If I’m arguing that there is fundamentally no difference between the Sides, then I must be proposing that there is something fundamentally the same about them: a contention that would certainly meet with ridicule from both sides. This is the strange thing: I find no end of people to hate: evil, careless drivers when I am out on the street doing the pedestrian bit, anonymous strangers out on the infotainment superslushpile ranting obscene opinions, the rich, the violent, the stupid majority who seem incapable of constructing logical analysis. Yet in everyday life when I meet people I tend to like them, even the generally unlikable. I’ve wrestled a lot with the reality of the Sides because even though my opinions and beliefs seem to gravitate to one of them, I simply can’t believe that reality is as simple as that. Bill Holm said “beware the single idea: there is a loaded gun inside of it, anywhere in the world, pointed directly at your head.” He was right.
In his book // illustrates the struggle that lay at the heart of why an ideology meant to liberate, like the concept of the Marxist revolution, ended up as an engine of dictatorship and imprisonment. I believe that the heart of this struggle lies in the justification of means. The political philosophy of Marx is absolutely a philosophy of Sides: on one side is the absolute evil of the capitalist state, on the other the absolute right of the classless revolutionary society. The introduction of the absolute is the essential condition for the belief that ends justify means. This belief was central and essential to the operation of Soviet Communism. When I read this book, I experienced great inner conflict trying to understand what it was about this idea that I was unable to accept. It is easy enough to simply assert that the ends were in fact wrong and that was why the means were unacceptable. But I was unsatisfied with this response. And yet if means were not justified by ends, what were they justified by? Was I proposing that a better, more refined end could in fact justify any means, however terrible and brutal they might seem in action? I knew I could not accept this conclusion but I didn’t know why.
I brought my thoughts up with my friend Daniel, who was raised in a vastly different ideological framework from myself, and he answered my question almost without thinking about it it. “The ends don’t justify the means,” he told me, “because there is not end.
There is no end. There is no end to the revolution, no end to the wars and wars and wars, no end to any aspect of human society. It just goes on and on. There are only the means, ongoing, always, happening right now. And if they do not justify themselves then there is no justification at all.
When I try to wrap my head around, for example, the relatively recent past where slavery was an accepted in the majority of American society, one analogy I present to myself is that of our treatment of animals. It may be that at some point further along in the social evolution of humankind (if there is such a thing) I will be looked upon with exactly the same horrified incomprehension that I feel for my slave-owning forefathers, or even Trent Lott for that matter, because of my complicity in the abysmally inhumane manner in which animals are treated in modern “civilization.”
But then there is this: //. I do not recommend this site. It presents, in a nutshell, a presentation of images from the holocaust - graphic, painful images of emaciated, naked humans subjected to unspeakable cruelty, juxtaposed with images of factory scale farming.
As rhetorical presentations go I can’t fault it. The equation is simple: the techniques of the holocaust - the mass production of murder, the treatment of the living as objects, the absolute disregard for pain and suffering - are the very techniques that animals are subjected to in the the factory farm, in the testing laboratory.
And yet I find this example of rhetoric to be reprehensible. The appropriation of images from the holocaust for their shock value is a morally bankrupt act of ideological hypocrisy and self-righteousness. What shines darkly out of these images to me is not a high regard for the value of animal life but an utter contempt for human beings.
For a person not actually in the camp I am relatively sympathetic to the assertions of the animal rights movement, and yet witnessing this evil exploitation of images of human misery tests this sympathy greatly. What then is its effect on the indifferent? Which way is the cause pushed by a moment of forgetting that there is no end to justify the unjustifiable means?
-=-
Her Majesty’s Fools
Testify that they that die
hear a voice or voices cry
in the bright vibrating void
rid your mind of thoughts unkind
the evil treasure lie behind
evils only the wise avoid
elementary: thoughts uncomplimentary
not for the manor meant are we
Thieves lurking at the gate
hearts on sleeves climbing the eaves
inherit only autumn leaves
receive orders or simply wait
this I know that they that go
even they must hear the wind blow
exceptions cannot make a rule
nevertheless we only guess
Those very things that could impress
her Majesty’s fool
inasmuch as I feel the touch
resist as such
to satisfy or be a tool
except to say all things pass away
no matter the reason
Taking tea and soft protesting we
heap up irony
investing in treason
restless visions endless revisions
talk to our televisions
encounter a dark side
excommunicate those who dare to date
nonsense we once chose to hate
Tell us we’ve been taken for a ride
hard upon its truth we stifle outbursts too uncouth
intone instead verily, forsooth
regal in our finery
Tall full of grace we’ve set ourselves in place
examples for the lower race
excuse ourselves to the winery
Near enough to dark we hear a voice hark
Telling us we missed our mark
heeding only our desires
Interactive porn or fashions better burnt than worn
regardless comes the morn
to see too clear the ashes of our fires
Erring in our passions passing over truth for fashions
even our friends storm the bastions
nerves shot watching the telephone
That refuses to ring our analyst won’t say a thing
he can no longer bring
illusions that we are alone
rushed packing you cannot buy what’s lacking
tired of our peasants flacking
enemies’ agendas
Easy enough, no doubt we were over rough
no way left to bluff
Thus these simple addenda
hear me friend if you might lend a
innocence we lost our sense
revealed in the present tense
taken out of time
ended with a whimper by those we once forced to simper
even with a limp, her
noble subjects saw to her unrelenting climb
this is what is up with this.
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