Sanction

by Roman McClay

  “Why did you just flinch?” he asked as he stopped in front of the man second from the Western end; he had been pacing and stopped quickly in front of Jack Two and saw a slight arm & neck twitch in the man as he had done so.

  “Muscle spasm sir,” Jack Two said and bit his lip then returned it from his mouth uneaten.

  “Cerebellum response; unconnected to the limbic region? You had no emotional affect right before it manifested?” Blax asked as the eyebrows lifted and the single axe scar-of-worry fattened up and was joined by the additional four furrows that appeared only when he did this; they themselves left no wrinkles or lines when the brow was relaxed. It hid this evidence of more folds available -in the brow- for immediate concern.

  “I have to think; give me a moment,” Jack Two paused and the other men filled the void of his lack of proper salutation by stating, in unison, the bark of: sir!

  “Relax, you’re not in trouble; just think of what you felt right before I stopped and made a slight but furtive movement toward you; think of that, and right during the moment when your body spasmed and right after, but before I began speaking to you. Those are your parameters,” Blax said.

  “Right, sir, I have it now. I felt an anxiety as you paced in front of me; slight but present; almost baseline. Then as you stopped abruptly in front of me I felt a fear that I had some reason to be singled out and a concomitant fear of being struck by you; and that remained until you spoke; I also remember feeling that it was wrong for me to assume malice or violence from you toward me as I have no reason to think that way of you, sir,” Jack had remembered the, sir, this time .

  “Good; why did you blame it on an involuntary muscle spasm from the basal region at first; was it fear or lack of self-awareness? Did you lie or were you just oblivious to its cause?” Blax asked. He was doing forensics, he was not angry at all.

  “I was oblivious, but once I began to articulate it, it seems to me that I knew it in some way the entire time; it was information that was there, but hidden; so, it seems nearer to a lie than I should tolerate, sir,” Jack breathed deeply in and then exhaled.

  “I concur, and I applaud you for this level of invigilation. There are two things here that need discussed,” Blax began walking front of them, equidistant apart as they were, “you feel anxiety and fear because I feel anxiety and fear; you feel like obscuring -then heroically revealing- your vulnerabilities because I will do -and have done- the same. I set the tone. But, that paradigm, that blueprint, is inside you; each of you. It is innate. And that is not something that can be said of most other people.

  “All that is required of you is to be self-aware and honest; that is it. I do not expect nor demand perfection; or even success; I don’t demand competence or unbroken eggs; I only demand self-awareness and honesty and from those two things, excellence and success and competency and even omelets will emerge.”

  The men smiled and he smiled too.

  “I don’t care if you’re scared; I don’t mind if you’re scared; I do mind if you aren’t aware of it or lie about it. The rules of the world you came from are turned on their head here. Down is up and up is down here; and so you will have to acclimate just like you’re doing with the altitude. A jump from 5280 to 8760 is significant enough to cause drowsiness and headaches and diminished cardiovascular endurance and cognition.

  “The culture shock of the last week is also disorienting and is causing a breakdown in confidence and ego-strength. This is probably useful and beneficial overall. I know it sucks. But know this: any malady you’ve had, any failure you’ve had, any defect or deceit you’ve endured or perpetrated; any self-criticism or chagrin or self-destructive impulse you’ve endured; any hubris or churlishness towards others, any bullying or lack of courage you’ve shown, any greed or weakness you’ve shown, I’ve both committed and endured 100 times that amount.

  “If failure and lack of character are the metrics by which a man is down-ranked here then you’d be in charge and I would be under your charge; because all of you combined are less fettered with the compendium of sins of these types than I am.

  “Time on the planet and lack of instruction in virtue have made me a much worse person than you. But, here I am in charge, despite these sins. Why? Because I am now more self-aware and more honest than you and those two categories of human capacity and action are paramount; they supersede all others, they inform all others, they make the other values we desire possible.

  “But, there is a danger,” he had reached the end of the pad and stared at the sanguinary sunrise, like God’s own laser-pointer right on him; between him and his men, and he squinted at it and saw the way it alighted the trees, the black scrub oak the deer loved so much, the Juniper and Ponderosa pines and the Birch and Aspens all black and cowled -carapaced- and like serrated figures held in situ , in state, in sepulchral erectness as this planet’s closest star tumbled forth from below the waterline of this their Gaian ship of earth. He turned and looked down at his own shadow cast and saw it stretch across the entire pad and like a black and ragged line the men could toe. They stood back from it .

  “The danger,” he began walking back westward, “is that these values are abhorred anywhere but here, among anyone but us; and yet they -modern man- will never admit to this. The rest of the world will insist they love in others and exhibit in themselves the apotheosis of self-awareness and honesty; some will even go so far as to say they tell the truth of all things,” he smiled and raised his brow again. They looked at him and smiled too.

  “It’s enough to make a cat laugh,” he began laughing softly and they too stifled an overt bout of laughter; these men laughed like people with bad teeth. They weren’t hiding any such thing, but it was their bashfulness and sense of decorum that prevented a full throated, baboon laugh; the kind that silly men seemed incapable of wrangling, Blax thought as he watched them with pride in their attempt at discipline.

  “The transvaluation of all values,” he said, “is the way Nietzsche phrased it. We are choosing new values; not merely new ways of transgressing or ignoring old values; we are not merely mouthing the rectitude of and adherence to their values and falling short as hypocrites; we are not merely advocating hypocrisy as a compliment -a nod- to what’s right; as Oscar Wilde said, hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue. ”

  “We are saying, no. We are saying, seriously, all joking aside, we think self-awareness and honesty are paramount; more important than business or politics or diplomacy or getting along with your wife or your boss or your Christian society; we actually mean it and thus, by definition will live that way . How you live, that is your religion.

  “And,” he turned to face them, breaking stride, “we say, this is what it sounds like, looks like, this is what it is motherfuckers when someone is self-aware and honest. Look at it, face it, don’t turn away, in fact we are no longer going to allow you to gaze at your shoes or to the side of our face; we demand you look us in the eye as we use honesty to erase your lies.

  “And unlike all other messianic and revolutionary movements, we first admit to how much we lie; that’s our first vaccine we give out as inoculation against hypocrisy. Yes , we say, we are natural born liars, and in fact, since the data show that the more intelligent a man is the more likely he is to lie; the more often he lies; we as 1%ers, we -here at elevation- are the apex of lying machines and thus it is even more heroic for us to lay down our arms in this war and give up our best and most deftly employed of weapons.

  “But we won’t do it inside your fucked-up society folks; we won’t be subjected to your jobs, your relationships, your cops and courts, your social circles; no .

  “We have our own culture, our own relationship paradigms, our own law and order, our own social milieu and if you want to adopt our ways we welcome it; but one of the first truths to come from our honesty and self-awareness is - and, Jacks, you’ll notice I speak very rarely, we speak very rarely of quote, truth , but rather of honesty. Why?” he asked as the wind blew from
the south over and around the containers that protected them. He had not finished his idea, he had left what he was to say dangling in the wind too. He reminded himself to come back to it as he waited.

  He waited for an answer as the men stood quietly, thinking, feeling.

  “It seems to me,” Jack Four began, as then Blax turned toward him; then focused on each man in succession as Jack spoke, “that truth is a product, a result, but honesty is a process, an attempt.”

  “And,” Blax asked .

  “And sometimes when you’re honest you get the truth and sometimes you don’t; honesty is no guarantee of veracity,” Jack One said, interceding as Jack Four side eyed him stoically.

  “That’s right; we don’t have hardly any truths to report,” Blax said as Jack Four felt robbed of the laurel. “We’re just a little less wrong than tout le monde, ” he said barely using a French accent, a slight one, just enough to make wrong and monde rhyme.

  “But one of the truths we have arrived at is that like follows like ; that homogeneity or self-similarity or fractal phenomenon are scale invariant. In a heterogenous society, the bigger it gets the more fragile it is; just as man who takes on too much weight, too much ballast, too many ideas or conflicting notions is unstable. And like a man can tear himself apart with contradictions so too can a people begin to cleave, like a mud and snow pie mixed together, along fault lines; along the brown and white, the warm and cold dissimilarities.

  “I don’t deny that there are benefits to a heterogenous amalgam or a heterodox theory; differences can be exactly what’s needed to solve a problem or make something beautiful or sonorous or right. We are not ideologues here; we don’t have tracts, or mantras, or tomes written by the creator of the universe; we have no dogma. What we have is tentative, likely results, subject to review,” he smiled, and they -again- did too.

  “Not exactly a winning slogan for creating a cult or a country,” he admitted with a grin, “but that’s the whole goddamn point; we aren’t using normal methodologies for group cohesion; we already have group cohesion because we have the same genome; the same blood and bone. Our hearts beat in sync.

  “Religion is a pre-Blax’s-Jack firmware,” he said, naming them obliquely, “necessary for group cohesion inside a tribe; it was sorta helpful for larger groups like nation-states but the national pride, the pride and cohesion of being German or American superseded it and worked quite well until what has always been the problem since day fucking one manifested. The problem is that people are different, and we hate difference.

  “We, as a species are attracted to sameness at every level and there is no getting around this; except by lying. And so lying is exactly what the liberal reformers are doing. The liberals are saying, no, no the blacks and blues and reds of many hues can all get along ; but this is dead fucking wrong.

  “Shit, the parasitic load of any population is directly proportional to post-genetic schema for group organization. Plainly put, the parasitic load of any group and the groups that radiate from them will map directly onto their variegated religious codes and identities. You wanna know what use religion is, look at that: it keeps you away from filthy people; other filthy people. For you are filthy to them too.

  “And right now in America, the heterogeneity that came about from post WWII desegregation and the increase in secularism has caused populations with nothing in common -except their distrust of one another- to live and work and miscegenate with one another at rates higher than ever before. The only thing that has averted a total parasitic crisis is that these populations still self-segregate at normal levels, and women are the loci of sexual selection and they eschew interracial relationships mostly.

  “But the pre-WWII paradigm of geographic and social-circle isolation was the ideal for prevention of disease and discord; it served the same function of religion that is played out in racially or ethnically similar groups like the Tutsi and the Hutu who used religion to cleave themselves even though no white man could tell the difference between the two groups of African blacks .

  “Religion, the religion of blacks and the religion of whites kept groups separate, and the legal codes of the south did the same in a more heavy-handed manner. But the total breakdown of these institutions alongside the normal cultural bullshit like music and TV and sports has forced disparate elements together. The parasitic load is kept low by a hygienic society; we are clean and all on anti-biotics, but,” he shrugged -leaving the sentence unfinished- and walked the courtyard; pacing like an Amur Tiger as each Jack stared straight ahead.

  “Anyway, you cannot be any worse than me; and therefore, I submit that there is no answer you could give, no honest answer that would shock or surprise me; I am you and you are me and we are all each other.

  “This is the thing that humanity always needed. It is the thing that a man like me, men like we , needed because we are so extremely anti-social and can’t stand anyone even remotely different from us, this genetic experiment 15 years in the making, is exactly what we needed. What we as a genome -as men- needed and what the larger society in which we exist needed.

  “You are the four fingers and I am the thumb of the fist,” he balled his right fist and his whole arm flexed in a terrible flat black craquelure of doom; it was large and it had the ancient strength that comes from work not just lifting weights; it was striations upon striations of muscles; and it was vascular like the eye balls of some angry dragon who had emerged from behind his own blown smoke.

  “Man needs a purpose and our purpose will be to be ourselves; for once, we will be able to be ourselves; for once we will have a culture, a tribe, a family of like-minded, like-bodied men who can support one another to achieve great things.

  “We will argue; we must. But keep in mind that I argued with myself before you existed; you are just an increase in scale; and the scale is immaterial to the nature of the phenomenon. Remember this. My brain modules were not -and nobody’s are- one thing. The part of me that is talking to you and using words and exists right behind the eyes, in metaphorized mind-space is one part of me; but my limbic region and basal ganglia all have input -maybe more input- on my desires, my thoughts, my vexations, my faults, my feelings of grandeur , my feelings of love and hate. We are 99% opaque; even to ourselves.

  “And sometimes my conscious mind overpowers my other brain modules in a fight, in a contest; the limbic will say, no, I’m afraid of that bear, don’t go outside , and my conscious self will actively and angrily say, fuck that, show some balls, and I will in fact go outside the tent; the bear was gone by then but still; I overrode the subcortical impulse for safety.

  “And sometimes my conscious mind says, I don’t want to be a drug addict any more, but my other regions are like, fuck you, you need those drugs, and so they make me sick and I feel sick when I don’t take my meds. And they play on my fears; I have a fear of being a drug addict but I have more fear of being sick; it’s a more acute and dangerous weakness to be sick right? You shit and puke and get dehydrated up here and you could die; people go into status epilepticus from drug withdrawal. Whereas merely being dependent on pills that I have access to isn’t as dangerous -I tell myself- so my conscious self capitulates to the tactics and arguments of my lower -drug-seeking- brain .

  “We will have such arguments; we will disagree. But, as aggro as it can get, we should never use contemptuous language; angry language is fine, but not insults. Two, we should avoid violence because we are dangerous and can kill each other and what a waste that will be. And you and I both know that while if all four of you ganged up on me, you probably could take me, it still would leave three of you dead. So, let’s avoid that and focus all our insults and invective and violence on the outside world. Here we have dialectics; heated ones, but respectful,” he paused and looked at each man as they nodded.

  “Now, there is another concept that I have not as of yet mentioned, but today is the day: the concept of Life Artistry. Now, this isn’t my term, I heard it first from Wulf Zendik and ma
ybe he got it from somewhere I don’t know. But the conceit is this: your life should be and in fact is an art project; no different in substance, only in scale, from a drawing or a film or a poem or a flower arrangement or an installation piece or a hot rod or a tattoo or a metal sculpture or whatever .

  “Art is scale invariant. In other words, it follows the same fundamental principles regardless of scale or size and therefore if we examine the phenomenon at one level, say the terrestrial level, we can discern certain truths about it, certain contradictions or failures in it, and then we can extrapolate those out either up or down the slide in scale.

  “The power law will be whatever it is let’s say it’s 4 or 2.5 or whatever, once we determine the power law we can build a stochastic model of it and kinda know what we are in for.

  “But if the artist is too self-aware, if he quote, knows what he is doing , then it is propaganda and not art.

  “But it is possible for the artist to quote, know what he is doing , on one level, and yet the art he produces still has the profoundly right brain, ethereal, unknown, mystic or numinous qualia that envelopes it like an atmosphere that is only produced after a while, like the way the earth developed an atmosphere after interactions by aerobic organisms and so on and so forth.

  “In other words, the artist can indeed consciously create metaphor and at the same time unconsciously create another strata or layer of symbols and semiotics that he is not aware of; and like all fractal phenomena the same principles apply to each layer of instantiation; so the art has the same value, the same grandeur, the same power of storytelling even at the conscious or self-conscious level because the artist himself is both more self-aware and more deeply unconsciously creative also; both hemispheres of the brain are involved in the art creation; so even if the one side is consciously creating metaphor and symbol and meaning the other side is doing its work too at the unconscious level with same intensity.