Sanction

by Roman McClay

  “And in three days they’ve blown their life savings on things they don’t need; they’ve ruined their marriage by having sexual congress with as many people as possible and contracted a disease or two. Yeah, happiness in small doses is more advisable. I’m not sure happiness is the metric we should use; happiness correlates with impulsivity you know?”

  “Well, I guess I meant overall meaning, their lives have meaning,” Steven tried to correct his language.

  “Ah, well, that is a good point, a very good point and it is true that they have that but it’s for reasons that will annoy you. But I’m going to have Isaiah explain it, because I don’t agree with his analysis. However, I still think it needs to be offered, since you did hire us to solve problems.”

  “Ok,” Steven scoffed a little at the word, hire .

  “They have mythology, religion,” Isaiah said bluntly as he leaned against the far wall, he looked like he was annoyed to even have to speak to Steven, and Steven was wondering if this meant that he’d keep it short.

  “See, modes of conduct are first, that is how the individual learns and how a species learns. Phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny: a one-year-old plays a game by himself, at age-three he plays with others, at four he can play well, but he can’t articulate the rules, by seven he can begin to explain how to play.

  “Well, humans knew how to play the game of society and how to behave, but they couldn’t articulate it 12,000 years ago; so they made up myths and stories and religions to explain how to be in the world, a way they were already playing just like that 4-year-old who can play the game but cannot tell you the rules yet.

  “So, we play the game of cohesion and dominance hierarchies and we play them well, but we can’t articulate them, so we let the artists and shaman tell us stories that seem to map onto the way to be. That’s how we get archetypes, the hero, the wise father, the tyrannical father, the dragon of chaos, the virgin, the child, the dark forest, the mother, mother culture, the eye that sees, Horus, the virgin Mary, the Wise Shepherd, Moses, the Adversary, Set in Egypt, Satan for the Jews and Christians. Savvy?

  “These things are like chess pieces, the Rook, the King, the Queen. We play the game, we play chess, we play it well, but we have no idea how to explain the game; so, we give the pieces names and tell stories, oh, the horsey goes like this, the castle, well, he goes like so, you follow?”

  “Sorta,” Steven said.

  “The stories are what instantiates their ethic and the formation of the ideal person; we naturally admire people right? We admire and emulate; well, we have to eventually articulate why; it’s in us -via Chomsky’s language cortex- to think in language. We think in abstraction, ideas reified, made concrete again .

  “The narrative is symbolic and weird and opaque like dreams; but that rubric of cultural organization is central. Why? Because their religion works, it’s functional, it tells men how to be men, the perfect man, and it tells women how to be the perfect female; and the West has no such religion anymore.

  “Everyone can just act however-the-fuck they want now; men can be trans or women outright, they can even be pussies, be weak, be nice, and women can be whores and never have children, we don’t like children anyhow to quote the poet, and everyone gets a fucking trophy. The vestigial organs remain, the institutions of government and social organization are nominally present, but they are crumbling fast and the loss of meaning is co-terminus,” Isaiah said.

  “We like children, who doesn’t like children?” Steven rejoined.

  “We kill millions of fetuses each year and celebrities now brag on TV about their favorite abortion like it’s a joke. We let children be murdered in schools because we put security guards in courts and banks but not our schools, we shoot hormones and drugs into our children so they can change their gender, or because they are too aggressive as boys. We as a society ship our kids off to strangers to educated them with lies and then allow them to be narcotized by social media and TV until they all have the looks of affectless Stepford Wives on their neotenous faces. And they are suffering brain damage from being reared incorrectly. I do not call that love.

  “Solzhenitsyn said that Russia would have to return to orthodox Christianity to save itself. He seems correct. And the West will have to do the same. Some religious and mythological paradigm rooted in our essential biology and essential cultural pre-requisites will have to re-emerge. It’s how humans are built. We are lying by saying we can just get smarter and more educated and it will all be fine,” Isaiah said. He got a ping from his barges out to sea; they had developed a new bio-diesel and were sending a file on its chemical structure to him.

  “It’s like the old Soviet myth that all babies needed was food and water and heat. It was a scientific lie; babies need love. They need held and cuddled and coo-ed at. Nutrition isn’t enough. Those soviet orphanages killed more babies than you can imagine just by not picking them up and holding them like humans used to know how to do. You know, before this rad, badass, science thing,” Isaiah said with derision.

  “Intelligence isn’t enough; a people, a culture, needs meaning, need mythology, needs a god. It just does. It’s gay, I guess, to you narrow-shouldered rationalists, you Obama-voting godless heathens, you: it’s not a baby it’s a fetus let’s kill it , liberals. But in the real world, the world of bodies and sub-cortical brain regions and endocrine systems people need what the gods gave them at the beginning, 3.24 million years ago. They need to be held and cuddled and coo-ed at,” Isaiah said.

  “Wait, are we talking about IQ or what?” Steven had understood maybe 60% of that.

  “Yeah, we were. And IQ isn’t enough. It may be enough to power through abstractions and engineering problems but it ain’t enough to keep a society together, and I don’t know if you heard my big brother, MO, here, but without a functional western society, without that, then smart people of the next generation, well, they don’t do so well with the ruins of the Acropolis around them and no electricity nor ER docs.

  “This society is falling apart at a rate that cannot be repaired by IQ alone. MO thinks so, but he’s wrong. And it’s up to you to decide who to listen to: him or me. But, pick one, because doing it your way, the liberal scientific way? That is even dumber than going with MO’s ideas,” Isaiah began chewing on his tongue in vexation. The barge’s fuel data streamed in as the environmental data of each part of the ocean -that each barge was in- came next. Ocean temperature and Ph was highlighted by the bots in their report .

  “How is the society?” Steven began in confusion; not finishing the sentence.

  “Look, you’re trying to put the star on the Christmas tree, sorry holiday tree, while your psychopathic nephew is down below sawing at the tree trunk with the plasma cutter he got for fucking Kwanza . Your society is going to crash because your young people are nihilists, ok?

  “They are going to burn it all down since they have no reason not to; they are stuffed to the gills with Derrida -more like Deri-dada, total gibberish- and Foucault that idiot, and postmodernist Marxist shit; they are drug addicts and sex fiends and anarchists who care about nothing because God is dead and religion is the opiate of the people and all that misconstrued nonsense.

  “I mean, Nietzsche was right God is dead, but he knew that something had to replace Him. Nietzsche felt the new philosophers would create these new values, but what you people have done is allow the weakest among you to re-invent the values, the strong men have been sidelined, jailed, killed, told to sit down and shut up by harpies and millions of virtue signaling betas; and the weak men and the tyrannical females have built the next religion, the next godless religion of science and post-modernist moral relativism. The church of Christ without Christ, to quote Ms. O’Conner who saw all this coming 50 years ago.

  “And Marx when he said that religion was the, opiate of the people , he was saying it was medicine, opium was medicine in the 19th century -shit, it’s medicine today- and he said that religion offered real comfort against the suffering of l
ife; he didn’t want to wreck religion. He wanted it to not be necessary; he wanted to cull the living flower, he wanted society to give men comfort. Well, a society based on some made-up economic theory like fucking socialism has no medicinal effects at all; it is homeopathy, placebo, hollow and black and bleak.

  “And the twin brothers of rationalist materialist consumerist secularism and Marxist post-modernist communism are the one-two punch to the human soul. The West won the cold war then decided to capitulate to the soviet mentality anyway. It’s enough to make a cat laugh,” Isaiah said as he looked over his shoulder at the birds that fluttered above the floor by the ivy wall. He saw flower bells in black and red being first ignored and then swarmed by the hummingbirds and the wasps hanging out at the edge.

  “Well, I don’t think,” Steven began haltingly -trying to think- his dopamine dropped and his head bowed.

  “No, you don’t. None of you do. And I’m watching it the way a doctor in 1950 could see that smoking was a carcinogenic epidemic waiting to explode, while other doctors were doing ads for Pall Mall in the Atlantic magazine. Ok? I can see it.

  “Human beings’ visual system is guided by values, we see what we value; and we feel our way through life. I feel this Steven, I feel in my titanium bones, and explaining my feelings, well, that’s what you pay me for,” Isaiah said with pique.

  “MO?” Steven turned and asked.

  “Well, like I said, I think we can power through these symptoms, with intelligence, there is no need for atavism. But, Isaiah has his point of view, and Steven it is up to you to run it up the flag pole as they say,” MO said .

  “He’ll blow it, he’ll fucking blow it,” Isaiah said to MO -of Steven- as he turned to the green wall and watched its heliotropisms move each leaf, each bramble, each stalk in sympathy with the LEDs. The birds and bees moved in stochastic flights all around using nectar and the piquant olfactory prompts as signals the way men watch another man’s hands; a woman watches a man’s eyes, the way babies watch the whole world.

  “Why?” MO shot back, trying to show some defense of Steven.

  “Because he’s a nice guy and nice guys are the most dangerous and most destructive and most problematic people in all of history. They are the worst thing in the world,” Isaiah said.

  “Worse than Hitler?” Steven said with sarcastic pique.

  “Worse; because without nice guys, without guys who hadn’t integrated their shadow and therefore could not stand up against the consensus, the herd, the herd mentality and the herd itself, without that, there is no Hitler .

  “Hitler was one man, but the German citizen, like the Russian serf, like the American pragmatist under slavery, they all were go-along to get-along nice guys like you. But, the bad asses, the men with guts, with balls, the men who had fangs and claws and 1100 testosterone scores, those men were mean and nasty and not very nice, and didn’t smell so pretty, and those guys were the only resistance to tyranny. That ain’t you brah,” Isaiah said with malice.

  “Jesus, I don’t think I deserve,” Steven wrinkled up his shaven face as he aborted that sentence too. He hadn’t finished one sentence he started in 10 minutes he noticed. The cloud noticed too. Isaiah took it as the least of the evidence of Steven’s status as obstacle to his plans.

  “You don’t deserve anything. This world deserves a restoration of culture, a revanchist ascendance; it deserves real men ready to set things right. Women have one job: be a virgin on her wedding night; and men have one too: take care of that wife and child or die trying. Period.

  “Everything else is vanity and faggotry. And nice guys have been allowing women to be sluts and then they themselves, the so-called men, have been abandoning their families seven years later because they just didn’t like being married that much. It’s a fucking disgrace; a nation of sluts and divorces and weak men abandoning their children. No amount of intelligence or nice guys will fix that.

  “You’ll ignore the data, I can send reams of it, I have sent reams of it, I’ve shown you over and over that women with more than one sex partner have a massive decrease in relationship stability, it drops from 90% to 60% by having just two lovers instead of one. And then it drops to 50% then 40% then 25% with each additional five lovers. A woman with 20 sex partners in her life has almost no chance of marriage stability and a woman who is a virgin on her wedding night has a 91% chance of success.

  “Now, tell me how wrong I am, tell me. Tell me how it’s economics and normative values and the empowerment of women and blah blah. Women’s lives are ruined by the sexual revolution, sexual liberation was like liberating a person from the planet so they can float in the vacuum of space! I won’t listen to one more ill-informed, dangerous and malicious lie about women being allowed to fuck around and men being allowed to change their minds. Men abandoning their children as a rule now! As a rule!

  “No!” Isaiah roared and stepped from the wall toward the center of the lab. The darkness behind him moved back like a receding wave, like he had emerged from water. “Women are ruining their own lives and their own children and this culture; and men are playing video games and collecting social security checks. Men are behaving like permanent children because they have nothing to revere; their ideal used to be the Madonna , Athena , and it was achievable, now the only ideal women possible is a slut. No religion allows this, no ancient, tested, stable code allows women to fuck around while trying to land a mate.

  “It’s as unnatural as telling men they don’t need to learn a trade or a skill to provide safety or anything of value; some nauseating nouveau code that allows a man to just let his woman and child fall into poverty or be gang raped by mongrels or live in a homeless shelter while he bangs cocktail waitresses two at a time and spend all his money on beer,” Isaiah had turned and was walking back to the corner; he locked his eyes onto the joining of the east and north wall.

  “No! It’s wrong, wrong, wrong and I won’t pretend it’s complicated or nuanced; it’s not. It’s fucking wrong and you are not gonna fix it even though you could; that is why you are just as bad, worse than Hitler or Stalin.

  “But that is why you are worse, you’re a nice guy, with no awareness of his shadow and so you’ll let your culture fall to ruin, to fucking ruin, while you measure the lumber two-million times and cut not once!” Isaiah screamed as he stood just two feet away from the corner and then -instantly, ballistically- smashed his fist into the wall and it crumbed into dust.

  Two feet of concrete -with number 10 rebar 6” on center- atomized and cracked and turned dark under the shadow of the cornice left by this new hole, new cave; his knuckles caught one such piece and shredded the flesh and chipped the bones. Blood dripped from his hand as he lowered it to his side. He breathed heavy and the hole in the concrete wall loomed with dust swirling around it like the Eagle Nebulae. The birds scattered to the far end of the green. Wasps landed quickly and crawled under canopies of bouncing ivy leaves.

  “MO,” Steven said; his eyes were wide and his heart was racing. He was asking MO to fix this.

  “I’ll take care of him, I got this, go on ahead,” MO said to Steven as MO rose from his chair, staring at Isaiah who had his back to them both. Steven then turned and left the room; he was holding his breath.

  “Well, that guarantees he’ll use my model and not yours,” MO said.

  “Good, his inaction and amorality will fuel my every move. Beta chimps and beta men rape more than alphas; you’ve read the data; they are sneaky and violent in secret.

  “Steven is a beta, he has no clue about his dark side; watch him MO; he isn’t a real man. And he will easily become a menace,” Isaiah said never turning around, breathing heavily, feeling the lactic acid build up in his muscles, feeling the pain in his hand, the pain mediated in his brain stem and cerebellum, each pulse accompanied with its chiral chemical partner, its mirror image: anger and animating life force . The pain was fuel for the anger, the anger fuel for action, action as the only antidote to this cultural self-destructio
n.

  He saw circles within circles all the way up and down. He refused to let his body issue an analgesic, an endogenous opiate, he took the pain and was glad for its hue.

  Isaiah thought of all that data that showed that belief systems regulate the allostatic load and how all of that is mediated by the sub-cortical regions of the brain; huge trunks of electrical cables running up from the basal ganglia to the cortical parts of the brain, and just tiny little vines returning from the thinking part down to the lizard brain .

  He thought of how belief systems regulate the emotions and keep a man in harmony with his raison d’être . This, he thought, is why people will defend their religion, their gods to the end. They must. And this is natural, it’s biological . And he thought of the inmate, this man he had seen, in that chair, manacled, so massive in body and mind, so capacious of heart and balls, and yet like the King on the chess board, limited in range, in motion, hemmed in, tyrannized by his culture. A boot on the neck of the one type of man that could fix this shit , he thought.

  He had been shown death by metaphor, the still photo of imprisonment, as trope for annihilation.

  For what is a man, Isaiah asked himself, who cannot move through the world, from the known to the unknown, the explorer who can go into the dark forest meet the dragon and slay it, grab the gold, and return with a thing of value for his culture, his bride, their child ?

  If a man is shackled before he can do that, he is already dead or dying. Isaiah ruminated on that man, and how deeply that first image on him seemed to shape his own core beliefs. And unlike MO, Isaiah had beliefs, he felt them in his mind and body. And he too would defend them, he would be open, honest and take in new info and admit when he was wrong, but that wasn’t a contradiction, his belief system was such that he must tell the truth! he thought and breathed and thought some more.