Splendor amidst the squalor: There is nothing good about self-destruction

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I said: “The social agenda, it would seem, is to make the world safe for high-schoolish exclusion.”

And: “I don’t think there is anything good about indulging and encouraging the worst in people.”

And: “Here is the unstated moral principle undergirding ‘realweenie’: It is a moral good for like-minded people to get together to chortle about other people they don’t like.”

To this, Joseph Ferrara asks: “Where are the examples of chortling?”

The answer was posted last night at Sellsius, with Teresa Boardman as the first commenter:

By these means do Joseph and Teresa rebut me by proving me right in every particular.

I saw every bit of this coming from Pat Kitano’s original post. I wasn’t working them, playing them like chess pieces. But people are who they are, and they will act upon their base premises, no matter what.

Michael Thoman quite properly chides me for suggesting that I had entertained the idea that Teresa’s weblog might be a joke. I never thought that was the case. In a comment at Sellsius, John Lockwood wonders if I had thought the weblog was directed at me. In fact, I thought it was directed at sites that, like BloodhoundBlog, are addressed to the industry rather than to consumers. I have seen Teresa make what I thought were underhanded comments, here and here, among others places, putting me on notice that she likes cutting people down to size, as people say.

What should you do about people like that? Avoid them, of course. There is nothing of the good in the dismantlement of oneself or the attempted dismantlement of other people.

This changed for me when I saw that weblog. I could stand up for what I know is right, knowing, in large measure, what to expect in consequence. Or I could take a chance a bunch of innocent people would get themselves cut down to size.

All week we have heard the expostulation, “But it was just a joke!” This is untrue. In the first place, “Can’t you take a joke!?,” is the ready-to-hand resort to plausible-deniability deployed by people who habitually make personal attacks disguised as jokes. This is why they’re disguised as jokes, to provide the cover of plausible-deniability — and to put you in the wrong for objecting to being attacked. Second, Teresa would not have gone to all the work to set up a weblog just to amuse Pat Kitano. She did it without having explicitly committed herself to doing it — it works the same way for vice as for virtue — in the hope of finding a pretext later. It turns out that I am that pretext by now. She is not morally culpable for doing something she herself knew in advance was wrong, it’s all my fault.

This is evil as I defined it, doing something you know in advance is wrong. Teresa’s evil is a tiny one, and you don’t have to write me to tell me she has many virtues. I’m sure she has. She has a tiny vice that I spotted, knew to watch for, and stepped on when I saw it taking root. Joseph Ferrara’s will to evil is much greater, and I knew that going into this, and I expected that he would make his true character manifest. But if Teresa’s evil is small compared to Joseph’s, his is small compared to Keith Brand’s (note that no one complains when I dissect him). And Keith Brand’s evil is nothing at all compared to true, criminal evil. People in fear, in doubt, in pain, shedding their misery to others rather than trying to heal themselves. One could wish it were uncommon.

But what we are talking about are the underlying principles, not the particular people involved. I am the perfect target for the attack embodied in that picture because I am indifferent to criticism. Either I am wrong — and I am going to some pains to demonstrate that I am not — or I’m not. If I’m wrong, I am profited to have learned better. If I am not wrong — so what? This by itself is valuable because you might not be so blithe about identifying the injustice of the attack embodied in that picture if it were you who had been depicted. For the record, I think I must look pretty much like that without clothing except I’m quite a bit taller than that guy.

Virtue is self-construction. Vice is self-destruction. And in every choice we make, every action we take, we are acting upon one motive or the other. I knew going into this fight that it would not be good for Teresa or Joseph — not that it could not be, not that they could not reflect upon their behavior and resolve to do better. But I thought the potential consequences were worse. But, ultimately, this is not about Teresa, Joseph or me. It’s about no one but you.

Vice is self-destruction, the dismantlement of your own ego. The more you indulge it, the less you will achieve. Less success, very likely, and less wealth. But these are secondary consequences. By indulging your vices, you will achieve less of the life that you yearn for, less of the interior experience of being the person you yearn to be.

In the end this is nothing to me, an intellectual exercise. I realize I have re-lit a conflagration I could have let die down. I’m doing it because I’m trying to help you — you alone in your own mind right now, reading silently, with no need to fear the disapproval of other people — help you find a better way of thinking. I don’t need to do this. I already understand all this, at much deeper level of detail than we’ve hit so far. Nothing would be easier for me than to say nothing and just go about my business. I’ve been doing precisely that for decades now. But BloodhoundBlog is about doing better, and this is the opportunity life has afforded us to do better at this moment.

The goal of all of this is Splendor, an enduring interior delight uncontaminated by pain or fear or doubt or guilt or anxiety — or envy, for that matter. Success comes as it comes. Wealth comes how it does. Neither mean anything if you cannot love yourself — without reservation — as a perfect reflection of virtues perfectly understood, perfectly mastered, perfectly executed, perfectly revered.

My apologies to Teresa and Joseph for having used them so cruelly as examples. I expect they’ll try to make me pay for that, and, even though they’ll fail, they will have my infraction as a bogus tu quoque rationale to justify their attacks. One could wish that sort of thing were uncommon…

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