The Amiable Reaper or We're All Going To DIE, and That's Just Fine
I was told by family members on the night of the 2024 presidential election that I was remarkably unfazed by the event. After this I spent a fair few hours playing therapist and trying to explain my beliefs. It was hard for them to accept that I was happy with the beliefs I hold, that I wanted to believe them.
I have not made peace with death and impermanence. I embrace them. They comfort me in times of trouble. They grant me motion and decisiveness when fear and worry would weigh me down. I don't worship them, but they are like a strange kind of friend to me, and, if nothing else, I know I can depend on them to be with me at every and any final departure. And the damnedest thing is that in this acceptance I have found a contentment and inner peace that have eluded me for many years. I do not embrace them with a wry cynicism or feeling of profound melancholy. I am happy, and I find myself unexpectedly happier than the people around me. I did not embrace them because it felt intuitively right to do so, I chose this. I worked to arrive at this place because I saw a thread of reason in it from early on in life and, with frequent stumbling, followed it through a dark labyrinth of petty, solipsistic faiths being offered up to me until suddenly I found myself standing in calm, gentle night.
So, what is it about death and fleetingness that brings this comfort? A big part of it is that when I considered these conditions of existence, I realized no one ever really wins. There is nothing you can do that will not eventually be undone in both small ways and, inevitably, in totality. Now, many of you will have encountered this idea before, in the broad strokes it is far from novel. There is understandable anxiety with initial exposure to this sentiment, and it's one that can be clung to in rather pathetic and even antagonistic ways. But there is also a liberatory perspective: you will never achieve final, lasting victory, but neither will anyone else.
The surface level take-away from this statement is something about the inherent futility of human endeavor. Which may be true in some sort of cosmically absolute, objective sense, but a truth is different from honesty in that certain virtues have independent, if situational, merit, while any given truth is only as valuable as its ability to fulfill a purpose. You can accurately describe the flaws of capitalism all you like, that's of little practical worth if everyone refuses to do anything to address them. I do not particularly care if Alex Jones is correct in describing some individual details of the world and existence, because his vision of what the former should be like and the latter is like is a myopically bloody John Birch/Psychonaut burnout love-child slapstick farce. The DMT Hell-Mantises could exist and they'd still be the invention of an idiot. In this case, the futility of existence is a potential truth that's been most valuable on the practical, human scale by provoking “so what do we anyway?” responses. In isolation, it has marginal utility.
To put it in Popperian, an everyday use solution to the Münchhausen trilemma type terms, think of the theory of evolution. It is not a valuable concept because it's something that we'll be able to describe and chart the process of with perfect accuracy. We'll never have the Truth of Evolution, even if we're comfortable with calling it a law. But it remains valuable because it is both a rational framework to work within, and interacts constructively with other theoretical frameworks relating to the material formation and existence of the universe. It's foundational or cornerstone genetics and heritability research that has identified the source of, and shape potential treatments for, some rather nasty conditions. Its specificity and detail of its claims provide it with a practical usefulness that Intelligent Design as “theory” simply does not. And while evolution has useful specificity, it is also broad enough to contain both contrasting and competing sub-theories and the ever important “we don't really know” space, which leaves the framework open to debate and modification with new information. Once you get into specific ideas of Intelligent Design proposed by specific religious groups, you run into explicit claims of certainty and mutual-exclusivity. In this way evolution has a practical utility, and therefore value, that something like Creationism as proposed by Creationists lacks, ultimately true or not. Which is why, Ben Stein, one is worthy of significant inclusion in secular education while the other is a footnote. This should also raise the question in the minds of those faithful as to what it says about their god if the human theory is more useful than Its Truth, but that is a subject for its own issue.
This may seem to be a long digression, but it is an explanation of a simpler point: I do not see the claim of futility as particularly interesting or of day-to-day importance, and maintain ANSWERS TO THE BIG QUESTIONS are, to some degree or another, often abstract to daily life. This has made some very Sober Minded Existentialist Sorts incredibly frustrated with me in the past, so I suppose you should take what I say on the topic(s) with up to a few grams of salt. The point I am interested in making is that I do not see futility in death and ephemerality themselves, I think they have both point and purpose, regardless of whether or not they are a result of design or a happy accident. It's not anything so saccharin as their presence making life more precious, but because, looking with the right eyes, one can see how they make it bearable.
Consider this: there are no Thousand Year Reichs, and I read the signs as pointing to there never meaningfully being one. Even in the cases of those famous ancient civilizations we consider to have long continuities, it's hard to say they are truly the same civilization from their earliest record to their late and gradual dissolvements, even if there is a heritage intact. China had its dynasties,different ones seeing the rise of civil reforms, relatively secular morality systems, and religions that would reshape the political culture and spiritual beliefs. Could you not imagine some earlier, vaunted emperor raised with more local beliefs finding himself feeling out of place in the Tang world of imperial patronage towards a foreign religion. The Han dynasty arising in the first place after the collapse of a cohesive empire and being followed by another. In Ancient Egypt we have a dark age, periods of instability, and even fragmentation to contrast with the years of stable preeminence. The religion saw shifts in predominance of certain gods and changes in pantheonic relationships that would have surely caused consternation to more devoted cult members who enjoyed the prominence of their particular deity and a high floor of consensus as to how that deity interacted with the others. In Rome we have a Republic, followed by an Empire, followed by an Eastern Empire that no longer held Rome and adopted Christianity. Even before then the polytheistic religion we are marginally familiar with had been subject to the rise of new cults now and again, and syncretism with religions beyond the peninsula. How at home would the enduring exemplar of civic virtue Lucius Quinticus Cincinnatus feel in either the wheeling and dealing, post-expansion of Plebeian Council power and professionalization of the military Late Republic or in a time of any hereditary emperor? We have records from Romans of those times pontificating about how men like him wouldn’t. And the days of the foundation of the Republic to the deposition of Romulus Augustus is still only a thousand years with a bit of rounding up. That may be pedantic in isolation, but considering the significance of changes to civil society during those times, I think that it too is a relevant point. Westphalian Sovereignty and the modern nation-state are not quite 400 years old yet, and no one has been an undisputed master of their domain for all that time, or even all that much of it. America enjoyed an ascension in global prominence and built a massive standing army as a consequence of Old World empires having the ability to mutually bloody each other up, after all.
When the Nazis invoked this kind rhetoric, the long and glorious reign, and when their many idiot children do it presently, we should not understand it even as a megalomaniac threat, but rather as childish fantasy. Not only is there no clear historical example to point to in reality, but it is ludicrous to think the beneficiaries of any great conquest will maintain a culture so static that the current chauvinists could slot themselves into the social fabric of year 900 without messing a step. How meaningful would volkishness be if there was nothing outside of it? What superiority would it provide you if everyone was the same? This is the nitwit's tension at the heart of the reactionary dream of homogeneity. As long as here is an Other anywhere, the cultural will never remain pure, without them the culture loses its context. The homogeneous dream is useful if your aim is engendering conflict, but I think Mussolini and Hitler demonstrated quite well that the higher the aim of an explicitly genocidal military campaign, the more people you're going to receive resistance from until you reach the threshold of biting off more than you can chew. And if you make too much of your population too bloodthirsty, you might reach a tiger by the tail threshold in which you lose the ability to moderate your responses to minimize short term backlash. The Catholic Church was happy to stoke antisemitism as long as it was useful, but as a consequence there were spirals of mass violence it could not reign in as it desired. The dream can be useful deployed cynically, but its flaw is that it is self-defeating, potentially to its own execution and inevitability in fulfillment. To create a value and belief static thousand year empire would require a level of conflict invention and restriction on thought and development that would make it miserable to a degree that, as far as the soft-hands of the Western far right are concerned, it would still be self-defeating. There would be little joy in achieving that dream.
How do you prevent generation ten from engaging in hindsight speculation as to whether or not all the enemies of the long dead founders were all that terrible to begin with and possibly concluding that they were not? Do you violently haunt them with some specter or controlled remnant? At a certain point intentionally burdening others with knowledge of your enemies becomes preventing yourself from enjoying an existence mentally free of them, even if it's a caricature you're depicting. But if you give future generations the freedom to judge those enemies as decent and they do so, is it still really your Reich? If you erase all memories of the Other somehow, how do you prevent a re-invention of intellectual foes or re-emergence of more defined at birth ones? Another tension of a fascist, conquest oriented society; the best thing for its long term stability is probably for the true believers to die and the people passively accepting of violence but not enamored with it to steer it afterwards.
Then there is the problem of what happens once the thousand years are up. The thing about Rome is that it at least conceptually enduring, well-known and culturally influential and relevant. If the average fascist knew for a fact that wouldn't be the case for their empire, would that thousand year mark be as inspirational and aspirational? What if existed in popular consciousness, but mostly as some cartoonish overgeneralization missing the fine details that made it “it” in life, a canvas onto which anyone can assign whatever significance or meaning to the details left? Would a centurion be all that pleased listening to all the reckonings and speculations and theorizing and mischaracterizations about what his hometown was like? Would knowing Rome was still thought about be much of a relief when all the people who filled it were gone and reduced to titles and categories and scraps of information and images painted by questionable histories? Broadening the view, all mention of Rome will still be gone one day, so what is the worth of it being remembered for a long time vs a brief time?
Fascists can be quite enamored by death, and tend towards trying to project the image of embracing it with a wild-eyed, nihilistic glee when they are. But they don't. For one, religious fascists with a belief in the afterlife are not really facing a cold reality if they think paradise is on the other end. But even among more secular fascists the dying and killing does not often seem to be an embrace of the end. When done as a part of a Struggle for a Cause, there tends to be an essentially trans-historical framing and significance. Even if individual death is unimportant, the deaths in aggregate are something glorious and meaningful, connected to struggle past and future. But not even the trans-historical will survive the death of history. There is still a denial of finality in their supposed embrace. There are the particularly bloodthirsty that desire war for no other purpose than making endless war, that seek death for no particular aim or purpose, but I have my doubts these are the sorts that will be leaders of popular movements. I think there's a minimum promise of goals beyond fighting for fighting's sake necessary to get broad buy-in for a project of mass death, and I would argue the Italian Futurists, for example, were effectively deifying death, putting a spiritual weight behind making it, embracing it as a thing greater than the simple end of life even if the do not anthropomorphize it or have formal ritual surrounding it. To me, death is simply something being over, life if we're being literal and not using the word as synecdoche for all different kinds of endings.
The obvious question raised by these statements is “aren't these things as true of laudable pursuits as grotesque ones?” Absolutely. The liberatory perspective I propose is just that, a perspective of death and evanescence. The facts of these phenomena are consistent. That all things die is a truth. Recall that a truth's value can be measured by its usefulness. How it can be used is determined, in part, by its context in a wider philosophy. Here, then, is my philosophy of death.
Death is not an escape. I won’t go that far. To my ears, escape implies a survival of some sort. But it is a limit on all experience, suffering and fulfillment. To be able to die, then, is to be able to move beyond the reach of those who would delight in your suffering. Nothing mortal can make you hurt forever. Anyone who makes threats like they can is being even more childish than they are sadistic, and I recommend derision if one were to respond at all. There is a relief to be found in that. If the future is only pain, the pain will only last until the future runs out. Death makes the murderous small. To die is one of life’s only guarantees, to take a life is mere participation in an inevitability. Let us consider then the holistic smallness of our current death-mongers. Their empires are beyond them, a great many would certainly be unhappy to live in one, the eternity they crave is illusory, and in their bloodletting and destruction they can only ever do that which was going to happen anyway. Their idea of the Grand is a delusion of grandeur.
I would argue also that in an existence in which severely violent conflict, sadism, and death are possible to any degree, universal death is the ideal version within those contexts. Without it eternal orders with perpetually bloody designs become plausible along with the imposing of truly endless torment, the possibility of which would be a considerable psychological burden even if they never came to fruition. Death is probably best as an all or nothing affair, and I don’t consider contemplations of possibilities beyond the ones we’re working with all that useful in a non-fictional, non-thought experiment context, so we won’t be covering them here beyond making a point that death and ephemerality as they exist serve a practical function. By erasing everything, they ensure that nothing lasts forever, and in an existence where both cruelty and change are possible, that limits the potential cruelties possible in worst case scenarios and makes the past less burdensome, even if it also limits the more happy possibilities of a linear progress of history or permanent non-scarcity. That is not futile, that is a useful function, and unless there is a point in which death, cosmic destruction, and cruelty can be abolished universally, their totality until then is a good thing, or ,at minimum, the least bad expression of those phenomena. Death also serves a tidy purpose in how it relieves the present from the past in a concrete way, even as histories carry on for longer. I mentioned Cinncinatus. It is probably good for him that he died before those aforementioned different times. To have stuck to his values through it all would have seen him either having to impose them by force or be brought down with force and tarnishment. The distant past being able to engage in armed conflict with the present would make progress look even bloodier than it does in our world, I imagine. Or he would have had to adapt and keep adapting, further and further alienated from the world he knew as time went on. We have plenty of accounts of people who did have to go through seismic changes in their world dying deaths of despair or suicide, particularly from modern era colonial projects. Death smooths the process of change. It makes times into which people are born and creates more discrete existences than if everything had to stack on top of each other,
What I mean by embracing death is not to simply make peace with it, to accept that it exists and can not be thwarted forever, but to incorporate it as a positive factor in consideration of practical, even daily if one aspires to a particularly purpose driven life, action. The sentiment that life is a game is often written into the mouths of villains, but I would go a step farther and say it is not a game, it’s more like free play in which rules are determined by participants and subject to rapid change rather than having a predetermined outside structure. This is not to say that life is not a serious affair, but that as far as we know, there is not a single optimal way to live it and that there is not a scrutable, universally acknowledged purpose to existence or a final state towards which it is moving. Society is built on mutual pretending to a considerable degree. A currency is only valuable as long as it is widely recognized as so. But it is useful, and beneficial, to treat it as real enough in absence of an alternative.There is no platonic Form of the dollar of which the USD is merely a shadow, as far as we know. We have a limited number of truths to work with, but we have tested many theories of how civilization could work and composed them into useful, if often extremely harmful, models in their absence. These things are not real, but they are not fake. To call life a game or free play with this in mind is not an attempt to diminish it, but to recognize that the value and importance placed on parts or the whole of it is subjective. Play can be engaged with either seriously or frivolously by its participants, and neither are necessarily wrong. To embrace death is to embrace the frivolity of the whole to make more bearable the burdensome seriousness of the now.
The games we have designed are pointless, but if you feel there are any worth playing, they are worth playing. If you can’t or do not want to commit to self-annihilation, you will get the most out of continued existence committing to something. Like currency, that its significance is pretend does not mean it’s fake, but that it is pretend means that failure to achieve any given commitment is insignificant. This is not contradictory, it is the folding of death’s truth into an everyday theory of how to live. A theory proposes I should do certain things, the truth renders these things insignificant. But if the theory is more useful than the truth, rather than discard the theory, incorporate the truth in its most complimentary form. E. g. I believe that it is good to improve the human condition in the most equitable way possible, but death will undue all work towards and in opposition to that goal. Despite this, I am drawn towards the goal anyway. Therefore, to get the most value from the truth, I should frame death in my mind as a lightness rather than a heaviness. Death does not abrogate a moment itself , only the objective importance of it, so to work in a presently fulfilling way is still personally useful. If I do good, the good is done even if its effects are only fleeting, but if I fail to do good, the consequences of failure are also fleeting; nothing is anymore lost than it was already going to be. By embracing pretend in the now and death as an absolute, I can find purpose in the present and alleviate the worry of the purpose going unfulfilled. It is existentialism as the antidote to dread. If all consequences are inconsequential, there is truly no reason not to try, and there are as many reasons to try as one feels there are.
To explore that with more specificity, I mentioned certain fascist and far-right views not because those are universally the ones people operating within those ideologies share, but because they are ideologies that both tend to exaltate violence, I feel confident in saying the “wars of aggression are a bad tool for improving the stock” fascists have been fairly well marginalized within broader movements historically, and get people to buy in by presenting themselves as long-term goal-oriented. I do not delude myself into thinking that if I tell a violent reactionary my views on death, read death as synecdoche for all final ends and ephemerality when appropriate from now on, that suddenly their belief in this world-view will collapse. It diminishes their loftier ambitions that attracts adherents, but those ideologies also offer more immediate rewards. A juicy one is being repellent and obnoxious to the demarcated enemies. It’s no that adherents don’t believe in the “loftier” goals, but they also get a big, immediately gratifying kick out making people afraid, uncomfortable, disgusted, etcetera, with the larger goals informing their methods of getting these reactions out of people: talk of camps and erasure, how they’re going to enjoy the world without x group or with them enslaved, rivers of blood, other assorted tedium. Embracing death is a handy tool for diminishing the impact of these and other made-to-seem immediate threats, and to be unmoved by their aggression is to deprive them of gratification.
As a brief aside , this is also a reason why any preemptive “well, I guess I'll see you {other potential target} in the camps, don’t say I didn’t warn you” and related talk is foolish to express even if it comes from sincere worry or frustration. You are giving the reactionaries what they want. It is a form of compliance in advance. It is appropriate to warn of harms, but despair before harm manifests is best kept relatively private. Not bottled up, but not shared with the general public either.
In accepting that there are no final victories, or guarantees of enduring ones even on the human time scale, there is an opportunity to reduce the weight of the world on our shoulders. To speak from personal experience, I think one frame in particular that older trans people offer to younger, or newly self-realized ones, as comfort is often counterproductive. There is a lot of “eventually we will win" talk. It has the shape of positivity, but let’s inspect that frame for stability. To be able to achieve an ultimate victory is to risk an ultimate loss. That is the burden placed on everyone told they can win, the worry of losing. The fascist, the progressive, and all other historical victory oriented ideologies share this vulnerability. It’s not a political horseshoe, but a lumpen-cosmological one stemming from a pervasive but often under-baked human belief that there are somewhat fixed states of social development through which societies pass, the gates closed behind us so that we cannot easily be made to fall back through their thresholds. This can be a good or bad thing. Sometimes the cycles are linear, sometimes they are cyclical, but they are commonly treated as fixed points. This enlists the self, comrades, and fellow travellers into a vague process beyond any specific movement in need of completion to reach some next, superior stage. The problem is that these processes are obscure and built on tenuous human connection. Movements, whatever their sins, are built on connection and commonality. To be a trans person in the trans fight sounds like being a part of something, but a gesture at a connection to all those other people is far less valuable than a connection to a few materially, emotionally supportive people of any kind. It is understandable when isolated individuals feel there is an element of deception when they are told “we’re all in this together” or “we’re with you” but have no one present for them in a more substantive way, and are stuck on the outside looking in at others who do. They are correct, even if there was no conscious, malicious deceit. To see rhetorical support not manifest more meaningfully is difficult, and to feel some vague but directionless connection only exacerbates the problem. Not only are you alone, you are failing to be one with the cause, or perhaps others are choosing to not live up to their end and forcing that weight on you. An undefined sense of expectations is perhaps even more distressing than unfair but well-defined ones. Fighting a monster has more demonstrable effects than swinging at phantoms. I think long term goals and multigenerational projects are helpful, it’s the eternal and the epochal that create problems. They can inspire, but only as long as they seem to be moving towards fulfillment. When history is supposed to march and bend and instead rolls back, the loss becomes more than loss, it is a force of nature defeated. It’s a biblical defeat.
But that’s the thing, you could lose every fight in your life and see your every cause defeated completely, and in a hundred years the same ideas that inspired you could emerge again and win their day without anyone ever having known you existed in the first place. When you lose the day, only the day is lost, not the sun that will shine on the next. And when that is gone, the signs and records of all the wins and losses will go with it anyway. Do you think anyone who ever saw through the abolishment of state-sanctioned slavery knew a fraction of a fraction of all the people throughout history who stood against it in some way? There is no way they could have, but it happened all the same, even if the same arguments had to be reinvented a hundred times, the same fights fought over and over. By the same measure it could come roaring back, but that doesn’t mean the days without it didn’t matter. If a thing is evil, everyday it is thwarted is a victory for decency. This language of winning and victory may seem to contradict my previous statements, but that there is no final triumph does not rob the fleeting ones of their importance. In some ways it grants them subjective importance.
If you could win history, set it on a chosen path for all of time, then doing so is more meaningful than any part of the journey, every failure to advance the cause is a failure of monumental consequence, every accomplishment rolled back is robbed of meaningfulness. But history cannot be won. And life promises no accomplishments, no happiness, no love. It does promise death. This is why I embrace death, not to be ruled by it, but that it may grant me an appreciation for life in the present. To accomplish anything is an accomplishment. If I cannot set the world on a true path, then it does not worry me if I don’t. We can’t save the world in the end, but we can save a world everyday; we can save the people beside us in ways great and small. We can never really win. We cannot win the everlasting victory, but we can win a day, a moment. A goal can be met even if it will not stay met. And all the striving and doing may not matter in a final sense, but our baseline instinct is to continue our existence and our minds seek constantly to find meaning, so if we can create a model of how to live that makes existence more bearable and gives us enough meaning to be content, what does it matter? What is the value of the truth of nothing mattering as long as we can make something, anything matter anyway? We cannot win, we cannot lose. Just as there is no undoing death, there is, again, no undoing what is done. Look at all those Germans who lost the war and carried on with a sad self-pity, who tried to shake away haunting self-reflections with childish you-made-me-do-it isms, who felt compelled to deny that they had ever believed the things they believed until they convinced themselves that they hadn’t. They thought they could have the world, they thought they could have history, and to see that slip away made them feeble spirits.
But to know the world is beyond you means you will never lose it. All little successful conquerings are made into parts of a failure when a conquest collapses. If your goal is to merely save whatever you can for as long as you can, anyone who lives for a single moment longer than they would have if you hadn’t stood your ground is a success, and they can’t take that from you no matter how much is conquered. And if you fail to do even that? Like I said, that we are all going to die was what was going to happen anyway. You still made the effort, there was still significance in the trying, and that significance will always have been significant no matter how the effort pans out. To lose someone to suffering does not mean the good times you made with them never happened. They did, and those moments will always have been happy ones even when there is nothing left to recognize such a thing as a moment. There’s not a man alive that can undo them, so don’t fear anyone like they can. There is no losing, but there is loss. In that way we will all lose everything and all be lost, but to have ever had anything to lose and to ever be counted as a loss is an extraordinary thing, a thing carved out of an existence that promises only subtraction. Sometimes things never get better, they get worse until they get terminal, but if there is small comfort in striving, the striving is not futile . Everything will end, but for something to end it must have first happened. What I would say then to those young trans people is not that “you will win”, it is that each moment you live as yourself is an indelible experience, and to make those moments is a triumph no oppression can erase, and that there is no oppression that will endure in ways you will not.
I do not imagine Sisyphus happy because he chooses to be happy because to be happy is to rebel against his situation. I can imagine him happy if he allows himself to treat every step as a step forward even though the rock always rolls back down the hill at the end of the day. I imagine him happy by meaning to get that rock up that hill, because in meaning to he gives the effort meaning to himself. If the rock goes up and stays up, he’s stuck it to the very gods. When it doesn't happen, he can always try again. His rebellion is not smiling in the face of futile, but in rejecting the futile as meaningful. As long as he’s got that rock, he has something to do, and maybe he’ll never get to the top, but he can always get one step closer, and that’s something. Maybe he never will stick it to the gods, but I think it might be satisfying to convince them that he thinks he can. It might be satisfying to let himself think he can, it may not be true, but if it takes a little shine off the punishment for its designer and lifts some despair from his soul, that’s something. There’s a power in pettiness. There may not be a final defeat of facism, but to defeat a fascist means that at least they personally aren’t around to enjoy any spoils or cause any harm. That’s enough for me to call the fight a good one, and it’s also why avaricious ideologies will always find some purchase. They are a way to get shit that isn’t yours, and if that’s all someone wants, then you might not be so susceptible to the disappointment of defeat as long as you got something you didn’t have before. Genocide often operates at a local level, and at a local level it will succeed. A true believer exterminationist may be thwarted by the tenacity of people they think are weak. If you just wanted those people out of your town though, or wanted the house of someone who was of those people, you might find success. There is resilience in being a hylic, to embrace death is a project in making ones of good intent. But the Non-Divine Mysteries of Hylicism will have to wait to be explored further later.
Apologies if this end seems abrupt, but the writing of this issue proved complicated and time-consuming, and is probably already a bit long for a non-technical newsletter. I would rather get issues out with some regularity rather than fall into the common trap of releasing longer material at ever slower intervals. There will be at least two follow-up issues to this issue. One in which I delve more into anti-transcendence and why I find value in not just mortal death, but also final death and not passing onto some world beyond: consider this the materialist grounding on which an anti-spirituality will be explored. The other will be an exploration of how much we can choose what we believe and how to kill, invent, and nurture parts of ourselves, as alluded to in the opening paragraphs.
Some disclaimers. No, I do not know how to instill specific benevolent beliefs in people who might accept this general belief. Non-religious morality systems are often accused of having foundations of sand, but I’ve always felt that’s a universal issue. Even prescriptive religions struggle to get adherents to do what they should do and avoid doing what they explicitly shouldn’t. There’s also the problem of interpretation, God may say something, what those words mean are going to be decided by people. If you could actually set down a firm morality, you would be more of a god than anyone throwing thunderbolts. It’s a problem worth working on, getting into my very specific moral and ethical views and how I arrived at them would be its own treatise. I also separate conceptual death from the process of death. The latter can shake any belief about the former, Jesus wept and all that, and I would agree that the act of dying is frequently harrowing to all involved. Dying is not what is being embraced, but rather Death the natural force. Do not take from what I say that I don’t think reactionaries can’t be dangerous, it’s merely that it’s not hard or exceptional to be dangerous. A toddler plating with a candle is dangerous, which is to say dangerous is not mutually exclusive with buffoonish and gaudy. Finally, as an admin note, is was written in extremely sub-optimal conditions, so if you catch any typos that make intelligibility difficult or places where it seems a sentence or phrase is oddly incomplete, feel free to message me so I can re-edit the archive version for future subscribers.
Furthermore, I consider Palestine to need to be freed.