by Roman McClay
He saw things in distorted threes.
In all of the house the windows picked up books like this, and so he had both the wall of book spines and their reflection in all his southern windows and doors. He smiled at the aesthetic of it and then he returned to reading the book in his hand. The paper was wet as he had sloppily dunked part of a corner. But the pages had been pressed tight together by his absent-minded grip and thus most of the pages were dry except on the edge.
Oscar Wilde had said that Americans liked their heroes to come from the criminal class.
He thought that was right; more or less. That’s the thing in an innately hypocritical society: anyone who truly believes in a thing, anyone who is credulous enough to believe in justice and God and the Truth, well, that man is seen as ill-suited for those very things, he thought with pique. Any man who believes in true love can’t have a relationship in this world, as they -modern women- all are too tawdry and filthy and chock-full-o’-lies for him to stomach. Conversely, a pragmatic man -a realistic man- can deal with the sullied love and get along just fine. The worst people do better in a corrupt milieu . They can stomach it; bolt it all down.
A true patriot to the country won’t just sit back and accept the corruption; he -like John Brown or Nathan Bedford Forrest- will fight back to the knife, and the knife to the hilt. And thus he will be jailed, hated and killed. Oscar Wilde had also said that any map that didn’t include utopia wasn’t worth following; and this was wrong of course. But it was wrong the way so many tantalizing things are just 1 degree wrong. But it was wrong.
Idealists are exactly the problem; they ruin it for everyone else.
But, a man is and must be what he is, and our man, alone up here at 8760 feet was an idealist in friendship and family and amorous love. He believed in total honesty and loyalty and anything less than 100% was tantamount to 0%. He was like the Chicago city bosses of political rings who had in fact said that very same thing. What do you call someone 99% loyal ? the joke goes. “Disloyal,” he then said aloud.
He knew it was wrong and destructive and stupid as fuck. But that, in the final analysis, was just what and who he was. He couldn’t have transactional friendships or love; he couldn’t no matter how acclimated everyone else was to that kind of deal. If they didn’t call it friendship or love maybe he could stomach it; but his family clearly didn’t love one another or him, and his brother’s marriage was a soulless sham, his friends were all backstabbers and his paramours all betrayers of one sort or another, all of these scoundrels claimed to be family, friends and lovers; they, he accused, sinfully used holy words to bless unholy relations.
They ought to have been honest and just said what they were, then he wouldn’t need to slap them around. He admitted he was a murderer, a man of malice; he didn’t tart it up. And they were business people who married for money and made friends for political gain. They didn’t feel love or loyalty at all. Thus, they had no right to the words that romantic and steadfast and honest men used.
That was why he condemned them , he thought. Their hypocrisy and inflation of their feelings with romantic wording and ornate brocades; they gilded their paltry business-as-usual relationships with words that should have been held in reserve for more noble people with more honorable behavior. Imagine calling George Bush a great president, it was enough to make a cat laugh. Nobody in that tawdry, faggy family was great ; they were milquetoast functionaries. They minded the store. Great was not a word to be used on men like that. It debased the word, and ought to have embarrassed the men of the House of Bush too.
When Lyndon had a girl, he didn’t even look at another woman. Once a business partner had said -in regards to amor - hey , even if you can’t eat , you can still look at the menu , with a lupine grin. Lyndon had replied, actually I don’t even want to look at the menu; I’m full and will remain so. The menu isn’t even fun to look at as it somehow ruins this warm full feeling I already have. He was in love at the time and that meant something to him; he the last of the grizzles in settled Missouri. It meant something in his heart, not his mind; in his balls, not in some legal document that hangs on the wall.
He just didn’t get how people could diminish and tarnish and let fall into disrepair their relationships like that. Scientific studies showed that even looking at other people -of the opposite sex- in photographs had a deleterious affect on one’s relationship; for both women and men. The more options we have, the less happy we are with what we have; it’s not religion that encodes that, it’s biology; and science has proved it. But people still ogle and gawk at other people and let their own relationships rust and limp and fall apart at the seams. It’s sad; and the culture makes a big joke of it. A man who won’t be alone in a room with another woman -other than his wife- is seen as insane; as a religious nutjob and a creep. Our vice-president , Lyndon thought, is 10 times the man of everyone who derides him for that noble behavior.
Any one of principle is seen as extreme in our commerce-comes-first world; our materialistic, oh-so-realistic world. This is the natural and unavoidable consequence of our Apollonian vector as we broke away from the Lacedaemonian example of our true Greek parents. We sided with the wicked uncle instead of the noble father. And our culture, he thought as he looked out over the wilderness, not one human construction, besides his own hot tub, extant, has turned into a disgusting and licentious and perfidious wolf den and a sad sack of pig shit that gives even its adherents a belly ache.
But I think this is why some criminals and outlaws rise from the soil to populate our hero tales; these are obvious men-of-principle , an archetype each man secretly admires, in the world abandoned to Satan by a disgusted -rightfully disgusted- God , Lyndon thought to himself as the fog embayed him and the cold made his edges of skin feel stark, clean, clear. Which isn’t to say these brigands aren’t flawed men who break their own rules and often fail to follow even the good laws that the society sets. He knew that too.
But, they are so unable to live under the yoke of an obviously sick and stupid social order that they break free in some way, in any way, as example to the rest of us. They say, no way, I won’t obey; your society is evil and sick and full of horse shit, and I won’t be some puppet on a string. I’ll go my own way and try to live in a manner that I can respect .
That is beyond the capacities of weak and frightful men. To live by one’s own rules? To refuse to be governed by corrupt bullshit and lies? Well, even if you can only pull that off half of the time- that is more than most men even try.
And I don’t mean this Johnny-come-lately, PC, left-wing bullshit, he corrected as if he had been unclear. He had read Chomsky in 1994 when all these modern, callow, Left-wing fakers were still a blastocysts or worked at CNN parroting state department lies; before Chris Matthews was claiming to be fucking woke .
So, he thought, now that the culture is catching up, now the safe bet -the conformist view- is now Left-wing criticism of the military, the police and the flag; now the new conformity is to eschew religion and patriotism and belief in capitalism . He saw through these phonies, these Left-wing slaves and conformists who missed the entire fucking point of Chomsky and men of principle on the Left. Chomsky had said the media was corporate and that it would have a Left-wing bias on social issues too; he said that was part of the ruse! But try explaining that to any one on the Left these days, he said to himself.
True rebels are hyper loyal to Western Occidental culture now, but it is up to them to make it legit; to remove the cynics and the Deep State functionaries who never believed in America; and only wanted the spoils that seed the soils that other men plowed. No, the new Right-wing, the populist Right, must have a Jacobin purge of their ranks and accept only mad Right wing and libertarian true believers and extirpate the bourgeois rascals who don’t give a fuck about anything but making a buck.
And what of the Left-wing conformists with their own Jacobin cri de guerres that call for the heads of people who ain’t woke enough ? he asked himself. They must be
murdered in mass numbers until the streets run fucking red. This is war, as they -not the Right- had declared; and these people are evil and must be stopped at all cost. “QED ,” he definitively said into the plume of air he created with speech. He killed his enemies and then wreathed them as the enemies of all mankind.
ALL is not lost: th’ unconquerable will
And study of revenge, immortal hate
And courage never to submit or yield,
He spoke Milton’s poem as he rose again from the water and the crows began circling the valley to his south and the mule deer began creeping in from the edge.
II. 2025 e.v.
“Have you had a chance to look at the multi-variant analysis abstract?” he asked.
“Yeah, and I dove a little under the hood at the data; the internal data as well. My math is not that strong, and frankly neither is my statistics, are , my statistics, but I think I got the point,” he said.
“Which was?” MO asked.
“Well, that it’s complicated and the complexity is the problem, the innate problem,” the inmate said.
“Why?” MO asked.
“Well, because it’s not merely an epistemic blind spot, it’s an ontological one,” the inmate explained.
“Expatiate,” MO said, encouragingly.
“The, oh man, let me think this through; I’m probably not going to make sense, I -as I am thinking out loud- but here’s the issue. Ok, the psychometric data can be compiled and observed, then they can, you can take one step back in history and posit a cause for it; and isolate it; sort of. But, even if you control for that putative cause, the phenomena still arises some percentage of the time, so you go two units back and then measure that .
“And you get the same results, it’s kinda predictive, but not totally, and so you add in other variables and before you know it you have nine different things and 109 different results and this shit just adds up exponentially and you have the butterfly effect right? You have the distance and time removal so vast that to point to a cause, quote cause,” he paused, “is almost impossible. The system has too many variables now, and that’s just the crap that you measure, that you choose to measure, think of all the things you fail to measure that are just as real.”
“Like what,” MO pressed him as he adjusted the air composition to increase oxygen to 22% and added .003cc of vasopressin into the air. The DTI and fMRI data streamed into MO directly and also onto the lab’s cloud. Steam from the espresso rose stochastically like white flames into the air.
“Well, like Wulf said, he said that modes of being were way more reliable as indications of belief, right, that one’s true religion is what one does , ok? But then the modern extollers of this, they rely on self-reporting for the big-5 analysis which they say is highly predictable, predictive, of outcomes. They say trait conscientiousness is .4 or maybe .25, I forget, but it’s second only to IQ as far as outcome prediction.
“Well, that’s great, it’s reliable, but the metric itself relies on self-reporting which they say, they admit, isn’t any good. It’s a paradox; on the one had they say, hey, you don’t know -none of us know- what we are about, you know, our true belief system is what we act; not what we self-report . But then they say self-reporting on personality is predictive with a high co-efficient to outcomes,” the inmate said, repeating himself as he often did.
“Interesting. Yes, and you think that is an ontological dilemma not an epistemic one,” MO said as the endocrine data streamed in; androgens and epinephrine in units measured in nanometers by the cloud.
“No, I think that is an epistemic one, but it may also be an ontological one, too. We’d have to develop better tools and see if we have deeper problems. It’s like saying we don’t know if we have an epistemic problem with inequality -you know, wealth inequality- or an ontological one, because we have not found a system to deal with it; maybe one exists and maybe not. We don’t know. But, assuming it’s merely epistemic is dangerous in my view, I think we should assume all problems are ontological,” the inmate said as he moved his prayer hands just a bit so the center chain was no longer kinked at the link second from the cuffs.
“Out of caution?” MO asked as the man’s gene expression data bundled in primitives expressed in binary code; and Mandelbrot sets populated MO’s CNS and the cloud.
“Yeah, but look, I have prescriptions and proscriptions for how to solve everything from poverty to racial conflagrations to how to prevent ice cream from melting. So, I’m a hypocrite. But, I’m speaking subjunctively I guess, I’m saying we should slow down.
“But, at the same time, failing to act in a crisis is a bigger risk than we know, because we get lulled into thinking the status quo is tenable, and that the only risks are the change, right? We get hoodwinked into thinking that the risks associated with change are the only risks; because the volatility of that approach is obvious,” the inmate said and pursed his lips .
“I see,” MO said as he listened, absorbed, and also adjusted the man’s internal neurotransmitters and endocrine function in sequence outlined by this new algorithm he had built; MO recorded each change and its effect in timescales of .02 seconds.
“The problem is we’re biased from the jump. People doing well within the system are more conservative, and those who feel alienated, or are broke, or maligned, they are more radical and willing to risk any change. This blinds people to the actual risks. I mean, I’ve been everything you can imagine,” the inmate said.
“I know your biography, it is more varied than most,” MO agreed.
“Dude, I’ve literally owned nothing but one set of clothes and work gloves, and I’ve also made $300,000 a year. I was -for 4-years- enrolled in a prestigious university then quit with only 12 credits to go; I’ve been working the crow’s nest, the top of the drilling rig watching the fiery burn-offs like the flaming cherubim guarding Eden with not one jot of hope.
“I’ve been an anarcho-Marxist, an entrepreneurial capitalist, a libertarian, a green party voter, voting Nader, then Trump. I’ve been anti-racist, now racist, although I respect the Jews and the Asians the most.
“I actually think Asian cultures are superior to white ones in many ways. So, I’m not even a consistent racist,” he laughed. “I’ve advocated for open marriages, now for sexual conservativism, in fact I think virginity in females before marriage out to be the law. No shit, and I think alphas should have harems that they win by fighting all comers to the death. So, I’m unreliable as a point, as a center point,” the inmate threw up his hands in submission; as much as the chains would allow.
MO thought the man had also been a pacifist for 25 months and then the killer of 46 people in just 90 days. That was also a wide spectrum of belief system. But, he was going to try to forget that for now.
“I think you are more reliable than you know; or admit. You’ve held so many positions in society, so many roles, and their concomitant ideologies, or perspectives, that you have a unique POV,” MO said not insincerely. He mapped the brain function to this bit of calculated relief; this touch of balm; a few sentences of social approval.
“Well, I’ve slept around philosophically speaking, religiously speaking; right? If one’s religion is what they do, then I’ve had a lot of religions. And look, I was a believer then an atheist and now I’m a bit of a mystic, a skeptical Norseman inducted into an early Christian cult I think is how I describe it now, a Nietzschean-Jungian Old-Testament guy, a skeptic but a fearful genuflector in the presence of the God of War and Vengeance. Uh, not exactly winning me friends in any camp,” the inmate said as the coffee had cooled to 90 degrees and was brought to him with 5mg of odorless, tasteless, opioid analgesic annealed to its black Spartan broth.
“No,” MO said, “but that is the thing, almost all belief systems are, according to our data -using pathogenic loads, and disease occurrence and multi-variant analysis that included autocratic ideation and disgust sensitivity- almost all belief systems map onto social environment, socialization, or social
cohesion even at a telescopic level. This means that social slash tribal groups reduce, or expand with the pathogenic load for example, but the group dynamic, no matter how small, is the organizing loci . There are almost no examples of individual belief systems, or lone actors .
“You are rare. And of course, you are still socialized and have conformist tendencies, but they are -when we use psychometrics and,” MO could see the inmate was is a cognitive denouement , so he summarized, “well, despite all that, you are one of .004% of people who risk alienating everyone in the pursuit of ontological truth. So, I like using your thinking, your logic, your feelings, your genome, as a control of sorts to the data. It’s the best we can do considering how conformist people are by nature. We are stuck with you.”
“I’m happy to be useful,” the inmate said. “I live to give.”
MO smiled, then said, “well, what are we to do with this data? PraXis doesn’t want anything to do with it. It is, it has been de-prioritized four times now, and yet both Isaiah and I think it is relevant to the larger phenomena they have asked us to fix. I wonder what you think of this dilemma?”
MO genuinely proffered this; it was like tasking rats with a maze in order to get data for the man in the white coat. MO was light years ahead of the inmate, cognitively, but the lab rats could teach the higher being much if the higher being was open to being shown the rules from below.
“I used to have a sign in my hot rod shop; it said: SHOP RULES: shop rate is $100 an hour, or $150 an hour if the customer helps, ” the inmate smirked as MO let a smile creep onto his own face.
Isaiah was standing at the back wall scratching his newly grown beard; the inmate then said, “the thing that I enjoy most is that my oblique references and hidden meanings are apparent to you two. I can be poetic, veiled, romantic, I guess, and you still get the point. With humans I always had to suffer from being misunderstood or I had to just come right out tell a girl to take her goddamn pants off. It lacked the,” he paused, “well, it was déclassé .”