The Little Things

The problem I realize I always run into is that I just hate humanity. It has been like this ever since I was a child and I’m always forced to pretend it’s not the case, to fit in. If you wandered into your kitchen one day and saw a teeming mass of cockroaches running over your dinner plates, you could tell yourself the cockroaches are doing nothing wrong, they just want to live their lives, it’s not their fault they’re cockroaches, they feel pain and pleasure just as you. But all you’re going to see at a guttural level are cockroaches and your desire is to just squash them all.

That’s how it is for me. And it’s always in the little things. It’s this thought that just intrudes when you don’t ask for it. It pops up when you’re standing on your balcony and see this stupid white cat sitting next to your pond and realize that animal released by your neighbors to fend for itself in the neighborhood is the reason you don’t see any frogs in your pond anymore.

You might consider strangling the cat, but what you really want, is to just strangle the neighbor. Not because your neighbor is a selfish jerk. No, it’s far worse than that. Your neighbor never even considered the consequences her cat has on her environment. Her weak brain just completely spares her from having to endure that realization. She gets away with being an idiot, there’s no mechanism left in the world that punishes her for it.

There is this one scene near the end of Der Untergang, where Hitler gets angry and yells out that if the Germans can’t win this war then they deserve to perish as a race. For a moment there, I felt like I finally really understood Hitler. That tends to be how I feel about my own country. As a teenager I was always very racist, I always hoped for this apocalyptic war against the invading tribes. I was also just honest about this to the brown boys in class, so some developed a crush on me. But it never came and now people vote for their local angry low status white male party, now that there is effectively nothing left to salvage and they’re feeling pressed with their backs against the wall.

I never understood the hatred for the Jews though, but I think Hitler ultimately didn’t hate the Jews either, I think he just saw them as an obstruction to his vision for the world. Jewish philosophy always comes down to love for humanity, this idea that humans can cooperate and make the world better, that the weak should be helped instead of being put out of their misery. I’ve seen it argued that Hitler hated the Jews because they mistreat animals. But I think the deeper essence of the problem for him was their philanthropy. In Israel today, the Jews are cured of their philanthropy. They discovered the hard way how humans really are.

Every racist white man eventually suffers the tragic fate of liking everyone else more than his own people. I very obviously like the Indians and the Tibetans more. The Germans had the same problem, it’s why they organized their expeditions to Finland and Tibet.

It should be beyond obvious that I like the Aztecs more too. The Aztecs had perfected fascism. They settled on a culture of constant warfare, constantly fighting neighboring tribes, capturing their warriors, sacrificing them on their altars, extracting the heart, holding it up before the sun and eating the bodies. The captured warriors had the same culture as the Aztecs and when the Spanish tried to stop a sacrifice, the warriors demanded to be sacrificed.

But eventually the Spanish won and the population of the Americas swelled from 18 million to 520 million over the course of five centuries, as the only tolerable human flesh to eat became that of their savior, Jesus Christ. Cannibalism never went away, what went away was human dignity. Instead of paying the bloody price for upholding the creation ourselves, we now beg a rabbi to pay the price on our behalf, by suffering through a crucifixion. We became entirely defined by our failure, our sins, our fall from perfection, for which we have to beg forgiveness.

And most disgusting of all, has to be this deeply cruel humanism. When Iceland converted to Christianity, they demanded to keep the right to infanticide. But this is unthinkable to modern humans. You people just keep bringing ghouls into the world, you bring children into the world, knowing they stand no chance of a normal life, knowing they will be burdens for as long as they live. You’ll bring some hideous girl with missing bones in her face into the world who will never be kissed by a boy and you’ll comment how “beautiful” she is on some photos she posts and you’ll insist how “inspiring” her attitude is.

You will just ignore the simple fact that if she didn’t play along with a big smile for you, if she didn’t play her part as the deformed court jester, if she just accepted the reality that she is stuck in a deformed body and that she will never know what a normal life would be, what little normality she gets to enjoy in life as an object of pity and paternalism would also be taken away from her, she would be left to dwell in misery all by herself, so she doesn’t even dare to be honest to herself anymore. That is your kind of cruelty, the kind that Hitler, the Icelanders and the Aztecs were all incapable of. And worst of all, is that you are not even willing to admit you are cruel.

The Aztecs understood what the gnostic heretic Valentinus understood too, when he spoke of the Pneumatikoi, the highest of three types of men. The Pneumatikoi, are people who allow themselves to be moved by the world. Whereas the hylikoi are basically what we now call NPCs, people who just blindly follow rules and psychikoi like the stoics try to escape all emotional attachment altogether, the pneumatikoi are willing to accept the totality of the human condition, including its darkness. There are things that can only survive in the dark, they deserve to exist too. So it was with the Aztecs: They understood the Gods tore apart their own bodies to create the world for us, so they were willing to do the same.

People will consider me racist, far-right, etcetera. But there is one thing I am not: A Western cultural supremacist. What we call the “left” today, are people who developed a secularized form of cultural christianity they seek to assimilate the whole world into. The world is not complete to them, until every single last African villager is working on a PhD thesis about how everything is racist. I on the other hand, accept that there are just different value orientations. To the Aztecs, the creation of the Gods is important, even if it turns out you can’t save it with some solar panels and some people will have to die for it.

Now contrast this with how we responded in March 2020, when a new virus emerged on the scene. I just genuinely never recovered from the realization that once a deadly virus emerges, most people do not have that response that I have: Finally! Finally this teeming glut of 8 billion fat aging people is dealt with! Finally, we do not just push this planet beyond the boundaries of habitability, we do not reduce the Amazon to a smoking pile of ashes, to feed cheeseburgers to fat morons in mobility scooters!

No, people were willing to just abandon the very concept of social interaction, forever. They would rather have a “new normal”, than accept that we were going to have a few more people die than usual from now on. That was so ugly, that it just cast in granite my hatred for humanity, because I knew there would never be a dignified way out of this predicament. No, when the next virus shows up, they would just do the same thing again.

How do you want to die? Do you want to die as the last surviving man of a Mesoamerican tribe, who racked up a death toll of seventy warriors, who turned himself into a prized possession, stalked in the forest for days by jaguar warriors, who understands his task that now lies ahead, who partakes in all the ceremonies, before he lies down on the altar and has his heart extracted by the priest?

Or do you want to die in the nursing home of gangrene in your toes, that spread through your blood vessels because nobody changed your socks for days, after you developed type two diabetes? Do you want your family to say “well he’s in a better place now”? Do you want to be gradually stripped of all dignity?

I am an optimist. I believe you’ll never have to go to the nursing home.