This new millennium sucks a whole bag of dicks.
Maybe it’s me.
I don’t remember my childhood fondly for many reasons, between being assessed into the ground by the system to no avail, or in running through the same cyclical patterns of trauma against my will or even my awareness or knowledge.
That’s the whole point of this series, right? To use my negative experiences as a roughneck disabled hick kid from the boonies of the 90s to make the world better through education and old insights that many may not possess.
It doesn’t mean I enjoy seeing how I wasted so much time in a finite lifespan in pushing for global change in other, less optimal, or less efficient ways. But it does mean I’m now committed to working faster and at a greater scale – silencing the idiots and morons who get in my way as rapidly as possible, and crushing the corrupt and unethical actors who try to stop me from seeking justice for those trapped in an intersectional hell, lacking the same privileges that I carry.
Most people can barely see their own hand when it’s held out in front of their face, remember?
So try seeing in multiple lifetimes all at once, watching your mortality trickle by until you eventually become ash, dust, or in my case, become the pinnacle of utilitarian use of the human body.
For the record? I want all of my bones made into D20 dice and given out as a symbol or sentimental memento to my friends and family, with the remainder to be held in reserve for those deserving of such a heavily blood-cursed item containing all the accumulated human experience and hope of a dead savant.
I know the more macabre of you out there would love such an item. Look at me, capitalizing my very future bones for good! Even better? When I’m dead, create some sort of contest or humanist/transhumanist challenge for savants to earn such an item through great human achievement.
My organs, I want you to donate as quickly as possible to save as many lives as possible.
The remainder I want donated to science and medicine, to help teach future doctors, nurses, researchers, and healthcare workers how to save even more lives.
Anything remaining even after that?
I want you to fire the cremated ashes of what remains into the sun, as a reminder of how fleeting and insignificant our mortal, human lives are. Let me be consumed by Sol, our friendly old nuclear explosion in slow motion. Let my carbon atoms become a moving part of the sun itself. Maybe I can buy a few more years of fusion inside that star for the species, perhaps!
It’s all just part of the brutal calculus that I refer to so often in my poetry. Consider it a living will of sorts.
See, the gift of longsight is also a sort of curse, as with pretty much every single one of my disabilities and how they interact and engage with each other. You begin to watch the positives and negatives blur into some sort of living hellscape that is your everyday life.
Part of this longsight is an acute awareness of the finite nature of your lifespan.
The average human only lives roughly eighty years, give or take.
Women survive slightly longer than men on the bell curve.
Again, that good old Brutal Calculus, remember?
Being aware of death is something we all deal with at a pretty young age, whether it’s flushing a goldfish down a toilet, or in my case, being forced to sit and watch one of your childhood dogs get put down because “someone needs to be there for him.”
What is the value of a single human life?
Some fucking economist somewhere will have a neat little number on a page somewhere that they have totally removed from the human equation of emotion and the value of life itself. They’ll tell you they know the exact valuation of a human lifespan.
I think those people are assholes, by and large.
See, I’ve had a lot of people die in my life. And when I say “a lot” please don’t think I’m exaggerating, as much as I do have a penchant for hyperbole.
Be it my friend who hung herself at fourteen, the myriad of loggers who committed suicide, to poker buddies burning up in car accidents.
The world seems to steal the best of us far before it’s deserved. And those who hold power and wealth tend as a majority to be selfish fuckheads that survive far longer than the good-hearted souls trying to make the world better for other people.
Which brings us to the whole fucking point – Honor, Morals, and Ethics.
The metrics one can use to judge how well a life is lived, and the true value of a person’s existence.
See, I’m not here to teach an entire philosophy course, but many philosophers will reduce things down to various brews of “Good” or “Evil.”
Which is hilarious for a man with ADHD to state, as most folks on the spectrum tend to see the entire world in black and white and struggle with greyscales.
Regardless, whether you’re talking about Epicurean Hedonism, in which you conflate pleasure and pain with good and evil, maximizing one and minimizing another… Or proper Mills-style utilitarianism, in which you maximize utility for common good…
They all conflate our human existence with simplicity of action.
Now, I don’t want to reteach the entirety of my first-year philosophy course on Ethics and Epistemology. So I’ll boil it down to this – helping our fellow humans and preventing a species-wide extinction-level apocalypse is pretty fucking crucial right now. Everything we do in working towards halting humanity from guillotining itself with shortsighted pollution, genocide, and meaningless governmental control of resources? That’s a morally good thing! But we have to boil it down to individual lives and actions, as too many experts are happy to sit in the frothy jello of academia and theory, without ever actually solving the problems that they problematize.
Yeah, you heard me over there in academia. Stop giving people Masters and PHD degrees for problematizing shit without also being required to provide solutions, even if they’re the same solutions that have been offered before by other researchers!
This is where honor comes in. And the first individual decisions come into play. Can you look yourself in the mirror and tell me you are living an honorable life?
I often admire the Sikh community for this, although they do have a tendency as with most Middle-Eastern and Subcontinental philosophies to take honor too far in terms of conflated logic in regards to personal honor and familial honor. Individual freedom is more important than reputation in my opinion, and I detest how women are treated as objects to increase social standing via arranged marriages, honor killings, etc. I know that’s largely a side effect of a caste system in the region, but still… I appreciate the idealism of trying to solve problems with integrity and in holding yourself to a higher account as a person. Never draw your Kirpan unless you intend to draw blood, leaving violence as a last resort because you know you’re cutting yourself if not them. Saint-soldiers protecting the underprivileged. Maybe I just like that concept because I’m a pacifist, though.
Seekers after truth, indeed.
Honor is an abstract concept. What is it? How does it work?
Well, the way I see it, honor is a moral compass. In any given moment, honor is that chance to self-reflect on your actions. Am I acting in a way that is noble and right? Am I helping people with my power, strength, or ability? Or inversely, am I hurting somebody or making their lives harder in my inaction? Or in my actions that make my own life better or easier, yet which harm or disadvantage others?
For me, honor is extremely important, because it’s not about my reputation. God knows anybody reading this series knows I hardly give two fucks what people think about me,being a self-professed Cartoon Supervillain. Hell, most people with negative opinions of me are often shortsighted twats who can’t find their own genitals on a good day when it comes to doing the right thing. They lack the enormous compendium of accumulated human history and knowledge I’ve been building for thirty years.
I’m a fucking savant, remember? I spent twenty-eight of those thirty-one years caring too much about what others thought. Social anxiety pushed me to make others happy at my own expense and the expense of other innocent people to further the interests of a few greedy, self-centered people.
Maybe I shouldn’t listen to the opinions of my lessers, to be blunt.
I know that makes me sound like an asshole, but again, I don’t really care. My goals are A. saving the species from suiciding itself as an Ecosocialist, and B. beginning the Reclamation Era to foster a new Renaissance of human enlightenment with incredible art and invention. If I stopped to explain myself to every single person on the street that wanted to “debate” or question my motives and logic, I’d already be long dead, frankly.
So honor serves as a sort of compass.
In any given moment, I can boil my own sense of honor down to a couple things. Firstly,I need to ask myself, am I acting in a way that protects or supports the underdogs in any given situation when it comes to power and privilege? Secondly, am I educating people and helping them grow as humans to reach their fullest potential? And not an official third, but can I ensure that I’m respecting my own self, time, and my abilities in any given moment?
Personal honor only matters insofar as you are defending yourself against injustice. It shouldn’t be a measure of social standing, nor of your inherent good or evil nature.
On the other hand, ethics and morals are the way in which you engage with the world in good faith. They are your everyday actions that determine whether you are acting nobly and honorably. The smaller pieces of the whole.
Once upon a time, I used to be a strict Deontologist. Deontology is the philosophy written by an old Christian Monk named Emmanuel Kant. Yes he has a very funny last name, but he was German, so try your best not to be racist, as much as Germany may deserve it historically.
It consists of following rules or laws, called Maxims, that determine whether you are living a good or bad life. In Kant’s views, these maxims came from the bible and his Christian faith. My own Maxims were self-selected in accordance with what I thought would be righteous. I even got a big black sun tattoo I drew myself to represent my unyielding determination to stick to these Maxims. (Not knowing that the symbol has been coopted as many other Norse symbologies by the fucking Nazis. Unfortunate that I learned such info after the ink was dry and healed, no?)
Some of my Maxims were simple – Only take what you will finish in regards to food and drink. Protect the innocent and vulnerable, defend the weak, etc.
But as a young man of nineteen or so, I quickly found that the Maxims were hard to apply consistently without self-harm. If I poured myself another drink, as is my tendency to mispour ever bigger glasses after a couple shots of Whiskey? Well, I had to finish it, come hell or high water! Nothing could be wasted!
I obviously abandoned the Deontologist philosophy after a few too many close calls and pretty rough hangovers or gorge-sessions.
But the principles at their core were good. A set of beliefs or systems that ensured I was treating everyone equitably and fairly, that the people who needed support were being supported, and that oppressors and antagonists were defeated, by myself or someone else with the power and intellect to do so.
I no longer stand by any one philosophy. But I do still believe in the concepts of Honor, Ethics, and Morals. That means believing in living a good life so that when I die, I won’t haved lived as a cretin or a tyrant. Problem is, when the world is full of rather dull or cannibalistic people who have no concept of such things, and who actively do immoral and unethical things to advance their own lots in life, I tend to have a lot of enemies to battle.
And depending on the choices you make, they might become your enemies as well. Because remember, immoral cowards will always work with a couple of caveats – they love shadowy lackings of transparency, they will try to twist narratives to make the righteous look poorly, and they’ll hide their accumulated power or wealth insofar as their ego is too fragile to not throw it around for their own emotional stability.
I can think of a dozen names that spring to mind as examples, and I’m sure you can as well.
As I only have so much lifespan remaining, I’ll ask you a pretty critical question that should help you shape your own sense of honor, morals, and ethics:
“When you are dead and gone, what will you want to be remembered for? Who will you want to remember you, and how?”
And with that question left hanging…
Now…
Let’s get the fuck out of here.
-McRae
