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[size=150]Mens Rea: The Guilty Mind[/size]
"The Church combats passion with excision in every sense: its practice, its ‘cure’, is castratism."
- Twilight of the Idols
We do not say of the thief that the root of his crime lay in his hands. Only in the most repugnant of moral systems do we find the command to pluck our hand off should it offend us; in all higher systems such methods of punishment are proscribed nearly as harshly as crime itself. The hand is a dead thing, useful only as an instrument. It is only fitting therefore that man, who is accustomed to venerating dead things and feels it “natural” to do so, should make of the hand an object of poetic sensibility.
The same holds true for the sexual offender. One does not think with their – head. Thus castration does no good whatsoever, “the first moral of society” though it may be; just as little as one accepts the notion that decapitation could somehow “cure” intellectual crime, so too do educated spirits disregard the clamor to re-introduce castration, physical or otherwise, into the punitive system.
What is lacking in those few remaining modern moralists is a sense for the body politic. They want always to make of man a heady animal, without acknowledging his bio-logical nature. By conceptualizing man as on some level unified, perhaps fragmented by “trauma” but nevertheless fundamentally whole, they have imposed upon the body a sequentially-ordered causal chain of events which does not exist save on a superficial level. The motivation at work here is easy enough to discern: priests have always been quick to separate man from his body, to turn his body into an object for a subject (it becomes far easier to germinate in man the seeds of self-disgust when he is made to perforate holes within himself; that is to say, when he is forced to acknowledge himself in any way whatsoever). It is safe to assume that they lack the psychological wherewithal to withstand even the most basic self-analysis, and - who knows! - perhaps they themselves too are dead. They have invented an entire cosmological pantheon of empty concepts to accompany their empty percepts, and one is inclined to agree in every way with Bernard de Mandeville when he says that they
cannot forebear mixing their own Meanness and Imbecilities, with the Ideas they form of the Supreme Being.
The most execrable of these notions is that of “human nature” (and one might just as easily say here “original sinfulness”). The moralist, being dead and, as such, detached from his body, has only a passing knowledge of the needs of that body; one imagines that if he were to attach a sphygmomanometer to his arm he would find absolutely nothing - there is nothing at all vital in the moralist. Having need to devise a method by which to make man as predictable as the harvest, they have invented a teleological regulatory system founded entirely upon their self-misunderstanding.
Their own weaknesses betray them. The very idea that a pacifist (as nine-tenths of these people claim to be) ought to have stumbled upon man - and man always in situ, no less - is absurd. Violence is a precondition of knowledge, as the autopsy table attests to; nothing is done without some underlying malice accompanying it, no matter how innocent and free of conscious contemplation it is. Had those ancient myth-makers any real sense of the self-renunciation they feigned they could never have conjured up such fantastical phantasms as the “spirit” or “ego” – such hatred comes only when one feels for oneself the steaming witches’ brew piping through his veins, or the cold, cavernous pit inside his belly.
For it is the body - and the body alone - which is natural; man is unnatural. De Mandeville, always himself two steps ahead of (and one behind) moral realists, anticipated this when he wrote:
I believe man, (besides skin, flesh, bones, etc., that are obvious to the eye) to be a compound of various passions, that all of them, as they are provoked and come uppermost, govern him by turns, whether he will or no.
What de Mandeville here suggests is simplicity itself. We are accustomed to understanding the self as complete, and so shape ourselves as such. If, however, we were to examine ourselves closely, under the microscope of consciousness, we would find that we are a bundle of desires - very often waiting to unravel. Those spiderwebs of passion which we know as our selves exist only tenuously, capturing the fly of perception as best they can, and a mere springtime wind is often enough to disrupt their placidity and send them flying into the distance. Even tripartite models of the soul (Platonism, Catholicism, psychoanalysis) implicitly presuppose a being which returns (from the underworld through recollection; from Perdition through the purgatorium; from the Id through therapy) replete with the occulted knowledge which his body has stored up like buried treasure. And yet, while this redemption-play is certainly pleasant to the mind which entertains it, it by no means should be taken to reflect either the nature of cyclical psychological recurrence or that of the “being” which reoccurs.
Understanding reoccurrence correctly is particularly needful in understanding an epistemological event, such as a crime of fantasy. There are a limited number of passions which men can feel, and each passion is only as real as the need which it serves. Thus each desire can be said to “reoccur” upon satiation without necessitating the presence of an entity which returns - or which desires. Guilt, for instance, which is mere reciprocal violence, a sour note in life’s refrain, enters into a circuitous route within the individual which, for the guilty party, becomes as natural as breathing. Even when engagement with guilt is no longer a matter of
confessional activity but a public event (as Plutarch and certain of the Platonists were wont to partake of) it remains essentially the same: the individual is a closed system from which nothing can ever escape. The tides of passion surge to the fore under the image’s lunar pull, crest, and break hard upon the external world before dissipating back into the sea. At no point in any of this is there a “desiring entity”, an ego, a subject, a soul, at work.
All psychologists hitherto have fallen into the error of making the passions nebulous, airy things, demons or angels, without acknowledging their grounding in the very fabric and fiber of our being. Not corrupt “animal being”, or human nature, which supposes the unity of self on a higher level, but being as multiplicity. For this, one must wade into the fray willingly, and for that one must almost be pagan - or, at any rate, not a Christian.
Foucault describes it thusly:
The individual is not to be conceived as a sort of elementary nucleus, a primitive atom, a multiple and inert material on which power comes to fasten or against which it happens to strike, and in so doing subdues or crushes individuals. In fact, it is already one of the prime effects of power that certain bodies, certain gestures, certain discourses, certain desires, come to be identified and constituted as individuals.
This will not at first be obvious to the pious generation into which I have had the monumental misfortune of being born, these pierced and posed Young Werthers for whom the passions come gracefully (their music allows for nothing else: the passions must always be placed somewhere above them, and must be reduced, through irony, from the grandiose to the merely banal), and so I will attempt a further elaboration of this idea.
In the old - that is to say moral, for everything which once was moral is today extinct - conception of things, men took it for granted that each thing possessed an inner essence, a spirit or soul or other such metaphysical substratum, which held innate characteristics of the object in question. Thus a stone might be evil - or cursed, or bewitched - or good - sacred, divine - and so might it also be within the individual himself. This soul-belief was called deep, and even the ugly and wretched could find relief in it through an appeal to “inner” beauty. The king’s crown, the national flag, the crucifix and the fetish each become the manifestation of such an essence within this worldview. The dedicated psychological archaeologist encounters traces of this zealous faith in essence even today in the unlikeliest of places, e.g. our prima donna teenaged egoists who sing high the hymns of the individual without ever grasping precisely what constitutes the individual as such.
In particular, instruments such as tools, weapons, and ceremonial objects were considered imbued with these properties. Even the sun and the moon, which for men are judged on the basis of their utility, were accorded certain essences, feminine or masculine, according to the biases of their observers and for the benefit of the poetic spirit. Such properties were in no wise specific to the instrument in question, but could, as in, for example, transubstantiation or transfiguration, be passed from one thing or entity to another, as if each thing were but a cell upon the skin of existence, subject to the process of osmosis and the laws governing thereof. The most delightfully archaic rituals, exorcism and communion, which predate all the sciences, always involve such a process of essence-supplantation, which first requires the assignment of agency to the object of consideration. This essence-supplantation I shall term consanguinity.
This is the logic - the instrumentality - of all morality: the object, whose purpose is within itself, possesses within that purpose a metaphysical “presence” which is either Good or Evil and which survives the object long after its eventual destruction. This belief is the kernel of all ritual activity, the cornerstone of moral belief, and the Archimedean point upon which the entire religious weltanschauung stands. It is also the foundational crack by which this edifice will fall, and the only such one which exists: none other will suffice.
For this logical manouever consists of a reductio ad absurdum in the most literal sense: it posits an in-itself where no such thing exists, and appeals to an inner plane which is nothing but absence. If, for instance, we say that “such-and-such used a pen to write his Manifesto”, we do not ascribe to the pen itself any particular moral qualities, good or evil, but only the purpose to which it is put to use - the ‘moral’ activity in this action rests entirely upon the such-and-such and not the so-and-so. And yet, if we were to carry this thought through to its fullest conclusion, we would discover quite soon that there is no final doer; that every doing is itself the product of another doing; also, it would become readily apparent thereby that transcendental morality is an impossibility. Even the moral instru-mentality itself leads one to this conclusion: just as water is displaced when an object is submerged within it, so too must the “essence” of the individual in question be vacated within the consanguineous act - thus demands the principium individuationis. When the criminal invokes the name of the Adversary to justify his crime, he does nothing but appeal to the consanguineous element of the moral worldview to justify his action. He thereby makes himself a tool of the Devil…
And what’s more: the criminal is the Devil; the Devil does Evil because he is Evil, and is Evil because he does such. This is tautology, an abomination to the introspective man, and a belief to be abolished.
We have dispensed with the ego as an explanatory device: what remains? Free will? But “free will” is as oxymoronic as “American individualism” - one is either all will or one is not at all. Consciousness is superfluous, a literal unconsciousness even moreso. Condemning it as a whole means casting that whole into swine.
The theocracy that is the legal system requires the existence of a soul to justify its very operation, and the black-robed ecclesiocrats who staff it have seen fit to enshrine into law this particular metaphysical prejudice towards that end. And against this idiot’s humanism one must pose its exact opposite: a bayoneted philosophy which fundamentally denies soul-atomism in favor of a reductive conception of the mind. For even the lowliest criminal can acknowledge his own culpability for his actions, and, depending on his self-love, will it as a universal principle (as in ever-fashionable maltheism); it requires a strength altogether inhuman to throw a wrench into the sentimental works and isolate and analyze individual feelings in accordance to their relationship within the whole. Only once Nietzsche’s “chemistry of concepts and sensations” has been established can the great task of ethics commence - chiefly, the task of undermining transcendental morality in favor of an ethos of the Earth.
Accordingly, a new paradigm must now be established. God is dead, as is man; what matters today is simply the act itself, the relationship thereof to the individual, and that of the individual to society - and the relationship of the multifarious passions to themselves and the manipulation of these passions to re-constitute the individual in a positive fashion. Let this, then, be the highest rule of ethics: to set passion against passion and to make ethical evaluations and commandments on the level of the passions. So one learns to discipline without punishment, and so I forgive my eyes and - hands.