[PC] Hatred

[christian]

http://www.hatredgame.com/

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[christian]

From the preface of Friedrich Schiller's The Robbers - http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6782/6782-h/6782-h.htm

It is, however, not so much the bulk of my play as its contents which banish it from the stage. Its scheme and economy require that several characters should appear who would offend the finer feelings of virtue and shock the delicacy of our manners. Every delineator of human character is placed in the same dilemma if he proposes to give a faithful picture of the world as it really is, and not an ideal phantasy, a mere creation of his own. It is the course of mortal things that the good should be shadowed by the bad, and virtue shine the brightest when contrasted with vice. Whoever proposes to discourage vice and to vindicate religion, morality, and social order against their enemies, must unveil crime in all its deformity, and place it before the eyes of men in its colossal magnitude; he must diligently explore its dark mazes, and make himself familiar with sentiments at the wickedness of which his soul revolts.

Vice is here exposed in its innermost workings. In Francis it resolves all the confused terrors of conscience into wild abstractions, destroys virtuous sentiments by dissecting them, and holds up the earnest voice of religion to mockery and scorn. He who has gone so far (a distinction by no means enviable) as to quicken his understanding at the expense of his soul—to him the holiest things are no longer holy; to him God and man are alike indifferent, and both worlds are as nothing. Of such a monster I have endeavored to sketch a striking and lifelike portrait, to hold up to abhorrence all the machinery of his scheme of vice, and to test its strength by contrasting it with truth. How far my narrative is successful in accomplishing these objects the reader is left to judge. My conviction is that I have painted nature to the life.

Next to this man (Francis) stands another who would perhaps puzzle not a few of my readers. A mind for which the greatest crimes have only charms through the glory which attaches to them, the energy which their perpetration requires, and the dangers which attend them. A remarkable and important personage, abundantly endowed with the power of becoming either a Brutus or a Catiline, according as that power is directed. An unhappy conjunction of circumstances determines him to choose the latter for, his example, and it is only after a fearful straying that he is recalled to emulate the former. Erroneous notions of activity and power, an exuberance of strength which bursts through all the barriers of law, must of necessity conflict with the rules of social life. To these enthusiast dreams of greatness and efficiency it needed but a sarcastic bitterness against the unpoetic spirit of the age to complete the strange Don Quixote whom, in the Robber Moor, we at once detest and love, admire and pity. It is, I hope, unnecessary to remark that I no more hold up this picture as a warning exclusively to robbers than the greatest Spanish satire was levelled exclusively at knight-errants.

It is nowadays so much the fashion to be witty at the expense of religion that a man will hardly pass for a genius if he does not allow his impious satire to run a tilt at its most sacred truths. The noble simplicity of holy writ must needs be abused and turned into ridicule at the daily assemblies of the so-called wits; for what is there so holy and serious that will not raise a laugh if a false sense be attached to it? Let me hope that I shall have rendered no inconsiderable service to the cause of true religion and morality in holding up these wanton misbelievers to the detestation of society, under the form of the most despicable robbers.

But still more. I have made these said immoral characters to stand out favorably in particular points, and even in some measure to compensate by qualities of the head for what they are deficient in those of the heart. Herein I have done no more than literally copy nature. Every man, even the most depraved, bears in some degree the impress of the Almighty's image, and perhaps the greatest villain is not farther removed from the most upright man than the petty offender; for the moral forces keep even pace with the powers of the mind, and the greater the capacity bestowed on man, the greater and more enormous becomes his misapplication of it; the more responsible is he for his errors.

The "Adramelech" of Klopstock (in his Messiah) awakens in us a feeling in which admiration is blended with detestation. We follow Milton's Satan with shuddering wonder through the pathless realms of chaos. The Medea of the old dramatists is, in spite of all her crimes, a great and wondrous woman, and Shakespeare's Richard III. is sure to excite the admiration of the reader, much as he would hate the reality. If it is to be my task to portray men as they are, I must at the same time include their good qualities, of which even the most vicious are never totally destitute. If I would warn mankind against the tiger, I must not omit to describe his glossy, beautifully-marked skin, lest, owing to this omission, the ferocious animal should not be recognized till too late. Besides this, a man who is so utterly depraved as to be without a single redeeming point is no meet subject for art, and would disgust rather than excite the interest of the reader; who would turn over with impatience the pages which concern him. A noble soul can no more endure a succession of moral discords than the musical ear the grating of knives upon glass.

And for this reason I should have been ill-advised in attempting to bring my drama on the stage. A certain strength of mind is required both on the part of the poet and the reader; in the former that he may not disguise vice, in the latter that he may not suffer brilliant qualities to beguile him into admiration of what is essentially detestable. Whether the author has fulfilled his duty he leaves others to judge, that his readers will perform theirs he by no means feels assured. The vulgar—among whom I would not be understood to mean merely the rabble—the vulgar I say (between ourselves) extend their influence far around, and unfortunately—set the fashion. Too shortsighted to reach my full meaning, too narrow-minded to comprehend the largeness of my views, too disingenuous to admit my moral aim—they will, I fear, almost frustrate my good intentions, and pretend to discover in my work an apology for the very vice which it has been my object to condemn, and will perhaps make the poor poet, to whom anything rather than justice is usually accorded, responsible for his simplicity.

[christian]

From the foreword to Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Demons - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679734511/

Writing to his publisher some years after completing Demons, he spoke of the "blasphemy" he was then representing in "The Grand Inquisitor" as "the seed of the idea of destruction in our time, in Russia, in the milieu of the young people who have lost touch with reality," and he defined this blasphemy as the "denial not of God, but of the meaning of His creation. The whole of socialism emerged and began with the denial of the meaning of historical reality and went on to a program of destruction and anarchism." In another letter from the same time, he wrote: "... the scientific and philosophical refutation of the existence of God has already been abandoned, present-day practical socialists are not occupied with it at all (as they were for the whole past century and the first half of the present one), instead they deny with all their might God's creation, God's world, and its meaning. Here in this alone does modern civilization find nonsense." The "seed of the idea of destruction" is the revolt against God; but that is over and done with, it is already forgotten, no one is concerned with it anymore. What follows is man's replacement of God and the correction of His creation. This amounts to a declaration of the absurdity and meaninglessness of history, of historical reality as the unfolding of God's will in time, but also as the lived life of mankind -- that is, to a separation from the historical body of mankind. Reality itself, physical reality, begins to drain out of this radical "idea," leaving only the drab abstraction of materialism. This Dostoevsky felt and realized, and it is one reason why his heroes, when they begin to save themselves, kiss the earth and "water it with their tears." The third stage of the revolt in the name of unlimited freedom is destruction and anarchism, represented by Pyotr Verkhovensky. This whole "development" is a continuous fall, and its thrust is towards sheer fantasy, which our century has witnessed in its bloodiest and most senseless forms. Dostoevsky explored, tested, represented these three stages with extraordinary prescience in Demons.

Everything is inverted here: freedom ends in despotism, adoration turns to hatred, lucidity increases blindness, the first real act of the liberator of mankind -- Nechaev or Verkhovensky -- is the murder of his human brother. Seeking the greatest good, we do the greatest evil. The demons parody God's world and invert its ends, playing for its loss. And the source of all these inversions, the primordial parody, is the replacement of the "authoritative image of a human being" by the would-be autonomous human will. Demons are unoriginal. They cannot come up with anything new or real. Their lies are copied from sacred truths. They introduce a dreadful buffoonery into the world.

[christian]

From The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939 - http://www.amazon.com/Intellectuals-Mas ... 897335074/

In his non-fiction works Wells committed himself to formulating ways in which this dreadful future could be averted and the world population controlled. As he saw it, the main problem was the mass of low-grade humanity such as inhabits the underground in When the Sleeper Wakes. All over the world, he observes in Anticipations, published in 1901, ‘vicious, helpless and pauper masses’ have appeared, spreading as the railway systems have spread, and representing an integral part of the process of industrialization, like the waste product of a healthy organism. For these ‘great useless masses of people’ he adopts the term ‘People of the Abyss’, and he predicts that the ‘nation that most resolutely picks over, educates, sterilizes, exports, or poisons its People of the Abyss’ will be in the ascendant.

The word ‘poisons’ may sound extreme here, but getting rid of these inferior types need not, Wells stipulates, worry the conscience of the rulers of his New Republic. On the contrary, it may be looked upon as an ethical duty. He derives his new ethics from two sources: Malthus and Darwin. Malthus’s Essay on Population has, he argues, destroyed facile liberalisms once and for all, by showing that unless the problem of reproduction is solved, all dreams of human betterment must be futile or insincere, or both. Meanwhile, Darwin’s theory of natural selection has rendered untenable the belief in human equality implicit in every liberalizing movement.

It has become apparent that whole masses of human population are, as a whole, inferior in their claim upon the future, to other masses, that they cannot be given opportunities or trusted with power as the superior peoples are trusted, that their characteristic weaknesses are contagious and detrimental in the civilizing fabric, and that their range of incapacity tempts and demoralizes the strong. To give them equality is to sink to their level, to protect and cherish them is to be swamped in their fecundity.

The ethical system that will obtain in Wells’s New Republic will favour the procreation of what is fine and efficient, and check the procreation of ‘base and servile types’. In the past, Nature killed these off, and in some cases killing will still be necessary. Nor, advises Wells, should this appal us. Death for such people will mean merely ‘the end of the bitterness of failure, the merciful obliteration of weak and silly and pointless things’. Clearly the effecting of this will be morally justifiable.

The new ethics will hold life to be a privilege and a responsibility, not a sort of night refuge for base spirits out of the void; and the alternative in right conduct between living fully, beautifully and efficiently will be to die. For a multitude of contemptible and silly creatures, fear-driven and helpless and useless, unhappy or hatefully happy in the midst of squalid dishonour, feeble, ugly, inefficient, born of unrestrained lusts, and increasing and multiplying through sheer incontinence and stupidity, the men of the New Republic will have little pity and less benevolence.

If ‘the whole tenor of a man’s actions’ shows him to be unfit to live, the New Republicans will kill him. They will not be squeamish about inflicting death, because they will have a fuller sense of the possibilities of life. ‘They will have an ideal that will make killing worth the while.’ The killing, Wells explains, will not be needlessly brutal. ‘All such killing will be done with an opiate.’ Whether this will be administered forcibly, or whether the victim will be persuaded to swallow it, he does not reveal. Selected criminals will be destroyed by the same means. Those guilty of ‘outrageous conduct’ to women or children, or of ‘cowardly and brutal assaults’, together with the criminally insane, will be humanely put down, on the principle that ‘people who cannot live happily and freely in the world without spoiling the lives of others are better out of it.’ The death penalty will also be used to prevent the transmission of genetic disorders. People suffering from genetically transmissible diseases will be forbidden to propagate, and will be killed if they do.

Even these wide-reaching reforms will, Wells realizes, still leave unsolved the problem of the black and brown races, whom he considers inferior to whites in intelligence and initiative, and who therefore seem to him to pose the general question to the Western world, ‘What will you do with us, we hundreds of millions, who cannot keep pace with you?’ Clearly administering opiates to the entire populations of China and Africa would raise some practical difficulties, and Wells does not present, in Anticipations, anything approaching a properly worked-out extermination policy. None the less, he appears convinced that genocide is the only answer. The ‘swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people’, who do not meet the new needs of efficiency, will, he insists, ‘have to go’. It is ‘their portion to die out and disappear’.

As a writer of fiction he is able to go much further. The advantage of fiction is that it can cleanse the world of people more rapidly and spectacularly

Vivid as these ways of getting rid of people are, they have the disadvantage of being relatively unlikely. Also, they leave no ruins, or none the stories permit us to inspect. We are not allowed to savour the shattered remains of the towns and suburbs with which mankind has defaced the earth. Nor can we watch the hated masses of humanity reduced to terrified fugitives, and eventually to corpses. The first Wells story to provide these satisfactions was The War of the Worlds, published in 1898. This tale of a Martian invasion of the earth is sited precisely in the areas of London’s suburbs that had caused most heartache to sensitive, thinking people in the later nineteenth century. The first Martian spacecraft lands at Weybridge. Armed with heat rays and poisonous black clouds, the Martians rapidly wipe out most of inner and outer London. Weybridge and Shepperton are early victims; Woking becomes a heap of fiery ruins; Richmond is destroyed by gas attack. Much of the excitement comes from place-names. The destruction is less a matter of human casualties than of postal districts being cleared. Towards the end, the narrator walks through suburban London – Mortlake, Putney, Roehampton, Fulham, Ealing, Kilburn, South Kensington – and finds it quite empty of people. Vegetation is returning. A red weed, introduced from Mars, spreads everywhere, burying the remnants of houses in its rampant growth.

The preface to this disaster had been panic. Law and government had broken down. London’s population had turned into terrified refugee columns, heading out of the city.

If one could have hung that June morning in a balloon in the blazing blue above London, every northward and eastward road running out of the infinite tangle of streets would have seemed stippled black with the streaming fugitives, each dot a human agony of terror and physical distress … Never before in the history of the world had such a mass of human beings moved and suffered together … without order and with a goal, six million people, unarmed and unprovisioned, driving headlong. It was the beginning of the rout of civilization, of the massacre of mankind.

The element of relish in this account is indicated by the position Wells allocates to himself – safe above the fugitives, composedly putting the phenomenon into historical perspective. In the novel the narrator does not confess to any joy in destruction, but Wells introduces another character who does. On Putney Hill the narrator meets an artilleryman who plans to collect a band of brave, ruthless men and women like himself, and perpetuate the breed. He is exhilarated by the megadeath around him. ‘The useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die,’ he urges. ‘They ought to die.’ This is just what Wells recommends three years later in Anticipations, and the tame, inert types the artilleryman condemns resemble the suburban lower-middle classes, lacking in ideas and initiative, who are excluded from Wells’s Utopias. ‘All those damn little clerks,’ the artilleryman labels them – cautious, law-abiding, with ‘no proud dreams and no proud lusts’, just railway season tickets, life-insurance policies and small, safe investments. They will all, he rejoices, be wiped out. ‘Life is real again.’

The exultation in death that sweeps through The War of the Worlds is unmistakable, but it is counterbalanced by the loathsomeness of the victors – the Martians – who are another version of Wells’s nightmare crabs. They have big, staring eyes, tentacles and horrible mouths that quiver, pant and drop saliva. Their steeds, the Handling Machines, are explicitly ‘crab-like’. The Martians eat human beings – or, rather, suck the blood out of them – and the narrator gets a close look at one prospective meal, a well-dressed middle-aged man with shining studs and watch-chain, as he is lifted, shrieking, to his killer’s mouth.

In the end the Martians are defeated, succumbing to germs and bacteria which their systems, unlike ours, cannot cope with. Just ten years later, in 1908, Wells published a fantasy of world destruction, The War in the Air, which offers no such get-out for the world’s millions. The destroyers this time are men in aircraft. Written soon after the advent of manned flight, the novel predicts the effects of air war, and foresees its major drawback – that it can effect only the destruction, not the occupation, of its target.

The novel makes it clear that the world deserves to be destroyed, because it has become so ugly... The penalty the novel metes out for this sacrilege is the destruction of virtually the whole civilized world.

Wells is often thought of as a rationalist, bringing science to the succour of mankind and planning technological Utopias. This view is not false, but it is incomplete. Many aspects of modern mass-mankind repelled him – newspapers, advertising, consumerist women, cities. A return to peasant life was preferable. The development of his fiction suggests that destruction lured him even more powerfully than progress. Reducing the world’s population became an obsession. In fantasy he took – again and again, and with mounting savagery – a terrible revenge on the suburban sprawl that had blighted Bromley.

[christian]

From The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt - http://www.amazon.com/Rebel-Essay-Man-R ... 679733841/

Historically speaking, the first coherent offensive is that of Sade, who musters into one vast war machine the arguments of the freethinkers up to Father Meslier and Voltaire. His negation is also, of course, the most extreme. From rebellion Sade can only deduce an absolute negative. Twenty-seven years in prison do not, in fact, produce a very conciliatory form of intelligence. Such a long period of confinement produces either weaklings or killers and sometimes a combination of both. If the mind is strong enough to construct in a prison cell a moral philosophy that is not one of submission, it will generally be one of domination. Every ethic based on solitude implies the exercise of power. In this respect Sade is the archetype, for in so far as society treated him atrociously, he responded in an atrocious manner. The writer, despite a few happy phrases and the thoughtless praises of our contemporaries, is secondary. He is admired today, with so much ingenuity, for reasons which have nothing to do with literature.

He is exalted as the philosopher in chains and the first theoretician of absolute rebellion. He might well have been. In prison, dreams have no limits and reality is no curb. Intelligence in chains loses in lucidity what it gains in intensity. The only logic known to Sade was the logic of his feelings. He did not create a philosophy, but pursued a monstrous dream of revenge. Only the dream turned out to be prophetic. His desperate demand for freedom led Sade into the kingdom of servitude; his inordinate thirst for a form of life he could never attain was assuaged in the successive frenzies of a dream of universal destruction. In this way, at least, Sade is our contemporary.

Real fulfillment, for the man who allows absolutely free rein to his desires and who must dominate everything, lies in hatred.

If that were all, Sade would be worthy only of the interest that attaches to all misunderstood pioneers. But once the drawbridge is up, life in the castle must go on. No matter how meticulous the system, it cannot foresee every eventuality. It can destroy, but it cannot create. The masters of these tortured communities do not find the satisfaction they so desperately desire. Sade often evokes the “pleasant habit of crime.” Nothing here, however, seems very pleasant— more like the fury of a man in chains. The point, in fact, is to enjoy oneself, and the maximum of enjoyment coincides with the maximum of destruction. To possess what one is going to kill, to copulate with suffering— those are the moments of freedom toward which the entire organization of Sade’s castles is directed. But from the moment when sexual crime destroys the object of desire, it also destroys desire, which exists only at the precise moment of destruction. Then another object must be brought under subjection and killed again, and then another, and so on to an infinity of all possible objects. This leads to that dreary accumulation of erotic and criminal scenes in Sade’s novels, which, paradoxically, leaves the reader with the impression of a hideous chastity.

What part, in this universe, could pleasure play or the exquisite joy of acquiescent and accomplice bodies? In it we find an impossible quest for escape from despair— a quest that finishes, nevertheless, in a desperate race from servitude to servitude and from prison to prison. If only nature is real and if, in nature, only desire and destruction are legitimate, then, in that all humanity does not suffice to assuage the thirst for blood, the path of destruction must lead to universal annihilation. We must become, according to Sade’s formula, nature’s executioner. But even that position is not achieved too easily. When the accounts are closed, when all the victims are massacred, the executioners are left face to face in the deserted castle. Something is still missing. The tortured bodies return, in their elements, to nature and will be born again. Even murder cannot be fully consummated: “Murder only deprives the victim of his first life; a means must be found of depriving him of his second.…” Sade contemplates an attack on creation: “I abhor nature.… I should like to upset its plans, to thwart its progress, to halt the stars in their courses, to overturn the floating spheres of space, to destroy what serves nature and to succor all that harms it; in a word, to insult it in all its works, and I cannot succeed in doing so.” It is in vain that he dreams of a technician who can pulverize the universe: he knows that, in the dust of the spheres, life will continue. The attack against creation is doomed to failure. It is impossible to destroy everything, there is always a remainder. “I cannot succeed in doing so …” the icy and implacable universe suddenly relents at the appalling melancholy by which Sade, in the end and quite unwillingly, always moves us. “We could perhaps attack the sun, deprive the universe of it, or use it to set fire to the world— those would be real crimes.…” Crimes, yes, but not the definitive crime. It is necessary to go farther. The executioners eye each other with suspicion.

They are alone, and one law alone governs them: the law of power. As they accepted it when they were masters, they cannot reject it if it turns against them. All power tends to be unique and solitary. Murder must be repeated: in their turn the masters will tear one another to pieces. Sade accepts this consequence and does not flinch. A curious kind of stoicism, derived from vice, sheds a little light in the dark places of his rebellious soul. He will not try to live again in the world of affection and compromise. The drawbridge will not be lowered; he will accept personal annihilation. The unbridled force of his refusal achieves, at its climax, an unconditional acceptance that is not without nobility. The master consents to be the slave in his turn and even, perhaps, wishes to be. “The scaffold would be for me the throne of voluptuousness.”

Thus the greatest degree of destruction coincides with the greatest degree of affirmation. The masters throw themselves on one another, and Sade’s work, dedicated to the glory of libertinism, ends by being “strewn with corpses of libertines struck down at the height of their powers.” The most powerful, the one who will survive, is the solitary, the Unique, whose glorification Sade has undertaken— in other words, himself. At last he reigns supreme, master and God. But at the moment of his greatest victory the dream vanishes. The Unique turns back toward the prisoner whose unbounded imagination gave birth to him, and they become one. He is in fact alone, imprisoned in a bloodstained Bastille, entirely constructed around a still unsatisfied, and henceforth undirected, desire for pleasure. He has only triumphed in a dream and those ten volumes crammed with philosophy and atrocities recapitulate an unhappy form of asceticism, an illusory advance from the total no to the absolute yes, an acquiescence in death at last, which transfigures the assassination of everything and everyone into a collective suicide.

[christian]

Proverbs 8:36 - http://biblehub.com/proverbs/8-36.htm

But he that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul: all they that hate me love death.

[christian]

Demons

He was one of those ideal Russian beings who can suddenly be so struck by some strong idea that it seems to crush them then and there, sometimes even forever. They are never strong enough to master it, but they are passionate believers, and so their whole life afterwards is spent in some last writhings, as it were, under the stone that has fallen on them and already half crushed them.

[christian]

The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

In a way, the man who kills himself in solitude still preserves certain values since he, apparently, claims no rights over the lives of others. The proof of this is that he never makes use, in order to dominate others, of the enormous power and freedom of action which his decision to die gives him. Every solitary suicide, when it is not an act of resentment, is, in some way, either generous or contemptuous. But one feels contemptuous in the name of something. If the world is a matter of indifference to the man who commits suicide, it is because he has an idea of something that is not or could not be indifferent to him. He believes that he is destroying everything or taking everything with him; but from this act of self-destruction itself a value arises which, perhaps, might have made it worth while to live. Absolute negation is therefore not consummated by suicide. It can only be consummated by absolute destruction, of oneself and of others. Or, at least, it can only be lived by striving toward that delectable end. Here suicide and murder are two aspects of a single system, the system of a misguided intelligence that prefers, to the suffering imposed by a limited situation, the dark victory in which heaven and earth are annihilated.

[christian]

Demons

“Ape! You yes me to win me over. Keep still, you won’t understand anything. If there is no God, then I am God.”

“Now, there’s the one point of yours that I could never understand: why are you God then?”

“If there is God, then the will is all his, and I cannot get out of his will. If not, the will is all mine, and it is my duty to proclaim self-will.”

“Self-will? And why is it your duty?”

“Because the will has all become mine. Can it be that no one on the whole planet, having ended God and believed in self-will, dares to proclaim self-will to the fullest point? It’s as if a poor man received an inheritance, got scared, and doesn’t dare go near the bag, thinking he’s too weak to own it. I want to proclaim self-will. I may be the only one, but I’ll do it.”

“Do it, then.”

“It is my duty to shoot myself because the fullest point of my self-will is— for me to kill myself.”

“But you’re not the only one to kill yourself; there are lots of suicides.”

“For reasons. But without any reason, simply for self-will— only I.”

“He won’t shoot himself,” flashed again in Pyotr Stepanovich.

“You know what,” he observed irritably, “in your place, if I wanted to show self-will, I’d kill somebody else and not myself. You could become useful. I’ll point out whom, if you’re not afraid. Then maybe there’s no need to shoot yourself today. We could come to terms.”

“To kill someone else would be the lowest point of my self-will, and there’s the whole of you in that. I am not you: I want the highest point, and will kill myself.”

“Reasoned it all out for himself,” Pyotr Stepanovich growled spitefully.

“It is my duty to proclaim unbelief,” Kirillov was pacing the room. “For me no idea is higher than that there is no God. The history of mankind is on my side. Man has done nothing but invent God, so as to live without killing himself; in that lies the whole of world history up to now. I alone for the first time in world history did not want to invent God. Let them know once and for all.”

“He won’t shoot himself,” Pyotr Stepanovich worried.

“Who is there to know?” he kept prodding. “There is you and me, and who— Liputin?”

“Everyone is to know; everyone will know. There is nothing hid that shall not be revealed. He said that.” And he pointed with feverish rapture to the icon of the Savior, before which an icon lamp was burning. Pyotr Stepanovich got thoroughly angry.

“So you still believe in Him, and keep the little lamp lit; what is it, ‘just in case’ or something?”

The other was silent.

“You know what, I think you believe maybe even more than any priest.”

“In whom? In Him? Listen,” Kirillov stopped, gazing before him with fixed, ecstatic eyes. “Listen to a big idea: There was one day on earth, and in the middle of the earth stood three crosses. One on a cross believed so much that he said to another: ‘This day you will be with me in paradise.’ The day ended, they both died, went, and did not find either paradise or resurrection. What had been said would not prove true. Listen: this man was the highest on all the earth, he constituted what it was to live for. Without this man the whole planet with everything on it is— madness only. There has not been one like Him before or since, not ever, even to the point of miracle. This is the miracle, that there has not been and never will be such a one. And if so, if the laws of nature did not pity even This One, did not pity even their own miracle, but made Him, too, live amidst a lie and die for a lie, then the whole planet is a lie, and stands upon a lie and a stupid mockery. Then the very laws of the planet are a lie and a devil’s vaudeville. Why live then, answer me, if you’re a man.”

“That’s another turn of affairs. It seems to me you have two different causes mixed up here; and that is highly untrustworthy. But, excuse me, what if you are God? If the lie ended and you realized that the whole lie was because there had been this former God?”

“You’ve finally understood!” Kirillov cried out rapturously. “So it can be understood, if even someone like you understands! You understand now that the whole salvation for everyone is to prove this thought to them all. Who will prove it? I! I don’t understand how, up to now, an atheist could know there is no God and not kill himself at once. To recognize that there is no God, and not to recognize at the same time that you have become God, is an absurdity, otherwise you must necessarily kill yourself. Once you recognize it, you are king, and you will not kill yourself but will live in the chiefest glory. But one, the one who is first, must necessarily kill himself, otherwise who will begin and prove it? It is I who will necessarily kill myself in order to begin and prove it. I am still God against my will, and I am unhappy, because it is my duty to proclaim self-will. Everyone is unhappy, because everyone is afraid to proclaim self-will. That is why man has been so unhappy and poor up to now, because he was afraid to proclaim the chief point of self-will and was self-willed only on the margins, like a schoolboy. I am terribly unhappy, because I am terribly afraid. Fear is man’s curse … But I will proclaim self-will, it is my duty to believe that I do not believe. I will begin, and end, and open the door. And save. Only this one thing will save all men and in the next generation transform them physically; for in the present physical aspect, so far as I have thought, it is in no way possible for man to be without the former God. For three years I have been searching for the attribute of my divinity, and I have found it: the attribute of my divinity is— Self-will! That is all, by which I can show in the main point my insubordination and my new fearsome freedom. For it is very fearsome. I kill myself to show my insubordination and my new fearsome freedom.”

[christian]

Demons

“There will be entire freedom when it makes no difference whether one lives or does not live. That is the goal to everything.”

“The goal? But then perhaps no one will even want to live?”

“No one,” he said resolutely.

“Man is afraid of death because he loves life, that’s how I understand it,” I observed, “and that is what nature tells us.”

“That is base, that is the whole deceit!” his eyes began to flash. “Life is pain, life is fear, and man is unhappy. Now all is pain and fear. Now man loves life because he loves pain and fear. That’s how they’ve made it. Life now is given in exchange for pain and fear, and that is the whole deceit. Man now is not yet the right man. There will be a new man, happy and proud. He for whom it will make no difference whether he lives or does not live, he will be the new man. He who overcomes pain and fear will himself be God. And this God will not be.”

“So this God exists, in your opinion?”

“He doesn’t, yet he does. There is no pain in the stone, but there is pain in the fear of the stone. God is the pain of the fear of death. He who overcomes pain and fear will himself become God. Then there will be a new life, a new man, everything new … Then history will be divided into two parts: from the gorilla to the destruction of God, and from the destruction of God to …”

“To the gorilla?”

“… to the physical changing of the earth and man. Man will be God and will change physically. And the world will change, and deeds will change, and thoughts, and all feelings. What do you think, will man then change physically?”

“If it makes no difference whether one lives or does not live, then everyone will kill himself, and perhaps that will be the change.”

“It makes no difference. They will kill the deceit. Whoever wants the main freedom must dare to kill himself. He who dares to kill himself knows the secret of the deceit. There is no further freedom; here is everything; and there is nothing further. He who dares to kill himself, is God. Now anyone can make it so that there will be no God, and there will be no anything. But no one has done it yet, not once.”

“There have been millions of suicides.”

“But all not for that, all in fear and not for that. Not to kill fear. He who kills himself only to kill fear, will at once become God.”

“He may not have time,” I observed.

“It makes no difference,” he replied softly, with quiet pride, almost with scorn. “I’m sorry you seem to be laughing,” he added half a minute later.

“And I find it strange that you were so irritated earlier today, and are now so calm, though you talk heatedly.”

“Earlier? Earlier today it was funny,” he replied with a smile. “I don’t like to abuse, and I never laugh,” he added sadly.

“Well, you do spend your nights rather cheerlessly over your tea.” I rose and took my cap.

“You think so?” he smiled, somewhat surprised. “But why? No, I … I don’t know,” he suddenly became confused, “I don’t know how it is with others, and my feeling is that I cannot be like any other. Any other thinks, and then at once thinks something else. I cannot think something else, I think one thing all my life. God has tormented me all my life,” he suddenly concluded, with surprising expansiveness.