Let The Past Die -
Kill it if You Have to.
They Weren't My Parents
They'd Served Their Purpose in History
I was Compelled to Resolve Them
The Only Way is Up.
" And then we have the story of Cain and Abel, brilliantly placed immediately afterwards. Those are the first two people in history, essentially. They make sacrifices, so that goes along with the idea of the discovery, and necessity, of work, and the discovery of the future. And then exactly what you’d expect happens: one segment of mankind, let’s say, makes the sacrifices properly, and prevails, and the other segment makes the sacrifices improperly, and fails. That’s perfectly reasonable, given what you see around you, because that’s what seems to happen all the time. And then, more interestingly, I would say that the sacrificial failure produces embitterment, and that embitterment produces a hatred for Being, and a desire for revenge. That seems perfectly appropriate. When I look at people who are bitter, and want revenge, it’s generally because their sacrificial efforts have failed. Now, I’m loathe to say that that’s a matter of their own doing—although, sometimes, it clearly it is. The embittered and vengeful complain to God, and blame him for the structure of existence.
I read about the Columbine massacre and the kids who undertook it. That’ll make your hair stand on end, if you want to read something that will really disturb you. Reading Eric Harris’ writings will really disturb you. No matter how much you know about human beings, reading Eric Harris’ writings will disturb you. Eric is Cain, you know? He says it, straightforwardly: he hates human beings; he hates Being itself. He would destroy everything, if it was within his power to do that. And, of course, him and his colleague were motivated to produce far more carnage than they managed, that day. What was successful was only a fraction of what they had planned. And Harris said, very straightforwardly, that he had set himself up as the judge of Being, and that it lacked all utility, in his eyes. Human beings, certainly, should all be removed from the face of existence, because of their pathology, and because of the fundamental horrors of Being itself. So there’s nothing in the Cain and Abel story that isn’t real. It’s real. Cain complains to God, as people will, when their dreams are dashed. And that goes for people who don’t believe in God, too. It doesn’t really matter. It’s harder, I suppose, if you’re atheist, to figure out who to blame. But that doesn’t mean that the sentiment is any different, right? The same drama is being enacted: you shake your fist at the structure of being, rather than at God Himself. But it doesn’t make any difference, except in the details.
So God responds to Cain, and tells him that he’s got no right to judge Being, before he gets his sacrificial house in order. And, even worse, he says that Cain is the architect of his own downfall—that he invited catastrophe into his own house, willingly, entered into a creative union with it, and, therefore, brought about his own demise. It’s that additional self-knowledge—imagine you’re facing the failures of your life, and let’s say that you had a failed life. You’re bitter about that, and then you meditate upon it. You think, ‘why has this come about?’ And then you think, ‘well, perhaps I did something wrong.’
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote The Gulag Archipelago, which is the book that detailed the catastrophes of the Soviet Union, and helped bring it down. There’s one part of that book that struck me so viciously, when I read it. He was in the gulag, and he was there for a very long time. He said that he observed a variety of people in the camps, who he really admired. They were rare. They were usually religious believers, in his experience, who were not participating in the pathology of the camps—at all; period; no matter what. He said he learned a lot from watching those people. He had a hard time believing that they could even exist. But he said that one of the things that he was brought to—as a consequence of watching those people live their contract with Goodness out, even under the most horrifying of conditions—was that it was possible that he himself was responsible for his position in the camp.
Now, it’s a very dangerous line of argumentation, because who wants to be the one who blames the victim of the catastrophe? You have to be very careful, when you walk down that road. But Solzhenitsyn was speaking about himself. He was a communist, and he arrogantly and forthrightly moved the movement out into the world, and had not fully gone over his life with a fine tooth comb, to find out what mistakes he had made that brought him so low. But his contention, eventually, was that part of the reason he ended up where he ended up was because he, and many others, had completely forfeited their relationship with the truth, and had allowed their society to degenerate into deceit and tyrannical catastrophe, without mounting sufficient opposition. And so he decided, when he was in the camps, to straighten himself out, bit by bit. That culminated in the production of The Gulag Archipelago, and that book really demolished, once and for all, any moral credibility that the communist totalitarian systems had left. And so one man, in the depths of catastrophe, who determined through good example, at least in part, to stop lying, produced a book, eventually, that demolished the foundation of the very system that had imprisoned him. That is really worth thinking about. That’s one example of the absolute grandeur of the human soul, and the capacity for transformation that it has, when let loose properly on the world.
So let’s say you’re conceptualizing your own failure, and you meditated on it, and you come to the conclusion that God forced Cain to: ‘
Hey, not only have things not been going very well for you, but it’s actually your fault. And not only that—you brought it on yourself. And not only that—you knew it all the time.’ Well, then you might think that you’ll wake up, and fly right—you’ll get your wings in order, and fly right. But there’s no reason to assume that, at all. That’s not what happens to Cain. The conclusion just makes him more bitter, and you can understand that, if you think about it for just a second. It’s bad enough when something horrible happens to you, but then to have to swallow the additional pill—to have to take in the information that you could have done something different; it was avoidable, and you knew it at the time, and you decided to do it anyways. I think people are in that situation a lot more often than anyone is willing to admit. You have that little voice in the back of your head that says ‘don’t do it,’ and you override it. You know it’s arrogance that makes you override it. It’s always arrogance. It always warns you. It’s always arrogance. ‘Yeah, I can get away with it.’ It’s like, no; you can’t. I don’t think you ever get away with anything. And maybe your experience has taught you different, but my suspicions are that it hasn’t. And if you think it has, well, the other shoe hasn’t yet dropped.
So Cain doesn’t take the opportunity to let God’s wisdom reorient his character. That could have been the outcome. He could have got down on his knees, so to speak, and said, ‘oh my God, I’ve been wrong all along. I’ve been living improperly. I’ve been making the wrong sacrifices. Abel deserves everything he has. I got exactly what was coming to me. Could I possibly, now, straighten myself out, live in repentance, and improve my position?’ That’s not what he did, at all. He said, ‘all right. Fair enough. I get it. I’m going to go after the thing I most admire. I’m going to destroy it, and I’m going to do that despite its cost to me, and I’m going to do that just to spite the creator of Being.’
That’s exactly what Harris did at Columbine. It’s exactly what he says, in fact, in his uncanny writings. It’s why the mass murderers always shoot themselves afterwards, and not before. Because you might wonder, ‘
if you’re so upset with the structure of Being, why don’t you just commit suicide, in your basement? Why do you have to go out and mass murder, before you top it off with a gun to your forehead?’ Well, you don’t make the point as effectively, if you just commit suicide, in your basement. It’s like, ‘
my life means nothing to me—but neither does anyone else’s, and neither does the structure of Being itself. I’ll take all my revenge as much as I possibly can, and then, just to show you how little I care, I’ll tap myself off at the end.’ People say, all the time, ‘I don’t understand how that could happen.’ I don’t believe that. I think an hour of real thought about your darkest feelings about existence itself illuminates the pathways to that sort of behaviour quite clearly. I mean, I might be wrong. I might be a darker person than most. Hah. Well, at least, I think there are plenty of people out there who are sufficiently dark to know exactly what I mean, when I’m saying these things. I would also say that, if it doesn’t lead to your understanding how that pathway might be illuminated, then you need to know a lot more about yourself than you actually know, now. Because whatever you might say about someone like Eric Harris, he was a human being, too.
There’s this idea in the New Testament that Christ was he who put the sins of the world onto himself. It’s a very complicated idea, but part of it is associated with the idea that he met the devil in the desert, as well. To take the sins of mankind onto yourself is to understand that within you dwells exactly the same spirit that committed the atrocities at Columbine, and ran the camps at Auschwitz, to actually understand that that’s part and parcel with your makeup, and then to take responsibility for it. I think that, in the aftermath of the terrible 20th century, that’s what we’re left with: we’re left with the necessity to take responsibility for the most terrible aspects of ourselves. And that way, perhaps, we can stop those terrible things from happening, again. That also means that you don’t look for the purveyor of malevolence outside yourself—it isn’t someone else, even though, sometimes, it’s someone else. You know what I mean. There are identifiable perpetrators, but that’s not precisely the point. The point is more that the proper place for the encapsulation of that malevolence—at least, the proper place to start—is within the confines of your own existence—and, perhaps, within the confines of your family. That way you’re not a danger to those that you misapprehend as malevolent and evil, because you won’t get your aim right, to begin with. You’ll identify them improperly, and you’ll take your revenge in a manner that allows you to omit your own responsibility, and to act out your own unconscious desire for revenge, and to move the world just that much closer to Hell.
So Cain kills Abel, and then Cain gives rise to his descendants, one of whom is the first artificer in weapons of war. And then comes the flood, which seems perfectly, miraculously reasonable to me. It’s so amazing that the story of Cain and Abel segues into the story of the flood. It is the case that the catastrophes that beset society can best be conceptualized as the spread of individual pathology into the social world, and the magnification of that pathology to the point that everything comes apart. And I truly believe that, if you familiarize yourself with the last hundred years of history, that that’s the conclusion that you would derive. The people who are most wise, that I’ve read, who commented on that, say the same thing, over and over: the key to the prevention of the horrors of Auschwitz and the gulag, in the future, is the reconstruction of the individual soul, at the level of each individual. And that’s a terrible message, because it puts the burden on you. But it’s an amazing message, because it also means that you could be the source of the process that stops that catastrophe, and malevolence, from ever emerging, again. It’s hard for me to imagine that you have anything that could possibly be better to do with the time that you have left.
Well, then we see Noah, who walks with God, and whose generations are in order—which means that he’s entered this contract with the Good, let’s say, that has the protective function of the ark. He’s put his family together, and he can ride out the worst catastrophe. He’s actually our ancestor. It’s so interesting—these people that get their act together properly, and make a contract with the Good, are constantly presented as the genuine ancestors of mankind. That’s a really positive element of the story, as well, and it’s one I believe. It hasn’t been easy for us to get here. We are the descendants of the great heroes of the past, and if you took all those heroes, and you told their stories, and you distilled their stories into a single story, maybe you’d have a story like the story of Noah, or the story of Abraham—the story of the successful; the story of our forefathers, and not the ‘cancer on the planet’ that certain people tend to think that we are. And so the goal is to be one of the people like that. There isn’t anything better that can possibly be done. The alternative is something like Hell. And so Noah rides out the storm, and that’s what everyone wants. You want to ride out the storm. You don’t want to be happy, because that’ll just happen. But you definitely want to constitute yourself so that you can ride out the storm, because the storm is always coming. So then you’re fortified against the worst, and that’s what you want, because, well, the best, you can handle—the worst, you have to prepare yourself for.
And then we see the same thing repeated in the story of Abraham, essentially. Abraham makes this contract with the Good, and he constantly renews it. That’s his sacrifice, and his worship. He constantly renews it. He has the adventures that are sufficiently typical of the adventures of a human being who’s alive and engaging in the world. He bumps himself up against all the horrors of existence, and yet, the story is told in such a manner that reveals that his primary ethical commitment to the overarching good is sufficient to protect him against the vicissitudes of existence. Well, that’s an optimistic story. As a pessimistic person, I appreciate an optimistic story that’s believable. There’s great demands placed on Abraham. It’s not just as if this comes to him as a gift. He has to be willing to sacrifice whatever’s necessary in order to maintain that contract. That seems, to me, to be realistic. There’s no reason to assume that life isn’t so difficult that it actually demands the best from you—that it’s actually structured in that manner, and that, if you were willing to reveal the best in you, in response to the vicissitudes of life, that you might actually prevail, and you might actually set things straight around you. Well, what if that was true? That would be a remarkable thing. I can’t see how it would not be true, and I can’t see that it’s not stamped on the soul of everyone who’s conscious. I think we all know this perfectly well, although the stories remind us.
Socrates believed that all knowledge was remembering. He believed that the soul, before birth, had all knowledge, and lost it at birth, and then experience reminded the soul of what it already knew. There’s something about that that’s really true, because you’re not just a creature that emerged 30 years ago, or 40 years ago: you’re the inheritor of 3.5 billion years worth of biological engineering. You have your nature stamped deeply inside of you—far more deeply than any of us realize. And when you come across these great stories—these reminders—they are reminders of how to Be, properly, and they echo in your soul, because the structure is already there. The external stories are manifestations of the internal reality, and then they’re a call to that internal reality, to reveal itself.
Well, and then we come to the end of the Abrahamic stories—at least this section of them—with Sarah’s death. Abraham was called upon to make the supreme sacrifice. And, interestingly enough, because he was willing to make the supreme sacrifice, he actually doesn’t have to. That’s an interesting thing, as well. I believe that it’s reasonable, from a psychological perspective, to point out that, the more willing you are to face death, for example, the less likely it is that you’re going to have to face it, at least in an ignoble manner. And so with that, then we’ll bring this 12-part series to a close.
I think that applause is for everyone. I hate to say that, because it sounds so New-Agey. Hah. But it really does seem, to me, that this is a participatory exercise, and that it would not be possible for me to go through these stories, without having you here to listen. I always think—when talking to a crowd—that it’s a dialog. It’s a dialog. You sit, and you listen, and you’ve all listened. Thank God for that. That gives me a chance to think, and it gives me a chance to watch, and it gives me a chance to interact. You’re emblematic of humanity at large. I suppose that’s one way of thinking about it. For me to be able to craft what I’m saying so that it has an impact on all of you, here, also means that I can, simultaneously, craft it so that it has an impact that, in principle, can reach far beyond this place. I’m really hoping that one of the things that can start to happen with this, at least, is that we can put our culture back on its firm foundation, because it’s something that’s desperately needed. In order to do that, we have to understand both the evil and the nobility of the human soul. That’s a fundamental truth, and I don’t think you can get to the nobility without a sojourn through the evil. I really don’t believe that, at all. It’s no place for the naive to go. That’s for sure. Anyways, I would like to thank you—as you thanked me—for your close and careful attention, and your support, during all of this. It’s been really a remarkable experience. It’s certainly developed beyond my dreams, so thank you.
