remains more difficult to define. The self is the great actor of evil who strode about the stage of Being as Nazi and Stalinist alike; who produced Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, and the multiplicity of the Soviet gulags. And all of that must be considered with dread seriousness. But what is its opposite? What is the good that is the necessary counterpart of that evil; that is made more corporeal and comprehensible by the very existence of that evil? And here we can state with conviction and clarity that even the rational intellect—that faculty so beloved of those who hold traditional wisdom in contempt—is at minimum something closely and necessarily akin to the archetypal dying and eternally resurrected god, the eternal savior of humanity, the Logos itself. The philosopher of science Karl Popper, certainly no mystic, regarded thinking itself as a logical extension of the Darwinian process. A creature that cannot think must solely embody its Being. It can merely act out its nature, concretely, in the here-and-now. If it cannot manifest in its behavior what the environment demands while doing so, it will simply die. But that is not true of human beings. We can produce abstracted representations of potential modes of Being. We can produce an idea in the theatre of the imagination. We can test it out against our other ideas, the ideas of others, or the world itself. If it falls short, we can let it go. We can, in Popper’s formulation, let our ideas die in our stead.¹⁴⁷ Then the essential part, the creator of those ideas, can continue onward, now untrammeled, by comparison, with error. Faith in the part of us that continues across those deaths is a prerequisite to thinking itself.

 

            Now, an idea is not the same thing as a fact. A fact is something that is dead, in and of itself. It has no consciousness, no will to power, no motivation, no action. There are billions of dead facts. The internet is a graveyard of dead facts. But an idea that grips a person is alive. It wants to express itself, to live in the world. It is for this reason that the depth psychologists—Freud and Jung paramount among them—insisted that the human psyche was a battleground for ideas. An idea has an aim. It wants something. It posits a value structure. An idea believes that what it is aiming for is better than what it has now. It reduces the world to those things that aid or impede its realization, and it reduces everything else to irrelevance. An idea defines figure against ground. An idea is a personality, not a fact. When it manifests itself within a person, it has a strong proclivity to make of that person its avatar: to impel that person to act it out. Sometimes, that impulsion (possession is another word) can be so strong that the person will die, rather than allowing the idea to perish. This is, generally speaking, a bad decision, given that it is often the case that only the idea need die, and that the person with the idea can stop being its avatar, change his or her ways, and continue.

 

            To use the dramatic conceptualization of our ancestors: It is the most fundamental convictions that must die—must be sacrificed—when the relationship with God has been disrupted (when the presence of undue and often intolerable suffering, for example, indicates that something has to change). This is to say nothing other than that the future can be made better if the proper sacrifices take place in the present. No other animal has ever figured this out, and it took us untold hundreds of thousands of years to do it. It took further eons of observation and hero-worship, and then millennia of study, to distill that idea into a story. It then took additional vast stretches of time to assess that story, to incorporate it, so that we now can simply say, “If you are disciplined and privilege the future over the present you can change the structure of reality in your favour.”

 

            But how best to do that?

 

            In 1984, I started down the same road as Descartes. I did not know it was the same road at the time, and I am not claiming kinship with Descartes, who is rightly regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of all time. But I was truly plagued with doubt. I had outgrown the shallow Christianity of my youth by the time I could understand the fundamentals of Darwinian theory. After that, I could not distinguish the basic elements of Christian belief from wishful thinking. The socialism that soon afterward became so attractive to me as an alternative proved equally insubstantial; with time, I came to understand, through the great George Orwell, that much of such thinking found its motivation in hatred of the rich and successful, instead of true regard for the poor. Besides, the socialists were more intrinsically capitalist than the capitalists. They believed just as strongly in money. They just thought that if different people had the money, the problems plaguing humanity would vanish. This is simply untrue. There are many problems that money does not solve, and others that it makes worse. Rich people still divorce each other, and alienate themselves from their children, and suffer from existential angst, and develop cancer and dementia, and die alone and unloved. Recovering addicts cursed with money blow it all in a frenzy of snorting and drunkenness. And boredom weighs heavily on people who have nothing to do.

 

            I was simultaneously tormented by the fact of the Cold War. It obsessed me. It gave me nightmares. It drove me into the desert, into the long night of the human soul. I could not understand how it had come to pass that the world’s two great factions aimed mutual assured destruction at each other. Was one system just as arbitrary and corrupt as the other? Was it a mere matter of opinion? Were all value structures merely the clothing of power?

 

            Was everyone crazy?

 

            Just exactly what happened in the twentieth century, anyway? How was it that so many tens of millions had to die, sacrificed to the new dogmas and ideologies? How was it that we discovered something worse, much worse, than the aristocracy and corrupt religious beliefs that communism and fascism sought so rationally to supplant? No one had answered those questions, as far as I could tell. Like Descartes, I was plagued with doubt. I searched for one thing—anything—I could regard as indisputable. I wanted a rock upon which to build my house. It was doubt that led me to it.

 

            I once read of a particularly insidious practice at Auschwitz. A guard would force an inmate to carry a hundred-pound sack of wet salt from one side of the large compound to the other—and then to carry it back. Arbeit macht frei, said the sign over the camp entrance—“Work will set you free”—and the freedom was death. Carrying the salt was an act of pointless torment. It was a piece of malevolent art. It allowed me to realize with certainty that some actions are wrong.

 

            Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, definitively and profoundly, about the horrors of the twentieth century, the tens of millions who were stripped of employment, family, identity and life. In his Gulag Archipelago, in the second part of the second volume, he discussed the Nuremburg trials, which he considered the most significant event of the twentieth century. The conclusion of those trials? There are some actions that are so intrinsically terrible that they run counter to the proper nature of human Being. This is true essentially, cross-culturally—across time and place. These are evil actions. No excuses are available for engaging in them. To dehumanize a fellow being, to reduce him or her to the status of a parasite, to torture and to slaughter with no consideration of individual innocence or guilt, to make an art form of pain—that is wrong.

 

            What can I not doubt? The reality of suffering. It brooks no arguments. Nihilists cannot undermine it with skepticism. Totalitarians cannot banish it. Cynics cannot escape from its reality. Suffering is real, and the artful infliction of suffering on another, for its own sake, is wrong. That became the cornerstone of my belief. Searching through the lowest reaches of human thought and action, understanding my own capacity to act like a Nazi prison guard or a gulag archipelago trustee or a torturer of children in a dungeon, I grasped what it meant to “take the sins of the world onto oneself.” Each human being has an immense capacity for evil. Each human being understands, a priori, perhaps not what is good, but certainly what is not. And if there is something that is not good, then there is something that is good. If the worst sin is the torment of others, merely for the sake of the suffering produced—then the good is whatever is diametrically opposed to that. The good is whatever stops such things from happening.

 

 Meaning as the Higher Good

 

 

            It was from this that I drew my fundamental moral conclusions. Aim up. Pay attention. Fix what you can fix. Don’t be arrogant in your knowledge. Strive for humility, because totalitarian pride manifests itself in intolerance, oppression, torture and death. Become aware of your own insufficiency—your cowardice, malevolence, resentment and hatred. Consider the murderousness of your own spirit before you dare accuse others, and before you attempt to repair the fabric of the world. Maybe it’s not the world that’s at fault. Maybe it’s you. You’ve failed to make the mark. You’ve missed the target. You’ve fallen short of the glory of God. You’ve sinned. And all of that is your contribution to the insufficiency and evil of the world. And, above all, don’t lie. Don’t lie about anything, ever. Lying leads to Hell. It was the great and the small lies of the Nazi and Communist states that produced the deaths of millions of people.

 

            Consider then that the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering is a good. Make that an axiom: to the best of my ability I will act in a manner that leads to the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering. You have now placed at the pinnacle of your moral hierarchy a set of presuppositions and actions aimed at the betterment of Being. Why? Because we know the alternative. The alternative was the twentieth century. The alternative was so close to Hell that the difference is not worth discussing. And the opposite of Hell is Heaven. To place the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering at the pinnacle of your hierarchy of value is to work to bring about the Kingdom of God on Earth. That’s a state, and a state of mind, at the same time.

 

            Jung observed that the construction of such a moral hierarchy was inevitable—although it could remain poorly arranged and internally self-contradictory. For Jung, whatever was at the top of an individual’s moral hierarchy was, for all intents and purposes, that person’s ultimate value, that person’s god. It was what the person acted out. It was what the person believed most deeply. Something enacted is not a fact, or even a set of facts. Instead, it’s a personality—or, more precisely, a choice between two opposing personalities. It’s Sherlock Holmes or Moriarty. It’s Batman or the Joker. It’s Superman or Lex Luthor, Charles Francis Xavier or Magneto, and Thor or Loki. It’s Abel or Cain—and it’s Christ or Satan. If it’s working for the ennobling of Being, for the establishment of Paradise, then it’s Christ. If it’s working for the destruction of Being, for the generation and propagation of unnecessary suffering and pain, then it’s Satan. That’s the inescapable, archetypal reality.

 

            Expedience is the following of blind impulse. It’s short-term gain. It’s narrow, and selfish. It lies to get its way. It takes nothing into account. It’s immature and irresponsible. Meaning is its mature replacement. Meaning emerges when impulses are regulated, organized and unified. Meaning emerges from the interplay between the possibilities of the world and the value structure operating within that world. If the value structure is aimed at the betterment of Being, the meaning revealed will be life-sustaining. It will provide the antidote for chaos and suffering. It will make everything matter. It will make everything better.

 

            If you act properly, your actions allow you to be psychologically integrated now, and tomorrow, and into the future, while you benefit yourself, your family, and the broader world around you. Everything will stack up and align along a single axis. Everything will come together. This produces maximal meaning. This stacking up is a place in space and time whose existence we can detect with our ability to experience more than is simply revealed here and now by our senses, which are obviously limited to their information-gathering and representational capacity. Meaning trumps expedience. Meaning gratifies all impulses, now and forever. That’s why we can detect it.

 

            If you decide that you are not justified in your resentment of Being, despite its inequity and pain, you may come to notice things you could fix to reduce even by a bit some unnecessary pain and suffering. You may come to ask yourself, “What should I do today?” in a manner that means “How could I use my time to make things better, instead of worse?” Such tasks may announce themselves as the pile of undone paperwork that you could attend to, the room that you could make a bit more welcoming, or the meal that could be a bit more delicious and more gratefully delivered to your family.

 

            You may find that if you attend to these moral obligations, once you have placed “make the world better” at the top of your value hierarchy, you experience ever-deepening meaning. It’s not bliss. It’s not happiness. It is something more like atonement for the criminal fact of your fractured and damaged Being. It’s payment of the debt you owe for the insane and horrible miracle of your existence. It’s how you remember the Holocaust. It’s how you make amends for the pathology of history. It’s adoption of the responsibility for being a potential denizen of Hell. It is willingness to serve as an angel of Paradise.

 

            Expedience—that’s hiding all the skeletons in the closet. That’s covering the blood you just spilled with a carpet. That’s avoiding responsibility. It’s cowardly, and shallow, and wrong. It’s wrong because mere expedience, multiplied by many repetitions, produces the character of a demon. It’s wrong because expedience merely transfers the curse on your head to someone else, or to your future self, in a manner that will make your future, and the future generally, worse instead of better.

 

            There is no faith and no courage and no sacrifice in doing what is expedient. There is no careful observation that actions and presuppositions matter, or that the world is made of what matters. To have meaning in your life is better than to have what you want, because you may neither know what you want, nor what you truly need. Meaning is something that comes upon you, of its own accord. You can set up the preconditions, you can follow meaning, when it manifests itself, but you cannot simply produce it, as an act of will. Meaning signifies that you are in the right place, at the right time, properly balanced between order and chaos, where everything lines up as best it can at that moment.

 

            What is expedient works only for the moment. It’s immediate, impulsive and limited. What is meaningful, by contrast, is the organization of what would otherwise merely be expedient into a symphony of Being. Meaning is what is put forth more powerfully than mere words can express by Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” a triumphant bringing forth from the void of pattern after pattern upon beautiful pattern, every instrument playing its part, disciplined voices layered on top of that, spanning the entire breadth of human emotion from despair to exhilaration.

 

            Meaning is what manifests itself when the many levels of Being arrange themselves into a perfectly functioning harmony, from atomic microcosm to cell to organ to individual to society to nature to cosmos, so that action at each level beautifully and perfectly facilitates action at all, such that past, present and future are all at once redeemed and reconciled. Meaning is what emerges beautifully and profoundly like a newly formed rosebud opening itself out of nothingness into the light of sun and God. Meaning is the lotus striving upward through the dark lake depths through the ever-clearing water, blooming forth on the very surface, revealing within itself the Golden Buddha, himself perfectly integrated, such that the revelation of the Divine Will can make itself manifest in his every word and gesture.

 

            Meaning is when everything there is comes together in an ecstatic dance of single purpose—the glorification of a reality so that no matter how good it has suddenly become, it can get better and better and better more and more deeply forever into the future. Meaning happens when that dance has become so intense that all the horrors of the past, all the terrible struggle engaged in by all of life and all of humanity to that moment becomes a necessary and worthwhile part of the increasingly successful attempt to build something truly Mighty and Good.

 

            Meaning is the ultimate balance between, on the one hand, the chaos of transformation and possibility and on the other, the discipline of pristine order, whose purpose is to produce out of the attendant chaos a new order that will be even more immaculate, and capable of bringing forth a still more balanced and productive chaos and order. Meaning is the Way, the path of life more abundant, the place you live when you are guided by Love and speaking Truth and when nothing you want or could possibly want takes any precedence over precisely that.

 

            Do what is Meaningful, not what is Expedient.

We are All Policemen : Cops are The Chosen People

HOBBES, on TV News :

The criminals don't accept consequences. They kill. 

“It's not their fault.” This is the consequence of what I do. 

JONESY :

Look who made it. 

How'd it go?

Mr. Consequence. 

HOBBES :

He died. 

LOU :

I told you. 

Get one more. 

HOBBES :

Nice to see you. 

How you doing, Gracie? 

LOU :

Don't tempt me with that. 

GRACE :

Sorry. 

LOU :

What's your poison? 

We got some Becks. We got some Guinness. We got some Bass.

HOBBES :

Budweiser's good for me. 

LOU :

Budweiser? 

HOBBES :

Yeah. 

GRACE :

Good. 

LOU :

No, we're going imported here. 

If you can't afford it, I'll buy. 

HOBBES :

I can afford it. 

Budweiser. 

LOU :

At least have a Bud-Ice or a Bud-Dry or something. 

HOBBES :

It is just a Bud, okay? 

GRACE :

You guys want anything? 

JONESY :

No. 

GRACE :

Here's your Bud. 

"He was one of the most notorious inmates...." 

GRACE :

Here you go. 

HOBBES :

Thank you, sweetheart. 

LOU :

You're an unusual cop, Hobbes. 

HOBBES :

Really? 

LOU :

I've been in this precinct about what, five, six months? 

Everybody says, "Hobbes don't take no cream." 

"Hobbes don't take no cream." 

Now is that True, or what? 

HOBBES :

No, I don't like cream. 

LOU :

That means "no"? 

HOBBES :

Yeah, it means "no." 

LOU :

Now, is that "No." as in "Never.", "No.", as in "Sometimes."... ...or "No." as in "I do, but I don't like to talk about it."? 

HOBBES :

"No." as in "Never." 

LOU :

This is a Big City, Hobbesy. 

We got a Tradition to uphold. 

JONESY :

Got something wrong with your ears? 

When The Man Says something, He Says it. 

LOU :

This is hypothetical : 

A Cop who's trying to make ends meet wants a little something on the side.... 

HOBBES :

I don't like cream... 

and I Don't Judge. 

LOU :

You don't judge? 

He's a fucking saint, huh? 

So you're telling me, that under NO circumstances, would a Holy Man like you ever, you know... 

...break The Law or do something.... 

HOBBES :

Look, Lou... I could jump across the table, snatch your heart out of your chest, squeeze the blood out, and stick it in your front pocket. 

LOU :

Oh, yeah? 

HOBBES :

If I lost Control. 

But if I did... I'd be no different than the people we bust. 

Now, as to your general question.... 

You take any cop on The Force, cream or no... ninety-nine percent of the time they're doing their job, aren't they? 

JONESY :

Ninety-nine five. 

HOBBES :

Point five. 

So he or she, cream or no... is doing more good out there every day... than any lawyer or a stockbroker or President of the United States can ever do in their lifetime. 

Cops are The Chosen People. 

JONESY :

Amen. 

LOU :

...guess I'm switching to Bud...!

Gracie, come here and get this foreign shit off my table and bring me three Buds.

 Harvey Dent: 

This is where they brought her, Gordon, after your men handed her over. This is where she died.

 

Gordon: 

I know, I was here... trying to save her. 

Harvey Dent: 

But you didn't. 

Gordon: 

I couldn't. 

Harvey Dent: 

Yes, you could've. If you'd listened to me. If you stood up against corruption, instead of doing your deal with The Devil. 

Gordon: 

I was trying to fight the Mob! 

Harvey Dent: 

You wouldn't dare try to justify yourself if you knew what I'd lost. 

Have you ever had to talk to the person you loved most... tell them it's gonna be all right, when you know it's not? 

Well, you're about to know what that feels like, Gordon. 

And then you can look me in the eye and tell me you're sorry. 

Gordon: 

You're not going to hurt my family. 

Harvey Dent: 

No. Just the person you love most. 

So... Is it your wife? 

Gordon: 

Put the gun down, Harvey. 

Gordon: 

Harvey, put down the gun. 

Gordon:

Please. Please, Harvey. Please. 

Oh, goddamn it. 

Will you stop pointing that gun at my family?! 

Barbara: 

No! 

Harvey Dent: 

We have a winner. 

Barbara: 

No, Jim, stop him! 

Gordon: 

Harvey. 

Barbara: 

Don't let him... 

Harvey! I'm sorry! For everything. Please don't hurt my son. 

Harvey Dent: 

You brought your cops? 

Gordon: 

All they know is there's a situation. 

They don't know who or what. 

They're just creating a perimeter. 

Harvey Dent: 

You think I wanna escape from this?! 

There is no escape from this! 

[Then another voice rips through the darkness] 

Batman: 

You don't wanna hurt the boy, Harvey. 

Harvey Dent: 

It's not about what I want, it's about what's fair! 

You thought we could be decent men in an indecent time. 

But you were wrong. 

The World is cruel. 

And the only morality in a Cruel World... 

(lifting his lucky coin) is chance. 

Unbiased. Unprejudiced. Fair. 

His son's got the same chance she had. 

Fifty-fifty. 

Batman: 

What happened to Rachel wasn't chance. 

We decided to act. We three. 

Harvey Dent: 

Then why was it me who was the only one who lost everything? 

Batman: (sad) 

It wasn't... 

Harvey Dent:

The Joker chose me! 

Batman: 

Because you were the best of us. 

He wanted to prove that even someone as good as you could fall. 

Harvey Dent: 

(a broken man) 

And he was right. 

Batman: 

You're the one pointing the gun, Harvey. 

So point it at the people responsible. 

Harvey Dent: 

Fair enough. You first. 

Harvey Dent: 

My turn. 

Gordon: 

Harvey, you're right. 

Rachel's death was my fault. 

Please don't punish the boy. 

Please, punish me. 

Harvey Dent: 

I'm about to. 

Tell your boy he's gonna be all right, Gordon. Lie... like I lied. 

Gordon: (whispering) 

It's going to be all right, son. 

Jimmy:  

Dad? Daddy, is he okay? 

Gordon: 

 Thank you. 

Batman: (looking down) 

You don't have to Thank me. 

Gordon: 

 Yes, I do. (also looking down) 

The Joker won. 

[Harvey Dent lies on the ground. Dead, his neck has been broken by the fall] 

Gordon:  

Harvey's prosecution, everything he fought for... undone. 

Whatever chance you gave us at fixing our city dies with Harvey's reputation. 

We bet it all on him. 

The Joker took the best of us and tore him down. 

People will lose hope. 

Batman:  

They won't. 

They must never know what he did. 

Gordon:  

Five dead? Two of them cops? 

You can't sweep that... 

Batman: 

 No. But the Joker cannot win. 

Gotham needs its true hero. 

Gordon:  

No. 

Batman: (panting) 

You either die a hero... or you live long enough… to see yourself become the villain. 

I can do those things, because I'm not a hero, not like Dent. 

I killed those people. 

That's what I can be. 

Gordon: 

 No, no, you can't. You're not! 

Batman: 

I'm whatever Gotham needs me to be. 

[He hands his friend a police radio] 

Batman: 

Call it in. 

[A montage is started: the commissioner gives a speech, an eulogy for Harvey Dent...] 

Gordon: 

A hero. Not the hero we deserved, but the hero we needed. 

Nothing less than a knight... shining. 

[...Gordon and his team, destroying the Bat Signal...] 

Gordon: 

They'll hunt you. 

Batman: 

You'll hunt me. 

You'll condemn me. 

Set the dogs on me. 

[...and Lucius Fox typing in his name on the machine he used to track the Joker, destroying it] 

Batman: 

 Because that's what needs to happen. Because sometimes... 

The Truth isn't good enough. Sometimes people deserve more. 

Sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded. 

Jimmy:  

Batman? Batman! 

Why's he running, Dad? 

Gordon: 

 Because we have to chase him. 

[Back at the perimeter] 

Cop: 

Okay, we're going in! 

Go, go! Move! 

[Gordon's son stares to where Batman has disappeared] 

Jimmy:  

He didn't do anything wrong. 

Gordon:  

Because he's the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now. 

So we'll hunt him... 

[Batman's theme kicks back in as he makes his way to the Batpod, driving it away, chased by dogs and cops] 

Gordon: 

 Because he can take it. Because he's not a hero. 

He's a silent guardian, a watchful protector. 

[Batman drives his Batpod up to a slope. Street lights surround him] 

Gordon: 

A Dark Knight. 

[Cut to black. The credits roll]

Commissioner Gordon: 

Foley? Where’s Foley, dammit?!

[Gordon heads for the door]

Blake: 

You shouldn’t be out on the streets!

[Gordon turns up at Foley’s house and bangs on the door, Foley’s wife answers]

Foley’s Wife: 

Jim, He’s not here.

[Gordon looks down the hallway behind her]

Commissioner Gordon: 

You let your wife come to the door when the city’s under occupation?!

[Foley appears behind his wife]

Foley: 

Wait in the kitchen, honey.

[Foley’s wife turns and leaves them]

Commissioner Gordon: 

What did you do? 

Bury your uniform in the backyard?

Foley: 

You saw what they did to those Special Forces.

Commissioner Gordon: 

Have you forgotten all the years we were out on patrol when every gangbanger wanted to plant one as soon as our backs were turned?

Foley: 

That was different and you know it! 

These guys run The City, The Government’s done a deal with them.

Commissioner Gordon: 

Bane’s got their balls in a vice. 

That’s not a deal.

Foley: 

You move on Bane, the triggerman is gonna hit the button.

Commissioner Gordon: 

You think he’s given control of that bomb to one of ‘the people’? 

You think this is part of some Revolution? 

There’s only one man with his finger on the button, that’s Bane.

Foley: 

Look, we’ve all gotta keep our heads down till they can fix this. 

If you still had family here…

Commissioner Gordon: 

This only gets fixed from inside The City! 

Look, Peter, I’m not asking you to walk down Grand in your dress blues, but something has to be done.

Foley: 

I’m sorry Jim. I gotta…

Commissioner Gordon: 

Keep your head down? 

What good’s that gonna do tomorrow when that thing blows?

Foley: 

You don’t know that’s gonna happen.

[Foley closes the door in Gordon’s face]