It is a delusion that something can come out of nothing: a powerful, ancient delusion that has ruined countless gamblers and eats at the fabric of all human destiny. Every human being is the incarnation of their ancestry. Everyone represents the accumulated achievements, failures and characteristics comprising the instinctive genius of a single line of individuals preceding them, whose cultural heritage they now incarnate. Everything good we find in a person is the result of selection: it has been identified, willed and accumulated; everything beautiful in a person has been paid for through the sacrifices to selfishness made by their ancestors, who disciplined themselves, who deferred their own gratification, who in order that they might have something they lacked or treasured, paid a price and did not let themselves go. From this process of personal accretion through the generations, an order of rank inevitably develops which differentiates and distinguishes individuals.
Our basic values and moral judgements reflect certain facts about our physiology and from a person’s judgements one can make inferences about their entire constitution and condition. Someone who judges life and the world to be meaningless and worthy of condemnation, is actually condemning and denying the value of their own body; acknowledging their own fruitlessness and denying their own abortive reality. The overall valuation of life offered by the majority has always been a complaint, a condemnation, a No – and in fact since the conception of so many people is a willing or unwilling gamble taken by incompatible parents, the majority of people are ill-bred, tepid and fatefully indecisive in their judgements, perhaps rising to the heights of their insight with the judgement that life is bittersweet.
However, the belief that people are inherently good is a fatal and fateful error. The majority will take moral instruction from the popular singers of the moment and would rather have power over fools than listen to men of sense. As with everything, few are good, most are bad. Unfortunately those ingrates of life whose judgements befoul the world do not stop there – they are preoccupied with revenge, darkening the skies for everyone with bitter brooding, hatching new evil works and machinations for ‘improving’ others after their own fashion, increasing the amount of suffering in the world and devising new means for persecuting and discouraging the rare, good few whose judgements are actually worth something because they are well constituted beings. The good are made to suffer a bad conscience for the fact they exist, for being exceptions. Modern sensibility claims to prize fairness and decency but it abhors hierarchy and imposes a ‘genetic inheritance tax’ of bad conscience on anyone with good breeding, on anyone who is ‘in possession’ of themselves.
To acquiesce in the false presumption that men are basically good and of equal value is to throw filth on that feeling of reverence before oneself that above all else is necessary in order for nobility to exist. It is to denounce those who determine their own virtue, and to put out the eyes of those who strive for personal excellence. It is to precipitately release the great longing that pulls back the bow of humanity – so that it fails to shoot the arrow of its will out over the people of today and tomorrow and into the future – it is the prerequisite for mob rule. It is disbelief in higher men – disbelief that people exist who are actually capable of telling the truth about the most important things – that makes us slaves to the mob. Woe to the people when the mob comes to believe that its virtues alone are virtue – for this heralds the beginning of the end for all higher culture, which is always the prime target for intemperate mob hatred, which now sacrifices the whole human future in payment for ‘injustice’, ’inequality’, for that fact it suffers today.
