Saturday, July 15, 2006

Chapter 2-9

9.
Man is part and parcel of the animal kingdom and (not withstanding Jefferson, Franklin, and Lincoln, Karl Marx, La Salle, and Liebknecht, Christ, Robespierre, and Rousseau, Hyndman, Tennyson, and Mazzini, Dr. Alder, Bebel, George, and Isaiah, Bellamy, Gronlund, and W.T. Stead) he cannot escape from the draconic ordinances that despotically govern that kingdom and environ his being like an atmosphere on every side.

Altruism, meek and lowly self-abnegation, upon any extended scale is among predatory organisms (and all organisms are predatory) impossible of practice on pain of wholesale felo-de-se.

Every man is under an obligation to fight and bear his own burden. If he cannot do so, others cannot do his fighting or his burden-bearing and their own at the same time with reasonable safety to themselves. He, therefore, who finds it impossible to carry his own burden, had better sink down and die in his tracks than impose an additional load upon the shoulders of his kind-hearted fellow strugglers. For then, they would be overloaded and consequently unable to fight successfully; so all might perish together.

Practical fraternal sympathy (upon any universal scale) has always in the end a most destructive effect upon the internal structure of communities. Men will always love and cherish those that are near and dear to them; but when it is proposed to extend the circle of their ‘near and dear ones’ to all mankind, that is going rather too far. Indeed, all must perish ignominiously if that foolish idea prevails. ‘All’ are, even now, enervating themselves, undermining their strength, by futile overexertion in that very direction. They are straining themselves to death by endeavoring to carry an impossible load. The majority of men are born far too weak constitutionally for their conditions; and the few who do possess the necessary stamina and grit, will have quite enough to do in proving by deeds their fitness to survive, propagate and possess. Many are projected, few are selected.

Yet altruism, wholesale self-renunciation, wholesale burden-bearing, for the sake of ‘Outraged and Suffering Humanity,’ is the maddening basis upon which ‘our good Lord Jesus,’ and his demented imitators have erected their sporadic sociology, their Magnificent Satanism.

Does not simple business acumen whisper to us that every man’s chief occupation upon earth is to sustain himself? ‘I mean subsist at any cost; you shall want ere I shall, business is business.’ If men had sufficient personal initiative to think along these stern lines, there would be little use on earth for the theologian and ‘the reformer’; those twin Mephistos who find their renown and grandeur in the abasement of mankind. The battle of life would then be so grim, terrible and realistic; (so Trojan in fact) that those holy dissimulators and crafty deceivers would rapidly die off or be eaten off; for in the clash of naked interests, the Best and Bravest only could possibly survive; and no one would ever dream of including them among the Best or Bravest.

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