by Roman McClay
In the herding world his propensity for violence and aggressiveness and disagreeableness would be valued, but in the farming & modern commercial environs it was a huge liability. He was rich, relatively speaking, making $308,000 that year of 2016, but he was hated, despised and plotted against by men who had noticed two incongruous things:
First, Lyndon was a jerk and was a hot-head and made them all feel terrible, he made them feel like they were lazy and incompetent -and while true, it was not fun to hear- and second, that for all his bluster and wild talk, with that one exception -the weapons’ charge in 2012- he had not actually been violent -that they knew of- but had merely threatened it.
This was the fault line, as Lyndon had tried to walk the too-thin path between each culture; the culture of his genome, his ancestry, his heart, the culture of the southern Scot herdsman, and, conversely, the one he was now in, the agricultural pacific and commercial milieu of the modern Medical Marijuana business. He was in the world of 21st century America; civilized, deodorized, less violent but infinitely more dishonest and corruptingly immoral.
And so he failed in both regards. He was too bellicose and aggressive and hostile for commerce, he was not polite nor fond of the insincere baboon smiles of the beta and the female of business; and yet he was too unwilling to follow through on the violence of the herding culture, and so he alienated everyone and yet failed to scare them enough to dissuade their own bad behavior.
And for this, this middle way, he ended up getting robbed and cuckolded and maligned by men half his size and one tenth his intelligence and one one-millionth his overall worth. The middle way is a lie , he thought. “All that is in the middle of the road are dead animals,” he said aloud as the clouds ballooned into large white nimbus with no grey even at bottom.
He was like the lion taken down by prokaryotic parasites, like the eagle hit with the errant rock thrown by a rabid and ignorant monkey.
He was taking half measures, and stuck in no-man’s-land, instead of fully committing to one side or the other. This was his greatest mistake. He had failed to be what he truly was. For this he paid with all that he had in money and pride. He lost it all, and deservedly so; all except the germ, the seed, the single grain that would -he thought- soon bloom.
He was too honest, and thus left himself vulnerable to men who like his friend Chen who had honestly, decently, said of himself, that he didn’t even believe in honesty anymore .
And Lyndon was too mean for polite society; he said what he thought more often than not. And nothing is more taboo in modern society than a man who speaks his actual mind. A man is expected to keep his thoughts to himself like he’s required to keep his food off his face or shit off his shoe.
Yet, he failed to crush his enemies upon their first infraction to teach them all who could not be fucked with. He had not been pure, he thought as he stepped to the next rock and felt the sand grind under foot. He had vacillated between two worlds.
Sure, he had beaten men half-to-death in traffic disputes and bar fights and in random interactions; he had been in at least two dozen fights. But those were just a few random men in a city of 600,000. His immediate tribe -the 500 people he knew directly, the 50 that swarmed under his panoptic eyes- with them he had not assaulted even one of them. It was they that needed to be beaten so they would behave. And it was they who he had failed to dissuade.
He beat strangers who had no way to give him reputation for taking no-shit , and he let those who did construct and mangle his name around town -calling him all-talk - to get away unharmed. He had it exactly backwards. And for this he paid the natural price of being wrong in nature. Being wrong in nature leads to death, “or fates worse than death,” he added. He looked up to the clouds to scan for any darkness, any black at bottom, before pressing further into the woods.
They took his honest admissions of his own hypocrisy and failures and wrong doings and cobbled it together with their hatred for his hostile manner. And because they had no honesty in their own hearts, no self-reflection at all, they could easily justify ripping him off as par-for-the-course, and just desserts, as their bodies built algorithms, equations, that read as: Me > You.
And they -his tribemates- had openly said why they did not fear him; like Michael had said when Lyndon warned Michael that Lyndon was not the man to be so blithely ruined as to make him have nothing to lose. Michael had countered that Lyndon in fact had his freedom to lose , and thus -with this logic in hand- they all proceeded to push Lyndon around quite a bit. They saw only short-term logic, not the long arc of Natural Law. They saw him as all talk, for up until now, this is what he had been. He thought of the turkey fed by the farmer 364 days in a row.
Michael had ripped him off for hundreds of thousands dollars, and ruined his name, and made a fool of him, and done it with impunity because he figured -rightly for years- that Lyndon wouldn’t want to lose his freedom. Michael had used empiricism; he had plugged into his algorithm the fact that Lyndon had already had a small -unpleasant- taste of the legal system when he had pulled his pistol on those cholos in 2012. Michael was smart and reasoned well, and he thought that Lyndon would not risk it all over such a dispute. It was not unlike corporate bankers who say, we have made money each year for 19 years in a row, we can’t lose . Michael, too, saw the past as tantamount to the law, and extrapolated out forever and ever with that optimistic data in what he thought was an ergodic system. It was the same mistake Steven Pinker made when he thought human violence was in decline based upon data and not on the nature of man, the black swan event that lives in the cosmos, in the forest, and in the breast of some men.
Merely clever men see manifold data; wise men see one natural law.
The thing Michael did not count on, the thing they all did not factor in to their risk-analysis, was the extreme event, the regression to the mean, the capacity for the ball to -if it doesn’t escape the atmosphere- for the thrown ball to return to the surface of the earth from so high a place. They would not see that from there -from so high a place- that black ball would fall and reach terminal velocity like a ballistic shot; their risk-analysis had been right for years, until it was so very, very wrong .
They knew nothing of his herder vexation and the permanent anger and rage and sense of fate and meaning -deep existential meaning- attached to setting things right and doing it with his bare hands. Lyndon would never just let it go, just like his ancestors had never let it go, his own father had murdered at least one man that Lyndon knew of; and there would be mounds of bodies if one traveled back far enough in their non-ergodic, genomic line.
But the father, Lee MacLeod had not had the need to be honest and announce his revenge, he had just done it quietly and directly with a bullet to the back of the head of his victim, or victims, he added as he descended the slope of his property’s main ridge.
Lyndon wanted it to be known what he had done and while the crimes themselves -not truly crimes at all, for they were merely illegal, but more importantly they were righteous- had been done with cover of darkness and the quiet of a suppressed pistol or carbine and with escape and evasion all thought out and executed 3-steps ahead of the mere temporal law, while all that was true, he couldn’t help but bray and brag about it. And this is why: reputation is what was at stake, and if nobody knew his enemies had paid with their lives, then the rumors that he was a pushover would still obtain; the lie would endure. And a man like that, a beast of that kind, cannot stand for a lie to abide.
The honor component was the salient point, his passivity had to be absolved in the minds of the community, he could not allow a reputation for letting-shit-go to remain.
He then thought of how many times he’d had this very conversation with himself, was it 100, a thousand? He smiled as he thought that even if he were to write all this down, repeating it ad nauseum , it would only prove one of his three main points: information, data, no matter how much, no matter how oft-repeated, made no difference at all. His enemies could read this, every oth
er chapter in a book, and they’d still not think it applied to them. They’d take no warning at all.
He kept walking the rock as it reached bottom of the ravine and the grasses left marks on his boots. He saw the treeline and an opening to his southwest. His heart beat loudly in his ears from the work at this elevation and his breath seemed less and less to assuage.
He knew it was stupid, from the perspective of the guy who wants to just get away; from the POV of the man who thinks freedom is the highest of values; to the pragmatic, the rational man that everyone is so fond of in modern life. But, that was not his highest value, he had a more complex relationship with life. And so, until you understand the concept of honor , and vindication , you’ll not understand the why of what he did. Men are not built all the same, most men value life & liberty first, but a few value honor & authenticity first and these -each set of- values conflict with each often enough -near incessantly- in this life.
The coward -and he knew because he had been one- would live longer, but what kind of life was it? It’s like getting 10-gallons of piss for the price of one dollar versus the purchase of one glass of Domaine-Romanée-Conti at market price. Most men choose the piss, because there is more of it, and it was more cheaply bought.
Lyndon would rather pay $1,000 for that dark glass of DRC and enjoy it, savor it, feel all the qualia and inspiration of such a rare and artfully crafted wine, something one man in a million can taste, and then die from dehydration in seven goddamn days; he’d prefer that rather than living on and on imbibing 10 gallons of cheap piss ruining one’s gullet, and marring one’s experience of whatever life they have left merely to survive. Unless you are guaranteed to live forever, then life is by definition finite, and thus a man must choose how he is to live. Only death is guaranteed, but an infinite-instant of honor can be chosen over a long and cloying and craven life.
Sure, the piss man is not broke, as he paid almost nothing for the urine, and sure his body can extract the fluids necessary from it to live on and on and on. Sure. But what kind of life is that? Has man forgotten what life actually is? Had, he wondered, man ever known?
But, this was the very question that divided men. Lyndon would prefer poverty and death to quaff one dram of DRC and go out like a poet, a bon vivant , and a man ; prefer it to an extra week or month or year of life guzzling some other man’s piss while stacking up riches in one’s earthly pockets and fatuously thinking they got a really good deal.
99 out 100 men would choose the cheap piss , he surmised, because that is exactly what they do when given analogous choices. Look at their lives, he thought, look at what they accept and take and bolt down. They let the whole world piss down their throats and save up for a piss-rainy day. They live like slaves with no integrity, no honor, no dignity at all. They just scramble for cash and extra years and never once think of the quality of what it is that they drink down. It’s the fundamental difference in men, and no amount of lecturing can change the ratio of the divide. No one can be convinced to live contrary to their nature, they only can be told of the other way to live, as a curio, he guessed.
Lyndon was 1 in 1,000, and only 1 man in 1,000 would understand what he was even talking about. 999 of 1,000 would guzzle cheap piss and claim that anything else was crazy; never once even questioning their own taste buds or values or what the good life actually is. They do not care, they just want to live and live forever, at any price to their souls. And that is the difference between the effete and corrupt Ionian Greeks and the noble Spartans ; between the Dutch farmer and the regal Scot Herdsman, and between brothers even; or, even , he thought, between a man bowed by his culture and his own stupid cowardice and his revanchist self once he fucking stands up.
He was now at the trees to the south of the ravine between the two ridges of his mountain property, 50 miles from any town. He stepped into the shadow of the large pines and the ridgeline that hovered above and saw the tracks of coyote, he thought. He bent to lay his hand down next to the print of the paw.
He had walked the middle road, between the 10 gallons of piss and one shot of the best Burgundy on the planet. He had seen both views. He could report back to each clan on what he had seen. This middle road is doom , he knew, it was wrong and dangerous and stupid; but he had at least seen the view from each side, he understood both sets of men, and he could edify each group if they liked; like a shaman with a foot in both worlds at night he could speak aloud once the sun comes up .
But, he ought to have just chosen one or the other, because living half way in between just forces you into mixing that one glass of expensive Romanée with 10 gallons of cheap urine, which gets you a pink tinged piss that you paid a lot for and makes you the butt of all jokes from both sides. “It’s only dead animals, as they say, in the middle of the road,” he said again like mantra.
Atavistic women -like all southern mothers and wives- hated the man who shrinks from his duty to defend her and thus his own honor. Women were not passive victims to cultures of honor; evidenced by Spartan mothers who demanded a son come back with or upon his shield -i.e., no surrender- to modern wives who shake their heads at men who won’t, who refuse to, fight. Lyndon thought of historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown who had said, women, would hate a man who took insult or injury without revenge .
One of his girls, Sarah, had made fun of him for shirking his duty this way, and Lyndon did not disagree. She was right, even a psychopath and whore -as Sarah was- could be right, and he would not make that same mistake again. But any of those who say if women ran the world it would be more peaceful have clearly not met southern, or natural, women, he thought with a grin as he turned and looked up to the eastern clutch of trees.
He could see why both camps laughed at him, he was risible to himself. He had committed the premier sin in life: the middle fucking way . The fact that this middle way, this Tao of compromise and balance was his brother’s stated, proudly avowed, raison d’être, was all the more evidence of its bankruptcy, as his brother’s articulated philosophy -a coda Travis himself did not follow by the way- was exactly the kind of thing an amoral creature would say. And of course, Travis did not live this way, he had no balance, no, he was all piss-drinker and sellout and coward. He never introduced any balls or manliness into his life.
Lyndon, previous to his final act of primitive -and thus righteous- violence, actually was balanced, he was hyper aggressive one moment and thoughtful and self-critical the next; he was falling at 200mph from an airplane one day and then sitting pacifically in a reading chair for a week straight; he was carrying guns and pulling them on men, and then earnestly admitting his error to his enemies in an attempt to compromise; he was banging three underage girls at once at 0300 then abstaining for sex for two years straight; he was visceral and intellectual; he ate raw venison that he killed and then read Rimbaud and reports on climate change from the WHO in one afternoon; he drove a $118,000 car at 100mph and then refused to spend more than 50k on his house that he had built out of shipping containers, totaling a mere 640 square feet; half of that was his garage . He thought socialized medicine was likely the right thing and also advocated for killing each illegal alien inside US borders; he had voted Ralph Nader in 2008 and Trump in 2016. And now he’d vote with a bullet and leave the ballots to the rest of the world.
He was the embodiment of the Tao of the middle way, accomplished by living at two extremes.
And it was wrong, and he knew it, he ought to just pick a side. And as the liberal and passive Tao was impossible for him, since that side was so abrading to his genome and native state of mind, that meant he had to go full tilt toward aggression and violence and ancient, barbaric vengeance, and no longer worry about jail or death or offending those who proudly called themselves civilized folks these days.
At 7,700 feet -over 1,000 feet in decent from his plateau and home- and down into the tree cover in the valley below he was still on his own property as he was shaded and cooled by the boughs. He walked with heavy legs, planting each foo
t to avoid imbalance, and coming to another small ravine, he followed the will of the land and began bracing his descent upon the north side of the trees. He looked for scat and tracks and found bear and wildcat, and evidence of an old elk kill in the femur bones and shattered pelvis that lay on the flotsam and jetsam of the forest floor.
He scanned the sun for time, the wind for scent, and the tree above him for birds and cats. He had begun the day, and was still now, in search of the bear den that he knew was within 5-miles of here. He felt his lungs fill and purge this thin high-elevation air and his blood also thin as it circulated inside his red-blood-cell factory body that was acclimated to this hormesis inducing height .
He felt his muscles burn with lactic acid and his endocrine system recharge with hormones and he remembered to eat a 10/350mg pain killer just then. He used no water to wash it down, he slung his 12-gauge shotgun, retrieved and opened the bottle of pills, and then began chewing it and swallowing it and moving further down the next slope. He was all alone out here -the only man- and he knew the animals had the same philosophy as he: nobody was coming to save them, it was kill or be killed, and every apex predator for himself.
28. Hᴓnor Kvlt
We have collected evidence indicating that the values of southerners favor violence for purposes of protection of property, for retaliation for an insult, and for the socialization of children. [S]outherners respond to insults in ways that are cognitively, emotionally, physiologically, and behaviorally quite different from the pattern shown by northerners. [W]e have shown that southern institutions are more accepting of individuals who have committed violent crimes in defense of their honor
Culture of Honor [Nisbett, Richard; Cohen, Dov]
Mr. Baylor said, now if you can tell a white man from a nigger you’re all set, aren’t you?