



Oct 27, 2011




But that's alright. He came for the fight.




No, that's not the worst.

What ought to give us pause is the light, itself. 


Let the shadowed silence hold you for a minute.

Dispel the light.







He would deliver...

...salvation, redemption, enlightenment:

The fire glow from an auto-da-fé.

An interrogation lamp, anywhere.







A clinic.

And a clinical outcome.



ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...


And what might be your motive for writing this blog, Jack?

Jack Crow said...

Not salvation, Thunder. I would aim a rhetorical arrow, or a real one in the right circumstances, at an opponent's chest. But I wouldn't try to save his soul or convert him. I don't care if he believes or behaves. I care only to stop him, if it's within my ability, from enforcing that belief and behavior on myself, or others.

But, I've no major illusions about my efficacy, or the medium itself.

So, I can point. Perhaps even with some grace, from time to time. But, this isn't an effort to enlighten, to dispel the darkness, to redeem or to edify anyone.

I hope I've at least made that clear, over the last two or so years.

In meatspace, strong emotions aren't a defining characteristic, for me. Until it comes to redeemers, saviors and reformers.

Them, I hate. With no offense to Coldtype intended or to be inferred, them I hate even more than the cops.

In the end, the policeman is just a guy with a job to do. I wish fewer people (as in, none) would do that job, and I'm pretty sure rapists and child molesters could be handled without them - but the cop, when he's not a crusader, is preferable to the reformers and redeemers.

The cop knows human venality isn't something you can meliorate. He knows, I think even as he slaps on the cuffs, that prison won't improve the thief anymore than law protects the people.

Not so, the redeemers and reformers. And that makes 'em more dangerous to human freedom and human lives than any gaggle of blue uniformed defenders of the status quo. The redeemer, the reformer, the crusader: that fucking type believes and worse yet, he isn't going to rest until you kill him or shame him. He has a world to fix. He has humanity to improve.

The cop is mostly wrong to think that hiding away the discontents of a social order will safeguard it, because that order will always find replacements, especially when its operation requires them. Still, I imagine he knows that his work is less than noble, especially once he's done being a rookie with a hard on for justice.

The redeemers and reformers cannot even generally make that small connection. They think that people themselves can be bettered.

The fires upon which witches burned were fueled with that shuffling urge towards betterment. The education of children into replaceable parts is predicated upon their systematic improvement into people who can no longer often recognize desire as such. The very clarion call against "corruption" demands a complete refusal to understand that power is not corruption of a good, nor abuse a mutation of the right. They are what people do when they can get away with it.

The reformer refuses this observation. He's too busy blinding himself with the light.

It's why he never sees his own co-option coming. It's why he never understands how it is that the mob finally ends up tossing him on his own pyre, seeing him as a hypocrite, right before they get back to their pain mitigating alcohol, drugs, sex and devil's dancing.

Mark S said...

Wendell Berry:


To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,

and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,

and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

d.mantis said...

truly. fucking. wonderful.

One shining gem among a treasure was this:


I have often encountered much more obvious hatred right out in the open from the physician class. Here are people (excepting the token few who enter the profession with honest intentions) who are taught, more than anything else, a god complex.

In fact what they have learned is an eight year crash course in learned CYA tactics.

It occurs to me that, in this sense, the dissemination of expertise in academia establishes the reformer as a class.

Or i might be full of shit. either one. that and i hate doctors.

Anatole David said...

Rationalism has its reactionary. It's the conceited, "humane", twin of superstition. The Church invented clinics, banks, and Knights of the Faith, Rational clerics refined these institutions into sharper scalpels.

Well done Crow. Platonic and Paulist epigones smile and smile and yet contemplate purfying holocausts. Even Malthus(a Parson), in the name of Reasonable economy, wanted the poor to stop breeding.

Nothing has changed but the rhetoric.

@d. mantis

I don't hate doctors. Some are fine materialists who believe the world cannot be saved through "greater hygiene". They understand that desire fueled Jesuit and Fascist efforts to rid society of "filth". I do agree many Medical Doctors and other strains of Academia(MBA's, Jurisprudence, etc) believe they practice the divine Husbandry of Light.


Goethe's shade whispers,"There is no crime I have heard of that I could not have committed myself." He died asking for "more light".

Life's messy. It's more than light and measure. Those who wish to cleanse and enlighten embrace death. The living protest.

Jack Crow said...

I don't despise healers, or researchers. My wife works for healers, mostly.

Credentialed medical experts, on the other hand...